by Sarah Vowell
Ira assures me that it was a good first day, though I’m so shook up I drive us straight to a bar where I down three whiskeys. He drives me home.
The next morning Ira shows up for my second lesson. He is ready to go. His readiness is not shared. I refuse to get back into the car. I might never get into a car again. I tell him I can’t drive, that I feel removed from the whole thing, that I wasn’t driving, I was doing a story.
“You drove for two hours,” Ira counters. “But somehow you still think you haven’t driven?”
“Well, driving just isn’t something I do. I guess I can see that physically, yes, I was doing it and I remember being there and all. But I just felt like that was my evil twin or something.”
Ira, trying not to lose his temper, reminds me, “Yesterday, when you and I were in the car, everything was just fine.”
“It’s only right now you’re getting on my nerves.”
“That’s what I was going to say! Sarah, you’re getting on my nerves. You are. I just can’t believe this. You can actually drive, and maybe this is just very boy, but I showed you how to drive. Now you’re turning around and you’re telling me that it never happened.”
Being irrational can get so inexplicable. I put my foot down: “I don’t want to drive. And since I have driven—it feels like I would imagine it feels to have an affair. I feel like I’ve cheated on myself. You know while you’re doing it that that’s what you’re doing and you can feel yourself touch this foreign object. And the next morning you just wish the whole thing had never happened. You just hope no one ever finds out.”
I’m deflated. I need encouragement. Ira launches into an America the Beautiful litany about hitting the road and Dean Moriarty and how “driving is America and how there’s a fundamental idea of what it is to be an American that’s bound up in every on-the-road song and movie and story that I have ever loved, like it’s waitin’ out there like a killer in the sun, just one more chance we can make it if we run.”
I know he’s desperate when he starts singing Springsteen, but it doesn’t work. I give him this incoherent spiel about driving through “the Monument Valley of the heart” on the “highway within.” Not to mention the more pedestrian (ha-ha) argument that American freedom includes the freedom not to drive. Besides, Dean Moriarty might have been behind the wheel but the Kerouac character in On the Road spent most of the book in the backseat being driven cross-country like the writer he was. He was probably too busy taking notes.
So Ira doesn’t get me with Jack Kerouac. He gets me with Jack in the Box.
“Drive-thru,” he says.
“Drive-thru? Really?”
I know that most people think of the drive-thru as a visual and gastronomic blight. But my sister and I are obsessed with them. Our dad wouldn’t go through drive-thrus when we were growing up. I think they make him nervous, partly because he’s always been a little deaf. He only approves of fast food when it’s served on the fancy trays. So we think of drive-thru as an object of desire, full of thrills denied to us so cruelly for so long.
Ira asks, “So what’s it going to be? Do you want Burger King or Mc-Donald’s?”
I want to go somewhere on the right-hand side of the street.
Three left turns later, I pull into the drive-thru lane of a Burger King. I cannot believe my luck. I drive up to the menu and the voice takes our order. And he doesn’t just say, “Drive through, please.” He says, “Drive through, please,” to me. It is a simple transaction in which I hand the guy some money and he hands me some food, but I am giddy. When he says, “Enjoy your food,” I feel like he really means it. It is the best crappy sandwich of my life.
Then I drive off into the sunset. Well, technically, it’s afternoon, and I head east, but still. I exit onto Lake Shore Drive, the most beautiful street in America. I merge.
Your Dream, My Nightmare
MY ROCK ’N’ ROLL FANTASY is that occasionally, every now and then, a song I like comes on the radio. It’s a simple dream, I know, and every so often, once or twice a year, it actually comes true. I get all I need from pop music song by song. That’s how I like it best—two or three minutes of speed or sorrow coming out of speakers with so much something that the world stops cold.
I’ve rarely daydreamed of befriending my rock idols. Maybe that’s because I tend to admire cranks. Like I really want to toast in the new year with Jerry Lee Lewis or go shoe shopping with Courtney Love or build sand castles with a peach like Lou Reed. My musical heroes are mostly snotty weirdos who didn’t become famous because of their social graces. Just because I have them in my heart doesn’t mean I want them in my life.
