ON & OFF THE ROAD #13

"It's time, to put god away," sings Bill Callahan on my terrace. "damning the children/making the ill a little more sick…"

For days now, the sun has fixed itself in the cloudless, blue German sky. The last time I felt the rain was almost two weeks ago, sitting on the back of a camel in the Sahara. We drive straight south from Fez, over the middle Atlas, then the High Atlas; with the Enablers album "Tundra" looping on the car stereo as we cross endless miles of tundra. Closing in on the impassable Algerian border. Raindrops in the desert seem as big as dung beetles on the dunes.  Where 25 years ago, the truck I shared with the goats and the chickens bounced across desert tracks, we're now afforded the comforts of a compact Kia cruising a new asphalt highway worthy of almost anything in America's Badlands, except with way better cell-phone coverage. Radio towers compete with cacti in the desert skyscape. A pre-dinner doumbek jam with our guide is suddenly interrupted when he drops his drum and jumps off the mat shouting "Afriika!" He's got a phone call. When I take the train from Dortmund to Hamburg, there are long stretches with zero reception, but 550 kilometers south of Fez, a 10 kilometer camel ride from the nearest hotel, in a tent with a single hanging bulb powered by a portable generator, my phone has 3 bars. 

Soon after dinner, the wind kicks up and the power goes out. The blackness is utter. Sometime during the night, the wind wakes us with whipping waves of sound that snap the tent flaps like towels in junior-high gym class showers. Then it begins to rain. I fear our tent will be transformed into a Hammam, the giant masseur in the sky emptying gargantuan buckets on our fragile shelter. The camel pelts are stronger, of course. The tent holds. Having made it back to sleep, we're awakened at dawn by the sweetest of voices repeating "Good Mooorning" in a lilting, high tone until I manage a response. I don't know how many times Idriss has to repeat his call to rise, but it's the gentlest wake-up call I've ever had.  

Out here in the dunes, there is no call to prayer. We are left without an anthropomorphic interpretation of command from the morning light, but just the light itself to inspire our ambition, humility and love. I scramble out of bed and through the multi-layered tent flaps. The air is perfectly still. Narrow, high clouds trail across the horizon, but save for the somewhat firmer consistency of the sand beneath my bare feet, it would be impossible to say a storm had just passed. The "oued"--riverbed--is dry. I walk a hundred meters to the top of of a small dune, the closest promontory. To the west is a rainbow. I have to repeat this sentence: To the west I see a rainbow. I squinted a couple times. I don't think I rubbed my eyes, but my character in the movie moment would have. A fat rainbow hangs over the dunes as the sun emerges across the horizon. To one side of our camp, the camels rest. I can't say that I feel total isolation. I'm well aware of the ATVs lurking behind nearby dunes and the other tourist encampments just a few hundred meters away, but the the desert is still large enough to conceal these intrusions and encroachments. Even the possibility of true solitude is enough for me at this moment. I could just start walking in the direction of the sun and soon enough, I'd be truly lost. The ability to lose oneself is the saving grace of the country whose passport I carry. While not quite the Sahara, the seemingly endless expanse of open land in the North American west contributes to a genuinely freer sensibility in the homeland of our fading empire than in most other places on our tiny planet. 

Soon it's time to mount our rides and make the short, stately trek back to the hotel. Camel butt stays with us for days! At our hotel, a painting of a camel caravan says "Timbuktu 52 days." In the 80's I tried reaching Timbuktu from the south, through Mali, but was forced to stop in Mopti, it being rainy season and the riverbed not suitable for travel. Camels, if I recall correctly, weren't an option along that route. But in any case, my ass would have to be anatomically reconfigured to enable 52 days of nonstop travel on a dromedary. (That's what they actually are in West Africa, two-humped Camelidae not being native to the region.)

I'm often sadder leaving places, rather than people, behind. A friend is yours. A place is only for the moment that coincides with experience and perception. We head north, driving the Kia with "Tundra" in the CD slot and the dunes behind us, crossing the Atlas again, the Valley of the Roses, gorges terraced with ageless mud villages and town squares resembling Albuquerque--save for the predominance of the veil. Dropping off the rental car, I forget "Tundra" in the player. Maybe it 'll make another ride across the mountains and into the Sahara. 

In Marrakesh, at the Djema El Fnaa, I share a bowl of snails with my son on his 14th birthday and have his "fortune" read by a tiny, 80 year-old Berber woman, her face and hands embroidered with Henna. Though swarming with foreign  tourists, the Djema El Fnaa is still a magnet for Moroccan and other Maghrebian travelers and truthseekers. The malarkey and spiritual moonshine flows thick amongst the locals as well. Hard-bargains driven, tall tales told. No lacking in Viagra of all kinds. Though the exoticism of the Djema El Fnaa is perhaps more genuinely representative of Moroccan life, in a way, than a camel trek organized for short-term interlopers, the sheltering sky of the desert affords us the purity we need if we are to put god away and make the ill a little less sick.

About twelve hours after we leave the Djema El Fnaa and about two hours after our plane takes off from  Marrakesh, headed back across the Meditterranean, a suicide bomber explodes his payload of nails in the marketplace of the Maghreb, killing 17 people.

ON & OFF THE ROAD #12

Frank Zappa--someone I admire--even though, (and I know I'm  generating some serious hate here), he made some of the worst music I've ever heard, famously said that music writing was people who can't write, writing about people who can't speak for people who can't read. After one year of filling this space, readers will know that On & Off the Road is not a music column. But everything has rhythm and lyricism isn't only expressed through melody. I just read Keith Richard's book, "Life," and picked up Patti Smith's tales of discovering Robert Mapplethorpe and New York City, "Just Kids." It turns out that two of the people most responsible for deploying the transformative power of loud, simple music are among the best prose writers on the planet. (Zappa, smart and entertaining as he was in TV interviews defending individual freedoms or praising Varese, was as snide and irrelevant a writer as he was a composer). While Richards' book gives a co-authorship credit to his friend, journalist James Fox, it's pretty clear that Fox didn't have to do much more than hit play on the dictaphone and faithfully transcribe 600 pages of Keith's storytelling. Everyone marvels at Keith's survival. The man survives because he truly loves what he does and is ecstatically aware of the privileged position he's enjoyed--not just since the first million records sold, but since the first day he picked up a guitar. 

Similarly, Patti's book is illuminated with a gratitude and humility worthy of religious devotion, but so rarely evinced by the theistically faithful, encumbered as they are by the weight of morality, guilt and fear of God. The difference between art and entertainment rests on morality served or not. Religious services and stadium events from rock concerts to mass market sports are the epitome of answers offered up and desires pandered to. Presentations of a more confrontational sort, allowing audience and performer alike more room for curiosity, exploration and doubt are what advance the species. The moments of wonder inherent in the virtuoso feats of star athletes and musicians certainly mitigate the glibness of the enormodome experience, but generally by the time the creative fire spreads to Madison Square Garden or Wembley Stadium, it's a gas powered flame no matter how bright it burns.

