Sunday, November 15, 2015
Sunday, July 13, 2014
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
Star Fits
Nothing humanizes a performer/celebrity more than seeing them backstage before a show. I’ve had the opportunity to witness many of the acts that play The Bell House from that unique vantage point and have seen the best and the worst of celebrity behavior.
The boring truth is that ninety-percent or more of the artists behave like normal folk. They are there to do a job without a lot of nonsense, and if they are left alone they are usually decent and friendly.
Here are a few exceptions to the rule:
~Witnessing a famous comedian screaming at a Chinese delivery girl because he had to wait forty-minutes for his Kung Pow Chicken.
~Stumbling upon four naked, large and hirsute members of a black metal band performing their ablutions in the slop sink.
~Shoveling up vomit of a famous host of an NPR show after he got drunk and before he passed out.
~Watching in shame as a grown man wept over a sandwich.
~Witnessing a tirade by the drummer of a famous garage rock band who refused to take the stage because the drum kit wasn’t to his ridiculous specifications.
One of my favorite incidents involved the former lead singer of a once popular 80’s band. He was performing solo. I’d heard through the grapevine that his contract rider required the promoter to supply him with Tucks medicated pads to ease his hemorrhoids. I happened to be passing him backstage as he was about to enter the bathroom, Tucks in hand. My embarrassment was quelled when he looked me right in the eye, held up the Tucks and said with genuine gratitude, “Hey man, thanks for getting my ass medicine.” That was awesome.
Tuesday, June 19, 2012
I know, I know...this blog has survived more costume changes than Cher. But hey, my single-digit readership deserves fresh material. For those of you who have missed my compelling stories of having my balls shaved by a clown or breaking my hip while skateboarding in my forties, that's a real shame. They were compelling, dramatic and Pulitzer worthy. Take my word for it.
So now instead of Baltimore I'm in Brooklyn and living the life of someone half my age with half a third of the resources. But so what?
I work at an old-school record store in Greenpoint and I bartend at The Bell House, a live-music venue on the superfund (superfun!) banks of the Gowanus Canal. A fetid waterway which includes both anus & anal in it's name. But that's irrelevant.
My point being I've suddenly found myself hobnobbing with the vaguely famous. People famous to the degree that I have to explain who they are and what they have done and perhaps twenty percent of the people I brag to have any idea who, or what the fuck, I'm talking about.
Case in point: On Saturday we hosted a comedy show with many famous comedians that most people could give a fuck about, but to me are living and breathing god-like beings. Even if they can be assholes at times. But that makes me revere them even more so.
One of these comedians is H. Jon Benjamin. Most people don't know him from such sweet voice-over gigs as Bob, from Bob's Burgers - Archer, from Archer - Carl, on Family Guy, and from the brilliant, self-titled, now cancelled Jon Benjamin Has a Van.
Anyway, Jon Benjamin has appeared at the Bell House numerous times and I always enjoy his odd brand of comedy.
Here is a photo I took of him on a previous night holding a copy of Straight Stuntin magazine.
I'd exchanged pleasantries with Jon in the past but I found him to be prickly. Which is a nicer way of calling him a prick. But I get it. I can imagine he grows weary of the sycophants, weirdos and hangers-on that occasionally recognize him for his voice-over work. I have found that the trick to talking with "stars" is not to talk about them at all. Talk about the outrageous prices at the local Whole Foods or the best bike lanes in Brooklyn...anything but how much you admire their work. I get that. If every time I went out and people came up to me to praise my skills at pouring a beer I would be embarrassed and freaked out. But that rarely happens.
So I was working the front bar when Jon came out from the main hall after his set. He tipped his ever-present ball cap to me and asked for a "small beer". I gave him a Dale's Pale Ale and started chatting. Long story short, he presented me with a copy of the story he told on stage that night. I present it to you with this disclaimer: The following is the property of H. Jon Benjamin and I have no right to distribute it, so...shhh!:
"I remember less the way our modest half-timbered house looked, but more the smell of pine wood, burnt leather and choucroute garnie. My father smoked a pipe, a small briarwood pipe with a black mouthpiece and a smooth almost pellucid chamber. When he kissed my cheek goodnight, his mustache was redolent of cherry pipe tobacco and kirsch. When the Nazi's came I was 7. I heard a banging and then loud voices. Then footsteps. Then, quiet. Cold, searing quiet. I waited till dark to emerge. The front door was open and my father's pipe sat upright in the ashtray next to his armchair. I took a deep breath - pine wood, burnt leather, choucroute garnie. From this point forward, everything had changed and the spirits of the dead walked the earth. I remember me when I was Jon benjamin and I was 7 and lived on 64 Rue Marbach. I even remember moments before, but that was someone else.
Now I was a phantom. I walked out my front door and down the walkway past the precise row of Impatiens my mother had planted to Rue Marbach and into the night filled with random screams and the rumbling of motorcycle engines from some all-black bike gang that was roaming the night streets like in that movie, Biker Boys. Kid Rock was in that and it was directed by Reggie Rock Blythewood.
I decided to be invisible and walked through Place Kleber with the street lamps burning reddish orange and groups of drunken revelers casting long shadows violently across the cobblestones and onto the buildings that penned in the square.
