Hard Listening: The Greatest Rock Band Ever (of Authors) Tells All

by King, Stephen

  Real sheep are so much more than these inflatable ones. The latter are fine to relax and watch television with. And they are in some ways more hygienic. But to a real, living, breathing sheep there is no comparison. A real sheep is woolly. Does go baaah and rub up against a fellow. Does nuzzle around in his pockets looking for kernels of corn. Oh yes. Is there any wonder why we call her “ewe”?

  Ted’s Management Lesson #2:

  Logistics

  For our Midwest tour in 2005, we wanted a bus big enough to accommodate everyone—spouses, friends, groupies, crew, interns. A typical tour bus doesn’t really hold that many people, but we came across a listing for a “modified 18-wheeler with a custom cab on the back, previously used by a semi-pro hockey team.” Apparently, they slept on the bus to avoid motel costs. PERFECT!

  Or not. It was big enough to fit everyone, but it was also big enough that the driver had to chart out his route to avoid all highway overpasses. Try getting into Chicago without going under an overpass. There was also bunk-style accommodation (three levels), a bathroom (nonworking), two TVs (one working), and a broken window in the back, covered in plastic. I’ll never forget the look on Ridley’s face when he saw the bus. I don’t think either of us fell asleep the entire trip, knowing the shenanigans people might pull. Lesson: Research the reality of the bus.

  ABOUT THE BUS

  The bus was just so damn low-class and weird. It didn’t look like a rock-and-roll tour bus or even a grandparents-tour-the-Grand-Canyon tour bus. It looked like a submarine. It looked like a bus a C-level sports team would travel in, which is what it was. It was just goofy. Mitch refused to ride on it, but truth be told, it was a lot of fun. Roger, who spent so many years on the road in both high- and less-high style, got on and took out one of those labelers and labeled the bunks across from his and Camilla’s “Kathi” and “Sam,” then settled in with a tiny, early-YouTube-like-TV-watching device of that year. Six-year-old Sophie, Dave’s daughter, planted her Barbie doll next to the driver, riding shotgun. It was just weird and funny. What would have been uncomfortable became fun. —Sam Barry

  From the Fax Machine of Amy Tan

  Sent: January 1992

  To: Kathi Goldmark

  Dear Kathi,

  Thanks for the faxes. I got a note from Louise about very important matters. We have in mind to wear one gold and one silver lamé glove, bicep length. As to the rest, anything that’s black, tight, and sleazy. I am using this band as my excuse to finally do some exercise.

  Can I wear my Supremes wig and sunglasses?

  By the way, a friend of mine who has heard me humming tunes to the radio asks, “Are you sure they know what you mean when you say you can’t sing?”

  Talk to you soon,

  Amy

  BLACK, TIGHT, AND SLEAZY

  Fifty Shades of Tan

  by Amy Tan

  What I Learned After Whipping the Boys in the Band

  For nineteen years, I performed unnatural acts as the Rhythm Dominatrix of the Rock Bottom Remainders. This was my calling late in life: to belittle the boys of the band by berating them and whipping their sorry butts. My hymn to their humiliation was “These Boots Are Made for Walking.” This is the true, unexpurgated, and only authorized story on how I rose to the occasion and made the boys do likewise. Don’t tweet yet, dears. Just listen. After it gets good, it gets even better.

  ***

  Although I was not born with any obvious talents as a dominatrix, I learned to wield my newly honed skills so effectively that many times after the shows, I received furtive cries and whispers, as well as ungrammatical notes, all asking for humiliation and punishment. It was shocking who made these pathetic pleas. One was an Eastern-European publisher, who confessed that he had been a naughty-naughty-naughty boy and wanted to come to my hotel room to tell me why. I won’t reveal which nation he was from, but if Kafka were alive, he would be ashamed of his fellow countryman. Some of the boys in the band also came to me with confessions that they had been very bad; they had missed their deadlines and they needed punishing. Never Ridley, however. He would never allow himself to miss a deadline. Instead, he inserted two punctuation errors so he could be a bad boy, too.

