by Wesley Stace
In Seattle, Jack—who listened to everything Sub Pop had to offer—insisted we go and see Nirvana, which was sweaty but nothing like that video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” which would unleash itself upon America—from sea to shining Walmart—later that year. Blake left after two songs, but I stayed out as Jack mingled with flannel-shirted Seattleites, some of whom came to our show the next afternoon, keen to genuflect before Curtis. That morning Blake had taken me to see a fish ladder, but we were both depressed by the reality of the gray, skanky-looking salmon, scales peeling from their ravaged bodies. I’d been expecting more of an Edward Lear drawing: an elegant fish in a top hat climbing up some steps with his flipper. And that’s what I remember of Seattle. I can’t recall the show at all.
Somewhere in Ohio—I think Dayton—Blake secretly took me out to see Jonathan Richman playing solo to about eighty people. It was around the time Richman was trying to make albums without the use of electricity. Blake was thrilled by every song, whether it was about eating with gusto, the Fender Stratocaster, the city of Paris, or Richman’s gossipy neighbors. Blake stood on a chair and yelled repeatedly for an extra encore. At the end, Jonathan was signing copies of his CD at a merch table: I surveyed this badly lit, haphazardly presented set-up with a professional eye. Blake was hovering, hopping from foot to foot like he was cold.
“Go up and say hi,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. Then, as we left: “we have to be better.”
I remember one of our gigs at some kind of Dr. Seuss, or Children’s Art, museum in Massachusetts, though. They played in the main gallery space, surrounded by epic canvases of art from the books. I was out in the lobby (the worst place to do merch) at a remove from the action, and I started to feel distinctly queasy. We were set up opposite an enormous, vertiginous Seuss print in which some cat-human hybrid was anxiously walking through an infinite gothic cellar: that wasn’t helping either. Vern told me to go lie down backstage. A few minutes later, I looked into the main room, where they were cleaning up some kid’s vomit right by the front door, and the smell sent me scurrying backstage as fast as I could, my hand actually covering my mouth. Becca saw me as I passed, and literally the next thing I remember I’m leaning over the toilet, throwing up, and she’s stroking my hair. The band, meanwhile, seemed to have stopped.
“What’s . . .?” I asked between bouts of coughing and hurling, eyes watering, the stench of sick in my nostrils.
“Shhh!” She said. “Blake’s doing one solo. Don’t worry. I’m here.”
She handed me tissues from her bag, left me lying on the backstage sofa with a cold wet flannel on my forehead, and hopped back up to finish the set. Food poisoning was the consensus, but I can never see one of those Seuss vortexes without feeling a little rough.
The worst is when you have a show in your hometown (which is how we thought of LA), but the schedule doesn’t allow you to go to, let alone sleep at, home because you’re pulling an overnighter after the show: they actually sent a runner to get us clean clothes. And the tour rolled on: north by northeast, south by southwest. Even Canada! You remember Canada: they have Marks & Spencer and sometimes talk French.
Arguments ensued about whether the band should travel with their own support. Blake thought it would unnaturally extend a show that was the perfect length, thirty-five minutes: “it looks like rock music, but it isn’t, and we can’t have it be like an imitation of a rock show—it wouldn’t work.”
Whenever Andy the Damager materialized, the atmosphere in the bus changed noticeably. People huddled together as if there was a draft. “Here comes The Compromise,” Jack would whisper when Andy turned up with this or that instruction from the record company. The good news always came first. “Rock Around the Bed” was climbing another, more important, chart. “Lucky Duck” was going to be used in the bumper for some new TV show. Fender was giving Jack a bunch of equipment. A film director wanted to talk to Blake about a song for a movie. And, best of all, some lunatic had the idea of turning the band and their shenanigans into a cartoon TV series. The mere fact that people were even entertaining such out-to-lunch notions was thrilling.
And then came the bad news, whatever it was; there was always some. Andy considered one particular piece of news so dire that he didn’t even bother to soften the blow with good.
In the front parlor, we registered only stern, worried faces heading past to the back of the bus. After a few minutes’ ominous silence, there was an explosion of hysterical laughter, and everyone emerged smiling. Andy disappeared after a couple of high fives.
