Rock and Roll: I Gave You the Best Years of My Life

We ware in the middle of Gloria, the part where Berler sings out the letters to the girl's name and the rest of us who sing--P.J., Gabby, myself and Drew, though at that point Drew wasn't with us yet, Pablo still being our rhythm guitarist--shout back, "Glo-ria!" when we felt the building shudder. The Del-Crustaceans are used to odd vibrations, but this was different. The sound was deeper, more structural than the stomping, alligatoring and table-dancing noises that sometimes accompany our music.

We didn't stop, though the electricity flickered briefly in the building--a three-story dormitory called Latham House at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. In front of us, the dancing crowd was wired. They thrashed, screamed, threw things at the walls. From behind the band, a veil of plaster exploded across the room. A partier wielding a sledge hammer struck repeatedly at the wall in the back room, the head of his hammer appearing every few moments above Gabby's amp. Someone on the dance floor grabbed a garbage can by its handles and pounded on the stairway banister, splintering spindles. A dancer struck randomly at bookshelves and at doors with a floor lamp. And then we felt the dorm shudder again.

As we packed up, the destruction continued. This was, after all, a farewell party, a demolition ball. According to the dorm's social chairman, Latham House was scheduled to be razed by the university sometime soon. Forty-two men lived in the building, and most of them were there now, destroying. Mike, who would join the band a year later as our keyboardist, had lived in Latham House as a sophomore. Former Senator George McGovern had lived there as a history major in the Forties. The building was 100 years old and storied, but its time was at hand, and we had been paid $150 to play its dirge.

Three days later, Berler called, nearly hysterical:

"Did you see the papers?" he screamed.

I had. News of the parts' had made headlines, "'Last Blast' Clears Dorm," read the Chicago Sun-Times. "Dorm Bash Riles Nu's Brass," read the Chicago Daily News. It had taken the press 72 hours to get wind of the party, but now it was hard on the case.

In the Daily News, photos of the carnage ran above a story that estimated damage to the house at about $10,000 and stated, "It might have been better if the Nu Wildcats had held a daylong scrimmage inside Latham." Another story noted that the worst damage done to the building was the weakening of the main support beams in the basement. That explained the shudders. While we were doing Gloria, someone had been below us swinging an ax.

Latham House had been declared unsafe, ready for collapse. The residents had already been evacuated. In fact--and this was the ominous part--the university hadn't even been planning to tear down the dorm. At the end of the school year, the building was to be sold, not demolished.

"Oh, Jesus," said Berler. "If they find out it was us playing there, we're finished." His voice, so loud on Satisfaction and In the Midnight Hour, was faltering now. "I knew something was wrong when they had all those tools with them," he said.

Perhaps we were in jeopardy; it was hard to tell. Although none of the band members was in school anymore, six of us had gone to Northwestern--and we knew there were precedents for suing rock groups for destructive behavior. Before he died, hadn't Keith Moon routinely had his wages garnisheed by most of the major American hotel chains?

Two hours later, Berler called back. He was smug, slightly neurotic, normal.

"It's simple," he said. "We confess."

He wanted me to ask what he meant, so I did.

"We call the Chicago papers and tell them we did it," he explained. "Everything. The Del-Crustaceans drove the students to mayhem. We make the front page: 'The Band That Destroys Buildings.' They can't sue us; we don't own anything. They can't expel us; we're out of school. They wouldn't throw us in jail; we're alumni. This is our break."

It seems strange to me now, remembering how close we came to doing what Berler suggested and going for that break. In fact, we did call one of the papers, but the reporter we asked for was out, and the plan slowly died.

In the next weeks, Latham House residents came forth and confessed; fines were paid; some students quit or were thrown out of school; the papers lost interest. Latham House was bulldozed. A Burger King now stands over its remains.

Although this occurred in 1972, something about the incident still seems compelling to me today. It was, after all, years before punk, before disco, even. I remember the feeling of power I had as the building came apart to our music. And I know that somewhere in there, amid the chaos, the blend of alcohol, sweat, fear, fantasy, brotherhood and electronic amplification of primitive sounds, lies the essence of rock 'n' roll, of what has kept the Del-Crustaceans together long after we should have given it up.

