Author: Larry Jones

It was a nice, big stage.

When I was young, trying to make a career of music, I rarely got to play on such a big stage, for such a large crowd. Often I found myself on cramped little bandstands like the narrow little strip of wood at The Flying Jib in Redondo Beach, where I was playing hard rock for two weeks and standing so close to the crash cymbal that a whole range of high frequencies were permanently canceled from my right ear. On the other hand, that’s where I met Diane. But I’ll tell that another time.

Now I was standing with my four-piece band on a stage big enough for a medium-sized orchestra, letting Kevin the sound guy make a few last-minute adjustments, and looking out over an audience of maybe a hundred music lovers, most of whom had arrived in the last fifteen minutes. I was hoping they were music lovers.

It’s hard to explain why I started this band. I quit the business in the mid-eighties, because I needed money and I needed to get away from the near occasion of sin. I was deep in the hole to several banks and the IRS, and I was a bad, bad boy, another story for another time. I had produced a five-year succession of high-quality products, I was working with the best musicians, drinking Stoli by the quart and taking the best drugs. I felt like a rock star. I was this close.

But I didn’t know how to sell it, and I was too selfish to let anyone else sell it for me. In the end I was addicted, depressed, frustrated, angry. I walked away from the whole thing. What the hell, I thought. I can do it all again when I feel like it. Turns out I didn’t feel like it for a long time, and when I woke up, clean and refreshed, the train was gone.

I lived without it for years. I discovered I was married. I had responsibilities. I got a job. I used to call them “day jobs,” but this one went on and on, day and night, night and day. I was wearing neckties, commuting, taking vacations, buying life insurance. In some ways I was back from the dead. In other ways I was dead.

After maybe ten years I started to throw a big party every year, inviting a lot of musicians to come and jam with me. It was a huge thrill for me. I’d re-string the Strat, stock in a lot of beer and burgers and we’d party all night. It would take days to recover from these, and then I’d be a drone again for another year.

One day I found myself shopping for a new guitar. I don’t remember how it started, but I just felt like I needed a new guitar, even though I was hardly playing at all. Once I found the Blackjack and fell in love again, I wondered if a new amp would help the sound any. You can read that story if you click on the link, but let’s just say I ended up with a new guitar amp, and after that I had to find some guys to play with, because, well, that’s what you do with a new electric guitar and amplifier.

I didn’t give the process a lot of thought as I was doing it: re-equipping myself, getting back in practice, finding some players to work with, booking time at rehearsal studios, making an audition CD and finally landing on this stage, looking into the lights, listening to the room hum. But when I think about it now and try to explain it to myself, what I think is that I just didn’t want to die as a drone. I’m not that dour nine-to-five guy shuffling papers. I’ve done it for a long time, but it’s not really me at that desk. I’m an artist. I’m a happy goofball who loves making noise, who’s been there, done that, and wants to share the joy.

Playing rock’n’roll for people is a major rush. Those who think it’s maybe not quite as exciting as skydiving — you should have been there Wednesday night. At ten after eight (I’m always late) I went up to my microphone. My heart was beating very hard and fast. I thought the thumping might be visible through my shirt. The audience seemed to have doubled in size, but I’m sure that was just my imagination. I said “Hi everybody,” and they said “hi” back. I told them the name of the band. I thanked them for coming to hear us.

Then for two hours we played loud and nasty, soft and sweet. It took only seconds for my butterflies to go away. I was proud of the band. They were just tight enough, just raw enough. Here was all the stuff we’d been working on, coming out as we’d hoped, song after song, rockin’ the house. It might be a stretch to call it a triumph — that’ll happen some other time.

But we owned that room and that crowd for those two hours, and for now, I’ll take that.

Pretty much everything happened as it should have.

I started to get jumpy about ten o’clock in the morning. By noon I had serious butterflies. I started to have ridiculous premonitions, scenarios in which I had forgotten all the lyrics, or forgotten to bring my guitar, or the bass player got sick and couldn’t make it. None of these things were the least bit likely to happen, but once I started to think about them they seemed entirely possible, even probable.

