The Scar Boys

by Len Vlahos

  Cheyenne offered me a smile tinged with melancholy, and nothing else in my life has ever made me feel like more of a failure. I wanted to kill Johnny. Looking back, this was probably the beginning of the end for the Scar Boys, but I didn’t know that at the time.

  I launched into our next song, with perhaps a bit more intensity on the downstroke of my pick hand. I let my wrist take out some aggression on the strings, punishing them for the long list of things that were wrong with the world.

  THESE BOOTS ARE MADE FOR WALKIN’

  (written by Lee Hazlewood, and performed by Nancy Sinatra)

  With the band graduating to new levels of musical prowess and interpersonal chemical connection, it didn’t take long before we were ready to play out.

  Johnny and Cheyenne took our new demo tape down to CBGB’s and tried to convince Carol, the booking agent, to give us another chance. She did.

  Having been through the pre-gig routine at CB’s once already, we knew exactly what we were doing and what to expect. What we didn’t expect, what I didn’t expect, was the feeling I got from being onstage, on a real stage.

  Playing in front of people was like a drug. The walls dropped away and I found myself surrounded by open air, floating above everything. The energy of the audience—even the tiny audience at that first gig—wrapped the entire band in a protective bubble. Only the music and the knowledge of each other existed. We were four individuals merged into one seamless being, each inside the other’s head, each inside the other’s soul. Music, I discovered that night, was a sanctuary, a safe place to hide, a place where scars didn’t matter, where they didn’t exist.

  We didn’t bring enough friends through the door to get a paying gig, but the soundman liked us, so they invited us back to play another showcase.

  Besides the CBGB’s gigs, we were playing Monday and Tuesday nights at the unsung clubs of Manhattan’s Lower East Side—the Bitter End, R.T. Firefly, A7, and an aptly named dive called the Dive. These were the least desirable gigs in all of New York—the rooms were cramped, the bartenders were surly, and sound systems were seemingly hijacked from a White Castle drive-thru window—but they were gigs.

  We got a small write-up in the Village Voice, and a DJ at WNYU, the only college station playing alternative music in all of New York City, had taken a shine to us, comparing us on the air to the Jam.

  The more we played, the better we got. We eventually graduated from showcases to paying gigs, from Mondays and Tuesdays to Thursdays and Fridays. By the time we played our first Saturday night at CBGB’s, in February 1986 and a little more than a year after Chey had joined the band, we’d started to gain a small but legitimate following.

  We were the first of four bands on the bill that night, so we had to start our set at the ridiculous hour of eight o’clock. But even that early the room was wall-to-wall people, two hundred or more. It was by far the largest crowd we’d ever seen. When I strummed the opening notes of our first song, our friends and small but growing fan base gathered around the front of the stage like an eager congregation.

  Richie and Cheyenne were in perfect sync. Their groove served as a polished steel backbone for the guitar and melody. The sounds screaming out of my big Peavey speakers were the exact blend of twang and balls I was always striving for but never quite seemed to nail. And Johnny moved and shook like he was possessed by the Holy Ghost.

  In short, we kicked ass.

  When we were called back for an encore, a palpable buzz made the walls of the nightclub shake. A coordinated throng of Lower Manhattan’s rowdy and raucous punks—our thirty fans having swelled to two hundred disciples—hopped in unison and sang along as we lurched into our one and only cover tune, Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’.”

  Johnny practically made love to the mic with his low, sultry voice while the three of us scratched out a punk arrangement of the music. Cheyenne marched in lockstep to the snare drum, her red cowboy boots keeping time with the beat, the sole of each foot sliding in small rhythmic circles on the dusty planks of the CBGB’s stage. Watching her had a physical effect on me—my palms and neck started to sweat, my sunglasses fogged up, and my heart, which was thumping along with the music, thumping along with Cheyenne, felt like it was going to explode.

  Then the whole band stopped on a dime. Johnny hoisted the mic stand in the air and pointed it at the audience like he was holding a sword. Right on cue, each and every voice before us screamed out in unison:

  ONE OF THESE DAYS THESE BOOTS ARE GONNA WALK ALL OVER YOU!