For Patti Smith in 1968, "the weakness for using the phone booth in the diner was…most problematic…A handful of coins…could mean one less meal." To say nothing of a trip to central New Jersey, then as now, a spiritual world away from New York City, but unimaginably distant as a physical and virtual entity in 1968 compared to the instantaneous concurrence of experience provided by today's miraculously cheap and fast technology. This morning I walked along the Vistula river as the sun came up in Krakow. I got on a Wizz Air flight, (pronounced "Weezer"--I think next time I'll fly Foo Fighter), and got back in Dortmund in time for "Blood Wedding" rehearsal. The Krakow show last night was the first Botanica appearance in Poland and my first time in the country since 1986. Part time Botanican, Miriam Eicher joined us from Vienna. The show's promoter gave us the following low-down on transportation options:  "The roads are terrible. People occasionally die on the busses. On the other hand, the trains are horrible--always breaking down and usually hours late. Even though the busses are dangerous, the chances of dying in a bus accident are still far slimmer than the near certainty that your train will be uncomfortable and late. So take the bus." I figured I'd split the odds for disaster and Miriam took a train to Krakow and a bus going back. The train was exactly one hour late--meaning that she exited the taxi in front of the restaurant where we were meeting--(for the world's best pierogis and a barrel full of Katanka cocktails)--at exactly the same time as the rest of us walked up to the door. As if we'd synchronized our watches on an episode of Get Smart.  Basically, our entire time in Krakow came down to the perfect timing and flow of that first meeting. 

At the Masada Klub the next night, a 1959 Hammond B3 sat on stage, it's varnish a deep and glossy reddish-brown, polished to the point where I could check my hair during the show. Shipped from Fresno, California and lovingly taken apart, cleaned and put back together, this organ and it's accompanying Leslie speaker cabinet is the best sounding and best kept Hammond I've ever seen. It's owner informed us it was the only one in Poland. I don't think there are a dozen like it in the world. The reason this beautiful beast found itself crouching on our stage was because for weeks it seemed as if a Korg CX3 organ was not an object that existed anywhere in the whole country. "No Korgs in poland" became something of a slogan for the promoter. Inquiries were made as far away as Gdansk and Lodz for Korgs--as well Wurlitzers, (eventually represented ably enough by a Nord). Finally, with the help of several bottles of vodka as bribery, a broken instrument case was delivered to the club with what was said to be some kind of organ inside. We snapped off the bungi chords, and miraculously, a vintage Korg CX3 lived inside. Even sporting scratches in exactly the same place as my own. Naturally, though, the B3 would find it's place in the set. Since budgetary considerations didn't allow for the toy piano to fly the WeezAir, Miss Jaymar didn't make the trip, but I ended up trading her in for the Queen of keyboard instruments. There I was sitting--and standing--on that gloriously polished organ bench, surrounded by keyboards. The opening to Truth Fish never sounded so rough, raunchy and just plain fucking huge. Standing center-stage with us Captain Jack, Masada's helmsman, in a French-style, striped sailor shirt and sporting a tall, tapered candle strapped to his head, did our lights by randomly pushing faders up and down and twiddling every button on the panel while dancing through the entire set--eventually stepping on Jason's guitar cable and unplugging his bass. 

Walking around the city reminded me a little of New Orleans before Katrina. Krakow is a town whose residents really love where they live and know they have something special. We weren't aware that May 10th is a national day of mourning in Poland. As it turned out, we were almost certainly the only band performing in the city--if not the entire country on Sunday, a day when art and entertainment aren't really considerations for most Poles. But somehow this worked in our favor and the packed club barely let us leave. 

We ended the night with This Perfect Spot--on the B3--and meant what we sang. 

I don't know if Patti or Keith ever played Krakow--but they definitely had nights like the one we had on Sunday. Or they wouldn't still be around to show us all how it's done. 

ON & OFF THE ROAD #11

The garlic I bought at the supermarket last week had a tag on it that said "Made in China." Let me repeat that: I went to the store in Dortmund, Germany and bought a head of garlic that was imported from China. It's been about 25 years since I was in China, but I have this feeling that it's still far away--somewhere on the other side of the world. I remember it took a long time and cost a lot of money to get back to Europe from China. It cost so much, that I had to spend a long time in Paris before I had enough money  for the flight back home to New York. But that's another story. I've been busy lately, but as far as I know, Germany is still part of Europe, as is Italy--(those two countries got along famously a while back)--not to mention Greece, Spain and Portugal, though I do understand the ruffled feathers in those relationships. Wouldn't it make some sense to buy stuff from those countries rather than just give them money? But that's another story too. In any case, if I wanted garlic badly enough, I could practically walk to Italy and pull it out of the ground. Hell, there are parts of Italy where the majority mother tongue is German. So what the hell is that Chinese garlic doing in my local produce rack? How little do those people pulling the garlic out of the ground in Szechuan Province have to get paid for it to be worthwhile for Angela Merkel and Co. to buy their fucking garlic before looking closer to home? So that's the bad news of the month.

The good news is that on the opposite coast of the Mediterranean from where we should be buying garlic, millions are buying into an idea most of us over here have pretty much given up on. From Western Sahara to Bahrain, something unexpected actually started happening. This is probably the first real news since the fall of the Berlin Wall, though I would look even farther back--to the 60s for anything approaching this level of positive surprise and global influence. For the last generation or 2, we've been treading water creatively and politically. Tentativeness--maintaining the status quo--has been the order of the day. The visual arts have languished behind an overarching scrim of decorativeness. Art music has bitten back at atonality and the avante garde in favor of minimalist soundscapes and ultimate tonality. Pop music simpers along with the limp-dick cleverness of the likes of Sufjan Stevens and The Decemberists topping the Billboard Charts. (Are you kidding me?) We've all been coasting along, inured to catastrophe or euphoria; trying to figure out what to do next. I think this thing going on south of the border, down Egypt way, might just shake things up enough to wake us all up. Change the whole creative zeitgeist. 

At the end of the month, with my band Botanica, I'll be doing a couple of programs of music, food and scenes from the novels of Haruki Murakami, the great Japanese writer. South of the Border, Down Mexico Way--(West of the Sun)--is on the menu. (We're going for a bit more of the Patsy as opposed to the Frankie…) Murakami is a true post-nuclear age artist. People appear and disappear in his stories. Worlds and levels of perception coexist easily within and without the corporeal frame of body and mind. Though literally surreal, Murakami's stories evince little of the fantastical or fantastically complicated fabrications that so annoy me in so-called magical realism. (Harry Potter for adults). Murakami's tales are informed by the reality of quantum physics and the possibilities of string theory. The basic notion that the place of a thing is based on perception; that things can be in more places that one at the same time--or so it seems; that juggling an existence on more than one plane might be just as natural as eating Chinese garlic in Germany. I don't think Murakami would have been possible without science from Max Planck to Maldacena. 

