Crystal City: The Life and Death of an American Rock Band

This is a true story, or as true as I can make it. For one thing, these events occurred when I was a tender young thing of seventeen: now at fifty, I may have condensed some events, but upon rereading this, I don’t think so. Events are pretty much as I describe them below.

At seventeen I was cast into a play, written by a student for an assignment in Creative Writing class at the local community college. It was not as nearly as good as it sounds. However, due to a fluke in timing or taste, the local dinner theatre decided to stage it, and I was cast as the ingénue (although I had wanted the part of the bitch ex-wife.) I won’t describe the seven-month hell of rehearsing that play, including the requisite walk-out of half the cast two weeks before the debut, but it put me in touch with a group of people I did not know existed, underemployed musicians in their mid to late thirties who couldn’t keep a job or get a girlfriend.  I’m not sure what they lived on, besides hope, and the occasional Social Security payment for disabilities not obviously apparent to the casual observer. What I remember most about this group was the smell of desperation, almost but not quite masked by Brute and the funky smell of dime-store clothing.

At some point, one of them discovered that I could sing, and offered me a spot in their band. The two other young things that had been offered spots as well were massively pissed off that I joined; both were cute, good singers, pretty good bass players. It says a lot about these men that they had three people on bass and no one on drums, but I was too stupid to think about that. I could sing a lot better then than I could now, being a lyric soprano with a range of over three octaves, and this also makes me think, why would a rock band want a lyric soprano? The answer is simple: eye candy. Needless to say, I had an eating disorder and did some modeling: at five feet tall, with long blonde hair, I was a striking contrast to the other two female members, a tall busty brunette with dimples and a half-Japanese redhead with melting brown eyes. The costumes the men chose for us were the nadir of taste, a cracker’s wet dream of femininity, extremely short cut-off jeans and red gingham shirts tied up over our navels with ruffled Calypso sleeves. Between the French-cut Daisy Dukes and the gay Harry Belafonte/Farmer’s Daughters shirts (which we sewed ourselves) we looked awful. It was one thing to wear them for performances but the guys insisted we wear them at rehearsals, which was a bit off-putting as the shorts were cut so high that our modest all-cotton, Mother-approved white panties showed every time we moved, breathed, or stood upright. My mother, who is not even Catholic, crossed herself the one and only time she saw me in this get up.

So, if we young ladies were dressed as hookers, what do you think the male members of the band were wearing? Well, for rehearsals, they wore the same sad gear, badly fitting jeans and t-shirts and plaid shirts which fifteen years later became the grunge look, but which, in 1981, just meant  “poor.” The leader of the group, Will, was in his late thirties, medium build, requisite pot belly, completely bald on top but with a long fringe of light blonde hair flowing to his shoulders. Moustache. Bitten fingernails.  Hang-dog attitude. He had recently been dumped by his fiancée, who showed up at a play rehearsal once sporting the pirate look (again, it was 1981) complete with a sword. This was our lead guitarist.

Next in our line up, The Worm, the OTHER lead guitarist. He had a name but I can’t remember it. He looked much the same as Will, only twenty years older, with a bigger pot, longer hair, and more facial hair. He did not sport the same hang-dog attitude, but was equipped with a fierce sense of superiority which I understand now is a mask. At the time, though, I just thought he hated me. Last but not least---the leading man of the horrible play whose name was actually the name of a ladies’ sanitary product. I can’t reprint the name, so a substitute will have to do, as he is exactly the sort of asshole who trolls the Net looking for possible references to himself so he can sue for libel. (Gotta love the US court system.) He also played bass. I have seldom seen a less attractive man. Well over six feet tall, gangly, not into personal hygiene, with yellow hair, yellow eyes, yellow fingernails and yellow breath, he exuded hostility whenever he wasn’t actively hitting on us.  Let’s call him Dragon.  Oh, yes, he also limped, as the result of running home twelve miles from a disco in a pair of platform disco boots when a lady he asked to dance with him said no, as she was in early labour at the time. (“If I’d a known he had a Social Security check comin’ in every month,” she told me later, “I’d a said yes, but at the time I was just thinkin’, o Christ, my water broke.”)

So, three middle aged men, three very young women, one vocalist, two background singers, three bass players, and two lead guitarists. This was Crystal City, which incidentally was also the name of a very large record store in the neighboring city. This name evokes everything wrong with our band, from a lack of direction to a lack of knowledge about copyright laws. I’ll skip over the hell of our three rehearsals, when the original material written by the buxom lady was passed over for bad covers of Alice Cooper tunes.

And now—The Gig. Just as local playwright had lucked out with the local dinner theatre willing to host her play, we lucked out with a local tavern willing to host our debut. At the time, I didn’t understand what Open Mic night meant, but I do now. I did know rather a lot about staging, and listened to the very elaborate plans, which stopped just short of fog machines and fireworks, but which did involve a safety harness, flying over the heads of the audience,  and jumping off a platform, guitars in hand, to strike the first epic chord. So imagine my surprise when the ladies and I showed up to our gig, dressed in our horrible tiny cocktail-waitress-dating-her-daddy outfits and found out the following: first, we were not allowed inside as we were underage, and second, the much-vaunted venue was a very small bar, seating capacity no more than 75, with a stage the size of a grand piano. How all six of us were supposed to fit on there was a mystery, even without the elaborate choreography or even a drum kit. So, although we three weren’t allowed in, we were allowed to sit outside on the grass and watch the show.

