Merlin’s Chickens: Life for Art’s Sake

When we yet had the luxury to do so, my friends and I chose art, with the result that one evening in the bar-spangled early 1980s I found myself in the restroom of a chicken sandwich joint, dressed in a New Wave rock n’ roll getup and helplessly retching over the single sink. Ah, I remember it well, as Maurice Chevalier might say. 

The young men and women with whom I’d academically consorted just a couple short years before had by then circulated out into the Larger World. They were now carrying valises, consulting carefully chosen wristwatches, and clicking with heel-to-toe determination down long, tiled hallways buffed to a maddening sheen. These former compatriots had long since begun stuffing their rolltop desks with the byzantine documentation of the successful. Yeah, they’d made it. What had I made? I’d barely made it to the sink. 

On the other hand, I was {unbeknownst to me} at the threshold of a madly cornucopious life. 

Dank Doozy

This was my band’s first gig and it was a comparative doozy. My helpless gagging was not the result of a chicken sandwich U-turn, but of garden-variety terror. In less than half an hour my band would take the legendary Merlin’s stage a few doors away. The destination, the grail, the happening hot spot – Merlin’s was a room so unspeakably and indefinably stamped with New Cool that even the slack-faced, nihilist, gloom-wave bands in their raccoon mascara betrayed themselves with moving eyebrows at the thought of gigging there. 

The year was 1983, and the city doesn’t matter (Phoenix). My band of misfits – after years of rehearsing and writing and writing and rehearsing in a succession of repurposed rented living rooms and egg-carton-deadened garages for just this moment – were about to take the stage and become the willing center of the noted club’s bug-eyed nocturnal attentions. The very idea had me fastened to a public sink in a chicken sandwich establishment, dry heaving with hunched, peristaltic fervor. Just another meditative hipster strolling Frost’s alternate route.

Mascara. Clove. Mousse. Art.

Crouched and prone in the nether shadows of a large parking lot a few blocks from the Arizona State University campus. Merlin’s was your standard pitch-dark noise box with a long, ragged bar and vestigial little tables placed around at random and bolted down like the furniture in The Poseidon Adventure. 

The guest attire ran to blacks and grays, and the dance space featured people twitching spasmodically à la Joy Division’s Ian Curtis, or swaying like undersea flora, faces expressionless in the feeble glow of aromatic ciggies. Haircuts varied but had in common shaved bits and colored bits and perpendicular, heavily moussed bits. These dank New Wave and Punk temples were mercifully murky during mid-day setup and sound check. 

You would wander in from the sun-blasted out of doors and into a cool but malodorous inkwell opacity, one arm cradling a crate full of cords and the other arm outstretched; a boneyard zombie looking for an electrical outlet. Your eyes would finally adjust to the gloom and at that moment your guitarist would kick open the club’s front door and lurch in with his amp and gear. Like a burst of phosphor, the stunning blast of sunlight would fleetingly reveal a battered chamber of scarred and bile-splashed interior malign that belied the swinging vibe the full club would later boast at the evening’s loud, joyous zenith.

Just summoning the club names of this, my Band Period, brings the sense memory back like a sonofagun; Merlin’s, The Mason Jar, The Profile Room, The Purple Turtle; these “clubs” – a word that accurately suggests membership – dominated my waking and sleeping hours. I loved the unearthly smell of these places, the pitiable band portraiture that decorated the walls with the long, heraldic tale of all the hipster hopefuls who’d poured through the place with their haircuts and their decal-mummified guitars and their Chuck Taylors. 

I loved the smart-ass, defiantly unfashionable bartenders, loved the fast-talking proprietors who would shamelessly, if good-naturedly, try to get away with whatever they could at the band’s expense. I would spend my days working at the Arizona Republic (the stentorian daily newspaper) thinking only about getting home, changing clothes, and tearing up the evening at a gig downtown. 

Chicks and Ducks and Geese Better Scurry

Eddie and I had met and clicked in much the same way Mick and Keith had; in the orchestra pit of a high school production of Oklahoma. We weren’t in the cast, we were tech crew – the rope-yanking Morlocks that even high school Theater Geeks regard with dismissive pity. During breaks in rehearsal Eddie could be found down in the orchestra pit masterfully playing the piano and wowing me, for one. 

We hesitantly began to commune around songs we both dug, and before long I was bringing my crooked poetry to his melodies. We stitched together a songwriting partnership that survives to this day. College brought Leslee (ASU, acting class, Grady Gammage Auditorium) with her late ‘70s baby-bangs, inertial energy, and dulcet singing voice. By 1979 we three had been gathering around a piano singing our songs for a year or so, and Eddie and I had been writing songs for longer. I was a journalism major working at the newspaper downtown, Eddie was a Psych major (holy cow), Leslee a bookish English Major-type. Or English Major, I guess they call them now.

Leap.

And here I’ll switch to the present tense and compress the action. Eddie and I continue writing in earnest and through a succession of bands the core of Eddie, Leslee, Cary, me, and our omnipresent, laconic, and unflappable sound man Danny Seibert (now a beloved Montecito landscape artist) hone our performing, our writing, our stage presence; our art. Our final incarnation, Spin Cycle, will conquer the Phoenix club scene and the ASU Greeks, will blow out our gigantic Gauss speakers at U of A’s All Greek Festival in a cavernous venue on that campus, and otherwise taste the Valley’s club and party scene to our satisfaction. We pay a couple visits to high school friends now attending Westmont. We are awed. “…uh, do people actually live here…?!”

Next thing you know we load up the truck and we move to Santa Barbara. Swimming Pools, Movie Stars, and thou. My future wife, the adorable and heartfelt Juudje, arrives from Holland with two of her friends for a year-long working sojourn, walks into Rocky Galenti’s where we’re gigging on a beautiful summer Sunday afternoon in 1986, and these 39 years later we are parents to two grown, lovely, smart-ass kids (results may vary). I have a home away from home in the Netherlands, a second family I dearly love, and a second language – some of whose words can sound like mild gagging. Yes, a full circle (see sink-clutching opener).

The Point

Don’t ignore the inner weather. Take it from me, Eddie, Leslee, Cary, Alan, Danny, Frank, Dave, Tony, and Bob – we get exactly one of these soap operas. ONE. It’s been estimated that 6,390 earthlings leave this planet every hour. That is, thousands of grand pianists, painters, sculptors, dancers and writers – unexamined creatives – are likely exiting every hour without having discovered what they actually Are. As dated and naive sounding as these “let’s put on a show!” declarations sound, it is worth noting that we are anyway all putting on a show in this life… The only question is, who’s directing yours?