I am here to tell you that, among his many other talents, David Bowie is very good at party games. I happened to be seated next to him at a gala event a few years ago, and unsurprisingly he was terrific company, giving everyone at the table five chances to name the bizarre instrumental arrangements of ’80s hits that were being played by a small combo, below the buzz of dinner conversation.
If the band had known the delight he took in counting us out as we failed, they might have thought better of their thankless task that night. He could name every tune.
Eventually, David leaned in to me conspiratorially and said, in his best David Bowie voice, “Do you remember? 1978? We were the only people having lunch in an Indian restaurant overlooking Central Park.”
“Yes,” I confirmed, but was actually astounded that he recalled the occasion. “It was Nirvana,” I said. “Amazing view. You were sitting in the window with a girl.”
“That’s right,” said David, a little naughtiness now creeping into his tone. “We were both entertaining young ladies.” He paused before ending with a flourish. “And acting far too cool to speak to one another.”
Then we both broke up laughing at the ridiculous memory.
The one thing that this encounter with David Bowie didn’t demand was an embarrassing speech about all the late hours and long miles that The Attractions and I had spent listening to that handful of astonishing records Bowie recorded in Berlin with Brian Eno and Iggy Pop, while we made our way across America for the first time.
They pretty much kept us sane.
It was not going to be easy to take the country by storm with just the four of us, plus our tour manager, jammed into a rented station wagon. We took turns riding shotgun, as that way you got to control the FM radio, though it seemed to have been preset to only play different parts of “Stairway to Heaven.”
Just as the epic track was staggering to a close, you’d flip the station to find some treacle-voiced disc jockey announcing the track again, as if it were a total surprise.
At other times, all of the stations seemed to be spinning either Linda Ronstadt’s “Blue Bayou” or The Eagles’ “New Kid in Town” at exactly the same time. Perhaps this was why they called them “frequencies.”
We were driving overnight from Atlanta to St. Louis. We had performed first on a double bill with the Talking Heads, and even with both bands on offer, we had failed to fill the Capri Theatre. Hitting the road before the Heads even hit “Psycho Killer,” we made it to Tennessee just as we got thirsty.
It was Sunday night and I hadn’t encountered the concept of a “dry county” before, so we drove up and down the same twenty-mile stretch of highway, trying to locate the county line and an open liquor store.
I couldn’t imagine how anyone had managed to write so many great drinking songs in such an unnatural place. Eventually, we cut off the interstate into the rough edge of Nashville and found a joint that was just about to close up.
The barman didn’t exactly have a welcome mat out for us. The place was only licensed to sell beer, and then with some reluctance, as if the barman was saving the last bottle to give to his grandmother.
A sign behind the counter said ANYONE FOUND DRINKING WHISKEY WILL BE BARRED.
It was not hard to imagine that this might mean a swift blow to the head with an iron bar.
We took our purchases and skedaddled.
The weather closed in as we drove on, drinking weak brew from a brown paper bag. The jokes ran out and I fell into a fitful sleep, only broken by the jolt on the highway that cracked my temple back against the cold window. It was still dark and the road was rolling under us. Our tour manager was chewing gum with his eyes pinned open, staring down the white line. I loaded the second side of Bowie’s Low into the cassette deck.
Those ominous Berlin synthesizer sounds were probably never imagined as a soundtrack for a dawning stretch of highway on the Tennessee–Kentucky border, but they seemed perfect for my alien mood.
The music ended as dull dawn light revealed a hard frost. I flipped out the cassette and an AM station came on at twice the volume. Snow was only flurrying on the windscreen but the announcer was listing school closures on the higher ground. The litany of parishes and counties continued until I jolted everyone awake with “Joe the Lion” from Heroes, and then we listened to The Idiot by Iggy Pop.
As the disguise of night peeled away, we ran into the morning traffic heading for downtown St. Louis. It was time to change the scene.
One of us accidentally cued up “When I Kissed the Teacher” from ABBA’s Arrival, just as a yellow bus of teenage schoolgirls rolled by on the inside lane. We pulled sinister goon faces at them just like John Lennon in A Hard Day’s Night, but they probably didn’t get the quotation and just thought we were perverts.
Arriving at our Holiday Inn, we staggered into a coffee shop for stewed brew and cardboard toast before falling asleep in our clothes.
I awoke in the afternoon with a trembling, lip-glossed soap opera actress looking tearfully down at me from a television set playing at full volume.
• • •
THE ATTRACTIONS had only taken two rounds of the English circuit to become a band to beat all comers. We got pretty cocky about it, too, dismissing most of the other new groups as containing at least one member who simply looked stylish holding his instrument.
