Hard Listening: The Greatest Rock Band Ever (of Authors) Tells All
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It also occurred to me that the spleen is probably not an organ with a high market value. You never hear about anybody anxiously awaiting a spleen donor. Many people–Scott, for example–have their spleens removed and do fine. A spleen-harvesting gang wouldn’t make any money. “He’s so dumb, he would harvest a spleen” is probably a common insult among illegal organ harvesters.
So I felt pretty stupid, there in the bathroom, scaring myself like that, and I swore to myself right then and there that I would not go overboard on the gimlets ever again. And I am proud to say that I kept that promise from that day forward all the way until Boston.
DAVE DEFENDING HIS 1ST GRADE PHOTO
LESSON TWO: Never kick a man when he is down, even if he is an attorney.
This is also something I learned in New York, although not on the same trip where I learned about the gimlets. (Maybe the lesson I should have learned is “Never go to New York.”) We were performing before a large and enthusiastic crowd, and we had launched into “Leader of the Pack,” one of our signature numbers (I am using “signature” in the sense of “stupid”). This is the 1964 hit by The Shangri-Las about a girl who, under pressure from her disapproving parents, tells her motorcycle-gang boyfriend, Jimmy, that they’re through. Heartbroken, he gets on his motorcycle to ride off on a rainy night, and she begs him to go slow, but tragically—as you have no doubt already guessed—a rival gang harvests his spleen.
No, seriously, Jimmy has a fatal crash. It’s tragic, as you can tell by the fact that the song ends on an F-sharp minor, which is a very sad chord that took some of us Remainders more than seventeen years to learn.
In the Remainders’ version of “Leader of the Pack,” Amy sang lead, and the part of Jimmy was played by her husband, Lou. In real life, Lou is a tax attorney who does not ride a motorcycle, although he does own a Segway. Lou would dress in leathers and stand next to Amy as she sang, revving an imaginary motorcycle while making vroom-vroom-vroooooom noises with his mouth, looking every inch like a Segway-owning tax attorney who had ingested some kind of pharmaceutical.
At the point in the song where the motorcycle crashes, we in the band would make discordant sounds1 with our instruments, which to be honest was pretty much what we did even when we were trying to make cordant2 sounds. To add to the drama, Lou would fall to the floor and pretend to be dead. He had really been getting into it, making his falls appear to be more and more dramatic every night, and in this New York show he executed his most spectacular fall ever, really crashing to the stage. As he lay there, it occurred to me, as a showman, that here was an opportunity to add a little “extra something” to the act, so I went over and, in what I considered to be a humorous all-in-good-fun manner, kicked him.
Lou responded by writhing around very dramatically. This amused the crowd, inasmuch as Lou was supposed to be dead. Stephen King, joining in the fun, strolled over and kicked Lou from the other side, and Lou writhed again, to the increased delight of the crowd. We each kicked Lou a few more times as the band finished the song. We got a big hand and then ended the show with another one of our signature songs, “Gloria,” which is even more signature than “Leader of the Pack,” if you get my drift. Then, with the crowd still cheering, we trotted triumphantly off the stage, feeling pretty darned pleased with our performance.
That’s when we found out that Lou was in the hospital.
It turns out that when he fell, he fractured his collarbone. From the instant he hit the stage, he had been in intense pain. So you can imagine how he felt when Stephen and I started kicking him in our hilarious showmanlike manner. He went pretty much right from the stage to the hospital emergency room, where doctors x-rayed him and then, as a precaution, removed his spleen.3
Seriously, the doctors put Lou’s arm in a sling and, trouper that he is, he remained with the band for the rest of the tour and even continued to play the Leader of the Pack, although he no longer did the dramatic fall. Instead he sort of slunk off the stage, a wounded and vulnerable gang-leading Segway-riding sling-sporting tax attorney.
