It takes more than stars to make a “star-studded” band. A screenwriter once put the following theory into the mouth of Brian Epstein. The Beatles were like one complete person: John Lennon was the mind, Paul McCartney the heart, George Harrison the soul. Lennon asked Brian what Ringo was, and Epstein answered, “Ringo’s the flesh and blood, John.” Myself, Ridley, and a few other now-close friends were the flesh and blood in the Remainders. And it was these journeymen who upped the musical ante during the band’s second decade. Dave, Ridley, Mitch, and I had been professional musicians, while Dave’s brother Sam is one hell of a harp player. Mitch’s wife, Janine, has world-class pipes. To bolster our chops, we had ringers Josh and Erasmo, along with prosoundman Gary. And together, after a little work (on at least a few nights), we truly rocked the house. The vocals might not have won us any Grammys, but the music kicked ass.
“I knew this would happen,” Roy bemoaned as we rehearsed for a show at Google headquarters. “We’ve gotten too good.”
AT GOOGLE HEADQUARTERS
The musical high point for me came when, filled with hubris, we took our shot at “Don’t Fear the Reaper” by Blue Oyster Cult. That song had been the theme of The Stand, and I wanted to give Stephen the chance to stand out there and wail that death anthem in front of a wall of screaming guitars. Cowbell in hand, Steve rose to the challenge, yelling “MORE COWBELL!” between verses while I did my best to shred the solos. You can’t buy that kind of experience with all the money in the world.
But my most treasured lessons were quiet ones.
There’s nothing more surprising than sharing a terrifying secret with someone as funny as Dave, then realizing that he understands more about your plight than your best friend. My favorite Dave quote: “Other people’s problems are always simple to fix. It’s only your problems that are complicated.”
For a long time I looked up to Scott as one of those magical writers who managed to walk the high wire between commercial and literary fiction while somehow remaining gracious, modest, and—like Mary Poppins—practically perfect in every way. In short, he seemed like a superhuman big brother. But after enough unguarded conversations over the years, I finally realized that Scott was as human as I—which made it a little easier to live with my own choices.
Once, after a show in New York, Stephen and I sat up late in his hotel room, swapping story ideas. One tale he told me later became a little book called 11/22/63, and one I shared with him is coming to life even now. Five years after that conversation, when I tore my aorta, broke far too many bones, and lost a leg in an accident, it was Steve who counseled me from experience, with brutal honesty and hard-earned black humor. I look back on a moment he and I shared alone in a dressing room in Webster Hall, not long after he’d almost been killed by a drunk driver. Tormented by pain and haggard with fatigue, Steve said, “Greg, I’m too old for this shit”—referring to going out on the road to play music and meet the readers. But then there’s that afternoon only months ago, when we shared a mike at The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, dancing like maniacs with our guitars and yelling out lyrics like two crazed punks in a high school garage band. Such is the redemptive power of rock and roll and of friendship.
I’ve left out a lot more than I put in, which is usually the way it goes in writing. As with all families, the most important things are those that can’t be spoken of until most of the principals have died. Sadly, some of our principals have died, and we mourned and carried on, which is what all families do. Attentive readers will have noticed that I’ve had trouble with verb tenses in this essay. Please forgive my confusion. Officially, this band is no more. Whether I believe we’ve played our last show is another matter. All that’s certain is that the people who proudly toured this country as Rock Bottom Remainders share a bond that transcends that of the “vanity” bands so common among star entertainers in various fields. I know this because I learned long ago that most famous writers, unlike other stars, remain very much who they were as their younger selves. They have to, for it is only out of that sacred well that good writing comes.
And so, like a faithful soldier, I await the call from Ted, summoning me to yet another show at Google, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the White House, or some no-name club in Miami or New York. I still don’t know whether Ted’s true occupation is rock manager, TV producer, arms dealer, or vertical transport specialist. All I know is that he’s currently off the no-fly list and thus able to put together yet another spectacle if the need should arise.
