Give Me $5 And I Will Blow Your Mind

Back in early April 2003 I put on a show at the legendary CBGBs.  I set up the show because one of my favorite bands at the time was coming to the States for a short tour from Holland and I wanted to make sure that I got to see them in a proper venue.  A few friends and I decided to follow them for the next few days to Pittsburgh and then to Dayton with a pit stop in Cleveland sandwiched in between.

We had spent a couple of hours in Cleveland a couple of years before when we followed another band on a tour for a couple of days.  The Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame was the primary driving force in each of the trips.  Outside of the Hall, we only got a small taste of Cleveland’s downtown and put the idea of coming back in our heads.  This time around the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame had a special exhibit on the Ramones because of their upcoming induction, so a trip seemed mandatory.  

We pulled into Cleveland in the early afternoon on a Sunday and checked into our budget hotel. The concierge recommended a certain street with a few different pub type options for food.  We set out, tired from multiple nights of shows and multiple days of driving.  We stopped at the first place we saw and had a pleasant meal in a fairly crowded pub.  There was an excitement in the air about the Indians opening their season the next day.  We left the pub and walked around downtown by the stadiums.  You got the sense of just how important sports are to the city.  The stadiums were immaculate, a stark contrast to most of the other buildings. 

The sun started to set and half of our group wanted to call it a night.  We headed back to the hotel to drop them off and to pick the concierge’s brain as to where to head for a night out.  Without missing a beat he recommended the Warehouse District.

The Warehouse District sounded perfect!  In my mind it’d be Cleveland’s proverbial Williamsburg or Long Island City, a run down area turned around by people who saw potential in a blighted area.  With a Xeroxed copied map in hand Chris and I headed out into the unseasonably cold night.  The wind off the lake cut through our thin jackets and hoodies, chilling us to the bone. 

We popped our heads into the first promising place, which was right off of the water.  It was empty.  Strange we thought but it must not be a very good place.  Two doors down we look through the glass to see one person at the bar and two employees.  Stranger still.  Like dominoes we dropped by place after place to find that the bar with three people was by far the most packed of any of them.  You must be thinking, well it must have been pretty late and people have work in the morning so that’s why this hip and happening area must be deserted. That would be a fair point except that it couldn’t have been later than 8:30pm.  It started to dawn on us that either Cleveland sucks or we got some back advice as to where to go out. 

We wandered some more hoping fate would land us somewhere memorable.  We turned down a desolate street, really every street was desolate but this one was different.  A down on his luck man in his 50’s with a bushy gray and white beard, filthy Starter Cleveland Browns windbreaker and Chicago Cubs hard plastic batting helmet, put down his sign and walked up to us uttering a phrase I will never forget. 

“Give me $5 and I will blow your mind.”

Yes, there were two of us. Yes, he had a good 6 inches on me.  Yes, he had a good hundred pounds on each of us.  Yes, that’s a terrifying thing to hear when you are in an unfamiliar city, on a dead end block and no other witnesses around. 

Chris, who was either unintimidated or extremely intimidated, reached into his pocket and handed the guy whatever change he had. 

“Good enough.  Go down the block and make a left and you WILL see Michael Jordan.” 

We walked away from the guy, laughing and speculating about the encounter.  I was convinced that the old nut job must have been referring to a Michael Jordan cut out in a Footlocker or some picture in a Michael Jordan Steakhouse.  Still, what else did we have to do?  In the hour and a half of wandering the city the most promising place had three people inside and two of them worked there. Down the block we went and promptly made a left at the corner.  Like every other street in Cleveland it was dead.  We scanned the storefronts and upper floors of every building for any two dimensional images of number 23 but there was nothing. The wind picked up, we pulled up our collars and our hoods, trying to retain any heat.  From the unknowing, casual observer, we probably looked like two vagrants; shivering from the cold, completely under dressed for the season with raggy looking clothing, unshaved from a few days on the road.  We kept looking with every second more and more convinced that the guy was at best delusional and at worst certifiably crazy. 

From behind us was heard the clacking of heels on the concrete and a young woman excitedly yelling into her cellphone.

“Oh my god!  Michael Jordan is in my restaurant!”

Our eyes lite up and I ran towards the lady as fast as I could screaming, “Where?!?!”  Hopefully the euphoria she was feeling from her previous experience overshadowed the fear that I thought she must have felt as an unkempt stranger rapidly approached her car on a desolate street.  She pointed to the corner and back away in an effort to keep her from hanging up and dialing 911.