But the point is that I should never have kicked him, and I am deeply sorry that I did. Lou, if you’re reading this: I apologize for my thoughtlessness; I would never knowingly do anything that could in any way cause harm to a band mate. I also want you to know—and this comes from the bottom of my heart—that if you ever decide to file a lawsuit, Stephen has way deeper pockets than I do.
AMY WITH LOU, THE WOUNDED AND VULNERABLE GANG-LEADING SEGWAY-RIDING TAX ATTORNEY
LESSON THREE: If at first you don’t succeed, it’s possible that you simply lack talent.
When the Remainders formed in 1992, we were not a good band. Technically, our biggest weaknesses were:
Starting songs
Ending songs
Playing the parts of songs that go between the beginning and the end
We butchered even the most basic songs. “Wild Thing,” for example. It is not easy to play “Wild Thing” incorrectly; it has only three chords, and they come along in a predictable sequence, set to one of the least-subtle beats in all of rock and roll, a beat that makes “Louie Louie” sound like “Flight of the Bumblebee.” It goes like this:
BOM BOM, bom bom bom bom BOM BOM...
And so on. Given time, you could probably train lemurs to play “Wild Thing.” And yet the Remainders consistently had trouble with it. We especially had trouble with the part where the band stops and the singer says, “Wild Thing, I think I love you,” then states that he wants to make sure, so he asks Wild Thing to hold him tight, and she4 does, and he says, “I LOVE you,” this being the cue for the band to resume going:
BOM BOM, bom bom bom bom BOM BOM...
A bit later, the band stops again, and the singer, having determined that he loves Wild Thing, proceeds to ponder the question of whether or not she moves him. Again, he asks her to hold him tight, and he concludes that she does, in fact, move him, as is evidenced by the fact that he says, quote, “You MOVE me.”
BOM BOM, bom bom bom bom BOM BOM...
My point is that this song is not musically complex. Yet the Remainders screwed it up pretty much every time. Who was responsible for this? Without singling out any specific individuals, I would say:
Scott Turow
Roy Blount Jr.
These are two wonderfully talented writers and fine human beings, but they both happen to be severely rhythm impaired. I frankly wonder how they manage to walk erect. They were our two main singers when we did “Wild Thing.” Scott, who had most of the lines, always rushed them. Instead of “Wild Thing, I think I love you,” he’d say, “WildThingIthinkIloveyou,” getting all the words out in the first three-tenths of a second, as though he had to leave for an urgent root-canal appointment before the end of the song. This had an unnerving effect on Roy, who was supposed say the “I LOVE you” and “You MOVE me” parts—these being his lone solo moments in the entire show—but was never sure when, exactly, he was supposed to deliver his lines. When Scott finished, we’d all be looking at Roy, who would have this alarmed expression, like a flight attendant who just found out the pilot and copilot are dead and he has to land the 747, the panic building inside him until, at some random moment—but never the right random moment—he would blurt out, “I LOVE you.” Then the rest of us, by this point thoroughly unsure of where we stood in the song, would lurch unsteadily back into:
BOM BOM, bom bom bom bom BOM BOM...
That is just one minor example of how the Remainders could screw up a song. But it wasn’t just “Wild Thing,” and it certainly wasn’t just Scott and Roy: We all messed up regularly. I personally messed up all the time. Ridley, our bass player, who stood next to me onstage and who has a very good ear, would periodically look at my amplifier as though it had just emitted a 250-watt fart; this was a signal to me that maybe I should think about tuning my guitar, or perhaps, as an act of mercy, take it outside and shoot it.
When I talked about the Remainders publicly, I was always forthright
about our badness. “We suck,” I would say. “We try to suck in an entertaining manner, but we still suck.” I was accused of deliberately downplaying the band’s abilities, to lower expectations. “You guys aren’t as bad as you claim,” was something I sometimes heard from people in the audience. But invariably these people had been drinking (see Lesson One). The truth was that, compared to real bands—the kind that practice and have their instruments in tune and always know which chord is coming next, or at least what song they’re supposed to be playing—we were bad.