  Growing up, there were no obvious signs that a whip was in my future. I once threw a rubber doll at my older brother and its finger caught the corner of his nostril and caused a nosebleed. Even though I got in a lot of trouble for being violent, a rubber doll hardly compares with a cat o’ nine tails as a weapon meant to elicit tears. For the most part, I was a sweet and gentle girl in pigtails, who sang in the church choir and strived to get straight A’s. My arrest in Switzerland at age sixteen for drugs was an aberration; I went on to win an American Baptist Scholarship based on my academic achievement, high morals, and the fact that I returned to the United States and left behind my criminal record. As proof of my rehabilitation, twenty years later I wrote tender stories about mothers and daughters.

  I have always been known as a kind person, a soft touch. In my early days of authorhood, I was humble. And I was not prone to megalomania, unlike some famous writers, whose names I cannot reveal but whom everyone knows. (Hint: begins with a C and writes murder mysteries.) I knew that a book of mine being on the New York Times Best Seller List did not mean I was automatically a better writer.

  Some best-selling writers, however, fall into narcissistic sinkholes. When they reach the top ten of the list, their brain goes off-kilter, and they start thinking things like, “Hey, I could be a rock star, if only someone asked.” Kathi asked, and she was once the girlfriend of Jimmy Hodder, the drummer of Steely Dan—a girlfriend, mind you, not a groupie. She knew all about rock stars, fawning fans, and twisted egos.

  I never fantasized about being in a rock band. I am not lying. I was a girl who loved classical music, a skill that did not require you to sweat in ridiculous skintight outfits. What’s more, I was not fond of singing in private, let alone in public. I did not sing “Happy Birthday” in restaurants to embarrass friends. At public ceremonies, I lip-synced “The Star Spangled Banner.” If drunken guests at a wedding reception were singing “One Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall,” I clinked mugs and pretended to guzzle beer and shout incoherently, “Take one down and pass it around!” My reluctance to sing extended even to the shower. I was embarrassed to hear my voice reverberate between tiles. I hummed.

  But when I turned forty, mortality looked me in the eye, and I had a frightening realization: If I did not make a fool of myself soon, I might never have a chance to do so again. Call it fate, but that’s when Kathi came to me and said she had founded a garage band and was recruiting people who liked to wear costumes but who could not sing. Could not sing. To me that meant you were not allowed to sing. I would not learn the semantic difference between her intention and my interpretation until after I had said to her offer, “Yeah, sure.”

  Kathi was quite stringent about the “cannot sing” criteria among wannabe rock stars. If you said you had musical talent, you were out. If you apologized and said you couldn’t even whistle worth shit, you were in. It became a contest of sorts to say how bad you were and then to blow people away with how semigood you really were. Touting that we were “pretty bad” became an essential part of the band’s reputation and our quintessential marketing strategy. In interviews, Roy boasted that our band was “hard listening.” The Boys with Guitars claimed they knew only three chords and they were all in the key of F. F is for Fail. “We’re really bad,” the others boasted. Only I was left to provide truth in advertising.

  I was horrified to learn that even though I could not sing, I still had to sing. Kathi believed that everyone could sing. It was simply a matter of finding the right song. Given my limited vocal range, we chose two songs for me that first year: “Bye Bye Love,” which had two things going for it: It had a predictable harmony, and it was meant to be a duet. Kathi would sing it with me, and that would provide a training wheels approach to my first attempt. The other song was “Mammer Jamm
er,” which I would sing with Ridley. “Mammer Jammer” had incomprehensible lyrics. They are: Mammer Jammer oh mammer jammer, mammer jammer oh mammer jammer…” and then suddenly out sprang the words: Walter John, well he’s big and fat, he do the mammer jammer like an alley cat. Huh? Who’s Walter? I had a hard time remembering the lyrics. There was nothing to hang on to. The whole thing was meaningless.

