Pulphead: Essays (18 page)

I’ve been a part of virtual seas of screaming sweaty kids before, but to see one from the stage, from just above, to see that many thousand people shaping with their mouths some words you made up in your head one time while you were brushing your teeth (needless to say, I was trying to imagine I’d written them), that was heady. “Guns and RO-SES, Guns and RO-SES” … Axl was pounding with the base of his mike stand on the stage in time to the chant. A kid with a beard looked at us, me and the model and her friend, every ten minutes or so, put his hands on his ears, and mouthed the word
pyro.
Then we were supposed to put our hands on our ears, because the explosion was about to take place ten feet away. Sometimes the kid would forget—he was busy—and then everyone would go, “Aaaarrrgh!” and clutch their head.

There was a sort of shambling older dude next to me in a newsboy cap, with a guitar in his hands—a tech, I figured. Then he ran out onto the stage, and I was like, “That’s Izzy Stradlin” (founding Guns N’ Roses guitarist).

Izzy, I know, is the reason the band sounds so much better tonight than they did two months ago in New York. He started joining them on three or four songs the very next night, after the debut, and has been showing up periodically ever since. His presence—or to put it more accurately, the presence of another original member of the band—seems to have made the other guys feel more like they are Guns N’ Roses and less like, as
El Diario Vasco
will put it tomorrow,
“una bullanguera formación de mercenarios al servicio del ego del vocalista,”
which means “a noisy bunch of mercenaries in the service of the vocalist’s ego.”

The Spanish press—they weren’t kind. They said Axl was a “grotesque spectacle”; they called him
“el divo”
; they talked about the endless, Nigel Tufnel–esque
“solos absurdos”
that he makes each of the band members play, in an effort to get the audience to invest emotionally in the new lineup (it’s true that these are fairly ill-advised, as has been the rock solo generally since Jimi died). One article says,
“Las fotos de Axl dan miedo,”
which translates literally and, I think, evocatively as “Pictures of Axl give fear,” with his “goatee that gives him the look of a Texas millionaire.” In a crowning moment, they say that he has “the voice of a priapic rooster.” They say he demands his room be covered in Oriental carpets and that he not be required to interact with the other band members. That he arrived on a separate plane. They say security guards have been ordered never to look him in the eye. They say the other band members also hate one another and demand to be placed on different floors of the hotel. They say he’s traveling with a tiny Asian guru named Sharon Maynard, “alias Yoda,” and that he does nothing without her guidance, that she chooses the people he should hire by examining their faces. But mostly the Spaniards are fixated, as have been all the European media gangs on this tour, with the secret oxygen chamber into which he supposedly disappears during the shows and from which he emerges
“más fresco que una lechuga”
—fresher than a head of lettuce.

I can’t confirm or deny the oxygen thing, and it’s hard to say whether the constant mentions of it in the press are evidence of its being real or just a sign that people are recycling the same rumor. The manager of a Hungarian band called Sex Action, which opened for G N’ R, claims to have seen the device itself, but Hungarians make up tales like that for entertainment.

What I can tell you, based on my model-side vantage, is that there is a square cell entirely covered in black curtains just to the rear of stage left. You cannot see as much as a crack of light through the curtains, and I tried. Axl runs into this thing about fifteen times during the course of a show. Sometimes he emerges with a new costume on—makes sense—but sometimes he doesn’t. Sometimes he goes in there when one of the guys is soloing or something—makes sense—but sometimes he goes in there at a moment when it’s really distracting not to have him onstage. I do not know whether Sharon Maynard is in this cell. I do not know what he does in there. If he’s huffing reconstituted gas, I don’t know whether it’s in a Michael Jackson “This is good for me” sort of way or if he has a legitimate lung problem. I don’t know anything about what goes on in the cell, only that it exists and that being in there is important to Axl.