A 250-WATT FART
I will admit that, over the years, we got to the point where we could occasionally sound decent on a certain type of song. I would define this as “a song where Roger was playing his guitar and singing.” Roger, at risk of being the first person ever to be kicked out of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, performed regularly with the Remainders; he did a set of classic Byrds songs with us, including “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “My Back Pages,” and “I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better (When They Remove My Spleen).”5
When Roger was onstage, the rest of us guitar players—me, Stephen, and Greg—would turn our amplifiers down to minus fourteen. This meant that the only people you could actually hear, aside from Roger, were Ridley and Josh, both of whom are good musicians. So for those songs, we really did sound kind of like The Byrds, because Roger’s guitar playing is superb, and his voice still sounds exactly the way it did back in the sixties. Although Amy’s karaoke machine may beg to differ.
I refer here to an incident that occurred in Washington, D.C., in April of 2010, where we were getting ready to start a four-city tour. Amy, who loves gadgets, had brought a portable karaoke machine, which she hooked up to the hotel TV. The machine played music and displayed lyrics on the screen, and you sang along into a microphone. When you were done, the machine gave you a score based on how close you came to the original performance. As it happened, one of the songs on the machine was The Byrds’ classic “Turn! Turn! Turn!,” which was sung, on the record, by Roger. Naturally, we insisted that he take a whack at it.
So he did, sitting on the hotel sofa, holding the microphone, frowning at the TV screen, singing along to the machine. When he was done, the machine did whatever calculations it does and declared that Roger had done a barely adequate job of singing this particular song. That’s right: According to this machine, Roger did not sound much like himself. So Roger gamely tried again, really concentrating, giving it his best shot. This time the machine—grudgingly, in my opinion—gave him a better score, but not a great one. Basically it was saying to Roger: “You’re okay, but you’re no Roger McGuinn.”
ROGER McGUINN VS ROGER McGUINN,
Photo by Mike Medeiros
But I digress. My point is that, aside from Roger’s performances, we never got good as a band; we never even reached the lower rungs of mediocrity. The best thing about the Remainders was, we knew this. We embraced our lack of talent. We gave up early on being good; this freed us to focus on having fun. That worked out well, not only for us, but also for our audiences, who immediately realized that they didn’t have to act impressed; they could laugh at us and sing along as loud as they wanted, because the odds were that, whatever song we were attempting, they could sing it better than we could.
Our last show was at the American Library Association convention in Anaheim, the same city where, twenty years earlier, Kathi got the Remainders together for the first time. The last song on our set list for the last show was “Wild Thing.” This was Scott’s last chance to race through the lyrics, and I believe he may have beaten his fastest time, setting a new indoor record. It was also Roy’s last chance to try to figure out when to deliver his lines. His lines, as you may recall, were “I LOVE you” and “You MOVE me.”
Here’s what Roy said: “You LOVE me.”
Which was, of course, wrong.
And, therefore, perfect.
BOM BOM, bom bom bom bom BOM BOM...
DAVE IN THE SPOTLIGHT,
Photo by Mike Medeiros
Most Likely to Fart
Which Remainder is most likely to fart on the band bus and blame someone else?
“Not to name names, but Amy Tan does this constantly.” —Dave Barry
Ted’s Management Lesson #3:
Risk Taking
En route to our show at the Texas Book Festival in Austin in 2003, I chatted up the cabdriver, who wanted to know what kind of music we played. I mentioned a few songs, including “Leader of the Pack.” Amy’s husband, Lou, appears in this number and provides the motorcycle sound effects.
Half an hour before the show, I got a call on my cell from the cabdriver. He’s outside with a friend and his friend’s giant Harley. “You should use this for the ‘Leader of the Pack’ sound effects.” The venue production manager’s response? “Great, bring the bike in as a prop, but under no circumstances is the bike to be turned on.”
