Just a minute guitar break

My name is Bert. And one time I got a chance to play in a band that was way over my head.

This is the story. It’s the saddest story I can think of, and it happens to me. So some of the names are changed, so that nobody knows who I am.

This neat lady was the bass player in this very neat band in Boston, in the late eighties. Let’s call them the Elves. They were very cool and they were famous. And she had some time off, like a month or something, from her Elves duties, and she thought she would write some songs and make an album.

Somehow, me…I knew this neat lady, because I was known, a little bit, in Boston, for being kind of a hanger-on to this other pretty odd, but beautiful, and also very popular band. I was their manager.

And they were so popular, this pretty odd, but beautiful, and also very popular band, that people thought I was actually crafty, a hard-worker, somehow imbued with the qualities of the people around me who were “making things happen.”

I wasn’t.

Anyway, through an interesting connection, somehow, somehow, when the neat lady bass player with the time off from the Elves was looking for a bass player, my name came up.

Now I want to try to give you a comparison as to how famous, or, how should I say it, totally cool this neat lady bass player was who was the bass player for the Elves.

It was as if the bass player for Nirvana was making a solo album, and I got the chance to be the bass player on that album. What’s that guy’s name, Krist Novoselic? Imagine yourselves being offered to play bass for Krist Novoselic’s solo album. Only, I cannot tell you how much cooler the neat lady bass player is. She still is!

Now, here’s the other thing, I also want you to imagine, that the reason you get this offer is because of the theory that anybody can play bass.

I had a very good friend that was now a member of this band, let’s say she played the French horn in the band. She was very enthusiastic and had confidence in me, and she got me into the band. She said, Bert can play the bass. And she said to me, you can play the bass, right? I said, yes, I can play the bass.

I was the bass player. I played the bass. I was showed some bass tricks by this neat lady from the Elves, and it was cool. Imagine it, you guys. It was very, very cool. She would write songs and I would go to her apartment and she would show me the songs and show me the bass. There was no problem, you see. My bass playing was being approved, like every night, in small, one-on-one sessions, and in a larger, practice-space, band-like settings.

Oh, and let me mention this. There were three rotating drummers in this band, due to, I don’t know what. But three very, very, very cool drummers. And I was partnered up with them. Because a drummer and a bass player make what is known as a rhythm section. These guys would smile at me and say stuff like, great, or good job!

And, the music that was being made, by us, US! Because I was a part of it! Was really pretty great.

We would practice in this band, and we were going to make demos and then we were going to make a record.

And, honestly, it was fun, but I wasn’t so super-into it. I had my own band going on by now, and I was getting a little cocky. I was part of a very cool bunch of little projects, and I was writing songs. People thought I was cool and I thought I was cool.

Then we went into the studio to record the demos. A very kind of famous, underground studio. Very cool.

We are recording, and we are all doing our parts and it is kind of professional and, I don’t know…it was going well. Well.

And I lived, right around the block from this famous underground Boston-ish recording studio. So when there was a break, I went home and had a sandwich.

And when I had that sandwich, everything was all right. Everything. The sandwich was all right. I was all right. And the world was all right.

But when I got back to the studio, the neat lady bass player was working on her vocals. And she was having, kind of a problem. She was talking to the engineer through her headphones.

“What is going on with the bass? It’s off, Randall. It’s, something’s totally…no,  I cannot…try it again. No, no, something’s completely wrong. Well, let’s just try and turn it down.” They try that.

“No, oh no, no way. Just, just turn it off. Turn it completely off.”

The bass, she said. Turn it completely off.

And that was it for me. She redid the parts, most of them anyway. And I wasn’t in the band anymore.

I went home and sulked for a while, but then I thought I should go back, maybe it was all a dream.

I didn’t get to be back in the band. But I did get to hang around the studio while they recorded, feeling humiliated, but somehow unwilling to let go. I got to look up some words in the dictionary. She was looking for a good G word to fit into a song. I cannot remember the word I found, but I believe it was a good contribution.

Ladies and Gentlemen, that one, I have never gotten over. It has shaped every move I have made since.  Every word I say, everything I do, everything I eat, everything thing I, I don’t know what… everything.

But, come on, she was the bass player in the Elves. One of the coolest bands, to this day, ever. Of course she was going to discover that I was, in no way, going to stack up to what she thought the bass player in her band should sound like. But how come I could not have figured that out? I could’ve saved myself a lot of humiliation.

Not everyone, it turns out, can play the bass.

Meeting Joey Ramone

During high school there was a record store that sprung up one day in Rockaway, NJ, about 10 miles from my hometown of Parsippany. I guess in keeping with the period popularity of an electronics chain called Crazy Eddie, the guy who owned the store decided to call the place “Meshugana Dave’s.” Meshugana being the Yiddish word for “crazy.”

The place was like paradise. Just about every LP in the store was $1!

