Okay. I'm going to do something that I wasn't, but this will whet your appetite, I hope. And since this is all your book, I feel obligated to show that you were right to trust me. I don't want to post any more excerpts after this. I just started writing today.
Keep in mind that this is a rough draft.
Ghosts and Ballyhoo
Memoirs of a Failed L.A. Music Journalist
By Thomas Wictor
All photos from the author’s collection unless otherwise credited.
For Scott and Carmen. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.
Acknowledgements.
(Too many to list here.)
Contents:
Introduction
Anthology One:
Prelude to Essence. 1962-1985
Anthology Two:
First Light. 1985-1991
Anthology Three:
Annihilation and Summit. 1992-1997
Anthology Four:
Wasteland. 1998-2003
Anthology Five:
Abyss. 2003-2011
Anthology Six:
The Great Unhaunting. 2012
Codas
Introduction
I was the most haunted person you could ever meet. Places, books, movies, animals, occurrences, sounds, and smells left me shivering, sometimes for years. Mostly, though, I was haunted by people and music. I’ve recently come to realize the inevitability of my becoming a music journalist, despite my stutter, my lack of musical training, and my difficulties interacting with people. My lifelong pattern has been to pursue that which has haunted me. I say “has been,” because I may--
may--have finally changed my ways. Time will tell.
This memoir is about my ten years as a music journalist in Los Angeles, my obsessive quest to “help” one of the finest musicians I’ve ever met, and my inability to move beyond a failed relationship with a woman I’ll call Carmen, herself a musician. The remarkable way in which this memoir came about has determined the form it takes, which is six collections of short stories. Most are by me, but several are the spoken words of former Frank Zappa bassist Scott Thunes, my central musical ghost. I first interviewed him in 1996 and wrote an article about him for
Bass Player, titled “Requiem for a Heavyweight?” It was this article and the interview I conducted with bassist Gene Simmons of Kiss, published in
Bass Player as “Call Him Doctor Love,” that convinced me I had a permanent place in the world of music journalism. As you will see, those two interviews actually signed my death warrant in the field.
Since I‘ve already written extensively about Thunes and Simmons in my first book
In Cold Sweat: Interviews with Really Scary Musicians [Limelight Editions, 2001], this memoir will touch only peripherally on the experience of sitting down with them in 1996. Simmons haunted me almost as much as Scott Thunes, but as with virtually all of the musicians I interviewed in my career, there was no question of further engagement with him after our initial interaction. It was just business. A few were different. John Taylor of Duran Duran, Stephen Jay of the “Weird Al” Yankovic band, and Bryan Beller of far too many projects to mention (This is
my memoir, Bryan!
Mine! Write your own!) come to mind. But for some reason Scott Thunes and I had a much longer, much more personal relationship until I ended it in 2003, when I resigned from music journalism and cut off all contact with people connected to the decade-long debacle I'd engineered for myself.
What haunted me most about Scott Thunes was that
he had resigned from music years before I did, a genuine tragedy in my mind. Bass was my chosen instrument; when listening to music, I always heard the bass first and foremost. There is no bassist like Scott Thunes. His is an entirely original voice that relies on no obvious influences. What makes Scott Thunes a genius is his ability to express emotion on his instrument, particularly when performing live with other musicians. Rather than play bass lines, he
accompanies his band mates in the traditional sense, improvising flourishes and ornamentation that propel the players into a much higher, much more passionate level of musicianship. It’s a remarkable talent, and it tore out my heart that he had given it up.
Perceptive readers will be able to work out for themselves why I was obsessed with helping Scott Thunes. There’s no need for me to spell it out. Instead, I’ll let everything unfold at its own pace. Since Thunes haunted me as much as my long-departed Carmen, I’ve decided to include his words often in this memoir. His story is central to mine, but not for the reasons I originally thought.
This is a strange book, the strangeness of which is as inevitable as both my career in music journalism and its collapse. I’m a strange person, and the way the book came to be is one of the strangest episodes I’ve ever come across. I happen to be a believer in both destiny and free will. Maybe I’ll write about that someday. For now, I present these anthologies of hauntings, of what not to do, and of how not to be.
Thomas Wictor
April 2012
Los Angeles
Anthology One
Prelude to Essence
1962-1985
It Does Make Me Want to Do Something with my Feet: Run.
