For those of us who were too young to be doing drugs and dyeing our hair orange at the time, this was a prophecy of the future. Not in terms of fashion—the pyramid-on-head look? Impractical. Ziggy Stardust’s loincloth? Too Pampers. The Pierrot constume as beachwear? As Tim Gunn might say, that’s a lot of look, David. We need you to go upstairs and clean out your space, okaaay?
Even a rabid Bowie freak has to be a little weirded out that the whole “Bowie’s in space” thing is still such a huge hit, such an inescapable cultural presence, after all this time. Major Tom is still totally famous, despite the fact that nobody gives a crap about real-life astronauts anymore. By now, he’s the only famous astronaut there is, unless you count Buzz Aldrin, who was famous enough to (1) go on Punky Brewster after the Challenger explosion and tell Punky it was still okay to want to be an astronaut when she grew up, and (2) go on The Rosie O’Donnell Show to recite the lyrics of “Rocket Man.”
The story of Major Tom keeps getting rewritten—for the story so far, see Elton John’s “Rocket Man,” Peter Schilling’s “Major Tom (Coming Home),” Joy Division’s “Disorder,” U2’s “Bad,” Neil Young’s “After the Gold Rush,” Black Sabbath’s “Supernaut,” and so many more. Lou Reed turned it into “Satellite of Love,” while Depeche Mode turned it into “satellite of hate.” The best scene in any Adam Sandler movie is when he takes his first helicopter ride in Mr. Deeds and leads the cast in a sing-along of “Space Oddity.” Cat Power can do her acoustic version of it in a car commercial, and nobody even thinks that’s strange. Like you’d ever want to be in a car driven by Major Tom! They’d never find your car again! Your GPS would simply read, “I think my spaceship knows which way to go” and then poof, you’re gone!
Practically every Major Tom song is great—who doesn’t love “Rocket Man”? (Besides Bowie, that is?) I think it’s just because everybody knows what it’s like to be crushed out on satellites. And when Peter Schilling sang “Major Tom (Coming Home),” about feeling so lost and confused on earth that you just want to blast off to your own private planet and be a pop star on your own private screen, leaving all the earth girls behind, I knew exactly what he was singing about too. Like Patti Smith says, “Okay, earth boys—you had your chance.”
The man has often stated he was out of his mind on drugs for much of this period; he claims he can’t even remember making his best album, Station to Station, and he’s cheerfully admitted, “I honestly have no idea what I thought between 1975 and 1977.” What we do know is that at some point, the universe said, “Mr. Bowie, meet cocaine. Cocaine, Bowie. Get acquainted, you two!” And so it came to pass that Bowie spent a ridiculous amount of his golden years gadding about L.A.like a blond coat hanger with a dead rock star hanging on it.
The blow-and-shoulder-pads days were strange even for Bowie: going on The Dinah Shore Show with Henry Winkler (“I’m a great fan of Fonzie”), singing “Song Sung Blue” on TV with Cher, even appearing on the Grammy Awards to present an award to Aretha Franklin, who proclaimed, “I’m so happy, I could kiss David Bowie!”
There’s no doubt Bowie was one fucked-up rock star then. He went through a powder-brained period of talking up fascism, as if any self-respecting fascist would be caught dead marching beside David Bowie. Like all English people his age, he was besotted by hilarious superstitions, embodied in the quintessentially English figure of Aleister Crowley, who wouldn’t be one of the ten weirdest people in my apartment building but somehow symbolized evil and decadence for all the English rock stars of the ’70s. It’s odd because Crowley just looks like Willard Scott, except nowhere near as scary. Come on, what’s more demonic—living in a castle and wearing a Sphinx costume or going on nationwide TV to predict the weather and talk dirty to hundred-year-old ladies?