So the very idea of spending five whole days cooped up attending guitar workshops taught by moldy rock big shots (and paying upward of three thousand bucks to do so) at something called Rock ’n’ Roll Fantasy Camp is not my fantasy. Try my worst nightmare. I feel compelled to sign up for precisely this reason. What could be more perverse than a headphones-wearing privacy partisan hanging around a bunch of chatty, starstruck record collectors who for all I know might even dance. As I packed a suitcase full of festive black clothes, I remembered the words of my gun-nut father. When I called him a few years ago to make sure he had no ties to the renegade militia called the Freemen, he replied, “Of course not. I’m not a joiner.”
Held at the Rat Packish Eden Roc Resort and Spa in Miami, Rock ’n’ Roll Fantasy Camp attracted thirty-three participants from all over the United States. Which pop heroes played camp counselor? People whose names you’ve never known if the years 1970–75 are underrep-resented in your record collection in both the chronological and spiritual senses. People like Mark Rivera and Lou Gramm, respectively the saxophonist and lead singer of Foreigner; Mark Farner, the scary, muscled, born-again lead guitarist of Grand Funk Railroad; and Rick Derringer of “Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo” fame. These names would only attract obsessive liner-note readers, the kind of fans who would thrill at seeking wisdom, not from Billy Joel, but Billy Joel’s drummer Liberty DeVitto; not from Bruce Springsteen, but guitarist Nils Lofgren of the E Street Band; not from Peter Frampton, but Bobby Mayo, who played keyboards on Frampton Comes Alive!
Campers like Joe, who markets sound equipment in Detroit. Connie and Maxine, sisters from Minneapolis who have left their husbands and kids back home. And Rob, the math teacher from Long Island who heard about the camp on Howard Stern’s radio show. Rob gushes, “I love famous people. I like famous people. I love to see and meet famous people, and this is hanging out with famous people.”
Except for one week at Bible camp in the Ozarks when I was nine—which doesn’t really count since my mom was my counselor and my twin sister was my bunkmate and we spent pretty much the whole time praying anyway—I never went to summer camp. Though like all twins I have seen the Hayley Mills movie The Parent Trap, in which summer camp is integral to the long-lost-twins plot, at least twenty-five times. So I have a vague notion at the first night’s welcoming cocktail party that this is the decisive moment people break off into cliques. Just as Connie and Maxine will end up spending most of their down time with Rob, I find myself befriending two reporters, both named Peter, covering the camp for People and Forbes. Peter from Forbes tells me that when he was a teenager, he walked into a barbershop wearing his Rolling Stones Some Girls T-shirt, pointed at Keith Richards’s picture, and told the barber he wanted his hair to look like that. I am completely charmed by this, and relieved, because now I have someone I can trust to eat lunch with. Even if he’s long since traded in his Some Girls clothes for a golf shirt bearing the logo of his wife’s law firm.
The first class I attend in the morning is Nils Lofgren’s guitar workshop in the Eden Roc basement. It’s probably the most low-key, sensible seminar of the camp. Lofgren is a kind, respectful man. Even though he knows what he’s doing, he doesn’t get all curlicued about it. He pumps out a chugalug rhythm, advising his students to “try to stay in the back pocket of the beat” and “to think like a drummer,
real rhythmic.” Watching them lurch along is hardly fantastic. It would almost be boring, except that watching nervous people in any given situation is at least slightly engaging. Also, as the only girl in the room, I keep cracking up watching an arrangement of men sitting around in a circle, stroking their instruments. They stroke and stroke and I begin to wonder how long these middle-aged guys can keep this up.
“Usually what I do when my hand starts cramping and I’m getting really frustrated and angry,” Lofgren advises, “I stop and play something that’s fun. Have you learned the major and minor scales?”
When Lofgren mentions scales, everybody knows the do-re-mi one, but no one knows the blues scale he plays—the most basic downward spiral imaginable. It seems like something you should be paying Kenny down at the Guitar Shack to teach you, instead of bothering the man who pinch-hits for Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young.
