Stone Arabia (10 page)

He began drinking coffee in third grade. He would make it with instant coffee crystals and lots of sugar. He would mix it cold with tap water. He often stayed up all night (which is another childish and cheap way to get high—stay up all night and the fatigue alone will make you feel giddy). He drank OTC medicine, all kinds: decongestant to get speeded up, cough syrup to sleep. I swear he always smoked cigarettes, but of course that can’t be true, he started at maybe twelve. By junior high he was taking any drugs he could get his hands on, and he could get his hands on so many.

Like the most serious druggies, he lived by the PDR, the
Physician’s Desk Reference,
the well-thumbed paperback book that made his drug experimentations seem so rational and
considered. He would root through his girlfriends’ mothers’ medicine cabinets. He would take a few of these, a few of those. The PDR would tell him what the drug would do, what the pill looked like, and it would tell him what it would interact with. He knew what he could mix or not mix. Nik became the guy you asked,
How many should I take?
Nik was the guy who helped the kid who turned blue or the girl throwing up in the bathroom at the party. And his gleeful hunger to alter his brain never abated and was never apologized for. In his youth he extolled theories of the need and even obligation to get high. He quoted the usual hallucinogenic pantheon of Huxley and so on. He didn’t miss any rationales for his enthusiasms: Huichol Indian peyote, Freud’s cocaine, Leary’s LSD, Richard Harris’s scotch.

As others of us (me, for instance) grew bored taking drugs, of “experimenting,” he never stopped. He wasn’t experimenting. But as he lived longer and longer into his aging, creaking habits, he stopped trying to extol them to everyone, or at least to me. If it came up at all between us, it was usually because I decided I wanted him to change his habits out of simple health or plain decency, or even economy (the cigarettes I never mentioned were now five dollars a pack). He would simply tell me that this was his consolation. And what could a sister say to answer that?

On the drive home from Tommy’s house, we didn’t say anything to each other until he idled his car in my driveway. Before I got out, he said, “Thanks for coming with me.”

“It’s real bad,” I said. He nodded. I climbed out and then I leaned into the open window to kiss him goodbye.

“At least it can’t get much worse,” he said with a broad smile. “It really can’t.”

Three months later, Tommy finally died. The day after Nik called me about Tommy, I opened my mail and found a copy of the obituary Nik had composed for his Chronicles:

New York Times, February 18, 2004

Tommy Skate, 49, Dies;

Guitarist for the Demonics

Tommy (Skate) Lester, the original guitarist for seminal garage rock band the Demonics, was found dead at his home in Van Nuys, California, on February 16, 2004.

Dr. Sam Wills of the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office certified that the cause of death was heart failure. Dr. Wills said no autopsy would be performed. Lester had a long history of drug abuse and alcoholism.

“The Demonics came out of nowhere to totally transform the 1979 scene in LA, working a unique sound counter to both commercial progressive rock and punk rock,” said Robert Hilburn, music critic for the
Los Angeles Times.
Lester played on the Demonics’ first two albums: 1979’s
Waiting for the Game
and 1980’s
Sound Fantastique.
Despite its dark lyrics and art-rock dissonance,
Sound Fantastique
’s fatal hooks and crafted melodies made it one of the best-selling records of 1980 as well as one of the most critically acclaimed. Nic Worth, lead singer and songwriter for the Demonics, remarked once that “Tommy Skate’s undulating leads really gave the Demonics their unique, intense sound.” A legendary band that broke up even before their second record was released, their influence long outlived their brief years together. The oft-repeated rock’n’roll cliché about them is that although the Demonics
didn’t play very many shows, every person who did see them live seemed to have formed a band of their own.

Thomas Lester was born in 1954 in Los Angeles. His father worked for the postal service and his mother taught piano. His mother bought Lester his first guitar for his 8th birthday. He attended Fairfax High School, where he met the other members of what would later become the Demonics. His first group was the short-lived proto-glam band Sticky Baby, which had a sixteen-year-old Nik Worth as lead singer. They played a simple heavy blues boogie in semi-drag that was later taken up by other bands as “raunch” rock. When Worth and Lester quit Sticky Baby to form the Demonics, they vowed to abandon blues-based rock forever.

