Gigantic.52
15 Minutes
We were in Kingston barely long enough to do our laundry, then back to London. We checked into the Columbia Hotel, then straight to V2 to do phone interviews with Taiwan and Latin America.
They took us to the bar and a restaurant after that. Grasshopper and I literally fell asleep on each other’s shoulders, but the night was just beginning.
Echo and the Bunnymen were playing at Brixton Academy. They brought us to the VIP lounge, where the music was piped in and you could watch the band through double-plated glass, sort of like the “skybox” at a stadium. That just wasn’t going to work.
I headed back downstairs and fought my way into the middle of the crowd just in time for The Killing Moon, maybe one of the best songs ever recorded.
The Killing Moon is not meant to be amplified through speakers. It emanates from the sky, starting brushfires and shaking the landscape like Mount Sinai. This wasn’t the case at Brixton, but the sub-bass was substantial enough to induce concussion-like symptoms, so I can’t complain.
I’d befriended an accountant at V2 whose boyfriend was Echo and the Bunnymen’s manager. She knew I was never going to get my nerve up, so after the show she took me by the hand and dragged me to the dressing room.
“Ian, this is Adam from Mercury Rev,” she said.
I was sure he was thinking, Who are these people and where are my fucking cigarettes? But what he said was:
“I like your new single.”
Okay. Set aside every Bunnymen track I’d listened to a thousand times. Ian McCulloch singlehandedly determined my hairstyle at age eighteen, when a haircut was everything. Now I was in his dressing room, in London, and he was saying he liked our single?
I smiled nervously. I think I said:
“I like yours.”
# # #
They do it down on Camber Sands
They do it at Waikiki
—Pulling Mussels from a Shell
Almost all my favorite bands during my teens were from the UK, Squeeze at the top of the list. At my yellow piano back on Warren Street, I’d taught myself pretty much every song on Argy Bargy.
Camber Sands, it turns out, is a beach on the south coast of England. There was a new festival we were playing, at a family campground there at the beach, of course I was going to like it.
The Flaming Lips, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, tons of bands I liked at the moment played and I saw all of them.
The festival was curated by Belle & Sebastian, whose rooms were right next to ours. I’d brought a small accordion on tour, to amuse myself and annoy others, but Isobel from Belle & Sebastian thought it was okay. She brought her cello over and the two of us started playing.
I’d left the door open. I was concentrating on my accordion and didn’t realize people had started filing in. Looking up, I suddenly realized there were forty strangers crammed into our hotel room watching the two of us play.
Somehow that made more of an impression on me than our actual show that night.
# # #
Being the Squeeze fan I was, it was no small thing that our next stop was Later with Jools Holland. Besides Squeeze, Jools had also played on The The’s Soul Mining, another absolute all-time favorite. He was probably as close to a keyboard hero as I had.
They film Later in a big studio at the BBC. Four bands, one in each corner of the studio. The cameras are all on some kind of circular track in the middle, they roll from band-to-band, and the audience does too. You have to wait something like eighteen months to get tickets, so people are pretty glad to be there.
One of the other acts that night was Robert Palmer. He didn’t have the girls in the black cocktail dresses with him, but he was wearing a suit, and was very friendly.
We played Goddess on a Highway and maybe one other song. It seemed very gray on stage, and I was wearing a gray v-neck sweater, at least that’s how I remember it.
Similar to Brixton, one of our manager’s friends made a point of bringing me over to meet Jools after the show. He was talking to someone else at the moment, then turned suddenly to face me and said:
“Oh, I’ve heard this man is quite a good piano player.”
He shook my hand then, over the course of the next two minutes, said several other things to me that didn’t quite add up to a complete thought, shook my hand two more times, then he was on to the next thing and so was I.
It was hard to believe this was my life.
# # #
In Dublin a few days later, we were doing a signing at a very crowded Tower Records. I’d done this before. I always look people in the eye, smile, ask how to spell their name if it’s phonetically challenging (often the case in Ireland.)
Suddenly, something was happening. There was a person with a microphone saying my name. She handed me something I almost thought was a pizza at first, but it was a gold record. With my name on it.
No one told us this was happening today, and mine just happened to be on the top of the pile. When she said my name, it really did catch me completely off guard.
I sat there smiling like the village idiot, holding this gold record. I was in stunned disbelief.
# # #
Our tour with The Flaming Lips began in Aberdeen, Scotland. Wayne Coyne, like me, had recently grown a beard and, like me, had been subject to occasional ribbing by his bandmates (beards not yet popular in 99.)
Wayne told me his theory that people with beards were the more adventurous ones in bands, and that the length of a beard should be reflective of having just climbed Everest.
The promoters in Aberdeen informed us that someone would probably set a fire in the men’s room that night. The modus operandi was that everyone had to file out of the concert hall while the fire department put out the fire, then the house didn’t check tickets when they reopened the doors, so half of Aberdeen got to sneak in for free.
Sure enough, right in the middle of our set, that’s exactly what happened. Outside, they had our tour bus cordoned off to some extent, but there was only one security guard and the crowd was getting rowdy. Accordion to the rescue again. I retrieved it from my bunk and was able to amuse the Aberdonians until the fire department gave the all-clear and we resumed playing to the now beyond-capacity crowd.
A lot of other adventures on this tour. Our driver, Karl, was a Scouser, so he was tickled that Jeff and I made time to take The Beatles tour while we were in Liverpool.
The tour was phenomenal. You ride around Liverpool on a 60s vintage tour bus and visit all the relevant sights, not only Strawberry Fields and Penny Lane, but all the houses where they grew up.
