Attempting Normal

by Marc Maron

  She said she was still with her boyfriend but they lived out of state now. She was in town for a few days and wanted to hang out. I said, “Do you mean hang out hang out?” She said they had an open relationship and that as long as she was honest about what she was doing it was cool. I didn’t ask for too much explanation. It felt a little weird. I wondered if he was aware of the status of their relationship but I didn’t mention that. I was in.

  I really couldn’t believe it was happening. I felt I had won some kind of prize. I had been so beaten down by myself since the split that I had no sense of self-esteem left, and I really hadn’t had much to begin with.

  We left the coffee shop and went back to my apartment. We had insanely deep, amazing sex. We danced in my living room. I smoked a cigar naked in my kitchen and watched her do an improvised nude mambo to Tito Puente music coming out of the radio on top of the fridge. It was one of those moments I realized that I could be anywhere—a castle, a yacht, a private jet—but it wouldn’t get any better than that moment. It would not be any better than what was going on in my dirty beat-up Astoria kitchen. That is the power beautiful women have: They are portals into the timeless, into other worlds. And I had needed very badly to get out of this one.

  We spent a couple of days together. I knew that was all I had. I felt grateful and stupid. That is what beautiful women do to me even if I don’t know them. Does that make me shallow or just a man? I don’t know.

  The last day she was in town she and I were walking arm in arm down Fourteenth Street. We were just talking and laughing, knowing this would be our last day together. About a half block ahead of us I sensed a familiar frequency moving toward us, a form, a person whom I had motion memory of. It was my ex. This was the moment. Could there have been a better one? No. I see her just as she sees me. The woman and I move past her. The woman does not know what is happening. I am watching my ex-wife as she watches me and we pass each other. Nothing is said. I look back and she gives me a “what the fuck” look. I turn away and start giggling. The woman I was with asks, “What are you laughing at?”

  “An amazing thing just happened. That was my ex that just walked by. I haven’t seen her in over a year. The fear has been lifted! Thank you.”

  She didn’t quite know what I was talking about but I felt my heart open in relief. At least I could save a little face. Not that it mattered, really. In retrospect her look could have been shock that I didn’t stop and introduce her and not what I assumed and wished she was thinking at that moment, which was:

  “You have moved on and replaced me with someone just as beautiful.”

  It was all so shallow, so relieving, so petty, so perfect.

  9

  Guitar

  I play guitar. I play a lot. I play when feelings build up in me and I need to put them out in the world in a safe way. Guitar is the only method of meditation that I have. I do it alone. I do it well enough for it to work. I wasn’t always like that.

  I was forced to play guitar. When I was kid there was an old Harmony hollow-body guitar with f-holes lying around the house that belonged to my father, who, I assume, at some point got manic and obsessed over guitar, took some lessons, then abandoned it. Judging by the songbooks that were lying around my father wanted to be Pete Seeger. I guess he saw himself as an everyman lunatic bard, singing about the struggle of the self-obsessed.

  I was about ten years old when my brother and I started taking lessons. Like any other activity my mother encouraged, I don’t think it was about anything other than it meant she didn’t have to deal with us. This was the same incentive for her to send us to camps (two different ones in one summer), swim team, Hebrew school, and actual school.

  I don’t know where my mom found our guitar instructor but he was a large, bearded, fat Christian hippie with horn-rimmed glasses named Brad and he had a tiny, portly wife named Claudia. Over the few years that he taught us guitar they became caretakers for us. My mother would build a day around keeping us out of the house. Brad and Claudia would pick us up from school or swim practice, take us out to dinner or prepare it for us, take us to their house for a lesson, and then take us home. It was odd.

