Step Across This Line (12 page)

Rock Music—A Sleeve Note

Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention are playing at the Albert Hall. It’s sometime in the early seventies. (As they say, if you can remember the exact date, you weren’t there.) Halfway through the gig, an enormous black guy in a shiny purple shirt climbs up onto the stage. (Security was lighter in those innocent days.) He’s swaying gently, and insists on playing with the band.

Zappa, unfazed, asks gravely, “Uh-huh, sir, and what is your instrument of choice?”

“Horn,” mumbles the Purple Shirt Guy.

“Give this man a horn,” Frank Zappa commands. But the moment the Purple Shirt Guy blows his first terrible note, it’s clear his horn skills leave much to be desired. Zappa briefly looks lost in contemplation, chin in hand. “Hmm.” Then he moves to the mike. “I wonder,” he muses, “what we can think of to accompany this man on his horn.” He has a flash of mock inspiration. “I know! The mighty Albert Hall pipe organ!”

The mighty Albert Hall pipe organ has in fact been declared strictly off limits to the band, but now one of the Mothers actually climbs up the face of the great beast, scrambles into the organist’s cubbyhole, pulls out every single stop, and almost brings the grand old hall crashing down with his deafening rendition of “Louie, Louie.”

Va-va-va / va-voom!

Meanwhile, down on the stage, the Purple Shirt Guy tootles away, blissfully happy, totally inaudible, while Frank Zappa looks fondly on like the benevolent, subversive wit he is.

Wit is not the quality most often associated with rock music, and when one listens to the Cro-Magnon grunts of most rock stars, one can readily appreciate why. In spite of the Spice Girls, however, rock ’n’ roll actually has a long history of verbal, musical, and off-the-cuff felicities and dexterities.

Here is Elvis, claiming to be itchy as a man on a fuzzy tree.

Here’s John Lennon’s quickness of tongue. (“How do you find America?” “Turn left at Greenland.”)

Here’s Randy Newman, proving, in “Sail Away,” that a song can be simultaneously anthemic and satirical. (“In America, there’s plenty food to eat / Don’t have to run through the jungle and scuff up your feet.”)

Here are Paul Simon’s surreal-associative lyrics. (“Why am I soft in the middle / when the rest of my life is so hard?”)

And here is the troubadour beyond categories, Tom Waits, telling his raw wanderer’s tales of alley cats and raindogs. (“I got the cards but not the luck / I got the wheels but not the truck / but heh I’m big in Japan.”)

In all this there is much for literary folk to study and admire. I don’t subscribe to the lyrics-are-poetry school of rock aficionado over-claiming. But I know I’d have been ridiculously proud to have written anything as good as this. And I’d have loved to have had the talent, the humor and speed of thought of Frank Zappa in the Albert Hall that night.

May 1999

U2

In the summer of 1986 I was traveling in Nicaragua, working on the book of reportage that was published six months later as
The Jaguar Smile.
It was the seventh anniversary of the Sandinista revolution, and the war against the U.S.-backed Contra forces was intensifying almost daily. I was accompanied by my interpreter Margarita, an improbably glamorous and high-spirited blonde with more than a passing resemblance to Jayne Mansfield. Our days were filled with evidence of hardship and struggle: the scarcity of produce in the markets of Managua, the bomb crater on a country road where a school bus had been blown up by a Contra mine. One morning, however, Margarita seemed unusually excited. “Bono’s coming!” she cried, bright-eyed as any fan, and then added, without any change in vocal inflection or dulling of ocular glitter, “Tell me: who is Bono?”

In a way, the question was as vivid a demonstration of her country’s beleaguered isolation as anything I heard or saw in the front-line villages, the destitute Atlantic Coast bayous, or the quake-ravaged city streets. In July 1986, the release of U2’s monster album
The Joshua Tree
was still nine months away, but they were already, after all, the masters of
War.
Who was Bono? He was the fellow who sang “I can’t believe the news today, I can’t close my eyes and make it go away.” And Nicaragua was one of the places where the news had become unbelievable, and you couldn’t shut your eyes to it, and so of course he was there.

I didn’t meet Bono in Nicaragua, but he did read
The Jaguar Smile.
Five years later, when I was involved in some difficulties of my own, my friend the composer Michael Berkeley asked if I wanted to go to a U2
Achtung Baby
gig, with its hanging psychedelic Trabants. In those days it was hard for me to go most places, but I said yes, and was touched by the enthusiasm with which the request was greeted by U2’s people. And so there I was at Earl’s Court, standing in the shadows, listening. Backstage, after the show, I was shown into a mobile home full of sandwiches and children. There were no groupies at U2 gigs; just a nursery. Bono came in and was instantly festooned with daughters. My memory of that first chat is that I wanted to talk about music and he was keen to talk politics—Nicaragua, an upcoming protest against nuclear waste at Sellafield, his support for me and my work. We didn’t spend long together, but we both enjoyed it.