But even if Bowie was crazy, dangerous and utterly baleful in every aspect of his influence on my impressionable little brain, I learned a lot from him. Even at his most out-there space-trippy, he’s making the case for earth. Even Ziggy, his most glitzily self-destructive concept project, ends with a big ballad that’s explicitly antisuicidal, insisting that you shouldn’t destroy yourself or cower from life, you should just find somebody as fucked-up as you to love (or at least be nice to), so you can treat each other like you’re rock-and-roll stars. He seemed to say, you’re not alone, since there are millions of other pathetic freakazoids out there, and the B section of the record store is where you will find them hanging out, so get cracking. Give one another compliments like “You’re wonderful” or “You’re a total blam blam” or whatever it is slutty Martians say to one another.
When I hear him sing “Ashes to Ashes,” he sounds scared, but he also sounds like the golden years are just beginning, because he knows the sky is full of lovesick space cadets like him or you or me, if you just care enough to notice them. And the stars look very dif-fer-ent today.
RAY PARKER JR.
“A Woman Needs Love”
1981
Why do we look to pop singers to tell us how to be boyfriends? I wish I knew, but we do. I still do—even though pop singers are probably the least qualified people on earth when it comes to such matters. Monogamous musicians are like vegan hockey players. But Ray Parker Jr., he was serving up boyfriend lessons on a monthly basis.
“A Woman Needs Love” kept humming out of the speakers at Houghton’s Pond, where my sisters and I went to swim. Since my voice was changing, singing along was a challenge—I would pick either my tenor or baritone and try to push it all the way through. My sisters thought it was hilarious, but one of the things I liked about Ray Parker Jr. is he didn’t sound like he was mean enough to make fun of me for not being able to sing like him.
Ray Parker Jr. was cool. He reminded me of Mr. Rourke on Fantasy Island, who was always lecturing Tattoo on what women want and what women need. Every time Tattoo would say, “Boss, she is beautiful,” Mr. Rourke would shake his head and say, “Tattoo, my little friend, how many times must I remind you? All women are beautiful!”
Ray always sang about women and what they need, and he always seemed to know what he was talking about with hits like “A Woman Needs Love.” He schooled me in my duty to the ladies of the world, because women need love and ask for lots and lots of it and it is in your selfish interest to satisfy their stupid whims and careless demands. If you cannot supply their needs, they will find various other men to supply the various needs you are not meeting. I was shocked at Ray’s scenario: “One day you might come home early from work, open up the door and get your feelings hurt.” I had a vague idea of what that might look like, and it wasn’t good.
Ray never stressed, though. He did not sweat the technique. He wasn’t exactly a high-strung diva or even a megafamous pop star—he was what serious Match Game fans call a “fourth seater,” the guy taking up the pivotal chair between Charles Nelson Reilly and Richard Dawson. You don’t want a chatty comedian in that spot (that’s the first seat) or a glamorous sitcom starlet (the sixth seat), just someone exuding a quiet charm and warmth to keep the game moving.
That was RPJ. He ministered to his flock of suburban swimming-pool acolytes who hung on his every word and shuddered at his parables of the Eternal Feminine. He stayed relaxed through it all. He reminded me of my grandfather, who’d sit there puffing his pipe while my grandmother ranted and raved. Then she’d ask him, “Are you over it?” and he’d nod. Then they’d go back to normal and he’d do some dishes.
In the news, Jimmy Carter had just gone to Poland and inadvertantly caused a crisis because his interpreter bungled his Polish speeches—Jimmy told the bewildered crowds that he “lusted” for their country, and that he had left America “never to return.” It was not a successful diplomatic mission. The Polish premier Edward Gierek later reportedly said, “I had to grit my teeth from time to time. But one must not be rude to ladies or interpreters.” That seemed like something Ray or Mr. Rourke would say.
