Chapter Twenty-Five

New York City, December 2004. Robert Quine's memorial, Shams reunion and Wreckless Eric at Maxwell's. Are things looking up, or about to get more complicated?

Songs in this episode:

• Shams File Clerk Blues, live at AS 220 , 1990 (you can watch the whole show  here https://youtu.be/H9uXsljPGUE?si=CNdTWP0v10BWrM7m)
• Rode Hard from The Sugar Tree
  
  

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Chapter 25. December 2004. It felt like the whole of downtown NYC had come out for guitarist Robert Quine's memorial at Seabee's Gallery. Quine died at the end of May that year. I'd been holed up in a hotel room in Portland between gigs when I read the news. New York City had never felt so far away. Now I was back on the Bowery, a place that used to feel like home. The trash and bums sharing sidewalk space with restaurant equipment stores. Lately it was feeling strangely tidy, like they were sprucing the place up. They were. The Giuliani days had given way to the Bloomberg era, construction and overdrive, stop and frisk, bike lanes. It was one of those perfect, brisk days you get in Manhattan, not yet fully winter, the light between the buildings still sharp. Lenny Kay, who'd been like the pied piper of what became punk, anthologizing the psychedelic era with the Nuggets compilations and accompanying Patty Smith from the beginning, had asked my old band, The Shams, to participate in the tribute. Lenny loved the Shams and produced our first and only album. We'd come along to the scene of our underwhelming CMJ Halloween appearance over a decade past. Back then, each of us had dressed as a male character we admired or aspired to be. Sue, Purple Rain era Prince, Amanda, a cross between Joey Ramon and Willie Deville. I'd been a country rock era Neil Young, or less charismatic J.D. Southern now we dressed as ourselves, feeling like everyone else at the event, the time really was moving faster and faster. Quine had been an older musician in his mid-thirties, back when he'd played in Richard Hill's Voidoids, before anointing albums by Lou Reed, Matthew Sweet, and Tom Waits with his lovingly vitriolic playing. He died at 61. The walls of CB's gallery were stark white, a contrast to the graffiti covered original CBG that would hang on for another two years next door. But the spirit of the original club was alive in the gallery that afternoon. It didn't feel right to see so many denizens of the night, everyone wearing black, in broad daylight, but people looked good in a way I wouldn't, until years later, understand still held the bloom of youth. Even those who lived hard seemed dewy in retrospect. Maybe those were even the folks who aged especially well, as years of abuse tended to halt time. I felt sad I never took Quine up on his offer to record with me. No offense, but some of your chord changes are a little um stock, and I think I could take them away from that, he'd said when I'd run into him at St. Mark's Guitars before my move to Nashville. I'd been flattered, flabbergasted, that he'd listen to any song of mind beyond the ones he'd played guitar on when the Shams made our album in 1991. Quine in the studio back then had been like a visit from an elegant poltergeist. Now in 2004, it was beginning to sink in that our heroes and friends' tenure on earth wasn't guaranteed. Kirsty McCall, Joe Strummer, and Joey Ramon. I could still count on one hand the influential people gone from my life before I had a chance to fully register what they'd meant. And the biggest name of all for me, anyway, Olympia Ann Costanzo McMahon, my mother, deceased almost a year to the day of the Quine Memorial. Mourning her had been drawn out over the course of the 15 years she'd lived with a brain injury, and will continue till I'm gone, too. But I preferred not to dwell on the loss. In my mid-40s, I didn't want to think about mortality. I still just wanted to make my mark and help my daughter get where she needed to be. Along with the Shams appearance at the Quine Memorial, singing Richard Hell's Time to the crowd who all knew the song and felt it deeply in this sad new context, we were performing a whole set together for the first time in ten years at one of Yola Tango's Hanukkah shows. Ira Kaplan, Georgia Hubbley, and James McNe had begun their tradition of playing each of the eight nights of Hanukkah at the Hoboken Club, Maxwell's, a few years back. The shows were full of surprise guests, band reunions, and star turns. This year, Ira had tracked down a special guest to perform the same night as the Shams, Reckless Eric. Scott Schinder, who'd burned me that greatest stiffs album some years back, had managed to find a copy of Eric's new autobiography, A Dysfunctional Success, and mailed it to me in Nashville. It unlocked a little of the mystery of the guy I met briefly in Hull, who kept threatening to come see me play when I was over in the UK, but never showed up. The book was charming and funny, full of detail about growing up on the south coast of England, art school in Hull, and his musician beginnings through his time on and then off of the stiff label. But it left out some of the other things I wanted to know, like what kind of girls he liked, and how exactly did you become his girlfriend? It felt like serendipity that we'd be playing in Hoboken on the same night. We'd connected in that room above a pub in Hull nearly five years ago. Maybe it was his green guitar or the magic of playing his song together, and the way he told me I was doing it wrong. It just seemed we were meant to be friends or more. I heard he was involved with somebody, and I was just extricating myself from a difficult relationship. I'd lost count of how many nights I'd spent at Maxwell's, either as an audience member or performer. The place had always been a steamy beacon in what used to feel like a far-flung corner of the hinterlands, i.e., not New York City. But Hoboken was becoming more and more developed. Condos, gyms, coffee shops. Outside on that Friday afternoon, the weather had turned, a snowstorm was blowing in, the cozy front restaurantslash bar started filling up with diners and drinkers. Passed the kitchen and restroom vestibule, then around a corner, the shams unpacked our stuff on the floor in front of the stage. I kept one eye towards the door, wondering when Eric would appear. Would I recognize him? He arrived brushing snow off himself, just like the first time we met. There was an atmosphere around him that was hard to pin down, an Oliver twist, boyishness and poignancy. I told him I had his book, that I was amazed to know a person who'd written an autobiography. I saw it as a terrifying act of bravery. I hoped he'd tell me how he did it. I'd been writing an online diary, but still had hopes of writing a book myself. I'd made a few attempts at getting started, but in my current situation, any kind of writing felt too risky. The necessary elements of honesty were constrained when another person was measuring your every word. Eric asked if the Shams had worked on our backup vocals for his cover of Neil Diamond's The Boat That I Row. We had, and rehearsed it on stage with him and the band. He was impressed by our chops, especially when Sue busted out the organ solo, Note for Note. You're all so professional, he told us. Probably the first time that word had ever been spoken in the Shams direction. This band had been so important in my development as a songwriter and musician. I would always feel like a carefree girl when Sue and Amanda and I were together, remembering the hours spent hanging out and rehearsing, blending our voices, aiming for ideas and notes we couldn't reach, watching Oprah, passing around paperbacks by Ann Tyler and Tony Robbins, recipes for cornbread, then sitting at the kitchen table with my daughter Hazel in a baby seat in the middle, while we laughed and argued about the best way to get somewhere, anywhere, with our harmonies, thrift shop aesthetic, freewheeling covers, and the faith the other girls put in my songs. After dinner in the front bar that transformed into a rambunctious episode of This Is Your Life, with friends appearing from across the years, the Parsons art school punk days, early band and married life and parenthood era, temp years and solo artist Genesis. I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the winter air and wet snow outside. Charles had arrived. It was his right to be here, he said. I reminded myself that my actual friends way outnumbered Charles, that there was life ahead of me, and here was reckless Eric looking at me like he wished we could go off together. It turned out he had a girlfriend who cast her own heavy shadow. But once the show began, none of that mattered. The shams goofily shuffled on and harmonized our way through 40 minutes. We sang only a dream, down at the Texaco, Fowl Clerk Blues, our wistful chemistry creating a timeless atmosphere that dispelled messy midlife concerns.

