American on Purpose Page 8

  “It wiz awright. San Francisco wiz great.”

  I told her about my trip to America and how I planned to return there and shamelessly hinted that she could come with me if she played her cards right. Then I got to what I had to know.

  “Meet any boys?” I asked.

  She smiled. She had a terrific smile.

  “Naw.”

  Funny, but I kind of knew she wouldn’t. It was San Francisco, after all; if you are a guy and you’re worried about the girl you like hooking up with someone on her vacation, I suppose San Francisco is the safest bet, assuming she doesn’t give her heart to a lesbian—and who among us hasn’t done that?

  Gillian said that she had got me a present. It was at her house but we could go and get it if I wanted.

  I did.

  We were inseparable for about two years. She worked as a secretary in the Inland Revenue tax-assessment center in East Kilbride, and I continued to con Burroughs Machines with my feigned interest in the emerging computer business. We watched TV in each other’s houses; she came to see my crappy bands play shitty local gigs; she ruefully dealt with my growing alcohol intake; our parents met, we talked about running away to America, but she liked her job and her family and was worried that she’d lose contact with them. I don’t believe she ever left Cumbernauld, although we did go on a fantastic trip to London.

  We stayed with my Uncle Davie and Aunt Sylvia, who lived in Romford. We saw Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament and did the whole touristy thing. We were in love, and during that trip Uncle Davie and Aunt Sylvia let us sleep in the same room. They assumed we had been allowed to do that in Scotland, and although that was not true, both Gillian and I kept quiet about it. We had fooled around a lot in Scotland but the trip to London was when we finally consummated our relationship. We lost our virginity to each other.

  We were both seventeen and were impossibly cozy, safe, and romantic together, but by the time I was nineteen the momentum of our relationship had taken me over and I felt trapped. There was talk of an engagement, and I thought that I would be with her forever, but if it came down to Gillian versus America she would lose. One night we went to a birthday party in the Rock Garden in Glasgow.

  It was a twenty-first for a friend of Gillian’s from work and we were excited because the Rock Garden was a trendy bar that we’d heard about but had never been to. I’d also heard of the band that would be playing, a notorious art-school punk group once called the Bastards from Hell and now known as the Dreamboys, more in deference to the singer’s adoration of H. P. Lovecraft than to any of his bandmates’ dreamy looks.

  Their sound was very exciting, rocky and wonderful and creepy and loud. Kind of like the Cramps but stranger. Their lead singer, Peter Capaldi, had the most commanding stage presence I had ever seen. At the end of the set he announced that this was to be the band’s last show because they couldn’t find a permanent drummer.

  And with that, Gillian and I were doomed.

  13

  Dreamboy

  Peter Capaldi was the first person I ever met where I was instantly aware I was in the presence of a star. Someone who was somehow different, with that ineffable quality of a born performer. Tall, very thin, and very handsome, fine featured with strangely pale clear skin and a shock of dyed carroty hair. Charismatic, confident, funny, and charming, he was few years older than me, which added to his glamorous air. He was dressed in black clothing that was styled to look as if he had just stepped out of a cheesy Universal science-fiction movie from the 1950s. Peter was Technicolored—an ambassador from Planet Showbiz.

  He was wearing eyeliner! which shocked me and made him seem even more alien. His demeanor, though not aloof, suggested he was smarter than the rest of the world and found it vaguely amusing.

  Gillian and I saw him outside the party, still sweating from the performance as the roadies were loading the band’s gear into the back of a rental van. He was leaning on a parked car, talking to some excited girls who laughed at everything he said and seemed to be fighting over the right to inhale the smoke from his menthol cigarette with the gold filter.

  At this point in my life I would never have instigated a conversation with a man in makeup—I had never seen a man in makeup apart from posters of Bowie and Marc Bolan and I was terrified of Peter—but Gillian had been drinking, and whenever she was tipsy she got a little mouthy.

  She marched up to Peter, elbowing aside his restless, tubby groupies, and told him how great his band was and how great a drummer I was and how we would be a perfect match. To my amazement, he seemed interested. He asked me if I had my own drum kit, and when I said yes he took my number.