We were upset, of course, but this fever pitch of teenage emotion was instantly quelled and replaced by a deeper and more intense horror when, with a scream of the engine and a puff of smoke, the tiny Pinto carrying all three men roared in the parking lot, and all three male members of Crystal City emerged. I have intimated that none were attractive—two short baldies with pot tummies and one very long tall piece of yellow string—but the outfits they wore did nothing to hide their figure faults or unify them as a group. The Worm and Will wore Lurex one-piece body suits with—very evidently—nothing underneath. Both of the suits had been purchased a decade or so ago when both men were considerably slimmer. They were sleeveless as well, and their chubby arms showed off flabby white chicken wings and a notable lack of tattoos, which, let’s face it, you rather expect in a self-proclaimed bad-ass. Will sported a top hat, and the Worm had a lurex cape as well. Will had an ok package going on—as horrifying as it was, there was still something there—but The Worm had a tiny little lump on the right side of his crotch which managed to give the impression of a floppy little earthworm even when he stood still. I cannot hear the term “member of a rock band” without thinking of The Worm, and giggling. But somehow these examples of sartorial splendor were eclipsed by Dragon, who was dressed up like a pimp from Starsky and Hutch Meet Saturday Night Fever, with a white suit with a black shirt, a fur-lined cape, the aforementioned white Disco stacked heeled boots which shot his height to well over seven feet even without the ivory-colored felt panama hat, bedecked with not one but three ostrich feathers—which stood straight up. Head to toe, he measured about eight feet in length and could be smelled at twice that distance with a heady mixture of pot, aftershave, dental plaque, and nervous perspiration.

We stood there in silence, mouths agape, our complaints about not getting in stuck in our throats (the way they had pictured us many a dark and lonely night, I’m sure) and one thing floated into my brain, the thought that perhaps I should be thanking God on my hands and knees that I wasn’t going to be seen in public performing with this lot. A similar thought must have crossed the minds of my two cohorts as they too stood silent, a silence mistaken by the men as profound respect and admiration.

“Couldn’t get in, huh?” Will said jauntily. “Yeah, we thought that might happen. Never mind, we (jaunty toss of his head to indicate The Men) have our own set.” And that’s when we found out that they had been practicing in secret, fearing that we youngsters, lacking their experience, might let them down. Liquor laws in the state forbade any minor from entering a place serving alcohol, a fact the older men knew and had pooh-poohed away when I brought it up. “You’re a rocker,” Will had said countless times, “And those laws are for pussies!”

We ladies sat on the grass in a state of shock, a bit envious of the swagger with which the men strode into the venue. We had enough money between the three of us to order a pitcher of lemonade (very good lemonade, by the way) and settled ourselves in for the show. Crystal City was the first in the line up, not with a one-hour set as we had been told, but with a maximum three-number set. We couldn’t see much of the stage, as small as it was, but we could see the men squabble over the placement of a large packing crate which they unearthed from somewhere and set on the stage, as well as much head-tossing of long stringy hair as they plugged in their amplifiers and sound-checked. I’ve never seen the point of a fifty-minute sound check for a seven-minute show, but there you go, that’s probably while they were onstage and I was sipping lemonade on the grass. Other people evidently shared my opinion as the other acts were arriving and objecting loudly to the length of time Crystal City was spending on tuning and checking.

I’m often accused of being a bitch, and sometimes with good reason, but in that moment, watching the men plug and unplug  and replug their instruments, I understood with blinding clarity that this sound check was their big moment, the moment when they were living their dreams and being everything they had thought they should be, but weren’t: sound check was the dream without the possibility of crashing, as they weren’t yet performing. I’d call it foreplay, but it wasn’t that, it was the taste of success without consequences, pure pleasure, pure expectation, the plunge of your hand into your Christmas stocking when hope is still very much alive, not yet doomed to disappointment at what you actually have, the hour BEFORE the big date which turns out to be a bust, but in which you still have an hour to dream that it’s going to be all right. 