  My transformation into singer was akin to what happened to the underdog older runner in Chariots of Fire. Imagine the soundtrack from that movie: the synthesizer French horns, the reverb pluck of the bass fiddle, the acoustic piano twanging. See me as the sweating singer, pushing beyond endurance as the notes I sing sail in slow motion out to the audience. Picture my face contorted in agony as I sing the last word and am then bathed in the roar of a million people and a synthesizer simulation of crashing waves. I am breathless, standing in a pool of light onstage, proclaimed a rock star. Hold that image in your head. We’ll come back to what really happened.

  ***

  Our band was named the Rock Bottom Remainders and members were known simply as Remainders. But Kathi came up with the idea that we girls should also be known diminutively as “The Remainderettes.”

  Her choice was puzzling to me at first. The year was 1992, modern and enlightened times. Diminutive names were considered sexist. So why would we choose to diminish ourselves with the “ette” distinction? Over time, I understood that the “ette” rubric was a badge of honor, a reminder of something primal in our souls, which, in short order, would manifest in me as a whip.

  The credo of the Rock Bottom Remainders was catchy: “Three Chords and an Attitude.” That relegated most of our song choices to those from the fifties and sixties—which, handily enough, were songs familiar to our audience. From the start, our audience was about our age. They grew up with us and, hence, identified with us. They remembered those olden days when you turned on the car radio and had to precisely adjust the dial, easing back and forth between squeals and static until, like magic, all the screeches became music. Like us, they listened to songs that led to “doing things” in the backseat of a car—often without the guidance of a wonderful organization called Planned Parenthood.

  The boys remembered the good ol’ days quite differently than did the girls. They cast back to happy times copping feels in movie theaters or getting it on in deserted football fields. Most of us Remainderettes, however, remembered being freaked out, wondering if word was going to get out that we were sluts. One Remainderette recalled no such worries: Scott. He was an honorary “ette,” so designated because he had no instrumental ability and was thus best relegated to the girls’ harmonic hinterland of Doo-Wah-Wahs. As boy Remainderette, Scott had to wear wigs, and he chose not sexy ones but ridiculous Bozo the Clown styles. He made it obvious that his being a chick singer was a joke and that his role in the band was not a statement of anything “ette” in his psyche or anatomy. We girls also knew he could never truly be one of us. He had not grown up with our zeitgeist—our world of hope and disappointment, our fear of a “bad rep” and unwed motherhood. Guys with Guitars had no effin’ idea what it was like to be scared out of your mind, thinking you were pregnant. Guys with Guitars didn’t sit down with their guy friends and cry together as they listened to the heartache songs of the sixties girl groups like The Marvelettes and The Ronettes.

  SCOTT’S AUDITION FOR THE FIFTY SHADES OF TAN MOVIE

  Remember that insipid song “Wake Up, Little Susie”? The guy sings, “Our goose is cooked; our reputation’s shot.” Our reputation? The guy would more likely get a yuk-yuk slap on the back by his pals for scoring. It was the girl who was the victim of sniggers. In the sixties, if you slept with a guy just once, you were a slut. Once. That’s all it took and you could kiss off your American Baptist Youth Scholarship. Those songs from the fifties and sixties ruined many a girl’s reputation.

  The bad-girl songs of the sixties represented the sexual milieu that shaped our teen expectations and self-esteem. We stared at pink Princess phones, waiting for a guy to call and ask us out. Our role was passive, accommodating, and for those of us who were not cheerleaders or prom queens, quietly desperate. The repertoire of songs that expressed our common psyche followed these four themes:

  Fantasizing about him—his looks, his hair, his car

  Losing your mind and your panties when he tells you he’s been fantasizing about you

  Chewing your fingernails until they bleed as you wait for your period or a marriage proposal

  Mutilating yourself because he dumped you

  Am I right, girls? Dusty Springfield’s 1964 hit summed up our mind-set: We were all wishing, hoping, thinking, and praying. To win him over, a girl would follow the age-old strategy: Care for him, do what he likes to do, wear our hair the way he likes, because you won’t get him by thinking, praying, wishing, and hoping.

  Why did we love those sad songs? And why were so many of the schmucks named Bill? We met him on a Monday and our hearts stood still, da doo ron ron ron, da doo ron ron. Somebody told me that his name was Bill...