And I believe it will.
PS: To Matt Groening, who’s a class act on the level of Stephen King: My son, like all the sons of numberless fans before him, thanks you for the autographed Bart Simpson toxic snack plate. I could have brought home the half-torched guitar of Jimi Hendrix as a present and Mark Iles would not have been as impressed.
PPS: Dave Barry and I share one bedrock belief: that the question of which is the better band, the Beatles or the Stones, cannot even be classified as a genuine debate by right-thinking people. I’m not sure I could hang with anyone who falls on the wrong side of this illusory question. And if Dave ever reaches the Oval Office, I expect him to settle this by presidential fiat.
PPPS: I had a lot of fun in high school, but my twelve years at Rock Bottom Remainders High topped the real thing by a hell of a margin. To those of you who shared some of those years and shows…we were blessed, all of us. To those who missed them…pick up a guitar, crank your amp to eleven, and find some like-minded maniacs who know that it’s not how perfectly you play the notes that matters, but how much feeling you put into them. And remember Uncle Stevie’s dictum: “MORE COWBELL!”
Nails On Fire
Dave: One night, we were playing in Nashville. And, we're on a high stage, and...Stephen's standing over there (left) and I'm standing over here (right).
Ridley: It was the encore, so they had their Bics out...for us.
Dave: So Ridley goes by me and goes, "Check out the woman in front of Stephen." I look over to the side and there's a woman like this (raises his arms above his head) right in front of Stephen King and all ten of her fingernails were on fire. And you're thinking, I *hope* those are artificial fingernails. Because, otherwise, this is a woman who can make her fingernails shoot flames. And then Ridley goes back the other way and goes, "I don't ever want to be that famous."
—Interview with the Remainders, Besides the Music, April 2003
Ridley on Greg Joining the Band
Greg and I met far too many years ago to remember exactly when. Late 1980s? Early 1990s? I was speaking at the Golden Triangle Writers Conference in a squalid Holiday Inn on a weekend so humid and hot that it rang itself out with a deluge on that Saturday night, flooding the city. Greg was about to have his first novel published, a long romp through Nazi Germany filled with spies and warcraft. He was an island of intelligence, and we clung to each other, probably in the bar—for that was in my drinking days.
We shared a love of Ken Follett and found we’d both supported ourselves as musicians in former lives. And that was about it. Forty-eight hours and gone. Probably with a headache on my part. Maybe a fax or two after that—for it was before e-mail.
At some point one of us contacted the other and we kept in distant touch. He was in the South, and sounded like it. I was in the Northern Rockies and dressed like it. He knew I was a founding member of the Remainders and, when we both realized we were to be at the same New York book expo, I invited him to sit in and play bass on a number. He admired Stephen and, knowing they’d have a chance to meet, accepted.
He did a competent job on bass—probably much better than I ever played. Greg is an alpha male. I am closer to omega. He was more than competent when it came to “hanging out,” which was the first requirement of any future Remainder. The man could talk the talk. He hit it off with Stephen and others with his self-deprecating musical modesty. His mannerisms and his Southern drawl even impressed Roy, the authentic Southern gentleman of the band. The f
unny thing about being invited into this band was—and maybe this had to do with Stephen’s bizarre writings—that it was more spontaneous combustion than planned arson. People like Scott walked onstage and just belonged with the rest of us. Greg was that way.
But he was a liar—another quality of Southern gentlemen? (I should ask Roy.) Bass wasn’t his instrument. Turned out he’s a top-tier lead and rhythm guitarist and one hell of a vocalist. By the time he was sitting in again—this time on guitar—we were awestruck. Usually people with talent weren’t allowed into the band. Musical deficiency was a prerequisite. We’d only looked the other way with Mitch because he had a hot wife. Greg’s private life, on the other hand, remained a mystery shrouded in an enigma, just to get as clichéd as possible. To this day, Dave and I refer to him as Mystery Man. Greg enjoys a bit of the unknown swirling around him.