  I auditioned for the band one wintry Wednesday night in a tiny recording studio located in the basement of a derelict tenement building near Glasgow city center. The studio was terrifying; it was like the lair of a serial killer. It had low ceilings and red lightbulbs, and there was even a decrepit old dressmaker’s mannequin propped in the stairwell that curved down into the dark damp cellar, where grimy, battered Marshall and Orange amplifiers had been stored by the various bands that frequented the place. The air was moist and heavy with mildew and stale from cigarette smoke. It was called the Hellfire Club—named for some fabled den of iniquity from long ago.

  Since it was a weeknight, I would never have had the time to pick up my drums after work and bring them into town, but when Peter phoned me he said I could use a kit already set up at the studio.

  That was a big mistake. The kit was awful—I had terrible difficulty playing it, and much to my shame I failed the test. They would rather break up the band than have me in it, or so they told me when we went to the pub for a pint after the audition. It was a shock, but I begged them for another chance because by now I knew I really wanted to hang around with these guys. They were older than me, they wore black, and they were all students at the prestigious Glasgow School of Art. These were the fuckers who had been in the record store with Gunka James all those years ago. They were different from any other people I had ever met. Sophisticated and hilarious, thoughtful and cool. I was already taken with Peter, but the other two guys were equally impressive.

  There was Roddy Murray—the guitarist whose first language was Gaelic. He was a native of the Isle of Lewis, off the northwest coast of Scotland, what Glaswegians dismissively call a teuchter. An intense, brilliant short man, he was gaining a little notoriety at the art school for his peculiar intestiney-looking abstract sculptures in sandstone and marble. And there was Temple Clarke, the bassist. I had never met anyone with such a cool name. It was his real one, too. (For a while I believed it was his punk moniker and thought it was spelled “Tempo.”) Temple was from a wealthy family in Edinburgh and was movie-star handsome, with James Dean hair and the giant white slab teeth of a rich kid. He was comfortable in his own skin and it was very obvious that he’d never have to work too hard at anything.

  They relented and allowed me to audition again that Friday using my own drum kit. Gillian was pissed off because we usually went out on Friday, but she let this one slide. My father drove me into town and helped me unload my drums at the Hellfire Club. He questioned the wisdom of hanging out in such an unsavory-looking area but relaxed after he met Peter and spoke to him for a few minutes. He found out that Peter was the son of the Capaldi family of Springburn, Italian immigrants famous for their ice cream business, and then it came up in the conversation that my mother had worked for Peter’s father as a secretary before I was born. I had been unaware of this but it seemed like a happy little piece of kismet. My dad drove away placated, and I set up my drums in the studio.

  By now I was no longer borrowing my older brother’s crappy kit. I had used my earnings at the factory to purchase a real set, and, much to the dismay of the neighborhood, spent long hours practicing after work and over the weekends.

  We started to play, and I was much better this time. We did some Cramps and Iggy covers and moved on to the band’s original stuff. I was rockin’, I was a pe
rfect fit. I knew it and so did they. In fact, after about an hour we took a break and went out to buy beer and whiskey to celebrate.

  When rehearsal (that’s what the audition had become very quickly) was over, they took me to an Indian restaurant. I had never tasted Indian food and had to be led through the menu by my amused companions, who delighted in my reactions of horror at the taste of the hot spicy dishes. I drank gallons of cold beer to cool my throat and we all decided it would be tedious and bourgeois of me to go back to Cumbernauld that night, so I slept on the floor of the large, drafty apartment in Glasgow’s trendy, bohemian West End where both Temple and Roddy had rooms.

  Next day, Gillian was mad; she thought I’d been with a girl. I hadn’t. It was far more serious than that.

  14

  Art School

  There seem to come times when certain towns find a rhythm and a style that defines them and fascinates outsiders. San Francisco and Liverpool in the sixties, L.A. in the seventies, Manchester and Seattle in the nineties. For a short while in the eighties, Glasgow enjoyed that kind of a groove. It was alive with creativity and expression, not just in music but also in art with painters like Steven Campbell, Adrian Wisniewski, and Peter Howson, and in film and theater with forces like Bill Forsyth, Bill Bryden, Michael Boyd, and Peter McDougall.