Lofgren informs the class that he’s going to take a solo and that they should try and “keep the rhythm strong for me.” Good luck. What’s apparent isn’t so much the gaping difference between skill or the lack of it, but rather, the chasm between confidence and self-doubt. Lofgren plays tough, spare riffs and looks so easy-does-it cool. Meanwhile, all the campers around him are tapping their feet like they’re marching off to the front lines and all their eyes are fixed on their fingers, trying not to screw up.
As a believer in the anyone-can-do-it, all-or-nothing-at-all ethic of punk rock, I think real music’s not about technique or virtuosity. It’s about believing in what you have to say and wanting to say it so badly that you’ll scream your guts out if that’s what it takes to get people to listen. That is my theory. Life, it turns out, is a little more Darwinian.
Later on, when I ask Lofgren if he thought anyone in the camp had real talent—or anything to say—he graciously answers, “I heard a love for music in everybody.” Love? Is love what Elvis had? Is love what made Kurt Cobain? Observing these random hobbyists try to keep up with Lofgren is like watching Origin of the Species: The Musical.
Over the course of the camp, I’ll sit through nearly a dozen such seminars. It becomes painfully obvious that rock ’n’ roll high school is a lot like real high school. Subject matter doesn’t matter as much as the personality of the teacher. Everyone wants to be Lofgren’s pet, but Rick Derringer leads his guitar workshop like the nitpick who takes points off for bad penmanship.
“John Alder? Is he here?” Derringer asks, taking attendance. Did he ever imagine, back in his heyday of selling out arenas, that the time would come when he would have to count roll to make sure people showed up to hear him play? After showing off for a while, he proceeds to spend nearly ten whole minutes spreading crackpot ideas. Such as, “I like my guitar to be clean. I find that if you get it all grungy and stuff in between the frets and dirt up here, all of a sudden your arm starts sticking up here. It just doesn’t feel the same. I see people sometimes playing, and their guitars are all dirty and the strings are all out of whack. The most important thing is making your guitar playable. So clean the thing. Clean it real good.”
“So I do things like”—and here he takes a can out of his guitar case—“Pledge!”
I cannot imagine anyone I admire talking this way. He is holding up a can of furniture polish as if he’s doing a TV commercial, reiterating, “Pledge!” Would Keith Richards display a spray bottle of 409? Would Neil Young, asked to discuss his craft, bring up the word “clean”? Isn’t the whole point of rock ’n’ roll that it’s supposed to be the devil’s music? That, at heart, it is messy and sweaty and wild? Doesn’t Derringer realize that he is uttering such nonsense in a decade whose most influential—and revered and profound—rock movement was called grunge, a synonym for filth?
I revere cleanliness—in operating rooms, bathrooms, and restaurants. But public health is one thing, truth and beauty is something else. Derringer probably would have gone up to Martin Luther King Jr. after “I Have a Dream” and said, “Great speech, Dr. King. Too bad it’s rendered meaningless by that spinach stuck between your teeth.”
While I was gagging at Derringer’s dopiness, most of the campers found him hilarious. In fact, these people sat through their workshops and jam sessions and lunch buffets with these serene smiles. Watching them, I got jealous. To me, music has always been an ideological battleground where you hate, hate your enemies and save, save your friends. To them, music seems like this uncomplicated part of their lives that makes them happy or something. As Maxine from Minneapolis puts it, “I’m just here to have some fun and get some exposure to the instruments. I really just like the music.”
I am having the quintessential camp experience—homesickness. Most of my days are taken up either wishing I was anywhere but here or pretending to have a good time. Not that I’m incapable of happiness. But I am suspicious of planning for it. My malaise at the camp might not have much to do with musical polemics. Maybe the queasiness I feel watching the campers enjoying themselves has more to do with the fact that I can see they have all kinds of skills I don’t have. What if I’m incapable of organized amusement? What if my rock ’n’ roll fantasy—the random favorite song on the radio—says less about my taste in music than it does about my taste in life? Doesn’t random happiness mean more anyway? What’s more exciting, kissing someone after Casablanca, a movie which you’re more or less legally required to make out after, or fooling around in the middle of the Bobcat Goldthwait vehicle Shakes the Clown?
