Crazy Enough (23 page)

What's it like to do my job? First and foremost you have to love singing or playing, writing, practicing, and performing. You have to love it more than anything and feel like total crap if you aren't doing it. You must also hate money, in the beginning, and enjoy pouring your guts out to strangers in dark bars, who may or may not give a shit. You have a handful of minutes to get them to notice and listen. Bottom line, you have to try to get them to love you. Otherwise you are just so much hot air in the dark. A lot of young singers ask me how they can get where I am.
Where I am
is, in truth, a dismal failure, by music-industry standards. I've sold tens of thousand of records throughout the years, charted exactly once on Billboard, have one video out there, can fill a three-thousand-seat theater in my hometown and two- to five-hundred-seat theaters in some different areas in the United States and abroad. On paper, to most major labels, that's pretty grim, but I am fiercely proud of these accomplishments. I am mostly proud of the fact that I have only been singing a slinging inappropriate banter as my singular income for the last seven years or so. And I have done it all as an independent artist. How I got here was nearly two decades of slogging through bars, clubs, bands, and towns, hiring and firing booking agents, managers, publicists, and hangers-on, following the yes, and trying everything, even if it looked or felt weird. Everything you experience today is part of the story tomorrow.

But a creative life is tailor-made to make drug addicts out of the weakest of us, musicians especially. We're up late at night, sleeping most of the day or traveling, often with shitloads of downtime and ample opportunities, as well as motivation, to get loaded. Oftentimes, musicians start to get all fucked up on drugs to enhance and prolong
the sensation of being, basically, a rock star. Most of our awake time is spent in rooms full of booze and intoxicated people who act as though we possess some magic that will keep them young forever. These are the people who buy us drinks or offer us drugs to keep us hanging out with them after gigs.

Sex. Drugs. Rock. And. Roll.

Maybe it's because I'm dyslexic, and see the world all twisted and backwards, but, music got me off drugs. Pat Benatar, specifically.

I got asked to sing Pat Benatar's “Heartbreaker” with a band called Louder Than God. I was still kind of a mess, and looked like a pasty slice of ass, in my opinion, so for my first time on stage in San Francisco, I wore a big, black, zipped-up hoodie, covering up my puffy maggoty limbs. It was their regular Sushi Sunday gig, a free-of-charge rock-and-roll night at a club on upper Haight Street called the Nightbreak. There were usually two or three decent bands, cheap drinks, and sushi, fresh off a cart in the back. It was always a good time.

It was towards the end of LTG's set. The club was packed, it was sweltering inside, and as soon as I stepped out, the lights cooked through me and my breath went sunburn dry. My colon shimmied in my gut and I saw black roses blooming in front of my eyes, swooning in the heat. I held a huge breath, waiting for my cue, and stepped to the microphone. With the black hood pulled over my head, I looked like a bummy punk rock dude, or one of the sand people from
Star Wars.
Nobody knew I was a girl until I started singing.

“Your love is like a tidal wave, spinning over my he-eh-ead!” I gripped the top of the mic stand as if it were my lifeline. My eyes squeezed tight, streaming with stinging sweat tears and black eyeliner.

I threw my head back and the hood popped off. I was burning out of my clothes, everyone was on me, with me, in me, the room,
the roar, the floor shot away, I whipped off the sweatshirt to shouts of “Yeeaah!!!” from everywhere.

“You're a heartbreaker, dream maker, love taker, don't you mess around with me. You're a heartbreaker . . .”

I had sung before in public, sure, but this . . . I was out of my body, spinning, soaring, surfing electric, fuck yeah, I jumped around in my head, free of all of my stupid everything, throwing the devil sign back at myself: Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! There you are! There. You. Are.

The crowd was one thick flesh mass of rags and damp heat. They crushed forward, going completely apeshit at my last screeching note. The lead singer said, “Thanks, Storm!” and started his last song as I hopped off the stage into the crowd. Swept into arms and hugs and shakes and shouts of “Fuck, yeah!” “What's your name again?” and “Ho-lee shit, woman, you rule!”

I felt pure glory, like I had won some sports thing, an undeniable exultant, fist pumping victory. I was flying out of my boots, tingling along every inch of me, completely high.
Really
high, as opposed to the high I had known. No hiding, I was slapped pink and raw, bitten and torn open. The stuff in me that made me feel ugly and alone, sloppy and crazy, I scooped out of my insides and screamed it into the faces of strangers who ate it up, spat it back, and howled for more. These people plugged into the nobody me, this big nothing girl, and got some kind of epic charge out of me, the me who was too busy screaming and burning to hide.

Out of all the cheering and compliments, three different guys asked me if I was in a band and if not, would I like to be in theirs. One in particular was a beautiful heavy-metal guitar player boy with huge tattooed arms, dyed black hair, and pretty blue eyes, and it was rumored he had a dick like a peppermill.

Want.

“I'd love to be in a band with you. Sure.”

He was a supersweet guy. He put the rhythm section together before we broke up. It would have never worked. The peppermill rumor was true and . . . ouch.

My music career began rather biblically. The part of the Old Testament where everyone begats everyone? I screwed Johnnie Peppermill. That band was called Mind Power. I stop screwing him, he quit. Then I start screwing the bass player. That band was called Flower. Bass player goes crazy, gets fired, so I start banging the new guitar player. That band was called Dirty Mouth and that one stuck for a while, seven years. In those seven years, I learned how to be in a band.