  Glasgow theaters were performing the works of Jean Genet and Dario Fo when they were considered too outré or politically touchy for the mainstream stages elsewhere in the U.K. Local novelists like Iain Banks and Alasdair Gray were coming to prominence on a national, and later international, stage.

  Glasgow’s image as a violent working-class town is only true in part. It’s also an extremely literate and artistic city. The only other place I’ve been to that seems comparable to me is Moscow, where the cold, the vodka, the misery, the literature and ballet, the depression and violence, the music, art, and humor all combine in a very familiar recipe.

  Glasgow began buzzing in the early eighties, and the Dreamboys were right there in the middle of it. A plethora of new groups got noticed nationwide, and some were even breaking in the U.S.—bands that had rehearsed and recorded demos in the dark, stinky, wee Hellfire Club.

  Before I joined the Dreamboys they were viewed as a weird art-school group, and before that, when they had been called the Bastards from Hell, were dismissed as poseurs. By the time I arrived on the scene, Peter was beginning to bloom as an artist. He was developing his own style, and I watched him, fascinated.

  The figurative oils he painted on canvas at art school were florid and intricate with an odd gothic yet cartoonish menace, and this was the direction the band drifted in, too, but with a very singular twist. Peter was also a devotee of American stand-up comedy. He had albums by guys I had never heard of—Steve Martin, Richard Pryor—and Robin Williams, whom I knew only as Mork from Ork on the imported sitcom that everybody loved for ten minutes.

  Peter had a strange need to have people laugh at him, so the Dreamboys were a dark, gothic, and bizarrely funny band, kind of like Peter himself.

  Peter was the first person who told me that being funny was a gift, and, when done well, was an art form. Up until this point, I had learned that being funny, particularly in school, was stupid and could get you physically injured.

  Peter had such a joy of performing that it was infectious, and it was he, more than any other person, who led me into stand-up comedy. He insisted that my natural boisterousness evidenced a latent talent for stand-up, and that that would be a far more healthy way of expressing myself than hitting drums, or occasionally people. During a festival of new Scottish groups at the ICA art galleries in London, he persuaded me to go up and introduce one of the bands, a real tough-guy outfit from Glasgow known as James King and the Lonewolves. I prepared a few crummy jokes and dressed up in a kilt and tuxedo and went out to try my routine in front of three hundred drunken cockney punks. I was terrified and all I can remember is that some girls in the front were trying to look up my kilt and noticed that I was so nervous that my knees were actually shaking. They started shouting, “Iz kneez are knockin’,” and the chant was picked up by the crowd.

  “Iz kneez are knockin’!” they yelled in unison. I was humiliated. I gave up, yelled the name of the band, and slunk off. I don’t recall ever failing so spectacularly at anything before that, except perhaps in my first brush with alcohol. I liked the idea of being a comedian—it seemed to be the fast track to the romantic failure that I suspected I would eventually become—though I was in no hurry to get on stage and try it again. I preferred the protection and anonymity that the drum kit provided, but Peter talked me into giving it another go, this time with much more satisfying results.

  A favorite haunt of the Hellfire Club bands and groupies and art students was a nightclub in central Glasgow called Maestros. Every Friday and Saturday night this small, dark club was packed with art students and rockers. Local bands would play, or the occasional London group who hadn’t quite made it big enough to fill the larger venues. The Maestros clientele was its own demographic. It wasn’t a huge community, and over time most people got to know each other; actually, most people got to sleep with each other, but the club itself was a safe-ish place to be at night in an otherwise dangerous city.

  One Christmas, Peter had the idea that he and I would perform a drag act and sing a couple of songs from the movie White Christmas to the assembled Maestros trendies. He came up with the stage name of Bing Hitler (I later stole this name and used it to my own nefarious ends), and I was Nico Fulton (a combination of the names of the junkie singer from the Velvet Underground and Rikki Fulton, an old Scottish vaudevillian). We wore big colorful ball gowns and delivered lames gags and patter, but the audience was good-natured and half in the bag already. They laughed and we laughed and I liked that feeling. I didn’t think there was a career in here but it was fun and you could do it drunk. These conditions were essential to any enterprise of mine at that time.