•

We aren't any good. To be honest, quality is not an issue here. And yet, it's the first thing people always want to know--"Are you guys any good?" Actually, it may be the second, the first being what kind of music we play. Well, we play rock 'n' roll--Sixties stuff, mostly, party songs, the best ever made. Our repertoire consists mainly of four-chord songs, three-chord songs, even a couple of twos--2120 South Michigan Avenue and Not Fade Away come to mind--and one remarkable one-chorder, Land of 1000 Dances, by Cannibal & the Headhunters. You'll remember that one--21 "Na"s in a row by Cannibal, then 21 more by the Headhunters, followed by "You gotta know how to pony/You gotta bony maroney," etc.

P.J. owns Cannibal & the Headhunters' only album, and in the liner notes, it says that Cannibal, who grew up in the Los Angeles chicano ghetto with the rest of the Headhunters (described in the notes as a social club), named himself Cannibal because he liked it and because he was born with "no given name." That's nice. It is the stuff of rock 'n' roll. Another member of the Headhunters is named Scar Lopez. That's also nice. It appeals to us because it's scuzzy and low-down and, in a basic socioethnic way, everything we are not. There are philosophers who teach systems predicated on a constant striving for the opposite, and without making too much of a form of thought pretty remote from loud guitars, there seems to be a lot of that involved in rock 'n' roll. The low-downs use rock to rise up. The higher-ups use it to get down.

There are seven of us in the Del-Crustaceans, and we are all white, proper, middle-to-upper-middle class youngish men with decent if not ecstatic childhood memories and "regular" full-time careers. We cut a record two years ago--Kansas City on one side, Keep on Dancing on the other--and as we left the studio, the producer said, "Guys, hang on to those day jobs." We aren't dumb. We have 33 years of college education among us, including three masters' degrees: lead guitarist Drew in business, bass player Gabby in engineering, singer-dancer P.J. in advertising. Singer Berler (who does have a given name, Ron, which somehow doesn't properly describe him and so is seldom used) is a free-lance writer. Drummer Jack is a vice-president of a premium sales company. Keyboardist Mike is an editor and a computer programmer. I play rhythm guitar and write for Sports Illustrated. Four of the Del-Crustaceans have wives; Jack is divorced; Berler still rides his bicycle everywhere.

How else can I describe us? As consumers, we are mainstream. We own a total of three houses, two condos, six cars, 11 TVs, two dogs, half a dozen tents, several thousand record albums, no guns, motorcycles or cats. Jack and Mike have beards, Drew has a mustache, Gabby's hair tends to get long. But it's not like you've got The Dead Kennedys or the Dickheads working your pool party; people don't seem threatened by our presence in their homes. We are products of the Sixties who believe in a mishmash of things both right and left, but as a group, we have no single political perspective. None of us wants to chuck everything and shoot for the big time anymore. That was probably the first sickness we escaped from, the one that kills more bands than anything else.

I think back for a minute on my adolescence, back to when I first realized that if I were to grow and be fulfilled as a man, it might be more than just cool to play in a band, it might be essential. I suppressed that knowledge for quite a while, playing sports instead. But then it hit me, and I knew this was something that had to be dealt with, just as surely as young men have always had to deal with the desire to get laid by cheerleaders or be class president. I think the common fantasy of being a rock-'n'-roll musician--of earning (continued on page 164) Rock and Roll (continued from page 134) respect and pleasure by playing defiant, electrified music, of being good by being bad--is a phenomenon that probably peaked when everybody in our band did: back in the late Sixties and the early Seventies, when rock stars were still culture heroes. I suppose fame and rebellion don't have much to do with what the Del-Crustaceans are up to these days, but at certain predictable intervals, we still want, in something very close to our heart of hearts, to get down.

•

On warm nights, my friend Bo Van Sant and I used to walk around the Northwestern campus singing doo-wop songs, blind drunk. We'd sit on stoops and yodel and screech and wait for people to call the cops. It was the spring of 1971, and I was a senior in my final quarter and I didn't give a shit about anything. I had been a corner-back on the Northwestern football team and now, I presumed, I was done playing football forever. Bo, a Vietnam vet with only sophomore status, really didn't give a shit about anything. He'd missed a foray with his platoon one night in the coastal highlands and the platoon had gotten blown up by enemy rockets, and now he was back studying with frat kids and war protesters. Bo wasn't crazy--just sensitive and keyed up. He loved the theater, classics and good times. Growing up in Connecticut, shy but forcefully attracted to new things, he would occasionally sit in his room, a crewcut adolescent in saddle shoes, and read poetry while sniffing airplane glue from a paper bag.

