Wonderkid
Page 12
“It’s all a bit Pilgrim’s Progress,” said Blake.
By the time I arrived in America almost three months later, it had all happened, and the tour was about to start. Blake hadn’t had a moment to get home, but Greg and the lawyers had sorted everything.“You should go, Sweet,” Greg told me on the phone, as though my arm needed twisting. “Not just for the merch. You’re gonna travel around and have some fun. One big happy family. Have you heard of the Allman Brothers?” I hadn’t. “Well, it’ll be a little like that but less heavy.”
There was hardly a moment to stand back and reflect on the evident strangeness of the situation: being adopted by a man not strictly old enough to be my father (let alone speculating on the reasons for this adoption), then following this chubby Pied Piper across the Atlantic. Like an artist who doesn’t really understand how they do what they do, I felt as if any analysis might jinx the gift, as though it might disappear into thin air. And this was not a time for second thoughts. It was like I was getting one over on the world for the first time in my life.
I thought I knew how we’d be riding, and I wasn’t complaining. In England it had been trains that shouldn’t legally have been as full as they were; minivans that reeked of petrol, sweat, and pee; a caravan of old bangers whose boots held surprisingly little. So I was ready for some hard traveling in a grubby van. I was a thrilled fifteen-year-old heading to the new world, and it felt like I’d been given the keys to the Magic Kingdom.
The Terrys deposited me at Heathrow, where I stood in the regular queue for half an hour until an airline official, with a glance at my ticket, coaxed me into a much shorter line that marked the beginning of my magic carpet ride. In this alternative reality, I was suddenly Mr. Sweet and what was my choice for dinner. I could smell the difference. I’d known I was traveling First Class but, never having flown, had no firm idea how superior this was: one trip ruined me for life. (I thought they were joking when they offered me a manicure.)
At LAX, after a brief conversation with immigration (my script: I was “spending some time with my father, who’s touring in a band”), I picked up my bag, stuffed with various of Blake and Jack’s requests (everything from Private Eye and NME to Euthymol toothpaste), and was met by a white stretch limo with SWEET written on a sign in block capitals. Inside was every soft drink known to man, a Wonderkids t-shirt and yet another postcard of the Hollywood sign: “See you at the band house!”
The band house: every band’s fantasy. At least, to start with. During the slow fade, they’d rather live as far away from one another as possible—one in his salmon fishery on Mull, the other near the drugs in Camden—but at the beginning, the band house is the dream in bricks and mortar. Because we’ve all seen Help! and we all want those four adjacent, semi-detached front doors that open on one big house full of comfortable sofas and mate-y companionship.
48002 Lookout Drive wasn’t that, but it was a variation on the same dream. There were balloons festooned on the gate as though announcing a children’s party and a big sign above the door—WELCOME SWEET! LOOK OUT!—but it was evident nobody was home. I took in the view, not knowing whether to be more impressed by the swimming pool (I’d never seen the kind where the water laps right to the edge) or the Pacific (I’d never seen the kind where a blue sea laps at a sandy shore).
I must have been jetlagged, but I merely felt slightly shitty as I tried to get my head around how it was that a cool breeze was blowing through the house when it was so brutally hot outside. I lay back on the white sofa and surveyed the alien environment, a page ripped from an architectural magazine in the dentist’s office. But there’d be no painful injection before a filling. Besides, I was already woozy, growing numb. I was in a dream. And then I was in a dream, an attractive Asian stewardess painting my nails, rubbing my shoulders, squeezing my neck, my back, then delving further down.
I came to with a start, then fell back asleep, lulled by the perpetual hum of the ceiling fan. An inflatable plastic bed floated absentmindedly across the pool.
Blake woke me, immediately regaling me with stories; what they’d done, whom they’d met, about Curtis and Becca who’d be here shortly, which room was mine, how great the house was. Even Jack was atypically enthusiastic.
