I hesitated to read Kink, Dave Davies' autobiography and de facto biography of the Kinks, because the blurbs I read on the back describe it as a "lurid" tell-all.  On the one hand, I wanted a factual, sequential, straight biography of his life with the Kinks, which I thought would serve my desires better than brother Ray Davies' arty memoir, which apparently features literary devices such as a section where the older Ray has a dialogue with the younger Ray, that sort of thing.  But the last thing I wanted to read was one retelling after another of rock star excess and debauchery.  Kink does include some stories of encounters with women (and men!) and the kind of drug excess that seriously affects Dave's mental health by the early seventies, but not as much as the blurbs on the back of the book would suggest.  The book also features wonderful passages of Dave's contributions to the band as a songwriter that include such great songs such as "Party Line," "You're Looking Fine," and "Death of a Clown."  He explains the inspiration behind these songs and others such as "Susannah's Still Alive."

A big inspiration for a lot of Dave's '60's songs centers around his painful forced separation with his teenage girlfriend after he impregnates her at the age of fifteen.  Both sets of parents conspire to separate them after Dave announced his intention to marry Sue.  The parents tell each of them that the other no longer wants to see them anymore, and they successfully keep this ruse going for a number of years.  So much so that Dave doesn't develop a meaningful relationship with his daughter until she reaches her mid-20's.  This backstory informs the rock-and-roll tales of debauched excess that follows the genuine pain Dave feels as a result of his and Sue's separation.

The Kinks had a long career, with many ups and downs, before Ray and Dave emerged as revered elder statesman in the 1990's.  Two whole generations of American fans felt as if each one of them personally discovered the Kinks impressive late-'60's output that included classic albums Face to Face, Something Else, The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, Arthur, and the early-'70's great, Muswell Hillbillies.  See, by 1967, the musician's union banned the Kinks from touring the United States due to a dispute.  That meant these great albums went largely ignored, because the Kinks couldn't tour the States to promote them, thus no radio airplay, thus no sales, and by extension, no inclusion in "Classic Rock" radio formats of the 1980's and '90's.  One typically heard early hits, "You Really Got Me," and "All Day And All of the Night," maybe "Well Respected Man," and when they could tour the states again, this development allowed for an airing of songs such as "Lola," "Sleepwalker," and "Celluloid Heroes," from the '70's albums on FM radio of the day.

Dave chronicles this pretty well in Kink,  with plenty of ink reserved for the tales of squabbling and personality clashes and outright feuding between him and Ray.  By the time Dave relates a VERY subjective telling of what sounds like a drug flashback that went for days in the '80's that details the existence of benevolent aliens that secretly and continually orbit the Earth looking over the stumbling, bumbling human race, well, I slogged through that part, because it's Dave Davies, and he's related plenty of stuff that one can pretty well rely on as an accurate telling of his and the band's history.  I think the Austin Public Library still has a copy of Kink, and one can probably find a used copy online of this out of print book.

When Van Halen's first album came out in 1978, my fourteen year old self instinctively hated them.  Seeing David Lee Roth preen around in his spandex and long blond hair later on only made me loath the band more, especially David Lee Roth.   I thought he epitomized the type of "strutting banty rooster rockstar" that I saw Robert Crumb grouse bitterly about in a Crumb comic in later years.  I imagined Roth as the guy who got all the girls I never could, and that has pretty much come to pass.

When I fronted Insect Sex Act in 2011, Max, the drummer, called Brett, the guitar player, and me over to his house for a band pow wow.  Max showed video of our last performance, and said he had a problem with how stiff I appeared as I did the vocals during our set.  I remember Brett specifically talking about what he DIDN'T want a front man to do when he asked me to audition for him in 2000.  He specifically said he didn't want a "dancer."  But here Max played the video and implored me to do SOMETHING during the performance that would reflect the energy the of the band as they played their instruments.  My solution became to dance around and goof like a trained monkey in our last several performances as a band before we dissolved the unit in late June 2012.  Everyone loved it.  The audience reacted positively to what I did on stage, and the other three guys in Insect Sex Act liked it too.

I bought two Van Halen CD's last Summer, something I was always way TOO COOL to buy until the age of... fifty-seven, I guess.  History has been very kind to the legacy of the Roth years.  Eddie Van Halen always had the massive recognition of changing the game in heavy metal/ hard rock guitar.  A lot of heavy metal guitarists took to practicing ten hours a day, like a classical or jazz guitarist, all because of Eddie.  Robert Christgau, critic for the Village Voice at the time of David Lee Roth's initial departure from the band, lambasted Roth's replacement as "one of the biggest assholes in rock and roll."  I saw an episode of Homicide: Life on the Street that featured a really cool usage of Van Halen's "Ice Cream Man," a cut from their first album, during a montage sequence that depicted a shipment of bad heroin hitting the streets in Baltimore.  The song sounded great in this context, and one really appreciates Roth's over the top vocalization of the lyrics.

Despite Roth's image as a decadent rock star, he still hasn't been "me too"ed, as far as I know.  He never did seem to have any personal problems or substance abuse issues that made the gossip pages, from what I remember.  I mean, I heard a story of an A and R guy from a major label scouting the band as they came up through the clubs, and he said that the band would be great, if only they got rid of the singer.  As an example of how the thinking on Roth changed over the years, I heard a clip on Howard Stern in the '90's that featured a Van Halen tribute band playing a club, and the singer went to great lengths to ape Roth's drawl and overall charisma as he bantered his way through the intro to "Hot For Teacher."  I could actually HEAR the guy swagger his way around the stage as he did his Roth imitation.   David Lee Roth had something, alright.