  Brad collected records and Claudia was an artist. There was a lot of sitting on cushions and eating vegetarian food. Brad was not a great player but he was a patient teacher and he liked to get us singing. I learned the basics from him. Chords and songs. He also introduced me to music I had never heard, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. Blues music struck something deep within me. I really don’t know why but I felt the rawness and mystery of it. Voices crying out of a place so far beyond my understanding, certainly as a ten-year-old, moved me. I innately understood the flow of the music. I have a blues-based brain and I have to thank Brad for turning that on. The depth of my appreciation continues to expand as I get older. I don’t listen to much new stuff, but the stuff I do listen to gets deeper every time I hear it, which I think is a testament to the genius of the form if you don’t trivialize it. Bad bar bands killed the blues for many people for many years, which is a shame.

  Once we were back at home, my mother would force us to practice for fifteen minutes every night. My brother and I would sing together and fight over which songs to play. Eventually we figured out how many times we could play “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” “Rocky Raccoon” and “Johnny B. Goode” to eat the time.

  In my freshman year of high school I auditioned for stage band but couldn’t get in as a guitar player because all I knew how to play was chords, and not many of them. I told the conductor that I could play bass. He said if I promised to learn how to read music I could be in the band. I said sure. Needless to say I never learned how to read music, because getting high with friends and driving around doing nothing was more important. We got our licenses at fifteen in New Mexico. It was insane.

  I became the bane of that conductor’s life. He hated me. I would stand in the back of the band with my Hohner copycat bass that I bought off Brad and try to improvise, having no idea how to play bass, not a clue as to how to read music, and certainly no ability to improvise. There was another bass player who would stand there with me. He had no idea what he was doing either, but we were both getting some kind of credit. We would take turns fucking up the rhythm section. It was embarrassing.

  We did a lot of traveling as a family. We had a Caprice station wagon and my brother and I would lie in the very back listening to the eight-tracks that my father rotated through. The ones that had the most impact on me were the soundtrack to American Graffiti, Abbey Road, The Buddy Holly Collection, Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits, and “Hocus Pocus” by Focus. There were some duds, like The Best of Bread and Mac Davis’s Greatest Hits, but “Guitar Man” was kind of touching and “Baby, Don’t Get Hooked on Me” seemed curious and sordid to my ten-year-old mind and anything to accelerate puberty was welcomed at that time. American Graffiti was my dad’s music. He loved it. I still know every song on that soundtrack. There were two Chuck Berry tunes, “Johnny B. Goode” and “Almost Grown.” “The Stroll,” “Get a Job,” “Chantilly Lace,” “Surfin’ Safari,” “Party Doll,” “Peppermint Twist,” “Maybe Baby.” My dad would sing along with all of them. The songs meant something to him. I wanted them to mean something to me so I could mean something to him. Now they do.

  I became morbidly obsessed with the Big Bopper, Buddy Holly, and Ritchie Valens after my father told me they had been killed in a plane crash and how upsetting it had been to him. When I heard their songs, they were saturated with death. When I looked at the picture of Buddy Holly on the cover of the eight-track it filled me with dread and horror. Buddy Holly was the sound of the dead to me. All his songs were haunted. It was the same with Janis Joplin. My parents had the vinyl of Pearl, with the beautiful picture of Janis on the chaise longue on the cover. My mother told me that she died of a heroin overdose. In my mind Janis was heroin. That’s what it looked like. The Full Tilt Boogie Band were smack’s supporting players. I was fascinated with
dirty hippies and drugs. They seemed to have figured it out.

  The Chuck Berry songs also got under my skin. I was already stuck on that two-string opening to “Roll Over Beethoven”—one of the first records I owned for myself was The Beatles’ Second Album, and out of all the songs on that record their cover of “Roll Over Beethoven” just killed me. I sought other versions of it. I was nine and I had my grandmother buy me a Mountain album because they did a cover of it. I finally arrived at Chuck’s with his live London Sessions version, and then later in the car with my dad’s American Graffitti album, my fixation was set. To me that riff was the gateway to everything. I was obsessed with it. I had no idea how to play it. It seemed impossible. I couldn’t get beyond chords under Brad’s tutelage.

  The guitar player in my high school stage band was a Latino kid named Adolfo. He had perfectly feathered hair that he was always combing with a large comb that stuck out of the back pocket of his bell bottoms. I stood behind him watching his hand move up and down the neck effortlessly. Once on a break I mustered up the courage to talk to him. It was hard, because the entire band sort of hated me because I sucked and I was holding them back. I really just wanted to be kicked out. It was very stressful.