For some reason it seemed like a good idea to drink a whole pot of strong coffee in the middle of the afternoon. I sat in my little home studio with an acoustic guitar, downing mug after mug, arranging and rearranging the set lists. You have to pace each set. Open with an attention-getter, up tempo but not frenetic. Maybe keep it up for one more song, drop into some mid-tempo country-ish stuff, kick it up one time before everybody dozes off, then for song number six, a sweet, sweet ballad. Come out of that with something bright but not too heavy, then close with three rockers in a row, increasing the intensity to a big finish at song number ten. Set one.

Set two. Lather, rinse, repeat. Only two sets tonight.

I get withdrawn as showtime gets near. I remember that now. I don’t feel like talking to anybody who is not directly connected with the gig, about anything except the gig. I don’t do this consciously. It’s just the way I feel.

For a couple of hours I work on my guitar parts, completely revamping the solo on one song. I realize that every time I’ve played it in rehearsal, I didn’t know exactly where I was going with it. Now I do. I start to feel better. I’m prepared, as much as I’m going to get, anyway. You can only prepare so much, I tell myself. Then you have to just do it.

Two o’clock. I load the car. Amplifier, guitar cases, duffel bags full of cables, tuners, foot pedals, microphones, mic stands, guitar stands, amp stands. Stolen milk crate full of more of the same. The familiarity of this — and the physical exertion — temporarily relieve my nerves.

I’ve done this ten thousand times, so why am I nervous?

At the venue four hours before the first set. Due to the vagaries of booking, I don’t know any of the club personnel. A woman I’ve never met unlocks the door, lets me in, turns on the lights. Later she switches on the sound system. More employees arrive, but they are all strangers. We’ve been told that the house sound guy won’t be with us tonight. We’re on our own with a strange board and a huge PA system. The board is easy enough to figure out, but nothing works as expected. There’s no easy way to tell where everything is plugged in to it. The hard way would take more time than we have. There is a rack of digital effects, equalizers and compressors. What’s connected to what? I can’t tell.

I plug the mics into the snake up on the stage and go back to the board. In a few minutes I have the drums up, but the drummer keeps stopping. I can’t find a talkback mic, so I go back up to the stage to tell him to just keep hitting the kick until I tell him to stop. I arrive at the same time as the bass player, who is immediately followed by an extremely irate woman whom I have never seen before. She is angry and yelling that she’s in charge of the sound man and the sound man is in charge of the sound, not us, and she would never allow him to turn things up so loud, there’s only one band who is allowed to play that loud, the Zeppelin tribute band and she refuses to be there on the nights they play, because they are too fucking loud, so we just need to turn down, and right now.

I give her my best smile and tell her that we don’t play loud, we’re a vocal band, the instruments are just accompaniment, but we’re not familiar with the sound system, and things will be better in a minute, as soon as we figure out the equipment. She is not mollified. She wants to be the boss of us, but she goes away, for the time being.

I decide to set up my own stuff on stage. The bass player did sound reinforcement in a past life. I’ll let him deal with it. But when the stage is set and we start again to work on the PA, the first woman approaches and tells us, nicely, that it’s too late for this, customers will soon be here, and anyway why don’t we let Kevin the sound guy handle it at seven when he gets here?

Kevin the sound guy. We thought he wasn’t coming. But he is, after all. This is good news, but still I have to shift gears. The band is pissed off at being yelled at and given the runaround. The bass player is talking loud enough for the bitch crabby lady to hear. No sound check, and he took time off work to be here early.

I don’t want a feud with the help. I get everybody together out of earshot and tell them that, for tonight, we are partners with all these people, these strangers. If we do well, they do well. We have to entertain, and they have to help us. Together, our job is to create a big room full of happy customers, enjoying the music and spending money. If that happens — and I know it will — the crabby lady and Kevin the sound guy and all the rest of them will be our best friends, and we’ll all be happy.

Sweating like a bride and nervous as a pig, I dash home to shower and change. I get back to the club at seven. Kevin is not there.

I tune a guitar and put it on a stand on stage, then tune another one just in case. I decide to work the room.

I’m surprised at how many people have showed up. It’s a big room. There won’t be a full house, but jeez, do this many people actually want to hear us? I go from table to table in the big, darkened bar, schmoozing, smiling, thanking. I meet everybody’s friends and spouses, and the names go in one ear and out the other. I never used to do this. I think I thought it was somehow beneath me. I know now that these people are the bosses. They can’t tell me what to play or how to play it, but they can go away and never come back, and I’m determined not to let that happen. I’ll play my ass off for those that care, and put so much butter on the rest of them they won’t even be able to get up and leave.