We’d honed this competitive edge when we alternated as the headline act of the “Live Stiffs” package tour with Ian Dury and the Blockheads, after a disastrous attempt to have all four bands rotate in that role. This meant that we either had to follow Ian or try to upstage him. Most of the time, Ian took the decision on points. He was charismatic, sometimes malevolent, and most important, funny, all qualities that I lacked.
Ian had also written by far the best song released on Stiff Records. It was produced by Dave Edmunds and performed by music hall comedian and Samuel Beckett actor Max Wall, and called “England’s Glory,” a catalog of beloved and reviled institutions from a chocolate confectionery to the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Anyone who could rhyme “walnut whips” with “Stafford Cripps” had my undying admiration.
The Blockheads were a ferocious band. Although Chaz Jankel’s music was a kind of jazz-funk fusion that didn’t really appeal to me, it was the perfect vehicle for carrying Ian’s lyrics to willing ears.
I’d wait every night for the very beautiful slow opening melody of “Sweet Gene Vincent,” which Ian would sing so tenderly.
Skinny white sailor, the chances were slender
The beauties were brief
Shall I mourn your decline with some Thunderbird wine
And a black handkerchief?
What followed was another of Ian’s dazzling catalog songs although the music always seemed like a slightly condescending facsimile of rock and roll, coming from a band so highly polished.
I sat on the charabanc on which the Stiff troupe rattled from Aberystwyth to Croydon, scribbling a song called “Sunday’s Best” in imitation of Ian’s catalog style. Every other line was cut from front-page xenophobia or imagined someone casting a prurient eye over the small ads on the backside of the same newspaper.
“Sunday’s Best” lyrics were set to a music hall waltz, and it was about the last song that I wrote from a purely English perspective for a very long time. It opened with this:
Times are tough for English babies
Send the army and the navy
Beat up strangers who talk funny
Take their greasy foreign money
Skin shop, red leather, hotline
Be prepared for the “Engaged” sign
Bridal books, engagement rings
And other wicked little things
Punk poet laureate John Cooper Clarke would say that much better, in his verse from “Readers’ Wives”:
Make a date with the brassy brides of Britain
The altogether ruder readers’ wives
Who put down their needles and their knitting
At the doorway to our dismal daily lives
The Fablon top scenarios of passion
Nipples peep through holes in leatherette
They seem to be saying in their fashion
“I’m freezing Charlie—haven’t ya finished yet?”
That’s about how swinging and sexy England felt around that time. Meanwhile, “Sunday’s Best” continued:
Don’t look now under the bed
An arm, a leg, and a severed head
Read about the private lives
The songs of praise, the readers’ wives
Listen to the decent people
Though you treat them just like sheep
Put them all in boots and khaki
Blame it all upon the darkies
Two years later, that last line would be quoted back to me smugly by an indignant journalist, convinced that it was conclusive proof that I had always been a bigot. Sadly, those people had not been around when skinheads were trying to beat up my mates in Hounslow.
Let’s not get too self-righteous about this.
When we first arrived in America, I was not seeking the moral high ground. I was looking to get into all sorts of exciting new trouble. First we had to get there, which meant my first long-haul plane ride. The budget was tight, so we didn’t exactly arrive in style.
We were in the third or fourth hour of flight, heading for our Los Angeles connection to San Francisco, when promoter Harvey Goldsmith ambled back from First Class to banter with us. He had just booked us for our first uneasy open-air performance at the Crystal Palace Bowl, sandwiched between Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes and Santana.
Smoking on planes was still allowed back then, so my memory is that Harvey was holding a cigar, but it might have been a small balloon of brandy. Neither thing was on offer in our cramped economy seats. For all I knew of what went on beyond the First Class curtain, Harvey might have just come from being rubbed all over with fragrant oils by a beautiful attendant, but I was such a wretched flyer back then that I consoled myself with the thought that I didn’t really care to sit up front, as that part of the cabin would probably hit the ground first when the plane went down.
By early evening, we had checked into the unimaginable luxury of a Howard Johnson’s in Mill Valley. Our English hotels of that time typically featured narrow bunks with scratchy nylon sheets, a television down in the “residents’ lounge,” and a freezing trip down the threadbare carpet to a shared toilet at the end of a dingy corridor.
These rooms were fitted with hot and cold running water, king-size beds, and a color television that offered more than three channels, even if they only ran noisy, almost transparent prints of old gangster films in the early hours.
Despite traveling for something like twenty hours, I was ready as anybody can be to explore America after dark. I stumbled first into a bar in Sausalito in the company of Pete Thomas, who wanted to show me the old haunts from his time as a Marin County resident.
