My sister Susan and her son John came to visit two weeks ago. I had been thinking about their visit for a long time, planning things we could do together, places to take them, things to show them. The weekend before they arrived, I gave my apartment a real good cleaning. That's one of the side benefits of having guests -- besides getting the chance to see some of the sights that you never get to see in your own town -- you also get a lot of cleaning done that you've been putting off. At least that's the way it is for me. It's a great excuse to do things that you want to do but never make the time for. Plus it's fun to have my family around.
Susan had no particular agenda, she was content to see and do whatever seemed interesting at the time. I had several events planned and a few optional activities. I think she really just wanted to relax. I especially wanted John to have a good time -- I still remember the trip my family took to Los Angeles back in the early Seventies. We went to Disneyland and Universal Studios, visited Tijuana Mexico and swam in the Pacific. It was one of those ideal childhood adventures. Ever since then California has always had a kind of magical aura. The type of place where childhood dreams become real.
The first event I had planned for Susan and John was a trip to Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank. We lucked out and got in a small group and were able to go all over the lot and see where the magic happens; the exterior sets for ER, the West Wing and the Gilmore Girls set and we even got to go inside one soundstage and poke around the set of the Drew Carey Show. They gave John a copy of the shooting script from the most recent episode. I think the thing that impressed me most was seeing the original Maltese Falcon in the studio museum. I couldn't believe that it was an actual physical thing right there in the same room as I was. After all, it is the stuff that dreams are made of.
That night we went to Santa Monica and visited with John's cousin Jesse who works at a video game company. He spends half the night in this big underground room with about two dozen other young guys testing the latest video games. And he gets paid for it. Is that a cool job or what?
The next couple of days we wandered around Hollywood seeing some of the favorite sights: Farmer's Market, Grauman's Theater, Sunset Strip, Beverly Hills, etc. John wanted to see some cool cars so I took him to a car dealer up the street from me where they have the most amazing collection of vintage Jaguars, Bentleys, Aston Martins, Ferraris, Maseratis, and the like. At one point the dapper salesman approached me and with an upper-clas British accent, asked if I was interested in "older cars." I told him that I had promised to buy one for John on his sixteenth birthday and was just letting him pick one out. The salesman smiled. "I like your style," he said.
John also enjoyed looking at vintage guitars, so I took him to Black Market Music where a lot of bands sell their old gear. There were some real beauties there, including a classic old "Flying V" like the one played by Pete Townshend. John has been playing bass lately, and had his eye on a nice looking fretless number. We stayed in there longer than the Warner Bros. museum.
At one point while John was looking in another guitar store, I took Susan over to the Chateau Marmont Hotel on the strip. It's one of the few places that still retains that mixture of elegance and decadence that truly captures the spirit of old Hollywood. It's been home to the likes of Clark Gable and Jim Morrison. Garbo lived there. John Belushi died there. I know of a side entrance that takes you directly into the courtyard where guests can relax in privacy and luxury. Susan and I slipped in and looked around, soaking up the history and the style. As we stepped back out into the street, we were nearly bowled over by a very serious-looking woman carrying a portfolio. Obviously a very important woman on her way to a very important engagement. We both recognized her at the same time, but I don't think Susan was really sure she was who she looked like. She looked at me, eyes wide in amazement. I nodded, yep -- that was Jodie Foster.
I think the high point of the visit for me was when Susan and John came to see me play with Jimmy and Will at our regular gig in North Hollywood. We tried out a few new songs mixed in with the tried-and-true chestnuts. It was great fun as always and even better to have my family in the audience. John even said it was "awesome." You can hardly get higher praise than that.
We spent a fun night at our cousin's, the Norelius's, playing world championship darts. John really held his own with the big boys. I mean those guys play some serious darts. I bought a dartboard just to practice up before I go over there to visit. Cousin Clay Sr. claims to have beaten the guy who is ranked 30th in the world, and from the way he throws, I believe him.
