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Interviewing bassist stories
- Thread starter Arthritic_Tom
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This will push the limits.
An L.A. story:
I'd gotten to know a working bassist. He got regular gigs, but his band was unsigned. I met him at a show. I have no doubt that he wanted to hang out with me because I wrote for Bass Player, but that was okay. I wanted to hang out with him because of his gorgeous wife.
She was just my type: small, dark-haired, funny, brilliant, quirky, and a trained dancer. I'll call them Roy and Linda. Here's the moment I fell in love with her. We were sitting in their kitchen smoking cigarettes, Linda and I on the floor and Roy on the counter. She wore faded jeans, a long-sleeved men's button-up shirt untucked, with a T-shirt under it, and her big, black motorcycle boots. Indescribably hot.
I told them I often put my interviewees at ease by referring to myself as a tiny cog in a vast machine, much to the disgust of my last girlfriend, who constantly reminded me that I didn't have a real job and there were men ten years younger than me who made ten times as much money.
Linda looked back over her shoulder at her husband and said in wide-eyed, campy earnestness, "But we're failures, too, aren't we, Roy?" and he nodded gravely.
One night we went to see Slingblade. I hated the movie so much it made my head hurt, so I put myself to sleep to escape it. I woke up hearing in my right ear a breathy murmuring of my name, "Tom. Tom. Tom," spoken with such tenderness, understanding, and acceptance. Whispered with the sort of affection you hear only a few times in your life, it was an incantation that flooded my body with a swirling, scalp-tingling rush. I pretended to remain out a little longer, until she had to settle her hand on my shoulder. She didn't shake it, she just left it there, warm and soft, and then I had to open my eyes.
Such a smile, from that lush-lipped, cat-eyed, classically Semitic face, only inches from my own.
We went to a Thai restaurant and ordered, and then something happened that caught me so much by surprise I honestly believed I'd instantly gone insane, as though I'd been dosed with some top-secret, colorless, odorless psycho-gas. For no reason I could determine, Linda suddenly began flaying her husband alive, dissecting him, exposing and examining his every fault, foible, and shortcoming.
"You loser," she hissed. "What, are you going to cry now?" She threw out her hand, appealing to me as her witness. Her eyeballs looked hot and glistening but not with moisture. They looked varnished instead.
"Just look at him. He makes me sick. You make me sick, you know that? Huh? I gave you the best years of my life, I gave you my youth, and you took it away and gave me nothing in return. You lied to me, you sick f*cker, you b*stard. You selfish son of a b*tch, you sh*t. When are you going to get off your *ss and do something with your life so I don't have to work myself to death for you? When are you going to do your share, you f*cking loser?"
And he sat there mumbling, "Oh. Okay. Sure. Hmm? Ah. I guess. Well. Huh." It was like one of those old Beat poetry recitations, with one person reading an endless torrent of words and the other playing a tom-tom. Dinner came and we silently ate. I was dizzy with shock.
When I left them at their house an hour later, they were cuddled together in a chair. She sat on his lap, her arms around his neck, giving him kisses on the side of his forehead and calling him her "little pooter-wooter" in a squeaky cartoon voice. He leaned back with his eyes half-closed and a big sloppy grin, his chin thrust forward and the corners of his mouth pointed upward in an expression of idiotic contentment.
He looked like a perfect imbecile; all he needed was a dunce cap. But the real imbecile was me, because it took me years to disengage from them.
Wow! Sounds like she's Bipolar or something. Not really normal for a person to come out of left field in a scathing assault on someone to cuddling up with them within an hour. Then again .......
Hi Tom, just another one enjoying the hell out of this thread, thanks for contributing.
I could listen to your LA stories all year, but just in case you're looking for any tangents, here's a couple of things for you to chew on if you feel like it.
- Are you still thinking of using a pen name for your novel? I thought you said that earlier, pardon me if I have that wrong. If you are, please don't - there's no good reason for it, you've done your name proud and no doubt will continue to do so.
- Any thoughts on the music business in the post-internet age? I'm against pirating and I want artists to make the money they deserve, but it kinda seems a lot of the lousy behavior you witnessed was the result of an equation that's going extinct.
- p.s. some phrases/sentences stick in your head forever. I'll probably be an old man still chuckling at "he belly-blapped the moustache man". Beautiful!
I could listen to your LA stories all year, but just in case you're looking for any tangents, here's a couple of things for you to chew on if you feel like it.
- Are you still thinking of using a pen name for your novel? I thought you said that earlier, pardon me if I have that wrong. If you are, please don't - there's no good reason for it, you've done your name proud and no doubt will continue to do so.