One year later, when the giant
Zooropa
tour arrived at Wembley Stadium, Bono called to ask if I’d like to come out onstage. U2 wanted to make a gesture of solidarity and this was the biggest one they could think of. When I told my then fourteen-year-old son about the plan, he said, “Just don’t sing, Dad. If you sing, I’ll have to kill myself.” There was no question of my being allowed to sing—U2 aren’t stupid people—but I did go out there and feel, for a moment, what it’s like to have eighty thousand fans cheering you on. The audience at the average book reading is a little smaller. Girls tend not to climb onto their boyfriends’ shoulders during them, and stage-diving is discouraged. Even at the very best book readings, there are only one or two supermodels dancing by the mixing desk. Anton Corbijn took a photograph that day for which he persuaded Bono and me to exchange glasses. There I am looking godlike in Bono’s Fly shades, while he peers benignly over my uncool literary specs. There could be no more graphic expression of the difference between our worlds.

It’s inevitable that both U2 and I should be criticized for bringing these two worlds together. They have been accused of trying to acquire some borrowed intellectual “cred,” and I of course am supposedly star-struck. None of this matters very much. I’ve been crossing frontiers all my life—physical, social, intellectual, artistic borderlines—and I spotted, in Bono and Edge, whom I’ve so far come to know better than the others, an equal hunger for the new, for whatever nourishes. I think, too, that the band’s involvement in religion—as inescapable a subject in Ireland as it is in India—gave us, when we first met, a subject, and an enemy (fanaticism) in common.

An association with U2 is good for one’s anecdote stock. Some of these anecdotes are risibly apocryphal. A couple of years ago, for example, a front-page Irish press report confidently announced that I had been living in “the folly”—the guesthouse with a spectacular view of Killiney Bay that stands in the garden of Bono’s Dublin home—for four whole years! Apparently I arrived and departed at dead of night in a helicopter that landed on the beach below the house. Other stories that sound apocryphal are unfortunately true. It is true, for example, that I once danced—or, to be precise, pogoed—with Van Morrison in Bono’s living room. It is also true that in the small hours of the following morning I was treated to the rough end of the great man’s tongue. (Mr. Morrison has been known to get a little grumpy toward the end of a long evening. It’s possible that my pogoing wasn’t up to his exacting standards.)

Over the years U2 and I discussed collaborating on various projects. Bono mentioned an idea he had for a stage musical, but my imagination failed to spark. There was another long Dublin night (a bottle of Jameson’s was involved) during which the film director Neil Jordan, Bono, and I conspired to make a film of my novel
Haroun and the Sea of Stories.
To my great regret, this never came to anything either. Then, in autumn 1999, I published
The Ground Beneath Her Feet,
in which the Orpheus myth winds through a story set in the world of rock music. Orpheus is the defining myth for both singers and writers—for the Greeks, he was the greatest singer as well as the greatest poet—and it was my Orphic tale that finally made a collaboration possible. It happened, like many good things, without being planned. I sent Bono and U2’s manager, Paul McGuinness, pre-publication copies of the novel, in typescript, hoping that they would tell me if the thing worked or not. Bono said afterward that he had been very worried on my behalf, believing that I had taken on an impossible task, and that he began reading the book in the spirit of a “policeman”—that is, to save me from my mistakes. Fortunately, the novel passed the test. Deep inside it is the lyric of what Bono called the novel’s “title track,” a sad elegy written by the main male character about the woman he loved, who has been swallowed up in an earthquake: a contemporary Orpheus’s lament for his lost Eurydice.

Bono called me. “I’ve written this melody for your words, and I think it might be one of the best things I’ve done.” I was astonished. One of the novel’s principal images is that of the permeable frontier between the world of the imagination and the one we inhabit, and here was an imaginary song crossing that frontier. I went to Paul McGuinness’s place near Dublin to hear it. Bono took me away from everyone else and played the demo CD to me in his car. Only when he was sure that I liked it—and I liked it right away—did we go back indoors and play it for the assembled company.

There wasn’t much, after that, that one would properly call collaboration. There was a long afternoon when Daniel Lanois, who was producing the song, brought his guitar and sat down with me to work out the lyrical structure. And there was the Day of the Lost Words, when I was called urgently by a woman from Principle Management, who look after U2. “They’re in the studio and they can’t find the lyrics. Could you fax them over?” Otherwise, silence, until the song was ready.

I wasn’t expecting it to happen, but I’m proud of it. For U2, too, it was a departure. They haven’t often used anyone’s lyrics but their own, and they don’t usually start with the lyrics; typically, the words come at the very end. But somehow it all worked out. I suggested facetiously that they might consider renaming the band U2 + 1, or, even better, Me2, but I think they’d heard all those gags before.

During an alfresco lunch in Killiney, the film director Wim Wenders startlingly announced that artists must no longer use irony. Plain speaking, he argued, was necessary now: communication should be direct, and anything that might create confusion should be eschewed. Irony, in the rock world, has acquired a special meaning. The multi-media self-consciousness of U2’s
Achtung Baby/Zooropa
phase, which simultaneously embraced and debunked the mythology and gobbledygook of rock stardom, capitalism, and power, and of which Bono’s white-faced, gold-lamé-suited, red-velvet-horned MacPhisto incarnation was the emblem, is what Wenders was criticizing. Characteristically, U2 responded by taking this approach even further, pushing it further than it would bear, in the less well received
PopMart
tour. After that, it seems, they took Wenders’s advice. The new album, and the
Elevation
tour, is the spare, impressive result.