"A nice name would be something like the Temptations or the Hesitations or the Ovations," Bo said one night. "Something with an-ation suffix."

I had brought along my sister's old guitar that night, and it had suddenly hit Bo and me that we were going to be a band. I'd learned five or six chords, and that, we sensed, would be more than enough for our purposes. Bo knew an awful lot about R&B and soul groups, but I knew about rock; I'd bought my first 45 at the age of eight--Hello Mary Lou, by Ricky Nelson. I said Bo's idea for a name was Ok, but shouldn't we think about a prefix, too, since the kind of songs we were doing--Come Go with Me, Runaround Sue--were the province of groups with Bel-and Dell- in their names?

"How about the Crustaceans?" Bo asked.

"Meaning what?" I asked.

He shrugged.

I said, "How about the Del-Crustaceans?"

Bo didn't complain; it's possible he nodded. It's hard to remember, exactly, since there was no importance to any of this at the time. But that was pretty much it.

A couple of weeks later, when an underclassman named Pablo joined the group, we changed our name to Pablo and the Del-Crustaceans. We did it sort of as a goof--Pablo was the worst guitar player in the world, worse even than me, which is going some, since to this day, I can't properly tune my guitar. (Drew does it for me before each set.) But Pablo was really bad--stunningly, repugnantly derelict. He strummed open, rattling chords on a bent-necked Japanese guitar, and at times he didn't even play the same songs we were playing. After a while, Gabby would simply turn Pablo's amp off in the middle of a set. When Pablo left to go to law school in 1974, we dropped his name and became the Del-Crustaceans again.

We didn't think the band's name would make any difference to anyone, ever. Indeed, I wouldn't be telling you how it came into existence if people at sorority formals and bars weren't always asking what in the hell it means and if decoding the history of rock names weren't considered such a worthy discipline. And perhaps it really is important to know that the Beatles used to be called the Quarry-men, or that a certain Top 40 band named itself 10 cc because that's the volume of the average male ejaculatory load. But in our case, I believe you can take the band's name, know where it comes from and still be pretty much satisfied that it means nothing.

All of the guys in the group are between 29 and 34 years old now. We were in our early 20s when we started. We have photographs that show us back in the early Seventies with long hair and sneers, and it is through those pictures that we have begun to learn about aging.

Bo isn't with us anymore, which is a pity. He had a great whiskey voice. No range, no ear; but after a few tumblers of gin, he sounded black. And he had presence. I remember one coffeehouse gig in 1972 when Bo sang with both of his arms in slings. He had fallen down, shit-faced, after a party the previous night and had fractured both of his elbows on the sidewalk. He danced around the coffeehouse mike stand that night, his hands crossed on his chest like a corpse, cigarette dangling, trying to remember the words to California Sun in front of a handful of inattentive students who had paid maybe 50 cents to see us, and, damn, he was nice.

Bo moved East in 1973, and Berler, who had shared spots with him on vocals, became our lead singer. P.J., who used to hang around our bar gigs playing the tambourine and trying to sneak in on backups, joined the band then as a singer and a dancer. P.J. was in grad school at Northwestern at the time and on his way to an executive position in a big Chicago ad agency. He's in New York now with the Madison Avenue crowd, in his Brooks Brothers two-piece, drinking martini lunches, discussing concepts and big pictures, educating the poor ignorant public as to its needs. A political and economic conservative, P.J. believes in his work. I remember the time after a gig when he and somebody--I believe it was Mike--got into an argument over P.J.'s statement "Nobody has ever bought something he didn't want." The debate went round and round, through drinks and early-morning hamburgers and tertiary hangovers, and it hasn't been resolved yet.

But talk about your Jekyll and Hydes. Onstage, P.J., the balding, preppie straight arrow, becomes a sort of honkie Mr. Excitement, a crazed rock-'n'-roll white dude with happy feet. Apparently, he's always been dual-sided, but it took rock to bring the stage half of it out. He sang tenor in the boys' choir in high school and played guard on the football team, but the first time he got up with us, he moved around like James Brown.