- Any thoughts on the music business in the post-internet age? I'm against pirating and I want artists to make the money they deserve, but it kinda seems a lot of the lousy behavior you witnessed was the result of an equation that's going extinct.
- p.s. some phrases/sentences stick in your head forever. I'll probably be an old man still chuckling at "he belly-blapped the moustache man". Beautiful!
Look at that, we really have lived parallel lives. Been there Brother Tom, good to be out.
Thanks for the kudos TinIndian and Tom, I wasn't fishing, just sharing. Let the catharsis continue . . . an L.A. story . . .
Thanks very much for all you said.
I'll reveal something here, just because this has gone over very well and because I feel you have the right to know why this is the swan song of Thomas Wictor the writer:
I have an implacable Internet stalker who reveals every personal detail of my life every chance the person gets. I'm surprised it hasn't happened here yet. I guess the threads here are very closely monitored. The nature of what the person reveals won't cause any of you to think any less of me, as they're details of what was done to me rather than what I did to anyone. So even if it happens here, I don't care. And, I'll be honest that I'm way, way beyond caring what other people think of me at this point.
But trying to sell fiction is a different story, particularly since much of my fiction will be based on my life's experiences. Writers write about what they know about. If I were to write a successful novel under my own name, I rather than my work would likely become the focus of attention. More importantly, other people would be dragged into it, and I can't have that.
If you've never seen the movie Harold and Maude (it's overrated), there's a scene that sticks in my mind: The couple is sitting on a dock, and the young man gives her a gift. I forget what; maybe an antique coin. She tosses it into the bay and say, "There. Now I'll always know where it is."
I'll be out there. You may not know it's me, but I'll be out there in that vast literary ocean. You'll always know where I am.
While it's true that the behavior of most people in the music industry could make you think they're causing their own problems, the people doing the pirating have never met most of the people whose work they steal. But you've given me an idea. My next post will be about someone I've mentioned here before. I'll show you what a truly class act he is.
A very classy bassist:
I knew my goose was pretty much cooked at Bass Player when they stopped giving me tickets for the annual winter NAMM (National Asociation of Music Merchants) show in Anaheim. This happened after the second visionary editor was replaced by the guy who killed all my articles.
After the first year I didn't appear there, I got a call from Bryan Beller, asking me why he hadn't seen me. I told him Bass Player hadn't given me a ticket.
For the next few years, until I asked him to stop, Bryan Beller sent me NAMM tickets without comment. They would just appear.
I asked him to stop because I knew Bass Player would never let me interview him again, and I didn't want to become an embarrassment for him. Bryan would never be embarrassed of me personally, but as he rose ever higher in the music world I didn't want his peers to ask him why he continued to associate with that useless has-been.
And that, my friends, is the kind of mensch Bryan Beller is.
I knew my goose was pretty much cooked at Bass Player when they stopped giving me tickets for the annual winter NAMM (National Asociation of Music Merchants) show in Anaheim. This happened after the second visionary editor was replaced by the guy who killed all my articles.
After the first year I didn't appear there, I got a call from Bryan Beller, asking me why he hadn't seen me. I told him Bass Player hadn't given me a ticket.
For the next few years, until I asked him to stop, Bryan Beller sent me NAMM tickets without comment. They would just appear.
I asked him to stop because I knew Bass Player would never let me interview him again, and I didn't want to become an embarrassment for him. Bryan would never be embarrassed of me personally, but as he rose ever higher in the music world I didn't want his peers to ask him why he continued to associate with that useless has-been.
And that, my friends, is the kind of mensch Bryan Beller is.
But MUCH better looking. He stayed with her because she was just drop-dead gorgeous; she brought in all the money; and they had that dynamic where the make-up sex was the reason they fought.First thing I thought of...
She stayed with him because he let her treat him like that. Most functional males would bail after the first such assault, but I saw her do it to him literally dozens of times.
The bassist knew tons of commercial photographers in L.A., so he often attended photo shoots of MAWs (model-actress-whatever) so he could ogle the girls.
He said at these photo shoots two things happened, every single time:
1. At some point, the MAW would get hungry, since they all starve themselves, so she would open her purse and take out a tiny can of tuna fish, the smallest size, like a can of cat food, along with a pink plastic spoon from Baskin-Robbins and wolf down the tuna. Always tuna, and always pink plastic spoons. Every single MAW did it.
2. During the shoot, every single MAW would say, "I'm not wearing any underwear!" and lift her skirt to show them, making a cute little high-pitched sound, like "Oopsie!" It was 100 percent consistent.