“Look out! It’s another looking-glass altogether,” said Blake. And when Becca walked in the door, he called to her: “Hey, come and meet my son.” And, primed, she hugged me.
Blake said: “Sweet, this is Mum.”
I imagined that my real mum had looked like Becca. You only had to take one look at her to know how ideally suited she was to the task. And now here she was, “Mum” to three motherless kids: Blake, Jack, and me. She and Blake would fall in love, have their own kids and forget about me: that was my immediate thought. I didn’t have time to tease it out—it was pure, stupid instinct.
The first thing she said was: “Poor boy, I know what you need.” She went straight to the kitchen, boiled a whistling kettle and made me a cup of some herbal tea called “Gentle Awakening” that she happened to carry in her bag.
I couldn’t figure out time on Lookout Drive. I woke absurdly early the next morning and found myself sleepwalking around the house trying not to wake anyone, looking for things you can never find in somebody else’s house.
I fell back asleep, opening my eyes to find everyone in the midst of a business meeting around me. I was allowed, no, expected, to sit in. Andy found nothing out of the ordinary in this: if Blake wanted me there, Blake wanted me there. At one point, Jack said: “Well, Sweet has been doing our merch in the UK, and I know we’ve got a company working for us now, but I’m sure they’ll be happy to hear how it’s worked before. And maybe they can take him under their wing and show him how it works here. It’s a good trade.”
“Well he doesn’t have to work the whole time,” said Blake. “He can just have fun.”
“No, I’d like to,” I said through a yawn.
“Well, either way,” said Blake. “He’ll be traveling with us, Andy. All access.”
And Andy, to my surprise, addressed the issue with some seriousness: “Great idea. Good to see the youthful face of the Wonderkid family. Absolutely.” And then turning to me: “Merchandise: thoughts?” I told him everything I’d learned from Greg, as he nodded vigorously. “I’ll put you in touch with Vern. You can iron it out with him. But if you want to keep it in the family, you should. That’s the right generational feel; you buy a CD from the singer’s own son.” I was more than happy to be a handy marketing opportunity.
Mitchell, the new road manager, joined us via conference call. His waspy voice sounded nothing like that of our only other road manager, Knobby (“with a K”), a notable failure whom Greg had had to ship back to his job at an abattoir on the Isle of Man.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, I am honored to be your road manager. Your job is to play music, fulfill your promotional obligations, and have fun; my job is to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. Please open your itineraries.”
Itineraries? On cue, Andy handed out ring-bound plastic-covered booklets, each emblazoned with the new Wonderkids logo, their contents a Rain Man wonderland of load-in times, hotel confirmation codes, and backstage office fax numbers. With each, like the free gift with a box of cereal, came a similarly-designed laminated backstage pass.
Jack and Blake could have died happily right at that moment.
In my depleted state, up unnaturally early every morning, I auditioned music from the huge piles of CDs that Blake and Jack had been glad-handed by WBA (and apparently every other label in Los Angeles—they were in that honeymoon period when you get anything you want for free). Jack’s eagle eye always landed on any label guy’s possibly spare stack of promo CDs: “Oh, may I? I haven’t heard that.” He wanted one of everything.
At home, I’d been strictly a Top 40 boy, a devoted listener to the countdown every Sunday evening, and quite a few of the bands were familiar to me: Erasure, Depeche Mode, the Smiths, the Pretenders—so many of the acts
were British; it was that time. But reissues were pouring out too—Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (you could get everything free except the Beatles: Jack was peeved that Capitol drew the line at Fab Four freebies—everyone wanted the Beatles catalog, so there was no need to give it away)—and they were all there, many still sealed in those shrink-wrapped and stickered plastic cases, so hard to prise open, so easy to shatter.
“Don’t listen to that shit,” Jack would invariably say when he was making his morning coffee. “You should be listening to this.” He’d pick out something recent: “It’s called Alternative Music over here, Modern Rock. There’s a chart for it.” There was a chart for everything.
