Who Asked Me?

I wrote a definitive piece on the rock n roller Sammy Hagar some years back and before I started logging my writing on this blog in its current form. It was probably one of the better things I’ve written, and I titled it Genius Redefined. I posed a particular definition of the word (genius) that included the innate sense to write about and work with what one knows instinctively. As example I referenced the Hank Williams line “you’re just in time to be too late” in conjunction with Hagar’s song “I Can’t Drive 55″ and his lyrics “when I drive that slow it’s hard to steer / and I can’t get my car out of second gear.” It was never Hagar’s music that impressed me; I outgrew that at about sixteen. It was his ability to work with what he had, and to sustain that over an entire career without falling in to the various trappings of ego and fame.

Panned by critics and “discerning” fans alike, Hagar has motored on for forty years. He fronted the seminal California-based hard rock band Montrose before beginning a notably successful solo career. He joined Van Halen mid-stride in 1985, leading them to a string of number-one albums and singles. And he did it all singing songs with titles like “Poundcake” and lyrics like “red, red, I want red / there’s no substitute for red.” (Two different songs, but they make an equally adept point.) Some might attribute this to dumb luck or an uncanny ability to step in to gold everywhere he goes. For them, Hagar embarked on a string of successful business ventures. He invested in Fontana real estate and patented a fire sprinkler system for his apartment buildings. He started a travel agency that became hugely popular with his rock star brethren. He helped start the beginning of the mountain bike craze in California with shops in Corte Madera and Sausalito, and produced his own line of bikes that sold faster than they could make them. He built a club in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, and called it Cabo Wabo. It faltered initially, but Hagar enjoyed the area so he stuck with it and turned things around. Along the way he also developed an interest in good tequila and began his own boutique line, naming it after the club. Before long, it was the best selling specialty label in America. In 2007, Hagar sold all but a 20% interest in his Cabo Wabo Tequila brand to Italian liquor conglomerates Gruppo Campari. His take? Eighty million bucks. Or, to put it another way, “get on the phone and tell all your friends – it’s going to be a rock and roll weekend.”

My buddy Paul sent me a copy of Hagar’s recent memoir “Red – My Uncensored Life In Rock.” Paul is familiar with my continued curiosity regarding the man. It’s a fast read – 238 pages blurted out in spoken-word prose as interpreted by Hagar’s co-writer, Bay Area music journalist Joel Selvin. The back cover includes unqualified words of praise from both Ted Nugent and Whoopi Goldberg, not to mention Emeril Lagasse. And, of course, it went to #1 on the New York Times best seller list shortly after its release. Perhaps some of those who bought it share my same fascination and were hoping for clues regarding Hagar’s apparent life-long Midas touch. There’s a difficult upbringing in southern California, an abusive, alcoholic father, scrambling from shoddy house to shoddy house .. but really, not much to differentiate his from other hardscrabble childhoods. A more subtle clue might lie in the few words he uses to describe his mother, a woman who both bought him his first guitar on layaway and occasionally sifted through dumpsters to keep her kids fed. “She was so solid,” Hagar notes. “I don’t feel like some big star .. but there’s something inside of me that is my mom, and I really like that.” In observing her recent death he relates simply “I miss her every day.”

Hagar also touches on his business success, noting casually but convincingly that he could be a billionaire if he wanted, taking everything and leveraging it “like Donald Trump.” But he concludes “that would be the biggest waste of time on the fucking planet.” The post-script notes from Selvin take effective aim at those critics who have held Hagar in scorn for his average talent. “As a lifelong card-carrying member of rock music’s critical elite,” he writes, “I am fully aware of the regard in which such circles hold Sam. To them, I say, fuck you, the guy had ‘Rock Candy‘ on his first album.” Who knows, maybe Hagar’s success can be attributed to dumb luck and the fact that, unlike Trump, he always had the hair for the gig. But I prefer to chalk it up to correct cosmic alignment, humility, an unfaltering work ethic, and maternal influence. Either way, it’s been a heck of a run. Rock on, Sammy.

like they teach in class – Stones

There’s a great article in the current (March 28) issue of The New Yorker on the Barry Bonds trial, which is finally getting underway in San Francisco. It’s neither hit piece nor glowing defense, but subtly points to the absurdity of the time, breath, and millions of taxpayer dollars being wasted by the federal government, ostensibly to prove that a baseball player lied. The prosecution’s stated motivation, which also has something to do with protecting future generations of young athletes from the evils of steroids, is as big a lie as any Bonds ever told. What they’re really trying to do is put forth a message that any citizen with a fourth grade education could spot as daily-disproved bullshit: you can’t lie to the federal government.

