During the summer of 1973, while I was living in Terry Ork’s loft, I was doing what I had been doing for many years. I was playing electric guitar during the day, and going out to bars, nightspots and taverns at night, seeing bands, drinking and trying to have sex with every woman on the planet.
When I practiced playing my electric guitar I never used an amplifier, thinking that would only mask any faulty playing and make me more self-conscious in the negative sense—more people would get to hear how crappy I was at the time. I have never thought that I was blessed with instantaneous talent. This has been a very good thing because it keeps me hungry and desperate. I have rubbed noses with many of the greatest guitar players on the planet. Part of my guitar practice involved imagining that inspectors were listening to me practice and pointing out how weak my playing really was.
Anytime I’m in the studio recording electric guitar, I imagine that several amazing players are there and they are commenting. I don’t care about what anybody else thinks, but I am looking to impress my invisible friends—those guitar players with whom I wish to be a peer. I don’t go in for hero worship and I am guru proof, but this meant that some of my recorded solos such as those on Marquee Moon like “Elevation” and “See No Evil” are melodically perfect, and cannot be faulted by Jimmy Page, Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck or anyone else for that matter. Those solos were constructed under the direct imaginary criticism of those personages and for all my self-deprecation, low self-esteem and perfectionism, those solos meet the criteria. That’s why I often played them live exactly as they were recorded because they had been honed to the point that they could not be improved upon. I will often start a solo the same way and go in a different direction or try something new altogether, but they are classic in the sense that all the solos that I’ve loved over the years are classic—they are melodic, they contain dynamics, they use the entire fretboard intelligently, they do not fritter away notes, and they avoid that very tiresome and well-known riff of endless triplets that has the nickname “look at me, look at me, look at me.”
While I was living at Terry’s house, I needed money badly. I usually woke up between 2 and 4 PM, got something to eat from the refrigerator, and started practicing my guitar. I kept this up until Terry came home from his day job. Then we would figure out dinner and plans for the night which usually included going to Max’s back room, where all the fabulous people were.
At some point I decided to “get a job.” I needed my own money and was sick of living off handouts. Since I didn’t have any diplomas and didn’t want to do anything that would shackle me to a career, I decided to become a restaurant worker. I didn’t want to be a waiter because I didn’t want anyone to see me working, and I couldn’t cook at the time, so I decided to become a dish washer. A friend of mine got me a job at an expensive French restaurant in the West Village. It was a place with only about 12 tables and a fancy menu including a lot of broiled fish and cheese dishes and au gratin. A lot of the dishes were baked on metal plates and they did not have a dishwasher because they did not want the noise to be heard by the romantic and fantastic clientele who ate overpriced meals and drank overpriced vintage wines in long stemmed glasses with rims as thin as the end of a razor blade. It’s a wonder the patrons didn’t cut themselves on the edge of the glasses.
I was stationed in front of the deep double sink in the kitchen. The dishes and plates and metal baking dishes were brought to me and placed in a file for me to wash, alongside racks filled with dirty wine glasses. The customers ate by candlelight, which meant wine glasses that looked clean after being washed by hand in the kitchen under fluorescent lighting would show fingerprints and smudges when placed on the candlelit table. If even one glass out of twelve showed a fingerprint the waiter would bring them all back to me to be re-washed. This drove me crazy. And fish and cheese baked on a metal plate acts like crazy glue. No amount of elbow grease could get them clean in a short amount of time. They needed to be cleaned and soaked in boiling water and cleaned again and soaked and cleaned again. All the while the owner would come in the kitchen screaming at me to hurry up and hurling epithets like, “What the fuck is the matter with you? I need those dishes. I need those dishes now! And how come you can’t clean no sparkling wine glasses. I’m going to make you clean them all night long until I don’t see a single smudge you motherfucking asshole.” For this I was being paid five dollars a night!
I lasted two weeks, and one night when it got particularly rough, I quit on the spot.
“You can’t quit on me!” the owner said.
“Oh yes I can—you pay me by the day so I don’t have to give you any notice.”
“I am not paying for you tonight.”
“NO! You will never be able to get another sucker to do this job for the amount of money you pay me and with the way you abuse people. You should wash the fucking dishes yourself—after all you are the owner!”
“But I’ll give you a raise. I will give you $10 a night. How about that?”
“It is worth a lot more than $10 for me to leave you stranded, after the way you mistreated me, it serves you right. Do the damn dishes yourself!”
I threw down my apron, pushed him aside and walked out into the cool air. Man I felt great! There was all that abuse while I had humbled myself for weeks, and I hadn’t said boo to him the entire time. I had suffered and thought that it was a good experience to be an employee and slave, but I had finally had enough and I picked my moment perfectly. I could hear all of his customers calling for his attention as I walked out, “Where’s my food? Where is that wine I ordered?” “The service here sucks.” Man, those were some sweet words.
I still needed money so I got another job washing dishes at a coffee shop. It was open 24 hours a day and I was put on the day shift. They had an automatic dishwasher and the pay was better. They had me do some bussing, but I never saw anyone I knew, so it didn’t bother me too much. Mostly I hid in the back. After a month they decided to put me on the night shift. Right away I knew my days there were numbered. I decided right then that I was not going to let work interfere with my partying—that would’ve been nonsense, because my partying was a component of my long-term goal which was to direct my fate toward my ultimate destiny—to make records and join the pantheon of the world’s great guitar players.
Hanging out at Max’s was certainly more in line with my interests than washing dishes in a coffee shop. Was I going to climb the corporate ladder at the coffee shop? Was my fate to be a waiter or restaurant owner or manager? No way. So, after a couple of days I quit. They couldn’t understand it when I told them that I was quitting because I would rather waste my life away in an alcoholic stupor than wash dishes. They didn’t understand it when I explained that the night shift was keeping me from hanging out with artists, musicians and transsexuals. I don’t think they would have ever understood. I just have a different way of thinking than most people. I’m not ashamed of it. Life is just a testing ground anyway. I went back to my life of almost indigent poverty. At least I had a place to lie down and live that was pretty stable, where my one suitcase and one guitar were safe while I roamed the streets looking for trouble.