Tyson Meade reflects on Alice Cooper, rock & roll gender-bending, and 45 years of Billion Dollar Babies

In 1973, when I was 11 and on a day trip with my mom and dad to Tulsa, I bought Alice Cooper’s newly released Billion Dollar Babies. At the time, I had no idea how it would shape who I am as an artist, as a singer, and even as a person. Melodrama notwithstanding, Billion Dollar Babies changed my life.

Going to Tulsa, an hour’s blue highway drive from my family’s 10 acres in the Osage Hills, was a big deal. This only happened once every two or three months, and sometimes not even that often. Our home, seven miles from the Bartlesville city limits, was similar to other acreages along those Oklahoma county roads. Out where I lived, it was not unusual to pass tractors, hay balers, road graders, or even horses, where the faint strains of Buck Owens, Donna Fargo, or Southern Baptist ministers belched from farm truck radios.

Our first stop was at a junkyard in North Tulsa. While my mom stayed in the truck and read her Erma Bombeck book, my dad spent the morning looking for small steam engines or steam engine parts. I explored with my dad.

My mom often stayed in the car because Dad liked to mark territory in places like junkyards. This was a constant source of embarrassment for Mom, who was actually a bit of a prude. When I was 5 I peed in front of some neighbors nonchalantly. Mom saw. This is the only time I remember her whipping the hell out of me. I am pee shy to this day.

My dad, a carnival huckster without the carnival, grew up on a farm but ran off to California at 16 to work in the shipyards and then later joined the merchant marines. At one point, once he had settled down on Sand Creek there in the Osage where I was born and raised, my dad amassed 44 steam engine tractors and at least one threshing machine. He dreamed of opening an American Old West tiny town museum on our 10 acres, which he christened the W. H. Meade estate, his first and middle names being William and Howard. That dream never became reality because a local media baron, Mr. James C. Leake, bought every last steam engine from my dad, putting them in his own Horseless Carriage Museum in Muskogee, Oklahoma. My dad didn’t mind selling his dream because he tripled his money.

Sometimes on these day trips, I would stay in the car and practice rudiments on the dashboard, paradiddles mainly — right-left-right-right, left-right-left-left. When I was 9, I had started taking drum lessons when other kids were playing baseball.

That day, we ate lunch at a hole in the wall hamburger joint. I brought my sticks inside and practiced paradiddles on the table of the luncheonette — right-left-right-right, left-right-left-left. After lunch, we were off to Sears, the biggest department store in the world, or at least it seemed to me at the time. Sears sprawled out over two stories and may or may not have taken up a whole city block. Dad looked at tools, mom at dresses. I headed straight for the records.

The record department was just a few racks of records squeezed in between the men’s department and housewares. My parents knew that for as long as they shopped, I would be transfixed there, often looking at the same albums over and over, putting a story to the cover art, trying to figure out who sang, who drummed, who played guitar. This was how I loved to occupy myself for an hour or two. For me, this was church.

Today, I say I embraced my otherness then, but at the time I am not sure how much I embraced being the alien, the fey little outcast, the only boy in my class not on the basketball team, the boy with the drumsticks playing paradiddles on chin up bars, the merry-go-round, the cafeteria bench seats. I do know, however, that my love for music and drumming was a consolation during those times when I felt so isolated and so other.

Memory plays tricks. My perceived vision of how I saw Alice and his band is not necessarily factual. And Billion Dollar Babies was by no means my introduction to the group, or even actually the group’s best album, but it is an important building block in the construction of my rock and roll psyche, my love for mascara, my affair with leopard print, glitter, gold lamé, and thrift store baby dolls. Billion Dollar Babies is a grand summation of all that was Alice Cooper.

The Alice Cooper Group made their first appearance in the W.H. Meade household via the Love it to Death 8-track in 1971. My brother Curtiss — six years older than me and in junior high at the time — received the 8-track from the Columbia Record Club. The deal, as you may remember, is you get six, or eight, or ten 8-tracks for a penny, or a nickel, or a dime but you, as a member, are obligated to buy five more at club prices during the next year or two years.

Love it to Death became nighttime listening, following an afternoon watching the Munsters, the Addams Family, and science fiction afternoon movies. Curtiss loved to frighten my brother Gentry and me with this 8-track. Now, it seems absurd that something so innocuous, so staged, so vaudevillian, so corny was so scary to us.

As you may remember, Love it to Death contained “Ballad of Dwight Frye,” a song about a mental patient, his escape from a mental hospital to see his 5-year-old daughter, and his run from the law that may have involved a S.W.A.T. team, or something like that. The exact meaning is vague but to 9-year-old me, it was like watching an updated Dracula, Mummy, or Frankenstein.

The song spurred my imagination, filling in the visuals, the possibilities of what was happening to this tortured soul, Dwight. In my head, I concocted my own Dwight Frye short story with the sirens and guitar moans of the song providing the soundtrack. On my latest album Robbing the Nuclear Family, “Motorcycle Boy #3” in some ways owes its pathos to “Ballad of Dwight Frye” — though my song is a true story that takes place in Thailand with my young lover named Bang, not Dwight.

Within a few months of hearing that 8-track, I came to love and even obsess over the Alice Cooper Group. Something triggered in my brain. Gentry felt the same. It pushed him towards discovering and obsessing over Black Sabbath, drawing him into the heavy guitars and the often macabre lyrics.

Strangely, It pushed me into a totally different area from that, one of glitz and glamour — the decadence of glam rock, the yin/yang of feminine and masculine, and a vague angst towards virtually everything regimented, militant, and unquestioningly masculine. Gentry and I never discussed why we loved Alice Cooper, but we both did.

Occasionally, during this time, articles appeared about the Alice Cooper Group, which focused on their debauchery and corruption of America’s youth. Mostly these articles focused on Alice himself.

Through rumor and hearsay, I heard about Alice and his onstage antics. These antics, some rumored, some true, enraged parents, teachers, principals, ministers, and basically everyone else over 30. These antics included cross-dressing, eating feces (onstage), tearing apart live chickens (onstage), destroying hotel rooms, mutilating baby dolls (onstage), hangings and guillotine play (onstage), carousing with loose women, Caligula style orgies, turning the girls next door into harlots, and more cross-dressing.

Alice and his antics were foreign, but shockingly wonderful, to my young mind. Sonny and Cher were the American Pop Ambassadors who bridged fringe society with primetime television. Three Dog Night, The Guess Who, and Chicago seemed to define the current state of rock, which was meant as much for adults as for teenagers. Chicago shocked no one. The Alice Cooper Group was different, was scary, was unique, was wonderful, was fronted by a slightly demented transsexual, or so I believed.

They helped misfits fit — misfits who were actually too young to know they were misfits. That they took the bad boy image that the Rolling Stones had touted and amplified it to 11 made them even more appealing to me. I was silently bucking the Hee Haw world around me, the Johnny Cash stern absurdities, Elvis Presley’s expanding waistline. Alice, the lanky androgynous male singer with the little girl’s name, made Mick Jagger look like a Southern Baptist minister by comparison.

Alice was my first male role model not afraid to flaunt his femininity, launching his own unisex mascara line appropriately named “Whiplash.” By the time Billion Dollar Babies arrived, I was an Alice Cooper Group acolyte. And here I was, at Sears, hoping to soon own this album that down to the core of my being, I knew I had to have.

When they were done browsing, Mom came to grab me. She knew I would like to buy an album. I would not be upset if I did not but I would be ecstatic if I did. She let me pick out something. Naturally, I knew Billion Dollar Babies was the album to take home. Gentry bought magazines completely dedicated entirely to Alice and his exploits, so I knew I would get the approval from him with this purchase.

Gentry, who was in ninth grade, wore Levi super bells, plain white t-shirts, and white Chuck Taylors, often with no socks, even in winter. He had thick, wavy, shoulder length auburn hair that he parted in the middle. That particular day he was out in the Osage on his blue Yamaha 100 motorbike, but his music opinion always counted when I bought records. I knew when I brought home this gem that he would say something along the lines of: “Wow, you are less of a dork than I thought.”

Mom bought me the record. She was oblivious to how allegedly dangerous to the youth the Alice Cooper Group was. Or maybe she just acted as if she was. Years later, I would discover that the group’s manager fed a lot of preposterous stories to the media to get Alice attention to keep him in the papers to help make him an outlaw to adults, a savior to teens. Because of this, with the release of Billion Dollar Babies, Alice was now a household name.

I could hardly contain my excitement once I held the album in my arms.

In the truck on the way home, I carefully opened it, not knowing what waited for me inside. Alice’s albums tended to have more than just a blank white sleeve inside. School’s Out actually folded out to become a miniature school desk. Killer had a 1972 poster calendar of Alice hanged.

A treasure trove awaited me inside Billion Dollar Babies.  First of all, the album cover is a gatefold shaped like a wallet. Second, an oversized billion-dollar bill — the size of a small poster printed on the front and back — is attached to a cardboard money clip. Third, there are lyrics printed on the sleeve, a first for Alice. Fourth, there is a picture on the other side of the sleeve of the band all in white with money everywhere, white bunnies, and babies donning the Alice makeup. The band looks cooler than ever, especially guitarist Glen Buxton with all of his rings and bracelets. Last, the several wallet size photos attached to each other that I later separated along the perforated edges and put in a photo wallet.

As we drove home, I looked at the lyrics, at the song titles, at all of the printed information. “Raped and Freezing,” the second song on the album, stumped me. I asked Mom what “raped” meant.  As a responsible parent, and doing exactly what I would do now if an 11-year-old asked me, she pondered this a minute and then replied she didn’t know.

Dad let me listen to KELI, the local top 40 AM radio station, on the way home. AM was the industry standard in 1973. No one I knew had FM radios in their cars at this time. At one point, Grand Funk’s “We’re an American Band” played. Although I did not understand exactly what it was about other than being in a rock & roll band, I loved it.

The rock & roll landscape of 1973 was decidedly masculine. “We’re an American Band” and Grand Funk themselves were a direct contrast to the fey girlie image that Alice embodied. This testosterone driven anthem was dedicated to male lust towards female groupies. Sure, Mark Farner had long hair but he performed shirtless so that everyone could see just how masculine and manly he was. He pumped iron. Everyone knew that.

Long hair and flower power had become accepted, part of mass culture. Thus, Grand Funk was a safe haven for masculinity. Young males didn’t have to question their sexuality as they blasted Grand Funk from their Camaro 8-tracks. Grand Funk represented a sexually liberated young America, as long as the sexually liberated were heterosexual.