We go to pop singers to hear such extravagant bended-knee submisson to the femal
e will—we learn from our advice-mongering studs on the microphone. And we will ourselves into believing they have any idea what they’re talking about. I have read Smokey Robinson’s autobiography, which is admirably frank on his swinging sex life, and I cannot help but think of how much I depended on Smokey Robinson to teach me how to be a boyfriend, a suitor, a husband. Just in the way he sings “ooo” in the chorus of “Ooo Baby Baby,” he taught me tons about how to be erotically bereaved, how to suffer for erotic choices poorly made, mistakes regretted, opportunities unwisely seized, reconnections that aren’t possible. The lyric is just a rough sketch telling you why the “ooo” is in the song, but nobody really needs it—it’s all there in the “ooo.” He taught me to be miserable suffering for a woman, and how to love every minute of it. But even after reading Smokey Robinson’s autobiography, and learning that he spent the “Tracks of My Tears” years getting more ass than a tour-bus driver’s seat, I still take a seminar from him on bending to the will of women every time I hear him whimper “You Really Got a Hold on Me” or moan through “Baby, Baby Don’t Cry.”
In his own way, Ray Parker Jr. is one of these musical sages of love. “A Woman Needs Love” was a hit that made me ponder my duties to women. Although I was only a boy, I was getting a sense of the ever-increasing list of services I would be called upon to provide, outside of those contained in various soul songs.
Reaching things in high places
I was about eight when old ladies began coming up to me in the supermarket and telling me to reach things for them. How did they know I would? They just knew.
Consuming food
This has always been a tough one. The desire of women to see men enjoy their food is one I have always found a challenge. My grandmother’s desire to fatten me up makes sense, given that she came from a rural Irish area plagued by famine and influenza, but it went deeper than that. My sisters always found it amusing when she would call and order them to feed me—yet now they have the same obsession with feeding their own sons. We’re not really sure how this happened.
Knowing what slingbacks are
A type of shoe. If you ask if she’s wearing slingbacks, the answer is usually no, but the effort is seldom wasted.
Walking to cars
I was twenty-one the first time. I was walking home from the Grotto in New Haven, where I had just been moshed into a bloody pulp. The girls behind me were yelling, “Hey, green shirt! Walk us to our car!” So I did. They were parked in a bad neighborhood, as were all the neighborhoods in that town. When we got to the car, I wondered for a crazy second whether they were going to offer me a ride, but they weren’t dumb. This same scene played out at about two-thirds of the rock shows I attended in that city.
Saving a seat
I thought this was just my first girlfriend, but it turned out to be every girlfriend. I do not have what you would call a “seat-saving personality,” i.e., I am nowhere near chatty enough to keep having the same two-line conversation with fifty people (“Yes, someone’s sitting here. She’ll be right back.”) in the three or four minutes before the band goes on or the movie starts. This is one of my designated areas for improvement.
Opening things with lids
And then saying, “You loosened it up for me.”
Checking the expiration dates
Salad dressing? Expires after about a week. Never gets thrown away. Every time I’m in my mom’s kitchen, I end up raiding the cabinets, searching for canned or bottled goods that have piled up years after they presumably went bad.
Singing Irish songs
Every year on my mom’s birthday, I call her and sing “Bold Thady Quill,” an Irish song we love to share because it’s one that nobody else seems to like. When we sit around the fire singing Irish songs for my mom, my brother-in-law John takes the long sad songs with plots, because he actually has a voice. I just sing the ones about drunken hurlers and wild rovers. Either way, singing for the women in our family is a sacred duty.
Asking if she got a haircut
If someone I knew asked me this question every other week, I would think there was something wrong with their cognitive process. But for some reason, asking this question never seems to come as an annoyance or a surprise. From across the room, you can just mime a pair of scissors and give a thumbs-up.
Beating up mean people
An offer always appreciated, though seldom taken up on, and blatantly insincere coming from me. The only times I have been called upon to actually do this were at a pro-choice rally in 1989 where we got attacked by right-to-lifers, and a Sleater-Kinney show in 1996 where I successfully threw out two tough guys and then wouldn’t shut up about it for weeks.
Counting the ply
On a roll of toilet paper, there is fine print at the very bottom of the package, with the suffix “ply.” The prefix is either the numeral 1 or the numeral 2. If you pick 1, you have made a decision you will regret a little or a lot, depending on whoever is back at home waiting for the toilet paper.