So let's raise our glasses to interdisciplinary, trans-global, cross-generational movement. And don't let anybody tell you it's all about Facebook. Technology's great, but bullshit in and bullshit out--and humans still shovel the shit. Nobody virtually burns.

Maybe the revolutionaries south of the border will somehow help kick the Decemberists off the charts. 

ON & OFF THE ROAD #10

I want to be in Cairo or Alexandria, but the train I'm on is stuck in the middle of a field somewhere near the Dutch border. Instead of embedded with the revolutionaries, I'm embedded in an Anselm Kiefer painting. The details of structure and vegetation along the tracks are not meant to be seen from such close proximity. Untended and unkempt, like a person startled out of bed and forced to answer an unexpected pre-dawn doorbell. Similarly, on the highway, every time I've had to make an unexpected stop--a flat tire, an emergency piss--I've felt something of the intruder; awkward among the detritus and details of dilapidation that are meant to be driven past at 100k or more. 

The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell is my favorite book of fiction. Molded from the experience of a place that only exists, at least for me, but I suspect also for a world-wide coterie of literary nostalgics, as the emblem of a mythical marketplace of commerce and culture lost to our more fragmented world. America is the archetypical example of such a place, extant on the map as a geographical demarcation, but alive as global code for freedom and opportunity. This despite the fact that Jacques Brel, in one of my favorite songs, "Voir Un Ami Pleurer," wrote that "there is no more America…"(Il n'y a plus d'Amerique) In 1970. The modern metropolis, with its droves of immigrants and travelers contains the same plethora of faiths and tongues, but interaction is avoided. Diversity is to be respected, not exploited. Better safe than sorry. 

I'm on the way to Amsterdam to watch the Super Bowl, America's true national holiday and day of communion.  I'll be watching on a giant screen in Holland, with my Russian friend, in the apartment provided by his Haitian employer, after eating at the Morroccan restaurant where he works and attending the art opening of our Italian painter friend. On the train, I run into the Turkish actor I just worked with. And not for a second do any of us feel at home. Not today and probably not all year. Last night I went to the ballet. "Hamlet: The Birth of Scorn." A Chinese director and lead dancers from Uzbekistan and Italy. The company of twenty features Brazilians, Rumanians, Serbians, Armenians, Japanese, Australians and various other internationals, but not a single German. This, In the heart of Bundesrepublik. But if the idea that is America doesn't exist, Germany, the nation itself, is barely known to the natives who live here. We work and we shop, but we don't sit and think. In Egypt, they also want to work and shop. They want to be like us. Citizens in a democracy. But though I'm definitely grateful for the happy accident of birth that allows me to carry the passport of a democracy, what I secretly wish for is the tumult and confusion, the hurly burly, to borrow from Shakespeare, of something much less clean. 

I find watching sport, the obvious simplicity of purpose and unity of passion, beautiful and relaxing. The sweat and violence is attractive too. The purity of the goal is unrivaled in society as an expression of communal action devoid of political machination. You just gotta fucking score. Everything else people do together involves politics. Not team sport. At least between the blows of the whistle. In American football, the purity of purpose when the whistle blows, on both sides of the ball, leads to a collision of stupendous violence, followed by a wake of anarchic madness. I imagine the opacity of purpose and violence of opinion brought to Durrell's squares of Alexandria, nurturing a fuzzier human than today's digitally sharp correspondents. All electric music, (as well as the recorded voice of Jacques Brel), lives on the edge of distortion. The pure buzz of humanity demands the dirt of of a thousand disagreements to survive. 

May they all get too drunk to fuck in Cairo.

ON & OFF THE ROAD #9

At midnight on January first 2011, all hell breaks loose right under my living room window. For the next hour, half the people on our block methodically light sparkler after sparkler and launch rocket after rocket, joining with millions of other Germans in an explosion of light and sound as incendiary as any battle--or at least the Hollywood incarnation thereof. The men--these pyros are all male and hundreds of liters of beer past boyhood--methodically walk to the center of our neighborhood crossroads and take turns lighting up. We open our window wide and contribute feebly to the merriment with a couple of inaudible champagne corks, while the rest of the non-arsonist population keep their windows and doors tightly shut. By 1 A.M. it's all over. The surprising hour of anarchy is done The citizenry retreats, leaving a white Christmas newly toasted in reddish brown as the only evidence of sudden chaos. Now, after a few days of rain and decay, I confuse the waterlogged and decaying dynamite for canine land mines as I stroll to the store for a bag of rolls. The Germans--so enamored of silence, cleanliness, punctuality; all the trappings of order--erupt like a woman in labor with a doula and no drugs. But only from midnight to 1 AM on the first of the year. They also profess to clean up after their abundant, beloved dogs--while generally neglecting to remove Prinz's poop as in no other place I've ever lived. This is modern German rebellion.

Germany is a still place. "Still," in the sense the Germans use the word: quiet. I welcome this stillness. I've never heard anything like it. In Italy the people are loud, the cars are loud, the bad disco music plays in every trattoria, when the football isn't turned up to 11, or the opera fans aren't around. France is not quite so loud, but the streets still buzz with the tension of dispute, dismay and even love. In Spain, no bar worth the designation could confine its regulars indoors. London thrums with the 24 hour urban struggle of man and machine, not to mention the sound of a million teenage girls vomiting together every Saturday night. We're not allowed to buy fireworks in New York City, but America, as nowhere else outside Africa and parts of Asia, makes it her business to bring noise into the lives of all her residents. Europe as a whole is a quieter place than the United States, but Germany in particular is another order of magnitude down the scale of sonic peace. This is the only country I know where a bar or restaurant with music playing is the exception rather than the rule. Oh yes--Berlin, Hamburg and all the big cities have their share of djs spinning trendy platters in trendier dives--but more often than not, you can eavesdrop on the domestic drama playing out at the next table, over a soundtrack of cutlery and clinking glasses. Walk down any major artery; hop on a bus or the subway--on a Monday morning or a Saturday night--and the sound you hear is inside your head. My refrigerator just switched to the off portion of it's cycle and it's so completely silent that when I pause momentarily from attacking my laptop, I swear I can hear the blood running through my veins. 

My 13 year-old son is lately enamored of a white ukelele he found and decorated in gold sharpie. The pop appeal of the ukelele is just something in the air. He knows nothing of Beirut or Amanda Palmer, (at least he didn't till I told him all about her). Strumming "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" in the Dortmund U-Bahn on a recent afternoon, a seemingly friendly older woman approaches Roman and tells him that "here one is still." Since he doesn't understand and I don't hear, I ask her to repeat what she said and she explains herself to me. As the sound my son produces from his 4 string axe seems to be the only joyful noise in the entire city, I call her an old Nazi and we go our separate ways. 

