(WINNERS: (Important things first: I decided to choose TWO winners, in honor of two sunny days in a row here in foggy San Francisco. My sister chose them from a sort of cyber-hat...and they are...
Ranurgis and Tammi!! Everyone say "yay!" for Ranurgis and Tammi! Send me your addresses, girls, and tell me whether you'd like a copy of THIEF or BATS. And thanks to everyone who came by to chat—it was fun!!! Hope you come back and do it again!)
A few years back I dragged some friends with me to the Great American Music Hall, a cool old mid-sized music venue with balconies and tables here in San Francisco, to see an afternoon show of a local band called the Movie Stars. The Movie Stars were sort of…well, an alternative country band, for lack of a better description. They were whimsical, they rocked a bit, they had accordions. Most importantly, they had a song called “Julie Anne,” which tickled me for probably obvious reasons.
But when we got to the club, it turned out I’d gotten the day wrong: the Movie Stars weren’t playing. We were told another local band we’d never heard of, American Music Club, was playing, instead. We all milled about in indecision on the sidewalk outside for a time, and then finally, under the reproachful gazes of my friends—I mean, I'd dragged them all downtown, after all—I flipped a coin. Heads, and we would pay to see this band instead.
Heads it was.
And thus my life was changed by a coin toss.
We ducked into the darkness of the club and once we got settled in at a good table in the back and had beers in front of us, I started watching this guy who was already standing on stage, twisting the mic stand upward to make it taller. Roadie, I mused absently. He looked like…well, someone’s Uncle Bob, I thought, slightly uncharitably but still amused with myself. Beetle-browed, dark-haired (thinning on top), slight. He was wearing a beige short-sleeved shirt that looked an awful lot like the top half of my uniform when I worked at Round Table pizza as a teenager.
But when the band began filing out onstage, each of them casually settling in with their instruments—guitars, bass, keyboard, drums—Uncle Bob planted himself with some authority in front of the microphone. And then the music began to sort of swell up around him…lovely, interesting, promising music…and he opened his mouth to sing and—
Every single hair on my body stood up. I stopped breathing.
It was one of those moments. BAM. I knew instantly, instantly, before they’d played more than a few notes, that I would passionately love this band, this singer, this songwriter.
This was my introduction to Mark Eitzel and American Music Club, the Godfathers of “Shoegazer rock,” their torch now carried by the likes of, oh, Coldplay and their ilk, probably. Their music was gorgeous, mostly mid-tempo, moody, but it was Eitzel's voice that got to me. It was an enormous, reckless thing, soft as scorched velvet one moment, stampeding the next. And the lyrics—he wrote them—were incredible: brilliant, biting, heartbreaking, funny. This short guy with the unibrow genuinely blew my mind.
I still played music at the time, and I now had a new idol.
AMC enjoyed pockets of pure reverent, rabid, adulation in the Bay Area, across the country and the UK, and Mark Eitzel was voted songwriter of the year by Rolling Stone Magazine in 1992, and every now and then I get a delightful surprise when I’m listening to BBC 6 online (British alternative radio) and hear a song by them thrown into the mix. But American radio never seemed to know what to do with American Music Club, so they never really became widely known in the U.S. It wasn’t that they were exotic or inaccessible…just perhaps difficult to categorize.
Anyway, they were local, and I went to almost all of their shows, and every now and then I saw Mark Eitzel in audiences at shows for other bands. And I once found myself standing right next to him in the audience at a show.
And I didn’t say a thing.
Now, I’m a little shy. People who’ve known me for a while simply don’t believe me when I say that, but it’s true. Which was part of the reason I clammed up, big time. But in a way, too…I wanted my icon to remain an icon. I liked having an icon—someone I admired from a distance, someone who represented something to aspire to. Who was more an ideal than a person.
I think it was Bruce Springsteen who reflected about not necessarily wanting to meet Elvis Presley, because he was worried knowing him as a person might interfere with the pleasure he took in Elvis’s music. Still, now I wished I’d said something to Mark Eitzel. But what? “I think you’re a freaking genius?” or, “Thank you for just being?” LOL.
As an author who’s still building a career, I love to hear from and talk with readers. It’s pure delight to hear that your book gave someone a few hours of pleasure. So I’m getting a little better at overcoming the shyness-in-the-face-of-icons thing, but I’m still working at it. At my very first Literacy Signing a few years ago in Dallas, I saw Jayne Ann Krentz, so I took a deep breath, thrust a copy of THE RUNAWAY DUKE into her hand as a gift, babbled something breathlessly and then, I think, I basically fled. It’s all kind of a blur now. I do remember leaving her gazing down at my book in a sort of bemusement. LOL. And JAK and I now have the same agent, believe it or not. Still, I’m pretty positive I wouldn’t exactly relax in her presence instantly should we meet again tomorrow.
I think I would like to be an icon someday. And even then, I still want to have icons of my own. People who make me babble or feel shy.
Have any of you guys had a chance to meet your idols? What was it like? Do you want to meet your idol, if you haven’t? What would you say? Do you think Springsteen had a point—that knowing someone personally might affect the pleasure you take in their work?
