by Dave Barry
Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: Grown men are doing this? Isn’t that kind of immature?
No! It is not “kind of” immature. It is extremely immature.14 The truth is that the Rangers venture far beyond the realm of immature, deep into stupid territory.
But guess what? We have fun. And the spectators love us. Part of their enjoyment, I believe, derives from knowing that, no matter what kind of idiotic behavior they may have engaged in, they have never looked as ridiculous as we do. But mainly they love us because the Lawn Rangers—I reiterate—are FUN.
And for idiots having fun, the Rangers have some pretty impressive accomplishments. They’ve marched in parades all over the country, including in the Rose Bowl and Fiesta Bowl parades. They’ve also marched in Chicago’s St. Patrick’s Day parade. It was there, in 2003, that a young, up-and-coming Illinois politician named Barack Obama, campaigning for the US Senate, stopped to meet the Rangers, and—showing the kind of instinct for the dramatic gesture that characterizes born leaders—posed for a picture brandishing a toilet plunger over his head.
Five years later, Obama was elected president of the United States. Whether this was a direct result of his Ranger encounter, nobody can say. But consider this: after Obama was elected, Pat Monahan applied to have the Lawn Rangers march in his inaugural parade, and, incredibly, we were accepted. I am not making this up.
And so it was that on January 20, 2009, amid the fifteen thousand participants in the inaugural parade—which included numerous marching bands and military units, wearing pristine uniforms and stepping in perfect unison—there were fifty-one Lawn Rangers, and I am proud to say I was one of them. We wore our hats and masks, of course, but in recognition of the majesty of the occasion, we also wore bright-red polyester graduation gowns.15 We had a nice selection of show mowers, including one with a large reproduction of the photo of Obama holding the plunger. My mower had a miniature bed on it, and a sign that said, EMBEDDED REPORTER.
Also with us were five women wearing fake beards and dressed vaguely like famous deceased Illinois person Abraham Lincoln. They marched in front of the Ranger unit carrying a banner informing the spectators that we were World Famous.
We were slotted toward the end of the parade, so we spent a long, cold day waiting in outdoor holding areas with the other marching units and a small, brave, badly outmanned band of porta-potties that I imagine had to be destroyed later by cruise missiles.
Finally, with night falling and temperatures dropping, the Rangers got the signal to march. We rolled our show mowers onto Pennsylvania Avenue, holding our brooms high. At that point the huge crowds had left and only a few smallish clots of spectators were still spectating, but we performed our precision maneuvers for them, and were almost rewarded with an appreciative “Huh?”
Finally the brightly lit reviewing stand in front of the White House came into view ahead. By then it was mostly empty, and I assumed all the big-name dignitaries were long gone. But as we drew close, we saw them, watching us from behind the bulletproof glass just a few feet away: President and Michelle Obama, and Vice President Joe Biden. At first they looked puzzled—not a surprising reaction, as we were surely the only unit in the parade boasting a lawn mower with a toilet mounted on it—but then the president saw the picture of himself holding the plunger aloft. He said something to the First Lady, and they both burst out laughing.
Then we Rangers performed a precision maneuver. If I recall correctly, it was “Walk the Dog.”
And then we moved past the reviewing stand, and our parade was over.
But damn, that was fun.
That was also the last time I marched with the Rangers. Every year, Pat Monahan sends me an email reminding me that the Broom Corn Festival is coming up, and the Rangers will be meeting and marching. Every year I’ve been too busy to go.
And every year I get another year older.
I need to reconnect with the Rangers. I need a fix of stupid, immature fun.
Which brings me to the other fundamentally ridiculous organization that I’ve been involved with: the Rock Bottom Remainders. This is a rock band of authors that was founded by Kathi Goldmark, a smart, funny, warm and joyful woman who was always up for fun. (She carried kazoos in her purse, because, hey, you never know when you’ll need a kazoo.)