The last day they were here, Susan and I left John alone with his internet rotisserie baseball league and we took a walk around my neighborhood. We ended up back at the Chateau Marmont and enjoyed some beverages on the patio with the rest of the well-heeled gentry. All in all a pretty nice time. It was great to be able to share some of the things I love about this place with the people that I love. It makes me feel pretty damn lucky. After they left, I found a "Best Uncle" award on my kitchen table. It's one of the best awards I could ever receive.
I'm not sure what's going to happen in the next couple of days. I guess nobody is. I know there are a lot of people who are working very hard to keep things from getting worse for all of us. I sure hope they know what they're doing. At this point it's kind of hard to tell. But I don't want to assume the worst. I want to believe that cooler heads will prevail.
Let's keep our fingers crossed.HWD[editor's note: the U.S. invaded Iraq on March 21st, 2003]
I didn't march yesterday. I told myself I was too tired. It was a very long week at work. I was cooped up in a room with a plaintiff who was reviewing hundreds of boxes of our clients files looking for evidence of unfair business practices. That meant I had to haul boxes in every morning and haul them out every night and lug them around the room whenever she selected one to review. Naturally the ones she wanted were always on the bottom of a stack of five. Anyway, I still don't have all of my energy back and all that exercise was really wiping me out. So I wasn't up for a three hour peace march.
I've been getting a lot of emails asking me to sign petitions or write to congressmen or call the White House or join a movement or make a donation. I get most of them from my Dad, who in addition to being an internet freak is also the family peace activist. I haven't really followed up on any of them. I haven't even read a lot of them. About the most I've done to support the peace movement is to honk my horn each night on my way home from work when I pass a group of protesters holding signs that say "Honk if You Want Peace!" They seem to appreciate it.
It's not that I don't care if we go to war. I guess I'm hoping that if I ignore President Bush long enough he'll eventually go away. Instead of actively supporting peace, I'm being passive aggressive towards war. I didn't used to be so lame. There was a time when I marched and chanted and protested right up there with the best of them.
In '78 I was at Kent State protesting the construction of a gymnasium on the site of the murder of four students by the National Guard during an anti-Vietnam demonstration eight years earlier. Former SDS founder Mark Rudd was there exhorting us to action in a voice hoarse from passion and urgency. (He's the guy Trudeau based "Megaphone Mike" on in Doonesberry.) They played "Ohio" by CSNY over the loudspeakers and we swarmed the construction site, tearing down the fence and occupying the area for several hours while the FBI took our pictures. Mark and several of the more prominent radicals wore bandanas over their faces to conceal their identities. It was pretty cool.
There were some other memorable events from those days: the antiapartheid sit-in in college, the march to save the Red River Gorge in Kentucky, the Vietnam War debate at our church when I was twelve... Yep, I used to be the real deal. What happened?
One thing that struck me when I saw the news footage of the protests yesterday was that most of the faces I saw looked like mine. I didn't notice a lot of twenty-year-olds out there. I always thought idealism was a disease of the young. But it was nice to see all the old farts getting out to march after all these years. I think that's what made me have this weird dream I had last night:
I was at a big Grateful Dead concert, like at the Meadowlands, and then I was playing drums with Val Kilmer -- we were the drummers for the Dead apparently and we were in the middle of the drum solo. We had broken the rhythm down to almost nothing, they way they do, and were beginning to build it back up. I started playing on a hollow wooden clave, tapping out a simple "one-two-three-four-one-and-two-and-three-and-four." The crowd picked up on it and started chanting "One, two, three, four -- We don't want your fucking war!" Just a few in the front at first but soon it spread through the whole arena. "ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR -- WE DON'T WANT YOU'RE FUCKING WAR!" I started shouting "HELL NO, WE WON'T GO!" and some folks picked up on that too and it turned into a real humdinger. The whole place was thundering with the rhythm and the chanting and it got so intense I woke up feeling charged with energy and enthusiasm.
