I was standing around, drinking coffee late at night next to the van with Captain Sensible and the crew members, at a truck stop somewhere in England, when Mikey Boy Peters came back over to the van and calmly told us, “My cancer has come back.”
There was a collective gasp. How do you respond to that? This was one of my truest pals ever and the singer in a band we were currently on a tour with. No one spoke. We were all bundled up, shifting from foot to foot, trying to stay warm, and even in the cold, no one was anxious to get back into the van. I remember getting very hot under my heavy overcoat; my scarf was pulled up around my face, and the steam from my breath was fogging up my glasses. It was English weather—damp, cold, and windy in the parking lot—the nearby motorway traffic was whizzing by, and the whole scene was lit by the usual fluorescent streetlights and signs in an English roadside services stop parking lot at 2:00 A.M. We had just finished a show, and we were driving overnight to the next one. More luxury and glamour, but with this gang, I didn’t mind; we were all pals and equals.
The Jack Tars is a good side project. We each bring a few hit songs to the table, and the fans like this combination of musicians. We continue to do this band with Captain Sensible, Mikey Boy in remission from his cancer, and current permanent member Chris Cheney from the Australian rockabilly/pop/rock band the Living End. He sings and plays guitar as good as anyone I’ve ever worked with and is a true pal. We first met when his older sister had to smuggle him into the shows on a Cats Australian tour in the 1980s. My son, TJ, later discovered his band, and we stayed reconnected. The Jack Tars is a bunch of beloved characters. Sometime guests and members include true pal Billy Duffy from the Cult, true pal Glen Matlock from the Sex Pistols, good buddy Duff McKagan from Guns N’ Roses, Mick Jones from the Clash, Rami Jaffee and Chris Shiflett from the Foo Fighters, and good buddy and super-talented fellow Long Islander Fred Armisen.
Fred’s the creator and star of the fantastic sketch TV show Portlandia, and he did a long, successful stint on Saturday Night Live. Fred and I have a good connection. His childhood train stop on the LIRR was in Valley Stream, not far from ours in Massapequa. He’s a longtime musician and fan; it turned out that he had seen the Cats play very early on. Besides being a real drummer, he has an act where he sings and plays a perfectly researched, invented punk rock character called Ian Rubbish. He is a perfect fit for the Jack Tars. I’m happy to know him.
Captain Sensible is almost indescribable, a one-of-a-kind, unique character. As a founding member of the original punk rock band the Damned, he’s become a British institution. He’s reinvented himself a few times along the way and is now a punk rock elder statesman in the best sense of the word. I’m fortunate to count him as a true pal and a bandmate. We’ve piled up a lot of road miles and sound checks together. One of our tours in the UK coincided with his attempted run for Parliament, as the Blah! Party representative. It didn’t seem to me to just be a stunt. The guy is passionate and knows his stuff. It’s not easy, punk rock and antipolitics.
There are tales around him of legendary bad punk rock behavior. I’ve only had positive times with the cat, although I did have to hold his hand a few times on bumpy flights and once had to read to him during some exceptionally rough turbulence on a flight from London to New York City. At the end of the day, he’s a wicked good guitar player and a lovely bloke.
Mike Peters and I go back thirty-five years. His band, Seventeen, would later become the Alarm. They were the opening act on the first Stray Cats UK tour in 1980. They turned up at the gigs and pretended they were the official opening act. It took ten shows until anyone realized there was no official opening act. By then, we all liked them, and they did the rest of the tour. The last night of the tour was in Blackpool, and we whooped it up at the show. It was Christmas 1980, and the Cats had a top-ten hit record on the British charts; “Runaway Boys” was at number nine when they froze the charts for the two-week Christmas break. We had followed through with everything we knew we could accomplish and had been shooting for.
In a tragic coincidence of that tour, we were in Liverpool on the day John Lennon was killed back in our hometown of New York City. I was and am a Lennon guy. I can’t even say how much I love and respect the man and his music. I can get choked up every time by thinking about it for too long. Liverpool was a mythic musical place to me like Memphis or Lubbock. The club we played was called Erik’s, and I think it’s been on the club circuit a long time. Everyone has played there. It’s right in the section of town where the Beatles had played the Cavern Club a hundred or more times. At the time, this place was the closest thing to playing the old Cavern Club, which was across the street but closed down. We were looking forward to visiting a music mecca. No one we knew had ever been there, for sure. The pile of flowers in front of the club was ten feet high. People were just walking by and throwing bouquets on the pile. There was a heavy vibe in the city, but we didn’t cancel, and everyone was nice to us, and we had a great show. We did an encore of “I Saw Her Standing There” with Seventeen coming up to sing along. Lennon was a well-known Gene Vincent fan and a rockabilly at heart. I’ve always liked to think he would have dug the Stray Cats.