Most Jews were being round up and sent to Drancy outside Paris or so I was told. I kept walking., invisible, through the city streets until the cobblestones turned to dirt and the dirt turned to pine thistle and mud and when i looked up the densely-leaved trees looked like sullen dizzy giants swaying in the night brezze. I fell asleep, hungry and cold, but strangely overcome with a sense of calm, as if the forest itself was rhumbaing me a lullaby. I dreamt of my mother laughing and father sitting in his chair as the tea kettle whistled and that scene in the movie Biker Boys when Slick Will played by Eriq La Salle (yes, the guy who played Dr. Peter Benton from E.R.) told "Kid" that when Smoke lines his bike up for race, he doesn't see anything, he doesn't hear anything...just the finish line...Slick Will tells him...'cat like that gets in the zone, it's like a gift from God' and then Kid stares right back at Slick Will and says, 'sounds like bullshit to me'. Only minutes later, Slick Will was killed by an out of control bike that crashed into him during the end of a drag race.
Just seeing Eriq La Salle (spelled ERIQ)...pretty ballsy by the way using a q in place of a c or k, really made me think about that other medical drama, St. Elsewhere and how that show's final episode where they show the hospital and it is snowing and they pull out to reveal that the hospital is in a snowglobe and the snowglobe is being looked at by the autistic son of Dr. Westphal, but Dr. Westphal comes home and we see he's not even a doctor, but a janitor or something who worked at St. Eligius Hospital, thereby concluding that the whole show had been the convoluted fantasy of an autistic child. That's what that felt like that cold night in the forest in Neuhof, when the Nazis came to Alsace and the world became broken and unreal."
Here is a photo I took of him on a previous night holding a copy of Straight Stuntin magazine.
I'd exchanged pleasantries with Jon in the past but I found him to be prickly. Which is a nicer way of calling him a prick. But I get it. I can imagine he grows weary of the sycophants, weirdos and hangers-on that occasionally recognize him for his voice-over work. I have found that the trick to talking with "stars" is not to talk about them at all. Talk about the outrageous prices at the local Whole Foods or the best bike lanes in Brooklyn...anything but how much you admire their work. I get that. If every time I went out and people came up to me to praise my skills at pouring a beer I would be embarrassed and freaked out. But that rarely happens.
So I was working the front bar when Jon came out from the main hall after his set. He tipped his ever-present ball cap to me and asked for a "small beer". I gave him a Dale's Pale Ale and started chatting. Long story short, he presented me with a copy of the story he told on stage that night. I present it to you with this disclaimer: The following is the property of H. Jon Benjamin and I have no right to distribute it, so...shhh!:
"I remember less the way our modest half-timbered house looked, but more the smell of pine wood, burnt leather and choucroute garnie. My father smoked a pipe, a small briarwood pipe with a black mouthpiece and a smooth almost pellucid chamber. When he kissed my cheek goodnight, his mustache was redolent of cherry pipe tobacco and kirsch. When the Nazi's came I was 7. I heard a banging and then loud voices. Then footsteps. Then, quiet. Cold, searing quiet. I waited till dark to emerge. The front door was open and my father's pipe sat upright in the ashtray next to his armchair. I took a deep breath - pine wood, burnt leather, choucroute garnie. From this point forward, everything had changed and the spirits of the dead walked the earth. I remember me when I was Jon benjamin and I was 7 and lived on 64 Rue Marbach. I even remember moments before, but that was someone else.
Now I was a phantom. I walked out my front door and down the walkway past the precise row of Impatiens my mother had planted to Rue Marbach and into the night filled with random screams and the rumbling of motorcycle engines from some all-black bike gang that was roaming the night streets like in that movie, Biker Boys. Kid Rock was in that and it was directed by Reggie Rock Blythewood.
I decided to be invisible and walked through Place Kleber with the street lamps burning reddish orange and groups of drunken revelers casting long shadows violently across the cobblestones and onto the buildings that penned in the square.
Most Jews were being round up and sent to Drancy outside Paris or so I was told. I kept walking., invisible, through the city streets until the cobblestones turned to dirt and the dirt turned to pine thistle and mud and when i looked up the densely-leaved trees looked like sullen dizzy giants swaying in the night brezze. I fell asleep, hungry and cold, but strangely overcome with a sense of calm, as if the forest itself was rhumbaing me a lullaby. I dreamt of my mother laughing and father sitting in his chair as the tea kettle whistled and that scene in the movie Biker Boys when Slick Will played by Eriq La Salle (yes, the guy who played Dr. Peter Benton from E.R.) told "Kid" that when Smoke lines his bike up for race, he doesn't see anything, he doesn't hear anything...just the finish line...Slick Will tells him...'cat like that gets in the zone, it's like a gift from God' and then Kid stares right back at Slick Will and says, 'sounds like bullshit to me'. Only minutes later, Slick Will was killed by an out of control bike that crashed into him during the end of a drag race.
Just seeing Eriq La Salle (spelled ERIQ)...pretty ballsy by the way using a q in place of a c or k, really made me think about that other medical drama, St. Elsewhere and how that show's final episode where they show the hospital and it is snowing and they pull out to reveal that the hospital is in a snowglobe and the snowglobe is being looked at by the autistic son of Dr. Westphal, but Dr. Westphal comes home and we see he's not even a doctor, but a janitor or something who worked at St. Eligius Hospital, thereby concluding that the whole show had been the convoluted fantasy of an autistic child. That's what that felt like that cold night in the forest in Neuhof, when the Nazis came to Alsace and the world became broken and unreal."
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