“Well, that was a classic,” said Jack, plonking himself down at the front table. “Andy at his very finest.” Curtis looked up from his Times, and Becca interrupted her seated yoga.
“He delivered the bad news at such great length and so thoughtfully,” said Blake. “And then he couldn’t understand why we cracked up. A paternity suit. Against me!”
“A paternity suit against Jimmy,” confirmed Jack, chuckling.
“There’s a bit of a backstory,” said Blake. “It’s that story I was going to tell you before. Are you sitting comfortably? Then we’ll begin. When I was teaching, one of the mothers got kind of obsessed with me. Honestly, I did nothing wrong. But it was weird: every friendly smile, every teacherly observation about her child, she misread them all and the first thing I know, she’s announced to her husband, who’s presumably as shocked as me, that she’s leaving him, and she and I are running off together. And he confronts me. I mean, it wasn’t funny at the time. I was, to put it mildly, surprised, and the upshot was I had to get an actual restraining order, against her not him. He was fine. Anyway, the absolute low point, just after that, was when she waited for me outside the school gate, chucked a large birthday cake at me and screamed: ‘Happy Birthday, Motherfucker!’”
“And it wasn’t even his birthday!” said Jack, with throaty glee.
“Anyway, we thought that was long past, but now she’s got wind of all this, and she’s filed a paternity suit against me.”
“But she’s mad,” I said.
“Did you sleep with her?” asked Becca.
“We didn’t even have a cup of milky tea!”
“Well,” said Becca, “going to court will be a drag, but at least you know it isn’t yours.”
“Well, that’s the funny thing,” said Blake. Jack started to laugh again. “I know it isn’t mine, because the one thing for certain about me is that I can’t have children.”
This unexpected admission sat there. I felt, as I sometimes felt with Blake, that everything had tumbled out in the wrong order. I didn’t feel put out, exactly, but it wasn’t hard to see where I fit in. I was a readymade, prepared before the show even began, like on a kids’ TV show: here’s one I made earlier. Like any adopted kid, I guess. And then I’d been born, like whichever Greek God it was, fully grown, to the greatest father of all time. Becca instinctively reached for my hand.
“That’s a pregnant pause,” said Blake drily, and told the story of a girlfriend, her name coincidentally Rebecca, gym teacher at the same primary school. She got pregnant and, after blood tests and so on, it turned out that the child wasn’t his. And a biopsy revealed that he’d never have any of his own. That was when he stopped being a teacher and when the band started playing for real.
“Kids’ bands and paternity suits don’t go together,” said Blake. “Andy was a very relieved man. I never knew how useful my medical condition would be one day.”
“We’ve arrived!” said Jack. “A paternity suit!” He toasted it with a sip of bourbon and popped another Benadryl.
Another piece of bad news—less easily brushed off—was that the label wanted to foist a lackey on us, a man who, in olden tymes, would have stayed out of the way, scored you drugs, and made sure you made the in-store on time, shaking the right hands during the walkthrough. But we knew they simply wanted a spy in our midst, someone to keep an eye on their investment. We didn’t like it, and we didn’t
need it. The Wonderkids were a family, and our jokes were at the expense of outsiders. We didn’t want spies. We had Mitchell. He made himself hard to find; you could do that in those days. I watched him fade from the record company radar, ignoring pages, unplugging fax machines, leaving messages only at lunchtime when he knew everyone was at Hamburger Hamlet. Mitchell’s was such quiet theater, requiring no audience, though I analyzed his every move from the wings.
The other news, apart from my upcoming sixteenth-birthday celebration at Disneyland, was a potential—and then suddenly very real—appearance at a televised music awards ceremony in Los Angeles. “Rock Around the Bed” was nominated, but (Andy seemed to know) wouldn’t win—the main thing was to give the greatest ever performance of the song.
Television was again to be our friend: it was where we did our greatest damage. There wasn’t much for me to do at such an event, so I became Blake’s personal assistant, making sure he did all the relevant interviews, including our first color cover of a weekly: a little landmark, something to send Barry—evidence.
