Author Archives: Brick Wahl

My kingdom for a word

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(2013)

Thirty years ago I was watching an Ancient Lives episode, Egyptologist John Romer‘s series from the early 1980’s. (The only television my wife and I seemed to watch back then were documentaries). Remarkable series, never seen one like it. He was standing in a tomb in the Valley of the Kings and behind him was this magnificent painting wall painting. The artist, he showed us, had painted the outline of the figure of a man (or was it a god?) in one continuous sweeping stroke, twelve feet long. It wasn’t a straight line, but a lifelike line, curving, gently undulating, utterly ungeometric. Then he pointed out that all the paintings were like that, beginning as immensely long single strokes, perfect. All the artists painting the tombs did the same. In whatever schools they taught tomb painting back then, they taught this patient, focused technique. And, Romer said, we can’t do that now. Not with such ease. I watched a detailer draw a line across my car in a body shop once, one long continuous stroke. It was exquisite. One long, focused, flawless stroke. But could he have taken that brush, dipped it in paint, and swept across a wall in one long stroke, curving, undulating, unerring, a perfect outline of the figure to be filled in afterward? I’m not sure, but I doubt it. Our art is grounded in Greek sculpture and Roman mosaics, I think, infinite details, a zillion tiny steps creating a whole. I can’t imagine one of those Egyptian artists would dig Monet. Theirs was a world of long, graceful, fluid lines. One endless, perfect, living stroke. And thirty years later I’m looking for an adjective that described that stroke. Or described the look of that stroke. I needed to compare a picture to a melody played on the trumpet. Nothing bebop and pointillistic, but a long graceful richly hued melody. Like the theme from Chinatown. I was looking at a still of Faye Dunaway, it was softly black and white, the light was low, her expression haunted, and it struck me that the still–a portrait, really–looked like the trumpet playing the theme sounded. So I began to write that and halfway through the sentence suddenly needed a term that described those long seamless ancient Egyptian strokes. Because that is what her outline was, that’s what would nail it descriptively. An adjective that could apply to both a painting of Ra and a photo of Faye Dunaway. I needed that adjective. I began with soft but it wasn’t soft. It wasn’t firm either. It was —–. I was stuck. There isn’t one. There’s no such word. And no wonder, the very concept of the impression made on us by seeing a shape made by one long stroke like that doesn’t exist. And if it weren’t for John Romer it never would have occurred to me that such a thing even existed, and I wouldn’t have wasted an hour trying to look for a fucking adjective describing it. Hell, I couldn’t even describe it here, this is a mess, I’m flailing about trying to describe something that can’t be described in English. Romer had the visual, he followed the line with his finger and loving camera. We could see it on the screen, and visuals, even after four thousand years of writing and a hundred thousand years of speech comes nowhere near the effectiveness of the eye. Even something as rich in vocabulary and concepts as English, packed as it is with the borrowed lexicons of several languages and bits and pieces of a hundred others, is struck dumb by things it doesn’t even know exists. That skill John Romer marveled at defies my ability to describe without elaborate description. So the Chinatown piece sits unfinished, awaiting one non-existent word, and instead out gushed this. My kingdom for a word.

 

 

April is the cruelest month

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I finally got to say “But you’re too much of Assisi even for Francis.” I waited 30 years for the set up. Suddenly there it was. Bam. Big laugh. But now what? Emptiness. So I sit upon the shore fishing, with the arid plain behind me. Shall I get my shit together? Nah. The piece that pisseth all understanding, in big letters in the dust:

Shanti shanti shantytown.

(Note)

(Note)

My skin is my clothes

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Proud to say I’ve known Steven-Paul Fortier for years, was even his drummer for a few weeks, and I would have played the Gong Show with him except cell phones weren’t invented. He had an incredible record collection, thousands and thousands of singles, and he’d frantically play them one after the other, raving. I remember he sold me a Ventures single at the Hollywood Record Swap meet. Walk Don’t Run. He told me about seeing the Ventures and something happened. Something always happened. I was there when he chased the daughter of the Ventura County district attorney up the stairs. She was half naked. He looked like Elvis Costello. I was drunker than I’ve ever been in my life. I’d see him everywhere, a character among characters, a poet, a punk, a freak, and a tri-county man. I’ve told many a Steven-Paul Fortier story over the years (indeed, I just did) and I just found the rubber snake he used to beat on the tambourine at Al’s Bar. It was with him when he was gonged. I ought to return it to him. I probably won’t. I’m still alive he told someone recently, up in San Francisco, and added the link to his latest film. The link didn’t work. But it didn’t matter. That wasn’t the point. Does there have to be a point? It’s a beatnik world, psychedelicized, full of words and music and California sun.