When the manager’s back was turned, the owner of the bike asked me, “Really, what’s the point of having this great Harley when we can’t showcase what it’s about?”
We’re never gonna come back anyway. What the hell. “Fire up the hog,” I said. We didn’t tell anyone in the band. We certainly didn’t tell the production manager.
When the lights went down for “Leader of the Pack,” on my cue, Mr. Harley fired up the hog. The audience shrieked. The band erupted in laughter. And the production manager of the Austin Music Hall was one unhappy camper. The Harley didn’t run for the entire song. We turned it off, fumes spewing all over the venue, and Lou did what he does best: He vroom-vroomed.
LOU FIRES UP THE HOG
Q&A: A Book About The Remainders
Q&A with the Remainders
Q: If you were to write a book (in your own genre) about the Remainders, what would be the plot summary and title?
A:
Title: There’s No Door Lock
Plot Summary: Hijinks ensue when more than a dozen aging author/rockers play a gig and are forced to share a single backstage toilet.
Title: All I Really Know about Playing Music Badly I Learned in Kindergarten
Plot Summary: Discovering that you already have the wisdom within you to make a complete fool of yourself.
I don’t know about a book, but here is a limerick I would write about the Remainders, if only it were feasible:
A band, the Rock Bottom Remainders,
[something] a Bill of Retainders,
[something else here]
delivered more cheer
Than Santa and all of his reinders.
Roynote: Words of Wisdom
Three signs you may be getting old, or drunk, or something:
You slip and fall into the lake and, instead of clambering out immediately, you sink for a while, thinking, “Now, what did I come in here for? Looking for something? What? Fish? No….”
Fish? What fish? What about fish?
GOD DAMN IT!
Three signs you may have just awakened and found yourself turned into a dung beetle:
You can’t get off your back.
You appear to have a lot more legs than when you went to sleep.
Certain notions that would have struck you as nasty before now sound pretty good to you.
One sure sign that you may be obese and nearsighted:
You can’t get close enough to the mirror to tell.
Q&A: All-Author Boy Band
Q&A with the Remainders
Q: If Dave, Ridley, Mitch, Stephen, and Greg form an all-author boy band, what should they call themselves?
A:
“The Bird Crappers”
“The Accidents”
“Roger McGuinn’s Backup Band—‘The Mockingbyrds’”
“Without Scott”
“I like the sound of ‘Dave and the Coauthors.’”
Q&A: Tuesdays with Mitch
Q&A with the Remainders
Q: What would Mary the intern learn if she spent Tuesdays with Mitch?
A:
“Mitch isn’t available.”
“Mitch does more on Tuesday than the rest of the band does in, for example, October.”
“He is already working on Thursday.”
“Mary would have a black eye Wednesday ’cause Janine don’t play that.”
My Elvis Takes It Off
by Mitch Albom
“Watch this,” I said to the band.
This was during rehearsal. I stood center stage, in front of our drummer, and yanked on the sides of my pants. They flew off and landed twenty feet away.
“Whoa!” “Cool!” “Perfect!”
I accepted high fives. At long last, the problem had been solved. In seventeen years of doing an Elvis impersonation in the Rock Bottom Remainders, I had never figured out how to strip out of my black slacks (worn for the first song, either “The Teddy Bear Song” or “Such a Night”) and down to the striped prison pants I wore underneath for “Jailhouse Rock.”
Over the years I had tried many things—tugging the pants over my shoes, which left me hopping on one foot like an Elvis flamingo, or shaking off my shoes and then pulling the pants down, which left me singing about how the warden threw me a party in the county jail in white sweat socks—less Elvis than a freshly arrested basketball player.
But my aha! moment actually came from watching the NBA, where tearaway sweatpants are all the rage. They snap along the sides. One yank and they fly off. The athletes use them to quickly enter the game.
I use them to strip.
“People are gonna love this,” Ridley assured me. Dave gave it a thumb-up. Even Josh, our dry-to-the-wry drummer, gave a smile and an approving nod.