  All Bill had to do was catch your eye, and it was love, then zzzzip!—off went the dress. And did he stay faithful? Uh-uh. The Marvelettes told it like it was in “Don’t Mess with Bill.” Good ol’ Bill was now trying to catch a venereal disease from a chick with kohl-rimmed eyes and a tattoo on her forehead. We also identified with The 5th Dimension’s “Wedding Bell Blues,” again for a jerk named Bill, whom we loved so and always would. Am I ever going to see my wedding day? I ask, because “kisses and love won’t carry me till you marry me, Bill...”

  Pathetic. Then came the inevitable. He cheated. In 1968, Etta James sang it with self-destructive pathos in “I Would Rather Go Blind.” Seeing her man with another woman, she wails that she’d “rather go blind, boy, than to see you walk away from me.”

  As teenagers, we also sang “Please, Mr. Postman.” We wailed with The Ronettes, cooing “Be My Baby.” We were different from our parents and the songs they grew up with—The Andrews Sisters, who sat under an apple tree, where the boy treated the girl like gold. He held her hand. The sixties girl groups expressed the toughness of a girl who was “experienced.” Boys expected to get laid while girls were expected to remain good by resisting. But more often, Nah-nah-nah-nah became yeah-yeah-yeah. The sexual mores then were nothing like what they are now. But they were evolving, and with them came a new sound and sensibility. Lesley Gore was no longer pouting while singing, “It’s My Party.” When she belted out “You Don’t Own Me,” it was revolutionary. She was not defined by a guy: “You don’t own me.” She was strong: “Don’t tell me what to say.” She growled: “Don’t tell me what to do.” She delivered a threat with attitude: “Don’t try to change me in any way.”

  That song was number two on the billboards, right behind the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Just the hand. Evidently, there were a lot of girls who were fed up with their pink Princess telephones. They would become the women’s libbers of the seventies, and “You Don’t Own Me” was their early cry to battle.

  When these revolutionary girls were humiliated, cheated on, or dumped, they did not simply take it anymore. They demanded r-e-s-p-e-c-t. They had fu-un. They were tough—they would survive. They were “Material Girls” who chose guys for their money and who dumped them when better prospects came walking down the street. They could be as unreliable as any guy.

  And they could be mean and inflict pain.

  ***

  To prepare myself for my singing debut, I sang in the shower and on the beach accompanied by crashing waves. I practiced in a private studio with a live mike, then at a Chinese karaoke bar, where customers gave me courage because so many of them sounded worse than I did.

  Finally, the Remainders reached a big stage in Anaheim called The Cowboy Boogie. The place reminded me of my first piano recital, a trauma that was the source of my performance anxiety and also my belief that people were ready to laugh at any mistake I made. To make matte
rs worse, during the show, I could not hear whether I was on key. The speakers were amped to a million decibels, and the monitors, which were supposed to allow us to hear ourselves, were turned way down on the girls’ side. Imagine being deaf and singing into a mike before a thousand people.

  During rehearsal, Ridley had sung “Mammer Jammer” in a low-key manner. But onstage, he was in full rocker mode, crooning meaningless words as if they were soulful confessions. He altered the song’s rhythm to make it stylistically unpredictable, especially to me. And here and there he grunted “Ooow!” or “Yeah!” or “Hey!”—as if the song were grabbing his core and giving him an orgasm. Meanwhile, I stared at him and sang in a monotone, off-key and off-rhythm. I also forgot about Walter John and his alley-catting ways.

  Kathi had said that everyone can sing if they find the right song. “Mammer Jammer” was not it. Neither was “Bye Bye Love.” The latter was hootenanny fare, not rock ’n’ roll.

  The band was supposed to be a one-time embarrassment. But because we had survived sheer terror together, we became a family united by adrenaline-coated love. We were infatuated with our band mates, our rock personas, and our bus. When a publisher offered us a ten-city tour on Aretha Franklin’s bus in exchange for a book, we said yes before he could realize how dumb he was for asking.