Ventura, CA (UPI) Steven Fortier came barefoot to his jaywalking hearing this week but he didn’t even make it through the swinging doors when the bailiff ordered him out. The county office demanded that he return wearing something more conservative than faded khaki shorts and an Indian poncho. The 27 year old barefoot poet returned Friday. This time he just wore shorts. “My skin is my clothes. My walking shorts is my address” he told Judge Robert Soares, explaining that he was an unemployed poet with $19 to pay the jaywalking fine. Judge Soares listened sympathetically to Fortier’s story then told the you, blonde-bearded writer to pen a poem or two rather than spend a couple nights in jail. Fortier later turned out three rambling odes, the shortest 86 words, in which he cried out for mercy from “narrow-headed, pea-brained judges who pass rulings on first sight…” The judge read the works to himself, paused, then rapped his gavel and declared “Case dismissed.” Fortier was a free man. (Seen online in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, July 22, 1973)

We all have our Frank Capra endings. This was his.

Robert Benchley

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When I was a kid I wanted to write something as brilliant as Robert Benchley’s wire from Venice: STREETS FULL OF WATER. ADVISE. Funniest thing ever, streets full of water, advise. If I had to pick one joke as the funniest joke ever, that’d be it. Streets full of water. Advise. Then the Western Union man goes the way of the pencil sharpener and emails don’t have quite the same zing. Certainly none of the drama, the show, the tipping: Streets full of water. Advise. *;) winking

And now email fades. What, then, now? Facebook would ruin it utterly–you’d be amazed at how funny all the comments are on Facebook–and I’d have to explain why the streets were full of water. Debate would ensue and somehow I’d wind up a fascist. I could try Twitter, though had Benchley and Twitter been contemporaneous, he’d be just another tweeting drunk. Me, I’m not much of a drinker, I just ate a brownie last night without asking first and was washing dishes at 6 am and making the glasses sing. I came to at noon with dishwater hands mumbling streets full of water, advise. Another smartassed dream. Most guys my age have dreams about their secretaries. Me, I tell jokes. Streets full of water, I say, advise. Everyone laughs and laughs. Then I wake up.

Maybe I’ll try Linked In.

Robert Benchley in "How to Start the Day" (1937).

Robert Benchley in “How to Start the Day” (1937).

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Aching and remembering

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Today is one of those days when a big gnarly fifty something hurts all over from being a big gnarly twenty something. Every single injury ever reminds you it happened. Amazing how many joints there are in the human skeleton. Ouch.

I was never an athlete but was a heavy lifter warehouse guy for years, among other things. I remember a beat up forty something UPS guy telling me I’d regret it some day. I laughed.

I probably lifted thousands of heavy loads–boxes mostly–onto my left shoulder. You know how it’s done–you lift the box up about waste high on bent knees then as you straighten up you toss it up onto your shoulder where it lands, hard, and you steady it with your left hand and, if really heavy, your right too. Takes what, two seconds, maybe three? My left knee is gone now, completely, disintegrated, and it wasn’t until today that I realized what I did to that knee. It was defective to begin with, always falling apart and sending me in a tumble to the floor–hurt like hell for a minute, that did–but I always waited till the pain got manageable again and got up and kept walking. My knee probably popped like that a hundred times at least. I never iced it or even stayed off it. Never took pain pills even. And still I kept throwing those boxes on my left shoulder, and the impact would have been focused on that knee. The knee as shock absorber. Who knows how many boxes–ten thousand? Twenty thousand? Two decades worth, plus some. A helluva lot of boxes. Each one a violent jolt to my disintegrating left knee.

Ouch.

And now I sit at a desk typing this into the ether, aching and remembering and laughing an aging stud’s laugh.

Keeping in touch

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Just looking over my Linked In contacts, none of whom I have ever interacted with, and it occurred to me that I am incredibly bad at keeping in touch with people. Not with friends…I’ve had many of the same friends for decades. Friends I got. That’s not the problem. It’s the circles beyond friends that I can’t seem to maintain. For example, I spent 15 years working at Disney and loved it, knew all kinds of people I was very close to, almost none of whom I have bothered to keep in touch with at all. They reached out, too. I never bothered reaching back. And even the tiny handful I did keep in touch with I barely ever talk to. I spent ten years at US Borax before then and I don’t even remember the names. You are supposed to remember the names. And college? Forget it. High School? You have to be kidding. I can name scarcely a dozen people I went to high school with. Have seen maybe half a dozen since then. College is even worse. There were three roommates. Actually more than three, I just remember those three. I can’t even remember the name of the roommate who fronted me the bread so I could buy my first drum kit. I’m hoping I paid him back.