We backtracked to the corner and through the floor to ceiling windows of an Italian restaurant there was Michael Jordan in a suit sitting with three other guys in suits.  We waved, he waved back, we went back to give the man the rest of his $5 because our minds were most certainly blown.

The story should end there but the epilogue is the cherry to this wonderful Sunday.  We found the man where we had left him and reached into our wallets to give him the five American dollars, which he was earned and was entitled to.  He literally burst into song.  It was the catchiest of tunes that we sang for the rest of the tour. 

Divorce

I’ve never been married.  Come to think of it, I’ve never been a really bad, drag out, knock down break up.  Almost all of my experience with divorce has come from television or movies.  Both mediums do a pretty good job of running you through the basic process and what the participants feel but until recently divorce didn’t click for me.

Last week I quit my job.  I understand your confusion as to how divorce and jobs go together.  Up until this job, I would have been in the same boat.  A job has always been a job to me.  You go in, you do your thing, you clock out and move along with your life.  It was a means to an end and that end was earning enough to do what you truly enjoyed doing with your time.  Maybe being in a position of power, where every decision came through me or maybe because of the relationships, this felt different.  The workday didn’t end at 5pm, really it didn’t end at all.  It would be a mental 24 7 of constantly thinking, analyzing, worrying about what to do next, how to get better.  Long story short, it was a commitment.  A deep commitment that was emotional, physical and mental.  Much like a marriage. 

In any successful relationship (I guess, it’s been a long time), you need a strong commitment along with a willingness to compromise, a devotion of time, energy, understanding that you are in something that’s beyond yourself.  You morph into something that’s bigger than just you, a team of sorts.  A pouring of yourself into a container that’s bigger than what held you before.  It’s an extension of self that comes with growth and change and hopefully a larger worldview. 

Or at least that’s what I’ve come to hope that relationships or marriage is, or strives to become.  Like I said I’ve never been married.  I have more recently thrown myself entirely into a job.  Such that the job would overtake any and all other responsibilities, and cause me to actively not do things so I could and would be ready for work the next day.  Is that what adults do all the time?  In any case, I had completed reworked my priorities, schedules, and social life.  The one thing that I kept doing was performing every Wednesday, and looking back on it now even that feels like it was part of a cliché marriage; the one night a week where you get to skirt your responsibilities and go out with the guys.

All of these choices were made willingly, mainly because I like the idea of being a part, an essential part, of something bigger than you.  A team, a partnership.  Also, I like being good at things, finishing things, accomplishing things.  This was an opportunity for all of that to come together and have everyone benefit.  Given a long enough period of time, your identity gets muddled (much like this post) and the defining line of you vs. you as a couple or you as an individual vs. you in this partnership/collective, becomes blurred.  It becomes difficult to see where one ends and the other begins.  As long as everything is going well everyone is happy and things progress as normal further blending that line.

For me, things started to head south until I quit.  It became interesting to see the moment where the fracture of the collective ended and how I felt like I was in a dark room reaching out wildly trying to find the edge of that blurred line to regain a sense of individual self.  Seeing something that you had invested so much time and energy into, felt like a divorce.  The whole breaks down into parts, into individual pieces; pieces, which in all likelihood will never come back again to form that particular whole.  

After giving my two weeks notice, the divorce analogy came to me.  It came to me when I was going through my usual routine but things started to change.  Tasks and questions that I would normally handle would be given to other people.  It was like the parents had decided to get divorced but hadn’t told the kids yet, so each was acting slightly strange and slowly deviating from the routine.  The discomfort of being there reminded me of what it must be like for couples who split up but still live together.  The routines are similar, but not the same even though all the characters are.  That cohabitation makes the situation far worse because neither side gets to move along.

Maybe I’m being melodramatic about a job.  Maybe I’m not.  I’m not quite sure just yet, time will tell.  I do know that all of those scenes in movies and on television make a lot more sense to me now than they did two weeks ago.  

Tony Aliprantis or how I learned to love punctuality

As a teenager I was in a band.  Like most teenage bands we were terrible and looking back on it we were probably more terrible than most bands.  Some people found us charming mainly due to our enthusiasm and naivety. In particular there was one man who took a liking to us. A man we found in the phone book.