Dan Hicks was hosting an open-mic night in an irascible fashion and was clearly not rehearsing for Temperance Hall. He had written a dozen or more songs that I loved, including his tune “I Scare Myself,” which I was leaning into at that time. However, this was not the way I wanted to see or hear Dan, so I called a cab and headed out alone.
It was late in the evening when I rode back over the Golden Gate Bridge. We were no sooner rolling down the streets of San Francisco than I called the cab to a screaming halt.
I couldn’t believe my eyes.
It was 11:45 p.m.
There was a record shop.
It was open.
As Chuck Berry said, “Everything you want, they got it right here in the U.S.A.”
I ran inside and picked up what looked like a music paper from a stack by the door.
I said, “How much is this?”
“It’s free,” came the reply.
“It gets better,” I thought.
I found a listing for the club at which we were going to make our American debut and discovered that Iggy Pop was performing that night. I got there in time for most of the second set and heard Iggy play “Funtime” and “The Passenger.” He was wound within a small wooden chair for a lot of the show, like some strange amalgamation of Marlene Dietrich and Harry Houdini.
I was so taken with the performance that I probably would have spent the whole tour hurling myself facedown on the stage if I hadn’t been holding a guitar.
When the show was over, the management of the club hustled me backstage, and Iggy put his arm around my shoulder and spoke to me like a real gentleman, perhaps sensing that I was still something of an innocent, newly abroad.
When it came our turn to perform, we got a taste of the welcome that would accompany most of our early appearances: some real enthusiasm mixed with a lot of skepticism and a fair deal of hostility. Sometimes you got the feeling that people just thought this was how you should act in the face of this music.
I think it was during one of the late sets at the Old Waldorf that I ran out over the tables that were jammed up to the stage, scattering drinks and drunks and curiosity seekers alike; a move that you can only pull off when you are completely smashed.
We christened Steven Nason “Steve Nieve” that night, after he responded to advice against consorting with a rather predatory-looking young lady with the rather too innocent inquiry “What’s a groupie?”
Most of the musical cues of our arrangements were clearly sketched out in my writing, but the songs really came to life because The Attractions chose to play just the right thing at the right time.
I can’t explain it better than this, as there was barely a word spoken between us, apart from “Don’t play that, play this.”
You don’t really need musical notation for rock and roll. I always said it was all hand signals and threats, I just didn’t specify who was doing the threatening.
When it came to the big song and dance that people now make about their “influences,” I was good at covering my tracks and would deny everything, but then, The Attractions and I could only agree on a handful of records.
When Pete Thomas had been a young teenager, he’d discovered he lived in the same town as the drummer from The Jimi Hendrix Experience, and spent so much time walking past his house accidentally on purpose that a roadie invited the lad in. Mitch Mitchell was reportedly dressed in a sunflower-yellow satin blouse and matching velvet flares and sitting in a room with two drum kits and all the Experience’s amplifiers. He poured young Pete his first vodka and orange and played him an Elvin Jones record.
I’d say he’s never been the same since.
Pete and I were the ones in the band who liked The Rolling Stones, but I wasn’t about to steal any ideas from their albums after Aftermath and Between the Buttons. One day I hoped to write something as good as “Play with Fire,” or what I used to call one of their “I’ve got a posh girlfriend” songs.
Bruce Thomas didn’t care much for the Stones, but loved the funky psychedelic group Spirit, and had obviously done his homework on the playing of Paul McCartney and James Jamerson.
All three of us thought “Tin Soldier” by The Small Faces was a masterpiece.
Steve Nieve hadn’t heard any of these records and claimed to like only T. Rex and Alice Cooper. I think we were working on our third album, Armed Forces, when Steve said to me, “Have you heard this record called A Hard Day’s Night?” I thought he was putting me on, but he had really never listened to that album by The Beatles until that year.
I came home from that first U.S. tour with half a suitcase full of classic, secondhand records, many of them bought at Village Music in Mill Valley, a greatly renowned store owned by my friend John Goddard. That emporium would do more to advance my musical education over the next ten years than any college could have done.
Daytime was then just the few inconvenient hours between nightclubs, but what few waking minutes were not spent traveling were usually spent hunting through cutout record bins for that elusive Question Mark and the Mysterians album or looking for thrift-store threads that had us show up onstage some nights looking like a mutant marching band. I did thirty years of listening in the first nine months of visiting America, picking up entire albums for pennies by soul singers, garage bands, and country artists who I had previously only known from one track on an English compilation record.
We already had about a third of This Year’s Model in the can when we arrived in America, but I was looking for the last pieces of that puzzle. So, on my second night in San Francisco, I bought the dark green Gretsch Country Club guitar that I would use for the intro of “This Year’s Girl” upon our return to England.