Then there’s the LA Weekly–I spent seven years there, had a big impact and have maintained connections with nobody. Not a one. Not deliberately, I just sort of dropped off that planet. All those readers, I just disappeared on them. Poof. Gone. In fact, I knew literally hundreds of people on the jazz scene, a lot of them extremely well, and I lost touch with nearly all of them. And jazz people, the musicians anyway, aren’t the easiest people to get to know. You have to prove your worth to earn their respect. Apparently I did. Then I dropped them all. I wrote a long beautiful email and disappeared. (I did that at Disney too.) And I lost touch with almost every single writer I was tight with then, that is my professional colleagues, and all the publicists. All the radio people and booking agents. Record company people. Promoters. Even the musicians. The whole scene. I remember actually purging my contact lists. I remember it felt good, somehow, liberating.

But this is not the way to function in a social media world. All these networks are vital. The people you worked with. The clients and colleagues. Maintaining those connections. Keeping in touch. Meeting new people. And the social media–Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, Google Plus and on and on. If you learn how to use those effectively you do well. Get gigs. Make money. Become influential. Why can’t I grasp these concepts? They seem simple enough. How do I explain this to myself?  Especially as I’m still doing what I’ve always been doing, still cutting myself off. Case in point: when Mark Zuckerberg told me Brick was a verboten name and I shut down my account rather than bend to His will, I lost contact with most of the people I knew on Facebook. Hundreds of them. I made a half-assed attempt to re-connect with some, and then forgot about it. I now have a Facebook account (I use my wife’s name) but a fraction of the Facebook connections I used to have. Which doesn’t seem to bother me in the least. What am I not getting here?

Maybe I need a social secretary. Back when I was at the Weekly I had a very good friend at Disney who wanted so bad to be my social secretary. Man, she would have been great at it. I mean perfect. A dream. She offered repeatedly. I never did take her up on it. Don’t know why.

Of course, that’s all moot now, since I’ve lost touch with her.

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I slept with a stewardess

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I slept with a stewardess once. Right in front of everybody. My wife even.

It was in flight, too, an L-1011 from O’Hare to LAX, double booked. Another flight had been cancelled and they shoved the displaced passengers, tired and sullen, onto our plane. We were midway down the row, all crammed and miserable, my wife on my right and an empty seat on my left. I thought I’d lucked out with no one beside me when at the last second an off duty stewardess, thoroughly irritated, sat down. It was the last seat on the plane another stewardess told her. I pressed to the right to give her room. She glared at the floor. She was blonde and lovely and perfect. I looked away. She shifted about, looking for room for her perfect legs. I gave her more room, squeezing to the right. She said nothing and read a magazine. I started a book and tried not to notice her every move. My wife was lost in a novel.

The flight was turbulent, bumpy, crowded, miserable. Endless. It was late and the reading lights flicked off and passengers tried to sleep. My wife nodded off. The stewardess, sighing, dropped off as well. I sat there wishing I could sleep too, knowing I couldn’t. I never fall asleep on planes, never.

I awoke an hour or so later and could feel my arm wrapped around my wife who was who curled up close, nuzzling my chest, sweetly asleep. Very comforting. I opened my eyes and looked down. My wife didn’t have blonde hair. It was the stewardess. I panicked. We had been curled together like that for who knows how long, almost intimate. Completely still, I looked to the right. My wife was sound asleep. Thank god. Very carefully I lifted my arm from round the stewardess, and with the other hand gently pushed her off of me. She mumbled something and rolled the other way. It was only when my arm was safely back in my seat that she awoke. I looked away, feigning sleep, but she was unaware. I said nothing. A few minutes later my wife awoke. The pilot announced we were nearing Los Angeles. We all got our things together and waited. The plane landed. We all stood and exited the aisle. My wife and I chatted but the stewardess and I never shared a word. She disappeared one way, we went another.

Years later I told this story to my wife. I must have been high to even bring it up, but I did. I slept with a stewardess, I said. My wife looked at me with raised eyebrows. Then I explained. My wife stared at me. Funny, she said, very funny.