I've been wondering about German identity these last few days. I'm looking for something big, loud and provocative to put on stage next year. A production with music to blow the roof off the whole damn country, or at the very least Northrhein-Westfalia. Before beginning its inevitable decline, the American Empire did manage to culturally conquer most of the planet. Nowhere is this more evident than in Germany, where every other advertisement is in English and hipster magazines are almost as likely to be published in the language of Kerouac as Kafka.  The shopping here puts the U.S. to shame, And at the same big-box stores, no less! Every large nation I can think of has a compendium of clichés we can call up from the collective card catalogue that shouts: this is my dumb-ass fan-fucking-tastic-country!  Germany has Nazis. 65 years from the end of World War II, the cleansing of the German soul has been so nearly complete that an Alex DeLarge style Clockwork Orange relapse most certainly need not be feared. But the first and often only association you get from anybody regarding Germany is: Nazis.

When Germans make things to put on stage, they adapt books and more often films; most commonly American films. A question posed to a room full of hyper-talented and overeducated theatre professionals regarding the question of German identity draws a complete blank. Yes--"Stille."  I suggest the following: Sometime in the future, Europe has really become one land. The uniformity has completely taken over, as Ikea, Starbucks, H & M, TK Maxx and all the rest of them have swallowed the landscape. National languages are withering and everyone speaks a diluted English--enough to retrieve the information they need from the constant flood of meaningless noise. Out of nowhere, a small band of Germans decide to find and defend what has been lost--(whatever it might be!)  A group from another country also materializes and the battle is launched, complete with internecine love affairs etc. I do realize there are only a few basic stories in the world!

It looks like what will happen on that big beautiful stage a year from now features a large cat, naked women, death, sex, the devil and a lot of flying. From Russia with love. I'm happy about this, as I get to write the music for a book that was much too fantastical for me when I was younger--hunting for information. In 1988, Elia Kazan said that "wonder is what we need today, not information." Sometimes I'm afraid that my son will be overwhelmed by the avalanche of facts. I'm hoping there will be enough white ukeleles in his life. I know the "Stille" here can be very conducive to finding the wonder when you need it most. But sometimes blowing the whole place up is a good idea too. And I still don't really know about this German identity thing. 

ON & OFF THE ROAD #8

A long time ago I boarded the daily Dakar to Bamako train in West Africa. The timetable publishes arrival and departure times to the minute for every station on the overnight journey, which ended up taking 2 days longer than listed and by all accounts was shorter than usual. I had a great night under the stars in the courtyard of the the local chief at Kayes, Mali. For better or worse, my current schedule allows less time for wayward trains. For the first edition of the "Small Beast, Dortmund" on tour, three venerable locomotives of the Deutsche Bahn managed to break down one after another on the way to Hamburg, putting me at the venue 5 minutes on the wrong side of showtime. When I was a kid getting carted around by my parents on their tours--(to all these same cities)--you could set the second hand of your watch by the punctuality of German rail traffic. 30 Years later nobody has a watch and the only thing you can count on is the tardiness of the train. The hundreds of travelers freezing on the platform in Muenster didn't even have it in them to get mad. In Africa there aren't enough trains or roads--or watches or timetables--for any of this to make a difference, but in India, where the railroad is both a vestige of the Raj and a source of local pride,  pretty much everybody is resigned to the fact that the time in the timetable is merely a suggestion. They might be headed that way in Germany. 

Last week was Small Beast, Dortmund #2, and after getting to Berlin almost on time, I had high hopes for Hamburg. 'Til 15 kilometers south of the city when the engine died. Bored and pissed off, I pulled the Bahn magazine "Mobil" out of the seat pocket and discovered that 2010 is the 175th anniversary of German national rail service. The first train was called the Adler. In 1933 came the Fliegende Hamburger. In the 50s the Kraftwerk immortalized Trans Europ Express. And there in the centerfold spread in Mobil, right between pictures of steam engines, troop trains, soccer teams riding to victory and East Germans coming west, is a photo captioned: "1941, Deportation of Jewish families from Bielefeld." An officer in a Wehrmacht uniform directs traffic, while the hordes carry bedrolls and rolled up blankets. They are smiling; looking cheerful. They probably think they're going someplace better. 

The Turks will put you in jail if you even so much as hint, in public, that an earlier generation of Turks slaughtered a few million Armenians. And I haven't seen too many monuments to lynching on display south or north of the Mason Dixon line. You have to hand it to the Germans for staring down their own history. And Turkey wonders why there might be some opposition to their joining the EU. My second public appearance in Dortmund was playing in the BvB football stadium for the entering class at the University. The third year of a "tradition" sponsored by the football team and the theater in an attempt to hook new fans among the newest Dortmunders. It's the largest stadium in Germany. This town is a football team with a city attached. Waiting to go on, in the VIP area where the local civic leaders sip their sekt at halftime, I get a chance to see the faces on the wall of fame. A century of soccer madness. And in the middle of the wall, in a frame bigger than most, is a black and white photo of the most aryan of all youths staring heroically off into a future of glorious goals--and sporting a sweater with a large swastika expertly stitched in the center. 

When I moved back to the east coast from California around the turn of the century, my dog Wanda, (a sprightly 15 and now a resident of Dortmund), didn't yet have a home in New York City and by some not so simple twist of fate, managed to lodge at the home of a particularly devoted Botanica fan in St Paul, Minnesota who owned world-class Doberman show dogs. Champions, as they're called in the business. My dog is a mutt bearing the traces of any number of breeds, but with something of a plurality in Doberman genetic material. Ears and tail unsnipped, she is nevertheless a handsome, brown creature, albeit about half the size and weight of the pure bred Pincher. One day, a certain Champion Adina and Wanda got into a little skiffle over a rabbit and while Wanda escaped with a scratch on her ear, Adina, with the help of a blood transfusion and the nation's best vets, survived, despite over a hundred puncture wounds. To my wife's horror, I've told this story many times, basically because I think it's a good tale to tell.  Still, I do understand why my wife objects. The fact is, I'm proud of my dog. Like the white lines marking the grass of the football field,  the line between being able to confront one's atrocities and showing them off gets blurrier and grayer as time goes by. 

When I was riding the rails with my parents, crossing the alps into Italy was always cause for joy--as it is now. The trains definitely didn't run on time, if they ran at all. And a hundred times I was told that "Mussolini made the trains run on time." As if it were his only accomplishment. (Which it well might have been). Sometime later I heard Gang of Four and thought--what the fuck are they singing about? "The scoundrel discipline is his passion" intones Jon King. Is it Yeats and conviction ("the worst are full of passionate…") all over again…or just a great groove? In north India, where Aryan pride is as strong as anywhere and Mein Kampf is  perennial bestseller, hearing of Hitler's virtues is a common feature of casual conversation. Here in Dortmund, during my first meal at the fine Taj Mahal restaurant, our waiter rhetorically inquires as to our thoughts on law and order in Germany. The question proves a setup for his prescription for Indian prosperity: "Hitler, that's what we need. India needs a Hitler." 