  “Adolfo, do you like Chuck Berry?” I asked, shyly.

  He clearly didn’t want to be seen talking to me, so he answered me but didn’t actually look at me. It was like I wasn’t there.

  “My old man does.”

  “So does mine! Do you know how to play ‘Roll Over Beethoven’?”

  Then, like magic, without even thinking about it, he laid into that opening riff. I was stunned and awed. I asked him to show me how to do it. He did, but he still wouldn’t look at me or let me touch his guitar. I went home and tried it, it worked, and the entire world changed. I had it, the key to music. I was ecstatic. I was probably the only fifteen-year-old kid in the world in 1977 who was beside himself because he could play a Chuck Berry lick.

  My first electric guitar was a Les Paul Deluxe copycat. Then I moved from Chuck to Keith Richards and I bought my first Telecaster when I was sixteen—just like Keith’s. My brother let the guitar go in favor of a tennis racket and I moved on to another teacher, Vaughn. I started going to this music store that was owned and run by an aggravated, bitter jazz drummer, a wiry little balding man with a large moustache who always seemed pissed off. He had studios in the back for teachers. Vaughn was a tall, lean dude with a frizzed and wavy bleached-blond perm. He had a moustache and glasses and smoked Marlboro Lights. He played in a band and he became my mentor.

  Vaughn would let me smoke while he taught me how to play lead. The approach was, I would bring in a piece of music on tape, play it for Vaughn, and he would figure it out and try to teach me. What usually happened is I would watch Vaughn figure it out and be amazed that he could. I would try to play it once, badly. He would be encouraging. Then we would smoke and he would listen to my teenage problems and talk me through them for the rest of the lesson, that is, most of the lesson. I learned my pentatonic blues and country scales and moved on. My guitar playing skills leveled off.

  I had the basics and I had heart. I was never disciplined enough or enough of a nerd to master the guitar, or anything really. I just needed to know enough to express myself, to get me out there, out of myself, to be heard and to feel something. I could never focus on learning leads or playing songs correctly. I was always an interpretive player. I would find a song I loved and play a version that was good enough for me. I was only in a band once, in ninth grade, and we only knew four songs. We went through several band names but the song count stayed the same.

  We had one gig as a band that I can remember. We said we would play at one of those parties where a family had just moved out of a house and one of the kids got hold of the keys and had half his high school over to destroy the house. I’m not sure what the band was called at the time. I think we were Change. Our regular bass player, Lee, wasn’t available to play that night. He was a sweet guy who wore a floppy hat. He always seemed to have a good time bouncing around smiling like a teenage hippie clown. I think we played four times with him total, so it wasn’t like he was irreplaceable. The other bass player we knew was this guy Monte. He said he could fill in for the gig. We all got to the house and Monte had a lot of equipment. He had a bass, an amp, and a couple of other large console components that I didn’t recognize. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days. He had dark circles under his eyes. He was wearing a big down jacket and chain-smoking Marlboros. I had never met him before and I can’t seem to forget him. He laughed out of context.

  I remember we were in the basement playing our four songs: “Takin’ Care of Business,” “The Needle and the Spoon,” “Sweet Emotion” and “Tush.” Monte was great, better than the rest of us. We put our instruments down and we all disappeared into the drunken throng to try to make out with girls, drink keg beer, and/or help destroy the house. About five minutes had passed when an explosive sound came from the stage. It was jarring. Everything stopped, as if something horrible was about to happen. Then there was a thunderous cacophony of rapid-fire bass notes that began to loop and echo. The house was literally shaking. The source of the sound stood solitary in the corner of the basement where we had been playing. It was Monte. The assault of bass went on for about fifteen minutes, building layers of looping bass noise that peaked like an earthquake. Nobody knew how to process it. I had never seen anything like it. When he stopped no one clapped. No one talked. He put his bass down and walked through the crowd and out of the house. I followed him. We stood outside. He lit a cigarette and started laughing and said, “I’m on acid.” It was one of those moments when I knew there was something out there that was wild, unmanageable, and accessible to me; if I hadn’t been paralyzed with fear of it I would have been there in a flash.

