Rock On (2 page)

There is one sister unit in our little family, who was sixteen when I was ten, which meant one thing: she had the means to buy more records than me. She also had a social life that got her out of the house regularly, which meant I could sneak any new records she had from her bedroom. Elton John's
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, and then there were three
by Genesis, or
Led Zeppelin IV
— I'd play them in my room on my little record player, and then put them back perfectly so as to leave no clue by the time she got back home. And if you listen to Led Zeppelin at an early enough age, you have to turn it up and picture yourself being in the band and impressing your sister and her cute friends. I would be lying if I didn't admit that, like a lot of the other 18,321,745 grade school kids that the census bureau says were living in the U.S. suburbs in the seventies, my early love of music led to daydreaming that maybe one day I'd be a rock star myself. Maybe you were doing this sort of daydreaming, too. Your resume may even look a lot like my own. A brief review:

• Fourth and fifth grade: Started/lead several lip-synch bands that rehearsed and mimed the bittersweet radio songs of 1976 in Jason Mace's garage. We played brooms and gardening tools, and our set list was basically whatever was on the radio at the moment we turned it on, mostly mid-tempo odes to lost love written by men I always pictured as bearded, very tan, and wearing white slacks and maroon silk shirts with the first four buttons undone. Men who wrote mostly of meeting new lovers while still lamenting a recent divorce. Sometimes the metaphors for lost love were thick and guarded: a horse
running free and not returning when its name was called, for instance. Women back then sang a little more openly and less metaphorically of the rigors of love and lust, preferring scenarios of, say, magic men with magic hands, and hoping their mothers could try, try, try to understand that he's a magic man. We lip-synched those songs just as emphatically as the ones from a man's point of view. Jason especially identified with the material back then because his mom and Bob were always arguing about whether or not they had made a big mistake in getting remarried after both having had first marriages that wound up in divorce. During the more emotional parts of songs I'd look over at Jason to make sure he was okay. To lighten things up, I'd give him one of those mid-song nods and knowing grins that you see musicians give each other on stage occasionally.

• Seventh grade: Nearly flawless gig as DJ for Valentine's Day Dance at school, the only real glitch coming when I had to fall back on playing “Stairway to Heaven” three and a half times in a row for reasons I won't go into now, locking peers into roughly twenty-four-minute slow dance. Threats to my welfare were hollered by both boys and girls; even the substitute-teacher chaperone looked pissed by the third time.

• Four-year hiatus after “Stairway” incident: Frankly, I wasn't sure if I'd ever want to work with music again.

• Eleventh Grade: Reevaluated, regrouped, and reemerged at age sixteen with my first band. I played guitar and sang in our power trio. We played at parties. We covered “Repo Man” by Iggy Pop and also played a slightly out-of-tune version of Agent Orange's version of the sixties surf classic
“Wipeout.” Our set list took about seventeen minutes to play through, and then we would simply play it over and over again at different tempos.

• After high school: Worked a bookstore job and the requisite record-store job, and later took a job in a wholesale record warehouse near Sacramento. Then I quit the northern-California agricultural-town rat race and drove to Austin, Texas, to finally get serious about starting a career as a singer-songwriter. I returned from Austin to my previous record store job after about a week and a half of what I like to think was a matter of being ahead of my time.

Upon returning, I moved to Seattle, Washington. There I worked a rash of food service jobs and became the drummer in a band of overeducated local girls who had somehow slid into their early thirties as unskilled laborers who loved to drink, with the exception of the bassist, who had a job as an engineer and helped design cranes for NASA. She paid the rehearsal space rent. Aside from the brainy one, our skill sets were a perfect match; I hadn't played drums since I was nine, and these girls had never played guitars in their lives. Together, the four of us found a drunken hobbyist's pleasure in staggering start-and-stop through our dissonant sonic spasms of crude, unformed songs — like stroke victims in some kind of groundbreaking, unorthodox rehabilitation program that involved trying to play electric guitars. We broke up after five rehearsals.

Settling surprisingly comfortably into the hobbies of mild regret, eating poorly, and financial insecurity, I took to hosting a morning radio show at the community radio station on
the University of Washington campus. Contrary to popular assumption by my on-air colleagues, I was not a student of the university.

After a few years of embracing life as a pessimist who enjoyed isolation and the seduction of low-grade depression coupled with an awkward lust for drinking too much and then wandering around town until drowsy, I took an uncharacteristic leap of faith out of my comfort zone and moved to New York. And just like clockwork, twenty-nine years after I started sneaking Led Zeppelin records from my sister Trish's bedroom, I got a phone call from Led Zeppelin's record label. They wanted me! Well, they wanted me to take an office job in their marketing department since I had, you know, laid off of the “songwriting” and had wound up working as a copywriter in New York advertising and marketing agencies.

By the time this record label job rolled around, I had gotten honest enough with myself to admit that I was only in three bands in my entire life; one of them was the fourth-grade lipsynch band, the other that short-lived quartet of depressed girls . . . so, one band, really. Maybe the music thing wasn't panning out. Maybe the next best thing would be taking this job and working behind the scenes of rock and roll. I tried to forget those daytime TV ads for a technical institute that I had seen all through my childhood; ads with mustachioed men and plain Midwestern women hunched over mixing boards, staring through a plate-glass control-room window at a recording studio full of musicians who were, for some reason, always wearing outdated, slightly disco-inspired, semiformal attire. The musicians were giving the thumbs-up sign to these ordinary folks to indicate that some knobs and levers had been adjusted to their liking. The ad asked you to “Imagine yourself
in an exciting career behind the scenes of rock and roll!” and every time it came on when I was a teenager watching TV after school I used to look at the people in the little glass control booth and think, “Jesus. Look at these poor bastards. Trapped behind the glass and giddy to have even made it that far.”

