Post by Fuggle on Dec 14, 2005 21:13:17 GMT -5
The greatest career move any musician can make is to stop breathing
JACKIE MCGLONE
THE voyage into darkness begins when Chuck Klosterman hails a cab in midtown Manhattan, amid the stupefying heat of a New York summer afternoon. He is heading for the notoriously eccentric Chelsea hotel, to search out some death. The shabby-chic hotel, filled with an eclectic clutter of period furniture and paintings signed by famous artists, often in lieu of their rent, has been home to generations of bohemians, who have lived, loved and even died here on West 23rd Street.
Lillie Langtry, Jack Kerouac, Tennessee Williams, Jane Fonda, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Vladimir Nabokov all stayed here. This is where Dylan Thomas drank 18 neat whiskies, his last. Arthur C Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey at the Chelsea, while Bob Dylan produced a record and a son here. And Sid Vicious - "the fabulously moronic bass player for the Sex Pistols" - allegedly stabbed his girlfriend in room 100, the room that Klosterman wants to check out, if not in to.
The gangling and geekish gonzo rock journalist is working on what he calls "an untitled death project". He plans to ask people at the Chelsea about the 1978 murder of Nancy Spungen, girlfriend of the notorious punk icon Sid Vicious. The demise of Spungen still intrigues him. "Sid and Nancy's relationship forever illustrates the worst part of being in love with anyone, which is that people in love can't be reasoned with," he says.
Describing Spungen as "a drug-addled groupie", Klosterman recounts the story of her last days. After two months in the Chelsea, where the couple planned to stay high forever, Sid ("almost certainly") stabbed Nancy, who was wearing only her underwear, and watched her bleed to death under the bathroom sink. Vicious overdosed on heroin a few months later, just before the case went to trial.
When he finally walks into the Chelsea, Klosterman can't decide if he is impressed or underwhelmed - "I can't tell if this place is nicer or crappier than I anticipated." He asks one of the two men behind the reception desk if anyone is staying in room 100, and, if not, can he see what it looks like. "There is no room 100," the guy replies. "It was converted into an apartment 18 years ago. But I know why you're asking."
For the next five minutes, the bespectacled journalist has a conversation with the pair about Vicious, "mostly focused on how he was an idiot". Lots of people disagree with them, however, and make pilgrimages to the hotel in the hope of staying in the same room. The staff are not thrilled by this tradition.
During this discussion, an unabashedly annoyed man interrupts Klosterman. He is Stanley Bard, manager of the Chelsea for more than 40 years, and he does not want the Spin magazine writer, whom he invites into his first-floor office, quizzing his staff. "Sid Vicious didn't die here," Bard says. "It was just his girlfriend, and she was of no consequence. The kind of person who wants to stay in room 100 is just a cultic follower. These are people who have nothing to do. If you want to understand what someone fascinated by Sid Vicious is looking for, go find those people. You will see that they are not serious-minded people. You will see that they are not trying to understand about death. They are looking for nothing."
At this point, Bard invites the sandy-haired scribe to leave the hotel. "And after we shake hands, that is what I do."
Thus began Klosterman's ghoulish 6,557-mile journey, chasing rock'n'roll deaths from New York to Mississippi to Seattle. The road trip is chronicled in his latest sharply observed book, Killing Yourself to Live.
Despite being spun out of an article for Spin magazine, his third memoir (the others are Fargo Rock City and Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs) has had some US critics comparing his work favourably to that of Nick Hornby and Dave Eggers, although it's actually Hunter S Thompson's shadow that stalks the 240 pages. Indeed, one reviewer thought the book a homage to the late writer. Klosterman is a 'me' journalist - of the that's-enough-about-me-what-do-you-think-about-me? school - but he writes with style. "Klosterman is acutely, humorously self-conscious... The book's road-trip intimacies and myopic, hair-splitting arguments are rendered with sharp precision," wrote New York Times critic Janet Maslin.
The first thing I ask Klosterman when we meet over a couple of drinks in downtown New York is why he didn't start his exploration of places where rock stars died - "the greatest career move any musician can make is to stop breathing" - at the Dakota building on West 72nd Street, the exclusive apartment block where John Lennon was assassinated in 1980. "Yeah, part of me is still wondering that too," he says, raising his voice to shout above the deafening jukebox in Hi-Fi, the Avenue A bar that used to be a favourite watering-hole for thrusting young rock critics - until it became too popular. Indeed, two giggling Japanese teenagers are busily photographing each other nearby. A Central Park bench across from the Dakota might have been less exposed.
