Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life

by Steve Almond

  The living room was scattered with toys and the computer on the kitchen counter was flashing photos of his son. It suddenly seemed important that I inform Bob I had a wife and child, too, a life beyond the borderline creepy feelings that had brought me here.

  Me: This must be your son. Very cute. What’s his name?

  Bob: Luke.

  Me: Good name. Good gospel. How old is he?

  Bob: Three.

  Me: I have a daughter who’s one.

  Bob: Cool.

  Me: So are you planning on having any more?

  (Long Pause)

  Bob: No.

  Me: Stopping at one, huh? Yeah, my wife and I are thinking of having another, not really trying yet, but also not really not trying, if you know what I mean. Ha-ha-ha. (Very Long Pause)

  Bob: My wife and I separated two years ago.

  Now many things began to add up rather quickly. Such as why there was no sign of his wife or child. Such as why Bob had been asleep at ten a.m. Such as why the premises exuded dishevelment. (What kind of woman allows a pile of white daisies to rot in her front yard?) A more observant person—a writer, for example—might have figured this out. I stood, blinking.

  “I’m gonna go get dressed,” Bob said.

  I was ready to apologize and leave. It was obvious he didn’t want to be talking to me. And in a weird way, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be talking to him either. I’d forgotten the sheer dread that is a central ingredient of hero worship. But then Bob reappeared and said, “You wanna grab some breakfast tacos?” and my heart thumped out a Y-E-S.

  The joint was called Jim Bob’s B-B-Q. It was across the street from a mall. In fact, it was surrounded by malls. This was the new Texas prairie; Lowe’s had run off the longhorn. Inside, the TV was tuned to Fox News. Bob ordered a Diet Coke and an egg and potato breakfast taco. The cashier set a Styrofoam cup on the counter for his soda, then handed me my change, which I immediately tossed into Bob’s cup.

  How to explain this action?

  Near as I can figure, I was so determined to seem like the kind of guy who tipped, to impress Bob with my casual generosity toward the service industry, that I somehow managed to put aside the fact I had seen the cashier put the cup on the counter and, ergo, it was obviously not a tip jar.

  Things were not going well.

  Die Young, Hope Somebody Notices

  Back at his house, I asked him if it was true that he’d learned how to play guitar at age three. He nodded. His father, a professional opera singer, had made him learn so he could perform at the parties his parents threw. “People ask me all the time, ‘How should I get my kid involved in music?’ And I’m like, ‘Well, be completely unavailable to them unless they play music.’” He laughed, but not happily.

  Bob eventually came to the University of Texas at El Paso, to study art. I had hoped to bond with him over our El Paso connection, but he dropped out of UTEP after a few semesters and relocated to Austin, just as I was arriving in town.

  His musical evolution over the next decade provides a convenient survey of unfortunate nineties genres. He did white boy rap/funk (Joe Rockhead). He did roots/jam music (Ugly Americans). He did party rock (the Scabs). “I knew exactly what the plan was when I moved to Austin,” Bob said. “I was going to become a huge rock star and die at twenty-seven. So I got into bands and drank very heavily and did as many drugs as I could. I just never got successful enough to die properly. Nobody would have cared.”

  Yes they would have! I wanted to scream. But I was afraid Bob would take it the wrong way so I asked if I could use his bathroom. This was a mistake. The moment I closed the door I melted down. I knew on one level that I was a writer with a semiplausible reason for being in Bob Schneider’s bathroom. But on another level—a far more emotionally convincing level, frankly—I couldn’t stop thinking: Ohmigod! I’m in Bob Schneider’s bathroom! That’s totally, like, his toilet! He sits right here! He sure does read a lot of art books! He uses really cool soap! Then I came out of the bathroom and Bob was sitting there, looking exactly like himself. I had to take a few deep breaths to calm myself.

  She Don’t Mind the Cum, G

  I had been in Bob’s presence for a full hour without doing something stupid, so I decided to ask the question I had been waiting to ask since I arrived: would he go steady with me?

  No, that wasn’t it.

  I stared at my notebook and tried to decipher my handwriting.

