WE’RE NO RADIOHEAD

OR

WHEN I PAINT MY MASTERPIECE, I’LL BE KING FOR A DAY
(part 5 of 6)

Shane turned off the alarm two minutes before it was set to blare-out its 7 a.m. instructions. He’d barely slept a wink anyway and had only set the damn thing on the off-chance that he might sleep through his big day, which wasn’t likely. For the first time in as long as he could remember, Shane was excited about something that didn’t involve any part of the female anatomy.

He practically bounded out of bed, took a quick shower, put on a clean pair of jeans, a well-worn long-sleeved T-shirt that said ZJ Boarding House across the front and a battered old LA Rams ballcap and stepped into the hallway, shutting the door silently behind him. Shane tiptoed down the hallway - careful not to wake the others - and down the creaky backstairs to the kitchen.

While he waited for the coffee to brew, Shane ate an orange, a banana, two organic granola bars and a glass of grapefruit juice in between puffs of a luscious, fruity bowl of blueberry nuggs just in front up north (He and Renner were careful to keep their pot-smoking from John, who seemed edgy now that he was out of rehab and they figured he probably didn’t need the temptation [Shane, however, was wont to go against all popular Drug War dogma and argue that, perhaps, pot-smoking was good for the recovering addict in that it allowed relaxation and the ability to change one’s headspace and step away, however briefly from life’s ups and downs to make a calm, considered decision. Renner argued that it was most likely up to the individual to decide what is best for him or her, though he didn’t believe that smoking marijuana was necessarily the best way to let-go a heroin jones.]). Shane also made sure his papers were in order. The school was very specific about that. Students had to have all fees paid, insurance forms filled out and signed repeatedly, all text books purchased and accounted for (there were, admittedly, few text books), etc.

Shane poured a large to-go cup of strong black coffee and, for the millionth time, looked at the brochure he’d picked up two weeks ago from the table in the waiting room at his dentist’s office: LA Stunt School. it said. It seemed like such a natural thing for him to do, yet he couldn’t believe he was actually doing it. He hadn’t told his band mates about it yet. He figured they’d just try to talk him out of it and he was doing it, that was certain. He’d signed up under a false name - he’d finally settled on Angus Young - paid all his fees in cash and hoped none of his classmates were big (or even moderate) fans of the Particle Board for World Recovery.

The hope wasn’t all that much of a stretch either. True, the band had once been well-known and well-respected members of the rock and roll elite, but that was all over (or so they thought) now. It was the standard, sordid story of chemicals, egos, money and, mainly, too much idle time on their hands to do nothing but drugs, look in the mirror and purchase things.

Shane walked out into the overly crowded driveway. The relatively small parking / garage area of the house was quite the showroom of motorized toys. A sampling [including owner in parenthesis]: No less than three Porsches - all 911s of varying vintages, colors and aromas about which Shane could drone on for hours if anyone would let him [Shane], a brand-new black Mercedes 500 sedan with blackened windows [Renner], a BMW crossover Dakar motorcycle [Renner], a yellow with black racing stripes down the front 1969 Dodge Challenger [John], a red Jeep Grand Cherokee [John], a tan GMC Yukon [Renner], a green1987 BMW M5 with stock gold wheels [Shane] and a dark brown 1986 Jeep Renegade with hardtop [Shane].

Shane reflexively went to the door of his current favorite - a 1974 British racing green Porsche 911 Sportster - and slid into its leathery, slinky grip. He put the key into the ignition and was about to bring the beast to life when he stopped, took the key out, opened the door and walked to the ‘86 Jeep instead. That would better fit the life of a budding stuntman. Shane quietly drove out of the driveway to his first day of school in years.

____________

All three of them - John, since he got out of rehab, Renner, since he got back into town from self-imposed exile, and Shane, who’d moved in to John’s house while John was in rehab- had been living together in John’s faux-French chateau in the Hollywood Hills for some months now. They hadn’t really planned it that way, it had just happened.

Renner had nowhere else to live and Shane couldn’t sleep in his beachfront home because the ocean was too loud, so John let them stay (as if he had a choice). Frankly, John was happy to have the company anyway, even if it was to the detriment of his once-swanky home. The lack of heroin was difficult to deal with. The lack of chemicals - except cigarettes, of course - in general was difficult to deal with. But the lack of Alexandra was and had always been the worst part of it all. However, John had vowed not to join her; not to let the Big H win and claim him too. And, now, because of Renner and Shane-whom he thought had written him off long ago - he actually had hope.

The second Shane and Renner picked him up at the detox mansion up in Malibu in the 1974 bright red Porsche Shane had bought just for the occasion of picking him up (“To make the Pacific sound better,” he’d said), they’d begun talking about the songs - or rather the beginnings of songs - they’d discovered in John’s basement recording studio while living at his house. John had played guitar almost nonstop during the last months of his addiction and recorded much of it on an eight-track digital recorder he wheeled around the house like an IV attached to his guitar.

“They’re brilliant,” Shane said over and over.

As it turned out, Shane and Renner had been tinkering with the fragments, snippets and sometimes full-on songs on the12 full-length CDs he’d recorded between his fiance dying, the debacle of the band’s last tour and subsequent destruction of said band, plus the subsequent downward spiral of his burgeoning heroin addiction.

“We could have the makings of a double record here,” Renner said.

“That’s no shit,” said Shane. “We’ve been constructing songs out of what you left, but we need you to start playing `em. Neither of us can do it right.”

The Particle Board For World Recovery was reborn.

