And for Bob, like, the problem with the people in the middle, the problem with normal people, is that they take the world so seriously, you know? They look out on the world around them and they treat it all with this heavy seriousness, because for them, there’s never any reason to doubt it. It all seems like it’s been perfectly arranged just for them, and so they treat anything that threatens it with this really intense heaviness. But what’s actually required is a sort of lightness, you know what I’m saying? For the normal people, for the people in the middle, the world that exists is this unshakable, unmovable thing. And they may not even know it, but they’re hungry for another world. The only reason they show up to my concerts, and like, the only reason they consume so much media and spend so much time obsessing over people like me and my life is that they’re hungry for an image of a world where all the bullshit they tell themselves every day just isn’t real. They’re hungry to let go. And so when people show up to my concerts, that’s the only time they’re really allowing themselves to be free, because it’s the only time they’re allowing themselves to imagine another way of being.
That’s actually why I wear all this crazy shit all the time, you know? Or at least that’s part of the reason. I mean, I like the shit I wear, no question about it—I think it looks dope—but it’s also like: I wear this shit to communicate that I’m not from here. I’m a different kind of human. So many people make fun of the way I dress all the time, or like, they make fun of the way Scaggs dresses or Z dresses, and it’s like: Yeah, okay, whatever, have your fun, but at the end of the day, like, you NEED us to dress this way, because the main function we serve in your lives is to give you an image of another way of existing. We NEED to look different from anybody you know or like, anybody who works in your office. And it can be something as simple as like: You’re not allowed to wear sweatpants to a really fancy restaurant. I hear that and I go: What if I get a REALLY fucking fancy pair of sweatpants? What if I get a pair of sweatpants that’s more expensive than a three-piece suit? What then?
And I’m not saying that people are just interested in me because they want all the STUFF that I have. Like, it’s honestly not about the money or the girls or the jets or the clothes or whatever. I mean, yeah, maybe it’s a little bit about that—like maybe people are getting off a little bit on imagining having all the material shit that I have—but what Bob says, and what I really think is right, is like: When normal people see my life, when they see the way I’m existing, they can see for a moment that another world is possible. They can see, through me, a portal into all the infinite possibilities of the human species. And so when they come to my shows or when they watch my videos, they’re not actually fantasizing about being ME. They’re fantasizing about being FREE.
And for Bob, like, the worst thing you can do as an artist is to try to hold on to your normal person status. Like, you can’t just think of yourself as a normal person who got really lucky or who gets to do a really cool job, because when you do that, you’re totally backing away from the actually amazing thing about doing what we do. He especially thinks it’s stupid to try to make art that’s soothing for normal people or that makes them feel better or gives them a break, because, for Bob, like, they’re barely ALIVE, you know? There’s nothing about these people’s lives that’s worthy of any sort of reward or congratulations or pat on the back. And he doesn’t mean that they’re bad people or something—I mean, I know it sounds like he hates them or like he looks down on them or something—but actually, when you think about it, like, Bob is being super-loving toward normal people, because he’s just trying to be honest with them. He loves them enough to see them clearly. How many people are willing to do that?
But, you know, people don’t really want to hear about that shit. People hear me say that or they hear Bob say that, and they think I’m judging them or they think Bob’s judging them, and it’s like: No, I’m not judging you. I just want people to be honest. I just want people to look at their lives and go: Whoa. Shit. But that’s hard, you know, because when people are honest with themselves, most of the time, the thing they have to be honest about is that they’re really fucking miserable, and so it makes sense to me that they might just want to forget everything and turn their brains off for a few hours and dance.
It’s like I said: You can’t control what people do with your shit. If you tried, you’d go crazy. Part of my freedom—part of what makes me free—is that I can just make the music and play the shows and then let the chips fall where they may. I’m not a priest, you know? I’m not a missionary. Maybe none of this shit even matters anyway, so like, why would I get so wrapped up in it? We’re all just little turds who are floating through time for a brief moment until one day we’re not, and so sometimes, the only rational thing to do is to just chill out and eat a hamburger. That’s what Bob taught me more than anything: You’ve gotta be able to take life more seriously than anyone else and less seriously than anyone else, and if you can’t switch back and forth between the two—like, if you can’t transition at the drop of a hat—you’re not nearly as free as you think you are. And along the way, you might piss some people off, or you might lose some people, but that’s just part of the journey.
