Wah-Wah

 George Harrison wrote ‘Wah-Wah’ hours after quitting the Beatles. As the story goes, the documentary seems to make clear that he just stood up and said, “I’m out of this band,” and went home. Sometime that evening, as the story is told, he wrote “Wah Wah.” Paul McCartney had given him a wah-wah pedal, a new and wild thing at the time, and evidently suggested he try it on whatever they were working on during the “Get Back” rehearsals. But the diminishment he felt from Paul, and I guess John, reached a point where he just said, “Fuck it. I’m out of here.” Imagine a situation where things got so fucked up that some group endeavor would lose someone like George Harrison. How bad does it need to get? How can you let someone that precious feel unwanted? And yet that moment came. Look, I know almost nothing about the Beatles, and I’ve written about how that doc and my emergence into more Beatles and particularly George Harrison music has done such a number one me, but I can’t still help wondering how things between friends get to this point.

            Things got to this point with Jeff and me in Lifter. It was always us against the world. And we were rabid and vicious and snarling in our outlook. Especially Jeff and me. Johhny was always the calm, cool one who, with a rare word, would bring us down to safety or at least something approximating sanity. Johnny was the glue. Johnny was the anchor. Johnny was our Ringo. He talked so much less than Jeff and I did, who were full of proclamations and opinions and the complete dissolution of the grey area. Johnny would say a couple perfect words, and we’d settle down. Trying to hold these two super ego maniacs together seemed his calling. And clearly, or maybe not so clearly, I’m not saying that Lifter was of the same caliber or force of kill per round that the Beatles were, but we were a band, and we were friends, and for a few years, we were each other’s entire worlds. We did everything together. Those years were the most powerful I ever felt because I lived them within a team. A tribe.

            At some point, as it’s prone to do, heroin fucked everything up. It didn’t take long. I’ve told you that virtually all of the Lifter years I experienced completely sober, but there were relapses where I’d use and get strung out for a couple of weeks or maybe a month before some tour. And Jeff would too

            I met Jeff at Impact recovery house. Same time and place that I met Melinda, who this entire part of my life revolves around like a cold asteroid clinging to the gravity of a star. He was already a counselor there. He’d done his time. He’d been trained, and in I walked full of tears and broken promises (all of them made to myself more than anyone). He truly helped piece me together. He was a few years younger than me but was my assigned counselor. God only knows what we talked about. My only memories are of walking into his office and feeling happy that I had some time with him. Finding time to talk to counselors there was a big deal. It was a chore. You had to talk to all of them, and it was such a struggle to book a half hour here and there, given the hundreds of people there. So I just remember smiling and closing the door and sitting in the chair and watching him put down his pen and turn to look at me. All memory fades to black after that.

            At some point of which I’ve written about I came to choose going out and finding a job rather than being trained as a counselor which was how Impact operated and so I went forth and have told you about finding a job and hiding my complete destruction of some task which was meant to result in acrylic fish tanks, my failure such a monumental fear that I just bailed and walked out and vanished and as such I had to leave Impact and it’s here where the life I’m writing about started and it sprang forth with such uncertainty but also such wild hopes for the future including loving Melinda or making music or some such vaporous faith that I’d be ok no matter what happened and as I left and started this period of sleeping on friend’s couches and occasionally having sex with some of them and going to AA meetings and eventually finding the series of apartments that I was constantly moving in and out of and collecting the things we do in such a life like the lime green couch from the thrift store which I toted around like a talisman for years and was sleeping on the day my manager called me, by way of a pleading warning to stop getting high, that Kurt Cobain had died and all of these things merged into what became the life that I sit here and write about and I don’t think it’s special or even particularly rare but it is MY life and it all really seemed to start with walking away from Impact and leaving Jeff behind with no sense of how quickly and deeply we’d become intertwined.