  Johnny draped his arm around Cheyenne as her little hips swiveled and her fingers crawled down the neck of the bass, setting me up for one big, distorted power chord. Ever the showman, Johnny kissed Chey on the cheek the instant my pick hit the strings.

  There were high fives all around as we leapt off the stage, retreating with our instruments to the dressing room for a drink of water before the frantic breakdown of equipment. We had to make room for the next band, a band with the dumbest name I’d ever heard: the Woofing Cookies.

  The Cookies were from Georgia, touring the Eastern US on the strength of a 45-RPM single called “Girl from Japan.” As I was coiling my patch cord and putting my guitar back in its case, the Cookies’ drummer said with a pronounced drawl, “Hey ma-an, great set. Y’all oughtta come tuh Geoorgia.”

  It’s funny how, to Yankee ears, a Southern accent on a woman sounds both charming and mysterious, a suggestion that a wild, untamed Scarlett O’Hara lurks beneath a praline-sweet exterior. A man with the same accent is a different story. He sounds slow, maybe a bit dim-witted. But if this drummer was talking with a regional dialect, I didn’t notice. For all I knew or cared he was speaking with a British boarding school accent.

  The road. Of course! We should go on the road!

  TRAVELIN’ BAND

  (written by John Fogerty, and performed by Creedence Clearwater Revival)

  I floated the idea of a tour on the ride back from the city.

  “I was talking to that drummer from the Woofing Cookies,” I began, as I drove north up the FDR Drive.

  “Nice name,” Johnny snorted.

  “Yeah, but they totally rocked.” Cheyenne had been mesmerized with their lead singer. It made me jealous as hell, and now I had the feeling it had been making Johnny jealous, too.

  “Whatever,” he said.

  “Anyway, I was talking to him,” I started again, “and he invited us to come play in Georgia, and it got me thinking, we should do a tour.”

  I don’t know what I expected, but I didn’t expect total silence.

  …

  …

  …

  …

  …

  …

  And then …

  “Fucking A!”

  Richie bellowed so loud that I almost ran my parents’ car off the road. Cheyenne, who was in the backseat next to Johnny, laughed and tousled Richie’s hair. I added a few whoops and hollers of my own for good measure.

  The three of us noticed all at once that something was wrong—Johnny wasn’t laughing or whooping or hollering. He wasn’t even smiling. He was silent and still, a department store mannequin in a bad mood. Our little celebration fizzled like a sparkler in the rain.

  “What?” Richie asked. He was in the passenger seat and turned around to stare Johnny down.

  “Well, I didn’t tell you guys,” he began, “but I’ve been offered a track-and-field scholarship to Syracuse and I accepted it. They’re paying half my tuition.”

  This was the first time we’d heard anything about Johnny’s college career. I knew he loved to run, but I thought he loved music more. This was tangible evidence that the Scar Boys might not last forever. It got very quiet very fast.

  “I mean, you guys applied to colleges, too,” Johnny said to Cheyenne and me. Neither one of us answered, because neither one of us had applied anywhere. I was done with school. I mean yeah, things had gotten better since I’d met Johnny and since we started the band
, but to do it again, at a new school, with all new people? No thanks.

  “C’mon,” Johnny continued, “did you really think we were going to do this for the rest of our lives?”

  And then it hit me: Johnny was a tourist. I’d been putting him on a rock-and-roll pedestal—he was the driving force behind the Scar Boys, the band was his idea, and he made most of the decisions. We were, or at least I believed we were, nothing without him. He was our David Byrne, our Iggy Pop, our Brian Eno. But all along he’d been posing as a rock star, playing dress up. As far as Johnny was concerned, we were just four kids from the suburbs who didn’t have the right to think they could be anything more.

  “Yeah,” I mumbled, “that’s exactly what I thought.”