After a high-energy show and big encore, I was in a bathroom stall doing a little powder when the door was kicked in and flew off the hinges toward me. I was dragged out and knocked to the floor by some angry security guards. They kicked me over and over again. I tried to crawl away and hide under the sink. With the help of crew member and buddy Bobby Startup, I got to my feet and out of the bathroom. There was a full-scale riot going on in the club and in the parking lot. I later found out that a girlfriend of one of the security guards was in the dressing room. All of this happened over the untrue and mistaken idea that some awful drunken woman was in our dressing room. One thing led to another, and the security guards stormed the bathroom where I was. This led to someone in the club getting a foot stepped on or beer spilled, which led to someone throwing a punch, and it was game on, and the audience was involved, too. People were just fighting each other, and the club security was going at it for no good reason other than it was Saturday night in Blackpool. These were the classic tuxedo-clad, no-neck or -brains gorillas that worked in the clubs in the north of England. These are horrible characters and would even be funny caricatures if not for their violent nature and quick tempers. I was unaware of this sort but have seen them a lot in the years since. They seem to propagate in club culture. This time it was not my fault. A few of our crew guys were caught up in the melee and were busted up pretty good. Lee and Brian were both uninvolved and unhurt. They had gotten out of the dressing room and into a car and avoided any injury.
The police arrived, and a few of us were being taken to a local hospital and then to the police station for questioning over our part in the riot. On the way out, I slipped a plastic bag with my stash to Mike Peters and told him to hold it for me. I had a chipped tooth and was bruised, but nothing was broken. At the police station, I called a copper Barney Fife and compared their town to Mayberry after they were interrogating me and treating me like the bad guy. They didn’t get the reference, which was good. We all drove back to London.
The other two guys flew back to Massapequa for Christmas. For some reason I can’t remember, I stayed in London by myself. After a few days of sitting around, I started to get a little antsy. There was not much going on, and BBC television just showed the picture of the girl holding the balloon for fifteen hours a day. On top of it all, I was out of blow and a bit lonely. Not being a proper drug guy, I was never very good at getting the stuff, and no one was around to help this time. I called around a little, but it was Christmas, and even dealers take off for the holidays. I remembered giving the baggie to Mike. So I somehow got to one of the main stations, probably Victoria, got the right train, and made the right connections on British Rail to arrive in Rhyl, North Wales, on Christmas Eve 1980. I then asked around at the taxi stand and found a driver who knew Mike, who took me to his mom’s house, where the family was having dinner. I managed this, I’m pretty sure, with no or very little money, wearing a T-shirt and leather jacket in the middle of a harsh winter.
Christmas in Wales—the whole extended family was there around the fireplace. It was a scene right out of a movie. They were understandably surprised when I turned up unannounced. Everyone greeted me and took me in as a member of the clan. They all knew Mike had been on tour with the Cats and were all proud of him and armed with questions for me. I had a few drinks with the folks; I seem to remember an elderly woman knitting by the fireplace, but I was trying to get Mike’s attention.
He sensed this and took me to an upstairs bedroom where he had the baggie stashed in his sock drawer. Mike didn’t use the stuff, so it was intact. I went to the bathroom, did a healthy whiff, and went back downstairs to Christmas in Wales. The whole gang was lovely, and I was more talkative now. The only slight wrinkle came when it was time to eat. I had gone back and forth a couple of times to the bathroom and had been steadily drinking wine and beer since I’d arrived. I was feeling just fine, but in that state, I didn’t have an appetite and didn’t want to appear rude or ungrateful. These people had just taken in an uninvited, rough-looking, 120-pound, frozen, greasy-haired, leather-jacketed New York stranger to their family holiday dinner. So when the Christmas goose arrived with all the trimmings, I had to keep pushing it around the plate to make it look like I had eaten it. It was real home cooking, and I’m sure it was amazing.
After dinner, Mike and a few others took me around their village, where I met all the locals at the pub and neighborhood disco that was a having a special do that night. Word spread fast, and in the pub there were quite a few people who wanted to meet me and say hello. The Cats were currently on TV and the radio, and it was a small town; Mike’s band being on the tour was big news. One guy, who thought he was the town mod and tough guy, wanted to start some aggro with me, the visiting teddy boy celebrity. With the day I had just had, I couldn’t even muster my usual vitriol for any comeback or response. The guy was so disappointed by my lack of interest that he wound up just walking away in the end in a kind of disgruntled defeat. The best way to win this fight turned out to be with pure indifference. I made it back to London the next day and carried on with life.