The guitar was as heavy as an anvil and as strong as a lifeboat. Twenty-five years later, when it was caught in a freak flood of canal water in Dublin, the Gretsch floated to the surface, and after I’d removed the stench of sewer rat, it lived to twang again. The red Rickenbacker that I’d purchased on the same day was crushed like matchwood.
I took an instant and irrational dislike to Los Angeles. This was a town where nobody seemed to walk. Not being able to drive then, I spent my first few hours sulking in my room at the Tropicana Motel. When I finally ventured out, I discovered the Tropicana’s most famous resident, Tom Waits, reclining in a chair in the registration office with his hat pulled down over his eyes.
Things were looking up.
All the best people slept here.
Tom stirred and we were introduced and we stood there shuffling from foot to foot, looking at our shoes. The few words that passed between us made him a friend whose call I would gladly take in the middle of the night and whose ability to dance out of painted corners remains an inspiration to us all.
By the end of my stay, I felt a little easier about Hollywood and all the lies it told.
Somebody had persuaded me that the Tropicana was the site of Sam Cooke’s murder. Now, this was completely wrong, but this was in the years before such details could be easily verified by consulting your pocket oracle.
So I lay awake that night in fear of ghosts, listening to low moans from the next room, sirens in the distance, and what I convinced myself was “Cupid” coming out of the air-conditioning unit under the window. All I got out of that night was the line “Somewhere in the distance I can hear ‘Who Shot Sam?’” which referenced both this episode and a George Jones song of the same title.
It would sit in my notebook for the next three years, until it was time to write “Motel Matches,” which concludes with the refrain about another kind of lie.
Falling for you without a second look
Falling out of your open pocketbook
Giving you away like motel matches
Our Hollywood debut was at the famous Whisky a Go Go on Sunset Strip, a venue that had been at the center of one scene and was now trying to make another.
To say the least, the scene was curious. In Waits’s memorable phrase, it was “all Halloween orange and chimney red,” and that was just the boys. Some young people had made spectacularly misguided attempts to emulate the London and New York punk style in ghastly makeup and bin-liner dresses, but the crowd also contained a fair smattering of leather-skinned industry types in neatly pressed denim.
Years later, Martin Scorsese told me that he and Robbie Robertson were at the bar that night observing this spectacle, something that might have paralyzed me with nerves if I had known it at the time.
I was still hoping that the fidgety music we were making would one day have the mystery that I had long pondered on records by The Band, and while the “mean streets” of Twickenham were a world away from what I’d seen in the Scorsese film of that name, Catholic guilt was a second language to me by now.
By the second set, people had quit pretending to ignore us, but just as the place began to liven up, some boorish, drunken English bloke forced himself into the center of the crowd, his hands roaming uninvited over a girl who was pressed up against the front of the stage.
Ever the gallant, I smashed a bottle that someone had conveniently left between my vocal monitors and made some kind of offer with the jagged end that I never really saw myself following up. Mercifully, the lout was hustled out of the premises before anybody’s blood was spilt.
I woke up the next day in a boudoir full of lace and ribbons with the scent of tuberose on the linens. A girl brought me very pale coffee, the color of her complexion, anything to steady my pale and trembling hand. I’d never been anyone’s trophy before, but I suppose I had served my purpose by leaving on her arm. Whatever happened after that was nothing to write home about. A few lies and evasions later, she pushed me out the door into the West Hollywood morning.
I walked down to the International House of Pancakes for something more robust for breakfast and then went to play pool and drink beer into the afternoon at Barney’s Beanery. You had to make your own fun in those days.
Three nights later, we found ourselves playing to a sparse crowd in a New Orleans club. They were wading in a foot of water due to a burst pipe in the wall. It was fortunate that we didn’t all disappear in a blue flash.
Our hotel rooms in the French Quarter had doors that had been kicked in more times than they had been locked. The carpet in the hallway was stained and tacky, like someone might have bled his or her way home after a knife fight.
Outside on Bourbon Street, we joined the gullible tourists drinking hurricanes in the open air, and paid a $10 cover charge to hear Clarence “Frogman” Henry sing two songs before they turned the house over and you found yourself back out on the street.
We rode in that station wagon all the way from Atlanta, Georgia, to Madison, Wisconsin, playing that same forty-five-minute dash through half of the songs from My Aim Is True and most of what would become This Year’s Model.
On a good night we could get that down to a mad thirty-five-minute sprint, especially when we had to play two sets in one night. On several nights, I didn’t even want to slow the pace to perform “Alison.”
I had quite a lot of odd ideas back then, and one of them was that we should not play our only ballad and what was already our best-known tune in America. I actually thought that playing “Alison” every night was making it too easy for people to like us.
