Tales of Madness & Depravity

SHIPROCKED: A HAIR METAL ODYSSEY

2011-06-07T21:24:00.000-07:00

BLURT magazine, April 2011

It’s a balmy November evening and I’m sitting in a cruise ship karaoke lounge, fixated on the small stage where a shirtless fat man in a turquoise Mexican wrestling mask is singing, or rather grunting, a classic Mötley Crüe tune from 1983. Just before the Nacho Libre look-alike hits the chorus, he screams to the audience, “Y’all know the words. Sing it, motherfuckers!” The boisterous crowd rises to its feet, fists pumping the air, chanting in boozy unison:

Shout – Shout – Shout – Shout at the devil!

While there’s no denying the allure of a chubby, half-naked man in fetishistic headgear performing karaoke for a drunken mob, it should be noted that this is not typical cruise ship fare. Today, most cruise lines cater to middle-American families and aging retirees, offering wholesome entertainment and a theme park sensibility. But the tattooed miscreants gathered in this lounge are not your ordinary cruisers. They are shadow people, existing on the fringes of society. They are the deviants your mother warned you about. They are the bastards, the rebels, the misfits, and the damned. Curiously, they’re also tax attorneys, dental hygienists, and kindergarten teachers. And now these denizens of darkness, these orgiastic Satan worshippers and part-time Lamaze instructors, have gathered on this 93,000 ton party boat for Shiprocked, a Bahamas-bound cruise celebrating all things Rock. And when I say Rock, I don’t mean the brooding melancholy of Pearl Jam or the electronic science fiction of Radiohead. I don’t mean the esoteric blues of The White Stripes, and I certainly don’t mean the bullshit studio formula of Seether or Finger Eleven. I’m talking about rock and roll, the kind that wears spandex and ladies’ mascara while sucker punching you in the balls; the kind that inspires the trashing of hotel rooms, grotesque inebriation, and a never-ending rotation of groupies sucking cock in the back lounge of a tour bus. Of course, I’m talking about 80’s arena rock, with its monster guitar riffs, sing along choruses, and pyro that’ll singe the hair right off your junk. “This music is about pussy, parties, and paychecks,” says Stephen Pearcy of Ratt. “It’s catchy and fun and it’s got that element of danger. Some of us really like danger, and some just like the facade. I mean, I’ll kill everybody.”

Held on the gloriously tacky MSC Poesia, Shiprocked features a three-day itinerary packed with rock-related activities, including live concert performances by hair metal icons Cinderella, Tesla, and Vince Neil of Mötley Crüe. Though it might be tempting to write off this event as a sad bit of nostalgia or an exercise in hipster irony, I assure you these diehard fans are serious about the music. “This isn’t a vacation, it’s a lifestyle,” says Sherri, a wild-eyed woman wearing leather motorcycle chaps and a faded Guns ‘N Roses t-shirt. “I quit my job two summers ago, and I’ve been following Mötley Crüe ever since. All my credit cards have been shut off and I’m about to get evicted from my place.” She sips her frozen margarita adding, “I’ve basically given up my old life, and it’s all good. I just want to rock out with my box out.”

The MSC Poesia is a full-service cruise ship with every amenity for the discerning traveler, including spas, casinos, sushi bars, and a dinosaur-themed play area for those who want to get in touch with their inner Fred Flintstone. On this voyage, some 1200 metal heads registered for the Shiprocked event, giving them exclusive access to all the concerts and activities. This means that the other 1500 passengers on the ship, mostly families with children and tour groups of the elderly, have unknowingly been booked onto this floating Sodom and Gomorrah – a fact that does not go unnoticed by the wary travelers. “They took over the whole goddamn boat,” I heard a crotchety senior tell his wife in the gift shop. “Did you see all the long hair and tattoos? They’re goddamn hooligans.”

Of course, not all the Shiprockers are hooligans, but they are a hard-partying bunch. For many of them, the blowout started several days before the Poesia even left port with pre-cruise gatherings at various Ft. Lauderdale watering holes. By the time these diehard fans actually boarded the ship, many were twisted three ways from Sunday. This was particularly evident during the mandatory safety drill where a pretty blonde crewmember gave evacuation instructions to the passengers. As she demonstrated the proper way to secure her life vest, a shoeless, slurring man in a frayed Trixter t-shirt screamed, “I’ve been drunk for fourteen hours. How am I supposed to remember this?” Another man, obviously intoxicated, repeatedly shouted to the woman, “Do you like seamen? Do you like seamen in your mouth?” His comments, thankfully out of earshot of the young woman, were vulgar, infantile, and delightfully profane. Clearly I was among my people.

When I told my family and friends that I was going on a heavy metal cruise with Cinderella, Tesla, and the lead singer of Mötley Crüe, I was greeted with a certain amount of bemusement. Most seemed to think that these former chart-topping rockers were either dead, working at the Home Depot, or playing canasta with the dudes from Foghat at the retirement home of forgotten rock stars. The truth, however, is that nearly all 80’s rock bands are touring in some capacity today. Many of these bands – like Skid Row, Slaughter, LA Guns, and Warrant – subsist at the club level, playing to a few hundred fans a night at beer-soaked dives with colorful names like the Crazy Donkey, Jerry’s Bait Shop, and G.B. Leighton’s Pickle Park. Though the stage may not be as grand as it once was for these middle-aged rockers, they can still make a decent living playing their music. But not all 80’s rock bands are relegated to the biker bar circuit. The heavy hitters of the acid wash era – bands like Guns ‘N Roses, Mötley Crüe, Aerosmith, the Scorpions, Def Leppard, and Poison – are selling out arenas in a tough economic climate when few artists have that kind of draw. In fact, the highest-grossing concert tour of 2010 belonged to New Jersey rockers Bon Jovi, not Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, U2, or Justin Bieber.

But it’s no longer just about touring: 80’s rock has gone mainstream. The Guitar Hero and Rock Band video game franchises have boosted these artists’ catalog sales and introduced their music to a new generation of fans. The wildly successful Broadway musical Rock of Ages – set on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip in 1987 and featuring music by Night Ranger, Quiet Riot, and Whitesnake – was nominated for five Tony Awards and is now becoming a major motion picture. Bret Michaels of Poison became a household name on VH1’s Rock of Love and Donald Trump’s Celebrity Apprentice. Vince Neil recently appeared on ABC’s Skating with the Stars. And now, Steven Tyler of Aerosmith is a judge on American Idol, one of the most-watched shows on television. “For many of these artists, the marketing opportunities and potential revenue streams are greater than ever before,” says Jeff Albright, president of the Albright Entertainment Group and publicist for numerous 80’s rock bands. “With the combination of television, radio, video games, and internet, you can now be seen and heard 24-7. And more places to be seen and heard means more places to be sold.”

***

I’ve got a few hours to kill before Cinderella takes the stage on this second night of the cruise, so I’m doing what any responsible journalist would do: I’m drinking Red Bull and Xanax daiquiris (my own recipe) by the pool and sunning myself like a monitor lizard. All around me, attractive women in thong bikinis seductively oil themselves, splayed on chaise lounges like bronzed, silicone goddesses. Perhaps it’s the brain fog from all the benzo and rum, but I suddenly feel as though I’ve wandered onto the set of a late-night Cinemax movie. I half-expect to find Frank Stallone and Shannon Tweed entwined in the jacuzzi.

As I make my way across the sundeck to the bar for another round of drinks, I see Tesla lead singer Jeff Keith in shorts and flip flops carrying an enormous plate of hardboiled eggs back to his table. As he meanders through the crowd, people smile and pat him on the back, saying things like, “Dude, you fucking rock!” and “I want you to put a baby in me!” He is friendly and gracious, stopping to chat with everyone who crosses his path. And the fans are ecstatic. “I’ve never been backstage at a concert. I’ve never seen any rock stars, like, walking around eating eggs,” says Myles, 39, from New Orleans. “But here, you might bump into Vince Neil in the buffet line, or see Tom Kiefer (Cinderella) at the bar.” And this is exactly why celebrity theme cruises are so popular today: fans want up-close and personal interactions with their music idols. It’s about access and inclusiveness. Because at some point, we’ve all been on the wrong side of the velvet rope at a trendy nightclub, denied entry because we weren’t cool enough, or pretty enough, or willing to grease some beefy doorman’s steroid-engorged palm. An event like Shiprocked is your passport through the velvet rope to the VIP lounge on the other side. “Back in the day when I would go to concerts, I was usually in the nosebleed section because those were the only seats I could afford,” says Nancy, 42, from Virginia Beach. “But now that I’m older and I have money, I can see these people up close. I can touch them. I can hang out with them.” But the lure of these events goes beyond access: it’s also about fantasy and wish fulfillment. “Before I even got my first kiss, I was making out with the rock star posters on my wall,” says Angelina Leigh, an actress and fetish model who has appeared in Playboy, Hustler, and Juggs magazine. “And now I get to party with those guys. Last year on Shiprocked, I hung out with Skid Row. And I totally wanted to marry them when I was a kid, you know?”

***

It’s ten o’clock and time to rock. More than a thousand rabid fans are packed into the Carlos Felice Theater waiting to be assaulted by the sonic donkey punch of Cinderella’s delta blues metal. When the band takes the stage and kicks into “Somebody Save Me,” the room becomes a raucous sea of split-fingered devil horns, a turbulent ocean of synchronized heads banging in unison like some futuristic heavy metal hive mind. As they launch into “Gypsy Road,” the electricity from the stage jolts through my body, shooting sparks up my spinal chord to my brain stem, creating an aurora borealis of sound inside my frontal lobe. And that’s what so great about 80’s rock. It exists for the flesh, not the intellect. It is the soundtrack of the id. Songs like “Girls, Girls, Girls,” “Talk Dirty to Me,” “Slide it In,” and “Cherry Pie” are testosterone-driven operettas about loose girls, fast cars, drinking whiskey, and raising hell. It’s not supposed to make you think, it’s supposed to make you feel. And if done properly, it’ll make you feel like fighting or fucking. “I don’t wanna go to a concert and hear about how shitty things are. I want to have fun tonight,” says Vince Neil of Mötley Crüe. “That’s what the eighties music represented: Get drunk, get laid, have fun.”

As Cinderella downshifts into the epic ballad “Don’t Know What You’ve Got (Till It’s Gone),” I start chatting with Karen and her husband who are sitting next to me. Karen is in her late 30’s, sharp-dressed and stunning, with a hint of mischief lurking behind her green eyes. And she’s completely hammered. “I’m a good girl, but when I drink tequila I get really bad. And then I start craving pussy,” she tells me, causing me to snorf an entire Jäger Bomb out my nose. She leans in close like she’s about to reveal a secret, her Jose Cuervo breath hot on my neck. “There’s nothing like the taste of good pussy – it’s way better than dick.” At which point, she grabs the busty woman next to her and they start making out. Her husband looks over, disinterested. He shrugs his shoulders and continues watching the concert.

On the way back to my stateroom, I notice that my neighbors, two Jersey Shore wannabes with ripped abs and Oompa Loompa spray tans, have hung a sign on their cabin door that says “Teezin N Pleezin” in large block print, with the cryptic phrase “Squirters Welcome!!” scrawled beneath it. The poster is dotted with several red lipstick imprints, presumably belonging to Buffy, Stacy, and/or Lila, all who dutifully signed their names at the bottom like some kind of twisted Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all bros are created equal, that they are endowed like wildebeests with certain unalienable rights, that among these are a lifetime Gold’s Gym membership and an unlimited Dave & Busters power card, the freedom to tap hot random ass, and the pursuit of mother fucking rock and roll.

Later, I’m awakened by a wretched cacophony of bleats and squeals echoing from the room next door. The passionate thumps and wails – best described as “barnyard-like” – reverberate through the wall and into my cabin. I’m not sure what kind of deranged sexual activity is going on over there, but I’m fairly certain it involves slaughtering a goat.

***

It’s the last full day of the cruise. We’re docked in the Bahaman port city of Nassau and I’m at Señor Frogs, drinking a 64-ounce frozen daiquiri served in a three-foot tall cup shaped like a saxophone. Some two hundred fellow Shiprockers are there, grooving their way through another round of heavy metal karaoke. The mysterious fat man in the turquoise Mexican wrestling mask has returned to the stage, this time grunting his way through Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love a Bad Name.” Better yet, he’s wearing a half-shirt that says, “Where’s the Queef?” Stay classy, Bahamas.

While I’m waiting in line to get another giant saxophone daiquiri, I meet two guys from Indiana, one of whom is wearing an actual cowbell around his neck. “We went to Rocklahoma to see Vince Neil and during “Live Wire,” his drummer didn’t have a cowbell. And that’s a song that depends on the cowbell,” he tells me. “So we went to see Vince again in Nashville, but we brought our own cowbell.”

“So at the concert, you played along with the band using your own cowbell?” I reply.

“Fuck yeah, buddy. Now we bring it everywhere. Because if you want to rock the fuck out of a party, wear a cowbell. People love the cowbell.”

Moments later, the lead singer of a Mötley Crüe tribute band takes the stage and launches into a blistering karaoke version of “Live Wire.” The cowbell guy promptly removes a drumstick from his back pocket and begins playing along in perfect time, even doing Tommy Lee’s signature stick twirl. And the crowd goes completely bananas. Maybe it’s the liquor, maybe it’s the sheer goofiness of a guy beating on a cowbell around his neck, but for the first time in ages I feel pure unadulterated joy. I feel connected to the people in that room, connected to something familiar from my past. “This is the music we listened to when we were kids. And now we’ve got money to spend, and we can still blow it out with the best of ‘em. We are ferocious rockers,” says James, an investment banker from New York. “This music helps us get away from our humdrum corporate lives and makes us feel like we’re nineteen again. It helps us get back to our roots.” The waitress brings over a bucket of a beer. He hands me a frosty Corona, adding, “We have no responsibilities here. No schedules. No alarm clocks. No kids. Total freedom. And if I walk away from Shiprocked with anything less than a two-thousand dollar bar tab, I’m gonna be pissed.”

There will always be people who think 80’s rock is a joke. And the genre doesn’t do itself any favors. After all, it can be hard to take a guy seriously who’s wearing a steel codpiece and platform moon boots. And critics are quick to dismiss the 80’s rock revival as an exercise in nostalgia. And you know what? They’re right. Nostalgia – from the Greek nostos meaning “return home,” and algos, meaning “longing” – is a longing for a home that no longer exists. “At first glance, nostalgia is a longing for place, but actually it is a yearning for a different time – the time of our youth, the slower rhythm of our dreams,” writes Harvard Professor Svetlana Boym in her book The Future of Nostalgia. “It is an affective yearning for a community with a collective memory, a longing for continuity in a fragmented world.” You bet your sweet ass it is.

As I disembark the MSC Poesia, I’m already thinking about next year’s Shiprocked. Maybe they’ll book a kick-ass band like Kix, whose 1989 hit Cold Blood is the best rock song of the last twenty years (yeah, I said it), or Steelheart, whose eponymous 1990 debut is my favorite overall rock record of the hair band era.

“It’s just good music and that’s the bottom line. The Beatles wrote songs that will live forever, so did Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith. And now people are realizing that Mötley Crüe and Guns ‘N Roses and Slaughter did too,” says Tiffany, 41, of Tarpon Springs, Florida. “Maybe subconsciously we’re regressing, but it’s the best music in the world. I’ll be seventy-five years old and still listening to my Slaughter records. My grandchildren will be saying, “What are you listening to, grandma? Turn down that noise.”

Abiding We Stand: The Lebowski Phenomenon

2011-05-18T14:30:00.000-07:00

BLURT magazine, Sept. 2010

I’m waiting in line to buy a White Russian cocktail from a beverage cart at a non-descript bowling alley in southern California. In front of me, a heavy-set Latino man in a hand-stitched marmot costume is volleying movie quotes with a small woman dressed as a severed human toe. The exchange goes something like this:

Woman: Nice marmot.

Man: You want a toe? I can get you a toe.

Woman: That, and a pair of testicles.

If you’re a fan of cult films, or if you’ve smoked a bong in a college dorm room at some point in the last decade, then you’ll recognize these bits of dialogue from the 1998 Coen brothers film The Big Lebowski. And this place – this bowling alley in an obscure suburb wedged somewhere between Los Angeles and Long Beach – is home to tonight’s Lebowski Fest. Described as a “chaotic celebration of the human spirit” by the LA times, the Lebowski Fest is a goofy two-day event that features a screening of the film, trivia contests, plenty of White Russian cocktails, a Creedence cover band, costume contests, and of course lots of bowling. But mostly, the Lebowski Fest is a place where fans – known as Achievers – can come to celebrate the film and get a little weird with likeminded people.

The first Fest was launched in 2002 by Lebowski devotees Will Russell and Scott Shuffitt and drew about 150 people. Today, the event travels to multiple cities each year and draws tens of thousands of fans. In 2007, Russell and Shuffitt took the event to London and Scotland, and the Lebowski Fest has landed on SPIN magazine’s list of “19 Summer Events You Can’t Miss,” Rolling Stone’s “Hot List” and was voted one of the “Best Summer Road trips” by Maxim and FHM. In addition to the Fests, The Big Lebowski has inspired several books, including the best-selling I’m a Lebowski, You’re a Lebowski, and a Lebowski-themed shop recently opened in New York’s tony Greenwich Village where the employees all wear bathrobes and pajamas. This summer in San Francisco, a re-imagined Shakespeare play called Much Ado About Lebowski premiered, and at the time of this writing The Big Lebowski has 346,133 Facebook fans, which is only 6 million fewer than Justin Bieber. The movie even spawned its own religion called Dudeism, based on the Zen-like attitude of The Dude, Lebowski’s underachieving antihero played by Jeff Bridges. And perhaps most baffling, there have been literally hundreds of doctoral dissertations, academic papers, and scholarly critiques written about the Lebowski phenomenon. In other words, this thing is big. Bieber big. Which begs an interesting question: How has this offbeat little film – a box-office flop and critical punching bag upon its 1998 theatrical release – garnered such a rabid following and become so thoroughly entrenched in the cultural zeitgeist?

When The Big Lebowski hit theaters in March of 1998 – two years after Fargo’s successful Oscar run – the United States was experiencing a period of unprecedented economic prosperity. This might be why Americans weren’t particularly receptive to the seemingly radical, leftist social critiques so prevalent in the Coen brothers’ acid-trippy, Raymond Chandler-esque bowling farce. But the cultural landscape has shifted dramatically in the decade-plus since The Big Lebowski’s release. We’ve lived through the terror attacks of 9/11, two bloody wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a devastating economic recession, and the comedy of Dane Cook. In his paper “The Big Lebowski as Carnivalesque Social Critique,” Paul Martin describes the United States as a place where the mainstream media tends to legitimize official government spin and where political dissent is unpopular – or worse – unpatriotic. This narrow, oppressive climate, according to Martin, has created a void in popular critical discourse. “With this void begging to be filled by those left voiceless and powerless,” says Martin, “The Big Lebowski has become even more relevant today.” In other words, the radical, leftist social critiques of The Big Lebowski and its not-so-subtle statements about class warfare, Saddam Hussein, big business, and mass consumerism are just what Americans want (and maybe need) at this point in our history. In this sense, The Dude really is the man for his time.

While there may indeed be a socio-historic element to The Big Lebowski phenomenon, I think this is only one small part of the equation. To begin to understand this film’s cultural relevance, we first need to turn our attention to the fans. In the parlance of our times, these people are fucking crazy. But in a good way. Most Achievers can recite every line of dialogue in the movie, they hate the fucking Eagles, and they make their own costumes for the Fests that they attend. Many come dressed as their favorite characters – you’ll see plenty of Dudes, Walters, nihilists, and Jesuses at the events. But some fans take a more conceptual approach to their costumes, dressing as the Foldier’s coffee can that holds Donny’s cremated ashes, the 69 cent check that the Dude writes for his half and half, or the aforementioned severed toe. To the Achievers, any bit of minutia related to the film is sacred. It could be a prop from the movie set, like the stuffed marmot the Coen brothers loaned the Fest back in 2004. Or it could be an extra from the film who had no speaking lines, like Jesus’s bowling partner Liam or the gum-chewing checkout girl at Ralph’s.

The Big Lebowski’s the fans are passionate, bordering on obsessive. But why are they so drawn to this particular film? Every generation has a quotable college stoner comedy. For me, it was Animal House, Caddyshack and Fletch. For you, it might be a Cheech & Chong movie, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure or Office Space. But they don’t have Fletch Fests, and people don’t dress up like Judge Smails, Carl Spackler, or Kent Dorfman (though I did play Spaulding in a re-enactment of the candy bar scene from Caddyshack in my cousin’s pool). The point is that these other highly-quotable, generation-defining comedies didn’t have the same cultural impact as Lebowski. Some think it’s because The Big Lebowski is the first major cult comedy of the internet age. And there may be some truth to that. But if you want my opinion, it all goes back to the Dude.

Achievers love the Dude. To them, he’s the grinning Buddha Zen master and the relaxed slacker hero all rolled into one lumpy, disheveled, oat soda-drinking body. But the key word here is hero. James Hoosier, who played Jesus’s bowling partner Liam in the movie, offers the following insight: “If I want to go out to the grocery store in my pajama bottoms, then I shouldn’t have to put on pants. But you know what? I always end up putting on pants any way. That’s why people love this movie: because the Dude does the things we want to but can’t.”

When we first meet the Dude – or his Dudeness, or Duder, or El Duderino if you’re not into the whole brevity thing – he’s in a supermarket writing a post-dated 69 cent check for a pint of half and half. He’s wearing Bermuda shorts, sunglasses, and a ratty bathrobe. According to the character description in the Coen brothers’ script, “His rumpled look and relaxed manner suggest a man in whom casualness runs deep.” Casual is probably the most polite way to describe the Dude, since he exhibits all the tell-tale signs of a slacker hippie burnout: He’s lazy. He’s perpetually unemployed and lives alone in a one-bedroom apartment. He’s habitually behind on his rent. He seems to subsist solely on White Russian cocktails, coffee, and breath mints lifted from a funeral parlor. And his only interests are bowling, listening to Creedence (or whale sounds), smoking weed, and taking bubble baths. By society’s standards, the Dude is a loser. And this is where things get interesting.

On the surface, the Dude seems to embody the failure of the New Left – the activists, educators and agitators in the 1960s and 1970s who fought for social and political reforms in America. These idealistic youths tried to launch a much-ballyhooed counterculture revolution but it never really got off the ground. Hunter Thompson described the failure of the New Left and the downfall of the Love Generation thusly:

“No doubt they all got what was coming to them. All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. A generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody – or at least some force – is tending that light at the end of the tunnel.”

But what if Hunter Thompson is wrong on this one? Perhaps someone is tending that light at the end of the tunnel – and perhaps that someone shops at Ralph’s in his bathrobe and has a fear of marmots. Is it conceivable, then, that the Dude is not the symbolic failure of the New Left after all, but rather a warrior who has remained faithful to his cause, a beacon of hope for the New Left (Yes we can!) that carries the dream from the 1960s into tomorrow, inspiring a new generation of revolutionaries (or stoned college sophomores) along the way? Think about it. The Dude has a history as an activist and spent his college years “occupying various administration buildings, smoking thai-stick, breaking into the ROTC, and bowling.” He was a member of the radical Seattle Seven group and helped draft the original version of the Port Huron Statement. In her essay “The Dude and the New Left,” Stacy Thompson describes the Port Huron Statement as a lazy version of the Communist Manifesto. The 1962 document argues that, “work should be educative, not stultifying; creative, not mechanical; self-directed, not manipulated, encouraging independence, a respect for others, a sense of dignity, and a willingness to accept social responsibility.” Thompson suggests that the Dude is not lazy, but that he simply refuses to work in a stultifying, non-creative job. Essentially, by refusing to work – or look for work – the Dude is enacting the tenets of the Port Huron Statement. As a result, he is the embodiment of those ideals, today. This means that the light at the end of the tunnel is indeed being tended. It means that the will of a single Creedence-loving man is keeping the dream of the New Left alive. Because as Walter tells the Dude, “If you will it, it is no dream.”

While the Port Huron Statement only briefly touches on the concept of labor, I think our changing attitudes towards the American work ethic is the accelerant that fuels the Lebowski phenomenon today. In his book Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers and Bums in America, Tom Lutz asserts that the American work ethic – really the Protestant work ethic – is a relatively recent development. “Before the Industrial Revolution,” says Lutz, “The slacker as an identity, as a kind of person, did not exist.” He writes that the classical communities – the Greeks, Romans, and Middle Eastern civilizations – all considered work to be a curse, unless it served the higher mind. “Antipathy toward labor,” Lutz writes, “has been the norm since the beginning of time.” He traces this attitude to the Book of Genesis in the Old Testament, when God expels Adam and Eve from Paradise and damns them to a life of labor. “The necessity to work for survival,” Lutz adds, “is the original curse, the punishment for the original sin.” In other words, nobody fucks with the Jesus. It wasn’t until the Protestant Reformation that our modern notion of a personal work ethic began to take shape. Even then, writers, artists and thinkers railed against having to work for a living. In 1706, John Locke (the philosopher, not the smoke monster on Lost) said, “Labour for labour’s sake is against nature.” In 1758, Samuel Johnson suggested that “idling is not a sin, but in fact the truest desire of all.” Even Nietzsche voiced his opinion in Thus Spoke Zarathustra:

“One still works, for work is a form of entertainment. But one is careful that lest the entertainment be too harrowing. One no longer becomes rich or poor: both require too much exertion.”