I never brought it up again.

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Punch line

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When I was young and buff and gorgeous and 22, I declined an offer from a beautiful blonde acquaintance to appear in porn movies. True story. I think her name was Monica, and she was icy and tall and leggy and serious and a production assistant in the San Fernando Valley. Her studio offered $200 per movie (about $700 today) she said, with the promise of lots of work. The money was tempting, but I had my heart set on being a writer. Besides, you could make a lot more than a lousy $200 (about $700 today) writing an article.

That was the punch line, actually. Too bad it’s not a joke.

A big bottle of pomegranate rum

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For the first time in I don’t know how long, a decade or two, I don’t have to drive anywhere on New Years Eve. No, I get to walk next door. Tonight I get to act like a real writer. I know hundreds of dirty limericks. OK, I don’t, but I have a big bottle of pomegranate rum–in a Martinelli’s apple juice bottle–in front of me. Rum in an apple juice bottle…life keeps getting more and more 1930’s. Let us now praise famous men.

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My music career

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Just listening to some ancient cassettes of an old band of mine, thirty years ago. I was in a lot of bands for a couple crazy decades there–no one you’d ever heard of–but this band was my favorite. It was the apex of it all. I hadn’t listened to us in years, though. Not in forever. I didn’t realize I played so very fast back then. Wow. No high hat, either–I remember picking it up and throwing it in the corner when the linkage broke, kept playing and didn’t bother buying another. I was free baby, all over the place. The music was crazy hard, loose, wild, funny, loud and out of control. What a ball we were having. I think we might have been a wee bit high. And no, you will never hear it.

I’d even forgotten some of the titles. Things like Baby Baby you blow my mind! (“Oh baby, you blow my everloving mind!”). Or I love you oh baby oh yeah! yeah! yeah! (“I love you, oh baby, oh yeah yeah yeah/Will I leave you, oh baby, oh no, no, no”). The classic  “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, No, No, No” (“every time I wanna say yeah/everybody else wants to say no”). And a version of Mrs. Robinson we did because you could say “yeah” eighteen times in a row. That was important. The singer/guitar leader thought all rock songs should say yeah and baby. All of them. Indeed, that is all they had to say. I remember on one song I couldn’t make out the lyrics between the baby baby chorus, but it was because there weren’t any, the singer was making rock star noises. You don’t need words in rock’n’roll, he said, you just have to make rock star noises. Apparently he’d been listening to Exile on Main Street on acid, and on “Happy” Keith Richards made rock star noises. Those aren’t really words, he said. He had a point, and I wasn’t even tripping. I never did. But he did a lot of tripping. As did the bass player. I was ground control, I guess. We seemed to do a lot of tunes about acid. My favorite was My Balls Feel Fine where a guy goes to a love in and is afraid he got the clap, “but I look them over/ and I feel them over/ but they feel fine/ and I’m feeling fine/ Because my balls feel fine/ I said my balls feel fine/ I took LSD/ but did I also get VD….”. Can’t remember the rest–I lost the notebook with all his lyrics. This would be about the time in the set when I’d look at the crowd and they were sitting there, jaws dropped, bewildered and uncomfortable. Even the ones who hated us. The ones who thought we were the greatest thing ever were singing along. It did have a catchy chorus.

There were a lot of stoner tunes, too. “Let’s Get Naked and Smoke” (“I wanna use your boobs for a roach clip baby!”) was a crowd pleaser, even danceable, not to mention on our very rare button. No one made buttons then, they were so thin tie new wave hokey, so of course we did. There were two, but all I can remember is Let’s Get Naked and Smoke. We also did a million covers, none of which sounded like the originals….we filled them with yeahs and babys and people probably couldn’t recognize half of them. Somebody once told me that our song that goes we’re caught in a trap, we can’t get out really hit him hard, because he was caught in a trap and couldn’t get out either. I didn’t have the heart to tell him it was an Elvis song. Thing was he really was caught in a trap, but that’s another story.

