Woodstock all over again ... But it wasn’t not the awe-inspiring Woodstock of 1969, the monumental Woodstock of 1994 or even the disastrous Woodstock of 1999. Instead, it was more like those Woodstocks that nobody remembers, the ones which officially commemorated anniversaries of the original event in 1979 and 1989.
I was standing outside of First Avenue, Minneapolis’ fabled, troubled event emporium, in a line with approximately sixty other people of varying ages and equally pale complexions. Rain began to pour on our pallid Minnesotan skin this swampy June night - a circumstance that put me in mind of the infamous rainstorm in the first edition of Woodstock that caused the throng to chant “NO RAIN!” In our case, though, if we were to say anything about it, it would have been more like “Could you please stop raining, Mr. God?” as we politely, slowly began to move, not to First Avenue proper, but to that of its appendage, the Seventh Street Entry. The reason we were herding into the Entry’s tiny, suffocating performance space like sodden hippies into a brown-acid recovery tent was to witness an event so unique, not only has it never been attempted before, but it is not expected to ever be launched again ... at least not with the personnel involved this night.
Chuck Klosterman, an author and journalist who could be described as rock’s answer to Sinclair Lewis, would read excerpts from his latest depth-probing and side-splitting analysis of rock and roll history, “Killing Yourself to Live” his “85% true” (as he puts it, perhaps predicting the coming of James Frey) chronicle of a cross country tour of the sites where music legends gagged their last. Complimenting the excerpts would be renditions of classic tunes by those dead artists, as well as a few that are still alive, by Mark Mallman, a local impresario who can only be described as rock’s answer to David Blaine.
Mallman has earned this comparison to the magician - whose idea of a good vacation is several days spent under water, encased in ice, or in a glass box suspended over the Thames River - thanks to a pair of live performances entitled “Marathon” and “Marathon 2.” In the case of the first “Marathon”, performed at a Minneapolis venue in 1999, it involved the singer and songwriter warbling his original piece for twenty-six hours straight with a rotating cast of twenty-eight backup musicians and 312 pages of lyrics. The sequel, performed at Saint Paul’s Turf Club in 2002, had the musical masochist (or sadist, depending on your point of view) doing the honors over the course of 52.4 hours with 528 pages of lyrics. These endurance tests, which he accomplished with very occasional breaks for food, showers, changes of clothing and eliminations of waste, succeeded in making the Milwaukee-born maestro a B-list media celebrity. Alas, he has yet to achieve his goal of being credited with “World’s Longest Song” in the Guinness Book of World Records, who regarded the two “Marathons” as medleys rather than individual tunes.
The sonic experiment being witnessed tonight would not, of course, be nearly so lengthy - Mark’s co-star, Mr. Klosterman, after all, is on a national book tour with a tight schedule. More significantly, the writer is not brimming with the natural and unnatural chemicals that drive the musician to perform such slavish devotions to The Muse. In fact, this first ever “book rocking”, which lasted roughly ninety minutes, was so short that the wait for it, both in the rain outside and the dry confines of the club, was twice as long.
The idle time within the dark, graffiti-smeared walls of the Entry gave me a chance to chat with another curious attendee, a long-haired dude of twenty-something who was the embodiment of “Dirty White Boy”, one of the few songs by Foreigner with a sense of humor. Dirty White Boy, an avid fan of the musical half of tonight’s double header, provided me with bits and pieces of background on Mallman, whom I’d never seen before or heard a recording by. According to Dirty White Boy, “MM” usually sings his own material and would therefore be venturing into a new patch of uncharted territory by performing a show made up almost entirely of covers (and that, even more unusually, was lasting less than a week). Dirty White Boy not only followed the live exploits of the frustrated Guinness record holder, but those of numerous other bands and artists as they carved a path across the country. This was thanks to his making a living cleaning the seats and aisles of commercial airplanes at the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport. This sometimes unsanitary job provided him with stupendous discounts on flights that allowed him to travel around the country catching live shows in venues of all dispositions - sometimes several by the same band on the same tour. Despite this obsessive attendance, and the fact that he downed three sixteen-ounce beers during the time we chatted, Dirty White Boy insisted he was not a hopeful rocker himself.