Dave really was meshugana. We later found out he had done some time in a psychiatric facility. And why I equate Meshugana Dave with Joey Ramone to this day is simple: The most cherished piece of vinyl I bought from him (which I still have to this day) is a copy of The Ramones album “Road to Ruin” on yellow vinyl. There’s nothing like hearing “I Wanna Be Sedated” while staring at a spinning yellow disk.

That yellow vinyl disc helped make me a lifetime Ramones fan. Some considered them loud or pointless, and I don’t think they gained the popularity they merited until more people looked at them in the rearview mirror. But I always felt like I “got” them.

I always had this feeling that Joey Ramone was having fun on stage, although it was really hard to tell. He always kept his sunglasses on, hair in his eyes and a still expression only broken by what seemed like a huge mouth enunciating words like “Cretin!” “Mental!” and “Lobotomy!”

While in college, at Syracuse University, I was working at the student-run radio station, WPJZ, 89.1 FM. The station decided that it would broadcast live from an annual dance marathon the school held. The marathon was to be held at Manley Field House, a 10,000-seat arena that was home to the Syracuse basketball team prior to construction of the 50,000-seat Carrier Dome. The dance marathon was to carry on for about 48 hours and feature bands.

And the one band I was interested in was The Ramones.

Since we had equipment on hand to do interviews with people who were participants in the dance marathon, I figured it would be a great excuse to set up credentials to get backstage and interview Joey, Johnny, Marky and Dee Ramone.

There was some fear among administration types about having The Ramones play. There were rumors that people just “went crazy” at their shows and that “fights always broke out.” So staff at Manley Field House put up in front of the stage one of those fences of chicken wire that was reinforced with wood slats. They set it about 10 feet back from the stage, so that no one could get close and potentially do a stage dive.

The show was great. As was their tradition, The Ramones ran through their three-minute, three-chord songs like they were on speed, with only the shouting of “One-Two-Three-Four” between them to signal any shift in momentum.

But about 50 minutes into the show, people broke through the fence. All they were doing was dancing in that 10-foot space in front of the stage, but that was enough for event organizers to shut the lights and blare through a speaker system that the show was over.

What a bunch of wusses.

Shortly after the show ended, I and another guy grabbed the radio station’s remote microphones with the intent of getting backstage to interview The Ramones. But as we got further into the bowels of Manley Field House, the concrete walls started playing havoc with the wireless equipment and our signal couldn’t be received. But that didn’t stop us from going backstage to hang a little.

The guys seemed a little annoyed that the show was stopped. I think it was Marky that eventually said, “What’s with this town?” Either Marky or Dee Dee said they’d seen much worse at some of their other gigs, which were never shut down.

There was a keg of beer tapped for the guys back there. We poured a few for the band and managed to have one for ourselves, but the supply ran out kinda quick.

And there was Joey. Tall, leather jacket, hair in the face, slumped over slightly. A real presence. I think we asked him who he was listening to lately and how was the tour going. The oddest question I asked him was, “Since you guys are from Queens, do you like the Mets?”

Joey, in his most sincere way possible, said, “Well, we don’t watch a whole lotta sports, ya know, but I guess we like to see the home teams do well.”

Stupid question, I guess. But he seemed more than willing to hear me out. And for that I always remained amazed by him.

The band seemed ready to leave. It didn’t seem like they had an entourage to shuttle them around town. For all we knew they could have just driven up to Syracuse in a van. Marky, noting that the keg was empty asked “Where can we get a beer around here?” And it was already after midnight.

The only places I knew were on campus. Marshall Street is Syracuse’s answer to a bar district. I said something like “Varsity has beer and good wings, I guess you could try that.”

Somehow I couldn’t really picture Joey, Johnny, Marky and Dee Dee walking down Marshall Street, clad in their classic leather clothes, stopping in at varsity and asking for 40 wings and a pitcher of beer.

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I met Joey again a few years later in an auditorium at the New School in Manhattan. It was there that Vin Scelsa, host of the long-running New York radio show, “Idiot’s Delight,” was taping an episode live for broadcast. On the bill this night were Mark McEwen, a former NY disk jockey who did the weather on the CBS Morning Show for several years, Douglas Brinkley, now known as Jimmy Carter’s personal biographer, who had just put out a book called “The Magic Bus” about traveling the U.S. with a class of college students, and our old friend Marshall Crenshaw.

(Ironically, for those of you who may have read my earlier essay on Marshall for “Just a Minute Guitar Break,” that night marked the first of my two meetings with him.)

Joey must have been watching from the back for most of the show. Because of his height, he had to be at least 6’ 3”, he probably didn’t want to have people yelling at him to “take of that hat” or something like that. Toward the end of the broadcast, Vin, who was very friendly with Joey, introduced him. There he was; looking as if time had stood still. The leather jacket, the sunglasses, the hair in the eyes.

Joey stayed to chat it up with anyone who stayed after the broadcast. His was more than willing to oblige me with an autograph. We talked a little bit. I told him how I last saw him when interviewing him backstage in Syracuse, “You know, when the show got shut down?”  And he may have responded something like, “Yeah, I guess that used to happen a lot to us.”

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