After the glory of the Demonics, Tommy Skate was in a number of much less interesting and successful bands. He embraced a harder, faster, and more generic style; he abandoned his eccentric edge (against the advisement of his mentor, Nik Worth) for what he thought was a more commercial sound and eventually he stopped playing in bands altogether. The money he made from publishing royalties from the songs he coauthored on the Demonics’ records helped support him over the lean years, but throughout the eighties and nineties he also worked periodically in fisheries in Alaska, at a hospital, as a gravedigger, and as a garbageman.

He is survived by his mother, Glenda Lester, and his brother, Jim Lester, both of Los Angeles.*

*Correction 2/19/2004:

The obituary for Tommy Skate on February 18 misidentified
the high school where the band the Demonics was founded. The Demonics were started at Hollywood High School by Nik Worth, not Fairfax High School. Only after Worth transferred to Fairfax High School did Tommy Skate join the already formed Demonics.

Nik couldn’t help getting his licks in, but he still nailed the odd tone of the rock and roll obituary, the way it would leaven even the most sordid life with comforting obitual formality. I knew this because I was a regular reader of obituaries. Before I read anything else, I scanned the obituaries. I wasn’t always like this, it was a habit of my morbid middle years. I just found myself drawn to them every day. Why? I don’t think it is hard to guess. I first looked for the age of the dead person. If they were under sixty, I looked at the cause of death, usually discreetly rendered in the second or third paragraph. (Nik’s obit for Tommy was less discreet than was typical; usually the drug use isn’t mentioned but just screams between the lines of the rock star found dead of “heart failure.”) Very young people mostly die in accidents. Most have not lived long enough to accomplish anything notable, and they rarely get full obituaries. So the saddest obituaries are the premature but not uncommon middle-aged “young” people, say between thirty-five and fifty. These folks do indeed die and I always took note:

47, ovarian cancer

53, heart failure

58, complications from pneumonia

54, breast cancer

46, self-inflicted gunshot

59, pancreatic cancer

38, motorcycle accident

48, breast cancer

58, overdose (“yet to be determined,” “toxicology report,” and “bottles of various prescription medications”)

35, drowning

46, died in a fall

57, sudden heart attack

50, heart attack suspected

42, heart and kidney failure

45, car accident

59, complications from a brain hemorrhage

49, killed himself by hanging

59, lung cancer

40, sudden cardiac failure

50, ovarian cancer

I think that anyone would get the picture here. No peaceful, natural deaths. It was either bad luck or bad living. Or, I guess, a bad attitude (the suicides).

Nik sent me his latest CD. I found the package in my mailbox (he always mailed his CDs to me). I undid the undecorated, restrained brown paper packaging.
The Ontology of Worth: Volume 2,
it said on the spine of the CD jewel case. Volume two of twenty volumes. But he counted backward, so the next album would be the first—and presumably the last—volume in this epic series.
The O.O.W.
was released on his experimental record label, Pause Collective. He began it in the mid-nineties. Every six to twelve months he would release an album in the series. Each CD had an edition number. Mine was number two, which meant after Nik’s copy, I got the very next one. Always it worked this way. There was a handful of fans (let’s be clear here: with the exception of Ada and me, everyone was either an ex-girlfriend or an ex-bandmate) on the mailing list, but I was always number two.

Not only did each disc have a limited edition (10? 12?) handmade cover, but each cover fit into a larger piece. This CD cover would fit, I knew, with the eighteen previous CDs in the series to make a huge self-portrait collage of Nik. Each cover worked on its own but also played a part in a larger mosaic. Just to have the second-to-last piece felt like a long battle almost
won—were we really coming so close to completing the epic, endless thing, or would he extend the plan? I didn’t see how he could get out of the finite rubric he had created.