  “Why aren’t you more famous?” I said.

  “Oh, I’ve always been a massive star in my own head,” Bob said. “The weird thing for me is when I look out into the audience and I’m not playing for more people and I think to myself—and it seems extremely arrogant—but I think, ‘At this point, with this band and this set, we should be playing giant stadiums.’ I’ve always wanted the external world to line up with that world in my head, but at the same time I’ve never been willing to do the things necessary to achieve that.”

  In fact, this was a big part of what made Bob Schneider so incredibly crushworthy to me. With his looks and his chops, he could become the next Jack Johnson without breaking a sweat. But he has absolutely refused to clean up his act. I submit as Exhibit A his recent composition “Hocaine.” It is about dating a crack whore.

  If you got the Humvee, she don’t mind the cum, G …

  If you got the thick bills, she’s got the sick dick skills …

  If you got the magic powder, she’ll let you give her a golden shower

  I don’t suppose it helps to note that this is the least offensive portion of this song. Nor that it is generally performed to a jaunty piano riff appropriated from “This Land Is Your Land.” But here’s the thing: while a certain part of me recognizes how offensive I should find this song, another part of me finds it incredibly liberating. And because I myself have done best as a writer when I focus on the abundant depravities of our species, it inspires me to encounter a guy who refuses to censor himself just to get ahead. When Bob told me that he wanted to call his new album Fuck All You Motherfuckers I had to physically restrain myself from climbing into his lap.

  A Kingdom of One

  It was time, as they say in Reality TV, to take this bromance to the next level. Or at least to Bob’s studio. He led me out past a small pool with leaves in it, to a shack inside of which were more instruments than I’ve ever seen in one place: guitars, banjos, mandolins, a baritone ukulele, what was either a xylophone or a marimba (Bob wasn’t sure), an ancient Wurlitzer that made a mysterious buzzing noise, a small drum kit in the center of the room, a baby grand piano. The room’s lone chair was surrounded by banks of synthesizers, mixing boards, and computer monitors. It looked like where a starship captain would sit. And Bob was, in a sense, a starship captain. Using this equipment, he could record, edit, and mix songs all by himself.

  The studio doubled as the HQ of his record label Shockorama, on which he’s released a dozen records in the past decade. In fact, he’d meant to release Fuck All You Motherfuckers months ago, but it was still sitting on his hard drive, along with hundreds of other unreleased songs. (The rumor was that Bob sometimes wrote a song per day.)

  It will sound hokey, but I honestly felt like I was standing in a holy place. I had 559 Bob songs in my iTunes library. I had listened to his music for entire days at a time and thought about him, in some capacity, every day for the past five years. I recognized the chance that we would run off together was extremely low, but I also believed—and I think Drooling Fanatics cannot help themselves in this regard—that I understood Bob in a way nobody else on earth did, that we were soulmates and though he didn’t know this yet he had a secret message to impart. This is perhaps the most annoying aspect of Fanaticism, from the musician’s point of view. They owe us nothing beyond their songs, but we keep hounding them for more.

  “How do you do it?” I asked. “How do you write so many totally ass-kicking songs?”

  Bob replied that it wasn’t really him, it was his unconscious, he was ju
st plugging into it, like you might plug a fork into an outlet. “There’s this weird thing that happens with songwriting,” he went on. “When you first start doing it you’re just doing your best with whatever comes into your head, but after a while you get this idea about what’s good or bad and you start doing this approximation of what you think you should be doing and the only solution I’ve come up with is just to keep my standards low.”

  Yes, I wanted to cry out, that’s it! You, Bob Schneider, have just identified the fundamental crisis (and resolution) of the creative process. Might I now briefly stroke your big beefy man hand?