Fucking Nietzsche. It figures that a German philosopher who died of syphilis-related insanity would write the most Dude-like line of the 19^th century. But the crazy old man gets right to the nut of it: Being rich (achieving) requires too much effort, and being poor, well that’s just a pain in the ass.

All across America, people – especially the younger generations – are questioning the way we think about work and the role that consumerism plays in our lives. If you’re truly lucky, you actually enjoy your profession, or at least you don’t hate it. But most people simply toil away in unsatisfying, creatively-void jobs to pay their mortgage and put food on the table. But they also do it to buy big screen TVs, ridiculously impractical SUVs, and the newest iPhone/iPad/iPod/iPuke that’s on every must-have gadget list. They’ve unwittingly joined the dehumanizing world of consumption and competition, because that’s the American way: we work, and then we buy. Because everyone’s got to feed the monkey. But the Dude, he doesn’t toil away in a job that he hates. And he doesn’t have a big screen TV. And he certainly doesn’t feed the monkey. And he seems content with his life. He seems content abiding. If all great art is simply a reflection of society, perhaps the Dude represents a new America, where less really is more, and where living a simple, decent life is at the heart of the new American dream.

Back at the Lebowski Fest, after several White Russians and an awkward conversation with a drunken, touchy-feely nihilist, I decide to pack up my things and head home. I say goodnight to the guy in the marmot suit and a young woman dressed as a cassette tape of the Eagles’ Hotel California. As I exit the bowling alley, I come across several Dudes and a Maude outside smoking cigarettes on the sidewalk. I ask one of the Dudes, a twenty-something lawyer from Beverly Hills, why he thinks The Big Lebowski has captured the imagination of so many people:

“It’s because of the Dude. He’s the prince of underachievers and I think we all aspire to do nothing. And he does nothing better than anyone else has ever done it. And it’s not just about him doing nothing – it’s about everyone in America doing nothing. It’s the ideal of doing nothing, and not doing it phenomenally.”

It’s the ideal of doing nothing, and not doing it phenomenally. It won’t fit on a bumper sticker, but hey, at least it’s an ethos. And this idea – as radical as it may seem – offers a certain amount of comfort during these difficult times. Like the Stranger says, “It's good knowin' he's out there, the Dude, takin' her easy for all us sinners.” Welcome to the United States of Lebowski.

Madness & Depravity at the Karaoke World Championships

2011-03-11T13:32:00.000-08:00

Harp magazine, May 2007

I arrive in Helsinki around noon, still reeling from a three-day birthday bender in Aspen and a brutal 15-hour transatlantic flight. Hung-over, jet-lagged, and nearly twisted on Lorazepam and Tanqueray, I hop a taxi to the harbor and board the M/S Galaxy, a luxury liner offering weekend cruises to Estonia. I drop my bags in the windowless cabin that will be my home for the next three days and make my way downstairs to the Starlight Show Lounge. At this point, the Lorazepam, a prescription sedative generally prescribed for anxiety disorders and short-term insomnia, has fully kicked in, adding a foggy, surreal effect to the proceedings. As if on cue, I’m approached by a large Irish man dressed in a velvet leprechaun suit. We begin chatting, and when he learns that I’m on assignment for Penthouse magazine, he insists on buying me a drink. This is a scene that will repeat itself numerous times over the next three days, though not all my benefactors will be dressed as magical elves. The bartender pours us shots of Salmiakki Koskenkorva, a foul Finnish liqueur resembling burnt Jagermeister. The enormous leprechaun raises his glass and toasts, “E’res to ya, mate!” At the front of the large theater, the stage goes dark except for a lone spotlight, and a hush comes over the crowd. It’s just before midnight when a fleshy, egg-shaped man with a towering pompadour and white satin jumpsuit takes the stage and launches into the Presley classic Burning Love. His name is Jouni Viirtala, but I will come to know him as the Elvis of Finland. His wide, spongy hips undulate to the rockabilly beat, his voice a soaring vibrato of passion and repressed sexual angst:

Lord Almighty, I feel my temperature rising/ Higher higher, it's burning through to my soul/ Girl, you gonna set me on fire/ My brain is flaming, I don't know which way to go

While this may sound like a Vegas-themed peyote trip of David Lynchian proportions, what I’m actually witnessing is a standout performance from the 2006 Karaoke World Championships. Over the next two days, 44 participants from 20 countries will vie for the hefty prize package and the coveted championship title. Now in its fourth year, the KWC has become the world’s premier venue for competitive karaoke, which sounds like a lofty and ridiculous claim. After all, there seems to be a world championship for every bizarre pastime these days, from rock-paper-scissors and air guitar to pillow fighting and kickball. These events, however, are mostly designed to boost tourism and are not generally taken seriously. But competitive karaoke is a different beast. For one thing, it requires actual talent (sorry, air guitar shredders). It can also be a springboard to a legitimate recording career. Just ask Nashville’s Mindy McCready, who parlayed tapes of her karaoke performances into six Top 40 country hits and over a million record sales. But most significantly, karaoke has become a global industry generating an estimated ten billion dollars in annual revenue. No longer relegated to seedy hotel lounges, bowling alleys, or happy hour at TGI Friday’s, karaoke has emerged as a bona fide cultural phenomenon that crosses all social, political, religious, and ethnic lines. In Japan, 280,000 bars are outfitted with karaoke systems and 64 million people, nearly half the population, performs karaoke on a regular basis. There are thousands of karaoke bars in the US, and hundreds of thousands more across the world. And it doesn’t stop there: The Karaoke Channel is delivering monster ratings on digital cable and satellite TV, and companies like Sound Choice offer karaoke tracks for your cel phone, computer, DVD player, and iPod. Next year, CBS will launch a karaoke-themed reality show, and a number of British churches have installed the Hymnal Plus, a karaoke system that allows parishioners to sing along with their favorite gospel tunes, including a disco version of Amazing Grace. There are karaoke taxicabs in Bangkok, naked karaoke parties in Tampa, and even “pornaoke” events across the UK, where participants provide the dialogue and sound effects to vintage porno movie clips. Like it or not, karaoke has ensconced itself in all facets of our culture, burrowing its way into our collective psyches. And it’s not going away any time soon.

The M/S Galaxy, home of the 2006 Karaoke World Championships, is a full-service cruise ship making daily runs across the Gulf of Finland, from Helsinki to the medieval walled city of Tallinn. For this particular voyage, karaoke systems have been installed in every nightclub, lounge and casino, allowing passengers to sing virtually anywhere on the boat. There are even karaoke machines in the pool area and inside the saunas, which seems like a novel idea until I witness an excessively hairy, psoriatic man in a Speedo performing Little Red Corvette from the confines of his chaise lounge. Adding to the Orwellian motif, the KWC performances are broadcast on TV monitors in all the restaurants and gift shops, and the audio from the event is piped into the bathrooms, elevators, and even into the passenger cabins. As one elderly woman lamented, “I am on the boat for vacation. But the karaoke is everywhere. You cannot escape it.”

It’s around 2AM on this first night of the competition and the Starlight Lounge is jumping. Japan’s Takahiro Masuda just ripped through a pitch-perfect version of Led Zeppelin’s Rock and Roll, and now Ari Koivunen, a 19 year-old heavy metal wonderkind from Finland, is powering his way through the Scorpions Still Loving You. Borrowing from the successful American Idol format, the contest features a series of performance and elimination rounds with the top five men and women advancing to the finals. The competitors choose their own songs to perform and are judged on voice quality, stage presence, and entertainment value by a multinational jury panel. At the end of the second day, an overall male and female winner will be announced during a lavish award ceremony. These competitors, however, are not the casual karaoke singers you might find in the bar at a local Applebee’s, getting drunk with their buddies and warbling their way through Garth Brook’s Friends in Low Places once or twice a year. These are the people who perform karaoke several nights a week, the ones who take voice lessons, who wear costumes and work out dance routines in their basements. Though they are extremely talented individuals and gracious competitors, I have to believe that anyone who would fly to the other side of the world for a karaoke contest must be deranged on some level.

The competition has all the rabid nationalism of the World Cup Finals, with legions of boisterous fans draped in the flags of their countries. Estonia has the largest contingent with more than twenty supporters. They wear matching shirts, hand-decorated with the names of the Estonian performers written in sparkle dust and puffy paint. A fresh-faced, genial group, they could be easily mistaken for camp counselors or members of the high school glee club. The Irish fans, however, are not of the sparkle dust ilk. Numbering at least fifteen (including the leprechaun), they are a loud, wild, drunken mob. Though they occasionally heckle other fans, it is all in the good-natured spirit of the event. I cannot say the same about the Russians. There are only three of them, but they are a dark and menacing presence. These barrel-chested brutes with enormous Popeye forearms and neck tattoos are seated at a cocktail table next to me. One of them, a stocky 50-something man, wears an all-white tracksuit with Soviet Union emblazoned on the back in fiery, Communist red. I’m certain they are Russian mafia or ex-KGB, dispatched from Moscow to assure victory for their karaoke comrades. The group is so intimidating, with their cold dead eyes and excessive man-jewelry, that I am compelled to cheer for the Russian competitors regardless of the performance quality. When Svetlana Erukhimova finishes a tepid burlesque rendition of Feelings in which she sounds like Natasha from Rocky and Bullwinkle, I applaud with the thunderous fervor of a madman, beating my hands together until the palms are red and swollen and tender. “Bravo!” I scream, but the only thought in my head is Please don’t kill me.

The first round of competition ends sometime after 3AM, and like many of the audience members, I migrate upstairs to the Zenith Disco because it is the only place on the ship still open and serving alcohol. And after eight hours of non-stop karaoke, a couple of prescription sedatives and a stiff drink are in order. The disco – a term I hadn’t heard since 1982 – has all the hallmarks of a small dance club, with one glaring exception: Instead of a DJ, the music is provided by karaoke. Scandinavian death metal karaoke, to be precise. The song catalogue reads like the entries in a serial killer’s diary, with cheery titles like Excuse Me While I Kill Myself, Unleash Hell, and Descending Curtain of Death. After an hour of these gloomy songs, the Elvis of Finland takes the microphone and launches into a blistering version of AC/DC’s Highway to Hell, one of the poppier tunes in the library. Though he shows impressive range for a big man in a satin pantsuit, the song clearly loses some its rock and roll punch when following the likes of Triple Corpse Hammerblow and The Suicider. Unfortunately, many of these songs are performed in their native languages, so I’m not able to grasp the poetry and nuance of the lyrics. While I’m waiting at the bar, a pretty young woman cozies up to me and introduces herself. She tells me her name is Katya and that she’s 22, from the Ukraine by way of Estonia. I tell her that I’m an American journalist on assignment and she scoots a bit closer, hanging on my every word. I turned 38 just a few days earlier, and frankly, it’s been a long time since I’ve had a conversation with a 22 year-old that didn’t involve the phrases “Mocha Frappuccino” or “lap dance.” On stage behind us, a tall man in a “Jamaican me crazy” t-shirt screams his way through though a hyper-aggressive death metal song in Finnish. I tell Katya I’m writing a story on karaoke, and I ask if she’ll translate the lyrics for me. She closes her eyes and listens to the performance for a moment, then leans in close to whisper in my ear. I feel her hot breath on my neck. In broken English, she says, “The song is about, how you say, the devils? And they eat the flesh.”

I nod. Flesh-eating devils.

Then she looks into my eyes and says with a sly, dazzling smile, “I make nice blowjob for you, yes? Two-hundred fifty Euro.”

When they said this was a full-service cruise, they weren’t kidding. I’ve made some bad decisions in my life (Tijuana, 1988 comes to mind), but having sex with a Ukrainian prostitute on an Estonian booze cruise at 5AM would probably take top honors. I thank Katya for her offer but gracefully decline and head back to my cabin for the night.

While there’s no disputing karaoke’s impact on global culture, there are many theories to explain its enduring popularity. Some see it as a self-help tool, providing the participants with the encouragement and adulation lacking in their everyday lives. For most of us, singing in a karaoke bar is the only time we’ll ever hear people cheering for us. It massages our fragile egos and restores our confidence. Others think karaoke is simply a revival of public singing, an age-old tradition that is hard-wired into our DNA. “People have innate desires for several things,” says Kurt Slep, CEO of Sound Choice. “Sex is one. Eating is another. And singing. People have been singing since the dawn of time. It’s natural.” Sociologists and cultural anthropologists, however, attribute karaoke’s success to something more reflective of modern society: our obsession with celebrity. Earlier in the day, I heard one of the competitors tell an interviewer, “If you aren’t somebody, you’re nobody.” This says a great deal about the value we place on celebrity, and how we use it to define ourselves as human beings. Noted sociologist and author Erving Goffman suggests that without celebrity, we “run the danger of being, in our own eyes, unpersons.” Karaoke fills this void, allowing us to become celebrities for a few moments while we’re on stage. “Everyone wants to be a rock star,” says Kristin O, a karaoke host from Michigan. “Everybody wants a taste of fame. And karaoke gives them that opportunity. ”

Though karaoke has many incarnations, perhaps none is more revealing than Porn Star Karaoke, or PSK. Every Tuesday night, leaders of the adult film industry gather at a Los Angeles bar called Sardo’s and perform karaoke for a small circle of friends, insiders, and fans. Before I left for Helsinki, I attended PSK with adult film producer Oliver Bone and a bevy of porn actresses including Monica Mayhem, star of Hole Sweet Hole, Ass Jumpers, and Fast Times at Deep Crack High 3. Curiously, Porn Star Karaoke is not a sordid affair. There is no nudity, no vulgarity, and sadly, the evening does not dovetail into a fantastic orgy: The porn stars are there to sing. Monica Mayhem, a native of Brisbane, Australia who’s been singing since she was six years old, performed stellar renditions of No Doubt’s I’m Just a Girl and Rage Against the Machine’s Killing in the Name. “Singing is a release,” says Mayhem. “It’s a way for us to show off our other talents. It’s a way to escape.” Though her day job may include an anal gangbang with fourteen moose-cocked steroid shooters and a lazy-eyed pirate dwarf (not exactly the epitome of girl power), by night she can sing anthems of strength and rebellion, asserting her self in ways that may otherwise escape her daily routine. When she belts out the lyrics, “Oh, I’ve had it up to here” and “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me,” she’s clearly making a personal statement.

Whereas the attainment of celebrity is about shedding anonymity and differentiating oneself from the masses, porn stars do karaoke for the exact opposite reason: They do it to rejoin the masses. For three and a half minutes, the length of a Lionel Richie song, a porn star can step out of his or her skin and become an average suburban middle class American. To me, this momentary transcendence is the heart of karaoke’s appeal. And it happens every night, in karaoke bars around the world. When people sing against type – the shy, mousy accountant who sings a sexy Madonna song or the porn star who sings an anthem of girl power – they transcend themselves if only for a moment. In my younger days when I’d sing David Lee Roth’s Just a Gigolo at the Silver Cloud in San Francisco, I would transform into a daring lothario, a bold and flirtatious cocksman with all the swagger of, well, someone else. And that was the point. But when the music would stop, I’d revert back to my nebbish self, a pudgy insecure lad with wrinkle-resistant Dockers and a nine-dollar haircut.

The second day of competition begins at 11AM, and the boat is rocking. Not rocking in the figurative sense, like how you might say Bon Jovi rocks (which they totally do), but actually rocking in a violent back and forth motion. A massive storm had formed in the pre-dawn hours, turning the glassy Baltic Sea into a swirling black cauldron. At this point, the ship is pitching so severely that the performers are having trouble maintaining their balance on the stage. I should probably mention that I suffer from motion sickness in all its regurgitative forms. I get seasick, airsick, carsick, and on one regrettable trip to the Grand Canyon, donkeysick. As the storm’s intensity grows and the ship’s vicious thrashing along with it, I feel the bile rising in my esophagus. Frantically, I thumb through my Estonian travel dictionary for the phrase, “I’m feeling nauseous. May I have a vomit sack?” Luckily, I remember reading that Lorazepam, the sedative prescribed for my anxiety on airplane flights, has a side effect of reducing nausea. I fish the bottle out of my camera bag and pop three of the little white pills, washing them down with a cruel Estonian vodka. As I would learn the hard way, which is really the only way to learn anything, this particular medication has the exact opposite of its intended effect when combined with copious amounts of grain alcohol and a lack of sleep. Instead of calming me, I quickly become jittery and overtly paranoid. Though my teeth are grinding and my mind is racing through a number of wildly improbable conspiracy theories, at least I won’t be blowing my lunch off the deck and into the angry sea.

In the afternoon, the top 15 men and women semifinalists are announced and surprisingly, all four Russian competitors make the cut. Perhaps it’s the narcotic-induced paranoia or just the cynicism that comes with middle age, but I immediately suspect foul play. One of the Russians, Veronica Konnova, is a true talent and easily a frontrunner among the women. But the other three performers are only average singers, placing them near the middle of the pack. Could this be a sign of jury tampering? My suspicions are bolstered when a series of mysterious technical “glitches” begin plaguing the top performers. As Malaysia’s Tham Hui Chye hits the chorus of Mama Mia, the audio suddenly drops out and she is forced to start again. Michelle Lynch of Ireland, clearly one of the strongest performers in the competition, flees the stage when her Bonnie Tyler song stalls and then skips forward. Is this the handiwork of the Russians? Clearly my paranoia is skyrocketing to dangerous Gonzo levels. Just as I feel that a complete psychotic meltdown is inevitable, my fears are allayed and I begin to come down from this miserable trip. When the top five men and women finalists are announced and the only Russian to advance is the lovely Miss Konnova, I know that all is right with the world.

It’s now 4AM, and I’ve been listening to karaoke continuously for 34 hours. The storm has finally moved beyond us, and my Lorazepam-induced neurosis has subsided. During a brief break in the action, I hit the bathroom to splash some cold water on my face. When I look in the mirror, I barely recognize the person staring back at me. I’m completely strung out, my cheeks puffy from the booze and fatigue, three-days of spotty beard growth, pupils wide as milk saucers, my right eye twitching uncontrollably. Though I’ve made many errors in judgment, it appears I was right about one thing: Anyone who would fly halfway around the world for a karaoke contest must be deranged. I just didn’t expect that person to be me.

The judges have submitted their final votes, and the winners of the 2006 Karaoke World Championship are about to be announced. The contestants nervously await the decision, some pacing, others praying, their faces all strained with anticipation and exhaustion. Mark Wilson of Australia and Tham Hui Chye of Malaysia take first place for the men and women respectively. Veronica Konnova places third, and the disappointment is visibly welling in her eyes. The Russian man in the white tracksuit embraces her, plants a gentle kiss on her forehead and whispers something reassuring in her ear. In the end, the Russians were not gangsters or thugs, but rather, doting spouses and supportive friends just like you or me. For the grand finale, all the competitors, sponsors and event organizers join hands on the stage and sing We Are the World. It is a saccharine-sweet moment, free from all irony, cynicism and ill will. “Karaoke epitomizes not just a way of making music but a way of life,” says Rob Drew, author of the book Karaoke Nights and Professor of Communication at Saginaw Valley State University. “Karaoke casts a model for how we can live every moment of every day, its Utopian ideals cobbled together from impossible dreams.” The sun is coming up as I leave the Starlight Show Lounge, and I can actually feel myself smiling. Maybe the world needs a bit of saccharine every now and again to remind us of a simpler time, when we were still young and full of hope. Of course, saccharin causes cancer in laboratory animals, but we’ll save that one for another day.

Editor’s note: Three days after the 2006 Karaoke World Championships, both Tham Hui Chyi and Badri Ibrahim of Malaysia were offered recording contracts by Sony BMG and Warner Music.

The Snow Leopard's Wife: Another Side of Gonzo

2011-03-02T11:12:00.000-08:00

Harp magazine, August 2007

It’s mid-March in Woody Creek, the small Rocky Mountain community that exists quietly just beyond Aspen’s northern fringe. The air up here is thin and crisp, and all around the drifts of winter snow are busy melting into spring. I’ve come here to meet Anita Thompson, wife of the late, legendary outlaw writer Hunter S. Thompson, and I’m about to have the first of several holy shit moments that will rock me throughout the evening. Anita, a pretty 35 year-old blonde, holds up a carton of orange juice and a bottle of vodka, and says with a warm smile, “How ‘bout a screwdriver?”

Holy shit. I’m at Hunter Thompson’s house and his wife is mixing drinks.

For the record, I do not usually booze with my interview subjects, not while I’m playing serious journalist. But on this particular occasion, I feel morally obligated to have a drink or three. I am, after all, standing in the kitchen of the man who wrote Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, the man who was attacked by giant bats on a lonely desert road paved with mescaline and shattered visions of the American Dream.

“Sounds good,” I say. “Better make it a double.”

Though it’s been two years since Hunter Thompson ended his brilliant, chaotic life in this very room, his presence remains vibrant and palpable. Anita keeps the house – called Owl Farm – exactly as he left it, from the hand-written notes plastering the refrigerator and walls (including an ominous one that says Never call 911 – This Means You), to the tall lampshade adorned with Mardi Gras beads, political campaign buttons, and all-access rock and roll tour laminates. In fact, the entire house is filled with bizarre objects from a lifetime of Gonzo adventures. In the living room, you’ll find an oversized Che Guevara banner, commemorative boxing gloves from the epic 1971 Ali-Frazier bout, an authentic Native American battle shield, and the jaws of a man-eating shark. And then of course, there are the peacocks. On a whim some years back, Hunter purchased several of the gangly creatures from a classified ad in the local paper, and now they roam the grounds like refugees from a forgotten Dr. Seuss book. If you listen closely, you can almost hear Hunter muttering, “We need birds. Large, exotic birds.”

Amidst the strange universe inhabited by Hunter Thompson and his merry band of co-conspirators, legendary for their pharmaceutical excess, antiauthoritarian values and deviant behavior, Anita was clearly a stabilizing force. Though they were only married twenty-two months before his death in 2005, their relationship would span eight years and have a profound impact on the final chapter of Hunter’s life. As with all great love stories, their meeting was a fortuitous blend of timing and happenstance.

In 1992, Anita Thompson – then Anita Bejmuk – left college during her sophomore year to work for the Sierra Club, a renowned environmental group in Northern California. “At the time, I was very political, and very angry,” recalls Anita. “I was the angry vegan.” Eventually, she fled the tense world of non-profit fundraising and headed for the ski slopes, landing a job at a snowboard rental shop on Aspen Mountain. These were carefree times for Anita, spending her days on the slopes and her nights mingling with Aspen’s social elite. One evening in 1997, she told her friend Don Dixon that she wanted to learn about football, hoping to better understand this universal male bonding experience. “I know just the person to teach you,” said Dixon. “His name is Hunter Thompson.” Driving back through Woody Creek, Dixon called to arrange the meeting.

“I’ll never forget the first time I heard Hunter’s voice,” Anita says fondly. “I could hear him through Don’s cel phone – he had such a powerful voice. And I remember exactly where we were on the road. I remember the railroad tracks. I remember the meadow. It was a beautiful voice.” She takes a sip of her drink, adding, “I could tell there was something very special about this man, so I really wanted to meet him.”

When football season rolled around, Anita – just 25 – was invited to Owl Farm and given a crash course on the gridiron basics. “Hunter taught me the rules by betting, incessantly, on every play,” Anita says laughing. “Game time was a big deal at Owl Farm. Everybody here took it seriously, and a lot of money was constantly changing hands. But it was always festive, with smoke in the air and drinks flowing.”

Over the next two years, Anita would become part of Hunter’s exclusive inner circle, meeting regularly at Owl Farm for sporting events and other social occasions. “He would read us things, and ask us advice,” says Anita. “We were part of the salon here, and it was enriching all of our lives.”

By the spring of 1999, Anita was planning to leave Aspen and return to college. Upon hearing the news, Hunter threw a curveball that would change their lives forever. “Wait,” Hunter pleaded. “I have an urgent situation.” He asked Anita to stay and help him work on his second book of letters called Fear & Loathing in America. For Anita, the decision was an easy one. She would become Hunter’s de facto assistant on the project, reading letters to him, photocopying, researching, and digging through some 800 boxes of unpublished archived material. “The hours he worked were just odd,” recalls Anita. “He’d start between 9PM and midnight and work straight through, sometimes until dawn. And I still had my job at the snowboard shop. Hunter would drive me to work at eight in the morning after we’d been up all night researching the book.”

Anita and Hunter had been platonic friends for the better part of two years, but that was about to change. “Once I started working with him one-on-one, it was impossible not to get together,” says Anita. “By the time I quit the snowboard shop, we were definitely an item.”

To provide some perspective on their relationship, it’s important to understand the nature of sex and celebrity. If you’re famous, even for the lamest of reasons, people will have sex with you. Whether your moment in the spotlight comes from eating goat spleen on Fear Factor, impregnating Britney Spears, or writing several of the most important books of the 20th century, you’re going to get laid. And over the years, Hunter had many romantic liaisons with star-struck women, including several of his former assistants. Initially, some of Hunter’s closest friends wondered if Anita wasn’t just another notch on the Gonzo belt.