  “C’mon Harry, get real. Do you have any idea what a long shot this would be?” He waved a dismissive hand at the three of us. “Grow up.” Johnny could be such a jerk when he was trying to win an argument. I remember once, at a rehearsal, Johnny and I disagreed on a chord change in the bridge of a song we were working on. It started friendly enough, but after a few minutes, in one of the rare moments where I didn’t immediately back down, Johnny got fed up and started saying “Blah blah blah blah” at the top of his lungs anytime I tried to talk. I would say “But I think—” and Johnny would say “Blah blah blah blah.” I guess he thought he was being funny, but I mean really, who does that? It was enough to shut me up and we played the song Johnny’s way.

  So it wasn’t a surprise that on the ride back from the CBGB’s gig, I did what I always did when he went on the offensive—I crawled back into my shell.

  “Even so,” Cheyenne chimed in, “I kind of thought we were going to give this a try for a while.” As was so often the case, Cheyenne was able to disarm Johnny with a simple, offhanded comment. Johnny didn’t have a ready answer. When he finally opened his mouth to speak, Chey beat him to the punch. “Can’t you defer?” She reached her hand out and very gently held his wrist. “This thing feels like it has momentum,” she added. “What if this is, like, our one chance?”

  Johnny was looking at Chey, trying to find something to say, when I saw a trace of pity in his eyes. He felt sorry for us. Johnny wasn’t just a tourist, he was a Potsie. He had everything—popularity, good grades, parents that fawned over him—he didn’t need this.

  It was different for Richie, Cheyenne, and me. The band was a lifeboat, a way out. A way out of what? I’m not sure I know. But the three of us needed the Scar Boys like a methadone addict needs his junk, and I know something about that.

  “What about Richie?” Johnny finally blurted out, turning away from Chey and staring straight at me. Knowing I was the weakest link, he focused his attention where he thought he could do the most damage. It was a trick my dad used all the time. Johnny was groping for any angle, any way to turn the discussion in his favor. “He still has a year of high school left.”

  “The school ain’t goin’ nowhere, John,” Richie answered. “It’ll be there when I get back. Besides, I’m not in school over the summer.”

  Johnny sat back. “The summer.” He said it out loud. This was new information. He thought about it for another minute before saying it again, “The summer.”

  We were silent for a long time. The only sounds were “Radio Clash” coming from the car speakers and the occasional whoosh of passing traffic.

  “Hey,” Johnny said, sitting forward all of a sudden. It startled me. “I have an idea, let’s do a tour in the summer.”

  Silence. No whoops, no hollers.

  “Whaddya guys say?”

  Yeah, the twit actually said all this without a trace of humor or irony. I’d come up with the idea of a tour, and Richie had come up with the idea of doing it in the summer, but Johnny just pretended like this had been his show all along. The sick part is that we let him do it. The three of us just mumbled our agreement.

  “Then it’s settled. We’ll do a tour and be back by the middle of August so I can go to school.” He clapped his hands together and smiled.

  I hadn’t been ready to admit it before that night, but Johnny had been falling steadily in my eyes for a while. Our relationship was breaking down ever so slowly. This, however, was a whole new low. In one short car ride, it felt like Johnny had gone from pedestal to poser. Don’t get me wrong. He was still Johnny the leader, I was still Harry the follower, and he was still my best friend. But something had changed.

  “But Harry,” you might be asking yourself, “if Johnny was such a jerk, why did you keep hanging around him?”

  Well, no offense, but if that’s what you’re wondering then maybe you haven’t been paying close enough attention. Before I met Johnny, I didn’t really know why I was alive. I don’t mean to sound melodramatic or to suggest that I was suicidal—I wasn’t—but do the math.

  Friends? None.

  Looks? None.

  Athletic ability? None

  Academic success? None.

  Prospects? None.

  Not to overstate it or anything, but in a lot of ways Johnny saved me. He was Vinnie Barbarino and I was Horshack. It was going to take something a lot bigger than this to finally blow us apart. But there I go getting ahead of myself again.

  To me, Richie, and Cheyenne, the tour would be the start of an adventure. We would be Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin heading out of the Shire. It wouldn’t be the same for Johnny. He’d have one last party with the band and then head off to school. For him, the ride would end once and for all in August. I tried to convince myself otherwise, or at the very least I let myself believe that the tour would change Johnny’s mind and make him see that this, the Scar Boys, was what we were all meant to do for the rest of our lives.