I can't be sure if the trains are any more punctual in the subcontinent than they were 20 years ago, but I have a feeling they're not. And maybe that's not so bad. I did make it to Hamburg for the Small Beast last week and shared the stage with that most un-German of rock stars, Herr Alexander Hacke, who shouted, growled and wailed like a southern blues man who never paid for a seat to ride the rails. Hacke and his wife have a band called Hitman's Heel and they sing about beauty and solitude. In Hamburg, we all played Walk on Gilded Splinters together as the encore.

ON & OFF THE ROAD #7

Rhythm.

According to the world's synergetic repository of communal knowledge--otherwise known as Wikipedia--the word was only coined in the 16th century. A confluence of repetition and flow. Is it only in the last 500 years that we've found the luxury to notice? We associate the term with music. The regular whack of the kick drum and the swirling patterns of guitars and synths. A lot of so called classical music we don't consider very rhythmic. But actually I think the lack of a steady pulse is often much more in tune with the way we function. And rhythm is infinitely more than an elucidation of musical organization. Or rather, it's the other way around and our very existence unfolds as a dance choreographed to the symphonies of the spheres.

About once a week, from the back of the stage at the Stadt Theater Dortmund, pimped out in a polar bear cum Elton John costume, I sit at a grand piano and watch the utter hopelessness of Woyzeck play out in front of me. Every once in a while I sing a song, but now that the carousel of opening night is behind us, I get to think about what might have happened to the girl who sat in front of me in 7th grade home-room; what I need to buy for breakfast--and what these people are doing sliding around in the snow yelling at each other in German. In a sense, the play was finished after opening night. I never considered how little time it would take for the creation to calcify, but fresh pasta does not cook faster. These professionals talk about the post-premiere blues the way new mothers commiserate over their "loss." It is all about process and applause.  What comes between threatens to be incidental. Except that we're human and we're good at it. Good at what we do--and maybe by extension, the human part of it. Last night, when Woyzeck asked the Captain if he was kidding about the cuckolding, the surprising gentleness was returned and I felt as if the entire platform on which I sit, piano included, levitated off the snowy stage and flew right through a giant window. The elasticity of communication between all six of us feels like the dough between my palms when I'm baking bread. An equivalently life-giving force.  

We've all been flying too many kites here for the past few weeks, which makes progress difficult. On Tuesday, all the trains in the Ruhr region were definitely tuned to a different rhythm than the one I thought necessary. I arrived in Hamburg hours late for the Small Beast night, barely making it in time to hang the little lady and try on the Mexican wrestling mask that Andras had thoughtfully provided, (since I'd forgotten my own bacchanalian headgear). The Friday before in Dortmund, I perched Baby Dee and her golden harp on top of the bar and everything was perfect. Now everything was too big and too late, but in the end, it felt as if we made time slow down and the space shrink. And Little Annie, who has no rhythm whatsoever in the sense that a "musician" would count it, rides the currents and shapes of the air we share with her as no performer I have ever seen or heard. 

The visual artist John Baldessari is quoted as saying that "we learned a whole new attitude about what art could be--not expression, but investigation." In other words, as Calvin Tomkins wrote, "self-expression and personal choice were off the table." The word artist wiggled its way into our language about the same time as the word rhythm. And for the last 500 years, has been mostly attached to people able to bore a hole into the consciousness of the rest of us with their personal choices for self-expression. And then a lot of us moved to the cities and made more money and had more time and somewhere along the line Mrs. Cage and Mrs Baldessari went off the rhythm method. And now we've stepped through that giant window to a very small clearing where the investigation begins. Sometimes the line between investigation and expression wraps around us like a vine and suddenly we're able to navigate an immeasurable  rhythm capable of saving us from the hangman's noose and this week's election results. Little Annie singing Stevie Wonder does it for me. 

All it takes, sometimes is one word; one gesture. 

ON & OFF THE ROAD #6

Memory.

A man in Queens, New York--a pharmacist--gets written up in The New Yorker because he is a Hafiz. Someone who can recite the Koran from memory. I don't remember a lot of the movies I see, many of the books I read and a number of the people I met last month, but I do remember meeting a Hafiz-in-training some 24 years ago in Mauritania. Like so much else that has disappeared over the decades, the name of of the boy I met in 1986 escapes me, but the name of the man profiled in the magazine that follows me across the Atlantic every week is Mohammad Tayyab. His 15 minutes come courtesy of the Ramadan fast, occasioning his nightly recitations at the local mosque. 

Depending on how you look at it, my route to Mauritania was interrupted or enabled by Ramadan. Walking south from Layoun, past the unfinished stadium and the Blue Men, (without a group), the ride I'd hoped to catch through Spanish Sahara turned out to be a lonely Morrocan cop with an ulcer. We pulled a U in the dusty road and headed back to Morroco's southern outpost. German tourists murdered; Canadians robbed; Algerian backed guerillas looking for trouble. No way would I be allowed to hitch a ride through the Sahara, I was told. 

My savior, holed up at home and exempt from fasting due to his medical condition, was gorging himself on all the food nobody else could eat. Fundamentally, he was sick of eating alone. I eventually managed to find a flight to Nouadhibou via Grand Canary, which is sort of like lunching at the Tour d'Argent as a last meal before the guillotine's descent. 

The airport in Nouadhibou, at least in those days, was a cinderblock garage serviced by camel taxis. Here, a 3 kilometer long phosphate train would take me to the middle of the country where I hoped to catch a truck to Nouakchott, the capital. Scores of cars, piled high with cargo and higher still with people too poor to pay the fare, made up the bulk of the train, while in the rear a single passenger car--missing doors and windows, but featuring seats, provided transportation for the employed and the curious. Mauritania is a country twice the size of France with about 4 million inhabitants. the 3,000 Belgian and French in the country earn 97% of the wages. But in my cabin on that train so long ago was a young native, not more than 18 or 20, wearing a white shirt and black pants and very happy to be riding below rather than above the roof of our train. We spoke in French. My travel companion asked if I knew the Koran, I said I didn't, to which he responded with a long, rhythmic incantation in a tone of Arabic I certainly had never heard before. I asked him what it meant and he said he didn't know. The meaning would perhaps come later, but for now he was just concentrating on memorizing it. His goal was to have the whole thing committed to memory. Like the man from Queens a quarter century later, he would be a vessel for the word of God, meaning be damned. 

Here in Germany I'm working at the theater. Over the course of the last few weeks, we've been rehearsing Woyzeck and I watch, from my perch at the piano in the back of the stage, (where I've been outfitted to look like a cross between Elton John circa 1978, and a polar bear), as the actors go from barely knowing every 10th line, to so utterly internalizing the entire play that whatever they say, whether in the book or not, seems to come from the soul of the characters they're playing. The meaning of every single word; the intention behind every scrap of punctuation, has been hoed and mulched during hundreds of hours of rehearsal. The premiere is beautiful. After so much thought and practice, every performer erupts with the extremity of communicating what we've learned to the packed house. 