Mike’s band changed their name to the Alarm and went on to have success. We always managed to stay in touch, as I have with a few true pals I still have from those early days in London. I saw the Alarm do their most famous show at a huge open-air concert at UCLA—I think it was televised on MTV. We lived in Stone Canyon at the time, which is close to UCLA, and the guys came over to my house after their big show. On a different occasion, Brian and I got onstage with them at the Palladium.
Sometime in the 1990s, Mike was diagnosed with cancer. The prognosis was not good, and I believe the doctors told him to get his affairs in order. He opted out of traditional treatment and got heavily involved with a self-healing method. I don’t know all the ins and outs of it, but he continued to play gigs as a casting-out type of therapy and fought the cancer like an enemy within. He miraculously went into remission and stayed that way for ten years. We continued to stay in touch and would see each other’s bands when we could.
Sometime in the early 2000s, he contacted me with an idea for a new band. After a few lineup and name changes, we’ve become the Jack Tars. The band is a loud, acoustic, traveling jukebox playing the hit songs from our respective bands. Each guy sings his own songs with accompaniment from the others. The gig is peppered with stories about the genesis of the songs and clever banter and brings some big onstage personalities. It makes for a good show and a fun night out.
It was during the early days of doing gigs with what would become the Jack Tars, with the overwhelming support of the others, I had the confidence to try to sing a few songs. I’m not a real singer, but I love singers and have always envied real singers. The natural ability to sing is a great gift. I’ve always been pretty good at playing the drums and can comfortably play anywhere, anytime, in front of anyone. Singing is another story, and I found it hard in the past. At Mike’s insistence, I sang the Cats songs during the set. The audience accepted me doing my own songs, and it made sense to me right away. I earned the right to sing these songs a long time ago, and the fans excuse my lack of vocal expertise because they want to see one of the Cats do those songs. I like to compare it to Ringo doing a Beatles song. I tell the audience that I was the third-best singer in the Stray Cats. Now I can sing quite a few and have learned the most important thing is to pick the right songs. I’m not going to try to do Otis Redding or Elvis. I owe it to Mike for encouraging me to just do it.
True pal and original Sex Pistol Glen Matlock was very helpful on this front, too. We’ve known each other since the early days of the Cats in London. The first official bonding act of our new rhythm section was Glen offering to pay the dry cleaning bill that I incurred from an old drinking incident with him at the Venue in Victoria at some gig years before. I told him I appreciated it but that the jacket in question was lost long ago. Glen and I used to drink together, and now we don’t drink together. Unbeknownst to me, he gave it up, independently, around the same time as I did. Everything else is the same. The love of rock and roll and the need to pay the bills win every time. Glen and I have driven in his car to and from gigs all over England. We had a blast stopping for cream teas and visiting historic monuments on the way to the shows. A Stray Cat and a Sex Pistol, stopping and making detours involving heavy map reading, for a cream tea lunch in an English country village? What has the world come to? Glen’s hospitality and friendship over the years have helped me beyond words. Having a luxury suite waiting in a good part of leafy London is a great relief when trying to hustle up a rockabilly life. In a spooky small rock-and-roll world coincidence, Glen had a similar incident at the same club in Blackpool the year before our adventure there. It was through his encouragement that I decided to write this book in the first place. We’ve recently done a record with mutual true pal Earl Slick, confirming my sneaky suspicion that there are really only twenty-seven people in the world and they’re just running around all over the place.
So back in the van, Mike had dropped this bomb, and we were all speechless. A bunch of old rockers were crying in a van at a motorway services truck stop. We drove to the next place in silence. The sound of everyone’s thoughts was loud. Sometimes silence can be the perfect form of communication. Everyone knew what everyone else was thinking without the use of words. We were near the end of this run of dates, and Mike got through them. I went home and didn’t hear from him for a while. I’ve since learned that he did a few rounds of chemotherapy and radiation then.
Mike has always been that “rock and roll can save your soul” kind of cat. No negativity is allowed to ride on him for free. This is real heavy stuff, but he’s the type of guy that does beat this. He’s also the type of guy that does something about it. When he told me he was going to start a charitable organization, I told him I’d always help, no matter what. Be careful of what you agree to in advance.