The other rock acts that captured mid-America and sold tons of records, if not overtly masculine, were still masculine. These groups — Emerson Lake and Palmer (intellectually masculine), Black Sabbath (metal masculine), Led Zeppelin (free love trippy mythically masculine,) and Deep Purple (overtly Neanderthal masculine) — flirted not with their feminine sides.

Meanwhile, Alice played up the whole homosexual-queen-freak aspect of his image. This he did for notoriety. Oddly, he was — and is — as straight as they come. Gender fluidity shocked, got press, gained fans, and sold records, briefly making Alice the biggest rock star in the world. He was smart to know this.

What about Bowie, you may ask? In 1973, Bowie had not cracked America, so he was not yet on my radar. What about Elton John? Sir Elton was outrageous, but not looked upon as sexually deviant yet, and Alice beat him to the punch anyway. As a rock & roll star, Alice stood alone in his sexual ambiguity, which he had been doing since 1971 as a hit-maker, and before that as a cult figure shepherded by Frank Zappa.

Strangely, my mom was never threatened or even really shocked by Alice Cooper. Her best friend, a devout member of the First Baptist Church, told her that our listening choices — referring to Gentry and me — should be monitored, that Alice Cooper was a bad influence, would tarnish our faith in our lord and savior above. My mom didn’t listen to this. She trusted us. After all, this was only music. Since she trusted us, we never rebelled, or rather, rebelled against her.

There were others to rebel against, like the masochistic principal/gym teacher of my small country school in the heart of the Osage. He loved ostracizing and separating kids, making kids like me feel alienated, isolated, disenfranchised. Petrified, I watched as he severely whipped a boy for smarting off.

The boy had just moved to Oklahoma from California. Instantaneously, he had become the most popular kid in school. We were all enamored with him. His name was David. All of us country kids had question upon question about his home state. To us kids born in the Osage, California seemed so foreign, so exotic, with surfing and malls and movie stars.

David was talking during some sports instruction. Principal Cuntingham may have given David a warning. All I remember is Cuntingham severely whipping David in front of everyone. If this happened today, there would be a prison sentence involved. Back in 1973 at a country school in Oklahoma, this was the norm.

After that happened, David was a pariah. No one talked to him or went near him. The principal was like a wrathful god.  He could — and would — come down on any child at any time.

“Hey Mr. Blue Legs where are you taking me?”

That lyric from School’s Out “Public Animal #9” looped in my head. By playing Alice Cooper songs in my head, I dealt with being other, disenfranchised, alienated — called a sissy by Principal Blue Legs. I would not let him break me. I would not cry.

However, I should say here that I was popular with my classmates.  My teachers were the ones with issues, lost somewhere in their own good ol’ days of the past. Most teachers at this parochial country school did not know how to respond to a fey rock and roll kid who played drums, not basketball, who liked to play dolls and dress-up with the girls as much as he liked to build forts and climb trees with the boys.

At home, Alice Cooper became the common bond between Gentry and me. I was in awe when Gentry drew the “School’s Out” heart and dagger tattoo on a t-shirt. Later when he grew out of the shirt and I grew into it, it became one of my favorite tees. All these years later, I still have it. All of this prepared me for the coming of Billion Dollar Babies.

It was late afternoon. Dad went out into his shop and puttered around on a steam engine that he’d found parts for at the scrap yard. Dad liked to tinker in his shop but he also knew in the back of his mind that he could make at least a few hundred on something he sold to Mr. Leake.

Mom continued reading her Erma Bombeck book in her bedroom. My siblings were all gone. That meant one thing: I had the living room to blast Alice. In a house full of siblings and parents, I never knew when I would get to play Alice on the living room stereo, a Montgomery Ward Airline console stereo.

I put on the record, turned up the volume, listened, and was instantly hooked. As I looked at all of the photos and paraphernalia inside the album, I was transported to another dimension. I dreamt what it must be like to be Alice and to be a billion dollar baby. Maybe I was, in fact, a billion dollar baby. As an outcast, I was “a rubber little monster, grimy little weasel.” Alice sang, sang to misfit me. I clung to every word. Since the lyrics were printed on the sleeve, I could read every word too.

The album starts out with “Hello Hooray,” a traditional folk song that the group turns into a rock anthem. This song hooked me, became my anthem. I played it over and over. I loved the rest of the album but this song was my song. It became the template for what I would become, or would hope to become as a vocalist. I sang it, bellowed it, and screamed it the way Alice did or, at least, the way I thought Alice did. This song became part of my soul.

“Hello Hooray” showed me the power of voice and the power of dynamics. His scream could, within seconds, become a whisper, or vice versa. I listened to his breathing, his intonation, his range of emotions. I became his pupil, though he did not know it.

Singing, especially the way Alice sang, had an importance and immediacy that spoke to me. Hearing Alice put such emotion and desperation in his songs showed me that singing had more meaning than drumming. I could play drums and technically I was very good since I had been carrying my sticks around with me practicing paradiddles everywhere on everything. Nevertheless, drumming did not express the emotions the way singing did.

Meanwhile, in her room — with the days of the calendar flipping like in an Orson Welles movie — my mom read Erma Bombeck, Reader’s Digest, the Ladies’ Home Journal, Family Circle, and Redbook and never told me to stop singing. Or when I played my drums along to the record, she never complained or made me stop.  And yes, drums are loud, especially when you are not the one playing them.

Coinciding with puberty, the arrival of Billion Dollar Babies held my mind and heart captive by the freedom, or perceived freedom, that Alice and his bandmates offered. I was not sexually attracted to Alice or his group; I wanted to be Alice, to witness this freedom he had sexually. More than ever, I wanted to be a rock star too. This I could not have verbalized as a tween. All I could blurt out is:

“I think he’s cool. I love Neil Smith. I want to play drums like him.”

Alice, without a doubt, started me on my glam journey. This journey led me to discover all of the gender-bending glam heroes of the time: Bowie, the Dolls, Iggy, Sparks, Mott. Not only that, being exposed to someone so outrageously loved and despised helped mold, at an early age, who I would become years later in my bands Defenestration and Chainsaw Kittens, and later as a solo artist. Ironically, he did all of this to gain attention as a character while my reason was to be comfortable in my own fey skin.

For the last 45 years, Billion Dollar Babies has been a touchstone for me, a continual source of inspiration. My new album Robbing the Nuclear Family could be seen as one of Billion Dollar Babies’ many grandchildren with the second song on the album “He’s the Candy” starting out with the lines:

“I’ve been robbing the nuclear family. Maybe you like me or you can’t stand me.”

Those words convey the same sort of buck-the-norm attitude that Alice, my prepubescent role model, preached. The 11-year-old me did not see the irony in the role model I had picked. I looked upon Alice as a real entity but, at the end of the day, Alice Cooper is only as real as any other literary or theatrical character, be it Holden Caulfield, Dracula, Marcia Brady, or Huck Finn. But then again, how real are any of us?

Recently, I christened my first solo art exhibition Billion Dollar Babies’ Babies’ Barbies. In this show, I hold that the billion dollar babies have grown up and had babies and those babies have transformed Barbies. The babies and grandbabies have adopted their own mythology surrounding the album and the cultural cataclysm it caused.

When art patrons have come to view the exhibition, seldom do they know or remember, if they are my age or older, the Alice Cooper Group story. For them, the album was not a life-changing event that bridged childhood and puberty, that helped them become who they are, helped them with fierce determination to go against the grain, challenge the norm, stay true to their own identity, forge a new path with mascara and glitter.

Whether Alice knew he was preaching for equality and liberation or just trying to shock, I don’t know. But the Billion Dollar Baby disciples like me took it as a battle cry, interpreted it in our own way. A few years later, that cry would become a gale force when Patti Smith sang: “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.” Because of Alice and then Patti and now my own experience, I know the importance of what the outsider, the pioneer, the renegade shows and bestows in their art to the generations to follow, what we bestow to the misfits, the alienated, those kids trying to gain footing on their own paths.

Free thinking trailblazers, often, are cult figures like me but then other times, as in the case of Alice, a sea change occurs because the wave crashing upon established mores is so strong. Thank you, Alice, for crashing that wave into the desolate redneck Oklahoma countryside more than 45 years ago. I dread to think what my life would have been like if the most gender-bending music I heard at age 11 was Tony Orlando and Dawn.

The post A Billion Dollar Baby on the Desolate Plains appeared first on Tyson Meade.

You may wonder how the title came about for this album. My young friend Troy,
who figures heavily into the album as a guest vocalist and as subject matter, named
the album though he did not know it when he blurted it out. We were discussing my
romantic liaisons – boyfriends leaving girlfriends, husbands losing wives, sailors on
leave, injured Muay Thai boxer motorcycle boys.

“You’re not robbing the cradle. You’re robbing the nuclear family.” Troy exclaimed
after I told him. Immediately, I knew that would be the name of the album.
Our lives – memory, action, influence, reaction – are a series of up and down spirals,
moments of doubt and elation. Some of us – the ones who question the world
around them – are fringe dwellers, the outcasts of the empire. We question this
world because we do not fit into this world. This album is dedicated to those other
fringe dwellers and friends of fringe dwellers, those who want something beyond
reality TV, casino gambling, car payments, 401k, church on Sunday, family portraits
on the mantle.

Me the misfit, a dandy born on a farm, I navigated my way through tractors,
baseball, hunting and fishing. Art – Warhol, Rauschenberg, Pollack – and music – the
Beatles, Janis Joplin, Bowie, the New York Dolls, Melanie – saved me. Later literature
– Jean Genet, John Rechy, Salinger – gave me the affirmation that those around me
had seemingly found in their Judeo-Christian world in which I never belonged
because I am an outcast, a misfit, the boy who hid his Barbies in a dresser drawer in
his room. As children, my best friend found them, outed me.

But me, being observant, I saw cracks in the veneer of the nuclear family –
extramarital affairs, abuse, alcoholism, dark depressions, madness – because the
constraints of the nuclear family is nothing more than a straitjacket to those who
question their surroundings, those who don’t fit into those surroundings, who are
not sheep. These cracks and flaws I embrace as my identity. This album represents
these cracks and flaws that make us more than computers, robots, androids, data
punch operators.

Those of you who have been following me know that in my 30 plus years as an
artist, I have always stretched myself, going in new areas, going out of my comfort
zone, reaching for something new. This part of me has led me to live in China and
Saudi Arabia in search of new pathways to my art, in search of home. But then, more
about that later.

