can i tell you a story? it's late '83 or early '84. i am living in poverty in london with my gf (eventually wife) rachael in a bedsit in chiswick. she is cleaning nice british people's houses illegally, i am busking on the tube and writing for melody maker (i'm in there like every week, sometimes with multiple pieces. but they are paying...5 lbs a pop or something? more for a big score like when i interviewed cyndi lauper, or would have interviewed chrissie hynde=my crush except she slammed the dressing-room door on (not in) my face at the hammersmith odeon. that only made me love her more, but made it 5 again.) anyway, they give me a plum assignment: fly to paris for two days, interview inxs and see two shows (they had the #1 right then i think), and see how far you can get inside the scene. ok, they were supposed to be these insane australian guys, the hardest-partying pretty boys the world had ever known. plus i actually thought they were a good pop band.
i was not necessarily the person you'd choose for this. i did drink and do drugs, but there was nothing i hated like some big party scene; i prefer to drink alone, actually, etc. this is fine if you're a record reviewer. not if you are doing big tour features and the like. but they were not only flying me to paris, they were paying me like what i'd made for the last 40 pieces or whatever. not saying no.
somehow i hooked up with the dude from new music express on the plane over; we might have known each other from gigs. he had gotten the very same rap: here are the passes. we talked to their people. do not go to the show and then back to the hotel. get the real story. he was this geeky-tall dude fresh caught from oxford. we actually looked at each other with some fear.
so, we cabbed over to the gig at a theatre. i think it was one of those things where the stadium-type band plays like five straight nights at a middle-sized venue. good show, just what you were expecting, very pro. michael hutchence was a pretty paradigm lead singer/showman/sex symbol type, kind of the next iteration of jagger and tyler. i was going to write about that. so, we go backstage. not only are they glad to see us, they were drinking whatever was the best champagne available in france and doing coke from these little mounds (if i had ever done coke, and if i had done it then, i would describe it as not quite like any coke i had ever done before, like if i had ever lived in bethesda with a coke dealer, say). that was trivial, but also there were a bunch of the world's most beautiful women in there, like nothing i had ever seen in my fucking life, seriously. and no other guys but my boy and me.
plenty to go around! said hutchence in his aussie thing. oh har har! i am trying to enter into the spirit of the thing, but to begin to form the picture think about how me and my boy look in this context. i was wearing clothes from london thrift shops (wait rumble shops? they had a term). i cut my own hair without a mirror before i came because the old lady down the hall would use the bathroom for two hours. i am 5'7" and not the very worst in maybe a gradschool context, but i am standing next to hutchence and co. with women whose sudden appearance would flummox any heterosexual man. i'm 22 (oops let's make it 24; i felt 14). also, just for the hell of it, sex was already not going well with my darling.
we split up into two limos? one crit to each limo with some band guys and plenty of girls? we hit multiple stops; i have no idea; socialites' special parties where there's margaret trudeau or something? it got to where we were the most hilarious thing ever, like they said, we brought our writing staff! they say they want to do a biography of michael! he's a redneck american! he was at oxford last year! he's 5 feet tall; he's 7' tall! aren't they scruffy? let's see how far they'll go! we did our part, because we were easily the most verbal people in the region and we were competing madly with each other; the whole way over it was music history trivia and assessments of the gigging bands in london etc. he was so wrong about everything. anyway: my god don't they talk! it's hilarious! let's see if we can shut them up!
after that it is a complete blank. i have this vague notion that they literally rolled me out of the limo in front of the hotel. both me and nme guy missed the gig the next night. but the paris paper said they played great (my boy read french, the fucker). we had collapsed into one room somehow and we sat there groaning, thinking about how to approach our editors. we had this notion that we could help each other fabricate stories that would like be long enough and seem plausible and still have some hijinks etc. we offered to write them for each other; oddly enough we each had little bundles of our own clips along, and we decided that - though each of us regarded ourselves as unique geniuses and disagreed about every pop act who ever played - our prose styles might be indistinguishable for general reader or editor. we thought it would be fun to try; well we were trying to comfort ourselves, like curling up and rocking back and forth for awhile. like we thought we'd tell michael, and he'd still think we were hilarious, and he'd invite us to the next tour, and we'd remember this time and write genius articles.
i think he had a girl who was still at oxford, or maybe u london. both were worried about our drinking, as i recall; maybe we'd both promised to be temperate and chaste. we had to figure out some fabrications there too, and we were helping each other. we could confirm each others' stories and meet each other's lovelies! we never did get any of the pieces to fit, like how we missed the plane, and why the stories looked wrong when they came out and so on and we just sort of gave up eventually over lunch in london. we were each engaged in covert self-examination for clues as to what might have happened with whom. then we drank a little more and passed out and missed our plane back in the morning, as foreshadowed.
i made 5, but he sent me out again as soon as i returned because he did like the review of the show. he just sat there shaking his head as i kind of vaguely drew the picture. he'd seen it before.
hutchence died in 1997, by auto-erotic asphyxiation. it has rather a mythological quality. that is the origin of my personal life telos, the single principle to which my very soul has been dedicated ever since, as often stated on this blog: never die of auto-erotic asphyxiation. the obits are excruciating.
