So God runs out of materials and has to yank a rib out of this poor schlub Adam to finish the one being who would eventually get him chucked out of Eden, good old Bloomingdales Eve.
Fine, I suppose to error is also divine.
But this girl hangs out all day with her new “Best Friend,” the unaccomplished Beverly Hills “Serpent in Paradise,” bitching endlessly about not being given the top job.
Meanwhile, Adam is sweating the naming of every animal of the earth.
John having a drink before I told him how much Keith Moon’s damage was going to cost The Who.
Keith Moon was out on the street, working as a doorman/bellboy at the Navarro Hotel in New York City in between shows at Madison Square Garden because he was running out of money.
I got him that job thinking it might be a character-building experience. It also relieved, for a little while, everybody’s constant anxiety over where he was.
The hotel manager, Mr. Russell, a personal friend of mine, arranged it because he felt obliged. After all, the band had rebuilt three of his hotel rooms over the last two tours. I always turned to the word ” shredded” in reporting what Moon had done to them.
It was August 6, 1978. I think.
We were in one of the suites playing scrabble and waiting for something to happen when Mr. Russell called to warn that Moon and his entourage were heading upstairs and that he was carrying two bags from a new guest that he had forgotten to leave in the lobby.
The initial confusion of having their taxi door opened by a rock star wearing a six-foot-long Indian headdress was working out in the manager’s estimation. The regular bellmen seemed please at the increase in tips coming in.
He was also sharing his gratuities with everybody conscientiously though he got ill-tempered with the math. It has, in fairness to Moony, been my experience that no rock star can count.
In minutes the drummer blasted into the room like a one-person Apache raiding party. Behind him trailed our security guys, five groupies, two bellmen, and I guessed from their suits the people chasing their stolen bags.
” Have you heard the news?” he was nearly moaning with excitement. “Some Pope is dead! “
Feathers whipping in his breeze, he whirled on Anne Wheldon, our publicist who lives in a barely suppressed nervous hysteria, ordering her to ” get me someone on the line right now from The New York Times and Billboard Magazine!”
He started to wring his hands like an early Adolf Hitler slavering over a defenseless prewar France.
“Go right to the top, Anne, tell them I am throwing my hat into this Papal ring.” His eyes had an almost religious luminescence.
She had the entertainment editor from the Times on the phone within minutes.
He straightened his feathers and hunched over the desk phone. The room grew silent. We hung on his side of the conversation.”
“That’s right; I have wanted to leave the band for years,” he confirmed to the guy. ” “Given this emergency, I believe that moment is ripe.”
He listened, and his face seemed to droop.
“No, I am not Catholic,” he paused, perhaps sensing his tactical error.” “But I am a quick study, ask Pete Townshend,” he attached smoothly.
“And don’t let that motherfucker Mick Jagger hear about this. He is the devil, you know,” cunningly racing to blot any competition quickly.
By this time, we were rolling on the floor, and Anne was standing next to him, trying to get his attention waving her arms and mouthing that she had Rolling Stone on the other line.
He put both hands over the phone and, in confusion, shouted at us,” Fuck, he wants to know what I think qualifies me to be the next Pope.”
Ever quick, Bill Curbishley, his manager, shouted back to him”, Tell him twenty-five platinum albums.”
Democracy is the reduction of the political ego to its smallest useful unit, the vote. The individual citizen is encouraged to regard his ballot as influential instead of expendable.
American elections mirror the reproduction process, which cunningly launches thousands of sperm toward one egg while convincing each one that they alone are imperative in perpetuating the species.
When I look up into the endless starry night, I take pleasure that it is I thinking of it and not it thinking of me.
I want people to celebrate my underachievement if I die suddenly because even in Death, I want to have the potential I did when I was twelve.
The puzzle of attraction is the lifetime preoccupation of all men.
No one ever tells boys how to do it.
When I was little, comic books convinced me I could purchase these skills by mail.
Below is an advertisement I answered.