I, on the other hand, have attempted everything in the arts BUT be a rocker ... unless you count my sixteen-ounce-and-Karaoke-fueled rendition of Right Said Fred’s “I Am Too Sexy” at a film production wrap party (and if the guy who taped that performance is reading this, play that tape for anybody and you will be “Drop Dead Fred!”). But ANYWAY - as the literary half of tonight’s bill would put it - I was the beacon of light on Chuck Klosterman, whom I have followed with as much enthusiasm as the airplane cleaner did his favorite show people. I, like most casual music fans, was introduced to the Minnesota-born and North-Dakota-bred writer through his first book, “Fargo Rock City.” Easily one of the funniest documents of rock - or anything - I have ever read, it is more or less an analysis of heavy metal via Chuck’s own life experiences, first as a youth escaping the dreariness of the farm community he was reared in by collecting and cranking up the works of Mötley Crüe, Van Halen, Guns ‘N Roses and other head bangers, and then as a journalist for Ohio’s Akron Beacon Journal and, later on, SPIN, Rolling Stone, and a slew of other major national squibs. This career path allowed him to meet, interview, tour with and God-knows-what-else with many of those “show people” who made his childhood more bearable.
Though his first love is music - especially the kind that kicks ass and scares Christians - Klosterman also writes extensively about movies, television and other kernels of pop culture. This is represented by his follow-up tome, “Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs” a more diffuse but frequently hilarious collection of essays on subjects ranging from an examination of the cultural impact of soft-core kids show “Saved by the Bell”, his guilty pleasure over being attracted to media blob Pamela Anderson (an attraction I resolutely don’t share, though I do confess to a long time obsession with “American Idol” dingbat, Paula Abdul) and the life and times of Paradise City, one of many bands making their living by paying tribute to Guns ‘N Roses. As a precursor to his stunt with Mark Mallman, on this past April Fool’s Day, Klosterman published a mock review of “A Chinese Democracy”, the album that G ‘n R leader (and, currently, only original member) Axl Rose has been working on for twelve years and whose completion and release is not expected to happen until that racist, sexist, homophobic scumbag - eh, I mean, troubled, lonely, confused visionary - joins the ranks of the prematurely dead.
Just as Dirty White Boy was about to order another sixteen-ounce to send him to his own early grave, the lights in the room faded, and the sound system played a droning synthesizer track accompanied by sound bites of various people recollecting departed musicians they knew or idolized. After several minutes of these eulogies, a drummer, guitarist and bassist materialized with their respective tools, followed by the far from cadaverous front man. Mallman, who looks like a mix of forgotten character actor Paul Sand and singer-songwriter Arlo Guthrie, whose main claim to fame happens to be a marathon of a song that gets longer with each performance, wore a suit that looked like it was not so much dyed as painted dark brown. After completing a tune that I was unfamiliar with, but which concluded with several “Hellos” I did recognize, being evocative of those sung by Kurt Cobain - unquestionably the biggest dead music personality of the 1990’s - Mallman then introduced his co-star.
Klosterman walked on stage at a more authorly pace, carrying the book from which he would read and wearing a plaid shirt that, along with his round haircut and thickset physique, made him look - as my Mom likes to say - “echt Minnesotan” (or, if you prefer, “echt North Dakotan”). However, as Klosterman dove into his account of examining the site of the last gurglings of Bob Stinson, lead guitarist for Minneapolis’ legendary band The Replacements, he spoke in a voice that resonated with the assurance and clarity of a scribe who had seen many corners of the earth and shaken many hands (and God knows what else) of the rich and famous. As for the corner described in this excerpt, an alley outside of the Bryant-Lake Bowl, a bowling alley, bar and theater near Minneapolis’ Uptown district, it was dingy and nondescript enough to remind anyone aiming to be a good looking corpse that a star’s final flame-out can be just as dreary as that of any street person’s (especially, if, like Stinson, you don’t actually overdose, but just plain collapse after years of dope and drink).
