Several years of piano lessons (Mrs. Pollack), a year of snare drum in the grade school band (Saint Andrew the Apostle), idle fooling around on a beat-up, passed-down acoustic guitar in the family basement (Wheaton, Maryland), air guitaring (various venues, ongoing). My greatest artistic and commercial success came with an imaginary band I formed with my younger brother. My illustrious musical history.
Piano lessons took place in Mrs. Pollack's basement, a few neighborhoods over; I have clear memories of my mom picking up my younger brother and me after school to take us there, and as I remember it was invariably raining, the windows in the station wagon fogged over, my headache probably the result of the gross weather, though my suffering felt existential. I had some difficulties getting over my aversion to going into strangers' homes, and I never much enjoyed entering the Pollack's, with its oddly contemporary architecture and wall-to-wall carpeting and exotic scents (I think that they were wealthier than my family). I do recall my red piano book fondly. I can still sing, and maybe even play, "Song of the Volga Boatmen," and one or two others. I never liked practicing. (Stop the presses.)
When my class at Saint Andrew’s would “put on a play,” I was often the narrator. I might’ve been offered the role, or been stuck with it. Yet however the assignment came, I relished it, and would hope for it again. Beyond being able to skip the nerve-inducing, stomach-churning responsibilities of having to memorize lines, I enjoyed the opportunity, in fact the requirement, once my recitation was over, of stepping to the side—to wherever the teachers dubbed “the wings” of the All Purpose Room—and vanishing. I liked being the center of attention only if the spotlight shone briefly, for the required ten or so lines of whatever story or backstory I’d narrate. Then I could repair to the dark again, separate from the spectacle but having done my part.
More than 72,000 fans gathered at Wembley Stadium in London on April 20, 1992 for a tribute to Freddie Mercury, who’d died of AIDS five months earlier. The concert was broadcast live on television and radio to nearly one billion people in 76 countries. My girlfriend Amy and were two of them, watching on MTV in Amy’s tiny house in Athens, Ohio. Now, I look at the schedule of artists performing that day, and they blur; I remember only David Bowie and Annie Lennox, backed by Queen, singing “Under Pressure,” a Queen/Bowie single released in 1981. The performance is permanently embedded in me.
Footage of their rehearsal offers only a hint at what would occur later at Wembley. Both Bowie and Lennox look fantastic, even while rehearsing in front of the crew and a handful of onlookers: he, slim in a bright blue blazer, black slacks, and a gray striped button-down shirt opened to expose his chest, his hair perfectly sculpted; she in black pants, a black leather halter top, a loose, long sleeve white t-shirt, and a black-and-white checkered cap. Bowie’s dragging on a cigarette throughout. The two are loose, as pros often are. They smile at each other throughout the rehearsal. At one point, Bowie loudly cracks up, his grin wide and childlike, while Queen—Brian May on guitar, John Deacon on bass, and Roger Taylor on drums—share laughs among themselves. Lennox seems the most serious—thoughtful, I guess—as if she’s working out a problem in her head. Her effortlessness is of a different make and model than Bowie’s, who’s singing—behaving—with Sinatra-esque nonchalance. Lennox seems inward-looking. She’s preoccupied, working, saving her voice.
A vivid memory I have from piano classes was a lesson having little to do with scales or chords. Mrs. Pollack calmly instructed her students to never outwardly react to the mistake that we’d invariably make during practice or a recital; we were advised to play seamlessly as if we hadn’t made an error. That way, it’d be likely that the patient parents in the room wouldn’t notice, or would politely behave as if they hadn’t noticed. I took this little instruction to heart—it emboldened me, at age ten or eleven, to play with confidence and a kind of worldly air that said, Of course mistakes happen, but I won't let them rule me.
Onstage at Wembley, Bowie and Lennox transform into modern opera players. They waltz onto the stage, bow gracefully to the massive crowd. Bowie’s wearing a sherbet-green suit, boxy in his early-‘90s style, a blue-and-white striped dress shirt, and a wide green tie. Lennox is utterly transformed from her boyish rehearsal attire. She’s in a night-black, full-length tulle skirt with a long-sleeved shimmering silver top. Her hair’s slicked back, and she’s wearing bright red lipstick and dark racoon eye makeup, looking like a woodland creature who’s stepped out of the woods for its debutante ball. It’s all highly theatrical, unsurprising given the two performers’ history. The costuming and grand entrance suggest what Lennox might’ve been mulling over in rehearsal.