Kevin shows up twenty minutes before we start. I tell him our setup, what we play, which mics are for lead vocals and background vocals, where I plugged them in, and what I did with the board when I was trying to work it myself. I explain the kind of echo I want to use (sorry, trade secret). He is receptive. He’s worked sound here long enough to know the equipment and the room, not so long as to be bored. Anyway there’s no time left. I have to trust him.

More tomorrow.

I guess I’ve always been a dreamer.

I think of myself as a serious guy, but looking back, maybe I haven’t taken my life seriously. I haven’t made practical choices. I clung too long to the things of a child, and I still resent being grown up. The fact that I have life insurance weirds me out when I think of it, which luckily is almost never.

Things haven’t turned out the way I imagined they would. It’s not so bad, this life I have, but the dreams — well, the dreams haven’t come true. They are now only dreams, having lost that component of hope that they had when I first dreamed them.

Tomorrow night I fire up one of the old dreams — the main one, now that I think of it — and take my rock’n’roll band before a live, paying audience for the first time in, well decades. The time I’ve wasted! I’ve written a few songs, and found some covers that I can sing with a straight face. Think of me on Wednesday at eight o’clock California time. I don’t have any illusions, and very little hope, but I will rock the house.

Because dreams die hard.

So Johnny took off during your birthday party.

[Listen]

Strolled right off into the night with Judy and left you, his “real” girlfriend, shocked and in tears. He was supposed to be yours, wasn’t he? You gave your love to him, and only him, never let any other guys touch your heart, or anyplace else. You daydreamed about him in class almost all day, waited for him after school, defended him when the other girls dissed him, which they did a lot, especially that bitch Judy, she seemed to have a real thing against him. Ha! If you knew then what you know now! Shoulda killed them both, is what you shoulda done.

Playin’ my records, keep dancin’ all night.
Leave me alone for a while.
Till Johnny’s dancin’ with me
I’ve got no reason to smile.

Cause now look: Your Sweet Sixteen party, streamers and balloons all over the rumpus room, Mom and Dad coolin’ it up in their room, trusting you, as they should because you’re a good girl. Half the junior class is there, stacks of 45’s loud on the Magnavox hi fi, Dad’s pride and joy, blasting Frankie Avalon and the various Bobby’s, all the kids dancing, all the kids looking, and where’s Johnny? And where’s Judy, the snotty little priss?

Judy and Johnny just walked through the door
Like a queen with her king.
Oh what a birthday surprise:
Judy’s wearin’ his ring!

Go ahead and cry, sweetheart. I would cry, too, if it happened to me. I mean, you thought you knew Johnny. Gosh, you thought you knew Judy, too, come to think of it. How could you have been so wrong? How could Johnny be so mean? You must have felt like the pain would never go away. Right in the middle of all that noise, all that action, on your Big Day, your 16th birthday, your special day, the day you knew you were finally a woman, right in the middle of all that, you are suddenly alone, and not just alone, but shunned!

You must wonder if there’s something wrong with you. You feel so mixed up, so rejected, so humiliated, and right in front of everybody. You think you will never live this down.

Johnny’s a weasel. Don’t give him another thought. Johnny and Judy, Judy and Johnny. They deserve each other! They should get married as soon as possible. Yeah, let ‘em get hitched and have kids. They’ll be stuck in hell, which is right where they belong. They don’t really love each other, not with the kind of love you’re capable of, and they’ll wake up after it’s too late. They’ll be livin’ in a dump by the river, and Johnny’ll be working at the A&P, a stone chain smoker and a doper with shaky hands. Judy’ll be home with the kids and a fifth of cheap gin, drunk in the afternoon, distant on the night before.

Oh, yeah. Don’t give it another thought.

UPDATE: Thanks to my copy editor friend Dana for telling me the correct spelling of “Lesley.”

You might not notice my lack of posts, but…

…I have left home for a week and am secluded in an undisclosed Northern California location. I’ve been here for three days now, relaxing, and it’s a different guy who peers back at me out of the mirror in the bathroom. A guy whom I like somewhat better than the regular, day-to-day Jones.

I won’t go on right now. Just checking in with the Precious Few who might read this. I am off to see what’s on the end of this road, and why the Auto Club map of Northern California doesn’t include Sacramento or San Francisco.