Nonetheless, many of the final acts described in “Killing Yourself to Live” are dramatic, bizarre and downright freaky. This especially applied to those involving hanging. According to Klosterman, Badfinger - a Beatles-influenced combo fostered by The Beatles, themselves, who had a handful of hits in the early seventies - is, so far, the only major band to have not one but two members hang themselves. More otherworldly was the self-strangulation by INXS’ Michael Hutchence, whose body the author reminded me was found not merely with a rope around his throat but with his neck at one end of a belt, the other end of which was tied around the doorknob of a bathroom of a Ritz-Carlton Hotel room in Sydney, Australia. What I did not need to be reminded of was the still ongoing debate between those loved ones of Hutchence’s who regard his death as an intentional suicide and those who believe it was an auto-erotica adventure gone wrong (his wife, Paula Yates, was among the latter crowd, and I’m inclined to respect her authority on the matter since she, herself, died of a heroin overdose three years after her husband passed on). Either way, the man who had more than one “Devil Inside” his Jim-Morrison-like umbra only succeeded in allowing unmusical shlubs like me, who can’t even do a good impression of Right Said Fred, to take comfort in the fact that they’ll never be rock stars.
“The Devil Inside”, in fact, was the next selection performed by Mallman, who folded the INXS classic with “Killing Yourself to Live” the Black Sabbath song that obviously inspired the title of Chuck’s book. Ozzy Osbourne, who not only helped launch heavy metal with Sabbath but the curious genre I call “Reality TV Shows Starring Hair Metal Has-Beens” with his family’s weekly colonoscopy on VH1, was witness to what had to be the dumbest rock and roll death ever. The stupidity, as recounted in another one of the excerpts Klosterman read that night, lay not with the rock star in question but with his airplane pilot, the unfortunately named Andrew Aycock. Aycock failed to tell the passengers of his tiny “doctor killer” - as the type of small twin engine plane he flew is known thanks to its popularity among rich, daredevil doctors - that his flying license had long since expired and that he had several lines of cocaine buzzing in his skull. Then again, he was probably too busy displaying his masterful skills at flying the craft low enough to graze the tour bus that carried Ozzy and personnel to a tour destination. He was also probably too busy to mention these facts as the plane hit the bus, veered sideways and crashed into a garage, killing him, a hairdresser, and Ozzy’s greatest guitarist, Randy Rhoads.
Mallman then segued into the most appropriate song of the evening, “Rock and Roll Suicide.” The irony of this selection is that not only was it written and recorded by an artist, David Bowie, who is still very much alive but who, in my opinion, may be one of the few to live till a ripe old age (well, as long as he stops smoking those three packs a day). Klosterman then did his final reading for the night, a rather lengthy one that made note of some deaths that are rarely, if ever, discussed in the rock community, but which the author feels should be due to their immense irony. Among these peculiar passings: T-Rex of “Bang a Gong” (or is that “Get It On?”) fame, who, despite devoting much of his brief career to tunes about the joy of driving, the beauty of cars and the thrill of highways, never actually learned how to drive, and ended up getting killed in an auto crash; Nico, who, despite singing for the Velvet Underground, appearing in Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita”, recording with Brian Jones, Jimmy Page, Jackson Browne, Lou Reed and John Cale, bearing a son by Alain Delon, and turning that son on to her drug of choice, heroin, ended up dying the death of a goofy, unworldly kid by tumbling off a bicycle; Steve Clark, guitarist for Def Lepperd, who, despite kicking another guitarist, Pete Willis, out of the band because of his excessive drinking, ended up dying after consuming a double vodka, a quadruple vodka and a sizable tumbler of bourbon in less than thirty minutes; and a seventies jazz-rock band I had never heard of before called Patto, who, despite losing lead singer Mike Patto to cancer and guitarist Ollie Halsall to a drug-related heart attack, and despite bassist Clive Griffiths losing all memory of having been in the band at all thanks to the amnesia he suffered following a car accident, carries on thanks to occasional live performances by drummer John Halsey, who walks with a permanent limp as a result of that same accident. I think Klosterman summed up all of these final bows best with his lesson learned from the Patto bassist’s permanent forgetfulness: “To live in the hearts of those we leave behind is not to die.”