            And so I trudged forward. I started working back on videos and, soon, TV commercials, the things which would be my source of income and community for decades despite the brief disappearance during the Lifter years. I went through the Melinda phase, and at some point, I knew it was time to really take a shot at making music. Making a record. Becoming a rock star (it never happened). So at some point, as I was living underneath Melinda, listening to her having sex with other guys and playing Helmet as loud as I could in the hopes of drowning out the sound of her bedsprings and moans and also just filling my head with an overwhelming field of sound to try and stupefy myself (being sober was not helping me here or maybe it was saving me from untold moments of regret) Jeff left Impact and needed somewhere to stay. We’d become very close friends by this point. These are where all the Lifter record songs sprang forth. He moved in, and we set up a makeshift bedroom in my kitchen. I can’t remember how long he lived there or when it changed. At some point, I just had to get out and away from Melinda because it was destroying me. Every bedspring squeak I heard cut another little Exacto knife carving into my chest and stomach in some runic language that, when finished, would say, “You’re unwanted.” I had to get out before the figure, the trench, the gouging was complete. And it wasn’t like she was fucking an army of different guys every night. It was actually rare, but when it happened, it was torture, and I’d set about carving myself up. I found an apartment in Echo Park and asked my Dad for some money to move in. I think it was 1800. It was the first of many times my parents subsidized my wayward life. And so I left and lived in some Melinda-free environment but never felt free of her. Whole weeks would pass where I’d be like a statue in bed, just smoking and drinking coffee and watching People’s Court wondering what she was doing. But, I started writing songs. And these songs were visceral and contained the fucking maudlin pain of the moment. Why are we so ashamed to feel pain? God. I know I did. I’d write these songs and feel so good about them but alternately feel like such a pussy for not being immune to this pain. We kill ourselves over our non-immunity to pain. At least I did. But this is where all the Lifter record songs sprang into being. In the little sunny living room of my apartment in Echo Park

            By then, I had taught Jeff bass. Taught is surely a convenience for describing what happened. I just wanted him in a band with Johnny and me. And so I gave him Birthday Party and Gang of Four records and just said figure this out. These two, Tracy Pew from the Birthday Party and Dave Allen from The Gang of Four, are the Northern star of bass players. Figure them out and how they’ve learned when NOT to play, and you’ll do fine. We started rehearsing and playing shows like madmen. We’d play anywhere. We were driven and, like I said, rabid towards everyone around us. We, or at least I, felt feral. I felt like a wolf slaughtering bunnies in summer fields and rearing up in triumph. I felt safe. And while the Melinda malaise surely continued, it lessened and, in time, just became this thing I sang about rather than the thing that kept me sleepless for months.

              At some point, Jeff and I moved into an apartment upstairs within this Echo Park courtyard two-story apartment building. It was a two-bedroom. I toted the lime green coach up there and whatever bed I had at the moment. And, of course, my guitar and amp. Those formative years of Lifter and the heady swarm of praise that started enveloping us as we pushed forward anchored us and also led us astray to perceived new freedoms which we’d been promised but surely hadn’t received yet. We’d signed a publishing deal for what seemed an ungodly amount of money, and we were somewhere on the side of signing with Interscope, but we really had very little money. We were always putting off the kindly old man landlord with promises that we have a check coming in.” At the time, I had, still do, a great friend and great writer named Allen MacDonell. At the time, he was the executive editor for all of Larry Flynt’s world. He’d send me a huge box of every porn mag they published each month. Like this crazy care package of sex and glossy photos of pussy, and they’d just languish about the place and fill up the stairs. It seemed so cool to get the thing, but maybe you’d look at one magazine and jerk off, and then it went into this pile of porn that grew each month like some single-celled being. I know it was there when we finally left.

            Jeff and I were always in various straights of using and strung out. When I first started writing about Lifter, I wrote that it was all done mainly in sobriety, but now I’m deluged by so many instances that we’d give up the ghost and just get high for days or weeks. Often together, very ritualistically but often in secret from one another. An animosity started gently building that I’m not sure we ever contained.

            But like I said, it was gentle and slow and almost imperceptible for so long. And we were still being buoyed by these tsunamis of praise and promises. And yet we sat there, the record written, and we dutifully played every show we were asked to play, and we waited. We waited to record, which kept seeming to be delayed. We lived in that sunny little Echo Park apartment surrounded by porn, half-written songs, drugs, occasional friends, and my meeting and consummating my love for Stephanie as the Melinda power finally abated.

            We waited. We waited for the call to just up and move to Boston for the winter. I know that that call came after I vanished from this apartment to go to rehab, which Interscope paid for. When I got out, I moved in with Stephanie.

            The green couch stayed. I never saw it again. I never saw any trace of that life again short of some clothes I’d taken to rehab and my guitar, amp and pedals, which I assume were kept safe by our manager Scotty. That chapter just slammed shut, and then things were never really the same with Jeff and I. We still had years of us against the world ahead of us, but the little fractures you can’t ever really repair had started, and you couldn’t put a finger on it. It felt like two huge statues that had somehow been connected and split and were slowly drifting away from each other in the mud. Glacially. Slowly. Unstoppable.