It only worked on three girls and two boys.
The company did not return my money.
It would be hard to argue I didn’t have fun touring with rock bands. Better phrased, I had the best life of anybody ever.
This career success made me a competent specialist in people who do not evacuate their jealousies quickly. Except for right here and right now, I have mostly remained silent about my life. It is compassion in my particular Buddhist way.
I know I can relieve people of their envious distress if I want to, but two of my substantial character flaws get in the way. Firstly, I am Irish, so forgiveness is uncommon inside me after an insult of any kind.
With me, “Well, fuck you then,” can surprise people by its permanence.
I don’t fight little wars.
One such battle occurred with Peter Gabriel and me on my first tour with Genesis. I was their tour manager for a very long time. Peter and I left the band at the same time. His departure had more impact.
In his defense, I wasn’t very good at the job. I was always lost, particularly in Europe.
I was also assumed to be in charge of our road crew. England’s maritime captains had been throwing guys like these, unconscious, into their ships against their wills as crew for five hundred years. These dumb fuckers did the job with Genesis willingly.
I was the only American, and I traveled with the band, not them, which did not sit well.
The English have a fixed internal caste system that India copied to invent Hinduism. The crew figured they could abuse me because I did not fit with the band, who, except for Phil Collins, was severely upper-class.
They also knew I grasped nothing about setting up the sound gear for the shows.
In those days, the Genesis sound equipment looked like a million home stereo hookups. There were thousands of wires, and only one guy knew how to plug it all in. We will call him ” Nick.”
Now Nick took a particular interest in me. He never listened and openly mocked me for much of my first tour through Europe. He knew he was more valuable than me to the band.
One afternoon during a soundcheck in Spain, he threw a balled-up strip of gaffer tape at me, which I dodged, but in doing so, I hit my head on the hinge on a door.
I don’t remember if he was unconscious, but because it was an uppercut, I saw both his feet leave the floor.
He quit and gave the band an ultimatum that it was “him or me.”
Peter called me into the dressing room to ” discuss it.”
On a good day, talking to Peter was exhausting. None of the crucial parts of his face played well together. His most critical thoughts spent most of their time trying to locate his mouth. We didn’t know each other that well then, which did not help. Having worked with mostly English bands, I got how insecure emotionally the entire island is. It was always my advantage.
I appreciated what I had done. Nick was powerful, and his leaving put the shows in jeopardy, but I resented Peter for even trying to discuss their choice with me.
I don’t pretend this story has held your interest, but this is where it turns cute.
I, in so many words, told Peter to go “fuck himself.” Gabriel, now confronted with emotion out in the open, did Lord knows what after I stormed out.
In the background, one crew member, out of a little known Texas sound company called SHOWCO, who had a low-level job moving equipment around offered that he knew how to connect all our shit.
We put this guy in a room with all our gear, and in one day, he rewired everything—Goodbye, old Nick.
Postscript: I stayed. Gabriel and I became close friends, and I, the godfather of his first child.
Showco, over my long career, made millions from my friendship.
A road crew never rechallenged me.
“Nick” Today
Every death,
comes with its particular novelty.
While birth plods into life
with a sloppy inaccuracy,
tumbling incoherently through
a thick sticky afterbirth,
while shackled to incomprehension.
Still, we guess birth to be miraculous
while it’s endgame, death
is reviewed as a misfortune,
accompanied by a chorus of “if only ”
and the tardy howls of regret.
But of what good is the marvelous,
if you can’t, watch?
PUBLISHED: June 2, 2017
FILED UNDER: Unnoticed in Clever Worlds
Republicans fear their Gods but generally ignore them unless his likeness appears miraculously on a Walmart. Then they all go out to buy their last suits for a second “coming” until our media broadsides the party and makes them look like cattail eating morons.
Democrats see god in sexual activity, kind of like the Old Testament Romans. They instead worship movie stars whom they believe are real people. Most wait breathlessly for new holes in human beings to build popular sex cults around.