So when Columbia Records wanted to sweeten the track to get it over to a mainstream audience, we dubbed on a string synth that had all the charm and warmth of someone playing along with the record on a musical saw with rusty teeth.
As we traveled from state to state and town to town, I discovered the true distance between the mythic America that I’d learned about from records and films and the truth. I was disappointed when the highway swerved away from a sign for far-distant Detroit, as nobody was prepared to book us there. I’d convinced myself that I’d still find The Supremes and The Temptations singing “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me,” a song that was playing while I was pining for a girl on a ship to Malta in ’68.
When we arrived at Bunky’s in Madison, Rick Nielsen was there to greet us and make an evangelical announcement to ease us over with his hometown crowd.
Cheap Trick would become the missing piece in our private hit parade, the one that nobody really suspected. I wrote a song called “Clean Money” that was a direct imitation of their style, and for a long time imagined it would be the opening song on our next record. That is, the record after the one we almost had in the bag. Or at least, that was the plan at the time.
I would fill notebooks full of song titles and album sequences that I was planning. The recording of “Clean Money” would end up on a B-side, but many of the lyrics found their way into “Love for Tender,” the opening track of Get Happy, an album that was still three years in the future.
The next morning, I was staring out over the still mirror of a lake, next to the Edgewater Hotel, thinking about how Otis Redding met his end in a plane crash and swearing never to go up in one of those contraptions again.
The server must have seen me looking glum or overheard something I had said, because he corrected me. “No, that’s Lake Mendota, you’re looking for Lake Monona. It’s over there,” he said, gesturing past the bacon and waffles.
We’d unveiled almost every song that would be on This Year’s Model by the time we reached America. All I had up my sleeve for our opening show in San Francisco was a reworked version of a song written well before My Aim Is True.
It was called “Living in Paradise.”
Fortunately, everything in America seemed strange and fascinating. Every bizarre shop sign or advertising slogan, each overheard remark, snatch of television dialogue, seductive word, or glance found its way into my notebook.
I was looking to get into trouble.
I was thinking a record or two ahead.
I’d already written one song in praise of the art deco splendor of the Hoover Factory. Now I took note of the name of another such building, called the Quisling Clinic.
My manager, Jake, had taken to quoting a Martin Mull quip that “writing about music was like dancing about architecture.” It was repeated so much among our company that it was eventually attributed to me. I was more interested in writing music about architecture and would leave the dancing to the experts.
In my mind, the name “Quisling” had only ever been associated with the Norwegian fascist collaborator from the Second World War. Attaching it to the word “Clinic” conjured up some kind of Boys from Brazil nightmare. The name went into my notebook to emerge as a detail in “Green Shirt,” a paranoid song that I wrote the following year about the simplification of seductive signals, the bedroom eyes that lead to tyranny.
I didn’t find it too hard to let my imagination go in that direction. The National Front were making their fanatical, bigoted appeals in England, and as ludicrous as their leaders seemed to be, they held sway over a certain kind of mind.
My first song to be released on a piece of plastic was written about their direct ancestor, Oswald Mosley, after seeing the old British Union of Fascists leader from the ’30s being interviewed late one night on the BBC.
He was revoltingly unrepentant. I didn’t want to see him debated. I wanted to see him defamed.
To this day, the Daily Mail persists with small-minded, prurient, xenophobic content to titillate and stoke the indignation of the impotent suburban petty fascist, but back in the 1930s it was even more overt in its sympathies. One headline proclaimed, “Hurrah for the Blackshirts,” and the Daily Mail sang Mosley’s praises as much as it had promoted the case for Hitler.
The appeaser and press baron Lord Rothermere owned both the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror as mouthpieces for his unpleasant views, but neither went as far as the viscount did in sending a telegram of congratulations to “Adolf the Great” upon his invasion of the Sudetenland.
As a young lad, I’d read stories of the upper-class twittery of Bertie Wooster by P. G. Wodehouse, and later realized that Roderick Spode and his Blackshorts was not a comic fantasy but a jab at Oswald Mosley, so it was shocking to find that the author was later regarded as a collaborator or even a traitor for making ill-advised broadcasts from Germany while interned by the Nazis.
But then, it seems those years were as full of quaint English eccentricity as English fanaticism. The Sunday Pictorial went so far as to report on a beauty contest to find Britain’s prettiest woman fascist, that I suppose combined the two.
However, when Mosley had tried to preach his poison in Liverpool in 1937, he got knocked cold by a stone hurled from the crowd. There is a picture of the would-be dictator at Walton Hospital, his head bloodied and bound, but still handsome in the manner of a cad in a cheap drama.
My song was a mere smudge on his memory.