There was a lot riding on this album, this tour. If things hadn’t gone well it might have been the end of U2. They certainly discussed that possibility, and the album was much delayed as they agonized over it. Extra-curricular activities—mainly Bono’s—also slowed them down, but since these included getting David Trimble and John Hume to shake hands on a public stage, and reducing Jesse Helms—Jesse Helms!—to tears, winning his support for the campaign against Third World debt, it’s hard to argue that these were self-indulgent irrelevances. At any event,
All That You Can’t Leave Behind
turned out to be a strong album, a renewal of creative force, and, as Bono put it, there’s a lot of goodwill flowing toward the band right now. I’ve seen them three times this year: in the “secret” pre-tour gig in London’s little Astoria theater, and then twice in America, in San Diego and Anaheim. They’ve come down out of the giant stadia to play arena-sized venues that seem tiny after the gigantism of their recent past. The act has been stripped bare; essentially, it’s just the four of them out there, playing their instruments and singing their songs. For a person of my age, who remembers when rock music was always like this, the show feels simultaneously nostalgic and innovative. In the age of choreographed, instrument-less little-boy and little-girl bands (yes, I know the Supremes didn’t play guitars, but they were the Supremes!), it’s exhilarating to watch a great, grown-up quartet do the fine, simple things so well. Direct communication, as Wim Wenders said. It works.

And they’re playing my song.

May 2001

An Alternative Career

[
Michael Ondaatje asked me to contribute a piece to an issue of the Canadian literary magazine
Brick
about alternative careers. This was, obviously, many years before my appearance in the film of
Bridget Jones’s Diary
. . .
]

I always wanted to be an actor, in spite of early reverses.

I started out at the age of seven as a pixie in a school play in Bombay. My costume was made of orange crepe paper, and halfway through the little pixie dance I had to do with several other pixies, it fell off.

When I was twelve, I played the Promoter (that is, prosecutor) in Shaw’s
Saint Joan.
I had to sit at a table in a grubby white cassock and make copious notes with a quill pen. The only quill pen that could be found in Bombay was actually a ballpoint with a large red feather attached. I scribbled away merrily. After the play someone congratulated me on my performance and said that he had been especially impressed by the fact that I had been able to write for so long without ever needing to dip my quill pen into the ink.

At school in England the difficulties continued. In one production I played a swarthy Latin hound who got poisoned at the end of Act One. I was permitted a wonderfully melodramatic death scene, full of staggers and clutches at the throat, before crashing down behind a sofa. In Act Two, however, I had to lie behind the sofa for an hour with my legs sticking out. Stagehands climbed up above the stage and dropped peanut shells onto my face, trying to make my legs twitch. They succeeded.

Next I was cast as one of the lunatics in Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s
The Physicists,
but then illness struck down the boy actor playing the megalomaniac hunchback woman doctor in charge of the lunatic asylum in which the play is set, and I was told to take over. (It was a single-sex school, so we were obliged to follow the boys-only casting philosophy of the Elizabethan theater.) I wore thick tartan leggings, a tweed skirt, and a Mad Cherman Akzent. The play was not a success.

At Cambridge I built myself a putty nose extension for a part in an Ionesco play, but on the first night, bending over a lady’s hand, I squished my fake hooter sideways and looked more like the Elephant Man than I would have liked.

In a badly under-rehearsed production of Ben Jonson’s
The Alchemist,
playing to a first-night front row full of English literature professors, I suddenly understood that the line I was speaking was the answer to the question I was about to be asked. The whole cast immediately panicked and began improvising in something like Jonsonian meter, trying to find our way to a bit—any bit—we knew. It took what seemed like hours, but we managed it. Not one of the assembled luminaries of the Cambridge literature faculty noticed a thing.

After graduating I spent a while involved in London fringe productions. In a production of Megan Terry’s
Viet Rock
I was required to insult an audience full of people in wheelchairs, attacking them for their apathy about the war. Why were they not marching in protest, why had they not been at the Grosvenor Square demonstration confronting the mounted police, I demanded righteously. The wheelchair people hung their heads, abashed.

In another production I went back into drag, wearing a long black evening gown and a long blond wig to play a sort of Miss Lonelyhearts figure in a play written by a friend who has since become a successful writer. To make the Nathanael West-ish point that such figures are often men, I also sported a prominent black Zapata mustache. My friend the now-successful writer still threatens from time to time to publish photographs of this performance.

After playing the blonde, I understood that I had a limited future in this line of work and ceased to tread the boards. The itch remains, however. A few years ago another frustrated actor, the writer, editor, and publisher Bill Buford, suggested that we should sign up one summer in the most out-of-the-way American summer-stock company we could find and spend a few happy months playing pixies, swarthy Latins, cassocked prosecutors, mad doctors, et cetera. It never happened, but I wish it had.

Maybe next year.

October 1994