The new charity was to be called Love Hope Strength and would do rock-and-roll type events to raise money for cancer research. I figured I could handle that. The first event was a climb of the interior staircase of the Empire State Building on April 16, 2007. We were set to play a little gig on the observation deck on the eighty-sixth floor. I was born in New York City and walked past the Empire State Building a thousand times but had never been inside. I figured I’d kill two birds with one stone—do a good deed and do a little hometown tourism.
A few of us were on the stair-climb event, including longtime true pal Billy Duffy from the Cult. I’ve known Billy since 1981, when he had an after-school, pre-rock-star job with another true pal, Lloyd Johnson, at Johnson’s Clothing on the Kings Road. Everybody shopped and hung out at Johnson’s. BD has gone on to make a dozen great albums; I’ve seen his band play twenty times, and he’s a current buddy whom I see all the time. We are charter members of Hike Club, a loose affiliation of idle musicians who stay marginally fit by hiking Franklin Canyon in Beverly Hills just about every day. He has known Mike almost as long as I have, confirming the twenty-seven-people theory. Other stair climbers included true pals—the excellent bassist and longtime neighbor Jimmy Ashhurst and the Pontiff, original Sex Pistol, and king over us all, Steve Jones. He’s one of my best pals ever, and I continually blame him for just about everything I’ve ever done. He’s the guitar player on Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, an album that is very important and influential to all of us. Along with Elvis Presley’s Sun Sessions and Gene Vincent Rocks! And the Blue Caps Roll, it made up the three records that really shaped me as a musician and style-conscious cat. I got into rockabilly around the same time as I did punk rock, and that record was an influence. I feel honored to have both Steve and Glen as true pals.
Billy and I were in pretty good shape for the Empire State Building climb, and once we got into a rhythm, it was very doable and kind of cool to see the skeleton of the most famous building in New York City’s skyline. I met LHS cofounder James Chippendale that day, and he and I were to become fast true pals. BD and I blew away the competition on the stair climb. He had a little burst at the end to pass me in a friendly race. There was a major storm that day in New York City, so we did the gig in the old gift shop on the eighty-sixth floor. This place is in a time warp out of the 1950s, complete with old souvenirs and original employees. We set up and played with producer Tony Visconti recording the whole thing. Later that night, we played a show in a club in the Village. My daughter, Madison, joined me on the first of our adventures together. No problem. Little did I know that this would turn out to be the easiest one we would do.
How could a drummer from Massapequa possibly conceive of hiking to the base camp of Mount Everest? Mike had planned the next event to symbolize conquering cancer by climbing the mountain and doing the highest concert ever performed. I had agreed to be on the team that was going to attempt this in October 2007. Team members were to include Mike; super-talented guitarist, singer, and songwriter Glenn Tilbrook from Squeeze, whom the Cats had done shows with in the 1980s; Cyril Curnin, singer; and Jamie West-Oram, guitarist from 1980s hit makers the Fixx. Cy is a spectacular classic English front man, and we would become close friends. The eclectic lineup was complemented by English whiz blues guitarist Nick Harper, whose mother had passed from cancer a year before.
When it comes to charitable endeavors, I’m best served by a small-picture, get-directly-involved type of approach. Some of these guys like Geldof—and, in this case, Mike—are able to look at a very big picture, but I don’t have the head for it. LHS is easily researched, and they’re doing a lot of big stuff. All these things we’ve done and they continue to do is readily available to see. I would like to think that I climbed a couple of mountains to help cure cancer, but I really did it because my true pal Mikey Boy Peters asked me to do it. I always say that I’m glad he didn’t ask me to go deep-sea diving to find a cure. It may be the same mind-set that makes you part of the rhythm section. Drummers don’t often write symphonies, but they will get their hands dirty and hang out with the crew.
I had no real concept of how hard this trip was going to be. I just did my daily hiking with my dog, Lucy the golden retriever, and tried not to think about it too much. When events are booked so far in advance, I tend to think the world will end before they arrive. So far, this hasn’t happened, and we’re all still here, but everyone has his or her process.
I flew on my own to Bangkok, stayed overnight at the airport hotel, and the next day flew to Kathmandu, Nepal. I was the only one coming from LA. Most of the thirty or so other people on this trek were from Dallas, where cofounder James Chippendale is from, or Denver, where former LHS director and fantastic woman Shannon Foley Henn is from. The rest were from England; I didn’t know anyone until the UK contingent arrived.