It was a fantasy played out with paper puppets of his sister-in-law, Unity—not his “sister,” as the song actually says—who was an idolater of Hitler and allegedly a plaything of Goebbels. But that’s the way they played with the truth. What was to be done with such people, other than to put them in cages and poke them with sticks?
I’m not sure that anyone in Cleveland has ever heard of Oswald Mosley or gave a damn about him when we played “Less Than Zero” that night. It was just some rock and roll music with a fashionable-sounding title.
We were sharing the bill with a grumpy ex-cop called Eddie Money. His records had as much to do with well-established rockers like Bob Seger as with Richard Hell and the Voidoids.
Someone had stuck him in a skinny tie and leather jacket, and Columbia Records was backing a two-horse race of their artists by promoting the show at $1.99 a ticket. They didn’t much care which of us came in last.
The poster for the gig at the Agora in Cleveland read ELVIS & EDDIE, like we were a vaudeville turn. They had pasted together two separate publicity shots to suggest that we actually knew each other, and colored it in with crayon, giving us both the appearance of wearing lipstick. It was a look that I hadn’t much considered since leaving my job working a computer at Elizabeth Arden, or “The Vanity Factory,” as I’d referred to it in “I’m Not Angry.”
I can’t say Eddie was very happy about it, either. In fact, he was seething.
We did a couple of those gigs with Mr. Money and always offered to perform first rather than flipping a coin to decide, even though our name came first on the billing. Our attitude was getting increasingly arrogant, along the lines of “Go ahead, you follow us. See what happens next.”
That said, we hadn’t taken that line in Atlanta when sharing a bill with the Talking Heads, and actually thought that they should close the show, just as I’d had no illusions about upstaging Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers at the compact Riviera Theatre in Chicago.
It was the opening riff of Petty’s “American Girl” that had triggered the guitar line in “Lipstick Vogue” as much as hearing The Byrds’ song “I See You,” although I’m not sure I would have admitted as much at the time.
We were in the homestretch now, playing a handful of shows in places that I couldn’t even pronounce or anywhere that would extend a welcome or at least not throw anything too sharp or heavy. At the Hot Club in Philly, I disappeared off into the night between sets with a cute little Italian girl, until we got back to her place and she offered to introduce me to her Dad and her brothers.
I had to admit to her that I was already married, even if I wasn’t acting that way, before they started measuring me up for some kind of suit, and I made it back for the late show with seconds to spare.
It took us a full four sets to break down the door in Boston and a mere nine songs to do the same in New Haven, but I was finally on the road to New York.
• • •
MY MIDDLE NAME IS PATRICK. I’m named after my Papa, the White Star bandsman. So I was actually the second “Pat McManus” in our family to hit the town.
I have a memory of being in the back of our old Morris Minor at about four years old. I was repeating my own version of the kid’s familiar question “Are we there yet?” We were rounding the bout before Shepherd’s Bush Green after dark, as I asked, “Where are we going?” for the twentieth time.
My Dad looked at the marquee lights of an Odeon cinema and at Shepherd’s Bush Empire up ahead. He said, “We’re going to America.”
For years, I held on to the belief that I’d visited the United States that night, until I got hold of an atlas and found that you couldn’t drive there.
The lights of New York City came up fast on the approach and my heart started beating fast.
We made it to the hotel bar just before closing time. Everyone was drinking those American inventions, screwdrivers and tequila sunrises. I ordered a gin and tonic. I specified Gordon’s gin. The barman was an Irish fellow who took a shine to me. He could see I was serious in my purpose and even stood me a drink or two. Then I took a little walk along Third Avenue in the chill December air.
On the night of our first New York show, we poured out of the Gramercy Park Hotel and hailed an old-fashioned Checker cab. Three of us got in the back and Steve Nieve opened the door and went to sit up front with the driver.
“You can’t come in here, buddy, I’ve got my eight-track up here.”
And he did . . .
A handwritten sign on the glass read: Beatles music played on request.
“So you like The Beatles, then?” I said, making more of a comment to myself than actually asking a question.
“You guys are English,” the driver observed. “What d’ya wanna hear?”
I think we requested “Paperback Writer,” and he flipped out one cartridge and tried to punch up the song on the new one he inserted.
Then he began his well-rehearsed speech.
“Do you know what John Lennon said when he landed at Idlewild?”
And without waiting for a reply, he proceeded to recite the entire contents of The Beatles’ first press conference, as we drove to The Bottom Line.
It might seem strange that I remember more about that journey to our New York debut than the show itself, but that’s what you get when everyone in the room is holding their breath. Some people were on our side and didn’t want us to fail, the rest of them were holding pencils and had probably already decided on their dismissals.
So many people have told me that they were in attendance that night that I sometimes wonder if we actually played Madison Square Garden.
