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By Ross "The Entertainer" Johnson
 I’m
the aural equivalent of a carnival geek. I make
unlistenable 'rant' records where I bellow incoherently
over an instrumental backing track. I’m
usually severely intoxicated when I do this
and the recorded results are uniformly cringe
inducing to me. I simply never want to hear
any of my records cuz they’re embarrassing
as hell to listen to … but very meaningful
for me to do, personally speaking. The process,
not the product, is what I’m addicted
to. This activity continues to be without a
doubt the single most important thing in my
life even though at this point in my noncareer
in the biz I may do a live gig maybe once every
three months and annually play a handful of
recording sessions, most of which never see
any kind of commercial release. Much more than
a small-time career in academia and being a
desultory parent, playing music has been my
'life’s work,' emotionally speaking. I’ve
failed miserably at it, usually in public where
an unsuspecting crowd of music fans or bar slugs
are treated to a dose of my brand of shit-rock.
It’s a desperate, ridiculous compulsion
that has cursed me for decades now. I’ll
do anything (and I have) for the chance at one
more gig or recording session. I’ll play
with anybody anywhere anytime just for the chance
to perform in front of a crowd, any crowd.
Frankly, there have been too many all-time
lows and musical Waterloos for me to recall,
much less to write about here. Okay, I’ll
relate one just to give a flavor of the incompetence
I’ve displayed publicly on a regular basis
for over a quarter of a century. In the mid
90s I had a band that played a handful of sparsely
attended gigs in Memphis. The band was called
Adolescent Music Fantasy, AMF for short, (truth
in advertising there…it started in adolescence
but unfortunately kept on growing and festering
long after that … we should have called
ourselves Middle-Aged Noise Compulsion) and
several talented musicians played with me, humoring
my 'musical vision' over the course of several
live shows and a couple of records. My vision
then consisted of playing excruciatingly long
instrumental versions of cliched tunes like
“Land of 1000 Dances” and “Louie
Louie.” Ponderously slow garage sludge
is a kind way of describing what AMF was grinding
out then.
We had a booking one evening at a local bar
and I had decided to add an old friend to the
mix that night as something of a vocalist/provocateur.
I picked up my pal for the gig and he got into
my car literally wearing a lampshade; it didn’t
take me long to discover that he was more 'lit'
(sorry, why resist something like that?) than
I was. We proceeded to the club where said buddy
took to the stage with the lampshade perched
atop his head while also playing with what I
think were little plastic army men. From time
to time he would bellow some disconnected words
into the microphone that sounded vaguely foreign
in an Esperanto-ish kind of way. The boredom,
horror and, finally, fear (as Mr. Lampshade
menaced a few young pups at the bar with his
toys and headgear) I saw on the faces of the
audience is something that will and should stay
with me for the rest of my life.
What was even more disturbing was seeing the
daughter of a woman I had once dated sitting
with a youngish musician I had played with a
few years before. She looked very much like
her mother had 15 or 20 years earlier when I
had known her, not quite a mirror image but
close enough to creep me out. There I was still
playing to ever younger and less tolerant audiences
that now included the sons and daughters of
former bar buddies who had moved on to some
version of adult life while I stayed behind
to romp in the playpen of Memphis nightclubs.
The audience kept getting younger while I got
nothing but older. But Rockin’ Rossie
had to keep treading the boards even though
I was playing more and more to and with people
less than half my age. Blank looks of incomprehension
and boos have never deterred me from mounting
a stage and punishing an audience to my fullest
capacity. There were lots of lessons to be learned
that night, but I didn’t pay attention
to any of them.
And, oh yeah, did I mention that I’m
an old gray haired geezer prancing around the
stages of local toilet clubs and overloading
vocal mikes in Memphis studios? I’m 51
freakin’ years old and I look it too,
every flabby, dissipated inch of me. My stage
gear usually consists of jeans I can barely
snap over my ample beer gut and a roomy button-down
shirt that I untuck to cover the aforementioned
gut that protrudes like an enlarged turtle shell
where my stomach used to be (don’t even
ask about man boobs; yep, I got a pair). And
I always bring a towel to wipe away the sweat
between tunes cuz a weak-ass, wheezing old guy
like me has trouble staying cool or keeping
up with any tempos faster than medium or slow.
I’m quite a sight to behold onstage, lemme
tell ya, visually somewhere between a flop-sweating
John Larroquette and a drunken manatee.
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