“At first, you really didn’t know her significance in this whole thing,” says Ralph Steadman, the English artist whose brilliantly twisted illustrations accompanied much of Hunter’s work. “Was Anita part of it, or was she just piece of totty?”

But Anita was more than a pretty conquest. And unlike many of the women who pursued Hunter in the past, she wasn’t a literary groupie, a gold digger, or a fame junkie out to fuck a superstar. “Sure, I’d heard of Hunter Thompson,” she says, “But I hadn’t read Vegas or Hell’s Angels or any of his work. I had no preconceptions about him, except that he knew a lot about football.”

“Anita wasn’t enthralled by his legend – There was no hero-worship. There was none of that,” confirms Ralph Steadman. “She just met the guy she thought was really interesting. It was quite a lovely relationship.”

NOBODY PUTS BEJMUK IN A CORNER

Anita was 27 when she moved in with Hunter, and her parents were unhappy because she’d once again postponed her college plans. “That’s when my mom started reading up on Hunter, and she came across all the drug rumors,” recalls Anita. “And being a traditional Polish woman, she was terribly worried.” In a classic bit of melodrama that plays like a scene from Dirty Dancing, Anita’s mother forced her to choose between her family and her lover. Of course she chose Hunter, and it caused a terrible rift within the Bejmuk clan.

Her family was also concerned with the age disparity. There were thirty-four years between them, and at 61, Hunter was older than Anita’s mother. For Anita, this was never an issue. “The age-thing was all blurred with Hunter,” says Anita. “He was very childlike – not childish – but childlike in so many ways. Sometimes, I was definitely the more responsible one in our relationship.”

Life with the legendary writer could be challenging, and no one knew this better than Ralph Steadman, his longtime friend and collaborator. “Living with Hunter is a bit like having a gorilla in your house,” says Steadman laughing. “And he lived out there in that old farm – It was like entering a gorilla’s cage. He needed someone who would understand the gorilla.” Fortunately, Anita understood the gorilla all too well, and her relationship with Hunter thrived – both romantically and creatively.

Anita and Hunter certainly loved each other and were even trying to have children, but theirs was a relationship based on work. Though initially hired to make photocopies and perform other administrative tasks, Anita quickly assumed a more active role in the creative process. Her most significant contribution, however, was that she motivated Hunter to write. He’d been in a creative slump for over a decade and hadn’t produced any work of real importance since The Curse of Lono in 1983.

“Hunter wanted to write again. And Anita gave him a great deal of hope,” says Ralph Steadman. “Because you can actually burn out, you know. And he burned out more times than once.” Steadman adds, “A lot of the relationships he’d been indulging in were not creative relationships. But I think with Anita, there was a genuine sense of getting back on track.”

It’s important to note that Hunter had been married once before – for seventeen years – to a woman named Sandy Tarlo. She’s the mother of his son Juan, and is believed to have been the source of Hunter’s strength in the early part of his career. She appears by name in Hell’s Angels, The Great Shark Hunt, and Hunter dedicated Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail to her. They divorced in 1979, and many see a correlation between her departure and his diminished creative output in the subsequent years. Nearly twenty years would pass before Anita came into his life, re-igniting the spark that had dimmed.

With Anita’s unflagging love and support, Hunter began to turn out the kind of biting, insightful and politically vitriolic work that had made him famous. It was a true return to form, and in those last years, he published the books Kingdom of Fear, Proud Highway, Fear & Loathing in America, and his “lost” novel The Rum Diary. He also wrote a weekly column for ESPN, and contributed to high-profile magazines such as Playboy and Rolling Stone.

When I ask Anita how she inspired Hunter to write again – how she became his muse – she laughs and says, “It’s really a question of motivation. What do you have to do to get the writing done?” She takes the last sip of her drink and says, “Here’s a typical scenario: It would be midnight with a deadline looming, and he still hadn’t written anything. So I’d say, Come on Hunter – Let’s write. And that’s what we did for years. That was my job, to get him to write. And he loved having someone encouraging him.”

At this point, Anita asks if she can refresh my drink – which is yes – so I follow her back into the kitchen. She continues talking as she mixes another round of screwdrivers. “Hunter wrote about me after I helped him on the first book, and I was very proud to appear in his work – very proud.” She hands me a tall cocktail glass and adds, “I wanted to make him proud too, and I did that by moving him to write. I wanted him to be as successful as possible on my watch. I worked very hard for that.”

When assisting Hunter with his writing, Anita learned to accommodate his unique creative process. He worked in the kitchen, always late at night, and always on a typewriter. “He wrote on an IBM Selectric. He had six of them,” recalls Anita. “Sometimes he’d say, the typewriter’s broken or goddammit, this one has the wrong font. I’ve gone through three typewriters in one night with him.”

Music was also a key component of the writing process. “When Hunter liked something, he’d play it over and over. I loved it too, especially when we were hooked on the same song,” says Anita. “We must’ve listened to Gordon Lightfoot’s "Sundown" twenty-five times a night. Same with Dolly Parton’s "Silver Dagger." And Dylan’s "Hard Rain" – I think we had to buy a second Hard Rain CD because we wore out the first one.”

Hunter was also a good editor of his own work, able to ferret the garbage from the gold. “We called him Doctor Chop – he was ruthless,” says Anita. “I often think he cut too much. But I loved everything he wrote, so I wasn’t the best editor.”

Any conversation about Hunter Thompson must eventually turn to the topic of drugs. Though his predilection for narcotics – both legal and illegal – has been covered ad nauseam, it’s important to note their place in his creative process. He referred to certain drugs as his “tools” – particularly marijuana, alcohol and cocaine – and often used them to facilitate his writing, the way an athlete might dope up before a competition. “If your goal for that evening is to write three pages or finish an article, then you could use some pot or some coke to help you get the pages,” says Anita. To illustrate this point, she launches into the following story, which appears here in its unedited transcript form:

“Hunter’s first book was Hell’s Angels, and it came out when he was 29. He always thought that if he didn’t have a book published by the time he turned 30, the gig was up. He even went to barber school, just in case the writing thing didn’t pan out. Can you imagine Hunter as a barber? So he finally got a contract with a publisher, and he’d written half of Hell’s Angels and it was fantastic. But the deadline was in four days. So he checked into a hotel room by himself, and stayed up for four days on Wild Turkey and Dexedrine. He finished the book on time, and it was brilliant. So he used the Wild Turkey and Dexedrine as a tool.”

Anita pauses to check on a rustling noise coming from the porch – it’s just the peacocks settling into their pen for the night. She continues her thought, adding, “Hunter could consume more than any human I’ve ever met, but you would rarely see him drunk. He handled his substances differently than other people for some reason, which may have been a curse, and may have been a blessing… I’m not sure.”

***

The sky is dimming as the sun prepares to set on Owl Farm. Anita and I are trudging through calf-deep snow at the edge of their property, angling for the best view of the valley at twilight. Their house sits on acres of pristine, untamed land and stretches back to the mountains behind it. In the distance, I can see the leveled mound where – per Hunter’s wishes – his cremated ashes were shot from a giant cannon. As we push a bit further, we come across the fresh remains of a bloodied deer sprawled helplessly in the snow. “The wolves are all around,” says Anita. “They killed this one today.” It’s easy to see why Hunter loved this place – the raw natural beauty of it all, and the limitless realm of savage possibilities. The only thing he may have loved more in his final days was Anita.

“Once you move into Hunter’s life, you quickly become very much a part of it,” says Ralph Steadman. “You become a satellite, and you revolve around Hunter. And that’s not demeaning in any way. I think Anita filled an enormous space in his life. She became extremely important to him.”

Hunter’s health had begun to deteriorate in the last few years of his life, and this may have hastened his desire to get married. A lifetime of substance abuse had taken its toll on his body, and the chronic back pain – which had troubled him for years – was becoming unbearable. He was scheduled for surgery to replace a portion of his spine and wanted to exchange vows before undergoing the risky operation. “He was worried that if something happened to him during the surgery – if he died on the operating table – that I wouldn’t be protected,” says Anita. “He said they would eat me alive, though he never specified who they were. So that’s one reason why the marriage certificate – the legal piece of paper – was so important to Hunter. He wanted me to have some kind of legal leverage.”

Hunter would ask Anita to marry him several times in the months leading up to his surgery, until finally she said yes. “He wrote me the most beautiful letter I’ve ever read – it was like something from a fairytale. And it came with a traditional ring,” recalls Anita. “So I said yes, I’d love to be your wife.”

They were married on April 24, 2003. “We went down to the courthouse in Aspen with a small group of friends,” says Anita. “We stopped by the Woody Creek Tavern on the way back – we didn’t even get out of the car. Hunter drove his JEEP up into the tables on the patio, right up to the front door.”

Hunter described the nuptials with typical flair in his ESPN column:

“It was done with fine style and secrecy in order to avoid the craziness and drunken violence that local lawmen feared would inevitably have followed the ceremony… Our honeymoon was even simpler. We drank heavily for a few hours and accepted fine gifts from strangers, then we drove erratically back out to the Owl Farm and prepared for our own, very private celebration by building a huge fire, icing down a magnum of Crystal Champagne and turning on the Lakers game until we passed out and crawled to the bedroom.”

Hunter survived the back surgery, but his health continued to deteriorate. He had serious complications from a previous hip replacement operation, and in December 2003 he shattered his leg bone while in Hawaii.

“There was a lot of care involved with his health issues, especially in the last year,” says Anita. “It could be tiring at times, for everyone – especially Hunter. At the end, I think he was just exhausted. We all were.”

As the pain increased, his moods began to wildly fluctuate. “The last few months before he died were not easy,” says Anita. “He had these awful drops in his personality, and he could be very cruel.”

The night before his death, Hunter was more affectionate and loving than he’d been in months. On February 20, 2003, Hunter shot and killed himself in the Owl Farm kitchen. His son Juan, who was visiting, found Hunter’s body slumped over in his writing chair. Anita was not home at the time. “I was at the gym,” she says. “We were actually on the phone when he did it. He told me that he loved me, and then I heard the gunshot. It was like he wanted me to be there with him when he went.”

“Buddhists believe in planning every detail of the day of your death – where you’ll be, what you’ll be wearing, who you’ll be with. So that way, your death is this beautiful experience,” says Anita, visibly choking back tears. “It wasn’t out of cruelty that we were on the phone when he did it. It was part of his plan.”

I ask Anita if she wants to take a break, but she shakes her head and continues. “At that moment, there was a lot of tumult and chaos and pain and love and beauty all swirled into his kitchen. But he was very peaceful.”

In the two years since his death, Anita has worked tirelessly to preserve Hunter’s literary legacy for future generations and to save his beloved Owl Farm. Unfortunately, he left behind very little money and a mountain of debt. “People want to tear this place down and build condos,” says Anita. “So we’re hoping to sell Hunter’s archives to a University – that would allow us to support Owl Farm for many years to come. Eventually, I’d like to turn this place into a retreat for writers. Hunter would’ve loved that.”

There have been other hurdles as well. Since the days immediately following Hunter’s death, the Thompson family has been battling Anita for control of Owl Farm and its valuable land. “She was in danger of being marginalized by the armies of lawyers with guns and money,” says Ralph Steadman, one of Anita’s staunchest supporters. “They are trying to diminish her role in this, and that’s terribly unfair. Anita was anything but a wife for hire. She was absolutely the personification of a young wife who was devoted to Hunter Thompson.”

Though Anita refuses to recriminate anyone from the Thompson camp, their actions have made one thing abundantly clear: The wolves are all around.

Despite this adversity, Anita has soldiered on. In the fall of 2006, she enrolled at Columbia University in New York to finish her degree – she’s on spring break when this interview takes place. She’s also doing her best to keep the Thompson literary tradition alive. Her first book called The Gonzo Way, a collection of the wisdom she gleaned from Hunter, is due out next month. She’s also helping to edit Hunter’s third book of letters, and is hoping to release his long-in-the-works novel Polo is My Life.

It’s just after midnight, and the vodka bottle is empty – which means it’s time to wrap things up. Anita continues talking as I pack my things. “People should know that Hunter was the ultimate student of life. It wasn’t about the mescaline and the uppers, downers or the salt shaker full of cocaine. It was about learning as much as he could.” She hands me my jacket, adding, “That’s why he admired excellence in any field. It didn’t matter if you were a lawyer, an actor, a cowboy or a garbage man – you just had to be excellent at what you do. It’s like Hunter said: At the top of the mountain, we are all snow leopards.”

As I’m driving away from Owl Farm, down the twisting road into blackness, Anita’s final words echo in my head. At the top of the mountain, we are all snow leopards. As I round the narrow bend heading into the gully, something leaps from the underbrush and darts across the road in front of my car – something that looks like a giant wild cat. Though it’s probably the vodka playing tricks on me, I choose to take this as a sign that one day, with enough hard work and determination, I too may join the snow leopards on top of the mountain. Then my vision sharpens into focus, and I see that the creature is actually an enormous grizzled skunk, waddling into the ravine. So I continue down into the valley, down, down into the darkness.

Heart of Darkness: The Summer Redneck Games

2011-02-17T10:43:00.000-08:00

No Cover magazine, April 2006

It’s July in Dublin, Georgia, but if you squint your eyes, it could easily be Mozambique or Katmandu or some other steamy, exotic locale. By late-morning, the air is thick, warm and damp as a newly soiled diaper. The sky swarms with hummingbird-sized mosquitoes and the trees buzz with the sound of locusts. Then, of course, there are the swamp leeches. I’m standing on the muddy banks of the Oconee River surrounded by camera crews from the Tonight Show, CMT, and a local news station out of Macon. We are watching with morbid fascination as Melvin Davis, a 68-year-old self-proclaimed redneck (the license plate on his monster truck says so), dunks his head into a barrel of murky river water. Finally, after a great deal of gasping and thrashing about, he proudly emerges with a gnarled pigs foot clenched between his brown, decaying teeth.

“I’m good at three things,” says Davis, choking up pints of stagnant water. “Lyin’, chasin’ women, and fetchin’ these pigs feet.” He tosses the hoof aside, then dunks under for another go ’round. Davis is demonstrating the fine art of pigs feet bobbing, one of the key events at tomorrow’s 10th annual Summer Redneck Games, the backwoods parody of the Olympics that draws thousands of fans to this remote region every year.

Since the end of the Civil War, rednecks have been characterized as conservative, working-class Southern whites with a rebellious nature and a near-fanatical sense of patriotism. But in recent years, there has been a renewed fascination with their throwback culture that extends well beyond the Mason-Dixon line. Thanks in large part to Jeff Foxworthy, the comedian who built an empire off “You Might Be a Redneck” jokes, his protégé Larry the Cable Guy, and their wildly popular Blue Collar Comedy Tour and TV show, the redneck phenomenon has achieved mainstream, international appeal. Last year, Gretchen Wilson’s “Redneck Woman” ruled the country and pop charts and nabbed a Grammy, and barefoot Southern rocker Bo Bice nearly became our American Idol. The new Dukes of Hazzard movie crushed its summer box office competition, while NASCAR continues to deliver blockbuster ratings across the nation (this year’s Daytona 500 was watched by more one million people in Queens, Brooklyn, and Manhattan alone). Mix in some Skoal Bandits, a John Deere trucker’s hat, and a pair of Confederate flag underpants, and you’ve got the makings of a full-fledged redneck revolution.

Dublin is a quaint, postcard-pretty village nestled halfway between Macon and Savannah, and on my first afternoon in town, I dropped into local radio station WQXY to meet with program director and Redneck Games founder “Mad” Mac Davis. Davis is a menacing wall of granite and muscle, with a head shaved bald and a sinister-looking goatee. He extends his cartoonishly large hand, and begins to inform me about the origin of the Games.

“Back in ’96 when the Olympics were about to happen in Atlanta, a lot of people were saying that we were just a bunch Southern hillbillies who couldn’t pull it off,” says Davis. “So I said, ‘If that’s what they think, let’s give it to ’em.’”

Davis and then-program director “Big Charlie” concocted an Olympic-style festival that would play upon redneck stereotypes. “We expected 500 people to show up, and instead we got 5,000,” says Davis, as he unconsciously wrings his big ham fists. “After the first year, I started seeing families coming from all over the country. They’d plan their vacations around this weekend, and it amazes me, because it ain’t Disney. It ain’t Six Flags. It’s the Redneck Games.”

In the first nine years of the Games, more than 95,0000 people have attended, and media from countries including Holland, Chile, and Australia have covered the event. Perhaps more importantly, the Redneck Games have brought much-needed revenue into an economically devastated community where 23 percent of Dubliners exist below the poverty level, more than double the national average. “These Games bring a lot of money to the businesses in Dublin,” says Davis. “Especially the convenience stores where they sell ice and beer. That’s money this town never would’ve seen.”

Towards the end of our conversation, I notice a gaudy, bejeweled championship belt hanging in a glass case on the other side of the room. When I ask Davis about it, he tells me that in addition to his duties at the country music station and managing the Redneck Games, he is a professional wrestling champion with the fledgling Georgia Independent Wrestling Alliance. He invites me to “Redneck Rampage,” a popular wrestling event happening later tonight at the Farm Bureau. It’s the official kick-off to tomorrow’s Redneck Games, and one of the city’s most anticipated entertainment events. I’m initially ambivalent about going, but when Davis tells me that grown men will climb into a steel cage and beat each other with folding chairs, I have a change of heart.

With the Games less than 24 hours away, it becomes apparent that I need a crash-course in redneck culture after I attempt to order a chai soy latte from the diner near my hotel (the nearest Starbucks is 90 miles away). “You want a Chachi who?” says the pubescent waitress, snapping her gum. I decide to seek some guidance from the Godfather of all rednecks, Jeff Foxworthy. Unfortunately, Foxworthy declined my request for an interview because of a long-standing feud with the founders of the Redneck Games. When I ask Jeff Kidd, the events coordinator of the Games, about the origin of the dispute, he tells me they’ve invited Foxworthy for a number of years and he always refuses to attend. “He’s just a prude little rich boy from Atlanta,” chides Kidd.

Instead, I dial-up redneck expert Ben Jones, who played “Cooter” on the original Dukes of Hazzard TV series. Today, Jones is the proprietor of Cooter’s Place, a museum in Gatlinburg, Tennessee featuring memorabilia from the show (including pants worn by Catherine Bach). “The redneck movement is a return to the pioneer spirit of America,” says Jones. “There’s not much difference between the Duke boys and Roy Rogers and Gene Autry. It’s the same American mythology, and those are the ideals America was founded on. Even if you’re a dusty old cowboy, you can still live your life how you choose.”

Jeff Kidd adds, “We’re down-home people, but we’re not backwards hillbillies. It’s a return to simple values that people are looking for in this day and age. And that’s what being a redneck is all about.”

But even within a culture boasting simple values, there are layers of complexity. Diana Itson, who owns a consignment shop in nearby Cochran, Georgia, explains the caste system that exists within the redneck universe. “There’s different degrees of rednecks,” says Itson. “There’s town rednecks who wear rebel flag T-shirts and listen to Charlie Daniels on the 8-track. And then there’s county rednecks like us, who get out there and have grill-outs and porch parties with the neighbors. Then there’s dirt-road rednecks. Them folks don’t take a bath for a week and they never wear shoes. Most of them live off the land. And they got four teeth, and two of them’s in their pocket.” She pauses to light up a menthol cigarette, taking a deep drag. “There’s poseur rednecks, too. You can spot ’em because they don’t know how to ride a four-wheeler or shoot a gun.”

It’s dusk, and I’ve made my way across town to the Farm Bureau for the big Redneck Rampage wrestling event. About three hundred diehard fans are in line, mostly families with young children. As we enter the cinderblock building that resembles a grade-school gymnasium, Rowdy Thigpen, a friendly fireplug of a man, explains that the venue is normally used for castrating sheep and hog auctions. At the center of the room is a tattered ring where strips of duct tape conceal rips in the Nixon-era canvas.

The low-budget event has the aura of a high school production, and the acting makes Hulk Hogan look like Olivier in Othello. In most cases, these wrestlers have regular jobs outside of the ring to pay the bills. By day, they might work at the mill or pour concrete for the county. But at night, when that bell rings, these blue-collar men become superstars with names like Loco Motive, Sugar Daddy Osborne, and Velvet Jones (who is the only black wrestler on the card and dresses like a pimp). For a brief, shimmering moment they experience the adulation and recognition that escapes their daily lives. It’s like karaoke, but with groin smashing.

The highlight of the evening is the steel cage match, where a bevy of wrestlers, including “Mad” Mac Davis, enter the cage (really just a heavy chain-link fence surrounding the ring) and proceed to pummel each other with an assortment of chairs, garbage cans, and random pieces of lumber. The crowd is whipped into a Budweiser-induced, orgiastic frenzy. One woman, 60-ish, with brassy stained teeth and an impressive mullet that’s bleached white and feathered at the sides, unleashes a torrent of screams at a 500-pound spandex-clad wrestler called the Professor: “Get that sum bitch! Stomp his throat! Stomp it good!” Of course, professional wrestling matches are scripted and the blows are staged. Yet this crowd believes what they are watching is real because they want to believe it, the way one might believe in Santa Claus, leprechauns, or the musical talent of Mark McGrath. There is something beautifully simplistic and hopeful about a group of people giving themselves over to a common ideal, and I find myself cheering right alongside the frothing masses.

The next morning, I arrive at East Dublin’s Buckeye Park for the 10th annual Summer Redneck Games. The grounds are situated along the shore of the Oconee River and surrounded by dense swampland. The area is a breeding ground for mosquitoes, West Nile Virus, and wild carnivorous hogs, and locals tell me that the murky waters are teeming with alligators. In other words, it is an ideal location for a gathering of inebriated adults, their half-naked children, and the family pets. The crowd, which will swell to nearly 7,000 (down from previous years because of expected thundershowers), streams in on foot, by car, and by boat, with beer coolers and barbecue grills in tow. On the north side of the park is a large stage where most of the competitive events will take place. To the south, there are numerous food and merchandise vendors.

At noon, the crowd converges on the stage to witness the ceremonial lighting of the barbecue grill, signifying the start of the Games. A man named L-Bow, who is barefoot, clad in overalls, and missing all his teeth, carries the official redneck torch—a flaming Budweiser can on a stick—through the crowd where he is greeted like a celebrity. He leaps onto the stage, flames up the beer-can torch, and lights the enormous grill in mock Olympic fashion. The crowd roars, and the Games are under way.

Each year the Redneck Games has a special celebrity guest, and this year it’s Steve Schirripa, who plays Bobby “Bacala” Baccalieri on The Sopranos. This might seem like an odd choice—an Italian from Brooklyn—but he’s a good sport and participates in all the events, nearly winning the redneck horseshoe competition (tossing toilet seats onto a plunger). “Don't tell me I'm no redneck,” he yells to the crowd. And that’s part of this event’s appeal: anyone from anywhere can be a redneck, regardless of social or economic status.

“People love rednecks because it’s a natural way of life,” says Tracy Giddens of Cochran, Georgia. “You don’t have to comb your hair or dress a certain way. You can be retarded or deformed, and still be a cool redneck.” Sue Radcliff, who made the 1,500-mile trip from New York City, adds, “We’ve got rednecks in Manhattan too, you know. But we call them alcoholics.”

The competitive events at the Redneck Games are almost an afterthought, and though a few hundred people gather to watch bobbing for pigs feet champion Melvin Davis defend his title, most are simply content to be eating, drinking, and mingling with their brethren. The event that draws the biggest crowd is the mud-pit belly flop, where a parade of fantastically obese men and women hurl themselves into a vile ditch of stinking orange muck. Afterwards, I hit the concourse in search of lunch, because nothing whets an appetite like the combination of mud-caked cellulite, man-breasts and rippling back fat. The food vendors are hawking every kind of charred meat imaginable, including Polish, Italian and hickory-smoked sausages, deep fried pork rinds, cheese steaks, and alligator ka-bobs. Unfortunately, I do not eat meat, and soon realize that I’ve stumbled upon Dante’s 8th level of Vegetarian Hell. I settle for a bag of hot boiled peanuts and a deep-fried Twinkie, nutritious snacks that go down well in 110-degree heat. Additionally, there are only eight Porta Potties for the thousands in attendance, and the lines stretch back to the river. Many people venture into the swamp to relieve themselves. I consider this option, until a young boy emerges from the bog with several enormous leeches attached to his leg. His mother, who is simultaneously smoking and chewing tobacco, takes the lit cigarette from her mouth and proceeds to burn the engorged parasites off, one-by-one. “Quit squirming,” she tells the boy, squirting a bit of tobacco juice as she speaks. “This one’s dug in real good.”