In 1992, Kathi, who ran a company that escorted book-touring authors around San Francisco, had the idea of bringing a bunch of writers together to raise money for a worthy cause. Basically she invited every author she knew, and the ones who said yes, regardless of talent, formed the band. Among the original authors were Amy Tan, Stephen King, Ridley Pearson, Roy Blount Jr., Barbara Kingsolver, Tad Bartimus, Robert Fulghum, Matt Groening, Greil Marcus, Joel Selvin, Dave Marsh and me. We had a professional drummer, Josh Kelly, and Kathi somehow recruited an actual rock legend, Al Kooper, to be our musical director.
The plan was for the Remainders to perform for one night, then disband. From a strictly musical standpoint, we should have disbanded, because we were terrible. Roy Blount described our musical genre as “hard listening.” We played music by what I call the Rumor Method, wherein from time to time an alarming rumor went around the band: There might have been a chord change. This prompted everybody to change to a new chord. Although not necessarily the same new chord.
So we did not show musical promise, in that first performance. But we had way too much fun to want to stop.
As Amy Tan put it: “I would do this to kill the whales.”
And as Steve King put it: “We ain’t done yet.”
And so the Remainders kept going. We developed a repertoire of onstage shtick and hijinks to compensate for our musical inadequacy; our goal was to entertain rather than impress, and we generally succeeded, especially if the audience was drinking. We wound up playing for more than twenty years, almost always for book-related or benefit events.
Along the way some people dropped out of the band, and others participated less frequently. But new authors joined us, including Mitch Albom, Scott Turow, Greg Iles, James McBride, Frank McCourt, my brother Sam Barry, Alan Zweibel, Mary Karr and dozens of guest authors. We acquired a saxophonist, Erasmo Paolo, and a manager/impresario, Ted Habte-Gabr, who could schmooze a turtle out of its shell.
Occasionally real big-time musicians performed with the Remainders, including Bruce Springsteen,16 Judy Collins, Monte Montgomery, Lesley Gore, Nestor Torres, Darlene Love and Gloria Gaynor. Warren Zevon performed with us for years; he was succeeded as a regular guest star by Roger McGuinn, one of the founders of the Byrds.
Musically, the Remainders got a little better over the years, although we didn’t get anywhere near good. But it was never really about the music. We had become friends—real friends, the kind you turn to for comfort when things are bad, and to celebrate with when things are good. This will sound corny, but it’s true: we became family. In fact one of the things we celebrated was the marriage of Kathi and my brother Sam, who met because of the band.
So we kept playing, year after year, because we loved to hang out together. And because we had fun. Man, did we have fun. To cite just a few memories:
There was the night in Cleveland when, after playing a benefit show at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, we gathered in somebody’s hotel room, where some band members got to singing Irish folk songs with such spirit that a hotel security guy came and pounded on our door. And thus we got to enjoy the spectacle of the security guy delivering a stern keep-it-down lecture to two contrite individuals: Roger McGuinn, who is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and his fellow Irishman Pulitzer Prize–winner Frank McCourt.
There was the night in Nashville when Steve King was singing “Teen Angel,” and a woman in the crowd in front of him raised her arms to reveal that—apparently this was meant as a tribute—all her fingernails were on fire. I still don’t know how she did that. I do know that I agreed with Ridley when, looking at the woman looking at Steve, he said, “I don’t ever want to be that famous.”
There was the night in Miami when Carl Hiaasen performed with us as a guitarist. Carl is a wonderfully talented writer but—I say this as a friend—he is musically challenged, even by Remainders standards. He’d been taking guitar lessons to prepare for his performance with us, but he was still very nervous.
Q. How nervous was he?
A. He was so nervous that he brought his guitar teacher onstage with him.
Really. The two of them stood together at the back of the stage, with their amplifiers adjacent to each other, and all night long we could hear the teacher yelling the chords to Carl (“E! A! NOW BACK TO E!”) while Carl tried frantically, with varying degrees of success, to locate each new chord before the teacher yelled another one at him. This was highly entertaining to listen to, and I can’t say that it noticeably impacted our overall sound.