Overall, I can’t agree with my fellow ink-stained wretches in the Old World about this show. Axl is sounding fuller and fuller. Every now and then the sound guy, just to make sure the board is calibrated, pushes the vocal mike way up in the mix, and we hear nothing but Axl, and the notes are on. Nor is he fat at all. In fact, he looks pretty lithe. At one point, he puts on a rather skimpy T-shirt and sprints from one end of the stage to the other, and it’s the sprint of the cross-country runner he used to be. Dana Gregory told me Axl used to run everywhere. Just run and run. Dana Gregory said there was one time out west when G N’ R played in a stadium that had a track around it, and Axl just started sprinting around the track during a song. When a security guard, believing him to be a crazed fan, tried to tackle him, Axl kicked the guy in the face. “That happened ten feet in front of me,” Gregory said. And now here the bastard was, ten feet in front of me. The moon looked like she was yelling for help because some dark power was erasing her side. They brought out a piano so that he could do “November Rain,” and the way they positioned the piano, he was facing me directly. Like we were sitting across a table from each other. This is as close as I ever got to him. And what I noticed at this almost nonexistent remove was the peace in his features as he tinkled out the intro. Absolute peace. A warm slackness to the facial muscles way beyond what Botox can do, though I’m not saying it didn’t contribute. His face was for now beyond the reach of whatever it is that makes him crazy.

After the final encore, he and the rest of the band ran down a ramp, into the open door of a waiting van. Heavy men in black ran alongside them like drill instructors. The van squealed away, taking the model with it. Big, heavy black cars pulled out alongside the van. And then it was quiet. The Basque country. Next morning the flags were still flying by the river, the press was preparing the scathing reviews, but Axl was gone.

*   *   *

They were the last great rock band that didn’t think there was something a bit embarrassing about being in a rock band. There are thousands of bands around at any given time that don’t think rock is the least bit funny, but rarely is one of them good. With G N’ R, no matter how sophisticated you felt yourself to be about pop music (leaving aside for now the paradoxical nature of that very social category), you couldn’t entirely deny them. They were the first band I got to be right about with my older brother. It was that way for a lot of people in my generation. All my youth, my brother had been force-feeding me my musical taste—“Def Leppard is shit; listen to the Jam”—and now there was finally one band I wouldn’t have to live down; and I recall the tiny glow of triumph, blended with fraternity, that I felt when one day he said, “Dude, you were right about Guns N’ Roses. That’s a good record.” That was
Appetite
, of course. Things got strange after that.

You read things that say Nirvana made Guns N’ Roses obsolete. But Guns N’ Roses were never made obsolete. They just sort of disintegrated.

Closer to the case is that G N’ R made Nirvana possible. When you think about the niche that Nirvana supposedly created and perfected—a megaband that indie snobs couldn’t entirely disavow, no matter how badly they wanted to—G N’ R got there first. Or almost there. They dressed silly. They didn’t seem to know the difference between their good songs and their crap songs. But we have to remember, too, how they came along at a time when bands with singers who looked like Axl and thrust their hips unironically, and lead players who spread their legs and reeled off guitar-god noodling weren’t supposed to be interesting, melodically or culturally or in any other way. G N’ R were. They were also grotesque and crass and stupid sometimes, even most of the time. Even almost all of the time. But you always knew you were seeing something when you saw them.

Shouldn’t the band just get back together? Don’t they know how huge that’d be? Dana Gregory told me Slash and Izzy will never play full-time with Axl again: “They know him too well.”

I don’t know him at all. Maybe if his people had let me talk to him, he’d have bitten and struck me and told me to leave my fucking brats at home, and I could transcend these feelings. As it is, I’m left listening to “Patience” again. I don’t know how it is where you are, but in the South, where I live, they still play it all the time. And I whistle along and wait for that voice, toward the end, when he goes,
Ooooooo, I need you. OOOOOOO, I need you
. And on the first
Ooooooo
, he finds this tissue-shredding note. It conjures the image of someone peeling his own scalp back, like the skin of a grape. I have to be careful not to attempt to sing along with this part, because it can make you sort of choke and almost throw up a little bit. And on the second
OOOOOOO
, you picture just a naked glowing green skull that hangs there vibrating gape-mouthed in a prison cell.