I expected the Redneck Games to be a rowdy, drunken, bawdy affair but it’s remarkably family-friendly and wholesome. At one point, a belligerent man who repeatedly says “fuck” within earshot of a group of children gets hauled away by security. For cursing. At a redneck festival. Many families set up large, colorfully decorated tents to provide refuge from the sweltering heat. Paul Schneider from Tampa (who won the mud-pit belly flop contest), his gorgeous girlfriend Lucy, and their baby Nevaeh (heaven spelled backwards) invite me into their double-wide tent for beer and barbecue with the entire extended family. They are kind, funny, and generous, handing me one Budweiser after another from an oversized cooler. David Green, the elder statesmen of the clan, offers a frightening demonstration of his award-winning hog call. Though the deafening, high-pitched squeal conjures images of Ned Beatty and the hillbilly-rape scene in Deliverance, I am more concerned that it will attract bloodthirsty razorbacks from the swamp. Their cousin James Estes, a proud redneck from Wrightsville, Georgia, asks me if I’ve ever “met the Lord.” When I say no, he hands me an enormous jug of Lord Calvert’s Canadian Whiskey and invites me to join him for a shot. I am goaded into doing whiskey shots with each family member as my indoctrination into the fun-loving clan.

At its heart, the Redneck Games is really just a large county fair, but with a decidedly Confederate twist. And when I say Confederate, I mean white. In fact, it is difficult to find a single black person at the Redneck Games, which is disconcerting when you consider that Dublin is more than 50 percent African American. One look around, however, and it’s easy to understand the conspicuous lack of diversity. The merchandise booths offer a wide variety of racially-charged products. If you’ve ever wondered where you could purchase a rebel-flag speedo or a 16-inch hunting knife engraved with the words, “White is Right,” this is the place. One booth sells bumper stickers with slogans like, “If I’d known this is how it would turn out, I would’ve picked my own cotton.” It is these types of racist overtures that cast a pall on a seemingly good-natured event. “Bein’ a redneck is not about hate,” implores Mandy Evans of Cochran, Georgia. “We just like to drink our Purple Panty Pull-downs (a concoction of vodka and Kool Aid) and have a good time.”

“It may seem like harmless fun, but an event like the Redneck Games has insidious undertones,” says Dr. Susan Glisson, a professor at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture and Director of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation. “To promote an event that consciously or subconsciously excludes half of the community is inherently racist.”

The line between rednecks and racism is blurred even further by the Confederate stars-and-bars symbol that is synonymous with this culture. The Redneck Games is a vast sea of Confederate flags, proudly displayed on people’s hats, t-shirts, bikinis, beer cozies, and even baby diapers. The majority of Southerners will tell you that the rebel flag is a symbol of their history and nothing more.

“The Confederate flag is about heritage,” says Redneck World magazine founder Frank Fraser. “There are many great great grandfathers who died on those Civil War battlefields. The flag is a way of remembering them.” Ben “Cooter” Jones adds, “The Confederate symbol is the Christian cross of St. Andrew and not a symbol of slavery or hatred. You can’t expect us to lower our flags. I mean, the KKK wears white sheets, but it’s not like we’re gonna stop putting them on our beds.”

“The problem with the heritage-not-hate argument for the Confederate flag,” says Dr. Glisson, “Is that Southern blacks and whites have a shared, interdependent history. And if we’re not willing to include the interracial nature of our Southern heritage into the conception of who we are, racism will continue to exist.”

After searching the park for the better part of two hours, I locate the only two African Americans in the throng. Both are friendly women working at a Pizza Hut booth, and one of them, a 55 year-old grandmother named Marsha, speaks to me with a clarity I have yet to witness since my arrival in these parts. “Here in Dublin, things are polite between whites and blacks,” she says. “But it’s all on the surface. If you’re a black person in this town, you have your place and don’t you cross that line.” She pauses to serve a slice of pepperoni pizza, and continues. “Things go on here you wouldn’t believe. There are rich white people in this town who make black workers enter their homes through the back door, like it was the 1920’s. Through the back door.” She wipes her hands on her apron, scanning the white crowd.

“I’m old enough to remember when blacks weren’t allowed inside the same restaurants as whites. And this still exists today for a lot of black people.”

David, one of the few non-white business owners in Dublin, reiterated this point over breakfast this morning. “There’s only one bar in this town, and black folks know not to go in it. Everything is controlled here. Everybody knows where you can go and where you can’t. There are invisible walls all over this city.”

I ask Marsha if she feels nervous or uncomfortable about being one of the only black people at the Redneck Games. She stands up tall, and says in a loud, clear voice, “This is a public park, and my tax dollars pay for it. So I have a right to be here. My spirit is very strong. And when you’re standing with the truth, nothing can hurt you.”

Later, I ask Freddie Baugus, president of the East Dublin Lion’s Club—the main sponsor of the Redneck Games—what efforts, if any, are being made to increase diversity at the event. He tells me in a lazy, molasses drawl that the Games are open to everyone and that all races of people attend. Wink wink. When I tell him that I counted only two African Americans out of 7,000 attendees, he deflects the issue. “Look, this is about good people getting together to have a good time. Are we finished here?”

By mid-afternoon, the sky darkens as ominous black clouds roll in, unleashing a deluge of wind and rain. Thunder crackles and lightning streaks the salmon sky. People scatter for cover, many returning to their cars and heading home early. The organizers cancel the remaining events—the armpit serenade, hubcap hurl, and the butt-crack contest—to the dismay of hopeful participants. I huddle under the Pizza Hut booth for shelter, chatting with Marsha.

“You know, I volunteered to be here because I thought it was important,” she says. “I believe that by standing tall and proud, I am breaking down the racial barrier. And I will be here again next year and the year after, and I will tell more black people to come. You are going to see a variety of people here next year, and black people will be participating.”

We share a smile, basking in this moment of optimism. But as we’re exchanging contact information, two shirtless teenagers pass in front of us, wrestling over a half-empty beer bottle. One says to the other, “Gross, dude. Don’t nigger-lip the thing.” And I am suddenly jolted back to a world where African Americans aren’t welcome at the only bar in town, and black laborers are forced to enter white homes through the back door. I want to chase down the teens and make them choke on their thoughtless, hateful words. But instead, I do nothing, pretending not to hear the remark. The truth is, aside from my dietary considerations and my aversion to handguns, I may not be so different from these rednecks after all. I live in San Francisco, one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse cities in the world, but I don’t count a single black person among my friends. In fact, I don’t really know any black people at all. Though I’m not consciously part of the race problem in America, I’m certainly not part of the solution. I wish Marsha luck with her crusade, and then I turn and walk out into the fine, steady drizzle, where you can’t tell me from anyone else in the crowd.

Madness & Depravity at the Cannabis Cup

2011-02-16T15:29:00.000-08:00

Spin magazine, March 2004

It’s a blustery November morning as I peer out a tiny, rain-spattered window seven miles above the frigid North Atlantic. I’m headed to Amsterdam where I will judge some of the world’s finest marijuana and hashish in the 16th Annual Cannabis Cup competition. But I am not alone in my journey. There are at least 30 drunken, unwashed hooligans seated nearby who also will participate in the four-day event. The 13-hour trip from San Francisco is not unlike a fraternity party at 32,000 feet, complete with beer bongs, projectile vomiting, and some questionable under-the-blanket activity from a young couple seated behind me. After the bathroom smoke detector has been set off for the fourth time, the pilot reprimands us over the loudspeaker, threatening to land the plane in Greenland if it happens again. It reminds me of my drunken stepfather behind the wheel of our wood-paneled station wagon, scolding my brothers in the back seat: “You girls shut your holes. Don’t make me pull this car over!”

Upon arriving in the Netherlands, we are greeted in baggage claim by Tad, an impish man holding a sign that reads, “CANNABIS CUP JUDGES” in a childlike scrawl. We follow Tad to a waiting bus, and as we climb aboard, we are each given a package containing a gram of weed, a small brick of hash, some rolling papers, and several disposable lighters. Free at last from the tyranny of U.S. drug laws, my jubilant comrades light up their joints in unison, raising a smoky toast to freedom.

When I booked my trip with 420 Tours, an herb-friendly agency specializing in Cannabis Cup travel packages, I decided to forgo the insulating comforts of a luxury hotel for accommodations more in tune with the spirit of the event. I wanted to live, eat, and sleep with these depraved lunatics. After all, I was hoping this would be my generation’s Woodstock. The unnervingly perky travel agent said she knew just the place.

The bus drops me at a youth hostel in a crumbling pre-WWII building just outside the city loop and adjacent to the Amsterdam Zoo. At 8:30 A.M., the lobby is bustling with festival-goers—mostly 18- to 20-year-olds—and the marijuana fog is thick enough to obscure the “NO SMOKING” sign hung prominently above a candy vending machine. I check in at the reception desk and the clerk indicates that my roommates have already arrived. I follow the echo of bongo drums up a narrow winding staircase, and walk down a darkened, dormitory-style hallway. Wet hacking coughs emanate from behind each door, conjuring visions of a turn-of-the-century tuberculosis ward. My room, only slightly larger than a prison cell, is an odiferous potpourri of urine, vomit, and stale pot smoke. Six rusted Hitler-era bunks with oily mattresses line the windowless wall, and a broken chair leans precariously in one corner. There is no television, phone, or radio. And in the lone shower stall, a large dead rat lays slumped across the hair-matted drain. I am fairly certain this is how the Black Plague spread across Europe in the 14th century. I make a mental note to check myself for ticks.

My new roommates are seated on the floor, passing around a cigar-sized joint. Lori and Donna are ravers from Milwaukee who have come to “get their smoke on.” They have matching magenta pigtails and Lori is wearing a pacifier around her neck. Donna takes a pull and passes the joint to Pete, a lanky Texan with a whiteboy fro. Pete has smuggled a significant amount of mescaline into the country to sell at the festival and the profits will go toward his college tuition. When I comment that he’s probably the only person in history to smuggle drugs into Amsterdam, he responds with a boastful, smile. “Groovy,” he says.

I say goodbye and make my way across town to the Arena Hotel, which is the official Cup headquarters and home to all daytime festival activities. I pick up my judge’s credentials and wander into the exhibition hall, which is filled with booths hawking every type of marijuana paraphernalia. There are exotic, hand-blown bongs shaped like swans and blowfish, as well as vaporizers, grow lights, and numerous cannabis food products, from a Bavarian hash strudel to a pungent array of marijuana baked goods. Noticeably absent, however, are the social, political, and environmental groups who populate the music festival circuit. If you want to buy an aromatherapy kettle fashioned from a rabbit skull, Cannabis Cup is the place. But if you want to save a whale, you’ll have better luck cruising the concourse at a Dead show.

Downstairs in the main room, lecturers are pontificating on cannabis-themed topics, including “Hidden Knowledge and the Conspiracy Against the Psychedelic Mind” and my personal favorite, “Jesus Was a Stoner.” According to the speaker, the anointing oils used by Christ were cannabis extracts, and application to the skin could induce hallucinogenic visions. As I ponder this bold theory, a heavy-set woman in the audience begins speaking loudly to no one in particular. “Jesus was a hippie?” she bellows. “Don’t surprise me none. He got the long hair and the beard. And what about those sandals?” Then she looks over at me and adds, “Personally, I always thought he looked like Dan Fogelberg.”

The Cannabis Cup was founded in 1987 by Steven Hager, former editor of High Times magazine, as a tribute to the California marijuana harvest festivals of the ’70s. Originally, the Cup was modest in size—there were four entries and three judges: Hager, a photographer who documented the event, and the grow master known as Dr. Indoors. Hager continued to organize the event from New York, but would not attend again until the sixth festival, which featured 50 judges and introduced the sterling silver Cannabis Cup trophy that would be awarded to all future winners.

By 1996, the Cup had become a media event, drawing 1,500 judges and 30 entries. The judging has been open to the public since 1993—for a price (except in 2000, when High Times gave voting responsibility to six Cannabis castaways who lived on a houseboat for three days with an unlimited supply of each entry). This year, High Times sold 1,700 judges passes at $200 each. Worn around the neck like a rock tour laminate, the pass guarantees free samples of pot and hash, access to all parties, concerts, and events, and the right to vote in the competition. “It was the first attempt to legally establish a worldwide standard for cannabis seed, and the event has kept its mission intact,” Hager says. “That is why it remains so popular.”

Although complimentary samples of some entries are available in the Judges’ Lounge at the Arena Hotel, the majority of entries must be purchased at the sponsoring coffee shops, which are government-regulated and allowed to sell small amounts of marijuana and hashish for personal use (up to 5 grams per transaction). In fact, most Dutch coffee shops don’t even sell coffee. And if you try to order a Grande iced caramel macchiato from one of these establishments, the proprietor will likely pitch you into a canal. This year, we must visit 28 of these coffee houses scattered across the greater metropolitan area—an extraordinary logistical feat to accomplish over the four-day judging period. The task must be attacked with military precision and a clear head—two traits not generally associated with stoners.

This year’s Cup includes 36 entries, so in order to sample them all, I need to smoke nine types of weed and hash a day for four consecutive days, which means getting stoned every 2.66 hours for 96 straight hours. As I soon discover, it is impossible to evaluate different types of weed when they are smoked in rapid succession. After a few tokes, I cannot taste the difference between the strains. After five or six, my judgment becomes clouded, and after eight or nine, I’m wandering the city aimlessly, frightened, and unable to find my hostel. Aside from the obvious pitfalls associated with this type of deranged marathon, there is a twist to this story: I do not use marijuana. Sure, I smoked a little grass in college. And I hit the bong during my bohemian phase in the early ’90s, when I lived in the Haight-Ashbury and wrote terrible poetry about ex-girlfriends and pretty leaves I found in the yard. But over the years, the giddy euphoria and soulful introspection induced by pot gave way to debilitating paranoia, fueled by an insatiable desire for chili cheese fries and Pop Tarts smeared with chocolate-chip cookie dough.

I begin the judging process at Barney’s Breakfast Bar, a popular coffee shop that took home the Cannabis Cup in 2001 and 2002. I purchase a gram of Barney’s current cannabis entry, a saucy full-bodied herb called Laughing Buddha, and a gram of its hash entry, Helter Skelter Ice. Sitting at a table, I roll a Buddha joint and pack a small ceramic pipe with the hash. For the competition, we’ve been instructed to grade the entries based on taste, smell, strength, and appearance. I light up and take a deep drag of the Buddha, which goes down smooth, with a pleasant fruity aftertaste. It’s strong, but not too strong. Then I fire up the hash. The first hit almost knocks me out of my chair. The room starts to spin. (I have never been good with hash.) Exhausted from jetlag and now very stoned, I head back to the hostel for a good night’s rest, stopping at several coffee shops on the way, choking down samples of Kali Mist, Shiva, and Gandhi Ganja.

I barely sleep the first night. The maddening, relentless clamor of bongo drums reverberates down the hall, through the air ducts, and into my skull. I drift off shortly before sunrise, but am soon awakened by a wretched cacophony of inhuman screeches. Monkey screeches, to be precise. Pete looks over from his bunk. “It’s the zoo,” he says. “Those furry bitches shriek like hell when the sun comes up.”

The “breakfast” provided by the hostel reads like the menu from a Dickens novel—dry toast, an assortment of odd-smelling cheeses, and a large tub of gray mush that could be fairly classified as “gruel.” I share a table with a mother and her 20-year-old daughter who have traveled from Florida to experience the Cup. They are wearing matching T-shirts that read “FUCK THE RULES” in bold print. I ask the mother, an accountant for a public school district, if she feels any conflict about doing drugs with her daughter. She flashes a crooked, toothy smile and offers this bit of advice: “The family that bakes together stays together.” Then she fires up a fatty.

I spend the next 12 hours zig-zagging across the city, smoking the likes of NYC Diesel, Cinderella 99, Thaitanic, White Widow, and Knockout. Because there are so many entries, most judges take meticulous notes, which is a valuable resource when it comes time to vote. Some judges organize their comments on Palm Pilots and take digital photos of each entry. I begin the competition jotting my observations in a tattered college-ruled notebook. By the second day, the notebook is destroyed (bong-water mishap) and I’m scribbling remarks on cocktail napkins and falafel receipts. By the fourth day, I will be scratching cryptic comments on my jeans: White Smurf good. My tongue feels fuzzy. And I am the chicken man.

To the coffee shops, the Cannabis Cup is a serious event with far-reaching financial implications. The winner is assured a substantial boost in tourist business, along with bragging rights for the next year, and the privilege to display the revered Cannabis Cup trophy. With so much at stake, many of the larger coffeehouses have taken to “lobbying” the judges (read: bribing) by offering free T-shirts, hats, lighters, pipes, and of course generous servings of their finest marijuana in hopes of swaying voters. One night in our hostel bar, I ask a woman named Tammy, a dental hygienist from Poughkeepsie, New York, which entry she likes the best. “I don’t know,” she replies, “but Barney’s had the best free shit.”

That evening I head over to The Melkweg, a popular club that is hosting the late-night Cannabis Cup activities. The Melkweg features an impressive roster of musical acts throughout the week, including a performance that night by George Clinton and P-Funk. As I work my way to the bar, I sense a palpable excitement sweeping through the glassy-eyed crowd. Actor and hemp crusader Woody Harrelson has been spotted at a nearby noodle shop, and it’s rumored that he might drop in for P-Funk’s set. To a devout pothead, the notion of hanging out with Woody Harrelson at the world’s most renowned marijuana festival is akin to chilling with David Lee Roth in the Champagne Room of a Vegas titty bar.

George Clinton delivers a predictably unintelligible set. In between songs, he urges the crowd to smoke pot but avoid hard drugs: “Smoke the dope but not the coke!” (Clinton will be arrested in Florida nine days later for allegedly smoking crack.) At midnight, a Pink Floyd cover band called the Machine plays Dark Side of the Moon synched-up with The Wizard of Oz on a giant video screen. The band is decent, but the synchronicity concept is tired and after a few minutes the room clears.

As I’m leaving, I meet a 19-year-old kid from Montana who introduces himself as Keith, but says, “Everybody calls me Frog.” Frog is wearing a “WHO FARTED?” T-shirt and snowboarder goggles even though it is not snowing. We talk about the competition entries, discussing our favorites and how we might vote. I am done smoking pot for the day, but when he offers me a taste of a hard-to-find entry called AK-47, I acquiesce. There are four basic types of weed: happy, sleepy, scary, and munchie. AK-47 is the last variety. I say goodbye to Frog shortly after 2 A.M., and that’s when the deep, insatiable hunger kicks in. I crave nachos. I need Moon Pies. As I scour the city in search of an open restaurant or market, I encounter one shuttered shop after another. Amsterdam is not a 24-hour city like New York and most places close by 10 P.M. I return to my hostel and head for the vending machine. It’s broken—a handwritten “out of order” sign is taped over the coin slot. I can see the beautiful candy just out of reach behind the tempered glass, calling to me. Must. Have. Candy. I begin rocking the machine, attempting to jar a Snickers bar from its coiled grip, but it is not to be. “Damn you!” I scream at the cruel metal beast. The young clerk at the reception desk eyes me with disdain. I give her the finger and go to bed.

I am heading into my 50th hour without sleep and desperately need rest. As I lie in my bunk, the familiar din of bongo drums is momentarily drowned out by a series of guttural shrieks emanating from the bathroom. My roommate Lori is in the shower having sex with a Finnish guy she met at a club that night. Their tryst ends just before dawn, and I hope to finally get some sleep. The moment I drift off, I am jolted back to consciousness by a chorus of screeching chimpanzees and howler monkeys.

In the morning, I force down a bowl of lukewarm gruel. There are approximately 12 hours until the Cup voting booths close and I still have 20 entries to sample. I frenetically toke my way through Hawaiian Snow, Yumbolt, Pot of Gold, Biddy Early, and Euforia. This pace, however, does not bode well. I haven’t slept in 72 hours and am close to a meltdown. I decide to take a break and do some souvenir shopping in the touristy area between Prins Hendrikkade and Centraal Station. I buy two pairs of tiny Dutch wooden shoes because I think my cat will look funny in them.

Mentally and physically exhausted, with several entries still to go and only a few hours until the polls close, I need an aggressive strategy. Making my way across town to the Kashmir Lounge, I sit at a long table with the remaining Cannabis Cup submissions fanned out before me. I lay out 6 overlapping rolling papers, licking the edges so they form a single sheet, and roll a thumb-sized joint with bits from all the remaining strains: A dash of White Rhino. A pinch of Killer Bud. A sprinkle of Arabica Hash, and so on. In my sleep-deprived stupor, it makes perfect sense. I finish rolling the green monster and fire it up. As the smoke tsunami washes through my lungs, I brace myself for the inevitable psychedelic shock wave. And I wait. Nothing happens. Have I smoked so much pot that my body has developed a natural immunity to it? Or will it creep up on me later, when I least expect it?

I hop the next train toward the Arena Hotel to cast my official votes. I am somewhere between Vondelpark and Liedesplein when the drugs kick in. The combination of marijuana, hashish, and lack of sleep triggers an extreme psychotic reaction: unbridled paranoia. I nervously scan the crowded commuter car, searching the pale Dutch faces around me for any trace of misguided rage. Would these lutefisk-eaters come at me? I notice an old woman glaring at me, and for a brief second her cold dead eyes meet mine. Her gnarled lip curls upward, revealing a jagged set of razor fangs. She can smell my fear. They all can. I jump off the train at the next stop before any blood is spilled and take to the street. Although the details are hazy, I vaguely recall eating Austrian funnel cakes from a pastry wagon in Museum Square and urinating over the banks of the Amstel River in full view of a crowded tour boat.

I arrive at the Arena Hotel Judges’ Lounge as the polls are closing. I make my selections for the best overall cannabis, local hash, coffee shop, glass piece, and expo booth, and drop my votes into the secured ballot box. Mission complete, I return to the hostel and drift into a deep slumber. In fact, I sleep straight through the awards ceremony that night, through the bongo drums, and through the symphony of baboons at daybreak. I later learn that the Greenhouse’s Hawaiian Snow entry took the top honors. I had voted for Laughing Buddha, which finished a distant third.

That morning, I say goodbye to my roommates and Aleksi, the Finnish gigolo who has taken up residence in Lori’s bunk. On the way to the airport, the events of the week play in my head over and over like a broken record. The nostalgic side of me had hoped that the Cannabis Cup festival would be a lightning rod for the modern counterculture movement, a hotbed of social and political activism reminiscent of the ’60s. But the extent of the political discourse I encountered throughout the week was “Bush sucks ass” and “Free Tommy Chong.”

So when I meet a young woman on the flight home with dreadlocks and a tie-dyed “Morrison Hotel” T-shirt, my heart soars. We begin talking, or rather she begins talking, and in one long-winded diatribe, outlines her generation’s four key hot-button issues: Greenpeace, hemp, the rain forest, and Dave Matthews. Okay, so they aren’t earth-shattering convictions, but at least she cares about something. That gives me hope. After a few minutes of socio-political banter, she asks if I want to split an 8-ball because she knows a guy in Berkeley “with some kickin’ powder.” I smile and politely decline. I just want to go home, put on a Belle & Sebastian record, and dress my cat in tiny wooden shoes.

The Beatles: Don't Stop Believin'

2011-02-15T12:30:00.000-08:00

HARP magazine, April 2008

It is 119 degrees in the teeming desert cesspool called Las Vegas, where methed-out vampires troll the Strip, sin is the prevailing virtue, and somewhere Wayne Newton is singing 'Danka Schoen' in a sequined pantsuit. If this isn’t Hell, then it’s certainly in the same zip code. I climb out of the air-conditioned rental car at the Mirage Hotel and the heat comes at me with the blunt force of a wrecking ball, the unrelenting desert sun burning my eyes like gamma rays from a distant holocaust. As I grab my luggage and make a beeline for the casino, the rubber soles of my Adidas actually melt to the asphalt, leaving a gummy residue with each belabored step. I am not a violent man, but if one more cheery fanny pack-wearing tourist tells me, “It’s a dry heat,” I will punch him in the neck.

I’ve come to Las Vegas to attend the world’s longest running Beatles fan convention. Since 1974, The Fest for Beatles Fans has been the premier gathering for diehard Beatlemaniacs, memorabilia collectors, pop culture enthusiasts, old hippies and disillusioned souls hoping to recapture the spirit and optimism of the 1960s. Hosted by the Mirage Hotel and Casino – home of the Beatles-inspired Cirque Du Soleil show Love and the ultra hip Beatles Revolution Lounge – the three-day event features musical performances by original members of Wings, an exhibition of Beatles fan art, trivia contests, photography displays, a battle of the bands competition, and the marketplace, a sprawling indoor mall with vendors hawking a dizzying array of Beatles-related products, from Fab Four beer cozies to Yellow Submarine underpants.

The Mirage is a sprawling and impressive property, a shimmering beacon of capitalism rising high above the Strip, complete with a 54 foot volcano that erupts smoke and sprays fire at the top of each hour, a dolphin habitat, mini aquarium, rare white tigers, and more. Simply getting to the Fest’s location in the Mirage Grand Ballroom is like trekking through the Burmese jungle by way of Rodeo Drive. My journey takes me through the lush tropical rain forest and cascading waterfalls inside the hotel lobby, past the casino floor and the endless rows of whirring slot machines, through the shopping promenade past the elegant Rolex, Versace and Cartier window displays, past the Spa & Salon and the DKNY Swimwear outlet, rounding the corner until... BAM! I collide head-on with a lean, leathery man sporting a silvery Jerry Garcia ‘fro and a scraggly white beard. He is wearing rubber fishing waders over cut-off denim shorts, a purple stovepipe hat, and a tie-dyed shirt that says, “Got Weed?” Clearly, I have crossed over into some strange parallel reality. I exchange apologies with the man, and after he scans the area for “pigs,” he shakes my hand and introduces himself as Mushroom Dave. He tells me if I need to score any ‘fungus’ for the convention, I can find him at the Dolphin Bar outside Siegfried and Roy’s Secret Garden. Then he flashes a ragged jack-o-lantern grin and scampers off, humming Lovely Rita as he disappears into a crowded Starbucks. Apparently, the mushroom man is jonesing for a Frappuccino.