  I used to buy Guitar Player and eventually became something of a gearhead, one of those guys who hangs around guitar stores. I was fascinated and obsessed with equipment. I had gear that I didn’t know how to use, really: wah-wah pedals, distortion boxes. I’d save up a ton of money and get something custom-made. I took the neck from my Telecaster and I put it on a Schecter Explorer body and had the guys at the shop refinish it. I finished it off with some fancy pickups, but I could never play that thing beyond my basic knowledge. I could never live up to my guitar. When I was sixteen I wished I was a wizard, but I never had the focus.

  I eventually put the Tele back together, had it painted candyapple red, put a brass pick guard on it and two humbuckers, and just loved looking at it. I still had that guitar in college, when I sold it for drug money to a guy who used to sleep on my couch. It was his first guitar and he loved it so I didn’t feel so bad. He was a genius, just not a guitar genius. He’s a pretty important poet and cultural critic now. I went to a reading he did at the New School in New York, and I was like, “What happened to that guitar?” And he said that his buddy’s daughter’s in a lesbian punk band, so he gave it to her. I felt pretty good about where it ended up.

  More than a musician, I’ve been an obsessive fan. Throughout high school I was obsessed with the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Tom Waits, Bowie, Eno, Muddy Waters, Iggy, Skynyrd, and on and on. Sometimes I would just become obsessed with an individual song. I would play the records over and over again, the music like an aural IV that changed my brain chemistry and paced my heart, taking me where I needed to go depending on my mood. There was driving music and there was sad music. Driving had to be done and sadness needed to be managed. Music transformed both into magical journeys. Add drugs to either and you had a day’s activities on your hands, if not a lifetime’s.

  By the time I got to college I had a fairly arrogant attitude about music and my place as a music critic. Before I left home I had become friends with an avant-garde musician in Albuquerque who led me through the noise: Fred Frith, the Residents, Robert Fripp, the Eno ambient albums, Jon Hassell. In college, in Boston, I became coke buddies with a guy named Bill who was ti
ed into the art scene and loft music movement there in the mid-eighties.

  One night I was at a party with Bill at a loft. I was maybe twenty, he was a bit older. I thought I could hold my own with artsy types. I had known them in Albuquerque when I was growing up. Hell, I thought I was one. The pretension was thick, as it always is with unknown and struggling artists. Most of their energy is dedicated to crafting an aesthetic disposition in preparation for the day when people actually begin to buy their bullshit, if they ever do. I was sitting next to a heavy guy wearing horn-rimmed glasses. This was like 1983, so it was long before the horn-rim explosion that we are just now seeing ebb. He was talking about local bands and declaring certain bands transcendent, misunderstood.

  I blurted out, “There’s never going to be another Buddy Holly. He was the best.”

  Horn-rimmed face snapped back, “You’re a fascist.”

  Bill stepped in and changed the subject, but I was hurt and shocked. I had no clear idea what fascism was at the time, but I knew I’d been slagged in front of Bill and his ridiculous friends. We left the party, but I couldn’t get what that guy said out of my mind for twenty-five years. It was genius. He had shaken my worldview with those three words. It had been drilled into me by the ghoulish mythmaking of the music industry and by my own father that Holly was the best, a martyred god. Horn-rims commited an act of deicide and patricide all at once. But he did create room in my mind for new things. That’s where Lou Reed came in.

  I had been into Reed’s Bowie-produced Transformer album, but when my buddy Rob gave me 1969: The Velvet Underground Live my mind was blown. So simple, so layered, so nasty. I had to have everything they did. They represented a gritty New York psychosexual dark good time that I missed and yearned for though I probably couldn’t have cut it had I lived through it. That’s what your heroes do for you—lift you victoriously above the dirty work of life and conjure a different way of being.