“I’ve got something special planned for the TV,” Blake told me. Peanut butter was now the standard climax. It was time to ratchet it up a notch or two. “I popped out to the store.” Apparently, he couldn’t achieve the desired effect (whatever it was) with just a guitar, like Richman could, but perhaps a few props would point him in the right direction.
“Shouldn’t you tell Mitchell?” I asked, all Jiminy Cricket good conscience. If you told Mitchell, nothing went wrong. Mitchell didn’t like surprises.
“Yeah, good idea. I’ll tell Mitchell. Could you get me a knife, maybe some scissors?”
I went to Mitchell’s office.
“What are the scissors for?” he asked offhandedly.
“Nothing,” I said, and went about my business.
By the time of the performance, perfectly rehearsed for camera, Blake had that gleam in his eye. The production team had shipped some kids to the front of the stage, good-looking little child actors ready to play the part of regular punters. There didn’t seem to be any accompanying parents; perhaps they’d also hired dwarf chaperones.
“Peanut butter? Tick. Balloons? Tick. Mad hat? Tick.” Mitchell was meticulously checking the contents of the dressing-up box. Often as he did this, he hummed “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” his theme song: “making a list, checking it twice.” It was either that, or when things were on song: “everything’s coming up roses.”
“And, band!” said Blake on the spur of the moment. “Give me the extra third verse for some spice.”
“Blake,” said Mitchell. “That’s not how they rehearsed it: camera angles . . . timings . . .”
“Extra third verse. Let’s do it.”
No time to argue. They were on.
Mitchell shook his head, but smiled.
The jam (rather than the peanut butter) emerged unusually soon, Blake smearing his face in sticky stripes. Also in the dressing-up box, it transpired, was a pillow, which Blake brandished in the first chorus, recreating the video. Feathers immediately started to fly—he’d sliced it—and when he brought the pillow down on the body of Becca’s bass, they billowed everywhere. I was transfixed as I watched the monitor. It looked absolutely amazing, like some crazy visual effect the producers had been planning for ages.
And still the band played. A little plumage wasn’t going to put them off. From the dressing-up box came another pillow, which Blake threw into the audience, and another that he immediately started to disembowel. And despite the feathers stuck to his face on the jam, he kept singing, and by the time they got to the third verse—the “controversial” one—there were feathers everywhere, floating up towards the chandelier in the pavilion, tickling Jack’s nose, bouncing off Curtis’s snare. And the kids in the front were going apeshit.
I looked down at the monitor. Though the band was hurtling headlong into the last chorus, I found myself watching an ad for hairspray. Fair enough, I thought, they ran out of time as Mitchell had predicted: roll credits.
Blake was ecstatic—a pillow fight and jam and the audience had gone nuts—but there was no hero’s welcome offstage. In fact, a melee developed in which I could clearly see Mitchell restraining, then blocking, an angry TV employee wielding a violent clipboard from collaring Blake. Mitchell hurriedly ushered the band into the dressing room. It looked like there’d been a party at the slaughterhouse.
“What’s up?” asked Jack, but Mitchell had already left. Jack tried the door. We were locked in.
“What a performance!” said Blake, oblivious. WBA had left a celebratory bottle of pop that he shook up, Formula One style. He snorted fizz back out of his nose, then immediately rolled a joint.
“Blake!” said Becca. “Not backstage!”
“Give us a break, Mum!”
“I hope they didn’t notice my clam,” said Jack, still trying to figure out why the door was locked. “I had a real senior moment there when those effin’ feathers started flying. Couldn’t even remember what song we were playing!”
“Forget it, man,” said Blake. “They love mistakes. Or they don’t notice them at all.”
Spirits were high until Andy and Mitchell, looking as grave as I had ever seen him, returned. Beads of sweat circled the manager’s brow; my head begin to itch.
“Party poopers!” said Blake, taking a toke. “Did we ruffle some feathers?” It wasn’t the moment.
In the silence, Mitchell said simply: “Altamont.”
No one spoke. We’d just seen the movie on the bus.
