We gather backstage and The Sweet’s glitter-pop anthem “Little Willy” blares inside the venue: “Dancing, glancing…drives them silly with his star shoe-shimmy shuffle down....” My children’s screeches and laughter bounce off the dark walls and Anvil road cases as they tear about, hair blurring together like a lemon-slushie flung into the air. This ain’t rock ’n’ roll, more like some kind of holy ablution infused on domestic tenderness; watching out for daughter Rickie’s already scraped knees, hoping our eldest Reece corrals little Zuzu’s unbalanced trot a few moments after she pulls off my pregnant wife’s boob to join the absconding action of her siblings.
Such reality surpasses my imagination. It is sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, without the sex and drugs. This show, a reunion of my old band Gentlemen Afterdark, could have been an embarrassing mess if not for some embers still glowing in our guts and the eternal bond of unfulfilled dreams and euphoric remembrances. As our old mutual buddy Doug Hopkins once wrote, “The last horizons I could see are now resigned to memories, I never thought I’d still be here today.”
The old band got new life after Fervor Records took control of our dusty shoe-box catalog and our songs began appearing in TV and film. Notably, the Alice Cooper-produced tune “Open the Door” landed in its entirety on Netflix’s “Stranger Things,” reaching more than 100 million people. In the 1980s, Gentlemen Afterdark filled clubs and did dates with everyone from Culture Club and New Order to The Go-Go’s and Los Lobos. Here we are, three decades after expiration, in a proper 1,800-seat venue, VIP amenities, inside the Gila River Casino outside Phoenix, on a bill with Modern English.
Finally, the full-throttle notes of our extended entrance song “Promises” roar through. The children nestle into mom’s arms.
Us six band members huddle side stage, dedicate the show to the fallen ones: bassists Fred Cross, Kevin Pate and Paul Cardone, drummer Jon Norwood. In the moment I think of our old road crew, mostly all dead now, soured livers or too much hard road, Nino Notaro, Greg Cox, Jon Suskin, our first manager Brian “Renfield” Nelson (suicide). But not guitar tech Arlo, tonight he’s tireless and resplendent in a Fu Manchu and the eternal wrenched élan of Keith Richards, like some flower-print pincushion pulled from the bottom of a dusty sewing box. And that is meant in an entirely beautiful way.
All that’s left is the memory, the music, one-third of the equation. A hop and a hip swivel into my old life, one I’d begun to believe had never existed, so solid the feeling of disassociation, of unlearning and then relearning how to live, stone-cold sober and without the music. But none of it was pointless, none of it without near-death experiences, losses of innocence and loved ones, my personal addictions, the joys, the yarns and wisdoms gleamed. Eleven years in that band and we could’ve all earned sociology doctorates, but, alas, there were no assignments to document our failures.
The stage and the audience thrums with newfound energy, the hips swing, the arms lift; works like the unconscious, a rhythmic act of breathing.
***
Thinking back, the band was a process; based on something that felt like a social misinterpretation. Personally, I was absolutely demoralized in the face of anyone with confidence and eaten alive by inhibition, overly self-conscious of my being. In a weird way, I guess, it is why I became a frontman, an easy, reductive persona based on romantic ideas of Jagger and Bowie. It was a new, mad absorption, beyond the point of nervousness and into a free, permissive state. I dedicated myself 24 hours a day, seven days a week to being a rock ’n’ roll frontman for two decades in long-term bands, Gentlemen Afterdark and later Beat Angels. It crippled at the same time because I never really had to approach anybody in any real way. It is also amped-up despair and self-hatred and led me to drink and drugs. When it all fizzled out, real life, replete with pure human interactions, came on in a cavalcade of sucker-punches.
Unbeknownst to me, through the entryway of music and therefore “art,” I was beginning a ride that would eventually lead me, however terrified, on some kind of creative writer’s life. It nearly killed me, but it also saved, leading me to my wife and our children. Always loved the Budd Schulberg bit from his novel “The Disenchanted” about how a writer or artist “should build slowly through his 20s, start maturing in his 30s and reach his peak in his 50s or 60s.”