This place was the first time I had ever seen the real third world, and I was unprepared for what I saw. There were open sewage and trash dumps everywhere, wild packs of dogs, and seemingly feral children in torn clothing roaming the potholed streets. People holding up traffic, leading farm animals around in an urban environment, crossing the streets in front of taxis beeping at them. No one seemed too stressed, but there was a general feeling of built-in despair, and the quest seemed to be about pure survival. I thought it made Tijuana look like Beverly Hills. We were in the one Western enclave of town where the embassies and government buildings were housed. We stayed in a nice hotel, aptly named Hotel Yak & Yeti. It was comparable to the older mid-level Holiday Inns.
I had managed to cajole another true pal into taking this trip with me. Garrie Renucci is a former Scottish Professional Football League player turned business tycoon and one of my best pals ever. In the 1980s, he was a rising star in pro soccer, and through the classic combination of booze and anger, he got himself kicked out of the league after an incident involving swearing at the coach and referee, removing his shirt, and storming off the field, all on national TV. I could relate. With some perseverance, a little luck, and sobriety, he turned his luck around and is now a partner in an international building and construction company that does everything from shopping malls in Dubai to hotels in Hawaii, the New York Times Building, and all the Topshops, to name a few. I met Garrie at a gig through longtime mutual friend Clem Burke, the rock-solid drummer from the great Blondie. We’ve always stayed very close. I have visited and stayed with him in Glasgow and London, and he’s in LA a lot on business. I talked him into leaving his comfort zone in Knightsbridge, London, SW1, to join me on this crazy adventure. His company also made a very healthy donation to the charity. Garrie and I would share a room and a tent for the next few weeks. I hadn’t shared a room with anyone since Lee and I shared one on the first Cats tour. He hadn’t shared one since his playing days with Dundee United. Garrie was cool, and we didn’t have a problem.
Mike had found the only recording studio in Nepal. We went in and recorded an on-the-fly version of a song Mike had written for the event—a cool little anthem called “Give Me Love Hope and Strength.” The others strummed, and I banged a little, and we all sang the chorus. It’s a very catchy number. The next day, we all were introduced and left from the hotel in buses. Everyone was all loaded up with brand-new, top-of-the-line camping and climbing gear, provided by Nike, North Face, and Marmot. James and Shannon had worked long and hard and had gotten all this gear through sponsorship and endorsements. Mike’s lovely wife, Jules, was along too and was very helpful with everything. I left most of it behind and took only the bare essentials to make my backpack as light as possible. I did bring a top-shelf pair of hiking boots, which I can now say was the most important part of the whole thing. There would be the real stars, the amazing Sherpas, to help with the big items, but each person was responsible for his or her own basics. We were headed to the Kathmandu airport to take shuttle planes to Lukla Airport, from where we would set off on the trek.
At the airport in Kathmandu, there was a ceremony where we were all draped with the local flower necklace and prayer scarf, and everyone had a red thumbprint applied by a local woman. This whole thing reminded me of a Nepalese version of the Hawaiian tourist send-off and greeting. It was the first of five thousand times I would hear “Nah mas te,” the Nepalese version of “Aloha.” For all the similarities, this place was literally ten thousand miles away and five miles higher in the sky than Maui—no beach, either. I would later deduce that this was more of a “good luck landing in Lukla” than a “good luck on Everest” ceremony. Lukla is among the world’s most dangerous airports. There is some technical info about how altitude and air pressure meet the steepness angle of the landing strip, but it’s just plain terrifying. I’m not a bad flier, and I long ago accepted that it’s part of my life, but this one was different. The first giveaway was the duct tape stuck on the wings, and the second was overhearing the story of how Everest conqueror and history’s most famous mountaineer, Sir Edmund Hillary, had lost his wife and daughter in a crash at this airport. This man is officially the first Westerner to summit Everest, and he continued to go back there his whole life, building schools and trying to help the locals. His name is everywhere in Nepal. If this guy couldn’t get a break from the mountain, no one could.
We flew in shifts of about ten at a time, and there was the usual gallows humor from those who were nervous and talked on airplanes. I think Garrie and I just kept quiet. It was truly scary; everyone has been on a bad flight and can relate on some level, and nobody likes turbulence, but this one was magnified by the rickety plane, desolate location, and knowing that you wouldn’t be landing at LAX when it was over.
I can’t fully express how difficult this climb was. Imagine walking straight uphill over loose gravel for twelve hours a day with a pack on your back, while every molecule in your body hurts, you can’t breathe, and every thought you have is telling you to quit. The only real thing preventing you from stopping is the overwhelming but basic knowledge that if you stop, you die. There is nowhere to go but to the next lodge. You must carry on.