And “Under Pressure” is a highly theatrical song, unsurprising given its writers. The tune has such gloriously weird movements—it surges from those finger-snaps and that taut bassline to orchestrated crescendos, as it churns and grinds under the titular burden, lurching forward and then back, and then sideways, and then finally ascending. Singing it must be tough, the lyrics moving from wordless scat-singing to anguished revelation to, in the final verse, primary color clarity. That’s a lot of emotional terrain to cover. Lennox takes on Mercury’s lines, a difficult prospect while singing solo in the shower let alone in front of a packed stadium with the world watching.
At Wembley, it’s clear a minute into the performance that Lennox is not going to merely sing the lyrics, she’s going to dance them, in a deconstructed pas de deux with Bowie, who looks astonished (as astonished as Bowie will allow himself to look) at his partner’s grace and drama, at her acting. She’s belting out and hitting all of the notes now, and as the song builds, so does her performance does. She sings “Pray tomorrow gets me higher,” and moments later Bowie answers that, in response, he keeps coming up with the idea of love, “but it’s so slashed and torn.” The theatrics grow. On paper, lines like “Why, why, why?”, “Love, love, love, love, love,” “Can’t we give ourselves one more chance?”, “Why can’t we give love that one more chance?”, look absurdly simplistic, hackneyed even. Yet Lennox and Bowie fully inhabit those shopworn ideas, perhaps moved by the sad occasion of the performance, perhaps by the crowd singing along with them like knocked-out apostles, profoundly affected.
In the song’s last verse, Lennox joins Bowie at the front of the stage to sing the final lines, so elemental in their wisdom that they sound Biblical, the melody’s notes an unpretentious sequence of rising and falling. They duet about “old-fashioned” love and how, though enshrined uncontroversially on Hallmark cards, it can still boldly dare you to care deeply—for lonely people, disenfranchised people, lost people, people on the streets at the edge of the night. Lennox presses her face against Bowie’s in a gesture of such tenderness and ache that it feels nearly private, this last dance, nearly too intimate to watch. They hold on to each other tightly as the song ends, as if they’d both fall down if they didn’t.
I was in tears watching the performances three decades ago; I was in tears watching it again this morning, in awe still of the emotional nearness and heat that Bowie and Lennox manage to create on an enormous stage in an enormous arena in front of millions of strangers. The chemistry, gifts, commitment, and courage between them feel, and look, miraculous to me. I can’t imagine.
I suffered awful anxieties playing snare drum in the school band. My first moments down in my basement alone with the rented drum were thrilling—the hard black case, the plush red lining inside, the twinkling silver on the shell, counter hoop, and lug casings. Yet I was gripped with fear. I knew that no matter how beautiful the drum looked and felt, I was going to have to play it in front of a crowd. The only song I recall learning was “Suicide is Painless,” the theme from M*A*S*H—somewhat bizarre for eleven and twelve year-olds to play, in retrospect—but vivid still are my intense nerves the night of the show. I stared in the mirror of the boy’s bathroom down the hall from the All Purpose Room and wished for any deliverance from having to perform. I considered faking being sick. I didn’t have a solo, was an anonymous member of an ensemble, yet I dreaded playing. Less, I think, for fear of screwing up my part than for the hot gaze of the crowd, which I’d already imagined, could sense even, before the show began. I felt as if, dutifully playing along with the band, I’d move from who I am to someone who’s pretending.
Miracles take myriad shapes. Eight years ago in Chicago at Beat Kitchen, capacity of 300 people—or roughly zero point four percent of Wembley Stadium—I caught Guitar Wolf, the self-proclaimed “Japanese Greatest Jet Rock Rock & Roll Band.” Opening that evening was Hans Condor, a terrific power trio hailing from Nashville, Tennessee. Their riffing lo-fi arena rock had the crowd moving, and guitarist and singer Chazz Kaster, who looked a bit like a teenager going as David Crosby for Halloween, wasn’t afraid to leap from the stage and witness first-hand what his band had detonated.
At one point, during a lengthy break down, he mock-heroically surveyed the crowd, shielding his eyes from the multi-colored stage lights, eventually pointing to a guy who was summarily given Kaster’s guitar to play on the floor. At first the guy simply, sheepishly, held on to the Ibanez, but Kaster was having none of this. “You won the guitar! Play it! PLAY IT!!” he screamed into his mic. After a few bars of good-humored thrashing, the mood turned dramatic as Kaster made a motion for the front of the crowd to clear out; he pointed to the guy and shouted “Ready? On four!”
It felt as if no one, least of all that dude on the floor, knew what was happening, or what was meant to happen, or what was going to happen. Kaster counted down and took a running leap from the stage as the guy tossed the guitar high into the darkness, its strap flapping like a bird’s wing. Kaster caught the guitar in mid-air, landed on his knees on the floor, and proceeded to shred wildly, not missing a note. It was hysterical, breathtaking, and felt utterly unpredictable—and if it was shtick, I didn’t care. It was a miraculous rock and roll moment. I hope they tried it again the next night.