Two days before the Woyzeck premiere, we go see Leonard Cohen in concert. 76 years old and he plays for 4 hours. He has the posture of a man half his age and gets down on his knees in every other song. The concert is nothing short of a religious experience. Stories of love and war and a lifetime in every note and every word. I'm an atheist and such experiences are what I thought would supplant the church, the synagogue, the mosque, as our species evolves. The transcendence of art, so full of the meaning behind the word, the image, the sound--rather than just the word itself--revealed, we've been told--in all the "great" religions. 

Cohen remembered every word of the 30 songs he sung. But he ended the show with the words "God bless."

ON & OFF THE ROAD #5

Placebo, Pernice Brothers, Dr. Hook, Leonard Cohen, Cosmo Jarvis, Death Cab for Cutie, Glassvegas, Led Zeppelin, Green Day, Dinosaur Junior, Nina Simone, Tindersticks, Adriano Celentano, Tom Waits, Hildegard Knef, Dalida...That's pretty much the playlist for this week. At least what I'm willing to admit to. I'm not saying I like all of it, but the actors want to sing it; or the productions demand it; my son plays it on guitar--and the director's ipod is always on. So it goes. (But not Nick Lowe, though there is Hope For Us All...)

Yesterday in Dortmund, the local Nazis, after being turned down by the city government, got the go-ahead from Berlin to take to the streets. The cops shut down the train station and confined the contingent that managed to make it into town to a couple parking lots safely removed from the main streets of the Turkish Nordstadt, where they'd been hoping for a good rumble. The most striking difference between the U.S. and Germany is the teutonic racial homogenity. In my neighborhood there is virtually no color--save for the bright purple and red dye jobs on the post-punk, hippie girls. In the North of the city, the ratio is almost completely reversed with nearly everyone a shade of  east-Meditteranean olive-brown. (The black people in this town of 600.000 are so few, I  think I've seen half of them already. Any extras being in visiting teams or  bands. (The short ones with good shoes are the bands). Still--what with Third Reich reunion day yesterday,  the uniformly white caste of the city was particularly extreme, as anyone likely to provoke the wrath of alcoholic teenagers  and their dementedly nostalgic grandparents bolted themselves indoors. At night, when the tension finally dissipated, the Saturday night subway tunnels seemed to erupt with relief as more black and brown people then I've ever seen here hit the streets of good ol' Dortmund.

The theater's planning a production called "Heimat Unter Erde"--home underground--a multi-media docudrama on the evolution of the guest workers form the time they were brought in to work the mines through the present, alienated generation. An Arab kid with Pro-Tools, Final-Cut and a video camera was discovered and enlisted as the project's centerpiece. I'd hoped to meet him at the first tech rehearsal yesterday, but his dad had him on home lockdown til the Nazis cleared out. My brief for this piece is to get a mash-up going between the 30 man-strong chorus of retired coal miners and a band of middle-eastern Saz players. I figure a Deliverance-style throwdown might work. A face-off from opposite sides of the stage. These folks do not socialize. The conventional wisdom on traveling says that the more places you visit, the more you'll see how we're all alike. Bullshit. Of course we all eat, shit and fuck--but so does every other animal. 

On a train from Varanasi to Calcutta in 1986, I sat on a beautiful wooden bench--in 3rd class of a 5-class train--next to a plump chap about my age who spoke eloquently yet obliquely of change, heroes and space travel before confiding that his oddly excellent English was derived almost exclusively from memorizing the David Bowie back-catalogue. Early in the morning,  with the train stopped at a provincial station, I watched, through the slowly clearing mist, a naked man in a deep, flat-footed crouch take a shit on what looked like a pitcher's mound poking out of a pond. All was still. The man, at least 50 paces away from the train, (and over water, so maybe strokes would be more appropriate), was certainly oblivious to anyone watching him. Not that anyone besides me paid him any mind at all. I watched the supremely tranquil and organic scene and tried to imagine being this man. Over the last 24 years, I've often returned to the scene of this dump trying to reconcile our parallel lives as humans on this planet. When I long for a simple life, I think of this man. When I try and justify the complex webs of interactivity I've formed with other people, I think of this man. I certainly have no judgement to offer here. Judgment in general, going hand in hand with religion, being a sure-fire catalyst to human misery. But I think I can say that two more different beings than me and the man on the mound could not possibly exist. To try and find common ground, at least in my opinion, seems fruitless and idiotic. 

But these Nazis here in Dortmund. They are so much closer to home in every way. If we switched the playlists on all their ipods, would that make a difference? We have the technology. Why Don't You Like Me!!??

ON & OFF THE ROAD #4

I just got back from a few days in the Czech Republic, opened the door to my terrace and saw that my neighbor had cut down all the trees in his backyard. 

This is the second time in as many months that I've been on a four day tour revolving around my move to Dortmund.  I'm definitely a creature of habit and routine and it's  a bit unsettling to come home to a place that isn't home yet. Which is one reason I love traveling so much. Takes me off autopilot. (Another being that I've traveled so much and for so long that the the constant transience has become part of the routine.) My June accomplice was Little Annie and we had a day off between each of three shows, so the whole expedition felt like it took about four months. This time I was on my own, save for my secret-weapon, Czech super-impressario to show me the way--and the time seemed to compress into one long day and night. As I type the words "show me the way," the image of Peter Frampton--yeah, "coming alive," unwillingly takes shape in front of me. A queazy, meerschaum-like apparition from my musical palimpsest. Makes me shudder, but not necessarily think... (apologies). 

Last month I got caught up with the rabbits of Dortmund and neglected to mention anything of the magic of Annie. This time it's the charms of Brno. I'm always up for a new city and this place has always been a somewhat exotic spot of ink on a map for me. It's a strong sounding name--like Bruno, (but not Borat)--and I've known some strong Brunos in my life. (Those tracks etched through my aging brain again...) I don't start in Brno, but actually in Uherske Hradiste--deep in Moravia. I fly to Vienna, where I meet our Botanica bassist, Jason--who happens to be from Philadelphia--at the Philadelphia Restaurant, an old man's bar by the Meidling Train station. Possibly the ugliest and least inviting point of departure in all Europe. The train is half an hour late, so I expect it to be equally late at my destination: Stare Mesto. Old city--the old city of Uherske Hradiste, I'm told. Somehow, though, the mighty engines of our iron horse have made up most of the time and the Stare Mesto sign suddenly appears at my window, the train slowing down in the middle of a field while, half asleep, I unplug my computer and collect all the crap I've thrown around the compartment. I make it off the train just as it starts moving again. A definite victory--the first of the day. (And you should all know by now that A Victory A Day Keeps Suicide Away). 