Let’s get this out of the way quickly – of course Barry Bonds took steroids, lied about taking steroids, and is defiantly unapologetic. I won’t go in to matters of his public persona or where he ranks as a ballplayer from the Steroid Era versus those who came before him. I’ve covered this before; the second part is a baseball argument and as such can be debated in circles until soccer is officially declared our national pastime. And while his personality has appeared suspect at times, the collective indignant response that this has evoked might cause one to conclude that there’s a worldwide shortage of assholes – something I think we can all definitively conclude just isn’t the case. What’s considerably less palatable than any of this is the blatant hypocrisy on the part of those going after him hardest and claiming to be acting for the Higher Good as opposed to making money off his name to sell books or facilitate some blatant Uncle Sam posturing.

The government’s timing for the Bonds trial couldn’t be worse. They’re attempting to sell the public on the nobility of this costly pursuit while entrenched in some of the worst economic times in recent memory. They’re exposing incongruous testimony relating to a game while a president who won the Nobel Peace Prize before lifting a finger drops bombs on Libya. (Not to come down hard on Obama; he’s facing the same “not the job I signed up for” woes as all his predecessors. But squelching this exorbitant farce would seem exactly the kind of thing he foretold doing while campaigning for the gig.) And they’re doing it by utilizing Bonds’s polarizing surliness as a rich, high profile athlete and hiding behind the sanctimonious veil cloaking this perpetuated myth of the Purity of Baseball.

The New Yorker piece, written by Ben McGrath, insinuates some of this with a certain grace and eloquence that I couldn’t pull off. It’s entitled King of Walks, a fitting metaphor for Bonds’s approach to being prosecuted and nod to what I always considered a more impressive aspect to his game than than his hitting – his practiced refusal to swing at a bad pitch. The article also does a nice job of putting steroids in past, current, and potentially future perspective, referencing Hank Aaron’s use of amphetamines and the often overlooked point behind Jose Canseco’s tell-all book. At the center of it is Bonds and a between-the-lines message that seems clear, both for those who hated him and loved to watch him play. “Yeah I did what I did, but you aren’t going to use me to make your point and you sure as hell could never hit a baseball like I could.” With all the lies out there, there must be better begging exposure.

Prop comic Gallagher collapsed on stage in a coronary-like incident at the Whiskey Bone Roadhouse in Minnesota last night. I’m completely up on this news item but have only a cursory grasp of the details of the 8.9 earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan. The 64 year-old comedian complained of pain in his left arm and shortness of breath earlier in the evening, but put his art ahead of all else. The collapse, caught on cell phone video, came while doing his famed watermelon-sledgehammer routine. The AP version of the story includes a single-sentence reference to the routine in its closing paragraph: “Gallagher, whose real name is Leo Anthony Gallagher, is best known for smashing watermelons with a sledgehammer.” I took an advanced journalism class in high school and can safely say that all anyone need know about competent reporting is contained in that sentence.

Anyone considering a move to rural Minnesota should pay careful attention to the Gallagher video; particularly the exuberant audience approval for his routine in the seconds leading up to the collapse. It might be enough to just note that someone was actually recording this bit on his phone – the guy’s been doing it for forty years now. I was at a casino in South Shore Lake Tahoe about twenty years ago hanging around the bar outside a Gallagher show, and observed hotel security escorting a disruptive audience member out of the theater. I noted that he must have been sitting somewhere in front because he was still wearing the protective tarp with chunks of fruit all over it. It made me wonder what you have to do to get kicked out of a Gallagher show. In the realm of theater etiquette, it must be considered a fairly low-set bar.

Had Gallagher died, the prop comic torch would likely have been passed to Carrot Top, his red-headed, anabolic steroid-using disciple. Say what you will about prop comics, they don’t come with much pretense. You wouldn’t catch either of these guys making indulgent, feature-length documentaries like Jerry Seinfeld, lamenting the loss of his diamond-cut comedic timing while returning to stand-up from his obscenely lucrative television career. This overtly needy personality trait is central to the psyche of many a comedian. Observe Orny Adams in the above-mentioned Seinfeld doc if you’ve ever thought it might be fun to know one of these guys personally. Prop comedians, on the other hand, are fully aware of the space they occupy on the comedy hierarchy, and it takes a certain resiliency to forge ahead, cognizant of this ranking. There aren’t many lining up to replace Carrot Top when he’s gone.