  And in a way, that’s exactly what happened.

  WE WANT THE AIRWAVES

  (written by Joey Ramone, and performed by the Ramones)

  We had only a few months to pull a tour together, and our first order of business was to cut a record.

  Since before Cheyenne joined the Scar Boys, we’d been hanging around the Mad Platter, a small, eight-track recording studio in Yonkers run by twin brothers, Dan and Don McAllister. Dan was Grizzly Adams—broad shoulders, thick red beard, a Zen-like confidence, and to us the very personification of wisdom. Don was the opposite—thin and twitchy, unable to locate his center.

  The two had been the rhythm section for a modestly successful sixties garage band called the Pepper Mint, and had used the money they’d earned to found the Platter. With a hardwired soft spot for nurturing local bands, the twins let us barter for studio time. We painted ceilings, put up drywall, even helped finish the wood floors in the hallway. It was as much an education in carpentry and home repair as it was in sound engineering.

  Over the years we’d recorded five songs at the Mad Platter, but the music was unproduced and amateurish—on tape we sounded like a bunch of kids from the ’burbs. We needed something better to press onto the vinyl that was to become the calling card for our tour.

  When we approached the twins about recording a single, Dan (Grizzly Adams) apologized that there could be no barter this time. Bills at the Platter were mounting, and we were going to have to pay the rack rate of thirty dollars an hour. To do it right, he said, to lay down basic tracks, to do overdubs, to mix, remix, and remix again, to make it great, we would need as much time as ten hours per song. “Add in the cost of the tape, the artwork, and getting the singles pressed and shipped,” Dan told us, “and you’re looking at fifteen hundred dollars or more, soup to nuts.”

  We’d earned close to three thousand dollars playing gigs, most of which had been earmarked for transportation. But we had little choice. There was no sense in trying to book a tour without a record. We’d just have to find a less expensive ride.

  The studio sessions at the Platter were everything we’d hoped they’d be. We recorded two songs: an anthem of sorts we’d been using to close our live set called “Assholes Like Us,” and a pop tune called “The Girl Next Door.”

  I know,
it’s been said before

  In every movie and Broadway musical score

  But I’d give my right hand and my parents’ car

  And my left leg and my guitar

  For just one night

  With the girl next door

  ’Cause she’s older than me and she’s smarter than me

  She’s taller than me and that’s how it should be

  Just one night, with the girl next door

  It was a song I had written about Leslie Murphy whose family lived two doors down from mine. She was four years older and babysat for me when I was a little kid. I had a monster crush on her that continued until she left for college. Strike that. The crush continues to this day.

  Watching Johnny belt out the vocal from the iso booth, listening to the small flaws in his voice—the tiny bit of nasal inflection, the occasional drift off pitch—lay over the already recorded guitar, bass, and drum tracks like paint on wood, I knew, I knew without any trace of doubt that we were an unstoppable force.

  The highlight was Dan’s invention of the “stereo bells.” He set up microphones on each end of the studio and had Richie run between them shaking a tambourine. The effect, other than to make Richie gasp for air and make us laugh ourselves stupid, was to hear the tambourine, when listening through headphones, moving from one side of your brain to the other. It was the crowning achievement on a record that was defined by whimsy.

  The day the singles arrived—ten cartons of a hundred records each—was, and still is, one of the greatest days of my life. To hold in my hands the tangible fruit of five years’ labor was an indescribable feeling. I imagined that this was what it must feel like to get laid. I can still remember the intoxicating smell of the ink on the jacket cover, a black and white photo of the band onstage.

  We spent the better part of a week in my parents’ basement stuffing envelopes and mailing the record with the Village Voice press clip to night clubs and college radio stations all across the country. Richie and Cheyenne spent the following week making phone calls. We had no idea how much an actual record would legitimize the Scar Boys, because in less than ten days, with what felt like a Herculean effort but in retrospect was really pretty easy, we had a tour. Twenty-three gigs through nineteen states in forty days.