Which brings us back to Lennon. "Oh, sure, his killing is undoubtedly the most famous murder in rock history, and it's something I actually know about: I know how many Beatles tapes Mark David Chapman had in his jacket when he shot Lennon in the chest (14), and I know the score of that evening's NFL football game, when Howard Cosell announced the assassination on air (Miami 16, New England 13, in overtime)."
He also knows, for example, that Chapman slowly came to believe that he actually was John Lennon, "going so far as to marry a woman of Japanese descent who was four years his senior".
He even remembers his dad dismissing the murder at supper the following evening, bemoaning the fact that a musician's death somehow warranted more publicity than the unexpected death of Pope John Paul I. "As an eight-year-old, I was confused," writes Klosterman, "mostly because I could not understand why everyone was so enamoured with a rock band's rhythm guitarist; for some reason, I was under the misguided impression that Paul McCartney was the only member of The Beatles who sang."
The older Klosterman gets, the more crazy Lennon's murder seems, "but not necessarily more tragic". He has never been moved by the death of a famous person, he sighs, although he does wonder what might have happened had Lennon not died before he got old. But I digress - and digression is catching when you read and then talk to Klosterman. He has turned the tangent into an art form. For someone who spends his life writing about the hip and the cool, the Brooklyn-based writer comes across as unhip - despite having 2,233 CDs in his collection. Dressed in a beige sweatshirt and nondescript trousers, he could be described as the archetypal anorak - he spent three hours deciding which CDs to take on his journey, finally narrowing it down to 600.
Anyway, after being requested to leave the Chelsea, Klosterman hit the road. His assignment: to write an epic story about famous dead rock'n'rollers. "This is probably because I think about death all the time," admits Klosterman, adding that dying is the most interesting thing everybody does. "That's absolutely true with celebrities... Dying is the only thing that guarantees a rock star will have a legacy that stretches beyond temporary relevance."
DEATH rides a pale horse, but Klosterman drives a silver Ford Taurus down the eastern seaboard, across the Deep South, up the corn-covered spinal cord of the Midwest, and through the burning foothills of Montana - finally coming to rest on the cusp of the Pacific Ocean, underneath a bridge Kurt Cobain never slept under, although he liked to claim he did. It's an odyssey that Klosterman carefully draws on a map for me, showing me the intersection in Macon, Georgia, where two members of the Allman Brothers band died in motorcycle accidents almost exactly a year apart. He also points out the site of the Lynyrd Skynyrd plane crash in rural Mississippi. Unfortunately, he never did find the swamp where Ronnie Van Zant was "driven into the earth", because the ground was alive with poisonous cottonmouth snakes and Klosterman didn't fancy getting bitten.
In the course of his cross-country trail of death, he has stood where 119 people have fallen, "almost all of whom were unwilling victims of rock's glistening scythe", and spent an evening snorting cocaine in a graveyard. "I am not a cocaine person; I am a marijuana person. This is a critical distinction... When you snort cocaine you allow yourself to become foolish in the hope of seeming cool, and that is the worst choice any smart person can make."
The graveyard is one of the most poignant stops on his journey into the dark heart of rock'n'roll tourism. It's in West Warwick, Rhode Island, where 100 people burned to death in the Station nightclub while watching the heavy-metal band Great White. "What used to be a tavern is now an ad-hoc cemetery - 101 crosses mark the scene. Almost every night mourners go there to get high and talk about how they keep living in the wake of all this sadness," he says. A man who lost his uncle in the fire offered Klosterman the cocaine. "I took it because somehow it seemed reasonable."
Klosterman was there in 2003, within six months of the tragedy. "The people who died weren't celebrities, just normal people who lived in the town. It was in West Warwick that I started to understand death. I went back later and listened to a lot of survivors talking about what happened. Apparently it took only 58 seconds for the whole building to become an inferno. I was told that one of the kids who died was only 21 and a great golfer. Firefighters on the scene compared it to seeing napalm dropped on villages in Vietnam, because that was the only other time they had ever seen skin dripping off bone."
WHEN Klosterman made it to Grace-land, where Elvis Presley's heart stopped beating while he sat on the toilet, and to Mud Island Harbour, on the Mississippi, where Jeff Buckley, "a well-regarded but relatively unfamous avant-garde musician", drowned on May 29, 1997, he began to think about why death alters the music canon. "Buckley's death made him a star, an almost messianic figure. As for the King, Elvis never meant shit to me," says Klosterman. "I dislike the idea of Elvis Presley, and that idea is what keeps Graceland in business. It's the religiosity of garbage culture; it validates the import of tabloid aesthetics, and it makes our society look stupid."
America, says Klosterman, is a confusing place, both for the living and the dead. "That's why Graceland exists, and that's why 20 million Elvis fans can, in fact, be wrong."
ON THE 11th day, Klosterman pointed the silver Taurus towards Clear Lake, