sort of normal to me. Maybe normal is the wrong word, but it worked. A study in the British Journal of Psychiatry in 1994 by Felix Post claimed that 69 percent of the creative individuals he’d studied had mental disorders.1 That’s a lot of nutters! This, of course, plays right into the myth of the fucked-up artist driven by demons, and I would hope very much that the converse of that myth isn’t true—that one does not have to be nuts to be creative. Maybe some problem of some sort can at least get the ball in play. But I have come to believe that you can escape your demons and still tap the well.
When I was at art school in the early seventies, I began to perform with a classmate, Mark Kehoe, who played accordion. I dropped the acoustic guitar and focused on the ukulele and my hand-me-down violin, which now had decals of bathing beauties stuck on it. We played at bars and art openings, and together we traveled cross-country and ended up playing on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. Busking, as it’s called in Britain. By this point we had a look, too—a variation on Old World immigrant, I guess is how you would describe it. Mark adopted a more Eastern European look, and I gravitated to old suits and fedoras. I had an unkempt beard at the time, and once a young black kid asked me if I was one of those people who didn’t ride in cars.
We played mainly standards. I would sing “Pennies From Heaven” or “The Glory of Love” as well as our own arrangements of more contemporary fare, like “96 Tears.” Sometimes Mark would play an instrumental and I’d strike ridiculous poses—bent over standing on one leg and not moving, for example. Something that absolutely anyone would be able to do, but that I—or my “stage” persona—seemed to think was show-worthy. We realized that in a short amount of time we could amass enough cash to cover a meal and gas for an old car I’d picked up in Albuquerque. One might say that the reviews of a street performance were instant—people either stopped, watched, and maybe gave money, or they moved on. I think I also realized then that it was possible to mix ironic humor with sincerity in performance. Seeming opposites could coexist. Keeping these two in balance was a bit of a tightrope act, but it could be done.
I’d seen only a few live pop-music shows by this point. At the time I still didn’t see myself making a career in music, but even so, the varied performing styles in the shows I had seen must have made a strong impression. In high school around Baltimore, one could attend what were called Teen Centers, which were school gymnasiums where local bands would be brought in to play on weekends. One act was a choreographed Motown-style revue, and at one point they donned gloves that glowed in the dark when they switched to UV lights. It was a spectacular effect, though a little corny. Another act did a Sgt. Pepper–type revue, and to my young ears they sounded just like the records. Their technical expertise was amazing, but it wasn’t original, and so it wasn’t all that inspiring. Being a cover band, even a really good one, was limiting.
It wasn’t only purist folk acts at the university coffee house. There were also rock bands, some of which had virtuosic musicians. Most would jam endlessly and aimlessly on a blues song, but one D.C.-based band, Grin, featured a guitarist named Nils Lofgren whose solos blew the others away. These displays of technique and imagination were humbling. My own guitar playing was so rudimentary that it was hard to imagine we were playing the same instrument. I figured these “real” bands were so far beyond my own abilities that any aspirations I had in that regard were hopeless.
I caught one big outdoor rock festival back then—in Bath, a town a few hours east of London. Exhausted after hours of listening to music, I fell asleep on the damp ground. In the middle of the night I woke up and realized that Led Zeppelin was playing. I think they were the biggest act on the bill, but I went back to sleep. In the early morning I was awake again and caught Dr. John, who closed the festival. He was in full Night Tripper mode, and I loved that record, so I was excited to see him. He came out in carnival drag, playing his funky voodoo jive, and the UK audience pelted him with beer cans. I was confused. Here was the most original act of the whole festival, dumped into the worst slot, and he was completely unappreciated by this crowd. It was depressing. Maybe the costumes and headdresses made it seem like too much of a “show” for this bunch, who valued what they imagined as blues-guitar authenticity? But authentic blues played by white English guys? It made no sense. I couldn’t figure it out, but I could see that innovation wasn’t always appreciated and that audiences could be nasty.
Later, when I was in art school, I caught James Brown at the Providence Civic Center. It was the best show I’d ever seen; it was so tight and choreographed that it seemed to be from another planet, a planet where everyone was incredible. He had sexy go-go dancers who just danced the whole show, and though it was exciting as hell, this too put any thoughts of being a professional musician out of my head—these folks were in the stratosphere, and we were just amateurs. That didn’t take any of the enjoyment out of the amateur experience; I’m just saying I didn’t have some transformative moment after seeing these acts when I immediately knew that was what I wanted to do. No way.
I was musically curious, and sometimes I would check out performers whose music I was only slightly aware of. I saw Rahsaan Roland Kirk, the jazz saxophonist, at the Famous Ballroom in Baltimore, a downtown venue with glitter cutouts of rocket ships on the walls. I realized there that jazz wasn’t always the staid, almost classical and reserved style I’d presumed—it was a show too. It was about musicianship, sure, but it was also about entertainment. Kirk sometimes played two or three horns at once, which seemed like the musical equivalent of playing the guitar with your teeth or behind your back or even smashing it—a stage gimmick. But it got everyone’s attention. At one point he took audience interaction to new “heights”: he gave out bumps of cocaine on a little spoon to folks up front!
After having played on the streets of Berkeley, back on the East Coast Mark and I opened for a wonderful local band called the Motels at the art-school auditorium. I shaved off my scraggly beard on stage while Mark played accordion and his girlfriend held up cue cards written in Russian. I didn’t have a mirror and couldn’t manage the razor very well, so there was a fair amount of blood. Needless to say, that kept the audience’s attention, though the bloodletting drove some of them away. In retrospect, it seems I was saying goodbye to the old immigrant guy in the dark suit. I was ready to embrace rock and roll again.
A brief flash forward—when I first moved to New York, I caught Sun Ra and his Arkestra at the 5 Spot, a jazz venue that used to be at St. Mark’s Place and Bowery. He moved from instrument to instrument. At one point there was a bizarre solo on a Moog synthesizer, an instrument not often associated with jazz. Here was electronic noise suddenly reimagined as entertainment! As if to prove to skeptics that he and the band really could play, that they really had chops no matter how far out they sometimes got, they would occasionally do a traditional big band tune. Then it would be back to outer space. There was a slide show projected on the wall behind the band, commemorating their visit to the pyramids in Egypt, and much of the time Sun Ra was wearing spectacles that had no glass in them. They were “glasses” made of bent wire that looped into crazy squiggles in front of his eyes. In its own cosmic way, this was all show business too.
In 1973 my friend Chris Frantz, who was about to graduate from the painting department of the Rhode Island School of Design, suggested that we put together a band. We did, and he proposed we call ourselves the Artistics. Being more social and gregarious than I was, Chris pulled in some other musicians. We began by doing cover songs at loft parties in Providence. We must have done a Velvets or Lou Reed song or two, and some garage-rock songs as well—“96 Tears,” no doubt—but interestingly, at Chris’s suggestion, we also did an Al Green cover, “Love and Happiness.”
I began to write original material around this time, now that I had a band that I hoped would be willing to perform my compositions. I still had no ambitions to become a pop star; writing was purely and simply a creative outlet for me. (My other artistic medium at the time was questionnaires that I’d mail or pass out. Not many came back completed.) The song “Psycho Killer” began in my room as an acoustic ballad, and I asked Chris and his girlfriend Tina for help on it. For some reason I wanted the middle eight