  The freedom of my hip new world was exhilarating. Whereas my drinking and especially my drug taking had been deeply frowned upon in Cumbernauld, amongst my rock-and-roll compadres in Glasgow it was a thing of celebration. I was witty and brave when I was liquored up. I could tell a good story and roughhouse with other angry young men in bars, which made me popular with the arty set, most of whom were middle-class tourists amid the hard tickets that frequented even the trendier Glasgow bars. I was tough enough to be faintly cool, yet not crazy enough to be psychotic. I never sought trouble but could handle it when it turned up, most of the time, although there was no shortage of diminutive, whippet-like scrappers who could kick my arse in a bar fight. Booze, the great catalyst, made me gregarious and outgoing even though I always felt less interesting than the people I was running with. I hugely overcompensated for my sense of inferiority by being as much of a wildman as I dared. The crazy moonish rock-and-roll drummer. A buffoon. That was the role I cast myself in.

  The two years I spent with the Dreamboys were my art school. I began to spend more and more time with the band and the fascinating cast of characters surrounding it. I tried to include Gillian, but she was uncomfortable around these bizarre artistic types, and that made me uncomfortable, too. Inevitably we broke up and she wisely found someone more stable.

  Soon, the mighty Burroughs Machines company felt that they could embrace the coming digital revolution without the help of a certain surly young Goth type who arrived late with a hangover most mornings. I tried to maintain some kind of work ethic but my heart was not in it and I was let go before my apprenticeship was completed, causing more shock and shame in my family. I moved into Glasgow and took a room in the same flat as Roddy and Temple. Almost immediately I started dating a punk goddess called Tricia Reid, the guitarist of an all-girl band called Sophisticated Boom Boom. Tricia was from the rough Blackhill area of Glasgow and was a fascinating mixture of competing philosophies. She’d been raised a Catholic and was very committed and knowledgeable about her faith, yet she also loved the o
ld rock and roll and reveled in the wildness and anarchy of the clubs and gigs that we went to. Tricia was extremely well read and academic but hid that beneath two pounds of eye makeup and spiked-heel boots. A good Catholic girl, she decided when I met her that I would be her introduction to sex. I adored her even though I think I was probably a little intimidated by her obviously superior intellect, and being her boyfriend gained me greater acceptance among the in crowd. Through Tricia I met David Henderson, the legendary owner-operator of the Hellfire Club. David was about six-five, rake thin, and an engineering genius. He cajoled the two primitive four-track recorders of his studio to work harder and more efficiently than their inventors could have imagined. Thus he made a lot of bands sound much better than they actually were, the Dreamboys included.

  David’s sister, Jayne, also became a friend of mine, and she was even more intimidating. As tall as her brother, and with a classic eighties supermodel look, Jayne seemed to be painted from the same brush as Peter Capaldi. Vivid and alien, she was Linda Evangelista from Mars. David and Jayne had grown up in another Cumbernauld, the ugly new town of East Kilbride. Having lost their father, who died tragically young, they spent a lot of time with their mother, whom we all called, naturally, Mrs. Henderson.

  Mrs. Henderson looked and sounded a little like my own mother, but she came to clubs and drank and smoked joints with us. I thought then the Hendersons may have been the coolest family on the planet. I think I still do a little bit.

  I went on tour with the Dreamboys which I thought would be my first experience of the rock-and-roll lifestyle but was actually more like my job delivering milk from the back of that shitty old truck. We rode the motorways of Britain in rented transit vans, Roddy driving, as he was the only one with a license, and the rest of us trying to get comfortable on top of amplifiers or drum cases as we rattled along. We played in awful, seedy clubs, places like the Limit Club in Sheffield. It was part bar, part swamp. The carpet was so moist, you could see puddles of some strange liquid coagulate around your shoes as you walked on it. The bathrooms looked like they had been catering to a population that was afflicted by some awful strain of explosive dysentery.