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I M P R E S S I O N S
It’s All Part of My Rock and Roll Dream
by Tim Lemire The phone rings, and it’s Ace Frehley, lead guitarist for Kiss. Drowsily, in a voice leaden from heavy drinking, he hits me up for a favor: Fill in for him in an arena concert Kiss is giving that night, only hours away. This is so Ace. I tell him, "Look, Ace, I’d love to, but we got two problems: one, I play rhythm guitar, not lead guitar; and two, as much as I love Kiss, I don’t know the chords to any Kiss songs. I couldn’t fake my way through ‘Rock and Roll All Nite.’" On the other end of the line, Ace groans. "Oh man," he says, "that don’t matter. You get up there with the lights, the fireworks, the whole thing, and the fans’ll never know the difference. They don’t give a shit. Besides, you got Paul and Gene to back you up on guitar. C’mon, man, just this once. I am so wasted right now." "Ace, I don’t even have a costume." Ace groans again. "Oh, man, who cares. The fans won’t care, so why should you? They’re stupid, anyway. C’mon, bro. Just wear jeans and that t-shirt you got when we played Boston for the Psycho Circus tour." Reluctantly, I say OK, and Ace, brightening, tells me he’ll courier over a costume and even some lucky pins and rings for me to wear. Ace says he owes me big time. Helping me dress and prepare for the concert is my father-in-law, but, as usual, it’s taking him forever. He’s got a good heart, my father-in-law does, but my wife’s family are the pokiest people I know. "Dave, come on," I say, "I’m gonna be late!" It’s not that I don’t like my father-in-law, it’s just that he tried to make a go of being a filmmaker, an artist and an entrepreneur, and his commercial video business never really provided for his family. His wife had to go to work, and she’s still supporting them. The last thing I want to be in life is, well, him: an artist wannabe who failed his family and failed his craft. Now, my father-in-law is looking over the contents of the package Ace sent: another Kiss t-shirt, enamel pins, rings. Wow, he says, look at this stuff. "Dave!" I yell at him. "You’re gonna make me late!" The next thing I know, I am running around the outside of the arena, trying to find the rear entrance, and as I pass doorways that give a clear view to the stage, I see the concert has already started. Shit! I find the entrance: The doors are glass, as are the walls, giving a clear view to a backstage party and buffet, lots of men and women have a royal time. Manning the door from the inside is Martha Stewart. Seeing me approach, she gives me a dour and skeptical look. She opens the door a crack. I try to charm her. "Martha," I say winningly, "how are you!" Unmoved, she demands, "Who the hell are you?" "It’s Tim Lemire," I tell her, "I’m filling in for Ace tonight." "Yeah, right," she says, starting to close the door. "No, no, wait!" I cry. "Bill Aucoin should be in there! Just tell him Tim Lemire is here, and he’ll vouch for me." (Bill Aucoin was Kiss’s manager when they went from being unknowns to superstars virtually overnight, in the early 1970s.) "Get lost," Martha says, closing the door for good. She heads back to the hors d’oeuvres table. Falling to my knees, I hurl my arms to the sky and release a slowed-down, elongated wail. Noooooooooooooooooooo! Determining what dreams mean is an inexact science, but not one bereft of logic and sense. If, like me, you consistently dream of celebrities — in my case, mostly musicians and actors — chances are good you are an ambitious person, driven to aspire, and the celebrities who appear in your dreams are people with whom you identify. Either you see yourself as being like them, or you desire to become like them. I don’t know how many people dream of celebrities (evidently, not enough to keep Gary Socol’s 1997 collection, Julia Roberts on Mars: And Other Dreams About Celebrities, in print), but I would suspect it would be hard not to dream about them, given how our entertainment culture pushes celebrities on us at every turn, heralding Bono as an international statesman, Ethan Hawke as a novelist, and Arnold Schwarzenegger as a politician. We wear J. Lo’s clothing, we eat from George Foreman’s grill or at Dick Clark’s restaurants, we read Oprah-certified books, we apply Michael Jordan’s cologne, and we sleep on Martha Stewart’s sheets. Ah, to sleep. Perchance to dream. About Martha Stewart. Or Sting, or Yoko. Midway through college, I was doing pretty well, arts-wise: I was writing short stories, starring in plays in a contemporary theater troupe I co-founded, singing and playing guitar in coffeehouses, and I had a weekly cartoon in the campus newspaper. Then one night, I was walking across an abandoned Red Square on a gray winter’s afternoon. A trio of figures in trench coats approached: One of them was Sting, and he whispered in my ear that I should start writing poetry again because I was pretty good at it. It’s only as I write this now does it occur to me why the dream took place in Moscow: Was Sting a member of The "Secret" Police? Did Sting have a secret? Did I? As nice as that encounter was, seeing how much I admired Sting as a musician-singer-actor-sex symbol, it can’t compare to the time I dropped in on my good friend Yoko Ono. They were great people, the Lennons: the music, the books, the art films, all those Beatles movies, the lithographs — they did it all. The Beatles had inspired me to drop orchestral instruments for the guitar: I worshipped them. So en route to