I have five brothers and one sister. My oldest brother Tim was a singer; my younger brother Pat is a professional singer-songwriter-guitarist who plays on the folk circuit; and my youngest brother Eric was a bassist. Dad was forced to play clarinet in school, and Mom was something of a music prodigy on the piano, although she gave it up early. My brother Paul and my sister Carrie are fans of music who never played instruments themselves. Paul bought an electric guitar once in college, but mostly it just leaned against the wall.
In our house, my father owned the only record player. He used it for his collection of Mitch Miller albums, Viennese waltzes, British parlor music, Sousa marches, ragtime, Irving Berlin, and operettas such as
The Red Mill. That’s what music was to me. I grew up in Venezuela, so I missed most of the sixties’ rock culture. I was vaguely aware of older kids getting into trouble when they were shipped off to the States after eighth grade, which was what happened in our oil camp. You finished eighth grade, went off to the States to attend high school, and came back with “drug problems” and long hair. We all had crew cuts in my house. Except for my sister and mother.
To me, drugs meant medicine. The older kids with their scary long hair talked to each other about music and drugs, and I imagined them playing ragtime with banjos and tinkling pianos while drinking cherry-flavored cough syrup and taking aspirin. I didn’t want to ever move to the States. It seemed like a terrifying place where inexplicable things happened to you. We’d visit my sweet maternal grandmother in Los Angeles and go to Miami every now and then on summer vacation, but I wanted to live out my life in Campo Verde, Tia Juana, safe from long hair and drugs.
The inevitable happened, however, and Esso transferred Dad to Tyler, Texas in 1972. Music still didn’t make much of an impact on me. Dad continued his ownership of the only record player, and none of us kids had radios. I remember somehow hearing Tanya Tucker’s “Delta Dawn” what seemed like every single day we lived in Texas, along with “I am Woman” by Helen Reddy. Both songs made me sick. We watched
The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour on TV and got to know the song “I Got You Babe,” which also made me sick.
For me, the best music was TV theme songs. A piece that gave me goose pimples was composer Gil Mellé’s opening theme for
Kolchak: The Night Stalker. The change that occurs 30 seconds into the theme is still one of the most incredible works of musical genius I’ve ever heard, and the ending is spectacular. I was shocked to learn decades later that Mellé wrote that theme in 20 minutes. Another favorite was the theme to
Barnaby Jones, by the legendary composer Jerry Goldsmith. I’d watch the show just to hear that music, which struck me as poignant and heroic, like the old detective, Jones, himself.
Generally, I felt music was something to be avoided unless it was part of a TV show or movie. Shirley Bassey belting out “Goldfinger” was as good as it got for me. My brother Tim would do a killer impression of Bassey, down to holding the song’s impossible final note. He’d been clandestinely listening to my mother’s Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and Paul Smith Trio albums in the den when Dad was at work. When he came home after dark, Dad would pull shut the accordion doors of the den and turn on his Mitch Miller or waltzes. Once I had to go in and ask him something. There was some frenetic ragtime piece blaring from the speakers of the Zenith cabinet record player.
Before I could ask my question, Dad said, “Doesn’t that make you wanna do something with your feet?” And to my utter horror, he began dancing a wild jig, the first time I’d ever seen him do such a thing, his fists clenched in front of him and going up and down as though he were pumping up a bicycle tire, his long legs kicking out sideways in rhythm to the banjo strumming, and his keys and coins jingling in his pockets.
That image went smashing into my hippocampus, which instantly jettisoned it through my neural pathways into my cortex, where it remains unchanged to this day, fresh and pristine as a newly minted penny, as accessible and as much a part of me as my own nose.
Led Zeppelin and the First Ghost
In 1975 Exxon transferred Dad to the Netherlands. He went on ahead, and the rest of us followed in a KLM Boeing 747. The flight was long, 10 or 11 hours. Since I’ve always been terrified of flying, almost to the point of becoming comatose, I had to keep myself distracted by listening to music. They gave you cheap plastic headphones that you plugged into little sockets in your seat, and there was a dial that you turned around to choose from several programs that repeated ever hour. I caught the Captain and Tennille’s “Love will Keep us Together,” which was bouncy but actually pretty gross, as well as Neil Sedaka’s “Laughter in the Rain.” While I really liked the sinister title, the song itself didn’t do anything for me.
