Tasteful Nudes: ...and Other Misguided Attempts at Personal Growth and Validation (14 page)

“Let me know if I can ever help with getting that DVD together,” I called out to the Hottest Naked Chick on the Internet as she continued down the street.

I don’t think she heard me but it really doesn’t matter. And as I watched her fade into the distance, I realized that none of it really mattered anyway. Except for one thing: the simple fact that, whenever I’m feeling down or thinking I’m some sort of pathetic and immature loser, I’ll always know that there’s someone somewhere out there who thinks I’m pretty darn great.

And, even better, I can see her naked on the Internet any time I want.

Rocking Me, Rocking You, and Probably Some Other People, Too

Once a year at my Catholic elementary school, they had something called “sports night” where they would play sports highlights reels in the church basement and then get someone from the Cleveland Browns or Indians to come out and tell us wide-eyed kids how getting a good education is the most important thing you could ever do, even more important than playing sports. One year some Cleveland Brown or another told us how he “put his pants on one leg at a time just like everyone else.” I eventually realized he was just trying to illustrate the fact that, despite being a professional athlete, in the end he was just a regular guy like everyone else. But at the time, since I had a habit of putting my pants on two legs at a time while sitting on the edge of my bed, his words only served as further confirmation of something I already knew: I was different.

Deep down inside, in my heart, in my gut, and—perhaps most of all—in my loins, I knew I had a higher calling, one that had nothing to do with being a team player or putting pants on one leg at a time or even wearing pants at all. It was a calling of thunderous guitar riffs, explosive drumbeats, throbbing bass lines, and singers that sounded like Vikings on the goddamn warpath. It was the call of rock.

It all started when my dad bought a copy of
Led Zeppelin IV,
an anomaly in a record collection that consisted mostly of jazz and classical albums. It looked cool and different to me right away. On the cover were weird-looking symbols and some old guy with a bunch of sticks on his back for no apparent reason. By the age of seven, I had learned how to work the record player myself, so one day I dropped the needle down on the Led Zeppelin record and was instantly transformed. I could tell right away that these guys were total badasses, like no one I had ever heard before. And I was certain they could beat up any of the other bands I had been listening to. I wasn’t sure I could even handle being like them, but dammit I wanted to try.

Since I was seven and all, my desire to become like the guys in Led Zeppelin was met mostly with resistance from my parents. For starters, I wasn’t allowed to grow my hair like any of the guys in the band, not even like the bass player John Paul Jones, who, with his face-hugging page boy locks, seemed to have the most second-grade-friendly hairstyle of them all.

“I wanna be a guitar player!” I announced to my dad one day.

“Okay,” he answered. “But you’ll have to take piano lessons for three years first.”

It felt like a prison sentence, but my dad’s thinking was that if I could stick with piano for that long, I would have proven my interest in music was genuine and not just an excuse to get wrapped up in drugs, Satan, and other standard rock stuff. I reluctantly went along with his plan and took piano lessons from one of the neighbors for almost three years to the day, learning compositions by Bach, Beethoven, and other dead guys until my dad finally let me quit. Soon after, I began messing around on my dad’s old nylon-stringed Spanish guitar, slowly figuring out how to play bits of various rock songs by ear, one string at a time. Like most people born to rock, the first thing I learned was the opening riff to “Smoke on the Water” by Deep Purple. The rocker’s instinct to learn this song first is kind of like how a little baby piglet knows to start suckling on a sow’s teat just moments after being born. No one knows how or why it happens—it just does.

This is the thirteen-year-old me with my first electric guitar, just moments before bringing the heat at another school mass. I just realized that I have the same hairstyle now as I did then. I can’t decide whether that’s sad or not.

“Check it out,” I’d say to my younger sister, Katy, before unleashing my best Ritchie Blackmore
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impression. “It’s ‘Smoke on the Water’ by Deep Purple.”

“Can you take that thing into the basement or something?” she’d say. “I’m trying to watch TV.”