We wanted to call the first band “Flower” after the skunk in
Bambi
. The best way I can describe our sound was a Zeppelin meets Jane's Addiction. I was a great singer, loud and adventurous, but my lyrics? I'd love to say that everyone's first attempts at songwriting produce cringe-worthy twaddle, but I'd only be trying to make myself feel better. I had filled stacks of journals with embarrassing poetry and long litanies of why doesn't anyone love me and wah-wah-wah-ing. So, my first go-round of lyrics were these precious, maudlin run-on sentences. My early songs were about my mom, heroin, and racism, terrible song material. I'm not exaggerating when I tell you they were really lame. I took myself so seriously, but it still felt incredible. To sing loud into a microphone with my eyes closed, surrounded by my own amplified voice riding on top of booming bass and distorted guitar, ducking around the huge drums like a salmon hopping up a raging river. I was full and empty and present and absent all at once, anonymous but sparkling in the loud, electrified bashing. I knew I
wasn't very good, but I knew I would get better. Most important, I was finally sure I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

Once we had ten songs or so, we decided to play our first gig.

The Boomerang was across the street from the Nightbreak and was not considered terribly cool. Anybody could play there, really; it was a perfect venue for our first time. We asked our friends to headline since they could pull some bodies in, so it was The Firemen (featuring members of Mountain Pig and Freak Show Ho Down) and Hate Holiday.

Flower was a mishmash of twentysomethings with no real unifying style. Elroy was a lanky boy of mixed race who had a sweet smile, braids threaded with bright yarn, and looked great with his shirt off. Fu was the drummer, beautiful and black with short, spongy dreads that sproinked in every direction. D was a white thrash-metal enthusiast and totally sober. He was very cute and wore whatever and felt whatever about it.

The whole day leading up to my very first gig with my very first band was about finding something to wear. In San Francisco in the 1990s, there was a new hippy glam resurgence. Bell bottoms, platform shoes, and huge cartoonish sunglasses were considered rock 'n' roll. I got into it as best I could, but I was still so fashion traumatized from being heavier, and having no idea what was cool. I decided to wear white nightgowns and army boots. Perfect. Comfortable, yet grounded, no one would accuse me of trying too hard or thinking too much of myself.

I was absolutely terrified until sound check. Once I had my feet on stage and felt myself facing forward with the guys behind me and at my sides, all I felt was an urgent, “Let me at 'em.”

We had a decent-sized crowd for our first time, not packed, but respectable. My dad was even there with his girlfriend Mari. Their
relationship was a successful matchmaking effort made by Daphne, Mari's daughter Heather, and me: We had seated the two attractive, yet stubbornly single, people together at Daphne's wedding, a couple of years earlier. They shared a dance at the reception, went on a date the next night. To wrap up their first date, Dad ended up at Mari's house for a beer, and never left.

Besides our family and friends, most of the other people were there to see the other bands. While we played, though, it was clear that for my handful of minutes on stage, those people were mine.

Flower's first gig was unremarkable in the sense of anything amazing happening. But, inside, I felt all my gears shifting and locking together, my machinery in sync with itself. We only played for half hour or so, but I already knew I was going to do this until I couldn't anymore. This was it, lights, noise, screaming and me, hoovering up the attention like I used to suck on drugs or men or anything before. I was throwing myself at people and they threw back. I was going to die on stage or die trying.

There are many theories about making it. You need to get signed is a big one. Signed to a major label was the addendum to that. You need a demo, a great manager, you need to play LA, you need to tour, you need
songs.
Hit fucking
songs
. Then you get on the radio, and . . . and . . . and.

The fairy tale goes like this: An A&R guy would come see a show, listen to your demo, then convince his label you were the next big thing and next thing you know, you and your band are drunk on Cristal in a huge tour bus having a spitball fight with torn-up hundred-dollar bills.

I instinctively knew that the major label thing wasn't going to happen for me. In my laymen's understanding of how the machine worked, a major label would peel off a chunk of cash to spread
around
you, giving you a little bit but making you feel like hot shit. You stand there with the ten bucks they just gave you, because you're awesome, and you feel terribly important. You don't realize right away that you're now on the hook for about one hundred large plus interest, and
maybe
they try to sell your records for you.

Nirvana was the biggest band in the world at the time, and they had started as a college radio phenomenon. The labels caught on long after the kids did. Little has changed since then. In fact, the Internet has made it so much easier for artists to get to their fans and fans to find the next cool thing without all the annoying hard sell of commercialism. Major labels are all but dead these days, and reality television has more star make-or-break power in the short attention span theater of today's pop culture. And radio? The only thing happening on radio is oldies, right-wing ranting, and a shitload of Spanish-speaking church programming. Enduring musical careers are now, as they were then, about the enduring love and loyalty of fans.

And boy, did I start collecting some crazy fans. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly crazy.

The Good: We played once or twice a month in San Francisco, and my whole life would become about those gigs. I'd have total stage nerves, palpitations, and vomitous sensations before every show, but I would knock myself out like it was the last time I'd ever open my mouth in public. My abject terror was that I would suck, have a shitty show, or lose my voice.