Green is the color of my 24 hours in Uherske Hradiste. The deep, wet green of the grass and the trees; the garden-of-eden green of the festival posters; the green of the "Irish Pub and Hotel" where I stay. And most impressively, the green of the local killer absinthe. The Irish pub looks genuine enough, but features the distinctly un-irish yet delicious garlic and egg soup, which I have for breakfast at 4 PM--about 24 hours after the absinthe. Fortunately, or sadly, depending on how the mood might strike, the exchange of clothing and pissing on the bar didn't involve me, though exactly how I got form the absinthe to the soup is anybody's guess. It's a big stage in front of a small crowd. The looper works. The Omnichord works. The mask works particularly well. It's a veritable glut of victories. As if it weren't enough to get to sing "I'm Your Man" every  night, I get to enhance the out-of-body experience for myself as well as the crowd. Plus it's bloody hot behind that painted paper maché. A couple degrees short of suffocation.  I ask the promoter who else is playing and he informs me it's a Prague band called "Kill the Dandies." I nod as if I had a fucking clue who they are--this bunch of exceedingly friendly rockers, dandies all. Sonia (from KtD) and I, work it out that there's not more than one degree of rock 'n roll separation between us. She implies that I'm influenced by the Berlin cabaret scene, by which she means Nick Cave et al, though my response to that is cabawhat and where's the scene? In any case, as far as I'm concerned Nick Cave ruined music in Berlin for at least a generation or three by spawning legions of 2nd rate fans, disciples and imitators masquerading as musicians. (This is not a slag at KtD, who definitely are not part of that unfortunate milieu.) And in case anybody's wondering, it's not meant as a slag against Cave either. But before I get into real trouble, it's probably time to move on to Brno. Along the short way, I enjoy the first of three amazing Czech deserts: the apple strudel with all the trimmings. 

In Brno, there's another band of sweethearts from Prague to share the stage with: Lealoo. Eva struts some sexy, red stilettos. They also sound like Garbage, by which I mean Butch Vig's band, whose first album I really liked, though when I mention this from the stage it doesn't quite make it in translation and I get a menacing response from clench fisted Eva in the audience. Seems Garbage isn't the most beloved band in this neck of the woods. The rapid expansion of my Czech vocabulary definitely goes over better. Butter is my word of the day: Maszlo. Which I'll never forget, as in "Hey Laszlo, can I have some more Maszlo?" Masso, "meat," rounds out my six word Czech lexicon. you should always know how to say what you don't want or can't have. I have a Moravian honey cake. That, I definitely want.

In Prague, it feels as if I'm once again at the center of the universe. Back in civilization, for better or worse. Thankfully, though it's a typically overrun afternoon on the Charles Bridge, most of the tourists don't venture off the literally beaten path and I find a moment of voluptuous peace by a canal moments away from disco hell. I remember being here in 1986 when touts wearing suits and hats from apparatchik central casting worked the train stations renting rooms for Deutschmarks. It worked on me. 10 marks a night. Make your own breakfast. Yes, the bread in the pantry was dark green with mold. People fished for carp off the bridge. But the stillness of the city transcended the local depression and for someone from the other side, it seemed as if the sound of Mozart's opera premieres were still echoing off the old stones. The statues on the bridge are, for the most part, as black now as they were then. Ultimately gothic--especially with the fat spiders bivouacked on their shoulders, just below the swarming fly halos. Miniature scenes of unparalleled predatory frenzy. I had cinnamon donuts with raspberry sauce, though on the menu it said they were pancakes. The menu also said the anchovies in my salad were soused.

After my walk, I went into one of those buildings from the time before North America had seen a bible and played a show on a sleek Petrof baby grand. I started with Leonard this time. Ended with the Linkous, (Mark), instead. A fat dose of new and old Wallfisch in between. Then it was time to take the Lufthansa back to Dortmund. 

In 1996 I joined Tod A's first Firewater incarnation, partly on the strength of a phone conversation where three things were determined: We both loved dogs, Peggy Lee's "Is That All There Is" and Milan Kundera. There's actually a seventh Czech word in my knowledge bank--Litost--from the eponymous chapter in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Sitting on my terrace, staring out at where the trees once were, my recent Czech memories begin the process of transforming themselves into the Litost of that aging palimpsest of mine. 

ON & OFF THE ROAD #3

Next to the Opera House and the Stadt Theater building in Dortmund, Germany, is a corrugated, metal structure resembling an abandoned boxcar, or the foreman's office on a large building site. An echo of the Opera's retro-futuristic curved green roof has been tacked onto one end, a completely useless attempt at architectural unity. This is the "Kinder Oper." (Not a nicer opera, but an opera for kids). Contemplating this structure next to the larger buildings in the complex inspires something of the Spinal Tap Stonehenge effect. That somebody hauls a Peavy guitar amp out the door as I'm staring at the thing completes the impression. And then I notice the activity across the spotty, dry grass. Darting everywhere are rabbits. Not one or two rabbits, but five, six--maybe a dozen just at first glance. They scurry under the Kinder Oper; hop out the other side. Stop in the middle of the lawn to sniff and nibble. Everywhere I look there are Rabbits. They practically run into each other, there are so many of them. Maybe it is a kinder opera...  

Over the course of the week in Dortmund, every time I walk past the Kinder Oper on the way to my new office, the rabbits are there, happily ignoring me. If only they knew how good they make me feel. I ask my friend and future boss, the new artistic director of the theater, if he knows about the rabbits and he says no. Am I the only one that sees the rabbits? Are they the bunnies in my head? I see the rabbits at the restaurant around the corner where I go for daily cappucino; I see them in the park by the subway. Dortmund is lousy with bunnies! What a wonderful surprise. The only place I don't see them is by the meth clinic--right across the street from the theater offices. My walk to work every day will end with hookers and hares. An appropriately thespian right of passage, somehow. 

Dortmund. The Pittsburgh of Europe. I've been saying this for a while now--since I've known that's where home base will be for the next year or two. Nobody knows where Dortmund is. They always ask where the nearest big city is. I answer "Duesseldorf," but Dortmund's actually bigger. It's just that nobody's ever heard of it. The forgotten city. Everybody in Germany seems to have heard of Pittsburgh, though. Or maybe they just think it sounds funny. There are still people in Dortmund because they had nowhere else to go after all the jobs disappeared. Unlike Detroit, for example, where fields and forests are reclaiming the land we used to build the machines we needed to raze more fields and forests. They're farming in downtown Detroit these days. But not in Pittsburgh or Dortmund. Incredibly, there are still people in Pittsburgh too--down by the river. Enjoying all the new, yuppie cafes and bars. Dortmund hasn't quite made it there yet, but is definitely in the process of trying. 

Andy Warhol is from Pittsburgh. On the amazing album, Songs For Drella--(maybe not quite the best thing Lou ever did, but definitely, outside of the viola drones with the Stooges, the highpoint of John Cale's career)--Andy's exodus from Pittsburgh is well documented. One of the reasons the people stay in Dortmund is probably because Germany is--or has been--slightly more inclined than my little country--to take care of those who can't quite take care of themselves anymore. I don't really know why they stay in Pittsburgh. Maybe it's because people who mine and forge for a living are proud of what they've done and justifiably a bit tired when they're done doing it for a lifetime. 