This album is my life and my view of life on parade, every crack and blemish proudly
metaphorically displayed. I have freed myself from the bondage of judgment of the
nuclear family. Thus I am robbing the nuclear family of their power over me.

Stay tuned for more details about the album and my life.

-Tyson Meade

The post About “Robbing the Nuclear Family” appeared first on Tyson Meade.

Oklahoma City-based alt-rock godfather and Chainsaw Kittens frontman Tyson Meade releases today his new record “Robbing The Nuclear Family” via Shaking Shanghai.

The creative zeal that established Meade as an iconic leader of the alternative-rock movement is inescapable throughout the album, and the 10 tracks that make up “Robbing The Nuclear Family” draw widely from his signature mix of punk energy, vivid arrangements and politically charged lyrics, according to a news release. The album is currently available for purchase HERE.

Meade has a couple of local appearances coming up: He is due to perform with Ada native and Nashville-based songwriter Zac Maloy during the fourth annual Oklahoma Songwriters Festival April 12-13, and he’s on the lineup for the Norman Music Festival, set for April 25-27 in downtown Norman.

The post Tyson Meade releases new album ‘Robbing The Nuclear Family’ today appeared first on Tyson Meade.

This article was featured on Pop Matters.

Tyson Meade, former lead singer of Oklahoma City’s Chainsaw Kittens and Defenestration, hailed by many as an “alt-rock godfather”, returns with his new album, Robbing the Nuclear Family on March 22.

After Chainsaw Kittens disbanded in the early 2000s, Meade traveled to China where he taught English for a number of years. Returning to Oklahoma, he made a 2018 bid for Congress as a Democrat in the state’s fifth district. Though he lost in the primary, he still considers the experience an overall positive one.

A new single, “P.S. Nuclear Forest Dance Boogie” reminds us of Meade‘s ability to weave the unusual into the familiar and create musical settings that are as forward-looking now as they were when he began his recording career in the 1980s. Sounding positively youthful in the song, Meade was joined by a cast that includes violinist Haffijy (from Beijing rock band PK 14), Matt Duckworth (Flaming Lips), and Grammy-award winning drummer Rob Martin, as well as multi-instrumentalist David “Immy” Immerglück (Counting Crows, Camper Van Beethoven, and the Monks of Doom). Additionally, former Chainsaw Kittens Trent Bell recorded the drums on the record.

Discussing the new single from his home in Oklahoma City, Meade waxes enthusiastic about the single. “‘P.S. Nuclear Forest Dance Boogie’ was written in China,” he says. “It was me, looking at them, this really simple, pretty wonderful Chinese life and how they’ve progressed on way through civilization and we’ve progressed another way. Those ways have sort of merged now, which is beautiful. I just felt so energized and recharged after all of that, a time when I didn’t know if I’d be making records again. Being in China was like being on another planet. It was like I was in a dream world. I thought, ‘What would Bowie and Iggy do in Berlin?'”

Throughout a lengthy conversation, Meade discussed his teaching and political careers as well as the drive to make a new album.

When did you decide you were going to make this record?

I look at my last record, Tomorrow in Progress, (2014) and Robbing the Nuclear Family as being Chinese-inspired records. I stopped making music for a time, went to China. I loved it but I felt like I was marking time. It was like The Karate Kid and I was just washing cars, getting ready to put out the most creative records I’ve ever done. When I finished Tomorrow in Progress, I kept writing songs. In the past, I’d finish a record and think, “It’s done. I’m not going to write for a while.” This record has songs that were written on the tail of that album. When I moved back, I had new songs that are a call-and-response in a way.

Do you feel like there are lyrical threads across these songs?

I didn’t really realize it until I had finished the album. A reoccurring theme is home and finding home. “Piece of Candy” is about fitting into a family when you’re [an] other. “Grandsons of the Empire” is one I wrote in China. I didn’t know where home was and if I found it I wondered what it would be like. It’s like in the original Planet of the Apes. They come back to earth and it’s not home. “Moonbeams” is about the acceptance of your situation and embracing it, having joy.

I think the album takes you on a ride of happy moments, melancholy. “Motorcycle Boy #3″ takes you on a journey. I went to Thailand for one month at one point. It’s about the boys there wanting to leave and go somewhere else. They meet someone and then that person has to leave. They know the other person is going to leave. Home, coming, going, accepting life. Trying to navigate through the modern world.

I’m curious about your Chinese experience. I saw an article sometime last year about how the American Dream is alive and well and living in China.

I’ve told young bands, “Go teach English. Have a band in China and travel around there. Make Asia your hub.” The only reason I really came back was because I wanted to make records. I had a fan base here. But if I was 19, 20, 21, I would go to China and launch a music career from there. You get ahead so much faster there. I started teaching and by the time I left I was running a boarding school.

I’m curious about the album title.

You know how Ringo Starr was credited with these phrases like A Hard Day’s Night? I was telling a friend about who I might connect with on a physical level. He said, “You’re not robbing the cradle! You’re robbing the nuclear family!” [Laughs.] I said, “That’s the title of my record.” Then I wrote “He’s the Candy”. If you look at it from the larger perspective, we are changing from the nuclear family of mom and dad, two kids, to mom and mom, two kids, single moms and two kids, two dads, two kids. For the people who don’t want change it’s the worst thing because they feel like they’ve been robbed of something.

Not to get political but I feel like I’m in the middle of so many things, but I talk to conservative people and discover I’m far left. When I talk to really liberal people, I think, “Wow. I guess I lean toward the right.” I don’t even know where I am in my leanings!

I feel like some of that is generational. I’m probably a liberal on many counts but I talk to people 20 years younger than me, and they are much more radical.

Exactly! And that’s what they’re used to. I do hang out with people in their late 20s or early 30s and they are much more radical. But they’re also more about common sense. “What’s the big deal about that?” There is no big deal. The older generations are just stuck in their way.

You said you weren’t going to get into politics but you now have had a political career.

[Laughs.] I guess I did! Literally. I was really struck by what was going on in Oklahoma with the 2018 teachers’ strike. I figured, “Maybe I have a louder voice than some people because people know who I am. I’m just going to do this.” I didn’t think about winning or losing. I just wanted to make the conversation louder. I feel like I did that.

I do have to ask about Chainsaw Kittens. Do you feel like the band is still finding an audience all these years later?

History has been very kind to us. I know this kid who just turned 18 and helped me on my campaign. He saw me out somewhere and said, “Hey! I just registered to vote just because I want to vote for you because I love your band!” I’ve experienced that a lot. I get letters from Brazil, the Czech Republic. It’s really been cool.

I never imagined what happened with alternative rock where it became this thing where there were platinum artists. I loved Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., and Cheap Trick. But I never though what we were doing was going to sell. But bands like Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana came along and proved me wrong.

Because I didn’t get on the treadmill where I did album-tour-album-tour I got to have this other adventure where I got to China and Saudi Arabia and New York. For me, getting that was much more important.

The post Alt-Rock Godfather Tyson Meade Returns With “P.S. Nuclear Forest Dance Boogie” (premiere + interview) appeared first on Tyson Meade.

The post Tyson Meade “P.S. Nuclear Forest Dance Boogie” appeared first on Tyson Meade.

Host Rich Reardin talks with singer/songwriter and ‘Godfather of Alternative Rock’, Tyson Meade.

Often cited as The Godfather of Alternative Rock, Meade was the vocalist for Norman, OK based rock band Chainsaw Kittens, along with Defenestration. Meade was cited by Kurt Cobain as an influence, friends The Flaming Lips covered Tyson’s song ‘She’s Gone Mad,’ and Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins credits the Chainsaw Kittens as one of his favorite bands, writing Meade during the recording of the SP album ‘Gish’ to express his appreciation. Meade released his debut solo album, ‘Kitchens and Bathrooms,’ in 2005, following with the albums ‘Motorcycle Childhood’ and ‘Tomorrow In Progress,’ with the latter being recorded and produced during Meade’s extended stay in Shanghai, where a young violinist named Haffijy reignited Meade’s passion for music. Meade was eager to explore a further musical collaboration with Haffijy. “I became very curious as to how he might score a song still in development, one that I had no preconceived notions about, one that I had just written — though I had not written any songs in some years at that point,” Meade says. “I was now driven to write a song.” The result was “Stay Alone” which became the catalyst for the entire China project.  Meade played the song for some of his Western music friends, including fellow Norman-based, alt-rockers the Flaming Lips (who covered the Chainsaw Kittens’ “She’s Gone Mad”), Jimmy Chamberlain of Smashing Pumpkins, Maria McKee, and Other Lives (Meade has previously collaborated with Other Lives’ Jesse Tabish and the Flaming Lips’ Derek Brown on a project called Winter Boys).  After hearing “Stay Alone,” these friends became interested in being a part of this unique, cross-cultural project and have agreed to contribute to this record as well. Meade will return to Shanghai this July and begin work with various high schools and universities both there and in the United States for the project. His goal is to write and record at least a dozen tracks, which he will release as an album next year. A series of live performances is also in the works. “I lived in China for five years and every Chinese person that I ever encountered is wonderful,” says Meade. “They love America and Americans and I would love for America to love them back. I want the people who hear this project to hear their jubilation for living and for mankind in general.” Tyson Meade is an American musician, painter, writer, and teacher from Bartlesville, Oklahoma. Meade has recorded more than a dozen critically acclaimed records for major and indie labels since 1984 with his bands Defenestration and the Chainsaw Kittens, whose 1991 debut SPIN magazine described as “The Smiths meets the New York Dolls meets the devil.” He’s also released records as a solo artist and has contributed songs to the soundtracks for “Hellraiser III,” “Clerks” and “Bug.” The new album, ‘Robbing The Nuclear Family,’ is out early 2017 on Jett Plastic.

The post Beyond A Song: Tyson Meade appeared first on Tyson Meade.

Alt-rock godfather and Chainsaw Kittens frontman Tyson Meade has shared a new track, “P.S. Nuclear Forest Dance Boogie”. The song premiered on Popmatters who writes that the track “reminds us of Meade’s ability to weave the unusual into the familiar and create musical settings that are as forward-looking now as they were when he began his recording career in the 1980s.” The track is the second single from his upcoming album Robbing The Nuclear Family, which will be released on March 22nd on Shaking Shanghai.