As awesome as I thought it was, my family got pretty sick of hearing me play “Smoke on the Water” over and over all day, so—if only to preserve their sanity—my dad arranged for me to take guitar lessons from a guy named Joe who lived a few blocks away. Joe had a Gibson Les Paul guitar just like Jimmy Page
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and his house smelled like cigarettes—a popular rock scent—so I was especially thrilled. And given my extreme rock determination, I worked hard at whatever Joe threw my way.

“Today I am going to show you how to play ‘Stairway to Heaven,’” Joe told me one day. It was like I was a medieval knight being handed the coolest sword of all time or something. I almost wet my pants right there in his living room.

By the end of the summer before eighth grade, I was playing “Stairway to Heaven” and other rock anthems about as well as what could be expected from a thirteen-year-old beating on his dad’s old Spanish guitar. Still, there was only one weapon suitable for doing the kind of rock damage I had in mind: an electric guitar. I was obsessed with the idea of getting one and watched MTV for hours just to see all the guitars the various bands played in their videos. It was like my own version of porn. At the time, Fleetwood Mac had a video where a couple of guys in the band happen upon dozens of electric guitars buried in the desert.

“Why couldn’t they just give one of those guitars to me instead of covering them with sand like that?” I thought. It was an outrage.

Despite Fleetwood Mac basically telling me to go fuck myself in that video, I had improved enough on the guitar by the time eighth grade rolled around that my dad finally took me to buy my first electric guitar. It was shiny and black and I couldn’t wait to bring it to school and start melting faces. Another kid in my grade, Tim, got an electric guitar around that time, too.

“This is ‘Aqualung’ by Jethro Tull,” Tim said to me one day after school, before launching into the song’s legendary opening riff. Even when played by a thirteen-year-old, it sounded like the gateway to Middle-earth. In that moment we both knew that our will to rock simply could not be denied. We soon became best friends and went about staking our rightful claim as guitar gods of the eighth grade.

“I can play ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash,’” one of our classmates might say to us in the lunchroom.

“Yeah, right,” we’d respond, though rarely with actual words. Instead we’d just stare him down with an awesome rock look worthy of Keith Richards or someone else who lived it 24/7 like we did. Rock ’n’ roll was no game to us.

It would have been great to form a band at that time, but since there wasn’t much of a band scene in our elementary school, Tim and I had little choice but to play guitar with a nun named Sister Patrice at school masses instead. It wasn’t exactly the relentless rock onslaught we had envisioned for ourselves, but at least it gave us the chance to play in front of an audience that wasn’t allowed to leave. And once the priest was far enough down the aisle during the closing hymn, we’d usually sneak in a guitar solo or two to keep our chops up.

“Nice job, boys,” Sister Patrice would tell us after mass.

“Yeah, we really nailed it. ‘On Eagle’s Wings’
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was fucking sick today!”

“What?”

“Nothing, Sister.”

School mass or not, it was awesome to be on stage. And if I squinted hard enough it was easy to imagine I was rocking Madison Square Garden instead of the church where I received my First Communion just a few years earlier. By the time high school rolled around, I was bringing a pretty solid amount of heat on the guitar for a fourteen-year-old, not quite face melting, but definitely hair singeing as far as I was concerned.

I ended up playing guitar at mass in high school, too, but by then it was mostly just so I could skip class to practice, which—church music or not—felt like a pretty rock ’n’ roll thing to do. Outside of school, I attempted to form my first “real” rock band. Tim had already joined a group that was busy playing high school dances, pep rallies, and other events where it seemed like a good idea to have someone play Simple Minds’s “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” and other hits of the day. As a result, I was forced to scavenge the lower grades for hungry players to piece together a band. We called ourselves the Good Ol’ Boys after the scene in
The Blues Brothers
where the band plays at a country bar. It seemed like a good idea at the time. And as the self-appointed band leader, I was a taskmaster, a total bastard even, throwing temper tantrums whenever someone hit a wrong note or wasn’t bringing what I felt was an acceptable amount of rock heat.