My friends and I half-seriously talked about forming a band in high school. But I knew it would never take. I was always happier playing in a band in my head.
A couple of decades after high school, I’m standing on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn with the Fleshtones, helping to load a van double-parked in front of guitarist Keith Streng’s apartment building. We’re preparing to head to Buffalo that night for the first gig of a five-city swing. I’m writing a book about the band, self-financing the whole thing, and I’m grateful that the guys invited me along to watch them work.
Streng’s then-wife Anne turns me to as we’re finishing up, winks, and says, “They’re gonna grab you and bring onstage, you know.” I knew that. The band is infamous for its democratic dissembling of the virtual wall between stage and floor. At the end of a typical show, front man Peter Zaremba will have spent as much time in the crowd as onstage. They enjoyed inviting the crowd to join them under the lights, and for many years would indiscriminately grab two audience members to play Streng and bassist Ken Fox’s guitars while the two held an impromptu “pushup contest” on the beery floor. Great fun. Something I wanted no part of.
At Fleshtones shows, I became quite adept at excusing myself to the men’s room or slyly hiding behind a beam support or in a dark corner of the club when such shenanigans began, careful to avoid eye contact with the band. Eventually, my time ran out. A dozen years ago at a show, I’d timed my escape from the crowd poorly, and before I knew it Streng was at my side, handing over to me his sparkling silver Gretsch guitar. My stomach sank, but, buzzed, and grimly aware of the diminishing odds I’d been dodging, I grabbed the guitar. Streng sensed my unease, but was having nothing of my shyness. “It’s ok,” he shouted in my ear. “It’s so loud it’s playing itself tonight.”
So I climbed onto the stage. Streng was right—the sound mix up there was deafening, and the guitar was fairly humming in my hands. I was an inexpert player: if you’ve ever seen the single photograph online of this auspicious event, you can spot the non-chord that I’m not playing as I’m trying to have some fun up there, under the lights, smiling in embarrassment as drummer Bill Milhizer guffaws. All in good fun. I hope it never happens again.
Mrs. Pollack’s lesson in grace and stoicism wasn’t all that easy to learn, of course. I'm struck now at the pressure it put on us kids, as we were at an age when innocent comical errors can cast an entire day in melodrama, when making mistakes went to the core of what felt like lame moral character—i.e., I'm a loser—though we couldn't articulate that at the time, only feeling it in our hot faces or in our ears ringing with derisive laughter of classmates and bullies.
During one recital, a girl tripped over a difficult passage she was playing, and, upset, she slunk back on her bench, sulking; she tried again, and again made the mistake, and to the horror of all of us kids and parents began hammering out the sequence of notes on the piano until she got them right, alternately dramatically sighing her way through her mortification and screwing up her face in frustration. As with all adolescent dramas, her public failing has grown to mythic proportions in my inner retelling. I'm hopeful that she recovered. Maybe she continued to play piano, perhaps wildly successfully, or just for fun. Maybe she has no memory at all of this minor flop. Yet her face, those slumping shoulders, have stayed with me.
I never played piano or any keyboards seriously after these early lessons, though I once played the Beatles’ “Here, There, and Everywhere” for Amy. We were 70 or so miles apart, early on in our relationship; I played it over the phone on a beat-up piano, clumsily and not too badly. We were under pressure ourselves at the time, tangled in affairs of the heart too complex to go into here. As I played, I likely grimaced once or three times at my mistakes, though Mrs. Pollack’s tutorial stuck with me. (Anyway, Amy later told me that she didn’t notice a single of my miscues.) What does it mean to perform? I was onstage, and yet I wasn’t; I was playing to someone, and I was alone. I reached my audience, happily, but absent was spectacle: the lights, a crowd, suspense in the air. Yet I did manage to create my own poor-man’s magic there. When bands I love and my many musician-friends perform onstage they seem to move inexplicably from who they are to purer versions of themselves, fully inhabiting the moments, shedding self-consciousness, believing in their calling as that calling encourages a gathering—of thousands, or of a dozen. I’m happiest in the crowd, encouraged to be a witness and not a performer.
Joe Bonomo was named the music columnist for The Normal School in 2012. His books include Field Recordings from the Inside, Sweat: The Story of The Fleshtones, America’s Garage Band, Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found, and AC/DC’s Highway to Hell (33 1/3 Series). Play This Book Loud: Noisy Essays is forthcoming from University of Georgia Press. He teaches at Northern Illinois University and appears online at No Such Thing As Was. Visit Joe on Twitter and on Instagram at @__bonomo__.