Compelled to Repel

Nick Cave, Morrissey, John Lydon...ugh...

I’m taking a real good look at you. I’m taking a real good look at your FACE. [Photo by Phil Sharp]

“Elayne Boosler! She’s NOT funny!” A stand-up comedian having well-crossed the line beyond his 15 minutes of fame had gone from funny to weirdly trenchant. “What? America is afraid to hurt her FEELINGS?!”

I like Elayne Boosler but outside of the rightness or the wrongness of the aforementioned claim, I think of this conceit a lot. Specifically in regards to sacred cows or, more directly, discussions of sacred cows. Of course my thinking about this also collides with a game created by former sports agent extraordinaire Sal Russo. The game was called “What Would It Take”.

The set up? You take some seemingly normal social patterns/behaviors — like going to a restaurant and asking for water — and push it to a ridiculous, cop-calling extreme. To wit: how many glasses of water can you ask for before your server has had ENOUGH?

All of which congeal, as they have, around my thinking regarding Nick Cave’s recent attendance at the King’s Coronation. As in “what would it take” for us to start calling the Nick Cave spade a spade and what? The world is afraid to hurt Nick Cave’s feelings by even threatening to do so?

In reality Cave is not doing anything super surprising. Firebrand Jerry Rubin went from a Yippie to a Yuppie, a firebrand to an establishment hustler, in the 20 years it took him to taste what the world was really cooking.

[W]ith Cave who, arguably, is having a later career resurgence it doesn’t feel contrived (which is probably good) but it most definitely feels…forced.

Morrissey, like Brigitte Bardot, motivated by a love for animals, at least initially, trundled over to an understanding of the world premised on racial archetypes and a hunger for a day when he could understand, again, England as elementally white. (Total disclosure: Morrissey recently requested a mailing list from me of Black authors I liked who wrote about more than the condition of being Black. I recommended me, SA Cosby, Adam Smyer, Ishmael Reed, Trey Ellis, and Yrsa Daley-Ward. So there’s that.)

John Lydon, née Johnny Rotten, famously pissed off as many people as he’s been able to piss off in awhile by, unforced error style, backing Trump for no clear cut personal gain. Exene Cervenka believes that Sandy Hook was a false flag deal and none of those dead kids are actually dead kids. And the legacy destroying list goes on.

In the twilight of whatever fleet-footed fame you once had, making suchlike noises makes some sort of sense in the search for relevancy. But with Cave who, arguably, is having a later career resurgence it doesn’t feel contrived (which is probably good) but it most definitely feels…forced. A fact that brings me around to Maya Angelou who advised that “when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

I’d not have said this but for the singular occasion I had actually managed to do a show with Cave. Now just to be clear, there is no bigger Birthday Party fan than me. However, seeing Cave play on the Bad Seeds first tour at the I-Beam in San Francisco prior to featuring an interview with him (done by now-theater great Josh Pollock) in The Birth of Tragedy Magazine, I remembered something funny.

For the entire show there was some girl pressed up against the stage, screaming. “NICK!!!? NICK?!?!?”

Insistent and urgent she continued her keening cries during every silent moment while Cave stomped around the stage, his florescent green sharkskin pants flashing all kinds of “no”. The show ends though, and he begins stalking off stage right. Out of the corner of his eye he spies her scrambling up on the stage and he redoubles his pace.

But then she surprises all and sundry by scrambling up on stage and instead of breaking right in the direction Cave has gone, she breaks left and begins chatting with another bandmate. By the time Cave reaches the stage end though his curiosity to, Lot-like, sneak a peek behind him is over powering and he does so, registers that she’s chatting with Barry Adamson (possibly him…but memory fails here) and he slinks off stage, either the victim (or perpetrator) of some wild prank. Or just circumstance.

I think of this when he and I are doing a show at the London Jazz Festival in Royal Albert Hall. I’m singing, at the behest of the aformentioned Adamson, a cover of Tom Waits’ “Romeo Is Bleeding”. Cave is singing Jacques Brel’s “Au Suivant”, also covered by Scott Walker as “Next”. He is there with his wife. All vibes indicate that he is, perhaps, under a certain amount of pressure only known to long term couples. That is, she seems pissed at him.

For my part I’m just excited to be there and feel no small amount of competitive pleasure at sharing a stage with him. Which is to say: he kills it, I kill it, joy abounds.

Later in the green room I say that it was great and suggest, enthusiastically, that doing it in French would have been mind blowing too. He sniffs, turns on his heels, and we’ve not seen each other again. As in: ever.

Photos of Cave at the Coronation surprised though. The Queen’s funeral is one thing, but the Coronation? Why’s Cave look so sad? Oh. Right. Nevermind.

I was aware of the fact that somehow I had transgressed but…had I? And is he thin-skinned enough to have actually taken offense?

Since then though life has caught up to Cave and a man who I was never sure and to what degree he was putting us, the listeners, on, has had to pay some heavy life tolls. His appearance in public life was occasioned by the death of his father, and the latter day Cave found himself the father of not one, but two, dead sons.

Whether or not this was causally connected to his turn/return to Christianity I am unsure. But his imagery, always rife with Christian symbology, didn’t feel so unsettling. Nor did his desire to play Israel when others were choosing not to do so. I’ve spent a lot of time in Israel and would have, pre-Bibi, been more than happy to have played there. So again: not surprising.

The King’s Coronation though?

Well, I think at this point we need to start listening to exactly what he’s saying.

“Do you feel like we fucking sold out?” Two people asked me this. Steve Ballinger, former co-founder of Whipping Boy and Bubby, drummer for early NYHC band AntiWarfare. “Like all of that shit we used to believe was…stupid?”

I’m unsure of what crisis points drove them to this consideration but I’d brook with no looking back in anger/regret.

“Absolutely not,” I foamed. “The way I was is in my blood and as definable as the sound of my voice or the shape of my head. Yes, I know consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds but coherency is not. You see my ideas haven’t evolved as much as they have accreted.” Ballinger agreed. Bubby I never heard from again.

So Cave’s intimations that the Coronation was consistent with a history of iconoclastic behaviors I am not totally buying. His protestations that he can do whatever the hell he wants? That I am buying.

I am also buying that wider cultural embrace (up to and including hanging out with Brad Pitt), along with the financial implications of said embrace, might change a man. As would a glimpse into the transitory nature of life and a personal need to have your future reality adhere to some sort of “proper” order.

But buying it and liking it are two very different things.

I remember though talking to a Brit journalist friend and the conversation curiously focused on which musicians would you want to have your back in a street fight and surprisingly enough while The Cult’s Ian Astbury can actually fight, according to the journo, so could Robert Smith from The Cure.

The goth make-up sporting sad boy Smith can swing it and moreover just said this: “I fucking hate Royalty. Any kind of hereditary privilege is just wrong. It’s not just anti-democracy, it’s just inherently wrong.

“What upsets me is that some people who I’ve actually admired down the years get offered a reward by the Royal Family, by the hereditary monarchy, and they take it. They become Lord or Sir. I would honestly cut off my own hands before I…how dare they presume that they could give me an honour. I’m much better than them. They’ve never done anything, they’re fucking idiots. I should be King.”

Not quite the goth make-up sporting sad boy hero we deserve but the goth make-up sporting sad boy hero we got.

Photos of Cave at the Coronation surprised though. The Queen’s funeral is one thing, but the Coronation? Why’s Cave look so sad?

Oh. Right. Nevermind.

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