Listen – Tyson Meade: “P.S. Nuclear Forest Dance Boogie”

Like his critically-acclaimed 2014 solo release Tomorrow in Progress, which included fantastic contributions from Smashing Pumpkins’ Jimmy Chamberlin, Other Lives’ Jesse Tabish, and The Flaming Lips’ Derek Brown, Robbing The Nuclear Family features contributions from elder statesmen of the Beijing rock scene PK 14, Shanghai violinist Haffijy, The Flaming Lips’ Matt Duckworth, and Grammy-award winning drummer Rob Martin. Drums were recorded by Grammy award-winning mixer Trent Bell at Bell Labs Recording. Robbing also has the heavy imprint of multi-instrumentalist David “Immy” Immerglück of alternative rock greats Counting Crows, Camper Van Beethoven, and the Monks of Doom.

Meade recently released the exquisitely subversive and frenetic video for “He’s The Candy”: http://youtu.be/XStqtTXFVcg

Through the years, Meade-and his legendary three-octave voice-has toured with Iggy Pop, Smashing Pumpkins, Jane’s Addiction, the Meat Puppets, and many others. Brooklyn Vegan wrote in 2014 that “Tyson Meade has fronted not one but two influential bands. In the ’80s he fronted cult band Defenestration (Kurt Cobain counted them as an influence on Nirvana), and got more attention in the ’90s with the glammy Chainsaw Kittens (Iggy Pop and Smashing Pumpkins were fans).” The group predated and outlasted the other 1990s alternative rock acts with its energetic blend of glam-damaged energy, theatrical extremity, and punk rock basics. As Popmatters previously observed, “But whereas in Defenestration it was all tempered with a vaguely mainstream rock sensibility… the Chainsaw Kittens dove enthusiastically off the deep end, into the extreme waters of glam-pop-punk, full-on transvestitism, and for the first time, openly gay lyrics.”

The creative zeal that established Meade as an iconic leader of the alternative rock movement is apparent throughout Robbing The Nuclear Family, and the album’s 10 tracks draw widely from his signature mix of punk energy, vivid arrangements, and politically charged lyrics.

The post Alt-Rock Godfather Tyson Meade Releases New Single, Announces New Album appeared first on Tyson Meade.

(I was the singer/ songwriter for a band called the Chainsaw Kittens which began in 1989 after my band Defenestration had imploded. These posts are about that time and the times after when I worked in advertising in NYC and then later still when I ran a boarding school in Shanghai. In many ways, because of everything I  ingested as a youth, I am lucky to be alive and I know that. Enjoy the read. My latest single is available at jettplasticrecordings.com.)

In the late spring of 1994, a miracle worthy of the saints, Mother Mary and Jean Genet, came to be. The rock and roll guardian angel overseeing my band Chainsaw Kittens’ destiny pulled some electric harp strings in heaven.

Iggy Pop invited the Kittens on a short tour, which was to crisscross America. Some of the places we were to play were where Iggy’s concerts had been banned and the ban was now lifted. As we know, there was a time when Iggy loved to pull out his iguana (or trouser lizard) on stage and wave it in the crowd’s faces or go beyond that and strip down to nothing but a microphone. This promptly got him banned from many cities across the continental USA. These upcoming ban-lifted shows were to be the hot ticket of the season.

As anyone in the music industry knows, Iggy is famous for inviting young bands on the verge of stardom on tour. Jane’s Addiction is the most famous band that comes to mind that once shared the touring stage with the Ig before their ‘Addiction’  packed concert halls.

At this point, Pop Heiress, the Kittens’ bombastic pop masterstroke, was newly released on Mammoth through Atlantic. Mammoth hired publicity powerhouse Susan Blond Inc., the publicity company founded, of course, by Susan Blond, who is said to be the inspiration behind the New Yawk publicist in This Is Spinal Tap.

“Tyson, I love your band,” Susan told me on the phone when she called my ramshackle cannabis cave in Norman. “I see big things for you. I have been playing your record for everyone. I just love it. You are going to be a star. I will make sure of that.”

One of the people for whom Susan played our record and gushed was industry magnate Lisa Robinson, with whom I was familiar from her days as the editor – and co-creator – of Rock Scene Magazine, the magazine that forever changed my life the summer before my 7th grade year.

Rock Scene Magazine – produced on a wee budget attested to by the newsprint on which it was printed – was a somewhat playfully subversive rock and roll culture magazine out of NYC with an advice column written by Wayne County.

Wayne advised boys to wear make-up; advised party throwers to throw underwear-only parties in which everyone traded underwear during the course of the party; advised starving musicians to beg, steal or borrow music equipment, anything to get that rock and roll band started. To say this magazine and this view of New York culture in some way had an effect on me in my later years is an understatement. Of course, Wayne County later became Jayne County and later still became a friend of mine but then of course, that is another story, the story of Sweet Saint Jayne who saved me from an advertising conglomerate which you can read about in an earlier post.

Lisa Robinson, who introduced the Ramones to Howie Stein at Sire and his (then) wife Linda, was now in our corner. She was a rock and roll heavyweight. Among other things, she had a high profile column in the New York Post in which she gushed about the Kittens. This is the woman who was the first to do major stories on mega-rockers Aerosmith. She imagined them as big stars when Clive Davies first signed them on at Max’s Kansas City in NYC, back when they were still surviving on peanut butter and smack.

She was now a major fan of the Kittens. There was a whirlwind of rock and roll activity swirling around us. We were in the eye of the rock and roll hurricane that had just swept up our friends the Smashing Pumpkins. We were about to set sail into that hurricane of candy apple excess.

We had been in the New Faces section of Rolling Stone after releasing our previous record, the Butch Vig produced Flipped Out in Singapore. Now, we had our picture in the New York Times, an article in the New York Post. I was profiled in Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine; when this came out, family members actually asked me for autographs.

Finally, after years of struggling and shuttling across the country in dilapidated vans, the Kittens had finally arrived—or at least we were in the parking lot, getting out of the car and heading into the party. We were getting closer and closer to stardom. Everyone around us were telling us we were the next big thing.

On top of all of this, we were touring with Iggy Pop, whom I had discovered when I bought my first Rock Scene Magazine at Bill’s Supermarket in Bartlesville while grocery shopping with my mom back in the early days of summer 1974. One of my favorite things to do as a kid was go grocery shopping with my mom, just her and me. My brothers had their motorcycles at this point, so they never accompanied my mom and me to town. They saw it as lame. They were independent.

Sabbath was their soundtrack. Mine was still undetermined. This was the summer that I would discover – with the help of Rock Scene – the New York Dolls, Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Sparks, Queen, White Witch and a slew of others.

When I went grocery shopping with my mom, she would spoil me somewhat and let me buy a rock magazine (usually Hit Parader until I discovered Rock Scene) and any sorts of snacks that I wanted. As a kid, I was anemically skinny, though I had a hearty appetite. My mom let me eat anything just to try to put some weight on me. She and I roamed the aisles of the grocery store putting anything new and improved in the basket. This is after I had picked out my magazine, which I carried. I never put it in the basket lest milk or something sticky might leak on it. At the checkout while the groceries were being tallied, I would look at the Friday and Saturday night listings in the TV Guide, specifically I would look to see who was going to be on In Concert, Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert and Midnight Special. With any luck, one of the aforementioned bands would be the guests.

In Rock Scene, there was always some little tidbit or other about Iggy. He was always in party shots with Alice Cooper, Groucho Marx, or John Lennon. Raw Power had just been released. He was set to take over the world.

With apple picking money, I bought Raw Power at Larceny Whipsnake’s Music Parlour in downtown Bartlesville. My family lived on ten acres in Osage County seven miles from Bartlesville. On our acreage, my dad – before I was born – had planted an apple orchard. To make extra money in the summer, I would pick apples for people from town who drove out to our farm for freshly picked apples. I received $5 a bushel. Sometimes, I would make $20 or $30 in a weekend, which allowed me to buy four, five or six records.

Larceny Whipsnake’s was in business for less than a year but the place burned an impression on my brain that has stayed with me vividly my whole life.  In an old brick storefront with a small balcony on Main Street in downtown Bartlesville, this was a magical place for me.

Inside were wood floors and always the smell of sandalwood incense, coming from an incense stick burning propped in the mouth of a funny little ceramic old man’s head on big wooden counter, the counter that was the center of the Larceny Whipsnake world, that housed the wonderfully loud hi-fi. This was in the front of the store and the first thing you saw when you walked in or if you were out on Main Street passing by the store. Looking back, I cannot imagine what people thought that walked by or even stopped in who had just been shopping down the street at Otasco  or Kinney’s Shoes or the Woolworth. This place reeked of counter culture though I had no idea of that at the time.

Beyond the counter, in rows, were floor to ceiling two by four columns with long carpenter nails driven partly through them. The albums sat in rows from floor to ceiling on these nails as if this was an art gallery and the record jackets were the art.

Larceny Whipsnake carried no Osmonds or David Cassidy records. Atomic Rooster, Lucifer’s Friend, White Witch, UFO, the Groundhogs, and Roxy Music records lined the walls. Since you could find Beatles records at Montgomery Ward, he did not carry them. Instead, he carried the Who catalogue and the older more obscure Stones’ records. Larceny Whipsnake had only one copy of each album. I meandered back and forth down the rows of this aural library as if I had been given special permission to invade the alchemist’s secret, highly magical, lair where there was a wonder around every corner.

While I spent my time looking at Jobriath, Eno, Bo Hansen, John Martyn, and David Werner albums, my mother would do her downtown shopping at JC Penney’s or Martin’s or Anthony’s shopping for clothes. Since most of my shopping at Larceny’s took place in the summer – the summer before my seventh grade year — Mom would usually buy herself a summer clothing item or two, like culottes or gauchos. She could leave me at Larceny’s all afternoon to go shopping, but when she came back to get me, I would still feel rushed. I could never make up my mind. Should I buy Bowie’s Pin-ups or UFO’s Phenomenon or even Groundhogs’ Split?

Early on, I knew I did not fit into a cookie cutter, ‘Go Team’ world. Any extra money, I spent on rock and roll, which made my dad grumble severely to my mom and me. At one point, Larceny Whipsnake’s girlfriend asked me:

“Where do you get all of your money? Do you rob banks?”

This made me smile. I suppose it was a bit odd for an 11 – nearly 12 – year old to come and buy three or four underground rock and roll records. As I said earlier, I picked apples for cash. One bushel of apples equaled one record.

That day, I would buy only one, and that was Iggy Pop’s Raw Power. The album looked as if there were magic inside ready to break forth and conquer the minds of the willing. The magi on the cover, Iggy, had the look of a distant shaman surveying, ready to educate the sadly schooled misfits abused by a puritanical system of paranoia and fear. He was not one of the sheep. He was looking for others who were ready to shed their sheep’s skin. I was ready and willing.

