44 Years. With a Bullet.

An on-the-road meditation on the long, LONG way to...well, somewhere...if you WANT to rock and roll.

“What time is Matlock on?” And if you get that, you’ll probably agree that this shit is about as funny as a firing squad. (Photo by Annapaola Martin)

The Fat Elvis is haunting. Mostly on account of it leaving you in a place of total confusion. Did he not know? Or care? Was he so tanked up on the brackish bile of the American dream machine that he both knew and cared but was powerless to stop his aggressive headline decline amidst the filthiest of lucres?

All good questions and all questions that must greet the day when your day will unfold on yet another show. At another club. In another city. Yeah. This is part of a very short tour diary (oh yeah, trigger warning: if you HATE tour diaries, though this is not really one, bail now) that will be over by the time many of you have read this. But still…it’s today’s name of the game.

That is, this is the 44th year of standing on stages with a mic in hand, a journey with no clear destination (outside of a cold and moldy grave), and an obsessive need to communicate…something/anything to any with the ears to hear it. After last week’s obituary for Marianne Faithfull, capping off a year of obit after obit, it is natural that a “young” man’s fancy would turn to suchlike morbid self attentions.

Even more so when it is known that in 1969 I was playing the Fir Tree in The Little Fir Tree, to be followed by stints as the Father in The Sound of Music, Captain Hook in Peter Pan, and the Tin Man (understudy) in a stage version of The Wizard of Oz. Life under the klieg lights, indeed.

And still…Fat Elvis.

I’ve endeavored to (either) not be Fat Elvis, or be Fat Elvis, whichever gives the most bang for the buck via “poignant” story tale endings. However, when you consider that Elvis died when he was 42 years old, this line of thinking is purely fantastical imagining. More so since reading that Ozzy can’t walk anymore but is playing a Black Sabbath reunion show, that Billy Idol is a grandfather (as am I), Steven Tyler fractured his larynx, ending Aerosmith, and there’s death after death after death all along the rock and roll watchtower.

And yet…at present I am sitting on a bed in a hotel in Ravenna, Italy writing this right now, after having played a show to 200 people, and driving off tomorrow to play Florence, the city voted most likely to give you Stendhal Syndrome, to do the same. [Stendhal Syndrome being the phenomena of buckling under the weight of the world’s art treasures into nervous breakdown territory.]

Which is part of the key to understanding what’s happening and why, this full-throated desire to live beyond your beyond, and over your appointed physical time on Earth, is both a blessing and a stinging reminder of it as lasting curse. There is the artifact, almost always the artifact. The documentation of the reason for the season on the road. In this instance it is Mansuetude, a record by BUNUEL.

Due to the death and dearth of stores where you might buy that which most now can easily and comfortably steal, touring on a release is much more important than usual. No one in the world sold more records — those black, round, plastic things — last night than we did. Making this touring thing necessary. Like candlemakers and farmer’s markets this is where commerce lives.

But the live shows are about a lot more than standing behind a merch table hawking your wares. It’s about, a la Bobby Peru, fraternizing with the natives. That is, people who care enough about the music that you’ve made to come out on a rainy night in Florence, where I am now, to listen to however it is that we’ve chosen to give them a sample of what they can take home with them.

And there is the live show thing, which is precisely where the Fat Elvis concerns bite the deepest because the key to doing this a long time and looking like you should be doing it, has everything to do with being in shape to do so. This is not so much about looking good, though that’s part of it too, vain man that I am, but having your body being able to answer the dictates of your soul.

It might get harder, as you get older, to get up early or get out of a chair, but if you’re on stage, unless you’re Michael Buble, it has nothing to do with “taking it easy.” Especially since like Tina Turner said, we never do anything nice and easy. And there’s no roadmap for this really. The former young Turk firebrands of generations earlier, if they were successful, have a lot of success to cushion well…just about everything.

Out of the elbow. And into the future.

But for the rest of us? Something else is happening. See, I used to dream of dying on stage. Not like when you suck, but like Jackie Wilson who, it had been incorrectly rumored, died on stage. From a heart attack. Not singing the most famous line from “Lonely Teardrops” which would be “my heart is calling, calling”. But later after collapsing from the aforementioned heart attack.

It seemed a perfect kind of closure. But after further reflection it seemed to suck as much as dying on the toilet, Fat Elvis’s last show.

What I’m talking/thinking about now though has everything to do with how one man chooses the toilet and another does wind sprints to both avoid toilet and stage death. In fact, after buffing and shining, the truth will start to appear and that’s that more than anything else this is a tribute to, not vanity, but a desire to make life trenchant, significant and lasting. Which is funny. Mostly because it is none of those things. At least according to Einstein.

But if this is about fooling ourselves than this works as well as anything else. So I dropped from 224 to 214 pounds, did the cardio (and the CrossFit) and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, cut the calories, got the elbow drained, got a knee brace (just in case), loaded up on the anti-inflammatories, and rubbed on the CBD salve (a gift from Nate from Converge) and…and then ready to go.

I could still die on stage, you know. Or on a toilet for that fact. But looking like I belong there while doing so takes care of the vain part. And creating something that exists in the minds and the record collections of those whose younger relatives will be regaled about the former while getting to throw out the latter, after they die, is the best we can hope for.

So here I am hoping for it. Because in the end what will matter the most, at least to me, is not only how good I looked while exiting the planet but leaving something else of note. Something other than a nickname that points to the squandering that attended how everything about you unfolded.

And even if that ends up not being the case well, I guess I’d still rather be Fat Elvis than Fat Jimmy.

[End Note: For those who will see us “next time” please mindful of how well that worked with the whole OXBOW unwinding.]

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If books are still your thing and you still do books, please do this one…the memoir A Walk Across Dirty Water and Straight Into Murderer's Row, from Amazon…Or the Bookshop.Org dealie: Here?

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