But who cares, really?

Sometimes I just have to bite my tongue.

Once, a long time ago, when a waitress asked me if everything was OK, I told her “No — look at the mess in Bosnia-Herzegovina! My God, it’s humanitarian disaster!”

No one in the room, including the waitress, thought this was funny. Or they didn’t know what I was talking about — I always have to consider that possibility. The people at my table were embarrassed, for me or the waitress, I wasn’t sure. In any case, the incident taught me to keep my mouth shut when these stupid thoughts occur to me.

So tonight when the checkout guy at Trader Joe’s asked me if I’d found everything I was looking for, I did not say “True enlightenment? No, I haven’t found that yet. But I will continue my quest, thank you.” I said,”Yeah, I guess so,” or something like that.

Everybody was happy, and the checker grinned and asked “Paper or plastic?”

If you’re an aspiring musician looking for a name for your new band,

…you may need to look no farther than your email inbox. Today I received otherwise useless messages from:

• Elusive Toothpick,
• Campanile Cross and…
• MegaDik

to name but a few.These would all be excellent band names, I think, but I have a question: Do the spammers really think I would send my bank account information to someone named Elusive Toothpick, even if they have approved my loan application?

I’ve been hearing on the radio lately that if I replace five of my regular light bulbs at home with these newfangled curly-cue compact fluorescent bulbs, it will be like taking 400,000 — or is it 40,000? I don’t remember — cars off the roads in California.

Sounds good to me. I’ve put in four of these bulbs in the past month, which (taking the low figure) should equate to 32,000 cars staying home.

Unfortunately it seems the other 8,000 of them are maneuvering around on the roads between my home and my office, usually at the same time I am trying to get from one to the other, and none of them are using their turn signals.

What’s the deal with turn signals? They are on every car I’ve ever owned. They’re mentioned prominently in the California DMV Driver’s Handbook. In fact, if you show up at the DMV to take your driving test in a car with non-working turn signals, you get sent home to fix them. You have to have them, and the handbook is pretty specific about the legal requirement to use them, too. Maybe it’s different in other places, but in my town, in my state, nobody uses them, or they use them wrong.

Of course there are the drivers on the freeway who feel perfectly all right about changing lanes whenever they feel like it, no matter who they might cut off. I rarely go an entire week of commuting without having at least one red-light, heart-in-the-throat, ABS-thumping incident due to some oblivious asshole sliding his crossover SUV in front of me with no warning. They are usually not going as fast as I am, either, which leads to ill will on my part, and when I eventually get to pass them, I look over, but they seem not to realize they have sinned, as they talk on the phone, fix their makeup (this is LA: even the men wear makeup) or tune their Sirius radios.

That’s bad enough, but I can sort of understand this lack of driving courtesy: they are turn signals, you know, and changing lanes isn’t really turning. I have more trouble empathizing with people who are actually turning and who don’t signal. They will turn right in front of you when you are rushing toward them at an intersection. They seem to think that the key is to get their car in your path at any cost, at which point you will have to let them through. Following this line of thought, you can see that signaling would defeat their purpose: If I know you are going to turn, I can speed up and prevent you from doing so. And I would, too, because the main reason I ever get in my car is to obstruct your trip to wherever the f*ck.

Then there are the drivers — and I use the term loosely — who signal only as they enter their turn. To them, the signal means “OK, I am turning now. See me turning?” They are not signaling about something they intend to do very soon, like maybe in a couple of hundred feet. They are signaling about something that is happening right now. Why signal at all? If your turn is going to cause an accident because no one knew it was coming, the only difference will be that your blinker will be blinking when I crash into your car.

Look, it’s just plain thoughtless rudeness. Or maybe it’s willful rudeness, I don’t know. Signaling is something you do mainly for the other guy, and in today’s world, with all your responsibilities and deadlines and preoccupations, who cares about anybody but yourself? The other guy would stick it to you in a heartbeat if it served his purposes, wouldn’t he?

Maybe so. Maybe there’s no cure for this epidemic of boorishness. But I warn all you non-signaling drivers: I have 50 more compact fluorescent bulbs in my garage. If you don’t shape up pronto, you are all going to be riding your bicycles.

It’s the last of my five-day minivacation.