We had a memorable standoff with a horse on a rope bridge at about five thousand feet. There wasn’t enough room for both sides to pass, so we were waiting and negotiating while the bridge was swinging, high up over a gorge, with the nerve-racking overriding idea of us being dashed onto the rocks below. I began thinking about how many people and animals had crossed this bridge since it was last repaired. We squeezed past after careful calculation, and I think Garrie got a slight mule kick on the way around.
There were a few professional mountain climbers who were very helpful. Jake Norton is a dashing pro climber who has summited Everest and was a big help in getting me up that mountain and patched up when I had a yak-induced fall into some sharp rocks. His wife, Wende Valentine, works for Water for People, an important charity I’ve done quite a bit of work with in the past. They help local communities build water purification facilities and dig wells. Jake and Wende are both genuine charitable people and a great couple. Alan Hobson is a Canadian cancer survivor turned mountain guide and motivational speaker. He was the biggest help to getting Garrie and me up that hill. We stuck together the whole time, and we owe a debt of gratitude to him.
We stopped at all the lodges and camping grounds along the well-mapped and historic route. The Sherpas were somehow always ahead of us, and when we reached the next stopping points, the tents were already set up. These are the most efficient, skilled high-altitude workers in the world, and without them, none of this would ever happen. One of the stops was at a monument of piled rocks that was in memorial of the Sherpas and climbers who died on this quest. Those guys got quiet, and it was clear that it was a sacred place for them. All along the entire route, there are thousands of colorful prayer scarves tied to just about everything. How I understand it, the idea is to say a prayer for a specific person and tie the scarf around an object, and with this, the memory of any pain is taken over by the mountain and is continually blown away in the wind. I’m unreligious and uncomfortable with all ceremony on most accounts, but this is a positive action, and it makes for a brilliant, moving, multicolored art installation. The locals sell the scarves, and it’s a little cottage industry. I’m all for local economies. It’s a nice thought. Some religions light candles. It’s hard to light a match up there.
We stopped at the highest monastery in the world. The grounds were very stark but impressive. It was carved out of the mountain, with Tibetan mastiff guard dogs roaming everywhere, while acolytes and monks did the daily chores and routines of a monastery in a completely relaxed and chilled way. We met the guy second down from the Dalai Lama and had an audience in his private, dark chambers. A little funny detail is that in his room, he had exercise equipment from the 1950s, complete with Indian clubs, dumbbells, and one of those old-fashioned reducing machines where a belt goes around the waist and a little motor jiggles you to fitness. It looked like a small gymnasium where Jack Dempsey would have trained. I kept thinking of a Three Stooges sketch the whole time I was in there. He seemed like a serious man and would be very helpful with advice and wise words, but I’m sure he didn’t know who we were or what we were doing. I envy the way these guys must be able to tune out and meditate. I’ve never been able to slow my head down long enough to give it a good try; maybe it’s in my New York DNA. If I haven’t done it by now, after this exceptional opportunity, I probably never will.
We started each day with a song. We would all take turns singing and playing every time we stopped. I believe there is a definite healing and unifying quality to music. The trekkers looked forward to the music and seemed to get some strength from it. It’s the best distraction and mood changer ever invented. Personally, watching Glenn Tilbrook shredding on an acoustic version of “Goodbye Girl” with his pants around his ankles at daybreak made setting out on a ten-hour uphill hike almost seem like the right thing to do. A real treat and head changer to see one of the most talented cats I’d ever known to be acting the court jester, lightening everyone’s mood before the brutal yet majestic day of climbing ahead of us. We played around campfires, and when we stopped for lunch on the trails, I had a pair of drumsticks in my backpack, and I played on water bottles, logs, and rocks. It always worked, and I’ve now confirmed that I can do a show on anything. The performance really is in the spirit and soul.
There is a natural, majestic beauty to a mountain, and every now and again someone would point out that the peak of Everest could be seen in the distance. There are plenty of other peaks to astonish on the way up. The air was crisp and thin, and it was hard, but I could manage. Every person’s body reacts to high altitude differently. Some people’s oxygen levels in their blood get low, and they feel more fatigue. I was fortunate my blood produces oxygen nearly the same as at sea level. I was lucky my blood oxygen level never got too low. The footing was very difficult, and it was hard to get into a groove because every step was different and needed to be measured. The whole trek can’t be done without two walking sticks, which become extensions of your body. Sometimes you’d be going on for a few hours and never be able to look up to see the magnificent surroundings and scenery.