The men of Gentlemen Afterdark were all from middle- or lower-class backgrounds, and all steadfast and pugnacious in our antipathy to real life. We aped styles of our heroes and, in my mind, it was a means of escape; the Clash, Bowie and Alice, Roxy Music, early Japan, Stones, Dolls, The Slits and the Pistols were all stylish motherfuckers, glam in a truer street/performance sense, and dressing how we dressed was a deterrent, gender-bending and subversive as hell, especially in Arizona all through the ’80s and ’90s. The ’80s were a terrible decade to play through. We were laughed at and had our lives threated anywhere we went. Affirming our personality crises in the face of absolute intolerance and blind compliance.
We had five rehearsals in the days leading up to the reunion, inside Tucson’s fetching, vintage-tinged Dust and Stone recording studio. Our drummer Winston and his band XIXA, graciously allowed us in. The sessions were basically awful. Barry’s car broke down in Phoenix driving down from his isolated highway-side place in Northern Arizona, missing rehearsal time. It didn’t matter. On electric violin and other instruments, my brother is close to genius. All he does is play, sometimes busking streets for coin.
I hadn’t really sung in years, hard time remembering lyrics, the naïve stabs at sadnesses as most were, and had zero control over my voice. My wife, who rises with our young children at sunup, had trouble waiting up for me to return at night. How rock ‘n’ roll. Also, gear snafus, shrugging apologies following a near-fistfight or two, a childhood trauma coming out to play, logistics shrouded in shitty communication, and so on. Hey, just like the early days.
The skinny, intelligent Winston A. Watson Jr., is as he always was, a comic fill with a bat’s ear for drama, regaling us with stories as drummer for Dylan, MC5, and others, a rational inflection with a gifted raconteur’s command of the language, all upheld absurdly by his strange left-brain expertise as a studio designer and electrician. Winston rolled in from Los Angeles, where he divides his time with Tucson when not touring.
My calm, better-looking younger brother Stuart, who lives in Brighton, U.K., flew in from Mexico City. Stuart creates real-time onstage graphics for arena and stadium shows on world tours, and works with everyone from Enrique Iglesias to Ed Sheeran to Green Day. After Gentleman Afterdark split up, his band Super J. Lounge signed to U.K. indie giant Creation Records, made a brilliant album. I always felt safe with Stuart and Barry as siblings, and when Stu stands to my right, low-slung guitar, legs akimbo, we are back in our family living room, having our heads blown off by Ramones and Sex Pistols.
Fill-in bassist Harry McCaleb, a guitarist first, picked up the bass for this show, learned the parts and held down the role with aplomb. We knew Harry from Phoenix, decades ago, he played in Algebra Ranch, Undertow, Crushed. He is quiet, and funny when he opens his mouth. He is one of those guys who seems to see all, know all, and say little.
Robin Johnson, who lives in Tucson, is so precise he is the band’s de facto musical director, born to be a rock ‘n’ roll guitar hero, appears tired at rehearsal from his day job, and whatever kneecapping variables life is tossing his way.
Despite years apart, even away from my two brothers, it shocks how little we’ve become strangers. As kids in the band, we cried, promised, forgave and carried one another in our pockets. So we put together 40 minutes of old songs.
***
Folks arrived from all over to see us, Denver, Detroit, Los Angeles, even Ireland. Countless beautiful faces from the past crammed to the front of the stage. The years suddenly bottleneck and spout forth like one of the million free long-neck Buds we downed years ago in the bars, this one shaken and aimed. Yet, it felt larger, I suppose, beyond nostalgia. Corny as it sounds, it was as if we connected to some complex emotional or psychological energy that could only pass through us. No, the stage is not absolutely trashed when we finish the set. I am not broken and bleeding. We are miraculously able to pull this off as aging men mostly in suits, so a natural human restraint played favor.
Dated as it is, rock ‘n’ roll was meant as a kid’s game. So, indeed, with my children and pregnant wife at the side of the stage, watching, laughing, pointing out their uncles, a kind of life-affirming alchemy arose in the moments.
The band will perform its last reunion Labor Day weekend in Tucson, HOCO Fest at Club Congress. Date and time TBA.