But, really, who can explain what happens to people onstage? Berler, for instance, becomes Mick Jagger. Shine a klieg light in his face and he'll fag strut and leer till you put the hook on him. At dinner dances, garage sales, fund raisers, weddings, it makes no difference--Berler turns into a snarling android when he gets near a mike, and he can't help it.

I remember deciding once that he was mentally ill. We were in somebody's living room in suburban Skokie, at an adult Jewish birthday party where the men all wore yarmulkes and there was no booze or cigarettes and the tables were set with little cardboard cups filled with jelly beans and candy corn. The guests were backed into the furniture, watching us silently. There was a barbecue going in the back yard, and it was still light out. I stood behind Berler, next to Gabby and Mike and half-hidden by one of Jack's cymbals, semiplaying my guitar, alternately marveling and cowering as Berler prowled over the carpet singing passionately to the dozen or so motionless people about heroin and death.

We had to quit early that night, after Jack had slipped Berler a hash brownie to calm him down, and he went rigid on us. The strange thing is, Berler is just a sweet, hyper little guy from New York, a scrappy softball player who once tried out with the Chicago Cubs. Maybe his stage transformation stems from repression. We've asked him about it, and he speculates that there may be something revealing in the fact that his mother wouldn't let him wear blue jeans until he left for college. "Really, I don't know," he says somberly. "It's probably the music."

Gabby played the clarinet in the 1965 Broad Ripple (Indianapolis) High School marching band. The sax player next to him was David Letterman, now the NBC late-night talk-show host. Letterman was a pimply-faced joker who quickly got himself thrown out of the band for acting up. Gabby liked music but found the discipline of the marching band too juvenile, too humorless. He liked Letterman and decided that he had made the right move. Gabby was the next to quit.

He's a civil engineer now, and he just finished building a solar home for himself and his wife near Grand Rapids, Michigan. A thrifty, soft-spoken and resourceful man, he dug the entire basement for the house by hand. The Del-Crustaceans mean a great deal to him. He drinks beer onstage, as much as he wants, and as he drives in for the gigs, he feels all over again the rush and the orneriness that you could never let out in a marching band.

Rock promotes--almost demands--a certain arrogance of its practitioners. Pete Townshend says he dreads going on tour now because of the ludicrous punk rage it brings out in him. At 38, he wants to grow up. It is a dilemma. We once got into a fistfight with some people only minutes after one of them had given us our check for playing at their party that night. It had been a great gig--outdoors by a swimming pool at a day camp in the country--and I can't begin to remember what the fight was about. Rock-'n'-roll orneriness, no doubt.

But the point here is that our band adapts. We don't have a manager calling the shots. We've been together 12 years and we still shuffle the line between democracy and anarchy at every gig, fighting over every song, every ending, every volume control. Often, it must be clear to the audience that we don't know what we're doing. Mike once took his piano and his organ and set up in the wrong city because he forgot where we were playing. We've nearly killed one another by plugging things in where they don't belong. Bo once sang a blues duet on his knees with his arm around a drunken midget at a high school reunion in Benton Harbor, Michigan, causing Berler, a closet moralist, to leave the stage in towering, unfeigned disgust.

But we've still got enthusiasm. And it has to be because we've built around what we've got. I've even come to accept Berler's lunatic gyrations, knowing that in our most embarrassing moments--when Jack passes out and falls under his drums, as he did during one Christmas gig, or when Mike "hyperspaces" and can't remember how to play the piano and just sits and looks at his hands, or when I trip over my cord and pull all the crap out of my amp, sending out mutilated-animal screeches--Berler will still be the foil, the point man, the guy people watch in disbelief. Among other things, playing in a band has taught me the value in life of people who don't get embarrassed.

Something else: We don't fire members. Once you're a Del-Crustacean, you're a Del-Crustacean forever, unless you leave. Bo and Pablo both left. So did a couple of drummers we had before Jack joined, ten years ago.

A lack of talent means nothing. Lord, Pablo was bad enough that he should have been banned from electrified objects for life. But he left because he wanted to, not because he was asked to. I am a wretched guitar player, with two football-damaged fingers on my left hand that will always prevent me from playing decently, even if I were skilled enough to learn how. Mike is marginal. So are P.J. and Berler. Gabby's Ok. Jack, though, is good, a pro. He used to drum on the TV show Hee Haw and once backed up Bob Hope in a joke-telling session. Drew is good, too. He was in eight bands before he joined the Del-Crustaceans. But it doesn't matter. We formed our group to have good times and be buddies. You can't do that when you purge people.