We had a great day in Namche Bazaar, an ancient trading post where we shopped for Nepalese trinkets and small gifts. I brought home Nepalese prayer scarves in every color. We met in a local tavern and played an impromptu gig that ended in a conga line around the village where the locals and visiting tourists got an extra treat. We slept in a lodge with actual walls that night. There was a cold-water shower in the room, and Garrie and I dared each other to go in, lather up, rinse, and repeat. We howled so loud during the ice-cold bracer that the other trekkers came out of their rooms to make sure someone wasn’t getting killed by a yeti. We formed an on-the-spot Himalayan polar bear club, anything to keep you going. It was a real luxurious treat. How many memorable cold showers do you have in one lifetime?
A week or so into it, we reached the goal of the base camp. There were a few international expeditions waiting for the all clear to do the summit. To summit requires a different skill set and equipment needs. We had done the extreme hiking trek to base camp, but some other crazies were going to climb the peak. Our own form of insanity was the other part of the mission, to play and record the world’s highest gig and get into the Guinness Book of World Records. So we took a little rest at base camp and then headed up one thousand feet more, straight up the side of the mountain to Kalapathar. My memory is that it was a ledge sticking out of the side of the steeper mountainside and that we somehow got some guitars, thirty fans, and a drum kit up there and played a few songs. It was very cold and windy; the gusts chilled you to the bone and knocked over the snare drum stand. The whole trek was filmed by a cool young pro cameraman named Stash Slionski, who was, in true small-world fashion, from Massapequa. His uncle had seen the Cats play in bars back on Long Island. He did the same trek as we did, but he did it walking backward to film us. He’s a good guy, and we’re close friends now. CNN International had a satellite flying over, and ten seconds of it went out on the air, live. We were playing “Rock This Town” when it went on the airwaves.
We climbed back down to base camp afterward. We had done the highest-altitude rock show in history. Some wiseasses did a gig in an airplane a year later and technically overtook us, but I personally don’t count it. We did it for real with no loopholes.
The whole week, Garrie and I had been planning a side adventure and an easier way back down the mountain. We had heard a rumor that there was a helicopter service that went from base camp all the way back to Kathmandu. One of the Sherpas was a real fixer. There is one of these guys in every community and walk of life, and I can usually find them. If you wanted to buy a Cadillac or score a little weed in Nepal, this would be the guy who could hook it up for you. We had been asking him the whole time we were climbing about the rumored helicopter. After the trek up, the achievement of the gig and conquest of the hardest part of the trip, the idea of going back down through the same yak muck for three days was unappealing and anticlimactic. We were sitting around a picnic table in the big tent back at base camp when the fixer told us it was possible to get a helicopter back to Kathmandu the next morning, in a small village about four hours’ walk from base camp. We would need to set out at dawn and be prepared to give the pilot $1,500 that could be charged on Visa. Miraculously, I had my wallet in my backpack. We agreed, and it was set.
At that point, we got a new player on the team. A woman, a friend of Chippendale’s from the Dallas contingent who was on the trek the whole time and we had seen but had not gotten to know that well, approached us and said she couldn’t help but overhear us and that if we’re doing the copter ride, she was in for one-third. This true gal pal was Rini Andres, and I think of her now like a sister. Rini is a successful businesswoman in her hometown of Dallas, a mother, wife, and all-around cool person. The next morning at dawn, the three of us set off to meet a helicopter in an unknown village with a Sherpa guide leading the way.
After four or five hours of moderately hard walking, we arrived on the outskirts of a tiny village with an adjacent field that, we were told, was used as a landing space for choppers. The guide left us, and we were standing around in a dirt field talking to some local kids, sharing the last of our granola bars with them. There was a certain amount of faith involved here, because if the helicopter didn’t turn up, we really had nowhere to go and no gear to even camp out with. Another one of those “How did I get here? Why did I agree to this?” moments was upon me.
We waited for a couple of hours, really doing nothing in the middle of nowhere. With no warning and out of nowhere, a brightly painted, shiny orange-and-blue military-looking Russian-made medevac helicopter appeared and landed in front of us with a great roar of the rotors, creating a huge dust cloud. We threw our little bags into the back and climbed in.