When we were standing in front of Paul’s boyhood home taking pictures, the shades were drawn, but a hand emerged at the bottom of the window and waved to us. I decided it was Paul himself, ducking in for a nostalgic look at his boyhood home, seeing a tour outside, feeling compelled to wave but not reveal it was him so as not to have to deal with a mob scene.
Then again, it could’ve been a maintenance worker. But I prefer to think it was Paul.
I made a point of watching the Lips show almost every night, it was that good. At first I didn’t know what to make of the fact that much of it was prerecorded, but it really was a different animal, with props, puppets, costumes, video. Several times, Sophie from V2 joined me in the audience and we sang all the words together, just having a blast.
Every night when Wayne was talking to the crowd, he always changed the way he’d phrase things ever so slightly, making sure to keep it fresh, keep himself on his toes.
One day during soundcheck, I asked him if I could bang the gong. He handed me the mallet and I had a go at it. It sounded like I’d just dropped a trashcan lid.
“I thought you said you wanted to bang that thing,” Wayne said.
Rather than leaving me to twist, he took pity and showed me where the sweet spot was. I let loose and did what he’d told me.
This time it reverberated into infinity.
# # #
We did another signing at Tower Records in London. Dublin’s had been a little crazy, but still had a touch of humanity, being Ireland.
This time in London, it was all business. A wall of photographers was standing in front of us. I tried to call out Hello to them but no one would answer, or even recognize that I was talking to them.
At someone’s signal, the flashes started going all at once, pummeling us. It was disorienting, literally blinding.
It felt like we were in front of a firing squad.
# # #
Back in 1986, Ian always made sure we had the television warmed up by 7pm on Thursdays to watch Top of the Pops. It wasn’t just a show, it was a British institution, dating back to the early 60s. Everyone watched it.
I clearly remember sitting on the couch with Ian, watching The Housemartins perform Think For A Minute. Lovely song.
“They’re Christian Socialists,” Ian gushed.
His dad was a minister, it was a major selling point. I went out the next day and bought their album.
To be on Top of the Pops, you needed your single to hit the top 20. Our first two singles had made the top 40 but hadn’t crossed the magic threshold. The third hadn’t quite made it yet, but it was rising fast enough that it looked like it was going to happen.
The producers of the show made the call, it was a go. Everything else stopped. We were whisked to BBC’s Elstree studios (where they’d filmed the famous Star Wars trash compactor scene, among other things.)
Probably the most excited person was Karl, our driver. He kept a photo of his family taped the the dashboard of the tourbus, had told his kids, who in turn had told all their friends at school that the band their dad was driving was going to be on Top of the Pops.
We’d done a lot of TV by this point, but Top of the Pops was different. Beyond its cultural significance, the production was really exacting. There were multiple sound checks during which the camera crew created a precise shot list to match every moment in the song.
When the time finally came to film our segment, there was a guy whose job it was to whip the audience into a frenzy, and he did his job well. As we took the stage, they sounded ravenous, like the crowd at a Roman colosseum.
Suddenly, we were playing. The crowd would not stop screaming at this same level of intensity. The guys and I were exchanging glances, like, What’s wrong with these people? We’d fine-tuned my monitor three times but I still couldn’t hear myself.
About two minutes into the song is when I took my solo. A camera breathed down my neck just over my right shoulder, trained with deadly precision on my hands. The solo I’d invented on the spot the night we recorded with Levon had become enshrined into the song, so I played it every night. Maybe there was some residual energy left over in the studios from having filmed Star Wars here. I used The Force, and my hands just did what they were supposed to.
The end of Top of the Pops is sort of like the end of Saturday Night Live. I was instructed to go over and hang out with some boy band so they could film us making small talk together, as if we’d become bonded over the course of making the show.
Later, we all went out for a celebratory dinner at a fancy sushi restaurant. All the top dogs from the label and management were there, but they were all on their cellphones for most of the dinner, wheeling, dealing, following up, making further plans.
No one in the band had cellphones yet, so it was a little weird on that level. I couldn’t help but contrast this dinner with the ones back in Italy when I’d sat with the promoter, we ate together, and actually talked.
This felt more like a war room than a fancy restaurant.
# # #
We were well-accustomed to flying economy, better than steerage on a steamship, but you still show up feeling like a piece of carry-on luggage.
On the flight back to New York, the label surprised us, treated us all to an upgrade. There was triumph in the air so they were feeling generous. Plus, this was the first tour on which the band had actually made money without relying on tour support from the label, so there was that.
It turned out that Opus 40 had peaked at 31. The segment we filmed would not be going on the air. Though anyone who watched through to the end would still see me on the set for some mysterious reason, chatting with a boy band while credits rolled over our faces.
The only ones I felt bad for were Karl’s kids. They were the ones who’d have to explain to their friends at school why the band their dad was driving wasn’t on Top of the Pops after all.
Whatever class we were flying had a favorable stewardess-to-passenger ratio. Before we even took off, a stewardess arrived and gave Grasshopper and me hot towels and mimosas.
She smiled and looked at the two of us as if infatuated.
“Are you Meatloaf?” she asked.
Hopper and I looked at each other.
“Do we look like Meatloaf?”
“The band, I mean,” she said. “We heard Meatloaf was on the plane today.”
“No,” we said, “we’re not Meatloaf.”
She continued to lavish us with attention just the same, and that was fine with us.
Whether our band was a household name or not, we’d unexpectedly gone from being an indie band to being a pop band in the course of about six months, at least in the UK and Ireland, and it wasn’t even festival season yet.
Most importantly, for the moment, we each had our own armrests so we wouldn’t have to compete for one, and our chairs tilted almost all the way back.
It was our best flight home yet.
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We all need that special someone to show us where the sweet spot on the gong is.
Best one yet! Love it!! ❤️❤️❤️