Outside the Grand Ballroom, several hundred eager Beatles fans wait in line for the festival doors to open. As expected, most of the people are in their fifties and sixties, but there are a surprising number of younger fans and even some teenagers, which is a testament to the Beatles enduring popularity and cross-generational appeal. Aside from Mushroom Dave and a few like-minded, psychedelic time travelers, most of the attendees are firmly rooted in the present. In fact, the majority of the fans look decidedly mainstream, suburban even, clad in Dockers and crisply ironed Let it Be t-shirts. Old hippies don’t die; they become dentists and drive Mercury Sables.

I head over to the media registration booth, pick up my press passes for the day and take my place in line. Dolores, a chatty graying woman in front of me, shows me photos of her Miniature Schnauzers named Eleanor Rigby and Mean Mr. Mustard. “I bought my tickets for the Fest six months ago,” she tells me. “I drove 37 hours from Sheboygan to get here. Only stopped to pee once.”

Inside the Fest, it is a veritable smorgasbord of Beatles lore. In one room, former Wings bandmates Denny Laine, Laurence Juber and Denny Seiwell sign autographs for excited fans. Another room has a Beatles Name That Tune contest, where people shout oddities such as, “Glass Onion” and “I am the Walrus, dammit! I am the Walrus!” Down the hall is a beautiful photo exhibition of the Beatles in India, and one of the smaller ballrooms features the Beatles museum and art contest, an impressive collection of newspaper clippings, photos, promotional materials and fan art, including a stunning painting of John Lennon in his Sgt. Pepper’s attire. But the real attraction of the Fest is the giant international Beatles marketplace, a massive room with vendors hawking every conceivable type of Beatles merchandise. There are hundreds of Beatles t-shirts, handbags, sweatbands, keychains, lunchboxes, cookie jars, beach towels, belt buckles, buttons, posters, rare LPs and vintage concert ticket stubs fetching $4000 and up. There are Beatles mouse pads, creepy talking John Lennon dolls, cigarette lighters, and even a CD called Live from the Pound that features dogs barking Beatles classics such as Day Tripper and Love Me Do. The cynical side of me questions the mass commercialization of these sixties icons and the ideals of the era, but then I meet someone like Leesa Lewis, now on her third Fest, who made the journey from Birmingham, Alabama. “These trinkets remind us of a simpler time,” says Lewis, motioning to a table of Beatles socks. “Sure, there were problems in the 1960s, the Vietnam War and the riots and all that, but it was also a wonderful time. It was a wonderful time to be young.” We walk past a booth selling Beatles Help! alarm clocks and Abbey Road makeup bags, and she adds, “We have six Beatles rugs in our house and our walls are lined with Linda McCartney’s Beatles photography. We live and breathe the Beatles on an everyday basis. It’s a huge part of our life.” On the far side of the marketplace, I meet Henry G, a forty-something man wearing a Fab 4 baseball jersey and cargo shorts. “It’s all about the music,” he assures me, as he thumbs through a rack of Beatles neckties, pausing to admire a silk beauty adorned with Blue Meanies. “I love that everyone is here to enjoy the music. Where else can you hear your favorite songs wherever you turn?” I want to say, “Um, on my iPod,” but it seems a little bitchy.

After buying a Ringo Starr action figure (all the George, John and Pauls were gone), I head into the Grand Ballroom where a nervous usher quickly shows me to a seat. “Hurry,” she says. “The wedding is about to begin.” Richard Barton and Lisa Loflin, lifelong Beatles fans from Montgomery Village, Maryland, are getting married on the festival stage in front of several hundred fellow Beatlemaniacs. Instead of the traditional wedding march, All You Need is Love plays as the beaming bride and groom walk up the long aisle to the stage. The bride wears a white dress with baby’s breath flowers in her hair. The groom, baring an uncanny resemblance to David Crosby of CSN, wears a black blazer with a carnation over a faded Sgt. Pepper’s t-shirt and jeans. During the ceremony, the minister makes them promise to, “Place each other above everything and everyone, including the Beatles,” which gets a big laugh from the crowd. After the couple exchanges vows, they leave the stage to a standing ovation as When I’m 64 plays them out.

Next, I decide to check out the Beatles museum located in a smaller ballroom down the hall. I’m looking for press clippings about the Beatles August 19, 1964 concert at the Cow Palace in San Francisco because my mom was actually there, and next to my birth and the spiritual training she received on a Swiss mountaintop from a one-eyed shaman named Bunky, it was one of the defining moments of her life. “I was sixteen years old, and driving through San Francisco to the concert, every radio station was playing Beatles music,” she told me in an earlier conversation. “And every car we passed along the way was playing the Beatles. It’s like the entire city was connected in that singular moment.” As I’m thumbing through old newspaper articles looking for references to the 1964 concert, I begin chatting with Fest-goer John Knuckols of Alabama. “It’s so great being here with all these people,” says Knuckols. “I can look around and know that I have something in common with every person here. You can start a conversation with a stranger and instantly feel connected to them.” This idea of being ‘connected’ is a recurring motif among old hippies. In a way, I’ve always envied the generation who came of age in the 1960s and the experiences that bond them. They share a unique place in history, having lived through the Kennedy years, the Beatles, Martin Luther King, The Graduate, free love and LSD. As a teen growing up in the 1980s, I lived through Reagan, Flock of Seagulls, Charles in Charge, AIDS and crack. I’m not complaining, because I actually enjoy the music of Glass Tiger and Men Without Hats. But it’s easy to feel that my generation was somehow slighted. Before you fire off your angry letters to the editor, I fully acknowledge that the 1980’s produced some terrific artists – it’s hard to imagine a world without U2, REM or the Cure. My point is that on a whole, the artists of the 80’s don’t have the same historical resonance as, say, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan or the Who of the late sixties. I mean, in fifteen years, will people be attending Wang Chung fan conventions? Will I be scouring eBay for vintage Hall & Oates bobble-head dolls? Is Huey Lewis the Arlo Guthrie of my generation? But don’t listen to me. After all, there was a point in my life when I thought Journey was the best band on the planet. This is obviously the ranting of a madman, because everybody knows that Journey is actually the second greatest band of all time, tucked snugly between Def Leppard and Invisible Touch-era Genesis.

I exit the Grand Ballroom, stopping at the Beatles Fest snack bar for a beverage. I grab an “official” 12oz Beatles water, which costs an astounding five dollars. An order of official Beatles chicken fingers costs $7.50, and a glass of house wine will set you back another $8.25. The tickets to the Fest are fairly steep at $55 a day, so if you come with your spouse, and you each have a glass of wine and a snack, you might have to turn a few tricks on the Strip to offset the cost.

As I’m walking back towards the casino through the shopping promenade, carefully sipping my five-dollar water, I notice the myriad window displays of Beatles Cirque Du Soleil merchandise. For the record, this Beatles gear is sold directly through the Mirage and has no affiliation with the Fest. Almost all the t-shirts, hats and coffee mugs are celebrating the 40^th anniversary of the Summer of Love, and the prices are offensive. One shop is selling a Sgt. Pepper’s Summer of Love tank top for $48. Aside from the obvious price gouging at the hands of the casino, it makes me wonder if this is the legacy John Lennon envisioned for his band. Truthfully, I don’t know what’s more depressing: That my generation lacks the cultural and historical connection that unites Beatles fans, or that these refugees of the Love Generation have had their noble, revolutionary ideals diluted to such a point that they only seem to exist on the fabric of a t-shirt.

I continue back through the casino towards the Beatles Cirque Du Soleil Theater to catch a performance of Love. After plunking down $80 for a ticket, I am directed to a seat roughly three miles from the stage at an altitude that causes my ankles to swell. Pretty costumed girls cruise the aisles hawking official souvenir programs, and roaming staff photographers offer to take your picture for a hefty fee. I considered buying some of Mushroom Dave’s hallucinogenic fungus to get in the proper mindset for the show, but it turns out the drugs were wholly unnecessary. Set to classic Beatles music, Love is a series of loosely connected vignettes that run the gamut from enchanting to darkly disturbing. In one particularly moving scene set to George Harrison’s brilliant Something, a beautiful, ethereal nymphet floats just out of the protagonist’s reach. Other bizarre vignettes feature creepy, faceless dwarves whose heads snap off and gelatinous flying squid men. And then there are the umbrella people. If Fellini had directed a rollerblading, breakdancing clown musical, this would be it. After the show, the crowd is funneled through the Cirque Du Soleil gift shop, where people snap up CD soundtracks, overpriced t-shirts and programs in a hyper-aggressive frenzy.

In need of a strong cocktail, I head over to the Beatles Revolution Lounge. I begrudgingly pay the $20 cover charge and head inside. The décor is cheeky swinging London circa 1967 with an Austin Powers vibe, complete with costumed go go dancers and a psychedelic light show. I drop $22 on a glass of wine and a Coke, and sit back to enjoy the retro hipster scene. The lounge has a casual chic about it, and I don’t feel out of place in my cargo shorts and golf shirt. (This would be a good time to mention that unlike most people who frequent trendy Vegas nightspots, I am neither hip nor fashionable. In fact, I have always been decidedly uncool, except for that brief period in 1985 when I pegged my jeans, smoked clove cigarettes and listened to Style Council’s Café Bleu and Tears for Fears’ The Hurting until my ears bled). After several minutes, a beefy security guard wearing a radio headset approaches my table and informs me that I am in violation of the Revolution Lounge dress code. He tells me that shorts (along with hats, open-toed shoes and jerseys) are not allowed in the bar, and that I have to leave the premises immediately. The revolution has a dress code? I ask him if Che Guevara would be ejected for wearing a beret, or if Jesus would be ousted for wearing sandals. The guard does not smile, and radios for back up. I point to a girl at the bar wearing a micro-mini sans panties who flashes muff every time she uncrosses her legs, arguing that my attire is more appropriate than hers. He doesn’t buy it, and a second security guard appears behind me. As I’m being escorted out of the bar, I begin shouting to no one in particular, “the revolution is a sham” and, “power to the people!”

I quickly make my way to the casino sports bar and order a Glenfiddich and Sprite, trying to wrap my head around the sublime irony of what had just transpired: I was ejected from the revolution for wearing the uniform of the proletariat. Karl Marx would be aghast. Like so many of the ideas that emerged from the sixties and found their way into the mainstream, the notions of “revolution” and even “love” have been co-opted and commoditized, molded into products that bear little resemblance to their origin. The Mirage Hotel and Casino has successfully turned the Beatles’ image into a chic entertainment experience and a revenue-generating mega-brand, not unlike Coca Cola or McDonald’s. Perhaps most damaging to the band’s legacy is record label Sony/ATV, who owns the rights to 259 classic Beatles songs. In April 2007, Sony/ATV began licensing the entire Beatles catalogue for use in television and radio commercials. Currently, Target is using a bastardized You Say Hello, I say Good Buy in a successful campaign, while Huggies is airing a diaper commercial using the tune All You Need is Luvs. Really? All You Need is Luvs? If that’s not a sign of the impending apocalypse, than I don’t know what is. Personally, I find Las Vegas, a city built on a foundation of reckless capitalism, felony and greed, to be a curious location for a festival celebrating an artist who once represented the exact opposite values. I finish my drink and head back to my room for the night. Tomorrow is a big day at the Fest, as it marks the 40^th anniversary of the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and features a concert where the legendary record will be performed in its entirety.

The next morning, I wake up refreshed, eager to put yesterday’s headaches behind me. I go back to the media registration booth to pick up my press passes for the Fest, but the PR woman says there’s been a mix-up and I’m no longer on the list. I ask her to call Mark Lapidos, the man who founded the Fest and oversees its daily operations, which she does. When she gets off the phone, she reiterates that I cannot have press passes but am welcome to attend if I pay the $55 entrance fee. It’s not that I can’t afford the $55 ticket price, or that HARP wouldn’t cover the cost; it’s the principle of the matter. And this is the moment I knew that all the hope and optimism of the sixties, the idea that we could actually change the world, was gone forever. Bureaucracy is the new religion, and the almighty dollar is the god to which we pray. So I promptly checked out of my hotel room, fired up my rental car, and drove north out of the city. Sometimes in the face of fascism, your best move is to flee into the desert. As I’m driving through the night, listening to Linda Ronstadt croon Blue Bayou on the radio, I’m reminded of a particular Hunter Thompson passage in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, where he describes the Love Generation and its subsequent fallout:

“And that, I think, was the handle – that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave… So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark – that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

Out on this lonely desert road, the wave seems like such a distant memory that I wonder if it ever really existed at all, or if the whole thing was just a beautiful mirage.

Editor’s note: At the time of this writing, the number one rock download on iTunes is Don’t Stop Believin’ by Journey.

The Oldest Living Confederate Groupie Tells All

2011-02-14T10:17:00.000-08:00

Spin magazine, Feb. 2005

It’s 10:30 A.M. on a Friday in Little Rock, Arkansas, and Connie Hamzy is sitting at the bar of the Sticky Fingerz Rock and Roll Chicken Shack, telling a story to a small audience of busboys and cocktail waitresses: “So I’m out on the tour bus, smokin’ dope and blowing roadies,” she says in a lazy Southern accent. “And who comes into the back lounge? Neil fucking Diamond.” A man pulls out a stool next to her. He is wearing a hat shaped like the snout of hog. “Neil looks me up and down and nods his approval,” Hamzy continues. “Then he gets high with us, and disappears backstage. A few minutes later, his manager says he wants to see me in his dressing room. So I knock on the door, and there’s Neil waiting for me in a blue robe. And I didn’t just suck him—there was fucking too.”

At first glance, Hamzy could be any middle-aged woman half-drunk on a Friday morning. But a closer examination reveals she’s different somehow, maybe even important. Customers—mostly men—begin approaching her from all directions. They seem to know her name. They say hello, and want to shake her hand. The man in the pig hat buys her a drink. She is, after all, a celebrity.

“Out on the road for forty days / Last night in Little Rock, put me in a haze / Sweet, sweet Connie, doin' her act / She had the whole show and that's a natural fact.”

—“We’re an American Band,” Grand Funk Railroad

But Connie Hamzy is more than a two-line cameo in the above 30-year-old song: She’s the world’s most notorious rock’n’roll groupie, with a sexual resume that dates back to 1970. Her list of conquests reads like the selections on a biker-bar jukebox, including members, she alleges, of the Who, Led Zeppelin, the Eagles, Bad Company, the Allman Brothers, and Deep Purple. In 1974, when Hamzy was 19, her groupie escapades were detailed in Cosmopolitan magazine profile, and in 1992 she did a tell-all interview in Penthouse. She’s been interviewed by numberous talk show hosts, including Geraldo Rivera, Joan Rivers, Sally Jesse Raphael, and Maury Povich. Though most of her groupie contemporaries—–like Pamela Des Barres and Bebe Buell—drifted out of the scene by the mid-’80s to raise families or cultivate book deals, Sweet Connie continued her exploits into the new millennium, and today she can be found lurking backstage at nearly every gig in central Arkansas. Connie Hamzy is 50 years old.

“She’s a legend in Little Rock,” says Sticky Fingerz owner Chris King as he wipes down the bar. “Whenever there’s a good concert at the amphitheater, she likes to come in before the show, have a glass of chardonnay on the rocks, and tell us these wonderful stories about her life.”

Though I’d spoken to Hamzy on the phone several times in preparation for my October visit, I didn’t know what to expect when I met her in person. As I discovered early on, she is prone to outbursts that teeter precariously between the profane and the bizarre. During one conversation, Hamzy, upon learning that I had briefly been a roadie for Dan Fogelberg, said with a hint of bemusement, “Yeah, I blew him. And his manager, too,” as if recounting the first time she ate string cheese or listened to a Josh Groban CD.

Hamzy lives in a modest white one-level house with green trim at the end of gently sloping street. There is a rusty Tercel parked on the dirt patch masquerading as a driveway. It’s covered with cobwebs and dried pine needles; the hood is tattooed with small animal footprints and there is a bullet hole in the passenger-side windshield. As I walk up the muddy path overgrown with tall grass, the screen door swings open and Hamzy waves me inside.

The décor of the house is 1970’s garage sale chic, and the smell of marijuana and unchanged cat litter hangs heavy in the air. Whitesnake’s “Fool for Your Lovin’,” is blasting on the stereo. Every wall in the house is adorned with rock memorabilia from her adventures over the last 35 years, including hundreds of ALL ACCESS tour laminates hanging from hooks in every room. There are framed, autographed photos of artists such as REO Speedwagon and Van Halen, each with a corresponding backstage pass. An enormous pile of drumsticks sits in a dusty corner of the living room. Most are monogrammed, including one that reads: “Ringo Starr.” Connie points to a photo of herself with Rick Springfield from 1985. He towers above her five-foot frame and his arms are wrapped around her. She looks radiant, with flowing mocha hair and large, chocolate-brown eyes: “I never actually did Rick Springfield,” she says, “but I had sex with his (female) masseuse on the massage table and he videotaped it. He got off on voyeurism. You know, he was Dr. Noah Drake on General Hospital.”

Today, as Hamzy approaches 50, she looks remarkably healthy for a woman whose life has been riddled with booze, drugs, and indiscriminate sex. She is thin, but not sickly. Her hair still flows to her shoulders, though the dark roots are evidence of a neglected dye-job. There are more lines in her face, and at times she looks tired. But there are also flashes of radiance—particularly when a song comes on the radio that she likes—and this morning her eyes are full of life. Hamzy pours herself a glass of Franzia chardonnay and drops in a couple of ice cubes. She motions to a tray on the cluttered coffee table containing a glass bong, some rolling papers, and a small amount of weed: “You mind if I get high?” She takes a hit from the bong. “I know it sounds crazy, but I wanted to be a groupie since I was a little girl.”

Connie was born an only child to working class parents in North Little Rock in 1955. Her mother was a housewife and her father did auto body and fender work, but according to Hamzy, “he was a womanizing gambler on the side.” When she was in grade school, her parents took her to see Dick Clark’s “Caravan of Stars,” a popular concert series featuring bands such as Herman’s Hermits, Little Richard, and Paul Revere and the Raiders. “I would see these girls going backstage—they were always dressed up, and they looked so glamorous,” she says. “And I wanted to be back there, too.”

Hamzy had her first groupie experience in 1970 when Steppenwolf played Little Rock’s Barton Coliseum. To beat the traffic, her mother dropped her and a girlfriend off at the show several hours early. “I knew where the backstage door was because I’d go back there to get autographs when I was kid. So my girlfriend and I walked around back, and there was a limousine sitting there. Steppenwolf’s road manager saw us and invited us back to the hotel to pick up the band. And we said Sure.” My girlfriend was with their lead singer in one room, and I was with their drummer in another room. We didn’t have sex, but he got me out of my top. I was only 15.” A month later, Hamzy lost her virginity to the drummer of Frijid Pink, a Detroit band that had minor success with covers of “Heartbreak Hotel” and “House of the Rising Sun.”

“She was such a sweet kid when I first met her, wide-eyed and innocent,” recalls Jonnie King, a DJ at Little Rock’s KAAY in the early 1970’s who met Hamzy when she was a freshman in high school. “For her, being a groupie was about being accepted. She needed attention and affection, and maybe that was the only way she knew how to get it. When I saw her a couple of years later, she wasn’t the same little girl. The sweetness had dissolved and there was a harshness.”

By 16, Hamzy was backstage at nearly every concert that came to Little Rock, from Three Dog Night to the Carpenters. She had blossomed into a dark-haired beauty and was becoming known for her willingness to experiment with drugs and sex. As her reputation in the music industry grew, managers and promoters began flying her to shows around the country. “They’d leave prepaid tickets at the airport, and I’d get on a plane and go. I did that with Grand Funk and Alice Cooper. One time I left on a private plane with Leslie West in Mountain. I was 16.”

“While the other high-school girls were trying out for cheerleading, Connie was hanging out with Cheech and Chong and Humble Pie,” says Constance Canfield, a longtime friend and former bi-sexual lover of Hamzy’s. “Being a groupie gave her an identity. Even today, it defines who she is.”

“I’ve been a groupie for almost 35 years, and I still love it,” says Hamzy. “I love the camaraderie with the musicians and the roadies, and everyone who works in the business. A lot of these people are my friends. Some of them I even consider family.”

A few hours later, Hamzy and I are sitting at the bar in Coulton’s Steakhouse, finishing lunch. We’re discussing Almost Famous, Cameron Crowe’s autobiographical love letter to ’70s rock’n’roll, in which Kate Hudson plays a beautiful groupie named Penny Lane.

“Do you think Almost Famous accurately portrays the era,” I ask.

“I thought they did a marvelous job,” she says, “although, they did sugar-coat it. You know, the drugs and the sex and all.” She pauses for a moment, scraping her leftovers into a Styrofoam take-out box, then adds: “Keith Moon once fucked me with a banana in a backstage dressing room while a bunch of people watched. They should put that in a movie.”

“I never pretended to be anything other than a groupie,” she says. “Remember how Penny Lane kept saying, ‘We’re not groupies, we’re Band-Aids?’ I met so many gals like that.” She pauses, “I’m sorry, but if you’re backstage sucking dick, you’re a groupie. And that’s not a bad thing. Not a bad thing at all.”

By the time Hamzy was a senior in high school, she had a solid reputation as the premier groupie in the South. She was mostly known for her oral sex skills. When asked about her technique, Hamzy replies: “Swallow it all. And don’t think twice about it. Don’t be all mealy-mouthed.” During this period, Connie’s conservative parents realized that their daughter wasn’t just going to concerts, and became determined to curb her increasingly outrageous behavior. The Osmonds were scheduled to play Little Rock, and her parents—out of touch with popular music—didn’t want her to go to the show.

“My mother took me to Memphis for the night, to prevent those Mormon boys from corrupting me,” Hamzy says laughing. “We stayed at the Holiday Inn Rivermont in Memphis, and the Allman Brothers happened to be staying there too. I met them in the lobby, and I went up to Gregg Allman’s room and we had sex while my mother was wondering where the hell I’d disappeared to.”

In 1973, Grand Funk Railroad released “We’re an American Band,” featuring “sweet Connie” in the opening verse. The song became a colossal hit, effectively launching Hamzy into the national spotlight. “The phone started ringing a lot after that,” she says. “I’d come home from school and there would be a list of messages about a mile long my mother had taken, from promoters, managers, and guys in bands.”

That fall, Hamzy attended the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. While her peers were going to keg parties and cramming for midterms, Hamzy was ditching class to meet Foghat in New Orleans or the Who in St. Louis. In 1974, Hamzy claims that Don Henley booked her a ticket on a commercial flight to see the Eagles play in Chattanooga. When the plane was delayed at a stopover in Knoxville, Henley picked her up in his private jet. “So I get on the plane and it’s just me and Henley and the pilot,” she says. “Henley and I are in the back, fooling around and making out. We’re up in the air and my eyes are half-closed. Then I feel another set of hands on me, and I realize it’s the pilot. So I raise up and say, “Who’s flying the plane?” And Henley says, ‘Don’t worry, it’s on auto pilot.’ So I just went with it.”

(It should be noted that during our time together, Hamzy tells several stories that seem too outrageous to be true. My efforts to verify her more fantastic accounts were generally unsuccessful, as most of the artists she mentioned either officially declined to comment (Def Leppard, Three Doors Down, Slipknot, Sammy Hagar) or simply didn’t return numerous phone calls and emails (Huey Lewis, Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, Don Henley, Eddie Money, Cheech & Chong, Cheap Trick, Lindsay Buckingham). It should also be noted that no artists officially denied Hamzy’s stories.)

It’s getting to be late afternoon, and we decide to head over to the University of Arkansas campus. Hamzy recently learned that her 1974 yearbook photo is on display in the alumni office and she wants to see it. Marching up to the elderly woman at the reception desk, she says in her boozy, booming drawl: “My name is Connie Hamzy. I went to school here a long time ago and I heard you had my picture up on the wall.”

The woman comes from behind the counter and leads Hamzy to a display of notable and controversial students from the ’70s. In addition to Hamzy—who is described as, “The Little Rock groupie immortalized in Grand Funk’s song American Band”—there are photos of the university’s “resident Communist” and the editor of the school’s first and only underground newspaper. Hamzy’s photo is stunning: Long dark hair cascading around shoulders, a hint of mischief and world-weariness in her gorgeous brown eyes. But someone incorrectly spelled her name “Hamsey” on the placard. When Hamzy catches the error, she screams at the receptionist, “How could you fucking misspell my name? Don’t you have me in your records somewhere? Couldn’t you look it up? This is so fucked!”