I had a day off work on Independence Day, and I took a couple of vacation days after that, Thursday and Friday, so I got myself a looong weekend. Five days for the price of two. I can’t pass up a bargain like that.

All I have done, really, is work on the recording project. Ten songs, covers, unusual choices, I hope. This is so I can put my garage band to work. At this point I no longer know why I want to do this. It’s just what you do. I mean, is it really a “band” if it doesn’t go out and play for people?

My instinct is to pick up the guitar and play it, to hear the notes and the harmonies, to feel the strings under my fingers, the body against my chest, to imagine the possible meanings. (It’s pathetic, really, how hard I try, and how little I produce.) But if you just do it alone, if you never show it, is it real? I don’t know.

Anyway I’ve decided that I have to make this CD, a digital audition, so the owners of bars and nightclubs, and maybe some booking agents, can be assured that the band is competent. They won’t have to bring us in for a real audition (although they still might demand one), so there’s no chance they can make a mistake.

What I have been doing, mostly all by myself in my home studio, is replacing most of the guitars from the original recording session, and all of the vocals. The tracks were recorded in a small room with no isolation between the instruments. Every open microphone became a drum track. Here’s what the floor tom sounds like from 30 feet away, with the mic six inches from the floor and pointed away from the the drum. Or how about that snare, mic’d from three different, apparently random, locations around the room?

This is nobody’s fault, of course. To save money, I set it up as a rehearsal recording. We were supposed to get a live mix of the session. One CD, nothing more, just to get an idea of how we were doing. For fifty bucks more I got the guy to give me the individual tracks, so I could shine it up at home and actually use it for something. Three vocal tracks, two guitar tracks, one bass and thirteen tracks of drums, on ten songs. That was three weeks ago.

Now I’m finished. Well, almost. I have resung all my parts and all the bass player’s parts, and got my brother to redo his parts. I have replaced almost all of the guitar tracks — some of the rhythm guitar tracks my brother played on his ancient Rickenbacker were too good to fuck with — and I have massaged the drums with EQ, echo, noise gates and automated mixing. I even had to move a couple of misplaced snare hits, and replace a couple that, for some reason, weren’t there at all.

It took more than two weeks to do this on the first five songs, and then — on my mini-vacation — just three and a half days to do the other five, which goes to prove what an impediment to progress my crummy job is. Along the way I felt pretty good about the whole thing. I mean, I have no illusions about this band. It’s a garage band. We should play cheap neighborhood dives and Pigma Sty fraternity parties. These kinds of gigs are exactly where I started out. Without changing much of anything, I have become a Classic Rocker.

But while I was working on the CD I wasn’t thinking of any of that. I was thinking about notes, mood, balance, placement, texture — as if it were any band great or small. Technically speaking, I did the best I could with what I had.

But I know no one will listen to a CD of ten cover songs by a garage band, and so the work is not quite finished. Now I have to cut those songs up into bite-sized pieces and string them together into one five-minute segment that will not allow you to turn it off, a demo so compelling that we will never be able to live up to the expectations it engenders. Given the attention span of most of us in this day of fast television cuts and instant gratification, I should try to cut it down to about 60 seconds, but the idea of ten-second songbites offends even me, so I’ll just go with the feel of each song, cut out the fluff and keep it under ten minutes for the whole thing.

Anybody could pay attention for ten minutes, right?

But before I do this…

After tonight this project will be over. Oh, there may be some whining from the band about the way I put it all together, and I’ll either have to spend some time beating back their criticisms, or spend some time making changes to mollify them, but in my mind I’m done. The next phase is what you’d call marketing, and I mean face-to-face retail selling the product, something I have little heart for.

That’s a step toward putting this group on stage. We’ll never make enough money to pay ourselves back for our time, effort and investment so far, but, you know: It’s what you do. I just don’t know why.

The bandstand used to be my refuge, the safe place where I could act any way I wanted, and nobody knew I was really shy, and I could be there at the dances and the parties and the clubs and the concerts in the park with all the people, and no one could question my legitimate reason for being there. Foolish thinking, I suppose, but it made me want to be there. It made me need to perform.

This time around it feels like I’ve gotten on a train without looking at the schedule to see where it was heading, and my stop is coming up, an unknown destination, and I don’t know where it is and I haven’t packed even a toothbrush.

Maybe it’ll stop at Willoughby.