If we’d arrived with the hope that we would be overnight sensations, then we were met with just as much suspicion that we were a novelty act.
I was feeling no pain by the end of the second set.
Someone pointed to a stretch limousine and told me that was my ride. It seemed unlikely, as we had arrived by Checker cab, but we’d “made it now,” so I got in and found myself facing an older, sober gentleman who offered his hand.
“Phil Ramone, I enjoyed the show.”
I knew very well who he was, so I wasn’t being entirely facetious when I replied, “Love your records, man.”
But I just couldn’t resist. As I hopped out onto the pavement again, I said, “Say hello to Joey and Dee Dee for me.”
My manager, Jake Riviera, took a confrontational approach to almost every situation, denying photo passes and press access and insisting everything be done exactly opposite of the way that Columbia Records planned it, generally trying to bully and bamboozle people into believing that I might just be Clark Kent.
Jake would joke about going to Columbia to get a brown paper bag of money to give to “Vinnie and Vinnie in New Jersey.” I can’t be sure if this was just Jake’s fevered imagination, but it was obviously not a very big bag of money, as such shadowy independent promo men never delivered any of our records to the airwaves courtesy of illicit favors and cash.
Yet it had started out so well in San Francisco. Disc jockey Bonnie Simmons allowed me to run riot at KSAN. Years later, I found that first playlist written on KSAN notepaper and tucked in an old address book. It was like a blueprint. Iggy’s “Search and Destroy” followed by The Searchers’ “When You Walk in the Room”; Aretha’s “Never Loved a Man” into Gram’s “How Much I’ve Lied”; Richard Hell next to Randy Newman. I played NRBQ, Andy Williams, and The Mothers of Invention’s “Who Needs the Peace Corps.”
By my second visit, Bonnie would let me ransack the record library for half an hour and then play “Homework” by The J. Geils Band into Groucho Marx singing “Lydia the Tattooed Lady” into “Big Eyed Beans from Venus” by Captain Beefheart. We stayed on the air so long chatting that people thought we were stoned or in love.
From there on, I stumbled from outpost to outpost, trying to find those few lonely, welcoming voices in the wilderness of charmless blather and repetitive, predictable music.
Yet despite the evidence, I didn’t write “Radio Radio” about American radio. For one thing, the song was first heard in London, just five days after Elvis Presley died and three months before I set foot in America. It wasn’t even a new song, in the strictest sense, but something that I’d reworked from an earlier draft.
“Radio Soul” was a shameless imitation of one of those mythical Bruce Springsteen songs from The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle that I’d written in my semipro days, despite lacking either the instrumentation or expertise to carry off something that aspired to be “Rosalita.”
The idea that the radio broadcasting from within you was ultimately of more value than the radio in the dashboard or the wireless on the shelf or a transmitter on a pirate ship, beaming from beyond the three-mile limit, is something that I would argue to this day.
In 1977, I needed to make a more narrow and obvious point. All window dressing aside, the English radio I was talking about was a smug, soothing appeaser of both the senses and those with more sinister motives of control.
The night before our American television debut, I stepped into a diner that was tucked back from the boardwalk and out of the gale blowing into Asbury Park. I liked the place immediately, not just because I was finally seeing locations that I had only known from Bruce Springsteen songs but because the town looked like a funhouse-mirror image of New Brighton, where I’d spent more innocent summers.
The place was deserted, except for a few stragglers who had trailed us from the Stone Pony looking for clues. I sat at the counter with a couple of The Attractions and ordered a cheeseburger, which still seemed the decent thing to do.
News had arrived earlier in the week that a blunder with visa paperwork had handed us a unique career opportunity. We would deputize for the Sex Pistols on Saturday Night Live.
Our reputation would be complete.
First of all, there was the small matter of getting out of Asbury Park alive, after I took the liberty of announcing Bruce Thomas as “the real future of rock and roll.” People didn’t realize I was joking and thought I was having a crack at the local hero. We had to barricade ourselves in the dressing room to avoid being impaled on spikes and immolated on the Tilt-A-Whirl. We escaped out the fire exit and beat a swift retreat in a last-chance power drive back to New York City.
We checked into the Essex House hotel on Central Park, a fair, if more sedate step up from earlier digs in Gramercy Park, courtesy of NBC. There was an hour to kill, so we shot the back cover of This Year’s Model, a curious shot in which I appeared to be flying through curtains into our hotel room like Peter Pan, with The Attractions standing around looking startled, as well they might.
I don’t think we really gave SNL a chance, as by the time we arrived at Studio 8H we were already daggers-drawn with our own record company.