As  they strummed and hummed and insisted that the sound go louder—louder—louder, I felt it: THIS was their big moment, not the show itself. This is all pre-Spinal Tap or else I might have made a joke about the sound going to eleven, which it pretty much did, but I said nothing. My two companions  were busy fending off hits from the sort of men who go to open mic nights, who were drawn by our obvious youth and matching outfits. Some asked hopefully if they were twins. No one hit on me, which I barely noticed, because I was caught up in watching the men set up, suddenly connected to them by a feeling I couldn’t identify but which I now know is compassion. Watching them set up and fuss and reset and fuss again, I felt a closeness to them that I have seldom felt with other adults, and when they finally finished their set up—more or less jerked off stage by the exasperated bar manager—they joined us on the lawn for a few minutes of head-tossing and stage talk. They were, of course several hours early, as were many of the other acts. I was concerned with how I was going to get home. My mother had dropped me off, warning me to get a ride home, and I was weighing the risks of pissing her off by calling and asking for a ride after all, walking the six miles home in the dusk, and asking Will for a lift after the show. I had the feeling I did not want to watch what was going to go down, however disloyal it might be to leave. I whispered my concerns to the buxom one, who told me I had to stay, that she’d kill me if I left, and that she would give me a lift home but I HAD to stay to see it through.

“Maybe they’ll surprise us,” she added. Truer words were never spoken. Maybe they would stand up and deliver tender ballads. Maybe they would pull their shit together and have a hard-rocking trio. Maybe Dragon would pull off that stupid fur cape—it was August—and strip off the Tony Manudo white jacket and the ten Bee-Gee gold medallions and sing…but maybe not.

I’d like to leave it to you, as you can probably guess what happened. When the time to go on came up, the band, deathly pale, nervously took their positions. By that I mean Dragon got on stage and Will disappeared behind the packing crate. He scrambled about and made odd noises and finally The Worm had to borrow a chair from the audience (oddly, there were lots of empty chairs) and drag it to the tiny stage. He hopped up on the chair (ewwww) and reached over the packing crate and helped to pull Will up on it. Will evidently had a fear of heights and he perched nervously on the crate, gee-tar in hand, refusing to straighten up, crouched and trembling so hard that we could hear it through the instrument. The Worm, meantime, had clambered off the chair, forgetting to return it to the audience in his haste to hit his spot downstage. Dragon was strapped into his bass, doing air licks and practicing his own dip and swirl movements which resembled not karate as he had hoped but the petit mal seizures one of my dogs has.

And at last—the show began. Will let out a horrific scream, hit a crashing chord on his guitar, then leapt off the packing crate onto the stage. The crashing chord was so loud that the first set of speakers on stage blew just like they do in the movies. The screaming continued while the band picked up off that first chord and as the smoke cleared it was clear that Will was still on the floor, having hit his leg pretty hard on the chair upon descent. The chair was upright, but Will was down. He continued to play while on the floor, squirming around as if he were some Rock God and trying to cover the fact that he couldn’t stand upright, or at least didn’t dare try in front of the crowd during the big number. Give him props for continuing the song. Within ten chords the audience began to boo. Within two minutes, the audience began to throw things—napkins, peanuts in the shell, French fries…and within ten minutes, the cops showed up and shut the show down for noise violations. They had to carry Will out to the grass, where one of the officers, trained in first aid, bandaged up Will’s ankle for him. Buxom took off in the meantime, leaving me stranded: I walked home, although in that outfit I had plenty of offers for rides.

My parents, tactful as ever, never asked me how it went, nor questioned why I arrived home well past midnight unescorted (and thankfully unmolested.) The only feedback I got came from my dad a few days later. Dad worked for the police department and part of his job was to type complaints into the system. He knew a lot about everyone and everything but never commented on anything he saw. This time, however, he saw fit to mention that the owner of the venue called in the noise complaint himself. I wanted to tell him that I hadn’t even sung that night, but he was smirking so much that the words died in my throat. It didn’t matter: no one had pelted me with peanuts and napkins and at worse I was only out of pocket for that god-awful outfit. If anything I felt that I had gained something, having had that moment of empathy for which I paid with a two-hour walk home in the dark.

 If Crystal City ever rehearsed or performed again, I wouldn’t know, as no male member of the group ever contacted me after that. I moved on: I moved to New York, I moved to Tokyo where I sang Tiny Bubbles and My Way an awful lot, and I never tried to stage a grand entrance via a packing crate. I sing a bit at local venues in the city where I live. Sometimes the art and music flow through me and when it doesn’t, I am the pathetic older person singing to a too-loud guitar.  I am aware sometimes that younger performers look at me with that same clarity I experienced at seventeen, knowing that I’m just a black-clad oldie making up in sound for what I lack in talent. But that’s life, and that’s the circle of life, and someday they’ll be the old person on stage, wondering where all the music went. Let’s just hope they’re not wearing Spandex when it happens.

Recipe: Really Good Lemonade

I should mention here that through the usual small town connections, I did get the lemonade recipe.

Combine half a cup of white sugar with a half-cup of boiling water. This is a basic simple syrup. Stir until all of the sugar is dissolved, let then it cool on the counter. While it's cooling, juice two to three lemons. If you're feeling fly, add the juice of a small lime or small orange as a kick. You can also add mint, but don't add it with the lemon juice, add it to the hot simple syrup to help extract the flavor, or add springs of mint to the glasses later.  Combine the juice, syrup, four cups of cold drinking water (aka "a quart") and pour over tall glasses filled with ice. Best served fresh. Some like to add a tiny pinch of salt to the lemon juice. Delightful.