No matter how cool you think you are, you can never truly impress a teenager. You may have an "Anarchy" tattoo on the back of your neck -- it makes you look old; you may have invented the skateboard -- you're a capitalist sellout; you may have hacked into the NSA mainframe and reconfigured all outgoing transmissions to play only Bob Marley music -- what's the NSA? Face it, you cannot impress a teenager, but that doesn't mean you stop trying.
My nephew John flew out to attend a summer film program at USC this month, and I volunteered to drive him up to Berkeley to take a campus tour and swing through San Francisco. On the way back we would make a stop at Big Sur and check out the amazing California coast. I was pretty psyched; I have wanted to visit San Francisco since I moved out here but never got around to it. When I was in college I took a semester off and worked at an hamburger joint across the street from the Berkeley campus. Later on, when I was paralegaling in Washington D.C., I worked on a big trial that had me spending half a year on and off living and working in downtown San Francisco. I was looking forward to showing John around what has always been one of my favorite places in the world.
But first we had to get there.
I found out the day John was due to arrive that I had a big deposition to prepare my boss for that was taking place in Hawaii in two days. It wasn't until 6:15 p.m. that evening that I learned that you can't overnight anything from L.A. to Hawaii after 6 p.m. And you can't get anything there before 3 p.m. on the following day -- by which time the depo would be half over. John's plane was due at 8 p.m. My boss had already left for the day. I needed a miracle. I hit upon the brilliant solution of having the whole set of exhibits scanned and emailing them to him in Hawaii. Thank God for modern technology.
Then I checked the United website to confirm the status of John's plane -- another miracle of modern technology. But technology is a two-edged sword. John's plane from Hartford to Dulles was late, so they tried to put him on different connecting flight. But that plane was delayed so they took him off that one to put him back on the original flight, which had conveniently been delayed as well. He wouldn't be due in until midnight. I ended up driving home to have some dinner before going out to the airport. When I got home I had an email from John's Dad -- the plane was now due in at 3 a.m. I slept for a few hours and woke up at 2 a.m. to go pick him up. After waiting around at the wrong terminal for a half hour, I finally got where I was supposed to be and met John. He was wearing his "Fuck Bush" t-shirt, which apparently was a big hit on the plane.
We got home around 5 a.m. and I slept for a few more hours. I woke up around 8 to pack and tried to let John sleep in a little. He had been up for 22 hours sitting on planes and in airports. My original plan of leaving town at 9 and shooting up Interstate 5 would have to be slightly altered. At this point I didn't realized exactly how much alteration that would eventually require. We had a hearty brunch at the Silver Spoon. John was quite pleased with the French Toast, the first of several excellent French Toast experiences to come. We hit the road around noon and ran smack into a traffic jam on Sunset. After a hot twenty minutes crawling along the Strip we were finally on our way. Or so we thought.
From Sunset we jumped on the 405 and breezed out of town, hooking up with the 5 going north. At top speed, we'd have about 5 or six hours to San Francisco. Unless, of course, something went wrong. Something did. At about 10 a.m. a tanker truck filled with jet fuel had overturned in the middle of the Tejon Pass and caught fire. The driver was unhurt, but by the time we were on the road, traffic was backed-up about ten miles from the Tejon Pass down to Castaic. John saw the flashing sign that said "Freeway Closed" and I veered across three lanes to catch the last exit into Castaic before we were totally screwed. We congratulated ourselves on our quick thinking as we headed up a side road, passing hundreds of stranded cars as they sat baking in the midday sun out on the interstate.
But our joy was short-lived. About a half hour up the road we were turned back by a State Trooper and forced to get back on the 5 heading south. We had to drive all the way back to Los Angeles, where we cut across the northern San Fernando Valley to Ventura and got on Route 101 north. We were now about three hours into the trip and still had over 350 miles to go.
We followed 101 along the coast through Santa Barbara until it skirts inland, past such exciting places as Buellton, "Home of Split Pea Soup," Solvang, where they filmed much of the movie "Sideways," and Paso Robles "America's Most Boring Town." We stopped off in Paso Robles in search of fine dining but found nothing to our liking. John was holding out for Taco Bell. We pressed on for another 45 miles until we finally found one at a junction just south of Pinnacles National Monument. After a much needed dinner break, we pushed onward into the setting sun, past Salinas and on into San Jose.
For much of the trip, John had been playing music from his Ipod, beamed into my FM radio and coming out my car speakers. Mostly new punk bands like his favorite called "Against Me" but occasionally a few songs I actually recognized. By now I needed a change of pace so John dialed up his Mitch Hedberg CD, downloaded illegally from the internet of course. Mitch Hedberg was a long-haired, slightly spaced-out stand-up comic whose goofy observations were delivered in a halting, weirdly-accented cadence that made him sound like a stoned ESL student. He died a few months ago, probably from a drug overdose, but he definitely made a mark in the annals of comedy. A few of my favorite Mitchisms: "When someone hands you a flier, it's like they're saying, 'Here, you throw this away.'" "I think Bigfoot is blurry, that's the problem. There's a large out-of-focus monster roaming the countryside." "Every time I go and shave, I assume there is somebody else on the planet shaving as well, so I say, 'I'm gonna go shave too.'"