I remember playing the Cathay de Grande here in Hollywood and the hardcore kids hated us, one of them–he looked exactly like Ian McKaye–marched back and forth in front of the stage screaming you suck and flipping us off through every song. He was wearing a “make noise not music” tee shirt. Apparently we were too musical. Some proto-grunge long hairs were going nuts like we were the saviors of rock’n’roll. Everyone else just stared, bewildered. That made us feel good. Played again and the same reaction. Pretty much the response we wanted. If 90% of the crowd hates you then you must be doing something right. Every gig, though, we picked up more fanatical fans. This was just before the eighties underground explosion, when hardcore punk rockers rediscovered rock’n’roll and weirdness. We were on the cutting edge, I suppose, though we had no idea. We were just in this crazy band. We were original class of ’77 punk rockers, and had that edge. We didn’t care about politics or causes or ideology, we just wanted to act crazy and bug people and fuck shit up. There were a lot of bizarre onstage antics, anarchy, surrealism, Marx Brothers moments and unbelievably stoned weirdness. We were a power trio. We were incredibly loud. The guitar player–dubbing himself Charles Joseph Renfield III–came off like a cross between Jimi Hendrix and Wayne County and that really weird guy in your high school gym class. Totally demented look, and this was 1984, when everyone looked like Ian McKaye and Henry Rollins. The bassist looked like a redneck–he was, actually, from Kentucky–talked and sang in a thick stage drawl and went by the name of Keltic Runes. I looked like a truck driver, a big giant strong as an ox working man–which I was–beating a tiny little jazz kit. I never stopped playing no matter how catastrophic it got on stage. One memorable night the other guys got tangled in each other’s chords during the long instrumental stretch in Let’s Get Naked and Smoke–I think they were copping the Mick Ronson-Trevor Boulder dance routine from Ziggy Stardust–and the bass became unplugged and the guitar amp toppled over with an enormous reverbed bang that echoed over and over. My brother jumped up on stage to helped untangle the mess–it looked like a Gordian knot of cables–and get everyone plugged back in, I’m still playing, the bass player joins in, the guitar player starts tuning up over the groove and finally comes back in like nothing had happened. People applauded with relief, I think they were sure we were just going to end it there, tangled and unplugged and sad. Afterward someone came up and asked if we’d planned all that. I said we had. He said he figured as much.

That was the same night that the guitar player, quite out of his mind–he wound up in a mental hospital soon afterward–tried to get in a fist fight with the Cathay’s doorman, Lawrence Fishburne, who’d have none of it. He just spun him around and I nearly got clocked instead. His fist stopped an inch from my face. He would have knocked me out cold, I’m sure, he was so high on whatever, vibrating, tweeked, quite mad. But he dropped his fist. Sorry Brick, he said. Then he started raving at the kids, trying to start a riot. They just stared. I managed to get him down into the bowels of the club and onto the stage. He’d used about two cans of hair spray and in profile had this incredible alpine pompadour that from the front was maybe two inches wide. Not a hair out of place, though. The rest of his get up included beat up jeans, demented high heeled boots with doll heads attached and a girl’s blouse. A scarf, too. He was a PCP hallucination of Jimi Hendrix. His stage banter was half Elvis, half Hendrix, half cartoons. I know that’s three halves, but then so was he. If you’re gonna be weird, be weird. I remember him once telling somebody we were the greatest band on the planet. They scoffed–on the whole planet? Yeah, he said, just not this planet. It became our slogan.

We never did record. We were supposed to do a session for Mystic Records but I had to cancel it because Charles Joseph Renfield III had been out all night plumbing the depths of downtown L.A. on dust and was a mess. I didn’t even know people were still doing dust. But the end, clearly, was nigh. He’d actually become his stage persona, Charles Joseph Renfield III. Weird thing to watch. We later talked about just recording one of the gigs and calling it Liver Than Living Fuck. But it was too late. He was way out there by that point–it got very strange, strange and disturbing–and I had to break up the band. Shades of Ziggy, I know. We all went our own ways. He got strung out, stayed that way for years, was in and out of mental hospitals and eventually died a sad, messy death. The bass player moved to Nashville to sell used Cadillacs. I wound up a jazz critic. Years later I’m at some club looking sophisticated and some geezer comes up to me and said he saw us at the Cathay and we’d changed his life. I thanked him and edged away….

A couple years after all this we were reviewed somewhere–Flipside?–which surprised the hell out of me. It came out of nowhere, a previous life. The reviewer said we “were either the world’s laziest musicians or light years ahead of everybody else or both”. I was very proud of that quote…. True on both counts. The only other review I ever remember getting was for my first band and Flipside said of us that “they could hold their own with Fear and Black Flag in a hardcore guts contest.” I’m still proud of that one, too. I even had my picture in the ‘zine. That was so long ago, 1979 I believe, and I don’t think I even have a copy of that. Of either. I just remember the quotes. But those two quotes were enough for my music career.

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