Then, too, you've got to understand where "good" ness fits into rock 'n' roll. It doesn't much. In fact, one of the worst things a rock band can be is too good. Do you think The Rolling Stones are good? Well, yes, they're unbelievable; but are they really, in any classic, musical sense of the word, good?

I once saw a very good blues-jazz band in a Chicago club. They started to dink around while tuning up, and all of a sudden, they were playing Last Time, by the Stones. I was clapping my hands, getting into it, when they stopped, smirking, and lit up cigarettes. "You don't think we're actually going to play that trash?" their looks implied. Well, I had.

The truth is, goodness breeds boredom. You can counteract proficiency, as Keith Richards does, by avoiding sleep and nourishing food for days and then filling your body with such quantities of contradictory drugs that even a simple Chuck Berry little-finger reach becomes an adventure in neuromuscular control. Or you can start from lower levels, like we do.

Five years ago, we even decided that if a band member left Chicago, he would remain a Del-Crustacean. Drew lives in Boston now. Mike and P.J. live in New York City, Gabby in Michigan. For a time a couple of years ago, Berler lived in Cincinnati and I lived in Florida. We flew in for gigs then; P.J. and Drew and Mike fly in now. Gabby drives. Transportation expenses come off the top of the band's pay checks. Of course, we don't take home any money these days--sometimes we even lose. But that's something else we decided long ago--to keep it going, we'll play for nothing, or less.

We try to get $1200 a gig now, a whole lot of money for a bar band. But that's our break-even point, assuming we don't destroy any equipment or have any major disasters such as the basement flood that ruined a lot of our stuff a couple of years ago. Berler estimates that since the beginning, the band has grossed more than $125,000. It's funny to think that all that cash has circulated in our name without ever really gracing our pockets. Some trickle-down bigwig, or at least the airlines, should honor us.

What we've got now is a system, a method for perpetuating our dual lives. It includes such logistical matters as finding decent vans at odd hours and knowing where vacuum tubes are sold and what cab company can get Drew to the airport fastest at four in the morning so he can make his nine-A.M. business meeting Monday in Boston. But mostly, it deals with our preferences and quirks. We play once or twice a month now, at big private parties and selected bars around Chicago. And that's pretty much the way we want it. We have roadies--college kids who think we're great--because we don't want to carry equipment anymore. You move a 125-pound speaker up three flights of steps in a narrow hotel stairway one time and you'll understand the second-biggest reason bands break up.

Onstage, we wear red-satin shorts and T-shirts with lobsters on them, because we think they look cool. (And, in fact, they are cool.) Can I say that we are unique? We've already outlasted the Beatles. I guarantee we'll never stop.

•

Tubby's was an old dance hall and bar overlooking Lake Superior outside the mining and lumber town of Ontonagon in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Tubby himself was a shovel-nosed reformed-alcoholic son of a bitch with a Pacemaker in his chest and a drooling German shepherd behind the bar. I say "was" because both Tubby and the dog are dead now, and the building is gone, having burned down under suspicious conditions not long after Tubby's demise. While he was alive and on the wagon, Tubby hated everything, especially everything young. But somehow, while I was up North fishing in the fall of 1974, I managed to talk him into hiring the Del-Crustaceans to play five nights between Christmas and New Year's 1975--our first road trip ever.

In three packed and battered cars, we drove north in a slow formation, like covered wagons. In Antigo, Wisconsin, Jack's drive shaft fell out, but we never knew it, because Jack was in the rear and it was dark. When the first two cars got to Ontonagon and we set up the equipment and Jack and his group hadn't arrived, Berler freaked out. "Call the highway patrol!" he screamed. "Call the Mounties!"

Jack is heavy, real big, about six feet and 250 pounds, and Berler kept screaming, "I hate his fat! I hate it!" We were all worried as hell, seeing Tubby and his animal glowering across the dance floor at us. But it was Berler who nearly put us over the edge. It was a relief when somebody--maybe it was Gabby--grabbed him and just sort of crushed the shit out of him, something that has to be done occasionally when Berler's in his full manic stage.