One day on the phone, right around the time I had taken my job behind the scenes of rock and roll, I asked my mom if she thought I would've had a shot at the big time if she and my dad had only encouraged my music a little more when I was younger. Her reply made me feel loved beyond measure, but it also confirmed my worst suspicions: “I dressed you up as the guy from Kiss at Halloween every year. Dad and I helped you get the drums you had been saving for. And then we got you a guitar and some lessons once you were a teenager. Frankly, I don't know what more we could've done.”

Come on, it's time to go to the office.

I'm on the subway Tuesday and it's so damn early that I feel the light wave of nausea usually associated with predawn air travel. It's 9:20
AM
and the only reason I'm up is because I have to attend my first marketing meeting at ten. After retreating from the nine-to-five New York advertising grind and mainly working freelance from home for the last couple of years, getting to a building in midtown and into a meeting by ten in the morning seems like just another load of crazy talk from folks who've been living well within the staid constraints of tax laws and steady employment.

I get off at Rockefeller Center, walk up Sixth Avenue, and enter the revolving doors at 1290 to catch the elevator going up. Off the elevator and through the twenty-fourth-floor lobby. Aside from the sort of spaceship feel of the lobby up here — with its huge wall of video screens, its unmarked magnetized frosted glass doors, and its hallway lit with recessed floor lighting — the place resembles every advertising or marketing agency I have ever set foot in as a freelancer, except that the ad agencies were a little . . .
less
conservative than this? What? Ah, but look.
There
. In the first office you pass, there's a hint of the rock-and-roll experience that awaits: an electric guitar mounted to the wall with about three hundred laminated backstage passes on lanyards hanging off of the neck. Okay, so maybe there's something vaguely eighties about that particular installation, and also about this particular
cream-colored completely unscathed Fender Stratocaster guitar with matching unscathed cream-colored pickguard — as well as the forty-something suburban-dad rocker who looks up at you as you briefly regard the guitar and backstage passes as you walk by. He looks so at home in his otherwise sensibly decorated office that it feels like I've peeked into his dining room at home. The whole vibe is a bit like a “Don't get him started about the time he got to introduce Huey Lewis and the News at Giants Stadium” situation. But still, you can't argue that electric guitars are often used in creating or performing rock-and-roll music, and I think the idea is that backstage passes are reserved for important and exciting people — therefore, I say to you: I am at the beginning of an important and exciting job on the front lines of rock and roll. I keep moving down the hall, down to the conference room in the corner. This is where the magic happens, right? Right. Yes. No matter what, so shut up, because I've been waiting since the day I turned ten — twenty-five years and seven months almost to the day — for something to finally make sense about adults and adulthood, so let me have this. I've been sitting at life's banquet table listening to losing raffle numbers and staring at my handful of tickets for a while now, so throw me the door prize, God.

I meet my assistant outside the conference room. Amy. She addresses a few things that we need to talk about: Do I want paper or electronic phone messages, or both? Do I need my e-mail printed out at the end of each day to be read on the way home? Wednesdays are her busy days because she has to do the TBS reports (I wish I could tell you, but I never found out myself). She can schedule car services for me if I'm working late, or I can also just wait if I don't know how long I'll be working and then get them myself with the vouchers on
her desk if she's not around. If I need help or suggestions for my boss's birthday, let her know. Also, she takes notes in this marketing meeting and then e-mails them.

Wait. An assistant?

I spent my twenties barely dodging bullets like nametags and hairnets and now I have an assistant? Okay, fine; I didn't dodge the nametag bullet. Anyway, all you need to know about Amy: a decade younger and somehow a decade smarter with freshly scrubbed New England blonde looks that hint at summers with a large, well-adjusted family spent mostly at a medium-sized lakehouse — an all-American guise to belie the permanent pistol-hot, whip-smart Saturday night grin and a glint in brown eyes that are hiding anything from a joke to a body. You talk with her for two minutes and all you can think is, “Somewhere a twenty-six-year-old man unwittingly awaits severe heartbreak and the kind of drinking where one ends up weeping alone for hours and then dialing.”

The fact that I have an assistant is too much to process, really, so I stare at her, overwhelmed and saying nothing, hoping I come off as understated and reserved instead of touched by semi-common mental disabilities. After a brief, barely-oxygenated battle with what feels like the soft, sweet, weighty pull of narcolepsy, I manage to suddenly straighten and swiftly motion with my right arm toward the conference-room door, seeming to suggest that we walk in and find our seats for the meeting. I sit down and take a quick inventory of the room:

• Huge conference table surrounded by super-expensive Germanic-looking chairs on rollers that swivel? Check.

• Big glass windows looking out to neighboring skyscrapers and an heir's view of Central Park? Check.

• A life-size cardboard cutout of, well, a totally anonymous boy band who evidently, years ago, failed to become the next Backstreet Boys or 'N Sync and are now faded blueish-green by the sun and left to tower over us? Uh, check.

• Catered coffee, fruit trays, and tiny muffins cut in half to fuel this rocket ride? Check.