Mitch kept us laughing for about an hour and soon we were within striking distance of Berkeley. I put my new Lucinda Williams CD on for the last leg of the trip. We had been driving for over ten hours with only a few short breaks and I could barely read the highway signs. John had to navigate our way into Berkely to the Hotel Durant.
We pulled in to the hotel around 11 p.m. and dragged our stuff up to the room. I left John watching ESPN and went down to the bar for a pint of ale. A guy and girl were playing music in the bar, they did a nice slow version of "Willin'": "I've been warped by the rain, driven by the snow, I'm drunk and dirty, don't ya' know, but I'm still... willin'." I sipped my ale and enjoyed the harmonies and tried to unwind from the long drive. We'd made it. It was good to be back In Berkeley. Tomorrow should be really cool...
END OF PART ONE
I've been wearing glasses since 11th grade, when I noticed I couldn't see the blackboard in trigonometry class. I thought the improved vision would help improve my grades in math, but apparently there was no correlation. My first glasses were ultra-nerdy looking and I hated wearing them. They did help me see better, though. They probably would have made a difference on the softball field in tenth grade gym class, where I was never a very confident player since I could never tell where the hell the ball was. But I wasn't playing softball anymore and never really did again. I was running track and cross country by this time and I didn't need my glasses for that. Glasses were a necessary evil, used for school, driving and watching movies. They always had to be removed before kissing a girl and they were one more thing to keep track of.
By the time I got to college, I was pretty well used to wearing glasses. I had graduated to a pair of horn-rimmed preppie-style frames that were almost cool. I wore them most of the time, I especially needed them in the larger classrooms where I would sit way in the back. It wasn't as much of a stigma to wear glasses in college since being studious-looking wasn't such a social handicap. There were plenty of smart girls who liked guys with glasses. I still had to take off my glasses to make out with them, though.
Towards the end of college I found a pair of gold Ray-Ban Aviator frames someone had left behind and got them fitted with my prescription and a new feature: "transition" lenses that automatically turn dark in the sunlight. Now I actually had glasses that made me feel cool. They were fairly stylish looking and they became righteous sunglasses when I went outside. I hung on to those babies for years, way past the time when they were still fashionable. (In fact I'm sure I still have them somewhere.) Finally, glasses were something to be proud of.
That is until I moved to Washington D.C. and met my girlfriend Sue Kennedy. By this time the Aviators were pretty much relics of the previous decade and mine were particularly crappy looking. Having been sat on and mangled various times they were crooked and had a broken bridge. Also the "transition" feature caused them to have a constant dullish tint even indoors which made me look fogged-in most of the time. Sue complained that she couldn't see my blue eyes when I wore them, and convinced me to try contact lenses for the first time. I dutifully went along -- anything to make her happy. But I found contacts to be a continuing irritation. My eyes would dry up so bad I had to carry a bottle of saline solution with me everywhere to keep re-wetting my eyes. Also, at the time, they hadn't come up with a way to correct my astigmatism in my left eye using contacts, so I was always a little out of focus. I wore them for about a year, but eventually Sue and I broke up and I went back to the Aviators.
When I moved to New York and was working pretty steadily as a temp paralegal, I decided it was time to up date my eyewear. I went to a Wall Street Optometrist and picked out a pair of classic "Malcolm X" style glasses that I have been wearing ever since and are still my all-time favorites. They are clear glass and I usually only wear them at night or indoors, since I also picked up a pair of new improved "transition" lenses that turned even darker than the old ones and stayed lighter indoors. Those became my everyday glasses and I have grown so accustomed to them that they seem like part of my face.
Or at least they did until a few weeks ago when I got some new contact lenses. I tend to go way more than year between eye exams and lately I've been noticing that I can't see certain things like road markers, walk signals, grocery aisle signs. I also noticed that, apparently due to the improvements in printing technology, they are starting to print things smaller and smaller so that they are impossible to read. I decided to go visit the local eye doc and sure enough, he recommended new specs. And not just for distance. He wanted to give me some "progressive" lenses to help me see street signs, computer screens and instruction labels. They call them "progressive" because they are a symbol of your progression into old age.
Sorry, doc -- I'm way too young for tri-focals, how about some of them fancy new contact lenses?
You see, contact lens technology has made vast improvements in the past 20 years. The lenses are thinner, more breathable and able to accommodate my astigmatism. The only problem is that if I get lenses to correct my long-distance vision, I won't be able to read anything. Ah, but they have a solution for that as well, it's called monovision. What they do is give me one lens (the right) corrected for distance and one (the left) corrected for closer-up. It took a few days for my brain to figure out what the hell was going on, but once I got used to it, it was like I could see for the first time since eight grade.
