Recently a good friend pointed me in the direction of The Blue Jean Committee documentary (Parts 1 & 2), a selection in the Documentary Now! series. It’s brilliant and made me think about my other favorite, er, documentary, This Is Spinal Tap, which also got my noggin’ wrapped around how rock’n’roll both as a culture and pertaining to individual humans, is ripe for depictions of absurdity. Other creative ventures don’t really come in for the same sort of send-ups. Actors come closest as targets of fictional mockery (Waiting for Guffman comes most immediately to mind probably because I was just staring at Christopher Guest’s face on IMDB) but visual artists and writers not so much (maybe because there’s not a lot to do with individuals staring at blank canvases/paper). R&R musicians have always blurred the line between bad behavior’s absurdity and excitement. Living vicariously through stories of TV sets thrown out windows and jet planes filled with licentiousness. I came of age reading and being thrilled by those moments, thinking in some part of my brain “Now that’s living” and “Fuck, yeah, rock’n’roll.”

Yet by the time I reached a level of grown-up where I was making a living in that business, it quickly became clear I could only handle a chaos-adjacent kind of existence. Of course, that’s why journalism made sense. I would only be visiting. When I was at SPIN, this visitation level of safety was sometimes put to the test. During my first year at the magazine, one of my coworkers spent time with the Butthole Surfers and wrote about the debauchery from such a deeply personal level that for a minute we wondered if we’d need to airlift him off the ranch (p.58). While others on staff went the distance into the wee hours with various and sundry music types. I wanted that too. But I also wanted safety, and it was all too obvious in too many situations that the boys, while not necessarily beyond the reach of danger, were in a far safer place than I would be at 4AM in a hotel room or bar. Not to mention, when I tested the boundaries of what worked for me, I pretty quickly discovered that I didn’t have a C.Love-level desire for mental or physical destruction or even a beyond-average appetite for adventure. As Chauncey Gardner said in Being There, “I like to watch“.

I knew this detachment the very first time I was given a pass to go backstage and meet a band I loved: The Psychedelic Furs when I was still in college circa mid-late 1980s. A friend had finagled some all-access malarkey. I had no reason to be there except as a girl who wanted to be in their presence. It was all twinkly and magic but also weird and disjointed. Yes, there were the musicians in post-show dishevelment. A mix of emotional high and I-am-a-golden-god attitude that rppled through. There was no destruction of the backstage area. There was a party at a house we went to. Again, no breaking of stuff that I remember. There were drugs, but nothing crazy to my memory. The thing that has stayed with me, along with the headiness of being invited to a party as a plus-one to a popular band, is that the LA Times music journalist Robert Hilburn was there and I thought “I want to be him someday” and then, in essence, ten years later I became my own version of him.

Naturally, nothing ever looks the way you think it will once you get there. This is a good thing. In no universe would I have wanted to end up naked on a bearskin rug in some grotty run-down shack while a band nodded off around me (see Rolling Stones documentary and/or the excellent 1971: the Year That Music Changed Everything for detalis on that kind of hoo-ha). Instead, the bands I knew could and did act extremely silly, but not as insane as I’d read about in the Creem magazine of my youth. Maybe it was the time. The nineties scene that I covered had a slightly more conscientious vibe with bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Alice in Chains acting stupid and self-destructive often enough but in less outward-facing ways. Standing sidestage while Kurt destroyed things was a level of breathtaking that bordered on end-of-times and Eddie literally swinging from rafters while bandmates and audience hoped to gawd he didn’t lose his grip and … die … was an adrenaline dump&pump but yet the melee would come to a close, the show would end, I’d go home or to a hotel if on the road and begin normal patterns of breathing again.

In some universe, I felt one half-step away from the hell&hiJinks of bands like Motley Crue (never met ’em) and the like. Once at a dinner with Greg Dulli (Afghan Whigs), David Lee Roth stopped by. His energy was definitely tuned high as if we all expected him to turn over the table or at least jump on top of it and do a high kick. It was actually weird given the rest of the folx there, and even especially those who actually could be considered rock stars, were pretty subdued, but Mr. Hot For Teacher was working a vibe that suggested he could become the performing monkey we might expect him to be. Then he pulled out a joint, depite having just been busted in Washington Square Park for buying a $5 bag of pot (now that’s absurdity). By the time I met other musicians whose notorious reputations had gone before them, they were either half-heartedly kicking at the tires of trouble (Metallica. Therapy. I had a very civilized conversation with James Hetfield while doing shots of Jägermeister until he then almost got in a fist-fight with someone. But only almost. Instead, he ordered another shot) or had hung up their jousting sticks altogether (AC/DC’s Angus Young sitting around a table at a posh Italian place with record executives talking about current events while wearing long pants).

By the time my career in music journalism had ended, I’d come to understand myself a bit better. I like guardrails. I’m someone who, if I’d had to live the scene in Spinal Tap where they all get lost trying to get to the stage (“Hello Cleveland“), I would have been so freaked out about getting in trouble with somebody/everybody that I might have been weeping. I always felt one step away from getting fired and therefore losing my career/housing/etc., this at a place where other writers were charging blow-up kayaks on the company card and not turning in their stories on deadline because they were in jail. But still, I felt if I was late on any level, that was it for me. Finito. I was someone who did a dry run to an interview location so I’d know how long it would take and therefore not be late. Obviously, this was absurd given on-time in the music industry was at least 60 minutes after the appointed hour. The members of They Might Be Giants were the only people who I remember being early to an interview. But my problems with telling (R&R) time were my secret (along with the fact that I didn’t love the Beatles sufficiently).

In the end, the endless entertainment I’ve had around and inside the rock’n’roll is an ongoing treasure trove of memories (witness I keep pulling them out for this blog) along with a deep appreciation of the entertainment its absurdity brings on the regular. My dream triple feature pretty much covers it all: The Song Remains the Same, This Is Spinal Tap, The Decline of Western Civilization Part Two…not necessarily in that order. The highs, the lows, the silliness. For those about to rock, I salute you.