  But Bob wasn’t finished. He said, more to himself than to me, “Sometimes I wonder if I wasn’t me, would I like what I do? Like, a few days ago I did a show and right before I went on, I started thinking, ‘I suck, I truly suck, and I kind of got lucky on a few songs, but they’re kind of worn and I’ll never write anything good again and I’m washed up and what’s the point and why am I doing this and if I had any other options, if I hadn’t painted myself into a corner, I’d take them.’” He shook his head. “I don’t have a life. I really don’t. I spend as much time as I can with my kid, but the rest of the time I work, period. You see that pool out there? I’ve swam in that pool fifteen times in five years. You and me hanging out like this? I never do this. When you came and rang my doorbell this morning, I was like, ‘Nobody comes to my house, nobody rings my doorbell. Ever. They just don’t. Maybe it’s the exterminator.’”

  After a moment, Bob continued, “In every relationship I get into it’s like, ‘Why do you spend so much time working? I feel lonely. I want to interact with you.’ And the reason I do what I do is that I feel I have to do it to justify breathing; I don’t have the sense of self-worth that allows me to not do it. People come up to me at shows and they’ll say, ‘Your music means so much to me.’ And I always try to be nice to them and appreciative, but I’m not doing it for them. I’m doing it so I can save myself from drowning.” He added, quite softly, “We live in a society that puts a high premium on success and I learned, mainly through my dad, that salvation would come through success, and I carried that into my adult life and it’s a total lie.”

  I was hit hard by all of this, not just the sudden darkening of Bob’s mood, but the acute solitude he described. It seemed to me that his ambition had become a kind of Oedipal curse, a way of vanquishing his father while also clinging to the sorrow of his childhood. Music put him in the spotlight and, at the same time, it had become the instrument of his exile. He had pushed his wife away. He had no real friends. His studio was a monument to his musical invention, but it was also a fortress, so crowded with the tools of his trade that there was room for no one but himself.

  Wave Good-bye to That Man You Love

  And what could I say to any of this? It was the old story about being careful what you wish for. I wanted to comfort Bob somehow, to confess my crush in a way that would return to him some of the joy he’d given me. And then on the other hand I wanted to get the hell out of there and hug my wife and baby daughter. It’s a strange feeling, to worship and pity someone simultaneously.

  Later that night, more or less by accident, I would attend a raucous dinner party and wind up sitting across from a woman in the local music scene. I told her I was in town to interview Bob Schneider. She fixed me with a quizzical look. “How did it go?” she shouted.

  “Kind of awkward,” I shouted back.

  “It always is these days. I don’t know what’s happened to him. When he was with Sandra they used to come out all time …” I couldn’t hear the rest of what she said but I could tell by the look on her face that she was being wistful, recalling happier days, and it made me wish that I’d never come to Austin at all, that I’d behaved like a reasonable fan, and not invaded the desolation in which his art continues to bloom.

  How Dave Grohl Taught Me to Stop Whining and, Against Every Known Impulse in My Body, Embrace Happiness

  I was asking Jimmy at the valet stand where I might find some decent food, because we were on Sunset Boulevard, where all the tourist joints smell like frat. “There’s an In-N-Out down there,” Jimmy said.

  “How far?” I said. “Walking distance?”

  Jimmy looked at me like I’d asked to lick one of his tattoos. “Whatsamatta,” he said, “you don’t got a car?”

  A drunk guy came stumbling out of the hotel. He had a sideways Mohawk and a T-shirt reading GET YOUR OWN, BITCH. His female companion was the color of the cheese mix you add to Kraft macaroni. Something in his manner, the belligerent public inebriation, I guess, suggested he might be a rock star.

  “Hey,” I said to Jimmy, “was that guy a rock star?”

  Jimmy made a sound like he was going to spit. “None of these people are rock stars. They’re rich Eurotrash who come here so they can act like rock stars. The Strip is all poseurs now. Not like it used to be. Man, you don’t even wanna know how crazy that shit used to get.” Jimmy was right. I didn’t really want to know how crazy that shit used to get. But he proceeded to tell me anyway, because the Sunset Strip is one of those self-consciously famous locales—L.A. is lousy with them—where the natives feel a civic compulsion to recite the prevailing mythology.

  I was only chatting with Jimmy because the rock star I was supposed to be interviewing for SPIN magazine—Dave Grohl, former Nirvana drummer and Foo Fighters front man—had blown me off. It was Labor Day, 2007, and I’d been in Los Angeles for forty-eight hours and had yet to spend a single minute with Grohl. Instead I’d spent those hours fielding increasingly frantic calls from my editor, who wanted to know why I had yet to spend a single minute with Dave Grohl.