Johnny Nitro is dead. This news arrived via the Internet and SF Chronicle website on the final morning of what would end up being a nostalgia-centric Presidents’ Day Weekend. Nitro was a blues guitarist who fronted The Doorslammers, the house band at San Francisco’s oldest bar and North Beach mainstay, The Saloon. He played solid, crunchy leads and twelve bar progressions in the fashion of a classic working man’s musician – one who’s been at the form so long that it’s ingrained in his DNA. People wonder how some musicians make it look so easy. The answer, invariably, is that they’re at it day in and day out, night after night after night. Johnny Nitro played those licks so many times it sometimes looked like he was doing his taxes or tapping an Anchor Steam. But when he wanted to, he could really tap that Steam.

Nitro died Saturday night in his room above the Saloon. According to the Chronicle, the bar patrons broke in to spontaneous applause when the paramedics wheeled him out, his body covered by a white sheet. I’m familiar with the crowd that frequents The Saloon, and the account seems plausible. I used to go there as a young kid, just prior to and for a while after hitting the legal drinking age. It isn’t the kind of place to order a Cosmopolitan or ask the bartender if they have ground nutmeg behind the bar. We’d typically pull in at the end of the night when the place was packed with sweaty, generally older revelers, cutting loose on the small dance floor in front of the band. I was never much of a dancer nor the type to get louder and drunker as the evening pressed toward last call. I drank, yeah, but somehow my intake wasn’t hitched directly to my volume control. By Nitro Time I could usually be found leaning against a wall, sobering up on a nursed Budweiser and fielding shouted questions from the 40ish guy standing next to me on my size and weight. “WHAT ARE YOU .. ABOUT 210, 215 ..?” This was always another curiously observed alcohol side effect – the tendency for smaller guys to hone their Incredible Human Scale carnival act.

Those Johnny Nitro days faded in to something else, and then something else again, and by the time I was 24 I was ready for a third something else, so I followed my girlfriend who had made a move to Italy. This takes me to part two of Nostalgia Weekend, and watching the Amanda Knox movie on Lifetime TV Monday night. Knox wasn’t my girlfriend, but a current day Seattle native and twenty-something serving time for murder in an Italian prison. Her guilt is a matter of some debate and despite watching the movie I’m patently unqualified to make the call. But having lived there I will say that I wouldn’t want to depend on any government run branch for anything, much less put my fate in the hands of the Italian legal system. Like Knox, I was a language student at Perugia’s Università per Stranieri, or the “University for Strangers” as I was fond of incorrectly translating it. I’d like to think that, unlike her and even then, I had a certain prematurely instilled sense of caution, perhaps linked to that same instinct to be a Budweiser-nursing wallflower at the Saloon a few years prior. But having lived some years since, I can see where a few unfortunate twists of fate might have landed me erroneously imprisoned in an Italian cell. Life is funny that way.

What struck me more than the sensationalized nature of the production or the fact that they were allowed to shoot on location (slip the Italians a few bucks and they’ll re-zone the Vatican for you) was what an impressively beautiful place Perugia is. It’s the Umbrian capital and has a recorded history dating back to 310 BC. The cobblestone streets of the Old City wind through ancient Etruscan arches and in to all reaches of the town, with spectacular views of the Italian countryside. And I lived there. Reflecting on this yesterday and while in email contact with my ex Saloon Days buddies Myers and Miller, I queried as to why, at the time, they didn’t alert me to the fact that I had the world on a string (not my exact words.) They responded that my world-strung days were still within reach – a nice gesture but not the desired reply, which would have been that, like then, I’ve still got it but am unaware. This led to further discussion on who has what by which and where and the nature of human perception. Or, put another way, how I could be in Amanda Knox’s shoes and she in Johnny Nitro’s.

I used to run in to people from the Midwest and East Coast in California who liked to beef about the lack of distinction between seasons. My suspicion is that they were some of the same people I’ve since met in New York who go on about freezing temperatures and having to shovel their walk. Some people like to bitch. Yeah, I’ve got one of those fancy phones like everybody else that allows me to finger-flick between the high 60s in San Francisco and five New York City degrees on the same day. But you pick your poison, as the Germans are fond of saying. There’s an Edward Hopper exhibit at the Whitney and superior take-out just blocks away. What’s a little ice-chipping from your post-jog beard in light of the Big City lights? Besides, it all looks so pretty before the cabs get at it.

Weather-talk, while one of the lower forms of chat, serves a vital purpose. It allows for polite conversation between casual acquaintances and neighbors and segues civilly into beating a hasty retreat. Without it, we’d all just be beating unadorned hasty retreats. It’s of particular use during brief elevator rides when you don’t want to come off as a stalker to the pretty girl in 6A. And it’s a good primer to actual conversation in this world of increasing online communication. Its only drawback is that it just comes in three forms: “Beautiful out,” “Hot enough for you?” and “I hear it’s going to get even colder.” I’ve resigned myself to coming across as a stalker on those days in between.