“Do you think John Bonham
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just stopped playing in the middle of a goddamn verse like that?” I’d yell at the drummer. “Do you?”

I was a loose cannon, even scaring myself sometimes. Making matters worse, I had asked a girl I really liked to play keyboards in the band, a surefire way to get her to like me, I thought. Unfortunately, some of the other guys in the band had the same idea, so between me screaming like Buddy Rich
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all the time and every guy in the band ogling the only girl in the band, the band broke up before ever actually playing a gig or even making stickers. I was barely sixteen and I was already learning how rock ’n’ roll can be a cruel mistress.

After that two or three weeks straight of nonstop band drama, I decided to strike out on my own as a solo artist, which is to say I mostly just played guitar alone in my bedroom. Occasionally, I’d crank my amp up really loud and force the neighbors to listen.

“David, stop it!” one of my sisters would scream up the stairs. “We got a call from the neighbors again.”

“Fine,” I’d say reluctantly. My bedroom concerts never lasted very long, but they were still enough to satisfy my desperate need for an audience.

After high school, Tim and I decided to attend Fordham University in the Bronx together, ostensibly because it seemed like a fine place to obtain a solid liberal arts education and equip ourselves with the necessary tools to thrive in the real world. In reality, though, we just wanted to form a band together in New York City. Our friend Pat, a drummer, was a year younger than us and still finishing high school at the time. Still, we wanted him to be in our band, so when Pat came to visit us during our freshman year, Tim and I tried to sell him on the idea of going to Fordham.

“Dude, you can buy anything you want at the liquor store off campus and they don’t even ask for ID,” we told him.

“Really?” Pat said in disbelief.

“Yeah, really.”

“Okay, I’m in.”

It worked like a charm, so the following summer back in Cleveland, Tim and I put our band together with Pat in anticipation of him going to school with us in the fall. We talked our friend Gary into being our frontman. Rather than going to the trouble of finding a bass player, Tim and I traded off on bass and guitar. Pat had some pictures of Elvis taped to his drumset, so one night Gary suggested we call ourselves Sons of Elvis. I still can’t decide if it’s the best or worst band name ever, but it stuck.

By the end of the summer, the newly dubbed Sons of Elvis had recorded a four-song demo tape that we were pretty sure contained some of the greatest rock music of all-time. It probably didn’t, but since our plan was to take over the world, we decided not to question it. Come fall, Gary stayed behind in Cleveland. The original plan was to have him just drive to New York and play gigs with us on weekends until Sons of Elvismania kicked in enough to justify him moving. Impetuous youths that we were, however, Pat, Tim, and I ruthlessly kicked him to the curb a couple days after moving back into the dorms. Even worse, we never actually told him he was out of the band—we just assumed he’d figure it out eventually.
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Meanwhile back at Fordham, my and Tim’s friend and classmate Kevin had cool hair, was from Minneapolis, and had seen both the Replacements and Hüsker Dü more times than probably even the guys in those bands. Those seemed like good enough reasons to have him be the new singer in our band, so we started practicing with him in the basement of a pizza place near campus. Within a few weeks, we managed to get ourselves a gig on audition night at CBGB, the legendary rock club that launched the careers of the Ramones, Blondie, the Talking Heads, and just about every other New York band we liked. It felt like a huge milestone to be playing there. And, given our extreme level of both confidence and naivete, we imagined the club would be pretty excited to have us, too.

“Hi, we’re Sons of Elvis,” we announced proudly to the door guy upon our arrival. Rather than light up with excitement like we expected him to, he just stood there and grunted a couple of times, as door guys at clubs are wont to do. The gig itself ended up being a little anticlimactic, too. Not only was the club even darker and danker than it looked in pictures, it also reeked of stale beer and urine of various vintages. And instead of being packed with rockers, punks, dope fiends, and hipsters like we had anticipated, there were maybe two people in the crowd, including the bartender. We didn’t go on until after midnight, which, being a Sunday and all, didn’t seem like a prime slot. But while it might not have been exactly what we had hoped for, we still rocked with enough authority that they agreed to let us come back.