I guess that spirit hasn't completely died out. In fact it seems to be lurking in the shadows just looking for an excuse to come back into the sunlight. Maybe next time there's a peace march, I'll drop by and see if anyone wants to join in on any of the old chants. Teach the kids a thing or two. Or at least, I may start following up on my Dad's emails. So don't be surprised if you start getting petitions and requests for donations. Just trying to stay active.
"Honk!"
HWD
I got to see what it feels like to be a rock star the other night. Well, pretty close. See, I was watching MTV and they had this show where they fool these guys into thinking they're auditioning for a band, when actually they're in a contest to be a rock star for five minutes. The winner gets to perform one song onstage in front of a live audience with a major rock act. In this particular case it was the Goo Goo Dolls. The guy who won looked like he was having the time of his life and I couldn't help thinking how cool that would be. After the song was over you could tell he was in seventh heaven. Definitely a dream come true. What could be more fun?
First, maybe I should explain why I was watching some goofy reality show on MTV. Nothing wrong with reality shows or MTV mind you, but it's not the kind of thing I usually do. At least not the kind of thing I admit to. It's because of the damn video store.
You may have noticed that the local video store isn't the local video store anymore, it's the local DVD store. You can hardly find videos in my neighborhood anymore -- they've gone the way of 56k modems and pay phones, relics of a dimly recollected era. If you want to rent a movie anymore you have to make the jump to DVD.
Of course, once I resigned myself to getting a DVD player, I could hardly watch them on my old TV. I bought it at a thrift shop for $30. It has this cool feature where you have to get up off the couch and walk across the room to turn it on. It works OK, but the problem is that the picture tube seems to be getting a little dimmer and the colors all look a little on the muddy side. Hardly the proper medium for viewing a state-of-the-art digitally re-mastered edition of Big Trouble. So I got myself a new TV. It is, in fact, the first new TV I ever bought and it is a monster. I decided to go with the 27-inch screen so I could watch the wide-screen DVDs and not miss a thing. The damn thing barely fit into my car, I had to take it out of the box to get it home.
Once I started watching it I was mesmerized. Everything looks so cool. Even commercials. The first day I had it, I basically just sat in my apartment and watched everything that was on. It doesn't matter what it's about, so long as it's visual. No wonder I was seduced by the flashy cuts and the undulating camerawork of the MTV show: Guitar! Tattoo! Pierced Belly Button! Cleavage! Loud Rock Music! Stretch Limo! More Cleavage! Another Tattoo! I was hooked. I wanted to be a rock star too.
As it happened, that same night I had a gig with my buddy Jimmy and another guy named Will Ray. Our regular guitar player couldn't make it, so I had suggested to Jimmy that we ask Will to join us. Will is a fairly well-know session musician and record producer who has played with the likes of Steve Earle and Lucinda Williams. He also produced Jimmy's demo. I was half-kidding when I made the suggestion, but Jimmy took me seriously and Will agreed. We spent one evening rehearsing at Will's house -- I was petrified, I mean this guy is the real deal. Plus he did all of the arrangements to Jimmy's songs. How's he going to react when he hears me mangling them? As it turned out the rehearsal went pretty well. Will is so cool, he made me feel totally relaxed and I hardly screwed up at all. Actually it was a lot of fun.
But not nearly as much fun as the gig. I didn't realize when we were rehearsing that Will was holding back. Once we got on stage he really let it rip. All I had to do was stand there and try to stay out of his way while he tore the place apart. I managed to keep up all right but it was hard to remember that I was part of the band and not the audience. I was having such a great time, it didn't even seem like I was playing. It felt just like I was the contest winner on MTV pretending to be a rock star. Except it was better because I got to play the whole show.
The best part was, Will had a good time too and wants to play with us again. That may be about the best compliment I ever got as a guitar player. That night as I drove home, I felt like a real musician coming home from a real gig. It was cool.
I guess I'm a little old to still have MTV rock star fantasies, but you're never to old to have a dream come true.
Happy New Year.
HWD