Not asking how they met their boyfriends
Most women love to tell this story, and indeed can’t keep still about it. But if you’ve known a couple for forty-five minutes, and the woman still hasn’t brought it up, it means they met at a party when she got drunk and blew him in the bathroom to make her ex-boyf riend mad. She does not want to talk about it. (He does, but not around her.) (And her ex is probably talking about it right now, but that’s someone else’s problem.)
Making conversation with their boyfriends
Female friends’ boyfriends are either in bands or they’re not. If her boyfriend is not in a band, it’s easy to talk to him. Just mention two geographical areas, and you will discuss the various ways to get from one to the other. You’re from New
Hampshire? Okay, Guadalajara. How do you get there? Do you take the Tappan Zee Bridge? Stay off I-95? I don’t know why, but for males, this seems to top politics or sports or music or any other topic. As long as you stick to “ways to get somewhere from somewhere else,” talking to boyfriends is a snap.
If he’s in a band, it’s a lot harder to be polite. It requires turning up at one of his shows now and then. It requires nodding and saying, “You don’t sound that much like Joy Division. More like early Can.” It requires paying for his drinks and not rolling your eyes when he claims he left his wallet in the guitar case. But it’s important to keep exposure time brief, because after ten minutes it becomes impossible not to laugh out loud when he claims he sounded this way long before anyone had heard of Animal Collective. At that point, you’ve done your duty for your friend; she will be grateful you tried.
You can now be as mean to him as you like. He has no idea you’re being mean, because (1) he’s not listening to a word you say, and (2) he has no idea he’s her boyfriend.
The list goes on, gets longer every year. It never ends. It never gets any shorter. There is always more required of you. That’s another thing Ray Parker Jr. was trying to tell me.
THE ROLLING STONES
“She’s So Cold ”
1981
My wrestling career record was 0-14, yet I racked up a few moral victories. For instance, there were matches where none of my vertebrae snapped, and a few times there were no loud crunching noises. My mom came to see me wrestle once, and apologized for never being able to go back. I don’t blame her. No Irish mother should ever have to witness her firstborn getting bodyslammed while wearing a plastic mouthguard.
I was a resounding success at wrestling, compared to my utter failure to explain to anyone I’ve met since high school why I was allowed on the wrestling team. When I took my wife, Ally, back to visit my old school, there were all sorts of places I wanted to show her. But the main thing I wanted to show her was the team photo from the 1981 wrestling team, with me beaming proudly in my Lycra unitard and leather codpiece, just so she’d finally believe me. I swear that when I graduated, the photo was still up there, framed and hanging in Warren Hall. But now it’s locked up in a closet
somewhere, perhaps to be sold for big bucks on eBay or used as an ashtray.
Because of the physics of wrestling, I never should have been permitted near the mat. Wrestlers are paired by weight, so obviously, if two wrestlers are the same weight, the shorter one will always win. If you apply enough pressure to a joint, it will snap, so it helps to have a thick, square, blocklike build, preferably with no joints at all. I was very tall, bony, stretched out like a sweatsock that had just been used as a gorilla condom, with a long neck that was easily laced into a full W indsor. Every wrestler my weight was built like a minifridge, so it was literally impossible for me to win a match unless I packed a nunchaku, or unless I pulled out the easily concealed and widely advertised Kiyoga: the Steel Cobra. I was below featherweight, bantamweight, chickenweight—somewhere near a shameweight.
Oddly, this is one of the few areas in my life where I was brimming with confidence, if only because there was no pressure to win. Indeed, if I lasted the whole match and lost on points, instead of getting pinned immediately, my teammates would slap me on the back as if I’d crushed a man with my bare hands. I had never been so extravagantly proud of having blood that clotted. Wrestling was to my teen years what karaoke became to my adulthood—a pursuit where I had no skill but total enthusiasm and full commitment, a performance ritual where I felt completely devoid of shame.
Talking to Girls About Duran Duran: One Young Man's Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut Page 4