 

I've decided that blogging about my personal life, particularly blogging about my relationship with women, adds way too much drama and intrigue to my existence.  Especially intrigue.  I will instead try to write about music I listen to, books and comic books I've read or am reading, and also maybe some visual art as well.  If my audience that I believe may exist loses interest in these posts, so be it.  I count zero evidence of sales of comics or music from this supposedly appreciative audience.  "A lot of people out there seek fame.  I think as an artist it might be a good idea to instead seek....anonymity.  All one has to do is look at how the famous live their lives."  Brett DePalma, December 5th, 1990, during a drawing class I audited from him while I attended the School of Visual Arts as a graduate MFA candidate.  Brett just said this in a kind of off-the-cuff manner, but it has stuck with me over the years. 

I have an interest in joining a support group to help deal with my love addiction.  The one I looked into has a concept of "no contact." It's the interpersonal equivalent of total abstinence from things such as drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes.  What no contact would mean for me personally would involve totally patronizing another business instead of a business I currently patronize.  All in the interest greatly reducing the chances that I will see someone whom I determined I have a fixation on.  It seemed like an extreme move on my part to actually take that kind of step, but my love addiction is extreme.  In 1992 I had to check into the psychiatric hospital twice due to my tendency to fixate on Jenna.  

I don't think I've wronged this person at this one business I will try to abstain from patronizing, but I think my move would probably serve both of our best interests, and I would, at the very least, let myself know that I'm committed to dealing with my issues in a tangible, material way.  I will try to take it one day at a time.  My ultimate goal in this endeavor involves a period of time spanning years.  Who knows if I can even last a week, but I've got a lot of success under my belt with cigarettes, drugs,  and alcohol.  With cigarettes I had to make quite a lot of tries at my ultimate goal, which now stands at nineteen years and counting since I've had a cigarette.

I mentioned in my last post that I try to take responsibility for my behavior in the midst of these crazy fixations I find myself in, and how I try to just bail when it seems time to bail.  Well, I made just such a decision a few weeks ago in regards to that young woman at that business I can go on and on about.  The question that inevitably arises when I'M the one making such a decision, as opposed to such a decision being made for me, centers around the notion that I bail way too early, and that I should just chill and see what happens.  I say this to that: One of the problems with one taking responsibility for one's action stems from the fact that one can make mistakes in what one does.  That comes with the territory.  I have the right to be wrong about this situation, especially if I think my heart is in the right place, and if I really think I'm acting in both our best interests by bailing at this time.

My last post seemed to resonate with some of her female coworkers, maybe.  I don't typically go into her place of employment when I know her to work there these days, but I see that I may have hit a nerve with some of what I said last week.  I wondered why.  I guessed this past evening that girls and women such as her throw out flirtatious looks and gestures to men in their world all the  time, but that the obsessive type of guy invariably becomes the one guy who takes that kind of stuff too seriously.  So, it they really have to be so responsible in regards to how they interact with an obsessive type, why do other types of men seem to have little or no problem with identical flirty behavior on their part?  Yeah, okay.

I think I did pretty good in my accounting of how I was towards her, both here on this blog and in the real world.  I said some heated things about a year and a half ago when I called her a bully and a coward.  I just felt that I was being subjected to some kind of entrapment oriented witch hunt at the hands of her and others.  So, yeah, that's a big reason why I'm so eager to bail at last from this deal.  She just didn't seem into the idea of interacting with me, even on a superficial level, the last time I had to chance to even say hi to her, so I just cut all of that shit loose at that instant.  I don't like the idea that women such as her, and other women observing the situations I find myself in with women such as her, see me as a guy who goes around bothering women. E-uh!

One of the main things I find most aggravating about these crazy fixations I get into with individual women has to do with the feeling that nothing ever changes in our deal.  I thought back on past bad fixation deals, and thought, "Did I do things that contributed to the feeling I had that nothing ever changed?"  Uh, yeah.  I remember calling Veronica Ortega almost every night trying to get a date with her after she kind of shut all of that down on me.  I've written about her before.  I've leveled the accusation on this blog that Veronica Ortega just wanted to collect me as an ardent admirer to help her get over a painful breakup with a live-in boyfriend in 1985.  On our first date at Kerbey Lane Cafe, I decided that I was in love with her based on some animated conversation with her at that moment.

Yeah, she may have just wanted to kind of use me for free male attention from an inexperienced guy she wouldn't have to take seriously, but the part where the wheels came off and I started the incessant phone calls, asking her out again over and over and over again counts as my contribution to the overall disfunction of that deal.  My lack of self-control made that whole situation about ninety percent my fault.  I mean, all she did was goose me some with a little flirtatious attention, go out on some dates with me, and then decide she'd had enough, but the part where I just went full tilt on her with the phone calls and the frustration that resulted from that was all on me.

Writing stuff on this blog to come off as some great guy, and then seeing if some woman in my world changes in the way she interacts with me KIND OF reminds me of those days, but only kind of.  There's not quite the white-hot intensity of flinging myself against the barricades that I felt in the midst of the deal I struck with Veronica Ortega.  Anyway, I've thought a lot about those days and how I do probably contribute to the overwhelming feeling that nothing ever changes between me and an individual woman to
a much, much greater extent than I sometimes care to admit.

I wonder what would have happened if I'd just backed off of Veronica in a timely manner?  I had sex with Chelsea almost FOUR YEARS LATER to the day after I met her.  I asked her in 2011 if I gave her the impression that I called her way too much, and she didn't even associate me with that type, and I'd known her since 2003.  Hooray.