Yes, I was quite sure, Saint Iggy, the performer of miracles with broken glass and peanut butter, was ready to rescue me, if only for 35 or 40 minutes at a time, from the tedium of youth and from football players and Baptist preachers’ scowling daughters. Iggy would come on his rock and roll spaceship and take me to some strung out glam rock netherworld.

Now, many years later, my band, which I had built on sweat and vomit, were about to tour with Iggy, the mythical. He personally chose us. We drove from Norman, Oklahoma to Seattle, Washington for our first show with this figure that loomed larger than life in my mind. Although the Kittens had toured with Johnny Rotten at this point (which was an earlier post), Iggy was a much bigger part of my rock and roll misfit psyche.

Finally, I was meeting this mythic character, this shamen, Bowie’s muse, the original punk. Of course, I was intimidated and the 12 year old me shook like a leaf but at the same time was vindicated. I was now proud that I was the misfit that stood out in junior high school.

“Hi Iggy! I’m Tyson,” I introduced myself to the shaman of shamans in the dressing room after Iggy’s set. Needless to say, I was nervous.

“I know you, Tyson!” he said, and shook my hand and smiled that cat with a canary in his stomach smile.

“I saw you many years ago near my hometown in Oklahoma,” I continued.

“Oh, they won’t let me come back to Oklahoma,” he said a little sheepishly. I had seen him in 1980 at Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa. This did not end pretty.

“Oh, we love you there!” I assured him, which was all I could think to say.

“Ya’ know, I getta lot of nice letters from people in Oklahoma,” he told me in a sort of guttersnipe fatherly way, “with names like Spike.”

“Oh, this is my friend, by the way.” At that point, Iggy introduced me to a cute guy with short hair who looked like a boy scout. He looked completely out of place in the backstage atmosphere of sweaty, greasy, long-haired rock and rollers, and I wondered how he knew Iggy. At that point, a photographer was there; we were getting our picture taken for Rolling Stone’s Random Notes.

“Hey Evan,” Iggy called to his friend, “get in the picture with us.”

There the three of us posed for Rolling Stone. It was not until the next day when I talked to our publicist at Susan Blond, Inc, that I realized that Iggy’s friend was singer-songwriter Evan Dando, the main dude in the Lemonheads. Up until that time, Evan had always had long, straight rocker hair. With his shorn locks, he’d looked totally different. He no longer looked like the rocker allegedly banned from Paramount Hotel in NYC for using his feces to paint the wall of his suite. Now, he looked like the leader of the pep squad or the star of a high school tennis team.

The next night, in Vancouver, the guys and I were sitting at a table, stoned, in the balcony of the large ballroom and club. Up until that point, the moment-to-moment happenings had not really hit me as anything special. However, that night, watching Iggy (and you must remember that this was a few years before Trainspotting made the 1977 underground classic “Lust For Life” an aboveground hit which reignited Iggy’s career) and sitting in the balcony, I realized how perfect it was, how cool life could be sometimes.

Here I was this farm boy who grew up listening to Iggy out on a farm in Oklahoma and now I was opening shows for him. Though I had not yet arrived, I was really starting to enjoy the ride to the stardom party. Back at that time, I had so many people around me, including Billy Corgan, telling me how big the Kittens were going to be and I naturally assumed we would be rock and roll lifers making platinum records like some of my friends but that was not to be.

And, you know, that’s okay. After I quit rocking, I sobered up. I started teaching in NYC, which led to a position in a boarding school in China and then running a boarding school in China. All of the people I’ve met and the things I have done since my rock and roll years I would not have had the chance to do if I was a career rocker. Life plays funny cool tricks on us sometimes. We should be thankful for those tricks. And, we should be thankful that Iggy Pop exists.

-Tyson Meade

The post The Miracle of Iggy Pop appeared first on Tyson Meade.

My Detroit Grand Finale! More Billy Davis! Meeting legendary photog Leni Sinclair!

After the Q&A and before Billy was whisked away, I was able to talk to him once more. To see such a legendary figure up close playing his heart out and showing the beauty of his soul is a once in a lifetime happening. It was easy to babble on about how wonderful he played and sang. He then commented to me how much he enjoyed my performance as well.

“I would love to record together,” I told him.

“I would like that,” Billy replied. We talked a bit more and then his handler – that was not Jarrett’s dad this time – steered Billy to the exit.

“Now I’m gonna hold you too that,” he told me as he left.

“Don’t worry,” I called to him. “It will be my honor.”

Earlier at the Q&A, Billy was asked about his relationship with Barry Gordy, the Motown Svengali. They had been childhood friends after all. When Motown started, Barry asked Billy’s band at the time to play all sorts of functions. This was always with no pay. At one point, the band mutinied and told Billy if Barry wasn’t paying them, they weren’t playing. With his hands metaphorically tied, Billy went to Barry and told him his boys had to be paid. Barry took umbrage and refused.

“After that,” Billy said, “we were still good friends but we never worked together again. That split our working relationship.”

I thought about this later as Jarrett and I were leaving Assemble where the show and the Q&A had been. Fate is funny in how one moment or one incident can sometimes shape or at least influence our entire future. Sometimes that incident we are not the ones spearheading it. In this case, Billy’s band took a stand and forever altered Billy’s working relationship with Barry and Motown.

I thought about this as Jarrett and I were getting in the car. The snow was really starting to come down and it was starting to stick to the roads as well. To save Jarrett from having to go out of his way, I told him that it might be easier if I just went home with him and slept in the den in his basement. With the snow coming down so heavy, the adult in me – who sometimes rears his ugly head – thought this would be safer. He agreed.

So there we were slipping and sliding along the avenue with all of the other motorists making our way back to St Clair Shores, the area where Jarrett lives a few blocks from the Lake St. Clair, the Great Lake. Although from the looks of it all of the cars looked as if they were playing bumper cars, the near misses with other cars were just that, near misses. Jarrett drove incredibly cautious which put my mind at ease.

Finally we made it back to safety out of the snow and into the warm confines of Jarrett’s house. Jarrett and his dad both have companies, which involve keeping boxes and boxes of stock – records for Jarrett, t-shirts, photos, and rock and roll buttons for his dad. Thus, the basement is full of these items. I found it comforting having boxes of the newest Jett Plastic releases and one of a kind Iggy shirts surrounding me.

Jarrett offered to fold down the futon but I told him I was fine sleeping with it in the couch position. I was really tired and didn’t need that much room really. I’m one of those people who enjoy sleeping in a twin bed here and there. We said our goodnights and he went off to bed. Shortly after, Gary, Jarrett’s dad, arrived home. He came down into the basement and I called to him to let him know I was there to not startle him, which, in fact, startled him.

I told him the slippery roads worried me so I had Jarrett bring me back to their house. He agreed that was the best thing to do. He then asked why the futon wasn’t folded down and I told him I was fine the way it was. Although Jarrett had given me blankets and pillows, Gary thought I didn’t have enough so he brought more. I was definitely not going to freeze to death in this house. The futon was extremely surprisingly comfortable. I tried to not think about how the snow would affect the turn out the following night at the UFO Factory. Fortunately, I was too tired to worry. I soon feel asleep.

The next day we woke and got out on the road to run around. The snowplows were out. The roads were being cleared. I was relieved. There might be a sizable turnout at the show after all.

Jarrett had promised to take me to his dad’s and uncle’s record store Melodies and Memories so we were finally going. I was quite excited from seeing pictures – all of that pristine used vinyl waiting for me to peruse. Stepping in the store, I was not disappointed. Right off, I found a copy of Badfinger “Straight Up” for cheaper than I had seen it anywhere. Several years ago when I was still tramping around the world, my storage unit had water damage and quite a lot of my best vinyl fell victim to this. Slowly, I had been replacing all of it though I am still looking for “In Hearing of Atomic Rooster.” Later, I found another storage unit casualty – Aerosmith “Get Your Wings.”

While we ran around record shopping and then stopping for lunch – Jarrett had been taking me to all of the Detroit places of some repute, I was hoping the whole time that my throat was not getting sore. Fortunately when I stopped drinking over a decade ago, I stopped getting sick. As a drinker, I was often sick several times during the winter. Now that I don’t drink, I don’t get sick. And, in as much, I haven’t vomited as a sober person.

But, at the same time, on this day, the day of the show, I felt as if my throat was on the verge of soreness but then it could have just been the dryness of the Detroit subzero air. At the same time, I was starting to feel a tad lethargic like I could just go to sleep. If I just pull off tonight, I can sleep and properly rest I told myself. As we headed back to his house to regroup and get the gear for the evening, I told myself I would be okay.

Jarrett’s mom Noelle fixed us sliders before we took off for soundcheck. My friends Brian and Audra had flown in from NYC to see the show. Since we would be getting together before the show for dinner in downtown Detroit, I didn’t gorge on sliders but I could have since they were some of the best sliders I’ve ever had. Soundcheck time was quickly approaching. We headed to the club. The roads were clear. I wondered if my flu symptoms were psychosomatic.

At the club, Jarrett introduced me to the other bands. Jon-Mikel Bartee from Idiot Kids was immediately striking, with his gritty fey glamour, like a 1973 Detroit Bowie infused with jagged black grease paint hair and one of those hats, those black hats with the wide brim meant for riding in limousines, snorting cocaine, and writing hits in 10 minutes with 8 minutes to spare. I was excited to hear his band play. Jarrett loves them. I know that I would too.

We decided to forego the soundcheck. The other bands seemed to have it under control and we were all enough alike sound-wise to not be too surprised when we took the stage. I wandered around the club meeting people, through Jarrett and the other guys.

My California transplant friend Sharon showed. She had once lived in Detroit. We had met on Instagram through friends and a love for Bowie. When Bowie passed, she had quoted me for an articles she wrote. I had never met her face to face. We were finally meeting face to face which was fantastic. We chatted a bit and then Jarrett took me to meet Brian and Audra at Wright & Co., a chic restaurant above the John Varvatos store in Downtown Detroit.

The place was packed when I walked in. Brian and Audra were at the bar. We hugged and stayed at the bar for a bit until our table was ready. The food was awesome and just what I needed, lots of small plates that we shared. We laughed and chatted and I got into a very good place to prepare for the show. All of us talked about how much we love Detroit, our new discovery that Motor City residents have known is pretty great for years.

We caught an Uber back to the club. Riding through the Detroit evening in the Uber, I saw Detroit as a traveler, that way you see a place when you are being ferried by a stranger – Brian and Audra in the backseat, me in the front. We talked but we looked as well. We took in the evening as we sped through the streets in a warm new car, motored in the Motor City. The revamped downtown looked even more majestic in this winter wonderland.