  I was so far from knowing the answer to this question that it had become an indeterminate philosophical inquiry. There was an entire circuitry of power and influence crackling around me, a network of publicists and managers and agents and editors, all of whom were yelling at one another on cell phones about access and contingencies and deadlines and all of whom sounded helpless. My life had become a Beckett play, as adapted for the stage by Chuck Klosterman.

  My editor was taking it the hardest. It was his ass in the sling. To make up for lost time, he wanted me to fly to Las Vegas to join the Foos for the MTV Music Awards, a plan that sounded glamorous until you realized that it would almost certainly involve me sitting in a hotel room, listening to my editor stroke out on the phone.

  “Oh hey,” Jimmy said. “There’s a California Pizza Kitchen down on Holloway.”

  My cell phone rang and it was not my editor. It was someone named Eliot, who worked for a music publicity firm employed by the Foo Fighters. Eliot had flown from New York to Los Angeles for the express purpose of making sure I got access to Dave Grohl. The Foo Fighters, in other words, had just paid thousands of dollars to lobby themselves on my behalf. “Let’s make this happen, buddy,” Eliot said.

  I turned off my cell phone and fled Sunset on foot. The sidewalks were littered with scuffed photos of young women eager to degrade themselves and flyers of bands who had already failed but didn’t know it yet. Down I plunged, through the lavender smogcrust, which registered as a corroding warmth in the throat. On Santa Monica, I passed an open-air club called RAGE where young men in underpants danced on raised boxes. They looked smooth beyond all feats of epilation, as if they had been flayed. The patio bars were packed for Labor Day. Billboard faces loomed over the avenue, vast and pale, like planets of narcissism. My cell phone buzzed. I had six new messages.

  Not Famous, Not Almost Famous

  If you’re wondering what it’s really like to write a cover story about a rock star for a national music magazine, this is what it is like. You spend a lot of time talking to people like Jimmy at the valet stand and staggering through hotel lobbies on the verge of nervous collapse.

  As to why I took the assignment, this was a complicated question. I’d long since sworn off rock criticism. At the same time, some crucial part of me wanted to see what it was like to be a Big Famous Ro
ck Star with No Integrity, and how such a life might differ from other sorts of lives, such as my own. Whatever cultural sophistication we might aim at, no matter how many Obscure Rockers with Integrity we might visit, the Drooling Fanatic remains an essentially covetous personality. Also, SPIN was offering more money than I had earned in ten years as a short story writer.

  Foo headquarters was in the San Fernando Valley, which meant numerous trips over the dirty yellow mountains that divide the hip part of L.A. (mansions, movie studios, boutiques) from the unhip part (strip malls, porn sets, ethnic worker bees). The first time I arrived at the Foo compound, some asshole in a black Beemer pulled up behind me and laid on his horn, then burned rubber into the parking lot. That was the closest I would come to interacting with Dave Grohl for the next two days.

  Instead, I was left to skulk accusingly while the Foos got their photos taken by Japanese magazines and huddled with managers and rehearsed, in private, for the MTV gig. I wasn’t even the only reporter on the premises. A guy from GQ, who looked about seventeen, was getting major face time with Dave. I was eventually reduced to eavesdropping on the band’s inane conversations during photo sessions, a practice I suspect produces 50 percent of the quotes printed in SPIN.

  Why couldn’t I just set up a time to interview Dave Grohl? Because there was a protocol, one that operated on two levels. The first was practical. Grohl was a rock star who ran his own multimillion-dollar-yet-still-impressively-disorganized corporation. He had no fixed schedule and eighty people required his attention at all times. The second level was psychological and largely subconscious. It was predicated on the fact that a reporter was an interloper, a nonfamous person, an envoy, in fact, from the larger world of nonfamous people. The idea that a nonfamous person would make a demand on the time of a famous person is inherently offensive to the keepers of celebrity.18