Or whatever it is you picture.

AMERICAN GROTESQUE

The first American revolution was fought over socialism, in 1609. This is rarely mentioned. Even before slavery and the Indian genocides, it’s our founding schism.

In that year, a ship called the
Sea Venture
was wrecked off the coast of Bermuda. Shakespeare based
The Tempest
in part on her story. She’d been on her way to relieve the struggling infant Jamestown colony in Virginia. So the ship hadn’t even reached here yet—that’s how early this was.

Among the passengers were several of separatist tendencies, the Brownists and Familists, whose ideas about society and Christianity had been shaped by the radical sectarian movements that rose up before the English Civil War. These were the parents, then, of the Levellers, Diggers, and Quakers (the people you read about in Christopher Hill’s 1972 classic,
The World Turned Upside Down
). Most of those movements contained at least some communitarian element.

The passengers made it ashore and right away set to work building another ship.

Some of them did. The others said, What are we doing? Why are we killing ourselves to get to Jamestown, where they’ll put us to work as colonial drones until we starve or get eaten by heathens, when we have everything we need on this island? Fresh fruit, seafood, plenty of space. Let us live here in common, worshipping God and sharing the bounty of the earth, and no man shall be master to any other.

Nor was there any indigenous population in Bermuda. It was
terra pura
, pure soil.

What happened? The ones who intended to go to Jamestown tried to imprison, banish, and execute the ones who wanted to stay. The latter ran off into the forest.

The governor killed one of their leaders, a man named Henry Paine, to set an example. He wanted to hang him, but Paine begged to be shot, as more befitting a gentleman. His last recorded words were “The governor can kiss my arse.” Those were his exact words.

In the end, almost everyone went to Jamestown and perished.

*   *   *

Today is September 12, 2009. We are marching.

Actually, at this moment we are massing around a parade float that will guide us from Freedom Plaza to the steps of the Capitol building.

You rarely see a lone parade float, one that’s not in a line with others. It gives this thing the look of a ship on a sea of people. The sea is us. (In a different mood it might look like a hayride wagon gone wrong and run into a mob.)

A woman calls to us from the wagon-ship. She’s about sixty; we don’t see her well. She has a microphone, but the sound system it’s connected to can’t compete with this level of crowd noise, so we don’t hear much. Another day, this would be annoying. Today it’s thrilling. We’re too many even for ourselves, and more are coming. As many of the signs say, silent majority no more.

The woman introduces someone; she says we may have seen him on the Internet. In the past week or so, he’s become a YouTube sensation. He recorded himself at home with his webcam, just talking, speaking from his heart about what he feels is happening to his nation, the trouble it’s headed toward if good people don’t make a stand. He’s a brown-haired man in his thirties. In the video, he said something, used a phrase that resonated. If you’ve seen it, you know the phrase; some of us haven’t seen it and can’t hear well enough to catch the phrase today, but we feel the tone. Something like: “I want my America back.” Or, “What happened to my America?”

A guy behind me is holding an ingenious sign he’s made. He’s cut out the mouth from a giant cardboard poster of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s face, creating a hole, a gaping maw, and attached a bag to the back of it, like a corn hole at the fair. He’s handing out Lipton tea bags to people and urging them to “tea-bag Nancy Pelosi.” People are doing it and laughing, even ladies. Pelosi, with her giant crazy eyes, gulps the tea bags eagerly.

It’s only fair. Liberals made fun of us because, at first, some of us didn’t know what “tea-bagging” meant—that it meant dipping your testicles into a woman’s or, if you tend that way, another fella’s open mouth—and a few of us, the older ones, may have referred to ourselves for a brief span as “tea-baggers,” in ignorance and in innocence. Now we’re turning the joke back on them. No one with a sense of humor gets hurt.