And when Blake finally got up, he’d hear ten seconds of Lush or Ride or whatever it was, grimace and say: “Sounds very serious,” and that was that. Not his sort of thing—he didn’t listen to anything new. “Keeping up” was Jack’s job.
First Class airfare, stretch limo, and then, to cap it all, not a grubby touring van at all: a tour bus. A streamlined tour bus called “Flame” (airbrushed on both sides in all the shades of autumn), designed for our extended stay. Nothing like a caravan. I’d never really seen anything like it. You could live in it forever, travel anywhere. I felt like I was boarding Apollo 7. A mustached bus driver, introducing himself as Randy, greeted us.
“Last crew I had on here were . . .” He said a name I didn’t recognize, the Something Boys. “So what’s this going to be?” he asked, casting a complicit eye. “Animal House or The Sound of Music?”
“Mad Hatter’s Tea Party!” said Blake.
“Alright!” said Randy. “I can roll with that.” He was thin as a rake, had a Dukes of Hazzard accent, and flashed a wide smile as we boarded his spaceship.
Blake rechristened Randy and all was well with the world: “Hey, Good Buddy, can we get WonderBus put on the sign above the windshield?”
“Ten-four,” said Randy, clicking his fingers and pointing at the same time. “WonderBus it is.”
And there we were in our own WonderBus in Wonderland, tooling down some highway to Six Somethings Over Somewhere-or-other. California was the ideal state for this tour: theme parks littered the countryside. They weren’t even to be full shows, just five-song showcases at peak hours.
On arrival, though we’d only traveled three hours, we rather dribbled out onto the tarmac, blinking in the sun, newborn. It was my first encounter with the disorientating effect of a tour bus and its tinted windows: however short the trip, without pee stops or snack breaks, you wind up outside the world, beyond time. Which is why it’s a hothouse for drink and drugs. Overnighters and day rooms only make things weirder. I have a photo of a snowcapped mountain, somewhere or other: everyone is outside the bus, in a pristine and beautiful landscape, and every single person is rubbing his eyes with his hands, or has his eyes shut, or covered in some way, except Blake, who is pissing on the emergency pull-off sign.
As we reentered Earth’s atmosphere that first afternoon, we met Mitchell for the first time. We couldn’t believe his clothes, his attire. He was in the wrong line of work. Unusually for an American, he looked ready for a game of village cricket. He was collegiate, smooth, urbane: all qualities quite unnecessary in a road manager. A pager on his belt chirped interruption. He tutted its impudence. He was so calm.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, shaking hands, naming everyone (even me) with utter confidence. “My answer to everything is: it’s in the itinerary. Normally we’d let you relax on the bus until we had you set up backstage, and we’re not quite ready for you yet, but if you’ll take us as you find us, just for today, we’ll get on famously.” Blake rechristened him Ripley.
Our own crew numbered two, dapper Mitchell—soundman and road manager—and a roadie type, Joe, with tattoos, a nose-piercing, and a Whitesnake T-shirt. He was the politest man in the world, never traveled with us, and never complained: apparently, he’d been driving a van behind with some of the larger gear. This wasn’t our concern.
I expected we’d be led through the interior of the park, where the sun always shines, where everything is sponsored, and paths never fork so as to minimize unnecessary familial debate, but instead, a large freight elevator took us down a floor or two to a conveyor belt, which efficiently bussed the gear a little way, where, to my surprise was waiting an entire stage: amps, drums, instruments, all set up according to the stage plot, tuned and ready to play. We were underground.
I asked Mitchell where the crowd would be, and he laughed: “Dear boy”—there was a touch of the theater about him—“Up there!” He pointed. The roof sixty feet above us was going to open up like the crater at the climax of that James Bond movie.
“Should I do merch up there then?” I asked, keen to stake my claim to that end of business, though Blake had been gently trying to dissuade me.
“Well, for today, why not let the merch company earn their keep, and you stay with the band, get on that stage, and when they go up, you go up. I think you’ll get a kick out of that.”