That's why the bassist would go to these shoots. It would be another reason for him to fight with his gorgeous wife, and then have more wild make-up sex. He called it "hate sex."
An artful gesture, but seriously what the hell?
Try making your mortgage payment with the knowledge that there's a valuable coin out there in the bottom of the bay, rusting away...
I've been asked why--since I can write--all of this happened.
Two reasons, one suggested by my 84-year-old mother just a couple days ago when we were talking about this thread.
Mom told me that the people who cut me off at the knees did so because they realized that they'd have no input in my work. If you ever go to a zoo where they have pandas, you'll see that pandas mark their territory by rubbing their butts all over everything, because that's where the scent glands are.
Most editors are like pandas. They have to rub their butt all over you to make sure everyone knows that you belong to them. What I wrote was so different from the usual fare that instead of ramming their panda-butts into my face, they decided it would be easier to Gaslight me out of the business.
The second reason is the usual corporate-culture thing that makes most institutions dysfunctional: They hire only like-minded people. If the person running the show has a certain approach, they hire only people who agree with them.
When the whole operation starts going under, they can only do more of what they know, which in turn speeds up the toboggan ride straight into hell. We've only seen the same story 19 billion times, so of course it's always a surprise when it happens to them.
Two reasons, one suggested by my 84-year-old mother just a couple days ago when we were talking about this thread.
Mom told me that the people who cut me off at the knees did so because they realized that they'd have no input in my work. If you ever go to a zoo where they have pandas, you'll see that pandas mark their territory by rubbing their butts all over everything, because that's where the scent glands are.
Most editors are like pandas. They have to rub their butt all over you to make sure everyone knows that you belong to them. What I wrote was so different from the usual fare that instead of ramming their panda-butts into my face, they decided it would be easier to Gaslight me out of the business.
The second reason is the usual corporate-culture thing that makes most institutions dysfunctional: They hire only like-minded people. If the person running the show has a certain approach, they hire only people who agree with them.
When the whole operation starts going under, they can only do more of what they know, which in turn speeds up the toboggan ride straight into hell. We've only seen the same story 19 billion times, so of course it's always a surprise when it happens to them.
Well, the point of the flick is she's old and about to die anyway.
And you just destroyed my poignant, carefully crafted metaphor! You maniac! You blew it up! Damn you! Damn you straight to hell!
I'm not Tom, but I am a military historian. IMHO, that show is a crock of nonsense. The weapons recreations are decent, but the conclusions, comparisons and generally the whole premise are ridiculous.
Ha ha!
Try and see it from my point of view. I'm saying I want to read a book and the librarian is telling me "You can never read it, but I can promise you that it exists. You're welcome."
But I'll stop harping on this. I asked, you answered. Thank you.
You can still read the book. I'm pretty sure that when I'm finally able to get my act together after putting all this lingering poo behind me, my fiction will make a splash, and those of you who've read this thread will recognize my style and think, "I'll bet that's Tom."Ha ha!
Try and see it from my point of view. I'm saying I want to read a book and the librarian is telling me "You can never read it, but I can promise you that it exists. You're welcome."
But I'll stop harping on this. I asked, you answered. Thank you.
In fact, I'll put hints in that only the people who've read this thread will recognize. That way you'll know.
And there's a certain beloved performance artist out there who OWES ME A G-D PUBLIC COMMENTARY ON MY BASS PLAYING.
I know, I know: Building the tension.
Mission accomplished, for the love of Zeus!!!!!!
I know, I know: Building the tension.
Mission accomplished, for the love of Zeus!!!!!!
Took the day off to get some home projects completed (I can do this...I'm the Boss
).
I find myself checking back to this thread often. I find TB counter-productive to my "work" sometimes...but sooo much fun.
Keep it up, Tom. Great stuff.
).I find myself checking back to this thread often. I find TB counter-productive to my "work" sometimes...but sooo much fun.
Keep it up, Tom. Great stuff.
You hit the nail on the head right there. And, as has been said so often already, look at where BP is now. I read your articles and that magazine religiously in the late 80's/early 90's, but I haven't read a single word in close to 7 years. BP often gets trashed on this forum for all the reasons you've mentioned; only commercial artists, pandering to advertisers, fluffy interviews etc... They've lost sight of who their target market is.
You were blessed to be thrown off that ship before it sank.
Last year my wife offered to get me a subscription for Father's Day or birthday or whatever and I very politely declined the offer. Not really worth the paper it's printed on.
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