SPEAKER_03 9:49

Let me read it rearrange my fingers. Hello, honey, can I holly back the bus handed me a stack of papers and it wants to power out of the way? If you could see this message, it comes to match. Well, the tape is the tea which is the two.

SPEAKER_00 12:21

He sang Paul Simon's America so heart-wrenchingly, the whole room stood riveted. I thought of Reg Presley and the Trogs, or Davy Jones singing Daydream Believer. I even forgot Charles was there, looking out of place in a tweed suit jacket and crisp shirt. The very combination I'd found erotic back when we started up. At the end of the show, when everyone was packing up, I said goodbye to Eric as he put on his parka. Our souls reached towards each other like two people on a dark train platform, one boarding an express going in that tunnel, the other taking the local in the opposite direction. Then I went back to a Manhattan hotel with Charles, and the same old litany started up again. Your friends are losers. Without me you're nothing. Stop this nonsense and stay with me. Why didn't I grab my clothes and take my guitar and head for my brother Michael's apartment only twenty or so blocks away? I could ring the buzzer and sleep on his ancient dark red vinyl sofa that always felt like home. Had I become addicted to defending my life, Charles and I had sex, along with music, my only power over him. And I finally fell asleep, thinking, I will get away from you. I have my songs and my friends and my family, and you can take back all the gifts you insisted I accept from you, but you can't have those. A few nights later, I went alone to my old East Village neighborhood to see Eric play a gig at the lakeside lounge. The place was packed. Eric Solo commanded the crowd easily. His humor and honesty and brutally loud guitar goosing people to laugh and cheer. I saw the woman I'd noticed at Maxwell's hanging around him looking cool, New York superior and very proprietary. Through the big playglass window next to the stage, I could see people watching Eric from the icy sidewalk on Avenue B as he hunched over his amplifier, creating squalls with the micro fret. It was like those photos of Jackson Pollock throwing paint on a canvas. When he finished, I gave him a wave goodbye and stepped out of the steamy bar onto Avenue B. That's an artist, I thought.