That was always the biggest tension between Bob and Mandy. One minute Bob would be saying the most serious thing, and the next minute Bob would be saying the most ridiculous thing, and Mandy would always just be like: Which one is it? Which person are you? And Bob would be like: Both! Both! But Mandy always thought that he was fucking with her. And I get it, you know, because when Bob would talk about music or when Bob would talk about art, it would always just feel like he was talking directly to Mandy. It would always feel like a rejection of everything she stood for and everything she was about, because for Mandy, she just wanted people to have a good time and relax and take a load off at her concerts and be happy, you know? Like, most people have a lot of shit they’ve got to deal with, and maybe it’s a little arrogant or a little judgmental to think that you know better than they do what they need at the end of the week. Mandy always just felt like Bob’s position was kind of superior and a little fucked up, because like, I mean especially for her, you know, she grew up in this super-working-class family and like, her parents worked really hard so that she could take singing lessons and dancing lessons and record a demo and move out to L.A., and Mandy really kind of hated it when Bob would say that those people didn’t deserve to be comforted at all or didn’t deserve to be rewarded at all for all their hard work, and like, she REALLY fucking hated it when he said that they were barely even alive, because like, who the fuck was Bob, you know? To Mandy, Bob was just this rich kid aristocrat who was born into a lot of money and had the privilege of spending all his time, like, looking out on the world and going: HMMM, what do I THINK about this? And she’s totally right, by the way. Bob’s family was SUPER-rich. LOL. Like, even though he talks all the time about how they were the deadest people of all, like, the least free people of all, and even though he’s totally estranged from them now, like, Mandy’s still right to say that they totally shaped him and that there are some things about her life and her perspective that someone like Bob—no matter how smart he is or how many books he’s read—could never possibly understand. And I mean, the sad thing is, you know, that Bob was only even talking about all this shit to Mandy in the first place because he really believed in her. I mean, Bob legitimately thought that Mandy was one of the most talented people in the game. He would always tease me about how much better she was than me. And he cared about her a lot because she meant a lot to me. And she did, you know? She does. She still does.
* * *
We actually did end up getting together again once, but it wasn’t after my dad died. It was a few months later, when that terrorist attack happened in Berlin.
I’m sure pretty much everyone reading this already knows about it, but just in case someone’s picking this book up sometime way in the future—like, if you found this in a used bookstore
or something on Mars—there was a big terrorist attack at one of Mandy’s concerts two years ago, and a lot of people died.
Mandy was fine, but immediately when I heard about it on the news, my heart just sank, and I was like: I’ve gotta go get her. I just got this feeling like: Mandy’s in trouble—I’ve got to go be with her. And so before I even texted Mandy to see if she was okay—they reported it on the news that she wasn’t hurt, so I knew that like, at the very least, she was alive—I made a call to my pilot, and I was just like: How soon do you think we could take off and get to Berlin? And he started making all the arrangements.
I was in London at the time for the opening of this musical my boy Bryan Rogers did, so it didn’t take long at all to get there. I called Mandy from the plane, and she was really shaken up—I mean, I’d never heard her like that before—and I was just like: Yo, hang tight, I’m coming to get you. And immediately when we landed, I just booked it right for her hotel.
Her people had sort of rushed her away from the scene and gotten her in a car away from the venue as quickly as they could—they weren’t sure whether more shit was about to go down, you know, or if like, the whole thing was about to explode, so they were just like, in full war zone mode, putting all their training to use. Thank God Mandy had such a good security team, because as soon as they realized that shots were happening, her team basically rushed onto the stage and tackled her. Mandy didn’t even really know what was happening, you know, because the music was so loud, and she was in the middle of singing “Ray of Sunshine,” so she was just about to hit that high note at the end of the bridge when her security people jumped onstage and rushed her off to the side. One of her guys even got hit in the process. He didn’t realize it until they had already gotten her off into the backstage area and somebody was like, “Mandy, there’s blood all over you!” and everyone was in a real panic for a second until they realized that it was actually Terry who was bleeding from his arm. He hadn’t even looked, and then, like, he saw it and he fainted and they rushed him to the hospital. He ended up being fine.
Anyway, when I got there, Mandy was sort of surrounded by this whole group of people—her road manager and her backup dancers, and this doctor who they had called to the hotel just to make sure that she wasn’t suffering from shock or anything—and I stepped into the room and saw all of the pandemonium that was happening around her, and I was just like: Yo, do you think we could maybe clear the room for a minute? I think Mandy’s a little overwhelmed. And everyone was sort of like: Yeah, okay, yeah. And they shuffled out of there.
And, immediately, when everybody left, Mandy just started bawling. Like, I think in the hubbub of the whole thing, Mandy was just like, too shocked, or too shaken up to really have any emotion about it—when I called her from the plane, she sounded terrible, but there wasn’t any feeling in it, you know? It was just so scattered, so dazed—but then once everybody left the room and she saw me, it was just like the whole dam burst open and she was sobbing, like wailing on the floor. I went over to her and held her and it was like she was shaking, you know? She was like a little hamster.