But here's the best part: now I get to wear really cool sunglasses! I bought myself a pair of Ray Ban "Predator" wrap-arounds and they are mega-badass. I never want to take them off. In fact when I don't need them I just slide them up on top of my head like one of those hip European dudes. And they are so dark I can look right into the sun without blinking, which is useful since I drive home facing west with the sun right in my eyes. It's been a long love-hate relationship with my eyewear, but I think that now I've finally achieved a balance. I can't wait to go outside again so I can slip on my shades and look slick. I even wear them when it's cloudy.
I think I'll put them on right now.
Ciao, baby...
HWD
Recently it was starting to look like things were really coming together for the band -- we had a pretty cool gig at a place in Hollywood where we could get a lot of exposure, and we even had an offer to play a club on the Sunset Strip. We've been back in the studio adding the final vocal and guitar tracks and the recordings are sounding pretty good. We've got a guy doing our graphics design for the CD cover and he's coming up with a lot of great ideas, including the cool Buzzards logo, soon to be emblazoned on hats, t-shirts and guitar picks everywhere, I've even met some folks who know a little about the music business and have offered to help out whenever we are ready. And we were almost ready.
Then our lead guitar player, Will Ray, decided to move to North Carolina.
Now, everyone knows that lead guitar players are a dime a dozen. Especially in L.A., where they are the next most pervasive life form after starlets and screenwriters, and every bit as annoying. So how hard could it be to replace Will?
The thing is Will isn't just a guitar player. If I had known exactly who he was when I first suggested to Jimmy that we invite him to join us onstage at Hallenbecks, I would have been way too intimidated. Fortunately we clicked that night and Will actually came up with the idea of putting a band together. I was pretty thrilled even to be included at that point. And I still didn't really know who Will was.
I got my first real clue when we went to Will's house one night to do some recording for a demo that we technically still haven't finished. In addition to a full blown recording studio in the back of the house there was a room filled with vintage guitars, plus about five or six new G&L guitars that I noticed had Will's name inscribed on them and his custom death's-head logo inlaid in the fretboards. Then there were the awards on the wall for 'Guitarist of the Year' and Producer of the Year' and a poster of him with the Yardbirds and the magazine covers and the Hellecaster CDs. Will's "other" band is a guitar supergroup called the Hellecasters that has loyal and hardcore following both here and in Europe.But Will's stature was confirmed when my old pal David Hamburger, himself an accomplished picker, was in town for the annual "NAMM" music industry convention. David met me for lunch and we got to talking about Will and the Buzzards and in his very diplomatic and understated way he asked me, basically "What the hell is Will Ray doing with you guys?" I had to confess that I did not know.
But actually, after a while I kind of got used to the idea of playing alongside a legend. Occasionally I might catch myself listening to what he was doing instead of concentrating on what I was doing and forget my part. But most of the time it was just a hell of a lot of fun playing with him. And that's the problem. See, now we have to find a new guy to take his place and it isn't that easy. For one thing, a lot of potential guitarists become intimidated when we tell the that we are trying to replace Will. One guy literally wrote, "Don't make me laugh!" Most of the guys we are hearing from are big fans of Will's and are pretty excited to have the opportunity to step into his shoes. Only thing is they don't quite fill them out. I find myself getting frustrated at the auditions and wanting to say things like, "Is that all you can do? Will could do that in his sleep with one hand tied behind his back!" But I have to restrain myself. They are, after all, mere mortals. I did get a little dose of humility when I tried to step in as lead guitarist just for kicks on a few songs one rehearsal. Considering I haven't played electric guitar for about ten years I didn't screw up too bad, but it was daunting to realize that I will never even approach Will's level of brilliance. And he Will makes sound as easy as falling off a log. For example, when we are recording, he is producer, engineer and guitarist all in one. He tells the musicians what to play and listens to their performances to make sure they are coming out right, watches the mixing board to make sure the sound and levels are being recorded properly and at the same time he's playing lead along with the track to give the other musicians something to cue off of. And the whole time he's talking and making jokes and goofing around. And those throwaway leads, called "scratch" tracks, are better than just about any guitar playing you've ever heard. Later this week we have another series of auditions with another group of Will Ray wannabes trying to impress us with all of their fancy licks and gimmicks and effects. I can only hope that one of them is half as good as he thinks he is. I know there's someone out there who can play well enough to take Will's place without trying to imitate him. But we have this whole CD full of songs coming out that we need to be able to go out and play live without sounding like a completely different band. Having spent so much time playing with the master, my standards have gotten pretty high. So I'll just have to keep looking until the right picker comes along.
It's the price you pay for aiming for the stars, I guess. Anything less just isn't worth the trouble. Anyway, we're still optimistic and the Buzzards will continue one way or another. And I guess if all else fails, we can all move out to North Carolina with Will. I hope he has a big house.HWD[editors note: as luck would have it, the Buzzards found an amazing guitarist to step into Will's shoes -- his name is Jere Mendelsohn and you can check him out for yourself at www.jeremendelsohn.com ]