We arrived to a club that was quickly filling up. Since it was December, there was a ton of drunk Santas drinking at and around the bar. I mingled a bit and felt rather great. I was ready for the show. Idiot Kids took the stage and floored me. They were like a raucous Detroit Bowie. I immediately loved them.

Finally, the time had arrived for the boys and me to take the stage. I was nervous but ready though we had only had the one practice a few nights before. We launched into the first song – “I ride free” a song from my days in the Kittens that had in fact been written before any of the guys on stage were even born. I was shocked and relieved. They all sounded wonderful.

Kristian gave the whole band a beat to ride and they all did this effortlessly. Craig, the lead guitarist, was Ariel Bender incarnate. (In my last post, somehow the section I wrote about Craig did not make it into the article. He had lined up our practice spot a couple of evenings before. His guitar playing is gritty, dangerous.) Michael kept the rhythm guitar perfect and chunky. My pal Jarrett who had arranged my trip to Detroit and had put the shows together was like the reincarnation of John Entwistle.

These guys had it and I was proud to front them. The show had some cacophonous near catastrophic punk rock moments but then that made it even better in the not knowing, the careening and colliding and then recovering. I imagined that this must have been what the New York Dolls or Stooges were like at their sordid Champagne / peanut butter drenched best.

Now that I had played the shows, the pressure was off. I was ready to relax. I had a few more days to enjoy Detroit. On Sunday, Jarrett and I ran around again to a few record stores. He had a commitment to – of all things – play a song at a church so he left me at his uncle’s record store so that I could really spend some time browsing. What we didn’t realize is that the store closed early on Sunday, which Jarrett immediately rectified. He called Jeff from the Detroit Cobras. Jeff came and whisked me away giving me a tour of some unseen Detroit neighborhoods in the process.

I asked him about the housing prices because houses are so cheap in Detroit.

“This will change right?” I asked him. “The prices have to increase.”

“Nothing is going to change,” he told me. “Prices will stay low.”

I had heard various opinions on the matter and it seemed to me as if many of the natives seemed to think Detroit would stay cheap. Nothing would change. I guess the future is always anyone’s guess.

The night before I left, Gary arranged for me to meet Leni Sinclair. We would have dinner with her at a Thai restaurant close to her neighborhood. Of course, I was excited about this. I had bought a handful of her photographs from Gary – John Lennon, Janis Joplin, Iggy Pop, and Alice Cooper. Now, I would meet the woman behind the camera.

Before we met her and Gary at the restaurant, Jarrett and I stopped at Found Sound records. There were quite a few records I thought about buying, a clean copy of the Frost album, Runt from Todd Rundgren, or a best of Lulu record but I didn’t buy anything because from all the booty that Jarrett and Gary gave me and then all of the albums that I bought, I knew I would already have a hard time getting everything in my suitcase.

After looking we made our way to the restaurant. Gary and Leni arrived shortly after. We immediately hit it off and she told story after story, lots of stories about Wayne Kramer and the MC5, some stories about her ex-husband John. At one point, the conversation made its way to Africa. Leni had shot and become friends with Fela Kuti. She went on about him. She loves African music.

Gary had brought a copy of Leni’s book for Leni to sign for me, which was very sweet of both of them. Finally it was time to go. We said our goodbyes took photos together and left. Meeting Leni was the ultimate climax to my trip to Detroit. Thank you Jarrrett for showing me such a good time. Thank you Detroit for still inarguably being Detroit Rock City!

-Tyson Meade

The post Detroit (Part 3) appeared first on Tyson Meade.

Friday came. That night was to be my show with Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee – friend of and mentor to Jimi Hendrix – Billy Davis. Of course, I was slightly nervous. My voice definitely showed signs of wear from practicing with the kids the previous evening. In a rock setting, this would have been no big deal but in a setting where it was just my voice with piano accompaniment I was nervous. Jarrett, who seems to be able to do everything, was to be my accompanist on piano. We had not gone through the songs yet. We were set to do that in the afternoon. On top of everything else, a heavy snow was to fall on Detroit that night. This was a day with a lot of variables.

In the afternoon, Jarrett and I went through the songs. Since we are both professionals, there were only a few glitches. Really, I have to hand it to Jarrett. Not only was he my pianist but the following night he would be the bassist in my band at the UFO Factory. He ran his label as well and he was in college finishing his first semester, which had come to the point of final exams and various essays. With everything that he had happening, he truly is a trooper.

Jarrett and I went early to the church – Assemble – hoping to run through a couple of songs before anyone arrived. No one seemed be there. Detroit was still cold, below freezing. We waited at the gated entrance; knocking and waiting, hoping someone would let us in before we became Motor City popsicles.

Finally a young man named Dylan answered our repeated knocks and welcomed us to come inside where it was by no means anywhere close to being warm and toasty. Later, Jarrett’s friend Lee showed up who had printed the posters for the two shows, posters for that night’s and the UFO Factory show.

Lee went and got us cokes in bottles at a local convenience store. Jarrett and I had picked up Tubby’s to eat at a Tubby’s that did not take Tubby’s coupons. Tubby’s is a delicious steak and cheese sandwich Detroit franchise. Another place that Jarrett had pointed out on one of our afternoon drives. Jarrett had a coupon. Both of us were perplexed when we got to Tubby’s and Tubby’s did not take Tubby’s coupons. Tubby’s, I love you but what the heck?! Take your own coupons.

After we finished our sandwiches, Jarrett being a neat and tidy person threw everything away. Lee returned with the cokes for us. He sat down to eat his Mac and Cheese that he had left on the table in a bag when he went to get the cokes. Jarrett being tidy and all, threw the bag away. Lee was not pleased but definitely a good sport about it.

The grand piano, which had supposedly been tuned recently, had some bum notes, which bummed both Jarrett and me out. It was also placed behind a beam so it was hard to make eye contact with each other. Being professionals, we would get through this though this was not an ideal circumstance by any means.

And then Billy arrived. Gary, Jarrett’s dad, went out to Garden City to pick him up. He doesn’t have a car of his own. When his car was stolen, he got so angry that he decided not to get another one. Billy, who in many ways resembles his protégé Hendrix, walked down the aisle. Walking in, he had star quality. Is it because of the pictures I had seen of him with Barry Gordy, the Beatles, Sam Cooke or was it because he is truly a star? – an angelic being of light passing through our time wielding his six string.

Although I was intimidated and more than slightly star-struck, Jarrett had told me repeatedly how nice Billy is. Billy walked up to me and I introduced myself and, of course, told him how pleased I was to meet him. His demeanor was slightly biblical like that of a kind old shepherd, a kind old shepherd who time-travels to shop at Granny Takes a Trip and any other 60s Swinging London haberdashery.

Knowing I may never get another chance, I immediately started asking him questions.

“I was at the Motown Museum and saw a picture of you and Barry Gordy. You both looked really young like you were 13 or 14. How old were you?”

“I think we were 11,” Billy replied and then added. “You know I saw him recently at some event and he was really nice to me but he didn’t seem to know who I was.”

“Oh no, that’s awful.”

“Yeah, I think it runs in his family. I knew his people. A lot of them got that way when they got older. He was really nice though, very polite but maybe not all there.”

“And Hendrix? What’s the story there?”
“Well,” he started. “When the Midnighters played Seattle, our trumpet player came back after the show and told me this teenager, this guy, wanted to talk to me but I didn’t want to talk to any guy. I wanted to meet women.”

“Hendrix?”

“Yeah, well anyway, this happened every time we played Seattle. And finally, the third time I said ‘yes, I would meet him.’ And there is this 16 year-old Hendrix. We became friends and I helped him out a bit. He took my place in the Midnighters when I got drafted.

“And the Beatles?” I asked. “I saw a picture of you and the Midnighters (Billy’s band in the 50s and 60s) with them. Were you in England?”

“No actually that was Miami,” he answered. “We were playing a show and there were these guys, these kids, these fans at the front of the stage during our set.”

“They were the Beatles?” I asked.

“Yeah, but they were not yet ‘the BEATLES!’” he added. I understood what he meant. Yeah, they had just taken America by storm but obviously no one could have predicted what their legacy would be by their then current single and first US #1 hit “I want to hold your hand.”

After all, Billy was a co-writer with Hank Ballard on “The Twist,” the song that made Chubby Checker famous.

“Chubby Checker had Dick Clark behind him,” Billy told me when I asked him how Chubby Checker had got so famous off of his song.

He told me all of these stories with no drama, no bravado. The stories spoke for themselves. The historian in front of me was more than an historian, he was and is part of the history, a living breathing part of the history, kindly telling the stories while minimally inserting himself into them.

Then it was time for the show. There were not as many people as we had hoped because a lot of people did not want to brave the impending snowstorm. I insisted to Billy that I play first so that I could really sit back and enjoy his set without worry. Jarrett rose to the occasion and was a fine accompanist for me. My voice was not 100% but at the same time there were no “uh oh, what note is that?” moments. And, at this point, I have done this so long that I am better equipped than I was as a youngster to maneuver around problematic notes.

There was a short intermission before Billy went on. Everyone mingled for a bit. I got as close to the stage as possible because I knew this was bound to be special. And, yes, it was special. I could see what Hendrix saw, what inspired Hendrix as a youngster, why Hendrix wanted to meet this guitarist – and Billy’s beautiful voice, angelic, pure, without affectations. I was completely enthralled and taken to another place. I could imagine Billy playing at these clubs in his youth while the world was changing, growing up, evolving and self-destructing.

Later, after he played, he and I were part of a Q&A that Jarrett hosted. Billy got to talk more about his pal Hendrix then.

“Yeah, when he got famous when I was in New York, he would come and pick me up and we would go riding around in his limo, in the back, smoking and drinking and then stopping at the Cheetah club and then getting back in the limo and riding around New York all night.” Billy nodded his head in remembrance of this as if he was back with Hendrix riding around in that late 60s New York where the kids were swinging.

“Jimi was not a druggie!” Billy emphasized seemingly out of nowhere at one point. He then went on to say how later on when he saw Hendrix he just always seemed sad and Billy did not know why. As Billy spoke, he spoke of Hendrix as a close friend and not as a legend, as someone gone too soon that Billy misses as we miss those who have gone too soon.

From there, he segued into being on the road in Memphis. The story went like this:

“Yeah, I was in my hotel room and there was a loud knock on my door. Two state troopers – imposing state troopers – stood in front of me,” Billy said.