The author then closed his potentially depressing - but somehow still uplifting - book and offered to sign copies over by the bar. But, first, he had to let his one-time-only partner bring the proceedings to a close with that old chestnut “My Way” - the Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley AND Sid Vicious versions, to be exact. Mallman began the tune with a slow piano intro and Rat Pack warble that would have made the Chairman of the Board raise his shot glass in a toast. He then got up from the piano and bounded into a pelvic shaking strut that would have scared - or delighted - Ed Sullivan. He and his band then concluded the piece with an assault on the senses that would have shaken the walls of Klosterman’s most infamous tour spot, the Chelsea Hotel (whose management was less than enthusiastic about showing the author the room where Vicious killed his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen). Mallman and company then sauntered off the stage, leaving the crowd to cheer, clap and demand that other old standby, the encore. Being his own man and a virulent anti-traditionalist - and perhaps saving his strength for his next installment of “Marathon” - Mallman did not give in to their demands. Instead, the lights slowly came on, and Klosterman slid behind the bar to begin signing editions.
As is usually the case at these things, I did not have a copy on hand for the visiting writer to scribble in. In fact, as I explained to our guest once the line of people who did bring volumes thinned out and I had a chance to speak to him, I hadn’t even read the book in question yet. I did, however, insist I had every intention of doing so and told him how much I enjoyed his earlier works. In true “echt Minnesotan” (all right, “echt North Dakotan!”) fashion, the author politely thanked me for my compliments. I then took advantage of his kindness to ask him about one of his many celebrity encounters. The celebrity in this case was not a member of the music scene, but a longtime member of the ever swelling ranks of political humorists. I had had a chance the previous day to catch Chuck being interviewed by Bill Maher on his new online talk show, “Fishbowl”, the first such program to be streamed on the web, courtesy of Amazon. Klosterman, who said he only chatted with the delightfully mean spirited - and beautifully Bush-hating - host briefly before his interview, said that he was kind of “prickly” but otherwise okay. I then asked him if he had any theory as to why Maher’s nose seems so much larger now than it was in his days hosting “Politically Incorrect.” Klosterman shrugged his shoulders and replied, “Probably all that coke has finally caught up with him!”
Though I doubt drugs and booze are the sources of Maher’s W.C.-Fields-sized shnozz, or even his Chelsea-Hotel prickliness, there’s no doubt they were the sources of most of the deaths related in “Killing Themselves to Live.” The endless supply of pleasures of the wallet, the gullet, the gut, the loin, the groin, the brain and especially the vein that Rock Gods and Goddesses are so justifiably famous for are, by themselves, enough to kill most bodybuilders. In addition to all that, most of these Gods and Goddesses spend six to twelve months a year swooping around in doctor killers piloted by unlicensed coke heads, or in buses filled with more coke heads, as well as pot heads, hop heads, knuckleheads, heroin addicts, screaming kids, bellowing managers, flatulent roadies and buzzing reporters, all of whom reek of alcohol, tobacco, firearms, bad food and B.O. worse than the occupants of a ballpark locker room. And don’t forget, every couple of years, these guys and gals get to take a break from their grueling tour schedules by spending three to four months arguing with their band mates and producers, and doing five hundred takes of single notes in recording studios with less daylight than most locker rooms - or coal mines - and with most of the same personnel and their attendant B.O.
I burst forth into the blinding sunlight from the equally dank confines of the Entry, whose main event this evening was, in fact, not like Woodstock ‘79 or ‘89, at all, but a fine blend of the love bomb of Woodstock ‘69, the grunge fest of Woodstock ‘94 and the death knell of Woodstock ‘99 (with a sprinkling of the murder spree of Altamont ‘69). As I walked down the litter-and-urine-caked street, past the homeless frustrated music stars with their palms outstretched, I realized the eternal question of rock mortality, as Chuck Klosterman, Mark Mallman and so many others (though maybe not Dirty White Boy) have postulated over the last fifty years, was not why so many rock stars die young.