Blake was buzzing. “What do you think, Sweet? Five songs and then home!”
Mitchell settled himself into a small office, from which he proceeded to fire off instructions at a military clip: how clothes should be pressed, where hung, when the meal should be served, and to whom the check should be made out. None of these issues seemed more important than any other: he was just ticking off a checklist. I could have stayed all day in the womb of that pleasure palace, with its luxuriously upholstered dressing rooms, all-you-can-eat (and no-one’s-checking-what-you-eat) buffet, free video games, and mysterious inner mechanisms: yet another new perspective.
“Oy!” shouted Blake, “Give these to Mitchell and get him to Xerox them and throw them round the stage.” It was the Wonderkids’ first American setlist:
Lucky Duck
The Dog Mustn’t Speak!
They Never Came Back
Fresh Air for My Nose
Rock Around the Bed
With the band in place, and me tucked behind an amp on the right, the ceiling parted, and the stage rose like that Boston Spaceship, pivoting slightly as we emerged into the sunlight.
I could hear the crowd, high-pitched, expectant, and when we crested, arriving slightly above them, stage locking into position with a jolt, I was amazed by the throng of kids, the mass of ant-like activity. We were the ones who’d arrived like extraterrestrials, but they were the alien beings. Blake turned around, his suit a red smear on the sea blue sky, and welcomed me to Wonderland with a smile. Curtis counted off “Lucky Duck,” and when the new rhythm section came in, it was obvious the band had never sounded better. Perhaps a bird and a black bloke trumps even twins. Jack was trying some genuine guitar moves, a little twist from his hips, and then a duck downwards to the floor. A duck! Then, a duckwalk! He was actually doing duck moves for Blake’s duck song. He would never have done that in England. Mind you, he didn’t smile while he was doing it.
The crowd went wild. I know that’s a cliché, but it’s exactly what they did. Actually, they went wildly wild, feral, running around and pogoing, leaping and twisting, doing their fake rock star poses, their antic air guitar strum, as parents tapped their feet and smiled. How many people were watching? Maybe a thousand. Were they even here to see the Wonderkids, or would they have happily watched anything delivered from the underworld? Who cares? We were the focus of all the attention. And then I saw the first of what I realized were hundreds of Wonderkids T-shirts and baseball caps. And they weren’t languishing on the merch table, they were proudly worn, along with onesies and twosies with cartoons of Blake’s face and the other members of the band popping out from behind him.
At the end of “Lucky Duck,” the audience let out an ear-splitting cheer. Parents whooped their appreciation. They were sick of Simeon and “Cumbayá”—they wanted this as much as their kids did—and when they bought the merchandise, they bought it for themselves. Andy’s plans had coalesced in a heartbeat.
The dog mustn’t speak!
Not out of his filthy nozzle
Or his toothy smiling beak,
The dog mustn’t speak!
His sweet slobber can clobber
As he spits out his
Sugared word-barks
The dog mustn’t speak!
And the audience sang along. It was baffling. How did they know the words? Did they know what they were singing? Did they think it meant anything at all? And for that matter, did it?
The show ended too soon. The new Wonderkids never outstayed their welcome. They’d quickly realized that a kids’ gig has its own duration, that the kids tire, that they’re easily bored, that they’re more interested in themselves than the band. And that the merch table is as good a place for an encore as any. So the band always hit hard and quick. Out the window went all notions of the flow of a show. It was just bang-bang-bang-bang-bang-bye.
The autograph session went on for over an hour. Record companies have a thousand names for it, none very respectful, but to Blake it was always just “saying hi”: “I gotta go say hi.” I followed the band out, but although Jack (never at ease in this situation), Becca and Curtis were on hand, it was Blake the kids were drawn to, and their magnet had infinite patience. There were a few lines he always used (some gently surreal, some unexpected—he’d learned them as a teacher) to calm overexcitement, to put them off their guards, to draw them into conversation.