“It’s not Altamont,” said Andy angrily. “It’s not that bad. No one’s died.”
“What the fuck’s happened?” asked Jack. “Why’d you lock us in?”
“Two kids collided, slipped on the jam. One got his front teeth smashed out and the other has a big gash in his head.”
“And tooth marks,” said Mitchell.
“Is that why they cut to the ads?” I asked.
“They cut to ads?” asked Blake in surprise. “What?” He extinguished his joint in a paper cup, realized what he’d done and grimaced. “When?”
“Last forty-five seconds,” said Mitchell. “They had to. An arc of blood actually sprayed across the camera lens.”
“You’re shitting me,” said Jack, laughing despite himself.
“Look, gentlemen and lady,” said Mitchell. “In the future, you have to tell me what you’re going to do, or I walk. We’re all in this together: one for all and all for one. But it’s me and Andy who have to go deal with this now.”
All eyes turned to Blake. How could anyone else know what was going to happen? Blake never told anyone.
“I’ll go and apologize,” he said.
“You’ll stay where you are,” said Andy firmly. “And this dressing room stinks.”
Mitchell continued. “The pillows, the feathers were one thing it would have been nice to know about. But they didn’t mind the feathers, despite the fact that Luther Vandross’s band aren’t going to get their line check because Sweeper’s Union 3056 has to get to work on the stage. It would have been nice to tell them about the jam, but they didn’t mind the jam. And it would have been nice for me to know that you were going to sing the third verse more than twenty seconds before you went onstage; but they didn’t even mind that. What they mind is a lawsuit. They are scared stiff of a lawsuit. And, in their eyes, you have just incited a crowd of under-eights to violence, put them in harm’s way. And if that lawsuit comes to them, then that lawsuit will come to you.”
“How are the kids?” asked Blake.
“We will find out,” said Andy. “Sit tight. Do not allow anyone in or out of this dressing room. Speak to no one. Do nothing. Give me the weed. And open a window.”
“What if I want to go to the bathroom?” asked Jack.
“Piss in the sink.”
The five of us sat in our holding tank, picking feathers from each other like monkeys and fleas. Blake couldn’t help giggling, which started Jack
off, and soon we were all laughing helplessly, trying not to laugh helplessly, which made us laugh helplessly, even though we didn’t want to seem like a dressing room of callous performers yukking it up through a crisis, which made us laugh even more. The moment the door opened, everybody stopped. But Mitchell’s mood had lightened.
“Great TV, guys,” he said, miming looking behind him in case Andy might be listening. “That will never be forgotten. But you must tell me what’s going on. I’ll make it okay, but I must know.”
“Sorry,” said Blake. “I was worried you’d tell me not to.”
“I would have told you not to, sir, but then once I realized you were going do it, I would have made it so it went right. That is my job. Anyway, lawsuit averted: apparently the parents signed some waiver. However, you will be leaving out of that window, and the bus will pull up in fifteen minutes.”
“Out of a window?” asked Curtis.
“Like Bing and Danny in White Christmas!” said Blake cheerfully.
Andy closed the door behind him, puffing his cheeks in relief: “We’re alright! But there’s a lot of press by the stage door, and they’re going to run with it: this is going to have one of two results. It’s either going to catapult us into the stratosphere or it’s going to set us back. That’s in the hands of God. We can do nothing about it. Onwards and upwards.”
“Any publicity is good publicity?” asked Jack, somewhat more tentatively than usual.
“That’s a point of view, and it may be true where you come from,” said the Damager, “but these are the United States of America. And you ain’t from round these parts.”
By the time the headlines appeared in the tour bus, we’d already seen the whole thing on CNN, watched in amazement at the blurry circled bubble where one of the kids’ heads smashed down, then cracked back. You could actually see, with CNN’s helpful televisual enhancement, the teeth fly through the air, the trajectory of the blood; one of the kids went down like a prizefighter, the other merely looked dazed and continued his feather dance. It’d be a YouTube sensation nowadays, or a GIF, viral in seconds, but in those days, you just saw that stuff once, for a day or two, and that was that. All you could do was talk about it; and everyone did.