“We’re looking for Hank Ballard and the Midnighters,” one of the troopers said with no lack of authority.

Everyone in the audience was on the edge of their seat wondering what was going to happen next. After all this was in the time of segregation and the Midnighters were in the South after all.

“He’s down in that room,” Billy pointed to a couple of doors down. At the same time he said that, he was wondering what Hank had done to alert the troopers. Curious, he listened to the conversation.

“Are you Hank Ballard,” the one of the troopers asked when the door opened.

“Yes,” Hank answered tentatively.

“We’ve been asked to escort your band to Graceland,” the trooper said. “Elvis couldn’t make it over to the hotel but he wants to meet you.”

“So what about the Manson family member that was part of Hank Ballard and the Midnighters when you reformed in the 80s?” Jarrett asked as any Q&A moderator would who had this kind of information.

“Oh man!” Billy exclaimed.

It seems one of the Manson Family had gotten paroled on good behavior in the 80s and joined up with Hank Ballard and the Midnighters on guitar when the Midnighters had reformed. The Manson Family parolee had changed his name because Sharon Tate’s mother wanted to make sure all of the members convicted stayed in prison for life. With his name changed, he was able to slip out of prison undetected and into Hank Ballard and the Midnighters.

When Billy found out who he was, Billy was not pleased especially since Billy was rooming with the Helter Skelter one.

“C’mon man!” Billy told Hank. “I don’t want him rooming with me. He might slit my throat in the middle of the night.”

As Billy told the Q&A crowd this story, he laughed – albeit a bit uncomfortably.

Don’t miss Detroit Pt 3 coming very soon.

-Tyson Meade

The post Meet Billy David (Detroit Part 2) appeared first on Tyson Meade.

Some months ago or perhaps even a few years ago – my memory is hazy now, I started talking to Jett Plastic Recordings owner Jarrett Koral in Detroit about working together. Our output started with him putting out a single of mine, Stay Alone – a song that I had recorded in the audio-visual room at Gezhi High School in Downtown Shanghai with my violinist Haffijy , on the flipside’s He’s the Candy which is the demo version of one of the cornerstones of my new record Robbing the Nuclear Family.
We did this as a co-release with Shaking Shanghai, the label that artist/rocker Matt Goad and I launched. During the process of putting out the single, Jarrett and I discussed putting out my album Kitchens and Bathrooms on vinyl, an album that had a limited release in 2004 and I later loaded to iTunes in 2006. Since we got on so well, I suggested he put out my upcoming record, the aforementioned, Robbing the Nuclear Family.

Why Jett Plastic? Jett Plastic is an exciting home for my music because Jarrett has already gained a great reputation for putting out cool stuff, not to mention the Guardian wrote a feature on him and Rolling Stone named him as one of the 17 youngsters changing the music industry. And after talking to him on the phone a few times, I realized first and foremost he loves music. He is a fan first and foremost just like me.

Although he had been putting out Detroit garage rock records since he was a tween, Jarrett got national and international notice when he released Macaulay Culkin’s Pizza Underground EP, a tribute to the Velvet Underground with pizza themed songs. I love how Jarrett thinks. Jett Plastic is soon releasing an album by John Sinclair, manager of the MC5 and public dissident that John Lennon wrote a song about. Said album is a funky Frank Zappa cum Captain Beefheart cum Tom Waits cum Funkadelic affair.

Since this was all happening, I thought it might be a good idea if I visited this young record label tycoon. We then discussed just that. Since I hadn’t played Detroit in 20 years, I thought playing a show might be fun and since Jarrett knew a lot of the Detroit musicians and is a musician himself, I asked him to put a band together for me and be the musical director. I had no idea what I was getting into but thought this would be interesting. Pumping new blood into my songs, some that are 30 years old at this point, seemed to be a cool idea.

In October, we nailed down a date for a show – December 17^th at the UFO Factory bordering Downtown Detroit. At this point, Jarrett discussed who the band might be. His friends in the Britemores were up for the challenge of learning a bunch of my songs. This seemed like a great fit. One of the guys, Jeff, had previously been in the infamous Detroit Cobras.

As October whizzed by, we talked more about my upcoming time in Detroit. Jarrett was excited to take me to the Motown Museum among other places. He was set to take his friend Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Billy Davis on a VIP tour of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. He invited me along. He then set up a show for me with Billy Davis at a church that had been converted into a studio and a performance space.

Suddenly Detroit seemed much more lively than the City I had remembered 20 years earlier that at that time looked as if it was still recovering from some unnamed war, some automobile apocalypse, some sort of MC5 meltdown. Jack White had added to the changing cityscape by opening a Third Man Records location in Midtown complete with a record pressing plant attached. John Varvatos opened a huge boutique in the downtown area. The Heidelberg Project, rows and rows of abandoned houses made into art houses, had popped up in one of the most dangerous areas of the Motor City. Grande Ballroom, where the Who premiered Tommy in America and where MC5 and the Stooges played their most incendiary shows, was slated for restoration. I was excited to see this Detroit.

Finally, the day arrived for my flight to Detroit. Jarrett messaged me to tell me there had been a huge snow fall the night before but that the roads were mostly clear. However, his father has a better vehicle for snow so he would be going with Jarrett to the airport to pick me up. So I left, the warm Plains for the cold Northeast.

When I arrived, Jarrett was sitting on a carousel not in use at baggage claim waiting for me. My bag came off the conveyor fairly quickly so we were soon on our way. Gary, his dad, was waiting curbside at his GMC SUV for us. I hopped in the backseat and we took off on the now crunchy snow. Once we were on the highway, the road was fairly clear.

Gary asked if I was hungry. I was. I had not eaten much that day. I had planned to grab a snack on my layover in Atlanta but the plane was a bit late getting in so I had to quickly disembark and run to my gate to catch the connecting flight. So, yes, I was hungry.

We stopped at Lafayette Coney Island on Lafayette, a Detroit institution in the downtown area. I had eaten there 20 years earlier but at that time, there was nothing around it, the downtown was a ghost town. 20 years ago, my tour guide ran red lights because there was no reason to stop for them. There was nothing in Downtown Detroit then, nothing but a lone Coney Island a lone Coney Island with delicious Conies.

Since that time, the downtown had been gentrified and another Coney Island, American Coney Island had opened next door to Lafayette Coney Island. Coney Islands are the most popular fast food in Detroit and there is one on about every block. They all have different names – Nicky D’s Coney Island, next to McDonalds. There is Woodward Coney Island, Detroit One Coney Island, Hollywood Coney Island, Universal Coney Island, Zeff’s Coney Island to name a few and then places like Coney Town and Coney King. Yes in Detroit, the Coney was indeed king.

Lafayette Coney Island has the atmosphere of an iconic eatery that is in its own time capsule, with the same tables and ambiance that it has had for the last forty or fifty years. Naturally, I ordered a cheese Coney and a coke. Gary said I should order two Conies. Since midnight was approaching, I erred on the side of caution and stuck with one Coney. How a Coney can be that delicious, I don’t know but it was. After all, in Detroit, the Coney is king.

After we ate our Conies, we drove to the Detroit – Gross Pointe border where Johnny, leader of Detroit rockers the Britemore, would be putting me up. He owns a duplex. He lives on the top floor, which is where I stayed. He arrived a short time after us, coming in from the U.K. where he had gone to see friends and hang for a bit.

Johnny talked about flying into Windsor Canada from the U.K. and how much cheaper it is to fly into Windsor instead of Detroit. Windsor is just across the Detroit River. Since Johnny had just flown in from the U.K. and I had just flown in from the South all of us realized how tired we were. Johnny showed me to my room and I quickly fell asleep.

The next day, I was left to my own devices until the afternoon. Johnny has a day job and Jarrett was finishing his first semester at University. Although it was only 7 degrees outside, I was itching to explore the area. A half a mile away from the duplex I found Cornwall Bakery. Thus everyday after that, I went there and had coffee and a pastry and started my day.

The Cornwall Bakery staff are exceedingly polite and even chatty. I told the lady at the counter that I applaud that they are able to deal with that kind of cold weather. I went on to tell her that I feel as if I had accomplished something just by walking to get my coffee and pastry. She laughed and told me that the cold weather is just starting in Detroit.

Each day in the afternoon, Jarrett took me to see the sights. The first day, he took me to Hamtramck, home to a diverse population and delicious Polish restaurants. We ate at one called Polonia and had the Polish Trio Dish, which included dill pickle soup along with dumplings, pancakes, and sausage.

Before lunch, we went to a hip little record store Lo and Behold. It was exactly what I would expect from a record store in Detroit. It was a mix of vintage clothes, framed photos, posters and prints, musical instruments set up in the store ready to play, a wall of 45s behind the counter, and of course along a wall was the records for sale, not to mention rock and roll debris scattered around the store giving it its authenticity.

That night we walked to a local bar Marges with Johnny, a bar that had bar food and had Detroit Red Wing paraphernalia. At times, some of the Red Wing players came to hang there and celebrate victories. On this night, however, other than a couple of folks sitting at the bar, we were the only patrons. Johnny ordered chili and a beer. Jarrett drank water.

The next few days were similar to that first day. I would go to Cornwall Bakery and then usually Jarrett would pick me up at the bakery and we would go see the sights of Detroit, be it Third Man Records, Motown Musuem or the Heidelberg Project where the abandoned houses had become large-scale works of art. Sadly, abandoned houses are burned down in Detroit. There is a love for arson. Quite a few of the Heidelberg houses had met a fiery fate. Their remains buried in the new December snow.

As we walked around the Motown Museum, Jarrett pointed at a pic of two kids. I looked at the description. One of the kids was Barry Gordy. The other kid was Billy Davis who I had not yet met but would meet in a few days. They looked young as if they were 12 or 13. I made a note to myself to ask Billy about the man behind Motown.

Wednesday evening, Jarrett’s parents invited us to go out to eat. Sho-Gun was the place they chose and I felt as if this indeed was a celebration of what was to come for Jett Plastic and Tyson. Before dinner, we went to their house. Gary knows how big of a music fan I am so he dug out picss taken by Leni Sinclair – ex-wife of John. He sells signed prints of hers. She and he are good friends.

I was completely transfixed by the pics of rock royalty she had snapped like John Lennon, Janis Joplin and Alice Cooper and punk godfathers the Stooges and the riotous MC5 but there were also iconic pics of the Black Panthers, John Coltrane and Fela Kuti, who I would learn later is one of her heroes. Looking at the photos, many that I had seen often because of how iconic they are, I knew that I had to buy at least one or two. Deciding what to have for my own would be difficult.

