Satan's Waiting Room, or Stages of Grief

Wrote this article about formerly famous rock bands sustaining their careers at casinos for GQ in 2006. It got killed. Spin read it, and said they might run it, but changed their minds. GQ kindly paid me my full fee for the story (or gave me credit for the wordage, as I think I was on contract at the time). It was a lot of work and travel. It's not easy to get to Atlantic City from Oakland, for example, and I wanted to take a bus on the final leg; I thought it might be interesting to ride a Friday night bus from Philly to Atlantic City, just to see who my fellow passengers might be. I was wrong. I recall being more disappointed by the Spin rejection, I guess because it would have been so nice for a killed thing to find a life after death. I did a bunch of editing at Spin's request, but in the end, they lost interest. I had originally pitched it to GQ as a story about once-famous rock acts playing at state and county fairs. But GQ thought it would be more interesting at casinos. They were probably right, but somehow I just couldn't pull it off. The original version included an REO Speedwagon show and backstage interview. I don't remember why or when that section got dropped. Might have to do with how nice the REO guys were, and that I just couldn't find much funny to say about them. I never liked their music. Or Eddie Money or Rick Springfield, for that matter. I admit to liking Styx briefly when very young. Doobie Brothers I have liked on and off, and they are very much the sound of my childhood summers. It was humiliating for the story never to see the light of day. It involved so much travel and work that just about everyone I knew was aware that I was working on it and was excited about it and often asked me how it was going and when it would appear. On my last trip to Vegas, outside the Eddie Money show, some dude sneezed all over me and I ended up being sick for weeks. The husband of a co-worker of my wife was a huge, life-long REO fan, and so I took him with me to the show and then backstage afterwards. It was very exciting for him, which was nice, but just added to my embarrassment when the story died. Of course, magazine stories get killed for all kinds of reasons, not always to do with the quality of the writer's work. But this one was probably my fault. My original, working title was "Satan's Waiting Room." It was some kind of joke about how, if Florida is God's waiting room, and if Rock & Roll is Satanic, and if casinos are where old bands go to die, then casinos would be Satan's waiting...well, you get it.

Stages of Grief

At first, to catch their names on a state fair schedule -- Journey, Styx, Blue Oyster Cult -- seemed a kind of cosmic rock comeuppance. Finally, these bands who had blasted music back into a dark, bullshit age of meaningless rock opera pomp, who had never deserved their former fortune or fame, were getting theirs in the hellish heat of the fair.

But in my more reflective moments, a certain nagging sadness would taint my schadenfreude. Did any formerly-famous musical act really deserve this fate: forced to trudge onstage and fain the triumphant rock and roll body language of their glory years while banging out their hit songs for the millionth time before another sweaty, heat-dazed, corn-on-the-cob sucking American crowd staggering about the fairgrounds.

Well, now these former idols and two-hit wonder mainstays of the fair have come in from the heat: fairgrounds rock has taken over the glam stages of Vegas and Atlantic City and the glamour-free nightclubs of the far-flung Indian reservations. Frampton is here. Juice Newton is here. REO Speedwagon is here. Even some remnant of Queen is here.

Sooner or later they’ll all be here in rock and roll’s Indian burial ground.

To read the whole thing, go here: Satan's Waiting Room

More Chekhov, more on books

This paragraph from a Chekhov short story describes something of how I read. The first and last sentences sound particularly familiar. Are these the last years of my confinement? What am I confined in? Life and consciousness and failure. Could books save me? (With the passage's final image, I was reminded of Ishmael clinging to Queequeg's coffin.) Ultimately, they destroy the prisoner in the story. Books, and his years of solitude, turn him into a cynic, a misanthrope, a Timon. Is Chekhov saying that if you knew humanity only through its books, you would want to avoid it in real life? Is he saying that that conclusion would be accurate? And if so, is he blaming humanity for this outcome, or just writers of books, like himself?


During the last years of his confinement the prisoner read an extraordinary amount, quite haphazard. Now he would apply himself to the natural sciences, then he would read Byron or Shakespeare. Notes used to come from him in which he asked to be sent at the same time a book on chemistry, a textbook of medicine, a novel, and some treatise on philosophy or theology. He read as though he were swimming in the sea among broken pieces of wreckage, and in his desire to save his life was eagerly grasping one piece after another.
                                                                                                         
                                                                                                           -Anton Chekhov
                                                                                                            "The Bet"

The part you can skip: WHF

I think it is much better for a book to have some parts that can be skipped just as well as not, you get through it so much faster. I have often thought what a good thing it would be if somebody would write a book that we could skip the whole of. I think a good many people would like to have such a book as that. I know I should. 
                                                                                           
                                                                                              -William Henry Frost
                                                                                                Fairies and Folk of Ireland (1901)

                                                                                                            

Line from the poet Desmond O'Grady

There's a time in the wound of childhood when something clots.
                                                                    -Desmond O'Grady
                                                                      from the poem "The Nail"

Also see: Poem by Desmond O'Grady - Was I Supposed to Know?