The record had begun to take shape almost immediately. Shane often holed up by himself on the second floor scribbling lyrics and smoking weed, while John and Renner barely left the house’s basement recording studio. Lost amid the initial ecstasy was the gaping hole in the center of the band, left when Wammo, the only drummer the Particle Board had ever known, entered rehab and quit the band. The cocaine-induced heart attack he’d suffered three months earlier had damaged his heart significantly, the doctors said. He had the heart of a 50-year-old (he was 27), they said, and that he could never do cocaine again or he’d surely die. More importantly, they said he could never play drums again or go on tour because of the stress. Wams told Renner as much on the phone when they finally let him go home from the hospital a few weeks ago. Wammo’s mother had come into town to take care of him and, judging from the steely looks she gave Renner and Shane when they visited, she apparently blamed them for her son’s drug problems and the current sad state of his existence. They stopped visiting and Wams stopped calling. No one really wanted to talk about it.

So they put their heads down and got to work. They took turns behind the kit on the demos they began to record. Renner and Shane were both actually pretty good, but neither could replicate the energy, much less the technique, Wams brought to the Particle Board’s music. In lighter moments, they tossed around possible replacements - Joe Bob Billingham, former drummer for Your Mother’s Hubbard, was out of rehab and available, as was Billy Yellow Owl, who not only played with The Schtick Figures but also Chang’s Lunacy and The System of the World. And, of course, there was Wile E. Peyote, who memorably powered The Sickening Walrus Fudge to stardom until a tragic (and revolting) accident involving a midget, a hamster and the band’s lead singer put an end to their once-promising career. But Shane, John and Renner just couldn’t bring themselves to even make the first phone call. Plus, they didn’t have a manager anymore - Whitey had moved on to a desk job at a Beverly Hills talent agency - and as far as anyone else was concerned, the Particle Board For World Recovery didn’t even exist as a band anymore. So, fuck it, they stayed in their Hollywood Hills world and played. And played and played and played. It was like the atmosphere in the basement of the old chateau in the South of France where Keith held court with all his buddies (chemical and otherwise) in the early 1970s and created one of the quintessential American roots-rock records of all time.

The three of them kept writing songs day and night; they just kept coming. They were in the zone. And it was made even stranger because, except for Shane and Renner smoking copious amounts of high-grade marijuana (which doesn’t really count), they were stone-cold sober. Not even alcohol was allowed (most of the time). Shane, in particular, was on a tear, the words erupting out of him as if he’d tapped his soul’s primordial gusher. Most of the songs were about war and death and fury with the central figure - at least as far as John and Renner could tell - being a young African mother with a drug habit caught up in her country’s civil war (She dies at the end of the record after the American soldier character shreds her and her baby to smithereens with a Gatling gun on the streets of Mogadishu). One or two were about love. Several more, naturally, were about sex, and they were vintage Shane Glory - sick as hell.

The music was equally intriguing. It hemmed and hawed from blues to pop to hip-hop with accents of folk and country garnished liberally throughout. Still, it was thematically linked, not only lyrically, but also by John’s raging, intense guitar lines, which he often insisted on running through various loops, effects and filters, though not to the detriment of the elemental melody. All he played was guitar too, both acoustic and electric, layering in the lines like a painter. Meanwhile, Renner and Shane filled in the rest - bass, piano, drums, percussion, turntables, harmonica, Hammond B3, whatever. In two months, they cut and pasted 23 songs into a cohesive demo tentatively entitled Perilous.

“It’s too long,” said Shane.

“Yeah, it’s long, but dude, we’ve been through this, what should we cut? We’ve already trimmed all the fat,” said Renner.

“I’m telling you guys, we need a producer,” said John. “We can’t self-edit this. There’s something really fucking good in there but we don’t know what it is yet. I don’t want to blow this.”

“Nobody wants to blow it, bro,” said Shane. “But a producer? All he’s gonna do is trample all over our shit then claim it was all him in the first place if the record does well. Or bad mouth us if it doesn’t. Been there, done that and no thanks. We can do it ourselves.”

“That was one guy, one time,” said John. “We’ll choose wisely. Ren, what do you think?”

“I don’t know,” Renner said. “Twenty-three songs is too many, I know that. But regardless of whatever decision we make, we’re still not talking about the one we gotta make first.”

“Wams?” said John, letting the word hang like an apparition in the room’s ether.

“Actually,” said Shane, “the first decision we need to make it what to do with this.” He held up a two-disc copy of the demo.

“What do you mean?” John said.

“I mean no one even knows we’re alive. We got no manager, no label, no contract, no nothing,” Shane said. “In fact, no one even likes this shit except us.”

“Yeah, cuz no one else’s heard it,” Renner said.

“Exactly,” Shane said.

“Are you saying we should shop it around?” John said. “Cuz I don’t want to deal with that shit.”

“How ‘bout Whitey?” Shane asked, conjuring his own apparition for the group’s judgment. “

____________

Shane walked up Wilshire Boulevard trying to look inconspicuous without trying to look inconspicuous. The bright sun beamed out of the crystal blue Santa Monica sky and glinted off the black wraparound sunglasses strapped across his face like a blindfold. He was on a lunch break from school and had to make this quick (so far no one in his class had recognized him, though the name “Angus Young” raised a few eyebrows).

He bounded up the steps to a glass and marble office building on 4th Street. He pulled the Rams cap further down upon his forehead and yanked open the heavy glass door. Shane approached the sultry, smiling receptionist (an actress no doubt) and, without taking off his sunglasses, took a folded manila envelope from his coat pocket.

“May I help you sir?” the actress intoned brightly.

“Could you make sure Whitey Osgood gets this please?” Shane asked.

“Of course,” she said. “Is there any message?”

“No,” said Shane. “Thanks.”

He walked back out into the nurturing sunshine, a face-wide smile on his mug. Shane wished he could be there when Whitey heard what he was about to hear. Then again, he had better things to do. Like learning how to properly fly off a 30-story building.

to be continued...