Germans--Europeans in general--are less likely to move; change cities, that is, than us peripatetic North Americans. We'll follow the money--and our whims--wherever the trail may lead. Europeans are always amazed that there's no place for an address in a U.S.  passport. I just spent a week looking for an apartment in Dortmund and the first thing I learned is that there are no kitchens in German apartments. There's a water pipe sticking out of a wall. That's it. IN the U.S., the kitchen comes with the place, on the assumption that you literally cannot take the kitchen sink with you when you skip town. Let alone the oven and the fridge. Not so in Deutschland. Don't these folks ever have to steal away in the middle of the night to set up a new life in some god-forsaken Bavarian village? Well--they do move--more and more, but they still don't think they do.  So--no kitchens. And no closets either. You have to carry your dresser on your back too. That'll teach you to go live somewhere else where you don't belong! 

They're planning a production in Dortmund called Heimat Unter Erde. A look at the the recent history of the city from the deep perspective of the mines--and the tens of thousands of immigrant workers who went down all those miles and if they were lucky enough to come back up, stayed in town beyond there allotted time. Everyone's black a mile underground. So one afternoon I got to play with a Turkish Saz virtuoso and then an hour later I was in a church meeting room 3 meters in front of 30, drunk 70 year-old men singing mining songs in four-part harmony. I'm supposed to be the one that brings 'em all together. 

Also last week I met a guy who plays guitar in a theater production of Songs For Drella that's a big hit in the "Ruhr Gebiet"--at the big theater in the next town over from Dortmund. The Germans turn that album into a musical and at least some of those old miners from the Pittsburgh of Europe love it. Go figure. 

ON & OFF THE ROAD #2

Dennis Hopper died a couple days ago. 

In Los Angeles you can live off the crumbs of the film industry. Even the music business is really just the retarded nephew of the big guy on the hill counting the weekend gross. Movies being the universe--there are the galaxies of cars, music and porn. So I wrote throwaway tunes for Roger Corman's soft-core flics; sold porn videos; hung out at Cheetahs to see my best friend's girlfriend dance and rented out all the old cars in my driveway to movie shoots in the desert. I spent seven years in America's version of the city of lights and ended up on a hill overlooking a lake that was really a reservoir. There's no rust out there in the desert, so the steel lasts longer, but eventually all the cars will die and the middle of the last century will become entirely virtual. 

We were the only tenants up there on our hill and our home-owning neighbors complained about the oil stains on the road. The road, that's right--not our driveway. We had nowhere to put the '55 seafoam green Studebaker; the 73 Riviera; the '69 paint-stripped Barracuda, (the rolling equivalent of a homeless ex-con on a bender); the '61 Benz 190 with the Chevy V8 engine that popped a wheelie if you tapped the gas too hard. And my personal vehicle, Donna, as in Donna Reed--(oh it was a Wonderful Life)--a canary colored Plymouth Volare with pushomatic, glow-in-the-dark transmission buttons. We had nowhere to put the family jewels, because the garage was the recording studio. So when Love and Rockets moved in, Daniel Ash parked one of his Harleys right out front with a big-ass pirate flag and we never heard from the grease-stricken neighbors again.  

But I'm getting ahead of myself. To get to heaven I had to take the highway. Even route 66. So I bought a a '73 Buick Electra 455, (biggest power plant GM ever built), from a one-eyed, one-legged homeless Vietnam vet in a Massachusetts parking lot. I knew the car was shit, but the 8-track tape player worked and it came complete with Dr. John's Night Tripper and the first ZZ Top album. Definitely worth 600 bucks. After the fucker broke down on the George Washington bridge, the garage we towed it to called her Christine, but eventually she made it to the promised land where I sold her to a friend of mine--and the undercarriage promptly fell out of the chassis. I guess she liked me. Way before the house on the hill, the studio and all those other cars, I ended up in a room in Louise Brooks' old house-on Ivar Street, just up the hill from Hollywood and Vine. And taking the bus. Amidst the piss 'n puke environment of the 101 Freeway underpass at the bottom of my block, someone had long ago painted Louise's portrait on the cement. Not graffiti, but an urban gallery; the the reception desk to my hill. The neo-gothic house had been extended over the years, til her bloated length hovered precariously over the shifting dirt of another L.A. hill. A fat backside, but the face she turned to Ivar was all svelte columns and elegant archways. My room was small, but the the black & white tiled bathroom alone was bigger than at least two New York City apartments I've lived in. 

The window next to where I planted my bed opened onto a ledge-cum-balcony that I was never quite sure would support me for too long, but ended up making it through the earthquake that cracked a 10cm wide gash down the length of the street. Directly across the lane in the next house was a window where a long-haired naked man, with the generally beefy body type of Harvey Keitel, often came to stare. Usually either when my girlfriend was around; or when it was pretty clear that he had company of his own to show off. I eventually became acquainted with the aging Lothario next door. Virgil Frye was quick to let us in on his life story, as is so often the case when time has already made it clear that the first chapters are sure to be the best. Vrigil hit the coast from the Midwest with his buddy Dennis in the 50's. They were the same--peas in a pod; ready to take over where Jimmy Dean would leave off. Except that Hopper got all the breaks. Why Dennis actually acted in Giant and Rebel without a Cause and his pal Virgil only got on the Easy Rider payroll as a makeup artist is anybody's guess. Life just isn't fair sometimes... Actually Frye did make an uncredited appearance in the classic film, and hell, JD Souther never got credited as screenwriter, so who's to say Frye wasn't screwed as well? 

Virgil ended up playing bit rolls in B grade horror movies; a TV show here and there; and stage-plays, something that in Hollywood is about two rungs below porn and maybe just above busboy at Duke's. But he was Dennis Hopper's old friend. And most importantly, he'd sired one of the better known set of breasts of the second half of the American Century, otherwise known as Punky Brewster, aka Soleil Moon Frye. So Virgil taught acting classes, mostly populated by contemporaries of his daughter. And stared at us through his drapeless window. When I heard last week that Hopper had died, I immediately thought of Virgil and googled him to see what had become of my almost-famous neighbor. It turns out that his daughter made an acclaimed documentary about her Alzheimer stricken father; partially an attempt at reclaiming a relationship before the fog surrounding her dad thickened for good. 

I also learned that Virgil, before heading west for fame and fortune, had actually been  a Golden Gloves boxing champ. Not an inconsequential achievement. But clearly not enough for Frye--even if it might have meant a clearer route to a more fulfilling chapter two. 

Years ago, when my ASCAP checks finally started paying for more than  a tofu-dog, I noticed that some music I'd written got placed in a Punky Brewster segment. We were somehow connected, the Fryes and me, at the nether reaches of the Hollywood circulatory system. Not just in the wannabe world of a car-less, dream filled Hollywood hill.