City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works Dissertations and Theses City College of New York 2012 The Fantastic Life of Rock Stars MacAdam Smith CUNY City College How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cc_etds_theses/456 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] The Fantastic Life of Rock Stars by MacAdam Smith advisor: Linsey Abrams April 20, 2011 Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts of the City College of the City University of New York The Fantastic Life of Rock Stars Chapter 1 Dust particles glow as they dance in the light above my head; I can imagine myself at the Beacon, haloed by the stage lights, in front of 3,000 packed seats that fan out from the stage. Heads crane from the balcony, knees twitch, a chain of excited coughs. I pull a string into tune. The crowd waits, would wait for hours, just to listen. We are about to begin an event, a shared experience of collective spirituality tapped through primal desire for music. I am the crier, they the devotees, ready to sing along to my naked intimacy, to the feelings and melodies that make them think of me as an intimate. Adjust myself on the stool, take a deep breath. Tap my foot in rhythm: 1 and 2 and— A glass breaks behind the bar and a drunken giggle follows from someone near the far wall. I hold my eyes shut, trying to keep the illusion. “Is he gonna fuckin’ play something already?” It’s gone. Broken up and spinning in the dust. It goes as well as it can, really. A forty-five minute set, by myself in the back corner of Crosstown Bar on 8th and Avenue B. There are maybe fifteen people here. Ms Reilly manages to rouse most of them to clap when they see me packing up. It’s been worse. Crosstown fills one long narrow room, kept dark and smelling of late-night bodies and stale beer. Three tables are clustered in the back by the stage; Ms Reilly sits at one of them. Most of the crowd is huddled around the taps, not willing to let the alcohol too far from sight. A high shelf circling the room is lined with dusty liquor bottles, lined up like participation trophies, and a muted TV in one corner shows a ball game. The bar itself is nicked and scarred with drunken slurs and vulgarities, inebriated witticisms carved into the wood. I make eye contact with Ronda, the bartender. She has thick arms, sleeved in tattoos from her shoulders to her wrists. Sometimes I fantasize about her pummeling me out back with those meaty limbs. She hands me my payment, a domestic pitcher and a glass. I take it over to sit at Ms Reilly’s table. 1 “Well done,” she says. “Well done. That was great. It must be hard to win this type of crowd over, but I think you really had them by the end.” I wonder if she believes it. “I really like that last one.” She begins humming the song I closed with, breaking into snatches of lyric when she can remember them. She’s seen me play it many times. The light domestic is tasteless but goes down quickly. Ms Reilly has a glass of something pinkish, which Ronda must have despised making. “Your fingering sounded good.” “Oh?” “Yes. I can hear you downstairs practicing. I can tell your fingering is improving.” She sips from the glass of pink. “Thanks.” I scan the bar hoping to catch someone looking at me, someone wanting to talk to the singer, maybe another musician to talk shop. But everybody seems too involved in their own worlds to pick up on the opportunity they’re missing. Ms Reilly puts down her drink. “Where’s Alex tonight?” “Out with some friends.” “That’s nice.” She looks around at the bar too. Ms Reilly is probably fifteen years older than anyone else in the room, a little larger than most. Her stretch jeans and sweatshirt too comfortable for this dank crowd. “So, do you have any other plans for the evening?” “Just you, Ms Reilly.” “Oh ho, how sweet,” she chuckles. “But I should head back. Going to do some work in the morning, and this is late for me.” She pushes away from the table. “Are you staying out?” “For a little, yeah.” “I’ll see you tomorrow then. Well done tonight. You get better every time I hear you.” She pinches my shoulder. “Goodnight Robbie.” “’Night.” I watch her leave. I sip on my beer. I stare at the bar. Will someone come by and have a drink with the moody artist sitting by himself, brooding over a half empty pitcher? I go over the set. One progression tripped me up during “Letters from Home.” It’s a difficult few chord changes but I like that it’s hard to play. Keeps me focused, 2 compliments my abilities as a songwriter, composer of chords and melodies. My voice dipped flat a couple times throughout, but never so bad that anyone at Crosstown Fucking Bar would notice. But who am I? From deep inside a life created out of struggle the tormented sounds of emotional discharge erupt. Such ideas cannot be spoken but must be sung at rock tempos, throbbing 4/4 time. Passions that must be played with a heavy backbeat. The songs are not the problem. Then what is? Eventually the pitcher sits empty in front of me. Alcohol and idyllic musical fantasies numb the doubts. The depressing atmosphere of Crosstown, and all the bars like it, are a hazing into the rock and roll cabal. You’re looking at the future of popular music, peons! For now I play to deaf ears, proving to the gods that I am worthy of my gifts. John Lennon looks down at me with a smart-assed grin. But my toils make me thirsty, so I cry to Ronda, emboldened by the brew. “Ronda,” a name for the titans, “another one.” “Manager said only one this time. You have to pay now.” “Fuck that,” I say and lean into her. “I won’t tell if you slip me a pint.” “No.” “Fine then. You know, if you’re not nicer to me, darling, I won’t ever come back.” “There are five more of you that we rotate in once a week, and a thousand other dicks with their guitars waiting in line. You see the crowd you bring in?” She gestures to the besotted few. “Go ahead and walk.” I lick my chops. “Enough with the foreplay. You and me, outside. Let’s go a few rounds, bare-knuckle brawl. I’ll spot you the first hit.” “You’re dreaming.” “I won’t lie, I’m not even going to fight back. How’s that? You can just shove me around a little.” I wink at her and somewhere in there she has to love the attention. All women do. She gives me the finger and takes someone else’s drink order. A good time to get my gear and exit “Nice set, mate,” a guy at the end of the bar in a British accent. 3 “Thanks.” “Cheers.” He turns back to his drink. Smiling now, I make my way out into the city. My crowd has gone international. Chapter 2 I want to know everything about you. What’s Jersey City like? There’s a cosmopolitan ambiguity to living along the north Jersey coast. A sense of there but not there. Freneticism leaking into the water from New York. Winds that gather out in the Hudson River, like excited children who can’t move in straight lines, colliding at intersections in eager, howling dogpiles. Upturned umbrellas abandoned in gutters, women holding down their skirts, flags saluting outside of office buildings. The din of traffic and construction, caked grime, the homeless man sleeping outside the 24-hour deli. All of this beating against the front rows, looking on to the acrobatics and pandemonium of the great show caterwauling across the river, the City, whose steel monoliths tent-pole the sky for the rest of the earth to wonder and gaze upon. It’s almost too grand, that Gotham City, that Metropolis. People grow loyal to their neighborhoods in order to form a communal identity: the Village, Astoria, Chelsea, Bushwick, Woodside, Harlem, Williamsburg, NoHo, SoHo, Park Slope, Flushing and on, ad infinitum. I watch from the crowd thrown up along the Jersey coast, the adopted children of the Kings and Queens, we will forever and always live in the shadow of the golden child Manhattan, that busy little island. Envious, and reliant on the wealth that pours out from it, Jersey City—my home—is one moment filled with self-proclaimed proud New Yorkers and the next with Jersey boys and girls, glad that the Hudson offers a geographical dividing line. We’re a moody bunch, a byproduct of urban sprawl, working within a fortress of prosperity. But at the day’s end, after toiling in the employ of Manhattan, we must come home and sleep in a zip code that begins with a 0 instead of a 1, with all the feelings of inferiority that that entails. I rent a basement studio apartment in a townhouse in JC (the place to be) from Ms Reilly, who lives and works on the floors above as a professional poker player.