“Watching the Detectives” had seemed like a good choice for our opening number, as The Attractions had now made the song their own, but Columbia insisted that the second song should be “Less Than Zero.”
The song had already proven to be obscure to many American ears, and if this was supposed to be our “I Want to Hold Your Hand” moment, I thought the song was way too low-key. Everyone had told me how hip, funny, and cool SNL was, but when we did the show, we hadn’t seen a single episode, as it didn’t air in England.
Two men who I later learned were John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd came to our dressing room masquerading as people from the sanitation department. I suppose them doing a bit for us offstage was intended as a compliment, but as I didn’t know who they were, the joke seemed at our expense.
Everything got very tense. The prevailing mood on both sides was somewhere between jaded and self-important.
All the time, record company reps kept banging on about us doing “Less Than Zero,” a song that seemed much less likely to be understood by the American audience than almost anything else on what I already thought of as our “old record”: My Aim Is True.
I was thinking about the future.
So I decided to give ’em a scare and went back into the past for the tools to do it.
In 1969, I had been minding my own business, pretending to do my homework while watching The Lulu Show, when The Jimi Hendrix Experience were announced as guests. Hendrix played a version of “Hey Joe” that sounded nothing at all like his hit-single recording of the song, and at some point he stopped and said, “I’m going to stop playing this rubbish.”
He made a dedication to the members of Cream, who had broken up that week, before he and the Experience played “Sunshine of Your Love,” until the BBC pulled them off the air.
It was like watching your television go out of control.
It occurred to me now that there was absolutely nothing to stop me from pulling the same stunt. The word “Live” was even in the name of the show.
The first song passed without incident. The studio sound was pretty flimsy, but we looked weird and tense enough to convey the idea of “Watching the Detectives.”
Then it came time to play “Less Than Zero.”
I didn’t even get through two lines of the lyrics before I cut the band off, made an apology to the audience, and said that there was no reason to play the song, and counted off “Radio Radio.”
We could have been singing about anything: space travel, insurrection, cannibalism, or a hymn of praise to eighteenth-century topiary.
There was panic on the studio floor.
We were not even certain if we were still on the air, but the light on the central camera stayed on through the first verse, and my eyes darted around looking for signs that someone was still calling the shots.
The Attractions drove on through the song and I sang it for all I was worth. It felt good, but it was hardly a revolutionary act.
I took a full bow at the waist, the way The Beatles had on Thank Your Lucky Stars, unplugged, and walked straight off the set past the cameras before the applause ended, followed by various scampering Attractions.
Then it was over.
There were far fewer video recorders back then, and it wasn’t as if the show were about to rerun this episode, so the appearance lived on mostly in the few column inches it generated and the memories of people present and those who were watching at home.
It didn’t, of course, work out like that, as whenever anyone did anything scandalous on SNL, our appearance would be cited as a precedent. So when Sinéad O’Connor tore up a picture of the pope, it was almost as if I got some of the credit.
By the time someone called Ashlee Simpson was caught lip-synching an apparently live SNL performance, the news reports stretched to the infinity of the Internet, with my name and that of Sinéad in a footnote of previous offenders.
Eventually, NBC started applying the principle of what Joe Strummer called “Turning rebellion into money,” and the “Radio Radio” performance became a commodity to be repeated in compilations of “legendary” moments from the long-running show.
I even got to see the tape again myself. Given how ungainly and awkward I appeared, it seemed odd that this was ever thought to be anything dangerous or subversive, but then I never promised to be Nijinsky.
After a couple of tetchy reprise appearances on SNL in 1989 and 1991, Lorne Michaels and I eventually made an uneasy peace at a few cultural gatherings and he invited me to do a skit based on that first appearance for the SNL’s twenty-fifth anniversary show.
The stage was set for the Beastie Boys to play “Sabotage” until I entered, pushed Ad-Rock off the mic, and cued “Radio Radio” with the Beasties proving their worth as a garage band.
The gala was in many ways as melancholy as it was funny, given the tragic exits of several of SNL’s most brilliant performers.
Regarding other matters, people were not so sentimental. Bill Murray sidled up to me at the after-show party and said, “Don’t let Lorne tell you that he was in on the joke. I remember him standing behind the camera, giving you the finger.”
But as Sammy Cahn once said, “You’ve either got or you haven’t got style.”
I was so focused on the song that night that I was initially oblivious to the curses and threats raining down on us as they bundled us out of the building.
The confused and indignant faces behind the camera were the funniest things we’d seen all night, and we laughed all the way to the bar, if not to the bank.
If we’d started out with the intention of taking the country by storm, we had to settle for a little minor infamy.
Then we boarded the plane back home to a Christmas Eve show in London, certain in the knowledge that we “would never work on American television again.”