And then something hit me like a fist to the jaw, this brutal, pounding, thrusting, filthy, exceptionally exciting tune that was like nothing I’d ever heard in my life. The vocalist was somehow screaming at a low volume; the drums made my feet tap; the guitars were like a chorus of banshees; and there was some low-frequency instrument in there that matched my heartbeat. The song was “Trampled Underfoot,” by Led Zeppelin. Since the lyrics were about cars, I pictured the musicians as muscular garage mechanics, their faces twisted with belligerence. I listened to that song every time it was repeated, trying to absorb it into my bloodstream. It had the same effect on my brothers Paul and Pat. Tim liked it well enough, but he was devoted to jazz vocalists by that time.
In Rijswijk, our new home, we all bought transistor radios and listened incessantly to Radio Caroline, a pirate station based on a ship anchored offshore to avoid the limitations placed on the state-run broadcasters of Europe. Radio Caroline was a life saver, because the Dutch music scene was a nightmare. Smash hits included André van Duin’s
"Willempie," about a ******** man singing in a ******** voice about his ******** life; Corrie van Gorp’s rousing oompah-march
“Zo Slank zijn als je Dochter” (“As Slim as Your Daughter”
, the chorus punctuated by the
boing of a Jew’s harp; and Nico Haak’s Dutch version of “Put Another Nickel in the Nickelodeon.” Music that could drive you immediately out of your skull.
Occasionally we’d see someone like Kate Bush, who sang “Wuthering Heights” on
Top Pop. She was the first in a long line of small, intense, dark-haired musicians who had a profound effect on me. Boney M, Bonnie Tyler, and Patricia Paay made less of an impression, even though they were on
Top Pop every four seconds. Tim listened to the BBC jazz shows on the radio and was the first of us to start buying records, because the Europeans re-released jazz albums long out of print in the U.S. He’d listen to them on headphones while the rest of us suffered through “Daddy Cool.”
It was in Holland that I met my first ghost. I’ll call her Brigitte. She was a dual national of the U.S. and another country, and she was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. Her family lived a few doors down from us and we were in the same grade, but she was popular while I was--to be blunt--a disaster. Photos of me from that era are indescribably embarrassing. I looked exactly like a 40-year-old lesbian spinster, with shoulder-length hair and thick glasses. My siblings and I had transferred into the school in the middle of the year, making me the newly arrived weirdo as out of place as an octopus in a pine tree. Brigitte was always polite to me, but we never had much to do with each other.
Brigitte’s brother and sister became good friends with my family. One or the other would always be over at our house, to the point that my mother began referring to them as her two extra children. Brigitte gradually warmed to me. It turned out she had quite a good sense of humor, and I found her aura of sadness extremely attractive. I wanted to help her. Of course, I was also madly in love with her. I wrote “I love Brigitte ________” on a tiny slip of paper, rolled it up, and tucked into the clear plastic body of a ballpoint pen so I could always have it close to me. One day at school a guy I hated asked to borrow a pen, and I went into what Tim calls the “rabbit trance” and handed over my Brigitte pen without thinking.
A few seconds later, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned around, and the kid was holding my little love note, unrolled. Grinning from ear to ear, he went into this demented, chanting ecstasy, like someone speaking in tongues: “I’m gonna tell
Brigitte and she’s gonna find
out and you’re gonna be so
embarrassed and everyone’s gonna
laugh at you and the
whole school is gonna
know and you’re gonna wanna
kill yourself and it’s gonna be
so fuhhhhhhhhny and we’re all gonna laugh our
asses off!”
And he did tell her. And he did tell the whole school. And they did laugh. And I did want to kill myself. But the funny thing is, the person who saved me from total mental collapse was Brigitte. She became my friend, whether out of pity or because she was just naturally a kind person, I’ll never know. But she and I became inseparable for a few months. She was really very nice. What I took as aloofness was shyness. Despite her astonishing beauty, she was unsure of herself. When I found out that her father had been transferred and they had to move to the U.S., I was devastated.
The last night I saw her, we went to a nearby park and sat on the swings, talking as the fog rolled in. She said she hoped she’d see me again someday, but we both knew the odds were against it. The children of men who worked in the oil business were nomads. We got used to coming and going, meeting new people and then leaving them. Lasting friendships were rare. At about ten o’clock, she said, “Well, I have to go.”
“Would you mind if I don’t walk you home?” I asked. She lived only a block away, and I was afraid I'd burst into tears. I still hadn't recovered from the humiliation of having my secret love note shown to the whole school.
“No, it’s okay. Just say here. I’ll see you later, Tom. Goodbye.”
And she turned and disappeared into the fog.