Hamzy has been drinking wine all day, and the smell of liquor is strong on her breath. The receptionist is clearly frightened. She hustles backward toward the phone on the desk, announcing in a shaky voice, “I’m calling my supervisor.” Hamzy continues her drunken tirade: “You cashed my parents’ tuition checks, but you can’t fucking spell our name right? What kinda shit is that?” The receptionist is dialing the phone. Connie looks over to me: “Come on. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

Hamzy left college before finishing her sociology degree. To support her groupie lifestyle, she’s worked part-time jobs that allow her the flexibility to travel and go to shows. She’s done alterations for J.C. Penney, handed out food stamps to the needy, and bred Persian cats. Nowadays, she works weekends at the Little Rock Zoo, renting out wagons and baby strollers for “extra beer and weed money,” and because her boss lets her off work for shows. “The gigs have always been the most important thing,” she says. Throughout much of the ’80s, Connie was a substitute teacher at an elementary school. “I would bring my students tour books and T-shirts and guitar picks from gigs. I even had them write letters to Kiss.”

Hamzy never married, but she was briefly engaged to a Little Rock man in the early 1980’s. “I told him up front that I wanted to keep going to shows and partying with rock stars, and he said okay, but ultimately he couldn’t handle it. He was too jealous.” They called off the engagement, and Hamzy continued her groupie exploits, enjoying liaisons with such Reagan-era luminaries as the Hooters, Loverboy, Huey Lewis & the News, and Ratt. Steven Pearcy of Ratt recalls, “We were playing Little Rock, somewhere around 1985, and we’d heard the famous stories about Connie. So me and Robin Crosby, our guitar player who passed away two years ago, were out on the bus with her after the show. She’s blowing Robin, and she looks up at me and says, ‘You want some of this too?’ She’s a force, man. You gotta have some big nuts to hang with Connie.”

“I loved the ’80s hair bands,” Hamzy says. “That was my favorite time in music. It was so glamorous—sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll. Mostly sex and drugs.” In a journal entry dated December 2, 1982, Hamzy details a playful incident in which rocker Billy Squier spanked her with a hairbrush. Squier issued the following response via email: “I liked Connie. She was quite different from what her reputation might lead you to believe: smart, well groomed, and kind of classy...and very friendly (as you’d expect). Of course, since ours was a strictly platonic relationship, she was always on her best behavior."

By her own admission, Hamzy’s had hundreds of backstage affairs, with artists diverse as Vanilla Ice, Peter Criss, Rick Allen of Def Leppard and the Oak Ridge Boys. Given her rich libidinous history, it seems appropriate to ask:

“Who has the biggest penis in rock and roll?”

“Huey Lewis,” she says. “For a white guy, he’s just got a huge cock. Huge.” She pauses, adding, “And Peter Frampton has the smallest. Poor guy—it’s a tiny little thing.”

Hamzy’s famous lovers weren’t confined to rock and roll. In 1984, Connie alleges she had a steamy make-out session with then-governor Bill Clinton in a laundry room at the Little Rock Hilton, a claim the former President has adamantly denied. Hamzy detailed the incident in a January 1992 Penthouse interview, but Clinton press secretary Mike Gauldin was tipped off about the story before the issue hit newsstands, calling the allegations “baseless and malicious lies.” The Clinton team moved to discredit Hamzy by getting signed statements of denial from the members of his entourage who were present that day in 1984. Hamzy pleaded her case on numerous tabloid talk shows, but the legitimate press refused to run her story. On January 25, 1997, Hamzy took a polygraph test arranged by the conservative political magazine The American Spectator. She passed. “I may be a slut,” she says, “but I’m no liar.”

In late 1992, Hamzy got a book deal from a small Buffalo publisher. She was paid an advance of approximately $20,000 and she used the money to purchase her house. The book was to be based on Connie’s detailed diaries, which she had kept since 1972. Coincidentally, the deal was brokered by Mike Pope, a friend of Bill Clinton’s, whose company MP Productions did sound and lights for much of the 1992 Presidential campaign. Hamzy never met with the publishers, and though she received a rough copy of the manuscript, which was nothing more than a transcription of her journal entries, she claims she’s never even seen a printed copy of the book.

“The Clinton White House was looking for a small company to front this thing,” says Hamzy. “They didn’t want this book to come out. I guess they thought if they gave me some money, they could keep me quiet and keep my story squelched.” Hamzy adds, “Good luck trying to find it, because it don’t exist.” The book, titled Rock Groupie: The Intimate Adventures of Sweet Connie from Little Rock, has a publishing date of February 1, 1995 and an official ISBN number, but is listed as “out of print” or “currently not available” from every major retailer and used book outlet I contacted.

It’s just after dusk, and I’m driving Hamzy home after her rampage at the university. On the way, she points out the various neighborhood bars from which she’s been banned for some combination of reckless inebriation and public nudity: the Press Box, the White Water Tavern, Pizza-D-Action, the Oyster Bar. At her house, we make a plan to see L.A. Guns and Slaughter the following evening at the Riverfront Amphitheater. I ask Hamzy if she wants me to purchase tickets in the morning. She shakes her head incredulously. “Puh-leaze,” she drawls, ‘Sweet Connie does not buy tickets.”

The next morning, Hamzy and I meet at Sticky Fingerz, a few doors down from the amphitheater. She’s at the bar with a tumbler of wine. She places an L.A. Guns all-access tour laminate around my neck, chugs the rest of her drink, and we head out the door into the blinding sun.

At the venue, Hamzy leads the way through an employee entrance. The guard at the gate knows her name. In fact, every worker at the amphitheater seems to know Hamzy, from parking attendants and beer vendors to the production crew and promoter. As we walk past the stage, a roadie looks up from the drum kit he’s assembling and waves. Another guy hanging lights in a cherry-picker yells, “Sweet Connie in da house!” She smiles, clearly in her element. I ask if she can explain her enduring popularity with musicians and roadies. “I’ve always been more direct than the other girls,” she says. “I don’t play the games. Most bands are only in town for a few hours. There isn’t time for dinner and a movie. There isn’t time for romance.” She taps the face of an imaginary wristwatch. “My attitude has always been, ‘Time’s a wastin’—let’s get it on!”

Most groupies will have sex with band members, but hooking up with roadies is considered distasteful and demeaning. Hamzy, however, is the ultimate egalitarian. She makes no distinction between a sweaty lighting rigger and the lead singer of a band, treating everyone with the same amount of sexual zeal: “I love roadies, from the truck drivers all the way up to production. Hell, truck drivers are the backbone of the business. Why not show them a little love?” Tim Walker, a swag seller from Texas, recalls: “I was out with Tanya Tucker in ’94, and Connie just walked up to me in [the] catering [area] and grabbed my balls. She said, ‘If I give you head, will you give me some T-shirts?’ So I said, ‘Let’s go.’ And she did it, right there in the back of my truck.”

Many of today’s younger musicians and roadies know about the legend of Sweet Connie and consider a blowjob from her the ultimate rock experience. Jack Knoebber, a sound engineer, says, “I was in Little Rock about three years ago with Tesla, and Connie was making the rounds backstage, asking if anyone wanted a blowjob. I thought about doing it, just so I could say my dick was in the same mouth as Keith Moon and John Bonham.”

Hamzy’s largesse didn’t stop backstage. She used to send nude photos of herself in Christmas cards to roadies she met across the country. “Then I got a threatening letter from some merch guy’s wife,” she says. “She said if I ever sent another naked picture to him, she’d jump a plane to Little Rock and stab me in the neck.”

In the ’90s, Hamzy used her celebrity status to run for public office. In 1995, she ran unsuccessfully for the Second Congressional District seat in central Arkansas as “the candidate of the working poor.” In 1998, she ran for mayor of Little Rock but her campaign derailed when she was cited for public intoxication. She received 4069 votes in a losing effort to incumbent mayor Jim Dailey.

“Was running for office a positive experience?” I ask.

“Yeah,” she says, “but I thought there’d be more cocktail parties.”

Hamzy and I head backstage to the loading dock where members of L.A. Guns and Slaughter are climbing out of an airport taxicab. The bands have flown in for the show, which means there won’t be any tour buses on the premises. “Dammit,” she says. “Where am I supposed to suck dick?”

Hamzy says she prefers performing oral sex to having intercourse at a show; “I can cover more ground sucking cock.”

While most of her sexual antics are quick and dirty liaisons accomplished with a methodical precision, there have been moments of genuine affection. This is apparent when she describes the time she spent with Jon Bonham, Waylon Jennings, and Keith Moon.

“Did you ever fall in love with any of your famous partners?” I ask.

“Believe it or not,” she says, “when I was 16, I fell hopelessly in love with the saxophone player from Rare Earth.” She unwraps a stick of gum and pops it into her mouth. “I cared about Waylon. He was a good man. And Bobby Lamm from [the band] Chicago. I always carried a torch for him. But he was into models and actresses. I guess in the long run he was out of my league.”

L.A. Guns take the stage for their sound check, blasting into their 1989 hit Rip and Tear. Hamzy sits on a road case at the edge of the stage, her feet not quite touching the ground. As the song gains momentum, building to a pristine metal crescendo, I notice an odd transformation taking place: Hamzy seems to be getting younger, the years melting away with each musical surge. Not just her attitude or demeanor, although they are part of the transformation, too—but physically. The lines in her face have smoothed and the sparkle in her eyes returns. The gigs have always been the most important thing. And 35 years later, they still are.

The concert is a bust. The gates have been open for nearly two hours, and there are only about 400 people in a venue that holds 2,000. The promoter drives by in a golf cart, barking commands into a walkie-talkie. When local opening band Bombay Black finishes its set, we decide to head home. On this night, Sweet, Sweet Connie will not be doing her act, perhaps an indication of a disappointing trend. “At Van Halen last Friday, I didn’t suck one dick,” she says. “Not a single one.”

Back at Hamzy’s house, she pours a glass of wine, drops Foreigner’s Agent Provocateur into the CD player, and fires up the bong.

“Do you have plans to continue your backstage antics into your fifties?” I ask.

“I hope so,” she says laughing. “As long as I don’t get arthritis in my jaw.” She takes a deep pull. “A lot of these young bands know who I am and they want to meet me.” She exhales, pointing to a Three Doors Down backstage pass. “These guys like me a lot, and I blow their bass player. Or I did before he got married. The guys in Saliva and Slipknot like me, too.” Foreigner’s “That was Yesterday” fills the air, and Connie cranks up the volume. “I love this song,” she says, mouthing the lyrics:

“Goodbye yesterday / Now it's over and done / Still I hope somewhere deep in your heart / Yesterday will live on.”

She takes one last hit, and gazes out the window into the darkness. Yesterday will most certainly live on.

But Seriously... Will You Marry Me?

2011-02-13T12:42:00.000-08:00

Marie Claire magazine, Feb. 2008

We’re a boring couple. That’s how we roll.

While our single friends are down at the bar, swilling happy hour martinis and picking over a free buffet of mystery meat tacos and suspicious grey cocktail weenies, we are making a beeline for home. By 8PM, when most of the urban pub-crawlers are just hitting their flirty mid-week buzz, we’re huddled on the couch under a blanket, eating macaroni & cheese and watching American Idol in our jammies. This has been our Tuesday night ritual since Clay Aiken made us ponder is he or isn’t he back in 2003. Our relationship is admittedly predictable, and over time, some of the initial romantic fireworks have faded into a comfortable, if unspectacular glow. This cooling effect is a byproduct of open-ended cohabitating, a trend rampant among unmarried couples today. For better or worse, we’ll never know the fizzy banter and romantic intrigue typified by the Doris Day-Rock Hudson movie romps of the 1950’s and 60’s. We’ve got our own version of pillow talk, and it’s invariably about whether the cable bill was paid or whose turn it is to scoop the cat box. So when I decided to pop the question after four years of living together, I was faced with the ultimate conundrum: How do I surprise her with a romantic marriage proposal in this modern era of pre-nuptial shacking up?

Whenever I imagined myself proposing marriage, it was always a grand romantic gesture, like something from a fairy tale or a Freddie Prinz Jr. movie. It had to be epic. And frankly, when the most exciting event in your life is Shark Week on the Discovery Channel, you know it’s time to shake things up. So after buying a diamond engagement ring and tucking it safely away, I started planning a storybook proposal that would make Cinderella blush. Here’s how it would go down: I’d rent a medieval suit of armor and a white horse, ride to my girlfriend’s office in downtown San Francisco, and ask for her hand in marriage. She would be the Guinevere to my Lancelot, the Demi to my Ashton. Unfortunately, there were a few hitches along the way. For one thing, I had never ridden a horse, and the thought of steering one of these giant beasts through midday traffic was giving me palpitations. Also, the renaissance fair was in town, so there’d been a run on medieval armor. I scoured every costume shop and community theater department in the area but came up empty. At one point, I found myself in a dungeon and fetish supply store, thumbing through racks of chainmail vests and crotchless rubber pants – not exactly the look I was going for. I eventually found a place with a badly weathered helmet and breastplate, but they were missing all the armor from the waist down. The sales clerk suggested I wrap tin foil around my legs to complete the ensemble, which I did with her assistance. When I saw myself in the mirror, with my rusty helmet and crinkly aluminum pants, any fairy tale notions of knighthood had vanished: I was an enormous baked potato, waiting to be gutted and topped with chives.

To be fair, we weren’t always boring. Before we lived together, we’d go boozing after work with our buddies, hit a few house parties on the weekend, and get freaky on every surface in our respective abodes. Bathroom floor? Check. Dining room table? Double check. But now, we’d rather be at Pottery Barn shopping for duvets than sucking down daiquiris in a crowded bar. And having sex on our kitchen’s unforgiving Formica countertop, once considered a kinky diversion, has become an exercise in cruelty that ends not with a bang, but with a fistful of Advil and a visit to the chiropractor. We’ll stick to the bedroom, thank you.

Though everything certainly changes when you transition from dating to living together, shacking up is not without its advantages. For one thing, she no longer has to do the 2AM walk-of-shame past my drunken roommate on the couch, and I don’t have to worry about my car getting stolen in her old neighborhood or inadvertently making a guest appearance on COPS as “stabbing victim #1.” By combining resources, we were able to afford a killer apartment in an upscale, low-crime community. With her designer furniture and my big screen TV, we were living like rock stars. Hell yeah we were.

Then reality set in.

I’m talking about household chores. When we were dating, if I knew she was coming over, I’d stash the dirty dishes in the oven, kick the skid-marked underpants into the closet, and spray Windex on the toilet seat to give it that “just scrubbed” sheen, though no scrubbing ever actually took place. Now that we’re living together, our Saturdays involve folding laundry, re-grouting bathtub tile, and frequent trips to IKEA. “Cohabitation is fundamentally about working out the details of life that are totally unromantic and unsexy,” says Dorian Solot, co-author of Unmarried to Each Other: The Essential Guide to Living Together as an Unmarried Couple. “Do the water glasses get stored face-up or face-down? Who deals with the broken vacuum cleaner? It doesn't leave you in a romantic frame of mind at the end of the day.” Determined to buck this trend, I began planning another lavish proposal.

In the spring of 2006, we were heading off to Mexico and Belize for an exotic, sun-drenched vacation. Near the end of the trip, we planned to visit the ancient Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza, famous for its towering pyramid. The proposal would go something like this: We’d hike to the top of the 1000 year-old temple, and there, in this mystical place high above the jungle canopy, I would present her with the ring and ask her to marry me. In the movies it would have come off brilliantly, culminating with a parade in our honor and a blessing from a village shaman. Reality, however, was not so accommodating. When we arrived at Chichen Itza, we found that the base of the grand pyramid had been roped off, and visitors were no longer allowed to climb the structure because of a recent fatality. The suggestion of death, I discovered, did not bode well for romance. My plan suffered a final, devastating blow when I contracted a nasty case of the turistas, which had me sprinting to the commode at regular intervals. I spent the last three days of the trip locked in a hotel bathroom, and we flew home sans engagement.

For many couples, it’s the not-so-pretty nuances of sharing a home and a life that keeps romance at bay. After a few months under the same roof, we began observing little things about each other that had gone unnoticed when we were dating. She discovered my borderline-creepy obsession with The Food Network’s Giada De Laurentiis and was dumbfounded at my inability to hit the toilet bowl when taking a late-night leak. In turn, I found that she leaves more hair in the bathtub than a yeti, and her bubbly laugh – the one I thought was so adorable – was beginning to sound like a harrowing witch’s cackle. We also began to develop an extreme and occasionally disturbing familiarity with each other’s personal habits, like the time she saw me eat pudding skin out of the kitchen garbage, or when I discovered she takes Metamucil for irregularity. These types of intimate revelations can shake your idealized perception of romance to the core, because Rock Hudson surely never ate from the trash, and constipation doesn’t exist in the chipper celluloid universe of Doris Day.

Over the next six months, I bumbled my way through a number of elaborate engagement scenarios, each one flaming-out more spectacularly than the previous. There was the skywriter, the hot air balloon ride, and the high school marching band, just to name a few. By this point, I was beginning to question everything. I wanted to marry this woman, but these over-the-top gestures felt contrived, as though I’d lifted them from an Audrey Hepburn movie script. It didn’t feel authentic; it didn’t feel like us. In fact, many of the timeworn rituals of courtship and marriage felt hopelessly outdated given our situation. Was she really expected to wear a white wedding dress when we’ve been living together and sharing a bed for five years? Was it necessary to ask her father’s permission to get married even though we’re already legal domestic partners? Should I be expecting a dowry as well? Will her family bring me two goats and rucksack of cornmeal? Even the terminology smacks of another era. When I hear the word fiancé, I think of William Holden sipping brandy and smoking a pipe in the study. And the term wife sounds like a leftover from the Donna Reed Show. That’s when it hit me: Certain aspects of romance and marriage are no longer relevant in this modern era, like the comedy of Joan Rivers or the 2nd Amendment. Maybe it’s time we stopped looking to the past for guidance and started forging a new path with our own customs and traditions.

It was time to take marriage back and make it our own.

So late last Christmas, after everyone had gone to bed, we reheated some Chinese take-out and settled in front of the tree to open the last of our gifts. “I think you forgot one,” I said nervously as I handed her the small ring box. I’d had plenty of time to work on my proposal, and I still fumbled through it like a jittery teenager. Her eyes welled with tears, and she replied, “Of course I’ll marry you. I would’ve said yes five years ago.” Alas, the perfect romantic moment didn’t take place over breakfast at Tiffany’s or along the rim of an active volcano, but rather, right here at home, in our pajamas, with our mangy cat and some leftover lo mein. And we wouldn’t want it any other way.

Dive Bars and Why We Love Them

2011-02-12T12:08:00.000-08:00

Modern Drunkard magazine, July 2006

Night falls on San Francisco’s bustling North Beach district, as tourists, flesh peddlers and hipsters troll the sidewalks beneath an ashen sky. I maneuver past a throng of fashion-conscious 20-somethings – all perfect hair and manicures - as they jockey for position in a velvet-roped line. I head south down a narrow meandering corridor, beyond the shimmering neon veneer of Broadway into the heart of Chinatown, past shuttered fish markets, junk shops and darkened alleyways. Steam rises from the empty streets, and for a moment I’ve stepped back in time to the untamed days of a bygone era. Two blocks down, tucked away from the arched rooftops and beneath a Chinese-style lantern, I arrive at Li Po’s, a quintessential dive bar. Inside, three old Asian men play mahjong in a red Naugahyde booth near the back of the room, eyes down-turned, as hand-rolled cigarettes dangle from cracking lips, quietly defiant in the face of a state-wide smoking ban. Yellowing wallpaper curls at the seams, and a dusty, tabletop Ms. Pacman game sits idle in a darkened corner, a hand-written “out of order” sign taped over its coin slot. Burned-out Christmas lights hang from the ceiling (it’s September), and a stream of easy listening classics pours from the jukebox, offering a healthy dose of Leo Sayer, Gordon Lightfoot, and Bread’s “Baby I’m-A Want You” in a seemingly endless loop. Between drink orders, the bartender watches John Wayne in The Sons of Katie Elder on a small, flickering black and white TV with tin-foiled rabbit ears.

And did I mention, the place is packed?

Groups of scruffy, jeans and t-shirt clad 30-somethings sip on aged whiskey while knocking back Budweisers, their swizzle stick legs jack-knifed over Naugahyde barstools. Coifed banking district refugees in designer suits mingle with crusty old-timers, swapping investment tips for nuggets of life wisdom worth their weight in gold.

This scene plays itself out nightly in gritty, no frills, busted pinball, sticky-floored bars across the country, from L.A. to Boston and all points in between. I began to notice this trend around 1995, as our national economy was growing at a record pace, fueled by a booming tech market and an unnerving sense of optimism. “When they file the IPO, we’ll all get rich” became the mantra of an overachieving generation. So why, then, is this renegade menagerie of highly paid young professionals rejecting slick and trendy nightspots in favor of neighborhood dives?

THE DIVE: GREAT EQUALIZER

“This is a world where everybody’s gotta be something – A dentist, fighter pilot, narc, janitor, preacher, all that. Sometimes I get tired thinking of all the things I don’t wanna do. All the things I don’t wanna be.”

-- Charles Bukowski, Barfly

Unlike the well-lit, glossy sheen of TV’s Cheers, where “everybody knows your name,” the dive allows its working-class patrons to bask in anonymity. In his book The View From Nowhere, Jim Atkinson refers to the dive as a Bar Bar, or “the only place left on earth where you can go and be nowhere.” Writer Ron Donoho discusses a stateside watering hole where the majority of late-night patrons are made up of weary restaurant staffers: “Tivoli offers a blue-collar respite from hours of fulfilling the wants and needs of hungry, impatient turistas.” Similarly, and proving that the dive is indeed a global institution, the Old Sailor Bar in Amsterdam’s red light district is a well-known haven for off-duty prostitutes looking to toss back a few Amstels after a long shift.

The dive bar offers a safe, comfortable environment for people to escape the pressures and drudgery of their working lives – a reminder that, according to Hunter S. Thompson, “the tyranny of the rat race is not yet final.” And whether you’re a drifter, plumber, lap-dancer or lawyer, the only thing you’ll be judged on in the dive is the quality of your jukebox selections and the ability to pay your tab. Jim Atkinson says the dive offers a kind of transcendent egalitarianism where, “Inhabitants don’t care what you look like, and certainly don’t care if you’ve screwed up just about everything you’ve ever laid your hands on.”

While this egalitarian attitude is certainly appealing to the down-and-out denizens who populate skid row watering holes, it is also a refreshing change of pace for affluent, educated professionals who are expected to compete and succeed in every aspect of their lives. In the dive, there are no expectations of its patrons, which is a blessing for workaholic go-getters and overachieving corporate climbers.

“Murio’s is the one place I don’t have to impress anybody. I love it here because nobody cares what you do for a living. And you don’t have to pretend to be someone you’re not.”

-- Eric Fischer, 36 year-old video engineer

In addition to being a place where you don’t have to “be something,” as Bukowski suggests, or “be someone you’re not” as the bar patron agrees, the dive itself is a kind of blank canvas, giving you the freedom to decide what you want it to mean. This is what semiotic linguists call an “empty signifier,” a word whose meaning is so open you can project anything onto it you wish. The dive, therefore, allows the patron to assume any number of guises: Hipster, historian, rebellious orthodontist or anonymous drunk.

“In taverns, men did not ordinarily sit according to their place in the local social hierarchy…. Here there was at least the possibility for greater assertion in posture and conversation.”

-- David Conroy, a liquor historian

In the earliest days of our nation, bars were the great equalizers, where peasants and noblemen could exchange ideas free from the traditional barriers of class or social standing. Even today, this is a hallmark of the dive, as J.R. Moehringer describes in The Tender Bar: “Standing in the middle of the barroom you could watch men and women from all strata of society educating and abusing one another. You could hear the poorest man in town discussing market volatility with the president of the New York stock exchange.”

THE DIVE: BIRTHPLACE OF THE COUNTERCULTURE?

In colonial American dives, says Conroy, men and women could voice anti-authoritarian ideas and behave in unconventional ways. These bars were the first public places where it was socially acceptable to question the authority of the government, the existing social structure, and the rigid moral code of the period. You might say it was the birthplace of the counterculture movement.

By the mid 1800’s, rowdy saloons, gambling houses and gin joints were called “dives” (or “dens,” “holes” and “dumps”) because they were often situated below street level in the basements of run-down houses in working class (read: poor) neighborhoods. Once patrons climbed those stairs down into the darkness, they could leave the conformist respectability of “above ground” values behind.

For the better part of two hundred years, dive bars have provided refuge to rebels, misfits and mavericks fleeing from the conformist ideals of the “respectable citizen.” Even today, the dive romanticizes a rebel culture of the “loner.” These rugged individualists were often heavy drinkers and troublemakers. From the Hell-raising saloon culture of the 1800’s, to the Beats of the 1950’s and the counterculture movement of the 60’s, the dive bar welcomed outlaws of all sorts, including drunks, addicts, and anyone looking to disassociate him/herself from traditional societal expectations. The dive offered sanctuary, both literally and figuratively: It was a place where people could hide from the wife, the boss, or the law while escaping the expectations of a polite society.

BOOZE & BOOKS: A LITERARY CONNECTION

“I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.”