In addition to the CD, there would be a vinyl release (which would just be the 12-by-12 cover with an old dummy piece of vinyl in it—he didn’t actually have the ability to press vinyl). But the paper center label would be carefully covered with one of Nik’s hand-painted adhesive labels. His Pause Collective was strictly for wackier, non-pop experiments. Its elaborate center label featured a color photocopy of a pen-and-ink snake carefully drawn in hundreds of hatched lines with a distinctly occult/medieval feel. The “logo” contained the word
Pause
hidden in the complicated hatches of the snake. The name of the album, the copyright date, the catalog number, and the name of the artist (uh, Nik Worth) were inked on top of the photocopy in a careful, matched script of Nik’s devising. The back of the LP usually had liner notes. These would be written on the cardboard in the same font. A photocopy, or sometimes a typed copy, of the notes would be pasted carefully in the Chronicles. And another copy of the liner notes would be folded up and tucked next to the CD in the digital edition, as well as reproduced in a photocopied and barely readable size on the back of the CD case itself. It was all quite systematic and gratuitously laborious. I loved its elaboration and counted on it. How deflated I would feel if he ever just handed me a blank paper sleeve containing only a blank compact disc with his name and the title Sharpie-scrawled across it. (Nik did make some faux bootlegs that had a cultivated amateur feel to them, but he never had the taste for the sloppy or the minimal. Even
his bootlegs appeared to be made by obsessive fans with acute horror vacui.)

I unfolded and read the liner notes for
The Ontology of Worth: Volume 2:

When I first met Nik Worth back in 1978, he was in two bands and not yet a star. He fronted the power pop band the Fakes. They would have three songs in the top ten by 1980. And back then I already guessed it. There were the clean, perfectly rendered songs of heartache and youth. The crystalline gorgeous harmonies got them compared to the Beatles. But they were also minimal in production, they never overwhelmed the songs with sentiment and bombast. They had a pared-down, solid unadorned sound. They resisted the ubiquitous processing of the time. (Remember gated reverb? Have you listened to any of those records lately?) They bucked the trends, the boilerplate, and yet—or maybe I should say, and so—attained top-seller status. That would have been career enough for anyone. But, as we also know, Worth also fronted the Demonics, and anyone familiar with their two brilliant albums knows that Worth was already testing boundaries and breaking new ground.

When he broke up the band in the early eighties, he embarked on a marvelous, unprecedented path of experiment and innovation. He would release a brilliant Fakes album every year, each one charting and succeeding. But he also nurtured a new path leading to his releasing two solo records under his own name, Nik Worth. These were made on a four-track in the living room of his isolated estate in the hills of Topanga, Western Lights. He was holed up for months, and rumors of a car accident or a drug habit multiplied. The truth was, Worth had gone through a nasty divorce from model
Alize Clement. During the divorce proceedings, he was driving his vintage Triumph motorcycle on the PCH and crashed. No one knows the full details of the accident, but he retreated to his private hermitage in the mountains to recover. Part of his recovery included the recording of these ache-and-angst solo records. The critics praised the new direction. Both of the albums have cult followings, but neither of them charted.

Then there was nothing for four years. Until 1990, no releases from Worth except the Fakes’ album Here Are Your Fakes, a double album of previous hits and some unreleased songs from the vault. It was the top-charting album of 1989, and fans scoured it for clues about the future of Nik Worth and the Fakes. Nik Worth, we later learned, had been living as a Buddhist monk in a monastery in New Mexico. He took a vow of seclusion and adopted the Dharma name Jikan, which means “silence.” Would he ever record again? In 1990, we got our answer. Worth got the old lineup of the Fakes back together and recorded an all-new studio album,
TAKE ME HOME AND MAKE ME FAKE IT.
It is generally considered to be the sine qua non of nineties power pop albums. Then, in 1992, Nik Worth also released an album called The Ontology of Worth: Volume 20, on his own mysterious label, Sound Traces (later to become Pause Collective). This album was apparently the first of twenty planned releases starting with twenty and counting backwards to one. As soon as you dropped the stylus, you were hit with the central thematic conceit of the Ontology: side one contained six bled-together linked songs about a character called Man Mose. The entire side two, infamously, contained one “song,” a cacophony of feedback experiments that were somehow tied to the story of Man Mose. Full of cryptic and hermetic references, Man Mose (one
gathers) lives in tunnels under the streets and hears things through the ground as he moves from place to place. He apparently makes or records his “music” all the time. Side two is the music MM hears (makes?). Underground music, indeed. Who would have guessed that what we were all waiting for was a collection of atonal, arrhythmic assault compositions mixed with concept sound poems?