There was the time in Washington, DC, when Amy Tan had brought along a portable karaoke device, which graded you, using a scale of zero to 100, on how close your singing was to the original record. We got Roger McGuinn to sing along to the Byrds’ classic recording of “Turn! Turn! Turn!,” in which the lead singer is: Roger McGuinn. The machine gave Roger a 96, so he tried again, and got a 97. So he tried again, but he only got to 98. We told him he was a pretty good singer, but he was no Roger McGuinn.
There was the time—I don’t remember the city—when we almost performed “Wild Thing” correctly. “Wild Thing” is one of the simplest garage-rock songs there is; it requires almost no musical talent. But we never got it right, and without naming any names I would have to say that the problem was Roy Blount.
Roy’s role in “Wild Thing” was to deliver the line “You MOVE me.” The problem was that he could never get the timing right: he was always early or late. (By way of background: Roy is the founder and national chairman of the League of the Singing Impaired.) Roy’s timing got to be a running joke in the band, to the point where, unbeknownst to him, we made a mass bet on whether he’d deliver his line too soon or too late. That night, with several hundred dollars on the line, the critical moment came; all of us turned to look at Roy, and he, incredibly, for the first and only time, delivered the line exactly right. Unfortunately, this caused the rest of us to collapse in laughter and thus totally screw up the song. Thus our record of being the only rock band in the world never to perform “Wild Thing” correctly remained intact.
And there was the night in New York when we performed our extremely campy version of “Leader of the Pack,” in which lead singer Amy Tan plays the young woman whose parents make her dump the motorcycle-gang leader she loves, and he dies in a tragic crash. Amy’s husband, Lou DeMattei, who in real life is a tax lawyer, played the part of the Leader of the Pack. He wore a leather jacket and pretended to be driving a motorcycle; he simulated the crash by diving dramatically onto the stage, where he writhed around in simulated agony, much to the enjoyment of the crowd. Seeking to add to the merriment, Steve King and I started kicking him, causing him to writhe even more as he crawled off the stage. Ha ha! What fun!
As it turned out, Lou was not having nearly as much fun as we were. After the show, we learned that he’d been taken to the hospital, where he was diagnosed with a broken collarbone. So when Steve and I were kicking him, he’d been writhing in actual, nonsimulated agony. Needless to say we felt terrible, although Lou was a great sport; he remained on the band’s multicity tour and continued to play the Leader of the Pack, although he wore a sling and no longer dived onto the stage. So he was more like the Leader of the Walking Wounded.
I also had an alarming band-related medical incident, after a performance on a different night in New York. The band had retired to our hotel bar, where I ended up sitting between Roy Blount and Scott Turow. Both of them were telling stories, and I found myself trying to listen to both of them, switching back and forth. I also found myself drinking a number17 of vodka gimlets.
Scott’s story involved his spleen, and it was long and complicated. Between the switching back and forth and the gimlets, I became confused, so I interrupted him and said, “Wait, do you have a spleen or not?”
“I don’t,” said Scott patiently. “That’s the point.”
So he resumed telling the story, and I resumed switching back and forth. A little while and a gimlet or two later, while listening to Scott, I again became confused, so I interrupted him and said, “Wait . . . So you do have a spleen?”
Scott again explained, a little less patiently, that he did not have a spleen.
If you have ever spent any time in the company of a drunken idiot, you will not be surprised to learn that, a little while later, I again became confused and inquired as to Scott’s current status, spleenwise. This time, instead of answering, he took a Sharpie and wrote NO SPLEEN in large letters on my right forearm. That solved my retention problem, and the rest of the evening passed without incident as far as I can remember, which is not very far.
The next morning the band had to catch an early train to Boston. I woke up in my hotel room in extremely poor condition and staggered toward the toilet. En route, I caught sight of my reflection in the bathroom mirror and realized that something was written on my arm.
I looked down and read the words.
NO SPLEEN.