– Hunter S. Thompson

It’s tough to pinpoint exactly how the dive bar became a beacon of authenticity in an overly conformist world, but a great deal is owed to the literary community who championed the boozy culture. During the 1920’s and 30’s, celebrated writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway were legendary for their drinking prowess, and their gin-soaked exploits translated to the printed page. Try to imagine one of Jay Gatsby’s fantastic East Egg soirees where the champagne does not flow, or a Paris in The Sun Also Rises that isn’t drenched in Vermouth. In the article "For Whom the Booze Tolls," Mario Pesta recalls meeting Hemingway at a Key West dive in the late 1950’s and challenging the venerable writer to a drinking duel. They agreed to chug rum by the pint until only one man remained standing, and Pesta thought he had a chance – he was younger, stronger, and he knew his way around a bottle. What he didn’t know is that Hemingway had a deep, unquenchable thirst for rum, dating back to his expat days in pre-revolutionary Cuba. “The old man beat me fair and square,” says Pesta. “I got into the ring with the champ and he floored me.” When the Beats and counterculturalists came along, writers like Kerouac, Burroughs and Bukowsi romanticized a working class, skid row version of the bottle culture and lived out the colorful stories they wrote. Bukowski mirrored his flop-house experiences in Tales of Ordinary Madness, while Hunter S. Thompson parlayed his days as a bowling writer in Puerto Pico into The Rum Diary.

What’s more, these writers actually believed that the alcohol made them better writers. In South of No North when Bukowski is asked if he always writes when he’s drunk, he replies, “Shit, yes. Sober, I’m just a shipping clerk, and not a very good one at that.”

The connection between drunkenness and literary output suggests the alcohol itself is the engine behind the creation of literature and great barroom tales. Unlike traditional inspiration, this liquid muse is perpetually on call, easily summoned by uttering the following incantation: “Jameson tall and neat. Leave the bottle.” As one contributor to Modern Drunkard magazine says, “A hangover may last one day, but a great drinking story lasts forever.”

THE NEW DIVERS: BOURGEOIS BOHEMIANS

“I know I have no right to complain. I know this neighborhood is gentrifying, and I am part of the problem, not part of the solution. I know that no matter where I move to get away from yuppies and hipsters, I will never be able to escape them, because I will be there."

-- superlefty.com

In this age of gentrification, where everything old is torn down and built anew, where entire neighborhoods are razed to make way for upscale co-opts and condo lofts, the dive bar remains a static piece of history in an ever-changing world. In his article In Praise of Seedy, Michael Serazio describes most modern structures as having, “No soul in them, no community feeling.” He adds, “It's very unsettling. You need architecture that your grandfather once had dinner at. It's important not to have everything torn down. It's important to the human spirit.” The dive bar, then, remains a vital connection to the past.

Before the hard-drinking, fast-living Beats hit the scene in the 1950’s, the Transcendentalists had been waging a quiet war against technology and the accumulation of wealth. Writers like Thoreau, Emerson and Alcott believed that machines and money prevented people from having the life experiences that really matter. Americans, they concluded, were able to calculate and measure, “but often did not take the time to sense and feel.” As technology loomed before us in the 1980’s and became part of our daily lives in the 1990’s (laptop computers, cell phones, Palm Pilots), it can be argued that these innovations further isolated humans from one another. People telecommuted to work, visited chat rooms and engaged in cyber sex – all one step removed from a legitimate human experience. “I work from home, so I don’t get the human interaction of working in an office,” says Chris Tokunaga, a freelance graphic designer. “I get my social fix at Murio’s, because I know everybody in the place and the bartender has my Jack and Coke waiting when he sees me come through the door.” For many, the dive, with its homey décor and community roots, offers an authentic, human experience difficult to find in today’s technology-dependent world.

“I made practice runs down to skid row to get ready for my future. I needed an isolated place to hide. Skid row was disgusting. But the life of the sane, average man was dull, worse than death.”

-- Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

We live in a culture of success, where health and beauty are prized above all else. Legions of white-collar professionals hit the gym before work, get Botox treatments at lunch, and participate in 12-step programs at night. The body and the mind must be fit, the bank account swollen, and the eyes wrinkle-free. The dive bar, on the other hand, eschews this self-help, fitness-fetishized culture that strives for physical and emotional perfection. Instead, the dive encourages eccentricity, acting out, and self-destructive indulgence, which makes sense when you consider its heroes (the crazy old man, the drunk, the belligerent brawling writer). In the dive, therapy is not an option, alcoholism is not a disease, and the only exercise one needs is a leisurely stroll to the commode.

In his book Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, political journalist David Brooks describes the new establishment as, “highly educated people who’ve got one foot in the bohemian world of creativity and another foot in the bourgeois realm of ambition and worldly success.” These bourgeois bohemians or Bobos, according to Brooks, have successfully combined the countercultural sixties and the achieving 80’s into one social ethos. Even Wall Street tapped into this in the mid-1990’s, when The Gap used Jack Kerouac in advertisements (“Kerouac wore khakis”), and Nike co-opted counterculture heroes William S. Burroughs and Dennis Hopper. But this has created something of a dilemma for the Bobo. Though they admire art and intellectual pursuits, they find themselves living in a bizarro world where creativity and commerce meet. By nature, they are anti-establishmentarian, yet they have become the establishment.

How, then, do Bourgeois Bohemians demonstrate to themselves that while climbing the social ladder they have not become all the things they hold in contempt? How do they convince the world they haven’t completely sold out their ideals? They reconnect with the bohemian half of their Bobo selves. They call on the free spirits of Bukowksi and Burroughs for inspiration. They admonish the culture of newness, surrounding themselves with rootsy artifacts (see the roughly hewn Tibetan rug woven from obscure mountain grasses), distressed furniture and vintage clothing. “We prize old things whose virtues have been rendered timeless by their obsolescence,” says Brooks, adding, “In our efforts to climb upwards, we have left something important behind.” Something they can certainly find in a dive.

The fascination with dive bars has been around for at least ten years, and their popularity doesn’t appear to be fading. And while there are a number of plausible theories to explain the phenomenon ranging from Bar Bars to Bobos, they all work their way back to the same conclusion: authenticity. People, especially those under the age of 40, are looking for an authentic experience in an over-marketed, over-stimulated, over-slick, and gentrified world. They yearn for something alive and vital that exists only in the darkened corners of our collective memory, whose ghosts can be found perched on Naugahyde barstools, throwing back shots of nostalgia with a PBR chaser.

The Legend of a Man Called Hoot

2011-02-11T12:49:00.000-08:00

HARP magazine, February 2007

There aren’t many famous bus drivers in the world, and even if you include cartoon characters, you can probably count them on one hand: Otto Mann from The Simpsons, Ralph Kramden on The Honeymooners, and James F. Blake, who ordered Rosa Parks off the Alabama bus in 1955 for not surrendering her seat to a white man. And then of course, there is Hoot Borden, the greatest rock and roll bus driver of all time. On this unseasonably warm November afternoon, Hoot is in the front lounge of his spotless 1998 Prevost coach, dispensing tasty nuggets of country wisdom and spinning colorful yarns from a lifetime on the road. He leans back, legs outstretched in front of him, and says in his trademark Southern drawl, “You know, it ain’t fair the way Britney gets hammered in the press. You reporters always trying to make a story where there ain’t one.” He coughs a bit of phlegm into a napkin and adds, “People forget she’s just a kid from Louisiana. She’s country folk. In the South, everyone drives around with their baby on their lap. She’s just doing what her momma taught her.” For the record, Hoot Borden is 70 years old, and while it may seem odd for a crusty septuagenarian to pontificate on the media’s treatment of Britney Spears, it’s even more shocking when he comes out swinging in support of the crotch-bearing pop star. But when you get to know Hoot, and you understand his loyalty to the artists he’s hauled over the years, his reaction makes perfect sense: He’s protecting Britney, just like any grandfather would. Then he leans forward, almost conspiratorially, and says in a low throaty voice, “I’ll tell you what, though. I didn’t like her husband one bit.” When I press him for a reason – and there are many reasons to dislike Kevin Federline – Hoot replies candidly, “Because of the way he wore his hat. That crooked cap pissed me off.” And then, as if speaking directly to K-Fed, Hoot growls, “You little son of a bitch. I’ll show you how to wear a damn hat.”

To call Hoot Borden a bus driver is something of an understatement, like calling Muhammad Ali a fighter or Tiger Woods a golfer. So what do you call a man who’s been part of the American music landscape since 1950, whose very name is the stuff of myths and legends? Singer Anna Nalick calls him “the rock star road daddy,” but I prefer to think of him as the Godfather. “Old Hooter’s driven more miles backing out of his driveway than most people do in a lifetime,” says Timmer Ground of Music City Coach, Borden’s longtime employer. “He’s an old road dog, and the last of a dying breed.” Over the last half century – and he’s never missed a week of work – Hoot has witnessed the birth of rock and roll, and the rise of the music touring industry. His contemporaries, many of whom he considers personal friends, include such heavyweights as Johnny Cash, Ernest Tubb, Bill Monroe and Willie Nelson – all members of the Country Music Hall of Fame, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, or both. And though he spent his early days on the country circuit, he’s hauled a wide range of artists from Megadeth and Cher to Patti LaBelle and Poison. In the last year alone, he’s driven for Bob Dylan, Rob Thomas, and Jack White and the Raconteurs. But Hoot Borden is more than a chauffeur who shuttles cranky superstars from one gig to another: he’s a symbol of a forgotten era, when a business deal was sealed with a handshake, people took pride in their work, and a man’s word was more important than his net worth. When I catch up with Hoot at the Wells Fargo Center for the Arts in Santa Rosa, California, he’s driving a crew bus for legendary singer Anne Murray. He greets me with a warm smile and a handshake and invites me on board. When we spoke on the phone a few days earlier, I’d offered to meet him at his hotel, since most drivers sleep in the afternoon so they can drive at night. “I’m more comfortable on the bus, if you don’t mind,” said Hoot. “This is my home. This is where I belong.”

Hoot Borden was born into an Oklahoma farming family, but his passion was always music. In 1950 at the age of 14, he dropped out of school and left the family farm to become a professional drummer. “I was pretty good, too,” says Hoot. “In those days, a recording session paid $42.30 – And that was good money back then.” Hoot’s knowledge of heavy machinery from his farming days ensured that he got plenty of work – he could play drums for a honky tonk band and keep the tour bus running. “Most musicians was so poor, they bought their buses off the scrap heap. So you weren’t trying to make it to the end of a tour, you was just trying to make it to the next town.” He eventually landed on the Nevada Circuit, playing for groups like Tex Williams & His Western Caravan, The Starlighters, and Orville Couch, who had five number one hits for Capitol Records. But his life forever changed when he quit drumming in 1959 to take a full-time job driving country music pioneer Ernest Tubb and his band The Texas Troubadours. “I played my very last show in Duncan, Arizona at a cotton gin that had been turned into a dance hall. And I been driving these buses ever since.” Hoot would spend the next 24 years hauling Ernest Tubb and his band, playing every honky tonk beer joint from Amarillo to Battle Mountain. This is the point in the story when Hoot’s adventures begin to sound like something out of Forrest Gump. His travels would introduce him to all the Nashville legends, including an unknown singer named Elvis Presley, who couldn’t get booked on the Grand Ole Opry until Ernest Tubb gave him a spot in his show. “I remember the first time I saw Elvis perform,” recalls Hoot. “I thought, that long-haired son-of-a-bitch. And then I saw how the crowd reacted to him. And I knew he was gonna be something special.” Hoot slides his calloused hands into the pockets of his crisp denim jeans, and adds, “Elvis was an enormous gentleman, right up until the day he died. My son and Lisa Marie are great friends – He’s even got a key to Graceland.” Over the years, Hoot would find himself in the company of four U.S. Presidents, with a standing invitation to Lyndon Johnson’s family barbecues at the 37th President’s Texas ranch. In perhaps his most Gump-like episode, Hoot crossed paths with controversial Governor George Wallace, who had fought against segregation at the University of Alabama in 1963. “We didn’t really get into the whole race issue,” says Hoot, “But in the deep dark of night, I do remember the Governor saying, ‘I didn’t really want to keep those people out of the schools. It was the people who put me in office who wanted it.’” Coincidentally, this is the same night in history when the terms “pass the buck” and “cover your ass” entered into the American lexicon. Hoot was also a first-hand witness to many of the technological innovations that would become standard in the music industry today. “I watched Shot Jackson and Buddy Emmons build the first Sho-Bud steel guitar in an auditorium in Witchita, Kansas,” says Hoot. “Heck, I remember when Leo Fender built the first echo chamber. It was a little box that sat up on top of your amp, and you’d hit it and it would go waa waa waa.”

Ernest Tubb’s band, The Texas Troubadours, spawned some of the most influential country musicians of the modern era, including Cal Smith, Billy Byrd, Tommy “Butterball” Paige, and a skinny young man with an awkward singing voice named Hugh Nelson, better known to his millions of fans as Willie. “In the early days, Hugh (Willie) would fill in with the Troubadours and play bass guitar. He didn’t look nuthin’ like the Willie Nelson everybody knows today – He looked like a banker. He wore a snappy suit with a skinny tie, and he had a buzz cut.” Hoot chuckles to himself, and continues, “Willie had a tough time in the beginning. He was writing all these brilliant songs – he wrote Crazy for Patsy Cline – but the world wasn’t ready for him as a performer. Back in ‘61, Willie was so broke he sold the song Hello Walls to Faron Young for $50 just so he could eat.” Hoot runs a hand through his whitish, close-cropped hair, adding, “He didn’t become the Willie Nelson everybody knows until he quit Nashville and moved to Austin, sometime around 1970. That’s when the outlaw movement was in its raw beginnings, with the long hair and the rebellion. He and Waylon (Jennings) kickstarted that whole scene. And the rest is history.”

Hoot’s personal life is just as colorful as his professional life, maybe even more so. Here’s a list of random Hooter facts: He’s been married five times, and he has three grown children. His sons are both bus drivers – one of them hauls Larry the Cable Guy, and the other pals around with Lisa Marie Presley and has a key to Graceland. His daughter is on a professional roller derby team out of Houston called the Burlesque Brawlers, and she skates under the name Ashley Juggs. The number on her uniform is 38D. Hoot swears he’s never had a drink of liquor in his life, and he lives on a street with a funny name (Tater Peeler Road). He also spent many years as a deputy for the Sumner County Sheriff’s Department in Hendersonville, Tennessee. He was a real officer with a uniform and a license to carry a gun, which he still does. And in between tours, he’d come home and help rustle up bad guys in the greater Nashville area. Sheriff Hoot. I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.

One of Anne Murray’s sound engineers climbs onto the bus and tells Hoot that dinner is ready in the backstage catering room. Hoot nods, and asks me if I’ll join them for dinner. Never one to turn down a free meal, I accept his offer and follow him into the building. As we move through the buffet line, various band and crew members greet Hoot with the warmth and respect generally reserved for the patriarch of a loving family. Everyone calls him Pops or Granddaddy Hoot, and he seems to relish every moment. They save him a seat at the head of the table, and then gather around like children pining for a bedtime story. Hoot sops a piece of white bread in some gravy on his plate, and launches into the following tale:

“When I was with Ernest Tubb back in the 1960’s, we’d always play this old beer joint in Austin, Texas called the Wagon Wheel. They had the best chicken-fried steak anywhere. And every time we’d play there, this little Mexican kid would come banging on the bus door. So we’d let him on, and Billie Byrd would sit there teaching him chords on the guitar. That kid didn’t know what notes he was playing, but he could play the Hell out of that thing. Yes sir, that little kid could play guitar. His name was Stevie Ray Vaughan.”

Hoot also witnessed the evolving cultural landscape through the turbulent 1960’s and swinging 1970’s, and didn’t always embrace the changes. “I was a typical, hard-headed Tennessee boy, and I resented the free-spirited nature of the hippie scene – the Haight Ashbury and the Grateful Dead and all that,” says Hoot. “In Nashville, Wanda Jackson couldn’t go on the Grand Ole Opry until she put a shawl over her shoulders because she had a strapless dress on. But out there in San Francisco, those hippies could walk around completely nekkid, smokin’ their dope and doing whatever they wanted. Talk about two different worlds.”

After driving Ernest Tubb and the Troubadours on the honky tonk circuit for 24 years, Hoot’s own world was about to turn upside down. On September 6th, 1984, Ernest Tubb died in a Nashville hospital at the age of 70, and Hoot Borden was without a job for the first time in a quarter century. With a wife and kids to support and the country music scene struggling (it would be another five years before artists like Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood reinvigorate the genre), Hoot made the big leap to rock and roll. His first tour was with Bruce Hornsby and the Range, followed by stints with Foreigner, Journey and Jefferson Starship. The differences between the Nashville honky tonk circuit and the world of 80’s arena rock were staggering. “In country music, everybody had one tour bus, and they stowed the music gear in the bays underneath. There were no trucks in those days,” says Hoot. “But on a rock tour, there might be thirty or forty buses and trucks. It’s like the damn carnival comin’ to town.” He laughs and says, “I didn’t even know they had concerts in arenas. I thought they was just for basketball and the circus.” But it wasn’t just the size of the venues that was different – it was the entire rock and roll touring culture. “With Ernest Tubb, we didn’t have tour managers or runners or even road crew,” says Hoot. “We’d set up our own instruments and I’d sell the t-shirts. The band would do the show, and then we’d load the bus, swallow a handful of pills and drive 800 miles to the next town. It was like that every night.” I ask Hoot about the technical differences between the over-the-top stadium concerts of the 80’s and the old beer joint shows held in dusty saloons. “There were no pyrotechnics on the honky tonk circuit,” says Hoot. “If you wanted fancy lights, we’d run an extension cord from the bus to the stage and plug in a lamp. That was our light show.”

It didn’t take long for Hoot to adapt to the world of rock and roll touring, and he hauled some of the biggest names of the 1980’s, including Poison, Billy Joel, and Michael Jackson. “I drove Michael’s family on the Victory tour, all his aunts and uncles,” says Hoot. “Michael and his brothers, the Jackson 5, those boys could really sing. They’d stay up all night working on their dance steps. Nice boys, all of them. I drove on several Janet Jackson tours too. That’s one talented family.” Hoot adds, “Most singers nowadays are making millions of dollars and they got no talent at all. If you’re gonna sit there and tell me Tim McGraw can sing, you’re full of shit. Tim McGraw can’t carry a tune with a bucket.”

I arrange to meet with Hoot the next morning at his hotel in a quiet suburb of San Jose in Northern California. It’s a day off from the Anne Murray tour, and when I arrive, he’s out in the parking lot changing the oil in his bus. He waves me over, yelling, “Come here, I want to show you something.” I follow him around to the rear of the coach where he lifts an enormous panel, revealing a shiny and spotless engine. I run my finger along the top of the big diesel motor and not surprisingly it is completely clean, without a trace of grease or grime. “She’s a beauty, huh?” says Hoot with a wide grin. Then he adds the following kicker: “Not bad for having half a million miles on her.” Not bad indeed, and perhaps a little depressing since the engine is cleaner than my kitchen. This attention to detail, however, is what makes Hoot a great driver and has contributed to his longevity in the business. “He’s in love with his equipment, and he’s in love with his job,” says Joe Jackson, tour manager for Anne Murray and Bryan Adams. “And he never places himself first. It’s always about the bus or the artist or the crew. Everybody loves old Hooter.”

Perhaps the greatest testament to Hoot’s staying power in the music industry is his relationship with the people he hauls, whether it’s a temperamental pop star or a grungy road crew. Regardless of their position, social status, reputation, or background, Hoot treats his passengers with dignity and respect. In 1988, Hoot drove the much-maligned and oft-troubled Bobby Brown at the height of the bad boy singer’s success. “I have nothing bad to say about Bobby Brown. I hauled him and six bodyguards, and we had a fine a bus. We cooked food every night, and had a good old time,” says Hoot. “You can take a guy with all kinds of troubles, and you can teach him your way of life and he’ll think the world of you.” In one of his most fantastic stories, Hoot recalls the night of a St. Louis concert when a rival of Brown’s fired a rocket launcher at the bus, exploding part of the rear panel. “It was a real rocket, like the ones they’re using Afghanistan, and it blew up the back of my bus. One of the crew guys wrapped the smoldering shell in a blanket and took it home for a souvenir.”

Hoot has also worked with difficult road crews, and he uses his unique brand of country psychology to manage unwieldy situations. The ZZ Top road crew was legendary for their foul behavior and bus drivers kept quitting in the middle of their tours. One fed-up driver unloaded the crew’s belongings at a hotel in the middle of the night and left them stranded. Another driver dropped their personal effects at a 76 truck stop and went home. So the band’s management called Hoot for the impossible job. “Now these crew guys had been with ZZ Top since day one,” says Hoot. “Their production manager was being sued by the city of Houston because his front lawn was infested with rats. That’s the kind of degenerates we were dealing with. These guys were animals. They could totally destroy a bus, with puke and piss and God knows what.” Hoot knew he had to take control of the situation from the outset, so he put an old Roy Rogers movie on the TV, and got out the loaded pistol Ernest Tubb had given him. “And I was sittin’ right here when they first got on the bus, cleaning this gun so they could all see it. One of the guys asked me what we were doing, and I said we’re watching Roy Rogers and cleaning this fucking gun in case I need to use it. And I never had a single problem with them after that.” Hoot developed a great relationship with the ZZ Top crew, dubbing them The Filthy McNasty Boys, a name they still proudly use today. “I got the swag guy to make up some ball caps and t-shirts, and I had giant letters put on the side of the bus that said Hooter and the Filthy McNasty Boys,” he says. “After two weeks, the crew started cleaning their own bus, and they’d make you take your shoes off before you came on board. Because it was their bus.”

These days when he tours, Hoot prefers to drive the road crew instead of the artist. Perhaps it’s because he’s tired of hauling cranky divas, but more likely it’s because he enjoys the blue-collar sensibility of most roadies. “I love my little crew guys,” says Hoot. “They always say, Pop, you’ve got to meet my lady. She’s the most perfect thing. So his lady comes out, and she’s about six foot tall, weighs about 88 pounds. Got on sandals, with about 15 pounds of steel in her tongue and her nose. Tattoos all down her body. But that’s their lady. That’s their pride and joy, so you’ve got to treat them with respect. And that’s really the secret to this business: Keep a good bus, don’t have a wreck, and treat people with respect.”

Hoot Borden has touched many people’s lives over his fifty some-odd years in the music business, and their affection for him becomes tangible when you walk through the long corridor of his bus to the back lounge. The walls are lined with custom-made plaques given to him by the artists and crews he’s hauled over the years, including Megadeth, Billy Joel, and yes, ZZ Top’s Filthy McNasty Boys. He puts his arm on my shoulder and walks me through each one, reading me the personal inscriptions and explaining the stories behind the stories. “And this one’s from the Elton John crew – they called me the Warden, and they all were assigned prison numbers. Nice boys, yes they were.” And that’s when it hits me: This isn’t just a tour bus. This is a man’s home, and I’m standing in his living room. The people represented on these walls are not merely a byproduct of Hoot’s profession, they are his children and his grandchildren, a sprawling lineage from a lifetime of labor and love. Singer-songwriter Anna Nalick, who rode with Hoot last summer says, “He’s very protective of me. And every night before I go onstage, he always says, I love you, Baby Girl. Now go out there and sing your tits off! Only Hoot could get away with that because that's his way, and I love him for it.” I thank Hoot for his time, and climb off his bus. And when this magazine hits newsstands, I’m going to frame the cover and have it mounted on his wall with all the other lives he’s touched. Now go out there Hooter and drive your tits off.

Inside the World of a Rock Roadie

2011-02-10T11:22:00.000-08:00

Spin magazine, 2004

On a cool morning in the spring of 2002, I stepped off a bus and hobbled into the bustling lobby of Cleveland’s Ritz Carlton Hotel. As I waded through a sea of Armani-clad business travelers sipping lattes and perusing Wall Street Journals, disapproving eyes knifed into me from all directions—a reminder that, by all appearances, I did not belong in their well-pressed, nine-to-five world. I was wearing my standard work uniform: faded Slayer T-shirt, stained knee-length shorts, and a tattered baseball cap that barely disguised my greasy, matted hair. I joined the registration line behind a sophisticated woman in a gray pantsuit who was clutching an Italian leather briefcase between her manicured fingers. She checked her watch; then stole a glance at my lumbering, disheveled figure. Our eyes met for a second, and she quickly looked away. She sniffed loudly several times, and I saw the corners of her mouth twist into a disgusted grimace. I hadn’t showered in three days, and although I had tried to conceal my stench with a hefty dose of Speedstick, this was a battle I was clearly losing.

I stepped up to the counter, and the middle-aged clerk greeted me with a hesitant, “Can I help you, sir.” His tone was the kind generally reserved for placating the severely retarded or completely insane. I told him that I had a reservation, and he just looked at me, one eyebrow forming a skeptical arch. Then I uttered the five most surreal words ever to escape my lips.

“I’m with the Doobie Brothers,” I said quietly. “I’m with the Doobie Brothers.”