We were sixteen and after about a year of practicing we had decided that the world needed to be able to take our music with them wherever they went.  A central theme throughout our career was that we had no idea what we were doing nor how to go about doing it.  We would make countless mistakes but we would learn from them.  A pretty great mistake that we made was to find a place to record not by asking other bands or going to different studios that recorded albums that we liked, but rather to grab the yellow pages and picking the first studio listed in our neighborhood.  We probably should have been tipped off that this was a mistake when we called the number listed and it wasn’t the studio’s number but the electrician’s who wired the studio. 

Instead of looking for another studio we decided to hoof it over to the address listed and book the space with a whopping $200 burning a hole in our band fund.  The doorbell for the studio was a red button mirroring any spaceship’s self-destruct button.  The owner or operator of Ragnarok studios was Anthony “Tony” Aliprantis.  Tony looked like he walked out of a metal video; with a panache for black, with thin black hair stretching half way down his back, with dark sunken eyes covered in scars.  He was surprised that the add he took out had the wrong number on it, which should have been a clear indicator of his level of professionalism but we were young and chomping at the bit to record.  Our second and third indicators of who were dealing with were that he was free the very next day and he would do it all for our $200. 

Over the years I’ve learned how good a recording is by how long it takes you to start hearing the problems with it.  A good recording will take you 4-6 months for things to bother you.  A great recording is over 6 months before you hear anything that strikes you funny.  This recording we heard things on the car ride home.  Usually if you are moving quickly you can finish recording a song in about 8-10 hours.  If all goes well you get all the sounds and basic tracks done in about 4 hours, vocals and the rest in about 2-3 hours and then about 2 hours to mix the song. That day we finished 8 songs in 8 hours and Tony mixed all eight songs in 35 minutes.  Now you can see why the warts became glaring on the car ride home.

That being said, Tony was always very good to us, he liked something about us and it most certainly wasn’t our music.  We spent a lot of time at the studio learning what we could and hanging out when we had any free time.  Tony became a resource for us.  He would barter studio time for us promoting the studio and any other odds and ends he could come up with like going to store and picking up iced teas and rolling papers.  Oh, and something worth mentioning, Tony loved his weed.  He would smoke constantly and then the 180 degree mood swings would kick in.

Much like most teenage bands we were poor and would scrap by either pooling our money and buying what we needed or borrowing from whoever we could.  We were playing a show and we needed a drum throne, the seat that the drummer sits on.  We called Tony and asked if he had one we could borrow and since he was on a good weed kick, he said of course, but with one caveat.

“Guys, I need the throne back tomorrow first thing in the morning.  I have a session and it’s the only one I got.”

“Sure, Tony.  Not a problem.  Charles will drop it off first thing in the morning.”

At the time we were practicing in Charles’s house and I was living in long island, a good 45 minutes away.  Charles was also closest to Tony so it made the most sense for him to drop it off. 

We played a completely forgettable show and reminded Charles to drop off the throne.  We agreed to have practice the following Saturday afternoon. 

Saturday comes around and we all get together in Charles’s basement.  Staring us right in the face is the throne.  You know the throne that was supposed to be dropped off a week ago, first thing in the morning.  We decided to practice and immediately walk over to Tony’s and return the throne and face the consequences.  Because of his demeanor, his proclivity to switch from the nicest guy to someone who would blow a fuse in the course of 30 seconds, we were all terrified.  Straight up terrified.  The entire walk over to the studio we were speculating over what Tony we’d get.  We were trying to gauge how angry he’d be because in a effect we were costing him money, probably weed money. Since it was Charles’s responsibility to return the throne, it was decided that he’d stand in front of the line with me second and Chris third.  We thought we had speculated every possible outcome of what would happen after we pressed the red self-destruct doorbell but nothing prepared us for what happened next.

We were severely on edge and every second felt like a lifetime, that’s just how intimidating Tony Aliprantis was.  Fear would permeate you to your core over returning a drum throne to a friend one week late. 

The door flies open and there’s Tony wearing a “Heart of Darkness” t-shirt rife with holes, hot pink Animaniacs sweatpants, holding a cocked shotgun.  I immediately thought we were all going to die and given how close we were standing together if it would take only one bullet from the shotgun to murder all three of us.  My bet was yes, only one. 

“Hey guys!  Come on in!  I’m cleaning my Civil war shotguns. What brings you by?”

After collectively ruining our pants we returned the throne apologizing profusely for its delay. 

“Oh don’t worry about it, who wants to go get me an iced tea and some rolling papers?” 

For the first time we all jumped at the chance to go buy him rolling papers.