The problem with hanging around the campers was that they were so gosh darn nice. Sweet even. I’m increasingly more embarrassed to realize that I might have come here with malicious intentions, to make fun of the kind of self-satisfied yuppies who could afford such a wacky vacation. But the campers ruined my fun by being so likable. I caught myself muttering Peter Frampton insults under my breath and felt guilty. And you know you’re in some kind of parallel universe when the most punk rock person there is the reporter from Forbes.
The campers came all this way, paid all this cash. Are they getting their money’s worth? One night I cornered Joe from Detroit after dinner. He was just getting out of a limo. “It’s the only way to travel,” he cracks. He and his family went to dinner with Rick Derringer and Lou Gramm at Gloria Estefan’s restaurant. “They were so, so congenial. We had a sing-along in the car. We were doing some Foreigner songs. We were doing ‘Hang On, Sloopy.’ It was all a cappella and our little kids joined in, too, to help out so it was kind of a group thing—the wives, the kids, the guys.”
“Hang On, Sloopy.” I’ll admit, I love that song. Which came in handy for my sanity. Since Derringer played on it a million years ago with his old band the McCoys, it was constant jam session fodder at the camp. And one night, all the campers gathered onstage to perform it with Derringer singing lead, sparking one of the rare moments when the music they made felt real and sounded exciting—to them and to me.
That kind of excitement didn’t last. For every second of participatory, palatable noise, there were three solid hours of rock-star war stories. While I gave myself headaches from rolling my eyes, the campers ate these anecdotes up, egging on people like keyboardist Bobby Mayo to fill their heads with behind-the-scenes insights into Frampton Comes Alive!, an album they had apparently memorized note for yucky note.
“We had gotten together as a group in January of that year, ’75, and we started touring,” Mayo drones. “We were opening for everybody. We opened for ZZ Top, J. Geils, Rod Stewart, Black Sabbath.”
If you think listening to this kind of stuff once was boring, try twice. On the camp’s last day, goofball Mike Love of the Beach Boys showed up. Every time he opened his mouth it was a defamation of the Beach Boys’ greatness. He insulted his audience by telling the same stories at his afternoon lecture as he did onstage the very same night.
In the afternoon, he brags, “I was in India. McCartney’s in one bungalow. I’m in the other. We used to have conversations up on the roof at night under the stars. It was pretty cool. He said, �
�Mike, you ought to take more care with your album covers.’ He was the mastermind behind Sgt. Pepper’s, right?” In the evening, after a pathetic knockoff of “Barbara Ann,” he tells the same story to the same people. “He would say, ‘Mike you should take more care with your album covers.’ This is the guy who made Sgt. Pepper’s.” Afternoon: “ ‘With all due respect,’ ” was his comeback to McCartney, “ ‘we always paid more attention to what goes in the album.’ Which is a touché remark, I have to admit.” Evening: “So I said, ‘Paul. We always took more care with what went in them.’ It was a touché thing, you’ll have to forgive me.”
The sad thing is, some people laughed both times. Maybe they were just being nice. They were nice people. Sitting there watching them drink in all those no doubt enhanced rock-star tall tales with such obvious glee was like watching new myths being born. Because anyone with relatives can tell you, rehashed, souped-up stories are not the sole property of washed-up rock stars. I bet Joe from Detroit’s going to be telling his Lou Gramm limo story for at least as long as Mike Love’s been dissing Paul McCartney. I actually found this reassuring. Once the camp ended, I could go back home to my radio: After a few mornings of sharing the breakfast table with middle-aged sidemen in shorts, the idea of disembodied voices is positively sublime. My nightmare was over the minute I boarded the plane home. But I knew that for the spouses and children and coworkers of the campers, the nightmare had just begun.
Dark Circles
I AM HOLDING A BABY picture in my hand—the portrait kind, from Sears.
It’s me and my twin sister, Amy. We’re maybe two, dressed alike. She’s crying. Amy’s this flashing light—blond hair, blue eyes, white tears. I have one distinguishing characteristic that makes me different from any baby in any picture I’ve ever seen: dark circles under my eyes. As if I were holding down the swing shift at the tire factory in addition to my official duties as a baby.
