If I could pick up a telephone and place a call back in time to my younger self, I would tell him two important things. Number one would be: “Moisturize now.” The other would be: “Stop stressing about whether or not you’re going to be famous.”
In my 20s, I sang in a four-piece rock band that almost went all the way. We met with record companies and toured the eastern half of the country, playing shows for three people some nights and 3,000 the next. It was the full rock’n’roll dream, until it all crashed and burned.
Exhaustion from living on the road, creative differences, substance abuse and the intense pressure we put on ourselves all combined to drive us apart as friends and as musicians. Ultimately we had to abandon our dream like survivors fleeing a shipwreck.
Now, after a fallow period of about 15 years, I’m back in the practice space, singing at the mic for hours, writing songs and getting ready to record and play some shows. It’s exhilarating and I’m learning something that I wish I’d known all along: making music is better when you’re not trying to get famous.
When I was, I constantly worried about the next show, the next set of recordings, the next meeting with executives. I was stressed about not writing new songs, stressed about how much money we weren’t making, stressed that the drummer was drinking up the money we did earn and stressed that the guitarist was putting the moves on the drummer’s girlfriend.
I was pretty much never “in the moment”. I remember playing in front of 6,000 people – our largest audience ever – at a music festival in Gainesville, Florida, and only for the briefest moment reveling in the electricity coming off a crowd that size before plunging back into worrying that we hadn’t added any new songs to our set in nearly 10 months.
I believed then that getting famous would solve all my problems, or at least that my problems would be a lot more exciting and interesting than not being able to pay the gas bill.
Then, a few months after that band broke up, I got a lesson in perspective from someone famous.
I was washing dishes in a restaurant that was partly owned by REM’s lead singer, Michael Stipe. Early one morning before we opened, Stipe came in and slumped on the counter and asked if he could get a muffin and some coffee.
“I’m having a really bad day,” he said.
I looked down at the bus tub of greasy, stinking dishes the night crew had left behind and my already damply stained apron and said, “I’d like to have one of your bad days, Mr Millionaire Rock Star.”
“Dammit, David,” he said in his weird, mournful speaking voice – think a whiskey barrel lined with bear fur. “Getting rich and famous only solves two problems. Not being famous and not having any money. And it hands you a whole new set of problems you never knew you could have.”
I later found out that the police had arrested a pair of teenage runaways from out of state who had come to town because they believed that REM’s music was speaking directly to them. They got pulled over roaming around town looking for Stipe’s address and among their belongings, officers found a 12-gauge shotgun. Believing that Stipe’s life might be in danger, the police had banged on his door at 3.30am, rousting him from bed.
Within a few months I was working as a research assistant on a biography of Courtney Love, which gave me an up-close-and-personal look at how you can be famous and wealthy and still have a life that’s blasted and empty. You can lead a life where you don’t even put in your own earrings and get carried from place to place like a gold-plated sea sponge and still be utterly, miserably alone.
As I look in the mirror at my face approaching 50, I think about how rotten it must be to be someone like Britney Spears, whose career peaked in her early 20s. Can you imagine how awful it must it be for everyone to think of the “real” you as who you were in your 20s? And that from now on, every photo of your body and face that gets published will get held up against pictures of you as a late teen and clucked over and criticized as you ruin people’s fantasies by getting older.
Given what did happen in my life in terms of my abuse of drugs and alcohol, sometimes I think that if I had gotten famous in my 20s, I’d be dead by now. There were times when the only line between me and a fatal overdose was my ability to pay for it.
But fame is no longer a possibility on the horizon. Forty-eight-year-old men like me don’t suddenly explode into the world of rock’n’roll. These days, pop stars are slated for auditions while they’re still in utero and get famous before they can legally drink.
So now I’m writing and singing and practicing because I love to do it and it’s fun. It’s so much better this way. Finally, I’m in the moment, enjoying each stage as it happens and not living weeks and months ahead of myself. And maybe soon, I’ll be playing a show to three people at a club near you.