The crew inside of the helicopter consisted of a big military-looking pilot, a local-looking Nepalese woman as copilot, and an average-looking guy, who I would later learn was a medic, sitting in a jump seat behind them with a doctor’s bag open and ready on the floor in front of him. All were wearing headsets and were very focused. The rest of the large interior was empty, and I figured it was originally built to transport tanks and that a private company had bought the old Soviet-era military helicopter and retooled it for a service for injured climbers. They didn’t know why they were stopping here and looked a bit relieved when they saw it wasn’t a medical rescue emergency situation.
We had a breathtaking ride through the mountains. The pilot was really driving, and it was in no way a walk in the park for him. It seemed like we were very near to the sides of the mountains a few times, and I could see the powdery snow being blown off the cliffs when we got close. The whole ride took an hour or so, and the relief of not having had to slog back down the mountain was intense. We were three happy campers. A taxi into town found us back in the comfort of Hotel Yak & Yeti.
The first hot shower and shave in two weeks was a relief and a treat. A soft bed was welcome, too. We had a good nap, and when we woke up, we went for a stroll around the neighborhood around the hotel. There’s a big U.S. embassy and the palace grounds, but it’s surrounded by squalor. We found a place to eat pizza and went back to the hotel. We had been living on power bars, bananas, and cooled-down boiled water for two weeks. Many of the trekkers had gotten sick, but Garrie and I didn’t eat the local fare and toughed it out with near starvation. Maybe it all hit us at once, but that night we were both violently ill. I was worse—this was a time when sharing a room was uncomfortable. It was the sickest I’ve ever been, and I asked Garrie to call the fixer guy, get a gun, and shoot me. I spent two full days either on the bathroom floor or in bed, in a fevered daze. We finally called the hotel desk and asked for a doctor.
An hour later, a young guy in a tracksuit knocked on the door. The doctor was a local guy who had trained in England and returned to his hometown to help the locals. He rode a scooter all over town and treated the poor. He had a little black bag and a lot of knowledge. I trusted him right away. I had no choice. He gave us a couple of injections and charged twenty-six dollars. He must have had the right stuff, because we both got much better by the next day.
The others returned three days later, and by then, I was in tip-top shape. We had a visit to the cancer ward of the Kathmandu hospital. The money we raised on the trek through donations had been used to purchase the first mammography and internal radiation machines in the country. There was a ceremony where we met the doctors and the mayor. We then went to Durbar Square in the middle of the city, where the police held up the traffic in the city’s biggest square while we played a thirty-minute concert on a ramshackle makeshift stage. This kind of thing may happen all the time in LA or London, but in Kathmandu, it’s a major, unique event.
We were there for one more day, and I still had a small personal itch that hadn’t been scratched. James, Stash, and I went to the very local and underfunded Kanti Children’s Hospital for a visit. This place is a haven of hope that everyone should see once in their lives before the next time you complain about not having a good parking spot or having to wait in line at the supermarket. A whole small neighborhood has sprung up in the parking lot and surrounding area of the hospital. The parents and siblings of the sick children move to be near them and visit every day. Many of them are from the countryside and cannot go back and forth to the city every day. They take jobs that allow them to stay near the hospital and some have market stalls in the parking lot that cater to other families of the sick kids. No child is abandoned by his or her family, and the whole gang comes every day to visit the sick one. We did a tour of the hospital, and it affected me like nothing else ever has. The conditions were appalling, and although the doctors, nurses, and staff are trying very hard, the poverty of the whole country pervades everywhere. They didn’t have enough paper towels or soap for the doctors to wash their hands as often as they wanted. Dirt showed through part of the floor, and they couldn’t keep the electricity on all the time. Still, the kids had positive energy and were thrilled when we brought some simple coloring books and small toys to the ward where the sickest kids were undergoing chemotherapy. I gave them some of my T-shirts. We had a good cry in the lobby and organized some steady shipments of basic stuff by encouraging our friends to go to a bulk store and send the stuff to the hospital. It’s harder to organize this than you’d expect, and I hope it’s still going on to some extent. I know it was happening for a while, because we were getting pictures sent to us. It fulfilled my own need to see things up close, to make a small, relatable personal difference, and to give one toy to one kid, as the whole concept of a radiation machine is way over my head.
I came back to LA and had a strong gratitude vibe going for a while. I made a bond with the new people who were on this trek and reinforced an existing bond with a few of the others. I was happy I did it but said I’d never do something like it again. This was true for two years until I got another call from Mike, James, and Shannon saying we were doing Kilimanjaro, the highest peak in Africa. All of this over again, with rhinos and giraffes, too? Sign me up for another adventure.