an art gallery (my favorite way to spend a day in New York City), I visited Yoko and showed her my drawing portfolio, which I thought she’d enjoy. As I came out of that dream, I experienced that slow, dawning disappointment that attends the realization that no, I’m not best friends with Yoko after all. I’m still a drone in a big city financial firm, dreaming about becoming a famous polymath. The Kiss dream revealed to me the wisdom (or lack thereof) of the ways in which I’ve tried to realize that dream. Ace Frehley calls me; I don’t try to call him. Meaning? I wait for opportunity to come to me. (That can be a long wait.) When Ace offers me the chance of a lifetime, I demur, citing my lack of qualifications (essentially, the worry I may not have what it takes), and Ace tells me not to worry because you can get away with faking it and the audience won’t care. (Scratch any artist, and you’ll find the fear of being discovered as a fake.) My father-in-law as the embodiment of my fear of failure is obvious: I fear that he (it) is slowing me down, making me late for my appointment with destiny — and it turns out I am late. (At the age of 35, shouldn’t I be famous by now?) And there are the famous glass doors and walls (a glass ceiling, turned on its side?), through which, enviably, I see the party underway, but who is there to stop me? Only the incarnation of white bread, middle-class domestic propriety: Martha Stewart. Who better to stand between me and my becoming a member of Kiss? I try the old first-name-basis charm: doesn’t work. I try the gambit of relying on someone already on the inside: in this case, Bill Aucoin. Perhaps if I get friendly with the right people, they’ll just let me in on the party, right? Wrong. Trust me, I’ve tried this before: buddying up to famous writers, businesspeople, etc. The door is closed, and the party goes on. At first, this ending depressed me, until it occurred to me that perhaps there’s another way into the arena besides trying to sneak in the back. I never even tried the front door. Lucky pins and rings, the right costume (the right "look"), knowing the right people, and indeed, passing myself off as someone I’m not (Ace Frehley) may not be the way to go. Talent, dedication, hard work — those frustratingly eternal necessities — may be the only things that will get me into that arena and onto that stage. Another backstage story. This time, I make it backstage. The big joke about to be played on Bostonians crowding into a tiny music club is that when the MC says the band that night is "just a local band," everyone’s about to find out that he means Aerosmith. Without a hitch, I am backstage with Joe Perry and Steve Tyler, and what a green room these guys have: It’s spacious, multi-level, and decked out in gold and red; very Chinese Buddhist, very inviting and relaxing with throw pillows and lanterns. Joe and Steve are sitting on the floor. (Joe, of course, has his shirt wide open to show off his abs.) I am sitting with them, taking notes, not as the buck reporter I used to be, but as an established writer composing a piece for a major magazine like Rolling Stone. Joe Perry looks mean, like one of the kids who used to beat me up in grade school. (Perry is, in fact, a nice guy: In real life, I talked to him a long while about coffee when, out of college, one of the many low-level jobs I worked was in a coffee bar.) I begin writing, describing my surroundings, and amazingly the prose is flowing out of me whole cloth: I’m astounded at myself, at the luxurious language I’m using to capture every little detail and flourish — but something Steve Tyler is doing distracts me. Steve is sitting cross-legged on the floor, making Chinese calligraphy with a brush and ink. He’s writing a simple vertical line of pictograms on a small, thin scroll. The scroll actually looks like a bookmark. "This is my new hobby," he says, not looking up from his work. "I do it to relax before a show. It focuses my mind. I like it." "Very nice," I say, though I wish I knew Chinese to read what he’s writing. A noise from the nearby door: Here come Brad, Joey and Tom, carrying their instruments. Hey, fellas! How’s it goin’! Good to see you, too! Terrific! I wake up. So the Boston boy makes good, hanging out with the other Boston boys who made good. So what if Aerosmith was playing in a small music club? They were still Aerosmith, weren’t they? The size of the stage may not matter. Indeed, the backstage green room was bigger than the stage: The interior space was more spacious, more colorful, more peaceful, than the space set out for the crowd. Those indecipherable Chinese pictograms, symbols: Perhaps I don’t need to understand them literally. Perhaps I only need to focus, as Steve Tyler was doing, on something simple and plain, the opposite of the purple prose I myself was writing. In the dream, I was writing describing my surroundings, looking outward, while Steve Tyler, the truly successful one, was looking down, and inward, very likely writing something deeply personal, straightforward. Every day, I dream of and work at becoming a famous artist, someone who, like my idols, has a hand in a number of creative fields and has a long career, but the methods I’ve tried so far aren’t making me the main character in my own dreams. Perhaps the rock stars are trying to tell me something. Tim Lemire is a Boston-based writer and a MFA graduate in creative writing (fiction) from the University of Michigan. His previous articles can be found here. Related Sites |