Somewhere in all this, he was invited into the band. I’m not sure when. I know that we realized we needed him as much as we could get him because he lent the band musical credibility, which was a dangerous road to go down. His rendition of “Steamroller Blues” was a Remainder show stopper. He could rewrite lyrics to standard rock songs and leave the crowd guffawing. Greg’s real contributions, though, came around the dinner tables and in the back of the buses and vans, where we all tell stories and lies and try to sing songs we shouldn’t. Those were/are the best times, and Greg understood that from the start. There isn’t much Greg is likely to miss.
INBOX > Subject: A big thanks from Brother Greg
From: Greg Iles
Sent: Friday, July 8, 2011 3:55 a.m.
Dear Remainders,
This is the first thank-you note I’ve written to anyone since the wreck. Like Steve, I broke a lot of big bones, but about three weeks ago I took my first steps on my prosthetic leg. Hallelujah! Also like Steve, at the time of the accident I was nearly finished with a 425,000-word novel. I wish I’d stopped trying to emulate the master at that, and skipped all the rest.
I want to thank everybody for the “iPod of Life,” which I received, like all true gifts, when I most needed it. When I opened that package, I could not believe what was inside: a brushed-black metal iPod that looked like a miniature version of the Monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Then I saw the song list—and the worksheet—that Sam thoughtfully included (my own one-off liner notes from the Remainders). To know that all you guys (and gals) took time out of your lives and thought up a song for recovery or meditation or just a good laugh made this the no-shit best present I got during the whole crazy nightmare.
A final note on age, mortality, and immortality: (There’s nothing like a torn aorta to give you some insight into mortality) I may have lost half a leg, but there are worse appendages for a writer to lose. Like the middle leg. Seriously, though…If you regularly play LIVE rock ’n’ roll in any way, shape or form, you stop aging. You may die, but you will die young. And that’s why this band should never split up OR retire. Authors may age and become irrelevant, but rockers just wrinkle a bit. The music pouring through you keeps you immortal.
So thanks for the music, and I’ll see you at the next motherfugging show!
Greg
Q&A: Literary Mash-ups
Q&A with the Remainders
Q: Mash-ups are popular in music. Why not in literature? Which two band members would you like to see a mash-up from? (For example: Disney holograms in a horror novel called Kingdom Eaters)
A: “I’m too embarrassed to ask my kids what a mash-up is, so I’ll just skip this one.” —Scott Turow
“I think the ideal mash-up would be Stephen King and Roy Blount Jr. There would be a sense of mounting dread and almost unbearable tension, but there would also be possum-tossing. ” —Dave Barry
Just a Little Talent
by Stephen King
One day in the early sixties—I was thirteen or fourteen—I went over to my friend Chris’s house and he said, “I got this cool record for my birthday. Wait until you hear this one song. I’m learning to play it. It’s pretty easy.”
The record jacket showed a bearded man in sunglasses. The title was Dave Van Ronk Sings the Blues, and the song Chris wanted me to hear was called “Bed Bug Blues.” I had never heard anything like it on the radio. Van Ronk’s voice was hoarse and urgent; his guitar playing was rolling and rhythmic. I was particularly taken by the comic desperation of the last verse, in which Van Ronk sings that he got a wishbone and “these bugs they got my goat,” and wishes they’d all “cut their own goddamned throat.”
That song was great, but others on the album were nearly as good. “Yas Yas Yas,” for instance, began with an entrancing couplet about his mother buying a chicken that she thought was a duck, which she put on the table “with the legs stickin’ up.” After years of soupy hand-holding ballads by teeny-bop yodelers like Frankie Avalon (“Bobby Sox to Stockings”—uck) and Bobby Vinton (“Roses are Red”—double uck), Dave Van Ronk was like a splash of cold water.