And the thing that was really disturbing to her, or like, the thing that she really couldn’t stop thinking about was that like, because she didn’t know what was happening—like, because it took a while for her people to realize that an attack had broken out—she was still singing as people were getting shot. Like, the attack had already been under way for a couple seconds, maybe even half a minute, before her team got up on the stage and covered her, and “Ray of Sunshine” has all these pyrotechnics and complicated dance moves and all this other shit, and so Mandy wasn’t really paying attention to what was going on in the audience while she was performing it—she just had too much shit to do. She was in the middle of doing the song just like she would do it at any other concert when all this horrible shit was happening out in the crowd, and, I don’t know, I think that’s what disturbed her so much: that, like, she could be so close to all this horrible stuff and not have a clue—or that like, in the moment, she could be so wrong about the reality of the space she was in. Not to mention, like, I think it was really kind of sickening to her that while all this shit was happening, she was providing a soundtrack for it, you know? Like, she was providing a live soundtrack to all these horrible murders, and “Ray of Sunshine” is just this very light, very fun and breezy and meaningless sort of thing, and so the whole thing just felt kind of demented to her. She even told me that a bunch of different people had already posted videos online of the moments leading up to the attack, and she couldn’t stop watching them. Like, she couldn’t stop going online and watching these videos of her face, like, smiling, and doing a dance move, and like, singing about how some guy is like a ray of sunshine while all these people were getting murdered. And I told her, like: Okay, that needs to stop NOW. Like, that’s order of business number one. You need to stop watching these videos. And number two, like, we’re getting the fuck out of Germany.
Obviously, Mandy’s team had decided to cancel the rest of the tour—there weren’t that many dates left anyway—and so I just told her, like, let’s go. You and me are gonna get as far away from all this shit as we possibly can. And so we got on my plane that night, and we left.
I ended up taking her to that same town in France where I was hiding out for a while during my dad’s whole meltdown. I wasn’t able to get exactly the same house I had stayed at before, but it was more or less the same area, and it was just as beautiful. I just thought it would be a good place for Mandy to get her bearings, you know? To remove herself from the scene for a second and remember that this thing was way bigger than her. Obviously, she felt really attacked by the whole thing, and she also felt really responsible for what had happened, and I just thought like, the best possible thing for Mandy at this point would be to take a step back and to realize that like, there were so many different forces at play that made what happened happen and that absolutely none of it was her fault.
Sometimes it’s hard, you know, to remember that you’re just this tiny little seahorse in the middle of the ocean. When you’re someone like me or you’re someone like Mandy, your existence just gets stretched out way beyond yourself, and for all intents and purposes, it feels like your concerts or your press packages or your music videos or your merchandise or all of the shit that people have branded with your name on it is a part of YOU—like it’s actually one of your limbs, one of your appendages—and so when something like what happened in Berlin happens, I mean, it just feels like it happened inside your stomach, you know? Or like, it feels like someone did it with your hand: like a little alien crawled inside your body and made its way into your finger and forced you to pull the trigger.
So, I don’t know, I think the trip was really useful for her.
We didn’t leave the house that much at all. Every day, I would just have my guys go to the market and get us some bread and cheese and veggies, and like, I’d cook us all our meals—I’m actually a pretty decent cook—and sometimes I would be cooking for everybody, like, Mandy’s security team and my security team and the two of us, but most of the time, it was just me and Mandy in the house, and so everybody else would do their own thing.
I remember one night, it was raining outside pretty hard, and so Mandy and I made a little fire and like, I made us some hot chocolate, and we just sat on the rug in front of the fireplace and imagined what our lives would have been like if we were normal people.
LOL.
We tried to imagine what would’ve happened to us if somehow we never got famous.
Mandy sort of imagined that she’d end up being a high school teacher—since that’s what her mom was doing, and she always really admired that—and I sort of imagined that I would’ve gone to college and become a doctor or something, since, like, when I was still in school, I would hear all these stories about the older kids getting to dissect a pig or a frog or something like that in junior high, and I was actually kind of pissed that I never got to
do it.
And we tried to imagine if we ever would’ve met each other in the normal people world—like, what would’ve had to happen so that Mandy and me would’ve met naturally, like, as just two people—and the scenario we came up with was, like: Mandy probably wasn’t gonna leave Arizona, you know, because her whole family was there and that’s probably where she would’ve wanted to teach, but like, when you’re a doctor, you sometimes just have to do your residency basically wherever they tell you to do it, and so maybe I would’ve been assigned to the hospital at the University of Arizona, and like, maybe Mandy would’ve been there getting her teacher’s degree, and then maybe we would’ve met in the cafeteria one day when we both reached for the same cup of pudding.
And we sort of played it out: I pretended to be this med student, and she pretended to be this teaching student, and we pretended to meet and talk about our lives, and talk about what we were studying, and I pretended to ask her out on a date.
And, you know, somewhere along the line, there was some kissing, and then there was some touching and blah blah blah, but it really wasn’t about that. It was nice, you know—I mean, it’s always nice with Mandy—but it felt like the whole week in France was more about us being friends than it was about us rekindling some big love affair. It just felt really nice taking care of each other.
And since then, you know, since being back in L.A., it’s been more or less back to normal for the both of us—back to being officially “broken up.” I mean, it’s not like we were ever back together, but we sort of left it where it had been once we landed, and I think we both still feel pretty good about that. I hugged her and kissed her on the tarmac, and we both got into our different cars, and we went our separate ways. In a way, that week really reignited our friendship, you know, which had been lacking for what felt like a really long time. Or like, I don’t know, I guess it created our friendship, since we were never really “friends” to begin with, but it’s been kind of beautiful navigating this new space together. I don’t really know what else to say about that.
Famous People Page 10