As the days went by, I was more and more excited to meet Billy. Seeing a pic of Billy and his band the Midnighters with the fab four, the fab ‘64 four at Jarrett’s house reminded me I would soon be meeting an integral piece of rock and roll history. Not only had the Beatles been fans, but Elvis had been a fan too. Billy mentored a teenage Jimi Hendrix. He had played guitar on Jackie Wilson’s Higher and Higher. Friday was quickly approaching, the night I would be playing with Billy at an old church that had been converted. I so hoped that I would get to talk to him about all of these things swirling around in my head. His legend was looming larger and larger for me.

Thursday night, I practiced with Jarrett and the band that he put together for me for the show Saturday. There was a change in plans with the Britemores because they were added to a show in Brooklyn on the same night as my show at the UFO Factory. Jarrett found some of his friends to be my band placing himself on bass.

Although I only had one practice with these kids, I knew the guys Jarrett put together would rise to the occasion. They are in their late teens and early 20s and had all been playing since they were pre-teens. They met at the School of Rock. I knew the songs would not sound as if we had practiced them and played them for years but I knew they would sound fresh with energy oozing from them. I was immediately awestruck by the drummer Krystian. He stayed instinctive and rock steady through the entire practice.

During practice, I could tell that everyone had spent a lot of time listening and learning the songs but, at the same time, songs could fall apart at any moment because this was all spontaneous and slightly tentative. After going through the songs a couple of times each. We were ready for Saturday’s show.

Although we would have loved to practice longer, I had the acoustic show with Billy Davis the next evening and I couldn’t afford to lose my voice. After practice, Michael, the ace rhythm guitarist, told everyone we needed to live and breathe these songs until the show. This was most endearing. I was excited that these youngsters had taken ownership of my songs, my songs that had been a written and recorded before any of them were born.

Don’t miss Part 2 in which I will talk about Billy Davis and his wealth of stories. He is a legend.

-Tyson Meade

The post Detroit (Part 1) appeared first on Tyson Meade.

My father passed away in July. He was married to my stepmother for nearly 34 years. At best, my dad was funny and entertaining with bawdy stories of his days working in the shipyards in California and hopping trains to get there – as people did back in those days. At worst, he was domineering and mentally abusive to my stepmother and my own mother before that. His abuse always seemed to roll off my stepmother’s back. She loved him no matter what. For the past several years, his health had been in decline. My stepmother was incredibly devoted during this decline.

My stepmother never asked for help. My brother that lives in fairly close proximity took care of my father for a few days once when my stepmother went to Kansas City to see her sister. Other than that , my stepmother did it all. She never asked for help even in the end when he was as feeble and needy as a baby.

Here, I should add that my dad, before he had become feeble and house bound, had become a hoarder. In the late eighties after he retired, he and my stepmother bought a house in an affluent part of Claremore, Oklahoma, a neighborhood where doctors and such live. My dad introduced himself to the neighborhood by collecting vintage riding lawn mowers – 40 of them – and constructing a tin carport addition on to the garage and additionally constructing a tin building to store their RV. They became winter Texans around this time as well and famously unpopular with their neighbors in Claremore, which has nothing to do with wintering in South Texas.

The neighbor to the West of my father’s house immediately put up a ten-foot fence as he saw the lawn mower collection become a collection of truck bed liners, rusted bicycles, wheelchairs (17 of them) and tires – loads and loads of tires. All the other neighbors seemed to grin and bear it except for the doctor across the street that took umbrage when Dad put an old rusty 10 speed out in the front yard as decoration. The doctor decided to talk to my dad about this. He walked up and started a polite conversation with my dad in the front yard. My dad politely told him if he didn’t get off his property he would have to remove a boot from his ass. My dad wears size 9. Not a big size but not something most people want in the ass. The doctor got off his property and never spoke to my dad again.

Sometimes my dad made me proud. Moments like these do not. The last time I saw him was in the early summer. When I drove up he was sitting on the front porch alone doing nothing but sitting, though he looked content, like a content old man just watching the birds. He smiled his really big toothless smile when I walked up. Ten years ago, he had all of his teeth pulled in Mexico. No one in the family is sure why.

“Hi Spottie” he said which made me happy because my brother Gentry told me my dad forgot that he had more than four kids and sometimes forgot that I exist. I’m the baby. I should add here that I have four siblings and he had a different relationship with all of us. I know I just said that he sometimes forgot that I exist but somehow I had always been his favorite.

We had a few rocky times here and there when I was growing up. Nevertheless, my mother had breast cancer when I was 16. My other siblings for the most part were out of the house by that time. It was Dad and me. I cooked our meals or sometimes I’m sure we would go out to eat. During this time, we became close or in my mind we became close. Maybe I’m delusional.

On this day last summer that he and I were sitting on the front porch, my stepmother had gone shopping with her daughter so it was just him and me sitting talking. He smiled the whole time. The old man sitting there was somehow my dad, but the dad that I remember, the Darrin McGavin Christmas Story dad, had long gone. The young pre-school kid who laid on his dad’s stomach while his dad played squeezebox had grown up and now was older than that dad that sang about the old oak tree and how all of the kids that played around it grew up and died. Dad was now soon to become a character in his own old oak tree song. A toothless old man had taken that young happy healthy dad’s place, a happy toothless old man, but a toothless old man nonetheless.

On the porch, there we sat talking, not really about anything. I talked about my new life as a painter. He loved hearing that I have paintings hanging in Paris and New York and LA among other places. I told him I would soon be painting a painting in the Hamptons.

“What kind of car is that?” during a conversational lull, he asked looking at my car parked in the driveway.

“It’s a BMW Dad.” I replied

“Well they don’t give those away,” he answered with a laugh of pride. During the course of our conversation, we would both repeat these lines verbatim three times. I never got upset. Each time, I acted as though it was the first time he had asked me and each time he replied:

“Well, they don’t give those away.”

That day, the last day I saw my dad, I told myself if that was the last time I saw him that would be a good last time. We sat for an hour or so on the porch just talking, him repeating things and me not minding but just loving that we had time together this one last time because I think I knew in my heart it would be the last time as our hearts tend to know this sort of thing.

Four and a half years earlier, I had left Saudi Arabia under the cover of night. I was back in Oklahoma for a few weeks. Word was out that Dad was dying. He was telling the whole family this was his swansong. He was ready to go. I was at my brother Bill’s in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma when I heard the news. I decided to go see him the next day. My niece Jackie told me she would drive me. Knowing his temperament, I asked her if she was sure she wanted to go.

“If he’s dying,” she said, “I definitely think I should see him.”

So the next day, we headed out to see him with my sister-in-law (Jackie’s mom) Bette. My sister Connie drove from Bartlesville to meet us. Both cars arrived at about the same time. Jan, my stepmother answered the door, and led us to where my dad was sleeping in a recliner in their den, which is always very dark with one small lamp lit. It had been some months since I had seen him last and he had aged drastically in that time.

“Dad, it’s me.” I said tentatively as I approached the recliner of death.

“Oh Spottie,” he moaned. “I am so tired of living. This is my time to go. I am so tired.”

“Well Dad,” I said, “it’s a warm sunny day. Wouldn’t you like to see the sun one more time?” For January, the day was unusually warm.

“That’s sound great!” he said as he suddenly perked up to a full recovery. “Let me get my shoes on. Jan, get me my shoes!”

Jan, my stepmother, who I am sure was slightly fed up with his thirty years of drama, threw his shoes at him and left the room.

Needless to say though he was getting feebler and feebler, there was a boy crying wolf element to this. Our relationship was complicated. I loved and love him but at times he was not easy to love. He had had years when he had stopped talking to a few of my siblings for no good reason. When we sat outside, he told Jackie she could take some old banjoes he had. She plays banjo. So as she was hauling them out to the car, he said, “Look at her that little old sweetheart.”

But then, I look back when my mom left him when I was a senior in high school. After 25 years, she had got fed up and left three days after Christmas. He was devastated. He really loved her but was an ass most of the time though they did have some good times.

I was the only one still living at home so we became really close. I wanted to go to London. He helped me pay for a trip to go to London. He gave me his fairly new pickup truck. He surprised me with a Mickey Mouse phone, which I still have. Once when I was playing a David Bowie record, he asked me if that was me singing. Really, he was a good dad to me but maybe I knew how to handle him better than my siblings. I don’t know. But then being the baby does have its rewards.

So after his funeral, my brother Gentry told my stepmother Jan that he would pay for a dumpster and he and I would come and clean up the yard. While my dad was still alive, Gentry and his best friend from high school Tom cleared out the garage enough for Jan to park the truck inside it.

Now Gentry had gotten a dumpster and we were set to clean out everything. We called AmVets about the 17 wheelchairs. They would come get them. Somehow my dad, though he never played golf a day in his life, had several sets of golf clubs. We pitched those. He had several old rusty cheap bicycles with flat tires. We pitched those too. All of the tires – for tractors, cars, trucks, whatever -we pitched. The rotting wood, the rusty tools, everything, pitched into the dumpster. We had called a junker but he never showed up so everything got pitched.

Jan told us that when my dad was still physically able he would go to an auction and buy a load of stuff and bring it home and unload it in the yard, garage, carport or the RV shed – the RV Dad had sold long ago. After he unloaded the truck, he would then come into the house as if he had not just added another truckload of crap to their yard, garage, carport and/or RV shed.

Really, I’m not sure why I’m writing about this other than maybe I need too. I don’t know. In the end, Gentry and I spent two days loading the dumpster. We were able to clean the garage floor. The shelves still need attention. We were also able to somewhat clean up around the yard so maybe the neighbors would sigh a big sigh of relief. We promised Jan we would come back in the spring and help with the house.

While I was removing rotten tree stumps – that had been impromptu stools – from the front yard, the post-woman pulled up to deliver the mail.

“Are they selling the house?” she called to me obviously seeing the dumpster as a sign the place is for sale.

“No,” I replied. “My stepmother is staying. We are just trying to de-Clampett the place.”

She laughed as the Beverly Hillbilly theme played in my head. And, I thought of that last time I had sat and talked with my dad, the old man on a front porch in Claremore, Oklahoma, the old man who had five kids and was a different man to each of those kids. Somehow, I had always got the tender funny part of my dad. Sometimes still, I hear his old crackly deep voice in my head:

“Well, they don’t give those away.”

-Tyson Meade

The post Well, They Don’t Give Those Away appeared first on Tyson Meade.