Chris showed me the chords on his grandfather’s guitar. There were just three of them, and the only hard one was the B, which I mastered after three weeks of pain and suffering. By the end of that summer, we had learned to play—after a fashion—every song on the Van Ronk album. We began to buy folk magazines like Broadside and Sing Out!, because each issue had lyrics and chord progressions.
My friend got a gorgeous bloodred Gibson guitar for Christmas that year. It had beautiful tone, and the touch was like silk. The following spring I bought a much humbler instrument in a Lewiston, Maine, pawnshop. It was a Sears Silvertone, and the distance between the strings and the fret board was approximately two feet.
1963…1964…1965. Chris and I would meet either at his house or at mine and listen to our latest purchases: Tom Rush on Elektra; Joan Baez and Mississippi John Hurt on Vanguard; Koerner, Ray, and Glover on Folkways. KR&G were another revelation to me; for weeks on end, I practiced the driving, bare-bones beat of field chants like “Black Betty,” “Whomp-Bom,” and “Red Cross Store,” songs I still like to play when I’m in a rip-ass mood.
We started to go around to coffeehouses and gig at open hoots. That was exciting and a lot of fun, but at some point I came to recognize the obvious: We had exactly the right guitars for our talents. Chris was good and getting better. I, on the other hand, was not very good and not getting better. This was depressing, but not too depressing, because I could write stories and I was good at that. Still, it was the first time I recognized the very basic fact that separates the major leaguers in any given field of the arts from the minor leaguers: Without a fairly large dose of talent, not all the work in the world will make you as good as the people you idolize. I remember telling my mother this once—or at least trying to—and her response: “Almost everybody has one thing they’re really good at. If you’ve got just a little talent for something else, be grateful.”
I don’t remember how I took this observation—at seventeen, probably not very well—but looking back from my midsixties, it seems like pretty good advice. But I’d add a codicil: Don’t let that little talent get away.
CULTIVATING THAT LITTLE BIT OF TALENT,
Photo by Julien Jourdes/The New York Times/Redux
I played at a few open hoots in college and for a while with a jug band called the Up Against the Wall Mother Juggers (Van Ronk’s version of “Yas Yas Yas” was always our closing number, and it always brought down the house). That was a good gig, mostly because Tabitha Spruce, my wife-to-be, played comb in the band, and when I stood next to her, I could look down her blouse. Then I graduated and got a job teaching school, and all at once there was nobody to play with but myself.
It was a thing I did less and less, and I might have stopped altogether had not a few verses of “Barbry Allen” or “Tell Old Bill” soothed the kids when they were teething and fractious. I can remember sitting on a lot of apartment stoops, cigarette burning in an ashtray beside me, playing “Galveston Flood” or “Baby, Please Don’t Go.” Music also soothed me when I w
as fractious and made me feel better when I had the blues. I knew these things, but still I played less and less every year. Once I had learned three or four new songs a week. After college, I rarely bothered. Sometimes I’d scratch a few lyrics on a napkin and chord them out, but mostly when I had spare time, I spent it at the typewriter. On the guitar, I knew twelve chords. On the typewriter I was learning new ones every day. On the guitar, I had to look at my fingers to make a B-minor chord. When I was at my typewriter, I could clatter out perfect lines while looking out the window.
There came a time when I could actually support myself with those word chords and a time a few years later when I realized they were making me rich. By then I had three guitars. One was a Gibson electric, and one was a Martin acoustic with beautiful tone. Both were gifts, because I’d made myself a promise when the big bucks started rolling in: I’d never spend money on a guitar just because I could afford to. That, I felt, would be the height of arrogance, especially when there were talented guys playing crap guitars on street corners all over America. The third guitar, the one I bought myself and mostly played, was a hundred-dollar Yamaha. I still think of it fondly when I hear Steve Earle sing the politically incorrect lyrics of “Guitar Town.” That cheap Japanese guitar was, I felt, about what my little smidge of talent deserved.
Hard Listening: The Greatest Rock Band Ever (of Authors) Tells All Page 11