For a few terrifying seconds, my brain—which, in its defense, had the same level of neural functionality as a Bermuda onion—could come up with only one explanation. You know that urban legend where the traveling businessman is drugged and wakes up in a hotel bathtub packed with ice, and he sees a note telling him that one of his kidneys has been harvested? I thought that was what had happened to me, except instead of kidney harvesters, I was the victim of spleen harvesters.
I started frantically checking myself for an incision, which was problematic because I don’t know where my spleen is. Then, as my brain rebooted, it occurred to me that the spleen is not an organ with strong resale value. You never hear about anybody urgently awaiting a spleen donor. Surgeons routinely remove spleens and throw them away. It would be moronic to harvest one. “He’s so stupid he’d harvest a spleen” is probably a common insult in organ-harvesting circles.
After a few seconds I remembered that Scott had written the words on my arm, and I had a subdued yet painful laugh at my own expense, then continued staggering toward the toilet.
But those were an exciting few seconds.
These are just some of the many fond memories I have of being part of the Remainders. We had a wonderful run, lasting way longer than any of us expected. But over the years, time—in this one respect, we were exactly like the Beatles—took its toll on the band.
Warren Zevon died in 2003.
Frank McCourt died in 2009.
And then in 2012, Kathi Goldmark, the woman who brought us all together, the heart and soul of the band, reached the end of a brutal battle with breast cancer. At the time the Remainders were booked to play two shows in California. Kathi, who never missed a Remainders gig, hoped to hang on long enough to be there. When she realized she wasn’t going to make it, she told my brother she wanted the Remainders to play anyway.
And so we did. In both shows, we stopped in the middle and did a tribute to Kathi, ending it by performing a wonderfully funny song she wrote, “Older Than Him.” It’s a country/western ballad about a middle-aged woman—that would be Kathi—who’s sitting in a bar when a young studly male walks in. She tries to attract his attention, but he doesn’t even know she exists.
The chorus goes:
Oh, I wonder if he’d care
If he knew I had underwear
Older than him
Better get back to the gym.
On both nights, that song brought down the house. One last ovation for Kathi.
We thought those would be our last shows. We told the press we were disbanding, and we believed it. We’d lost our founder, and we were getting older, maybe too old to be putting on wigs and blowing kazoos and prancing around like fools making mediocre music.
But w
e missed each other. And we missed the fun. And we’re a terrible band, so it only makes sense that we would be terrible at disbanding. In 2015, we were invited to play at the Tucson Festival of Books. Most of us said yes, and we played to a big, enthusiastic crowd, and it felt wonderful, being together again. A few months later, we played at the Miami Book Fair; there was a monsoon that night, and we ended up having to move into a smallish tent, but we still had a blast.
That was the last time we played. As I write these words, I don’t know if we’ll ever play again. Getting the band together is a logistical and financial hassle, and the truth is, there’s a limited demand for our musical talents. So maybe we’re really done this time.
And maybe we should be. Maybe we’re too old for this silliness.
But I don’t want to quit. I want to believe that if my old dog can still have fun, I can, too. I don’t want to wait until it’s too late. I want to heed the words of my friend and bandmate Warren Zevon. After Warren was diagnosed with terminal cancer, he went on David Letterman’s show, and Letterman asked him how his approach to life had changed. This was Warren’s answer:
“You know, you put more value on every minute . . . I mean, I always thought I kind of did that. I really always enjoyed myself. But it’s more valuable now. You’re reminded to enjoy every sandwich, and every minute of playing with the guys, and being with the kids and everything.”
I don’t, thank God, have terminal cancer. But I don’t have forever, either. You get only so much time, and as Warren said, it’s more valuable now. So I’m going to see if my bandmates, my friends, would be up for un-disbanding again, and making some more memories while we still can. I don’t know if they’ll be up for it. But I’m going to try.
I’m also going to reconnect with my Arcola roots. I sent an email to Pat Monahan, asking him when the World Famous Lawn Rangers will be marching next. He got right back to me: there’s a Broom Corn Festival coming up. I plan to be there, pushing my show mower and performing highly imprecise precision maneuvers. I plan to have some fun.