My strange journey as a rock’n’roll roadie began in the summer of 1988, a time when Ronald Reagan was President, cel phones were the size of toaster ovens, and Milli Vanilli dominated the Billboard charts. Over the next 15 years I would drift in and out of the roadie world, doing brief stints in 1994, 1998, and most recently in the fall of 2001, when I left behind the predictable comforts of the corporate world in search of a writing career. My transition from Web coding desk jockey to full-fledged “road dog” was remarkably smooth, considering I hardly fit the roadie profile: I had two Liberal Arts degrees from a prestigious West Coast university. I bathed regularly. I wore khaki pants. And the only debauchery in my life involved freeze-framing the naked Katie Holmes scene on The Gift DVD. Now, two years later, I’m humping band gear with guys named Opie, Steamer, and Taliban Dan.

I’d just flown home to Los Angeles after three months with the Doobies and was sorting through an enormous pile of unopened mail, when I noticed three things: All the plants in my apartment were dead; my cat no longer recognized me; and my live-in girlfriend—a borderline schizophrenic named Taffy—was nowhere to be found. There was, however, a note scrawled on the bathroom mirror, in her favorite shade of lipstick, that simply read, “Fuck this I’m gone.” I hadn’t even unpacked my bags when I got the call offering me a job on the Elvis Costello “When I Was Cruel” Tour.

“Great,” I heard myself say, “I’ll be there on Thursday.”

When I arrived in Seattle for the first show on the Costello tour, the production manager, a gargantuan New Yorker called Wookie, handed me an all-access laminate, a copy of the tour itinerary, and a key to the bus. He introduced me to the rest of the crew—Itchy, Squinty, Flavor Flav Dave, and the others—then rattled off the crew bus rules in a monotonous drone, much like a flight attendant giving an in-flight safety presentation. “No smoking and no drugs in the front lounge,” he said. "But anything goes in the back. You can smoke it, snort it, shoot it, or fuck it -- I don't give a shit." It was standard first-day rhetoric. But then he added, “But never ever fall asleep in the back lounge. You got me?” I wasn’t sure what he meant, so I just nodded and smiled.

The first day of a rock tour is a lot like the first day of school. The crew, generally ten to 12 guys, gathers on the bus, swapping handshakes, quietly scrutinizing each other, and trying to discern three things: Who is the lazy guy, who is the asshole (anyone who refers to himself as a “technician” is immediately suspect), and who can get the drugs. Some of the guys may know each other from previous gigs (“Hey man, weren’t you the LD on Slipknot?”), but generally each new tour is a gathering of strangers. I use the same tactic I used as a child when moving to a new neighborhood: I try to impress them with my toys. As I’ve gotten older, my Hungry Hippo, Slip N’ Slide, and life-size Chewbacca punching bag have given way to a dizzying collection of DVDs, X-Box games, and German dungeon porn.

There is a definite and immutable hierarchy among roadies, which goes like this: production manager, front-of-house mixer, monitor tech, instrument techs, lighting director, rigger, bus and truck drivers, and at the very bottom, me. I’m the tour merchandiser, in charge of band swag: T-shirts, sweatshirts, ball caps, and other overpriced souvenirs. The merchandiser goes by many nicknames, including “Swaggy,” “The Swag Man,” “Cotton Boy,” and “Merch Guy. On a typical day, while the other roadies are pushing cases, flying speakers, laying cable, and rigging lights—all potentially dangerous activities—I am busy folding T-shirts and arranging the sizes into neat little piles. It’s like working at the Gap, with the added incentive of illegal narcotics and genital herpes.

Although rock merchandising does not involve the physical risks associated with other crew jobs, it is not without challenges. One of the more frustrating aspects is trudging the bureaucratic quagmire of International Customs—specifically, bringing merchandise from the United States into Canada to sell at Canadian concert dates. In 1998, I landed a job on the Celine Dion tour at the peak of her Titanic success. Our most popular souvenir was a small stuffed frog wearing a tiny Celine T-shirt. Celine Dion loves frogs. People send her toy frogs from all over the world, and before each concert she has them playfully arranged in her dressing room. Fortunately, kids love them too, and the frogs were a huge seller. As a result, I found myself declaring a payload of 9,000 toy frogs to a humorless Canadian customs official, who informed me that the frogs themselves could enter Canada, but the tiny T-shirts they were wearing could not—something about trade sanctions with the country that manufactured them. So there, at the Canadian border, in the middle of a blinding, testicle-retracting snowstorm, I carefully undressed 9,000 frogs.

Upon arriving at the arena in Ottawa, one of Celine’s assistants strode up to me, a deadly serious expression on her face. She was holding a small shirtless frog.

“These frogs are naked!” she said tersely. “What happened to their shirts?”

I told her about the customs incident.

She studied the toy for a moment, examining it from all angles, then looked me in the eye: “Maybe you can find them some tiny pants. Because we can’t sell naked frogs. Celine won’t have it.”

Trying to find a decent margarita in Ottawa is difficult. Trying to find 9,000 pairs of tiny frog pants, on a snowy Sunday evening, is enough to burst a vein in your head.

On a typical rock tour, there are four to six shows a week. When a roadie does get a day off, it’s rarely in a desirable city like New York or Miami. Instead, a break usually comes in a place like Rapid City, South Dakota, or Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

Each production crew has its own day-off ritual. The Cowboy Junkies crew, for example, liked to do drugs and visit the zoo. We watched the penguins on acid in San Francisco, the monkeys on Valium in the Bronx, and the llamas in Denver after smoking something called a “Boulder Salad”—a colorful blend of Northern California sensimilla, Indian hashish, and a mild southwestern peyote. They Might Be Giants’ crew liked to get stoned and race go-carts at Malibu Grand Prix parks across the country. This was fun until, after smoking some wicked Thai stick, I drove my car off the track, across a miniature golf course, and nearly plowed into a children’s birthday party.

At the halfway point of the Elvis Costello tour, we had a much-deserved day off in Knoxville, which is located in the Smoky Mountains in central Tennessee. It’s a place where, just outside the city limits, hillbillies roam free like jackals on the Serengeti. Squinty, our wild-eyed lighting director, invited me on an expedition to purchase some authentic homemade moonshine. We rented a car and drove into the backwoods, past several abandoned fireworks stands and a burned-out Shoney’s, to a small clearing with a dilapidated house at the center. A friendly man in cut-off overalls greeted us, then told his wife Luanne to “fetch us the hooch.” Luanne returned with a large ceramic jug, for which we paid $35.

Two nights later, the crew broke out the moonshine and had a party on the bus. The liquor burned my throat, and at first I wondered if the hillbillies hadn’t sold us low-octane gasoline or industrial strength paint thinner. The pain subsided after six or seven shots, and that’s when things got foggy. I woke up the next morning in the back lounge—apparently after passing out—with my shirt caked in what I hoped was my own vomit. As I staggered out to the front lounge, the entire crew pointed and laughed. Turning to look in the mirror, I saw the words “I CHOOSE COCK” written on my forehead in black permanent marker. I was mortified, and for a moment I considered catching the next plane home. Then, to my surprise, their laughter turned into applause, congratulatory hoots and high-fives. My reckless inebriation and projectile vomiting had somehow earned the crew’s respect, and this juvenile prank was their way of saying, “Welcome to the club.” That was the moment I became one of them.

Most roadies are on tour 300 days a year, leapfrogging from the end of one tour to the beginning of another. At times, the extreme juxtaposition of tours is so bizarre that it requires mass quantities of mind-altering substances to maintain a grip on one’s sanity. Last summer, I left the easy-listening Dan Fogelberg tour and went directly to the grotesque circus of GWAR, which is the kind of head-trip that can only be duplicated by mainlining Crystal Meth and Liquid Drano directly into your cerebellum.

My mother was a big Dan Fogelberg fan in the 1970’s. In fact, Fogelberg’s core audience is, essentially, my mother: 55-year-old women in Ann Taylor slacks, sipping glasses of merlot. His crew had a no-smoking and no-drug policy on the bus, which was a refreshing change of pace. Instead of getting high and watching Spongebob Squarepants, we would watch Antiques Roadshow and swap amusing stories about our cats. On a particularly raucous evening, we might bust open a case of Zima and play Boggle.

The day the Fogelberg tour ended, I was on a plane to join GWAR for a handful of shows. GWAR, for the uninitiated, is a band that dresses in enormous rubber monster costumes and performs theatrical decapitations, mutilations, and bloodlettings onstage. Their songs include “Sex Cow,” “Slaughterama,” and “America Must Be Destroyed.” For me, the only way to cope with the surreal disparity of these bands was to cloud my mind with psychedelic drugs. With a head full of mescaline and a belly full of ‘ludes, the enormous gap between Fogelberg and GWAR narrows considerably.

To the roadie, pot-smoking exists in the pantheon of daily rituals, and bong hits have taken their place alongside morning coffee, checking e-mail, and flossing. The 1994 They Might Be Giants’ crew were cannabis connoisseurs. On one particular morning, Dingo, the Giants’ grizzled Australian drum tech, brewed a pot of coffee using stagnant bongwater just to see if it would get us high. It didn’t. As we discovered, the toxic combination of bongwater and espresso beans rapidly induces violent diarrhea. The beverage, appropriately dubbed “crappucino,” earned a place on the long list of failed roadie drug experiments, narrowly edging out the Percodan smoothie top honors.

Another fundamental aspect of the roadie experience is groupies. People invariably want to know: What are groupies like? Will they really do anything to get backstage? Groupies do exist, but sadly, most do not look like Kate Hudson in Almost Famous. And the ones who do don’t go for roadies. A roadie is more likely to be propositioned by a “ramp rat”: A leathery woman who will trade sexual favors for a backstage pass. Aside from the momentary thrill associated with a blowjob behind a garbage dumpster, the result of this brief union usually involves a degree of shame and a stubborn case of pubic mites.

My first experience with a groupie was back in 1988, on the “Club MTV Tour featuring Jodi Whatley, Tone-Loc, Paula Abdul, and Milli Vanilli. One night, at a show in Battle Creek, Michigan, I was backstage in catering where I met a woman named Bonnie. She was around 35, had crimped hair, and wore deliberately torn acid-wash jeans and white stiletto pumps. She was a local legend and a permanent backstage fixture; the guys on the crew referred to her as “The Battle Creek Freak.” She sauntered up to my table, and looked me up and down. She leaned in close enough that I could smell the menthol lights on her fetid breath, and whispered, “Do you want to go out to my van?” I was barely 20, with all the worldliness of a nine-year old girl, so I said, “Sure.”

She led me outside to a metallic green van with a giant screaming eagle painted on the side. She swung open the door, and I saw a mattress in the back, covered with a single dirty sheet. We climbed inside and she pulled the door closed. There was no small talk—she immediately kissed me, then removed her shirt and turned around so I could unhook her bra. I quickly noticed two things: A jagged eight inch scar behind one of her kidneys – probably the remnants of a drunken knife fight - and a large grinning tattoo of Burt Reynolds just above her right shoulder blade. When she twisted her torso, the loose skin around Burt’s eye folded in such a way that he appeared to be winking. The “Battle Creek Freak” proceeded to violate me in ways that are still illegal in several southeastern states. Although I eventually lost consciousness, I do recall the sting of a Malaysian flogging cane and the hum of a large vibrating egg. When I came to, in the back of a green van during my twentieth summer, I was no longer a boy. I was a man.

The very nature of the roadie’s job—the brutal schedule and constant travel—dictates that most roadies are single. And if they aren’t single, they soon will be. On every tour, at least one marriage or long-term relationship comes to a difficult yet inevitable end. Absence, it turns out, does not make the heart grow fonder. Instead, absence smokes all your weed, forgets to water your plants, and leaves a nasty note on your mirror.

On a muggy Massachusetts morning near the end of the Elvis Costello tour, Flavor Flav Dave’s wife called and said she was leaving him after 15 years. Since there is no privacy on a tour bus, everyone overheard his sad, yet painfully familiar conversation. Dave was devastated. The next night, our entire crew took him to a seedy strip club on the Jersey shore for the best therapy money can buy: enormous quantities of grain alcohol and three hours of lapdances from a Puerto Rican beauty named Dazzle. We had a good time, and for a few hours, Dave did not have to think about the unpleasant realities that awaited him back home. As I looked at the well-traveled faces around our table in that smoky club, I realized that I was proud to be among these wandering souls. I was proud to be a roadie.

The last night of the tour, I wandered out front to watch Elvis Costello play. He delivered a blistering, inspired performance—a rare blend of artistry, passion, and craftsmanship that reminded me of why I had fallen in love with music so many years earlier. After load-out, I said my goodbyes to the crew: Itchy, Squinty, Flavor Flav Dave, and Taliban Dan. I felt a bit like Dorothy at the end of The Wizard of Oz. “I’ll miss you the most, Wookie,” I heard myself say. And within hours, I was back in my empty Santa Monica apartment.

A few months later, a magazine purchased one of my stories. It appeared that my writing career was finally taking flight. In my heart, I knew it was time to leave the roadie world behind, and after 15 years, my long strange journey was winding down. I don’t know exactly what the future holds, but if Foghat should call my name five years down the line, I can’t promise that I won’t come running.

Chinese Democracy: A Review

2011-02-09T17:23:00.000-08:00

I am not going to recount the long and winding history of the fabled Guns N’ Roses Chinese Democracy record. But I do need to give you some context before we get to the actual review, so you’ll know where I’m coming from.

In the fall of 1987, my first semester of college, I worked at a video store in Mill Valley with a sixteen year old beauty named Madeleine. Now, Madeleine wasn’t a typical high school girl. She was a budding fashion model, and she would periodically jet off to New York and Los Angeles and Paris for high profile modeling shoots. And then she’d come back to work at the video store – her parents thought it would keep her grounded until she graduated. But more important to this story, she was cool in a way that I never would be: She smoked cigarettes and drank Jack Daniels from the bottle and cavorted with hair metal rock stars of the day. One night while we were working, she told me how she’d just returned from a weekend clubbing on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, and how she’d partied with this new band at the Whiskey called Guns N’ Roses. “Their new record is about to come out,” she told me. “And it’s going to blow your dick off.” To this day, that is the single greatest endorsement for a record I’ve ever heard. Less than a year later, they had the number song in the country and one of the best-selling records of all time.

Appetite for Destruction is a stunning masterpiece – few critics will disagree. But I’ll go ya one further: The song ‘Rocket Queen’ – the 12th and final track on Appetite – is one of the five best rock and roll songs ever written. (The other four, in case you’re wondering, are Lou Reed’s ‘Sweet Jane,’ The Who’s ‘Baba O’Reilly,’ Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born to Run,’ and The Rolling Stone’s ‘Sympathy for the Devil.’) Yes, 'Rocket Queen' is that good. And while the Use Your Illusion records from 1991 are admittedly bloated – it could’ve been a single amazing record instead of two mediocre ones – there are certainly moments of greatness. And Axl’s version of the Skyliners ‘Since I Don’t Have you’ off the otherwise forgettable Spaghetti Incident is one of the greatest rock cover tunes of all time.

And here we are, seventeen years after the release of the last G N’R studio record, and rock and roll is in dire straits: Jack Johnson and Josh Groban have the best-selling records of the last two years. Jack fucking Johnson. He wrote every song on the Curious George soundtrack, and my mom listens to him while she bakes banana bread. I’m not philosophically opposed to anyone writing songs about cartoon monkeys, but this guy is clearly dangerous. And I can’t even talk about Josh Groban without throwing up a little in my mouth. Thankfully, it’s been a great year for rock and roll (though not in record sales), with stellar efforts by Bruce Springsteen, Motley Crue, AC/DC, and even Journey. But right now, at this very moment, the world’s eyes and ears are on Axl Rose, who has jettisoned to planet earth to save rock and roll.

And now, on to the review of Chinese Democracy.

Track 1: Chinese Democracy

The title song ‘Chinese Democracy’ kicks things off to a promising start. It’s no ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ and, for my taste, lacks a definable hook, but the song does indeed rock. This is Axl saying, “It’s been sixteen years, motherfuckers, and now I’m going to punch you in the throat.”

If this song were a Steven Seagal movie, it would be Above the Law (It’s not quite Under Siege, but way better than On Deadly Ground or Belly of the Beast).

Track 2: Sheckler’s Revenge

Uh-oh, I’m getting a bad feeling about this. Remember those stories in the late 1990’s about Axl shaving his head, listening to Nine Inch Nails, and going all ‘industrial’? Sheckler’s Revenge clearly came out this era. And frankly, this is a terrible song. I don’t know who Sheckler is, or why he wants revenge, but I wish he would stop screaming at me through the stereo.

If this song were a Chuck Norris movie, it would be Sidekicks.

Track 3: Better

Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. ‘Better’ is a damn good song, if not a bit slight, and maybe the third best song on this record. It doesn’t rock like anything off Appetite, but it would have fit nicely on either of the Use Your Illusion records, which isn’t a bad thing. It’s got a strangely popish chorus that reminds me of something off a Cardigans record. The more I listen to this song, the more I like it.

If this were 1970’s TV show about inner-city high school basketball, it would be The White Shadow.

Track 4: Street of Dreams

I was never one of those Guns N’ Roses purists who hated everything off the Illusion records, who thought the band sold out when Axl started writing 14 minute piano ballads. I mean, who doesn’t love them some ‘November Rain’? In a historical context, it’s important to remember that Axl was doing something revolutionary. Most love ballads of the era were confectionery pop diddies about a guy losing a girl and being sad about it – Poison’s ‘Every Rose Has it’s Thorn,’ Cinderella’s ‘Don’t Know What You’ve Got ‘Til It’s Gone,’ Skid Row’s ‘I Remember You,’ or Warrant’s ‘Heaven.’ But an Axl Rose ballad was layered with darkness and dreamlike, nightmarish imagery. These songs – November Rain, Don’t Cry and Estranged – are about love and loss and mysticism and death, and Stephanie Seymour fighting another chick at a wedding and then dying in the rain. This stuff was heavy, man. In other words, if Axl Rose was George Harrison and Gun’s N’ Roses were the Beatles, then Bret Michaels was Davey Jones and Poison were The Monkeys. And that’s as clear as I can be.

But back to ‘Street of Dreams.’ I unabashedly love this mid-tempo ballad. At first listen, it seems a bit strange. The recurring piano riff – and I realize that the term ‘piano riff’ does not usually denote any sort of rocking – is clearly stolen from REO Speedwagon’s ‘Keep on Rollin’’. And for some odd reason, Axl sings the opening lines of the song in a deep, slightly Transylvanian accent that can best be described as ‘Dracula-esque.’ (In the movie Forgetting Sarah Marshall – which I highly recommend – check out Jason Segel singing the tune from his Dracula puppet musical, and you’ll know what I mean).

As ‘Street’ opens, and for the first minute, I neither love it nor hate it. I am indifferent, withholding judgment, because I am waiting for Axl to deliver the goods, because he owes me. He owes all of us. So I keep listening, waiting. And then at the 1:20 mark, something begins to happen. Something familiar, yet new. Something grounded in the physical world, yet ethereal. Something that can only be described as magic. If the hair on your arms doesn’t stand up just a bit, if the tiniest smile does form on your cynical lips when Axl’s screeching voice soars and the guitars kick in, then you’ve got a dark, empty cavern in your chest where your withered heart used to beat. ‘Street of Dreams’ becomes a certain kind of awesome that I have neither heard nor felt for a very long time, and was quite certain that I may never hear nor feel again. This is everything I want from Axl Rose. Consider the goods delivered. Now here’s the disclaimer: If you’re a G N’ R purist and hated everything off Illusion – and if you hate REO Speedwagon and guys who talk like Romanian vampires – then you’ll probably hate this song. But it fits nicely into the G N’ R canon, and it rightfully belongs in any collection of their best songs. Axl croons repeatedly, “What I thought was beautiful don’t live inside you any more.” Axl, old friend, you couldn’t be farther from the truth.

Track 5: If the World

This is an odd, slow-tempo number. With it’s vaguely Spanish-Flamenco guitar picking at the outset, and the funky, grooving bass line that sounds like an Isaac Hayes b-side from the Shaft era – I’ll admit it took me a while to warm to this one. But Axl’s voice has never sounded better, and the song, in it’s own bizarro way, is kinda cool.

If this were a Jean Claude Van Damme movie, it would be Time Cop.

Track 6: There Was a Time

Another mid-tempo tune, less quirky than ‘If the World’ -- A solid effort that wouldn’t sound out of place on the Illusion records, perhaps as a companion piece to ‘Yesterdays.’ But here’s my concern: Six songs into Chinese Democracy, and there has been very little rocking. I understand that Guns N’ Roses has moved beyond the dirty blues-inspired post-punk garage rock of Appetite for Destruction. Axl has a unique creative vision, and I get that. I do. But Axl – and now I’m speaking directly to you – there was a time when the shear force of your rocking would jam me in the nutsack and push my balls up into my esophagus while you pummeled me about the head and neck with your utter disdain for civil society. There was a time my friend. There was a time.

If this were a Billy Joel record, it would be River of Dreams.

Track 7: Catcher in the Rye

Yet another mid-tempo pseudo-rocker, only now Axl is writing lyrics about a JD Salinger book I read in junior high. It’s baffling on so many levels. I mean, this is the guy who wrote 'Mr. Brownstone,' which is the third best song ever written about heroin. Don’t get me wrong – ‘Catcher’ is not a bad song, probably the fifth best song on this record. But what’s next – a stirring ballad based on Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women? A fist-pumping anthem called To Kill a Mockingbird? Suddenly I’m 14 years old, eating tater tots and sipping a cran-apple juicebox in the Del Mar Middle School cafeteria, staring at the budding cleavage of Monica Dillweather. And while the memory it conjures is pleasant enough, it does not fucking rock.

If this were the new Coldplay new record… Actually, it doesn’t suck that bad.

Track 8: Scraped

‘Scraped’ should have been scrapped. What the Hell is going here?

Track 9: Riad N’ the Bedouins

This song is called Riad N’ the Bedouins. And that really says it all.

If this were a Steven Seagal movie, it would be Stone Cold starring Brian Bosworth. No, that didn’t make sense to me either.

Track 10: Sorry

Sweet Jesus. Another slow number, but this one is awful. How many bad puns can I make using this title:

- This is a ‘sorry’ excuse for a song.

- I’m almost ‘sorry’ I bought this record.

- I’m ‘sorry’ I subjected my neighbors to this steaming turdpile of a song.

Okay, you get the idea.

If this were a bowel movement, it would be explosive diarrhea.

Track 11: I.R.S.

Now we’re finally getting somewhere. I.R.S. harkens back to Illusion-era songs such as ‘Civil War’ – and that’s a good thing. A solid-if-unspectacular tune.

If this were an item on Taco Bell’s 89 cent Value Menu, it would be a Cheesy Double Beef Burrito.

Track 12: Madagascar

Aah, yeah… 'Madagascar' is the tits. Sure, it’s not the balls-out rocker I’ve been waiting for, but it’s a damn good song. In fact, 'Madagascar' comes off like a distant cousin of Blind Faith’s ‘Can’t Find My Way Home,’ with Axl crooning:

No I won't be told anymore / That I've been brought back in this storm / And left so far out from the shore / That I can't find my way back, my way anymore

Not as uplifting as ‘Street of Dreams,’ but possibly a better song.

If this were a John Cusack movie, it would NOT be One Crazy Summer.

Track 13: This I Love

This one had me worried going in, because any Guns N’ Roses song with the word ‘Love’ in the title is bound to suck, unless it’s something like, “I Love Heroin” or “Gonna Give You My Love in a Bathroom Stall,” which would be totally awesome. But ‘This I love’ – Hmmm. So I press play on the old iPod, and guess what?

It does not suck, not even close. ‘This I love’ is a dark, ominous and tortured Use Your Illusion-esque ballad that is, or should be, the fourth part of Axl’s brooding quadrilogy that includes November Rain, Don’t Cry and Estranged. Stylistically, ‘This I Love’ leans more towards 'Estranged' than 'November Rain,' all sadness and frustration and hopelessness and gloom.

Slash wouldn’t wipe his ass with this song, but I kinda dig it.

Track 14: Prostitute

Sadly, this song is not about a prostitute, because that would have been so rock and roll. Instead, ‘Prostitute’ is Axl’s big “fuck you” to all those who doubted his fifteen year journey towards Chinese Democracy. And really, what’s more rock and roll than that? This is one of the better songs on the record, and when Axl croons, "Ask yourself / Why I would choose / To prostitute myself / To live with fortune and shame" – it’s clear he’s talking to all the haters out there.

If this song were a breakfast pastry, it would be a bear claw.

So there you have it. There are two great songs on this record (Street of Dreams, Madagascar), two very good songs (Better, This I Love), three decent songs (Chinese Democracy, Prostitute, Catcher in the Rye), and the other seven songs? Well…

And the verdict is: Axl Rose will not save rock and roll. Perhaps I had too many hopes pinned on this effort, too many lofty expectations. Because to me, Chinese Democracy is more than just a record: It is a bridge to my youth. And if the bridge is not sound, it will plummet into the angry, raging waters below. So perhaps the ultimate failure of Chinese Democracy – and it is ultimately a failure – is not entirely Axl’s fault. Maybe I needed this record to be something that it never could be, regardless of its artistic merit. Axl could never recreate the soaring memories I have of his earlier work, and anything less would be abject failure. So the torch of rock savior will be passed on to another. There’s a new Springsteen record due out in January, and a new U2 record in February. Perhaps our fate is now in the hands of Bono. I leave you with the following quote, that seems somehow appropriate:

“He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.”