Jack and his crew arrived minutes before we had to go on, with a rental car and a mechanic's estimate guaranteeing that he would personally lose about $1000 on the tour. But the skiers and the snow-mobilers and the sons and the daughters of copper miners and lumberjacks were already arriving, and we really let it out that night.

They ate us up--come hear "the Big Band from Chicago," read an ad in The Ontonagon Herald the next day. And it was nice--playing cribbage all day in the Dry Dock Bar with old Finns, taking saunas and flogging one another with hemlock branches after rolling in snowdrifts, drinking ourselves insane every afternoon. Berler got a groupie on the third night, a frail thing from Minnesota with skin so preternaturally translucent she seemed almost back-lit. We dubbed her the Fetus, and when Berler brought her back to the hotel where we were staying, we gave him holy hell for it, as must be the case whenever somebody in a band tries to flaunt something.

Being the front man, Berler naturally gets more groupies than the rest of us--which is not to say there have been a lot of groupies in Del-Crustacean history. Five, maybe six girls total who've actually come up and implied that they needed sex with a musician. A lot, of course, is tease.

On another holiday tour--this one in Key West, Florida--a lush, tanned coed marched up to Berler and effectively gagged him with a ten-second tongue-to-tonsils thrust in mid-song. She then disappeared and never came back. That same night, Berler thought he had it made with another beauty at the bar. Five minutes later, yet another tube-topped honey approached and, in a voice tingling with viciousness, said to him, "I want my stool back and I want my woman back." When we were done playing that night, the band went to another bar and Berler asked still another beauty queen to dance. That one turned out to be a guy. Mind-blown, Berler danced with him anyway. Dykes and fags--rock-'n'-roll hazards in Key West.

But in Ontonagon, we felt like the genuine articles. We'd sit in Syl's Café on River Street, hung over, loud, insolent, knowing that it was time to get lit up for that night's show. It wasn't so much us against the world as it was us despite whatever the world could have thrown in our way just then. We felt like outsiders, renegades who could strike fear into the hearts of the city fathers and lust into their young daughters.

On our last night, a blizzard hit. As we drove over the Ontonagon River bridge back into town from Tubby's, I put my car into a slide that carried us silently down the center of the main street, revolving through the swirl like a slow-moving puck. It was three A.M. and there was nobody anywhere except a county cop in a patrol car. He pulled us over and asked us what the hell was going on.

"Officer," I said with what seemed like total clarity, "I'm sorry, but I'm in a band and I've never seen so much snow."

The cop let us go; he might have sensed what was happening to us there in the night. Surely, he could see all the guitars and gourds and patch cords and dirty T-shirts in the back, and he might have felt the transcendence of our mood. It was something like this: As our car had circled and the snow had billowed, I remember realizing for the first time--I'm here with my best friends in the world.

•

We're playing tonight. I'm getting fidgety, cranked up. I'm thinking about the shape of the dance floor in the party room and whether or not we'll get free drinks. I may as well leave my desk now, because I'm useless here. Drew gets in on United at 6:45. Mike and P.J. got in an hour ago. They're over at Berler's apartment. I know because Berler called a few minutes ago, insane.

"Where's Drew?" he screamed.

"In mid-air, you stupid bastard," I screamed back.

Gabby right now is driving east on I-94 with his truck that says Del-Crustaceans Rock Stars on the side, the one he uses to haul lumber and fishing gear back home.

We'll all meet backstage, like we've done 500 times before, and we'll shake hands and hug and ask one another about our wives and girlfriends and businesses. Everybody will have a little less hair or be a little grayer or paunchier or shorter or something, and there will be the usual jokes about old age. Maybe Mike will have the chords to the Supremes song we've been trying to learn for the past three years.

Each of us has another life, but we have this one, too. Our men's club, our inner circle. There are a million good musicians out there, maybe 10,000,000, and I envy them all. But we've got a band, and that's what counts. In about three hours, we'll be prancing in our red shorts, whipping a party into line, ecstatic. It's hard to explain. Jimi Hendrix is gone, and so are Joplin and Holly and even old John Lennon. Maybe, in some small way, the Del-Crustaceans are part of what rock 'n' roll has drummed up to fill that void. Or maybe we're just aging kids who don't understand the phrase "graceful exit." Who knows? I just hope P.J. wears his new T-shirt tonight, the one that says Fuck Art, Let's Dance.

"I'd learned five or six chords, and that, we sensed, would be more than enough for our purposes."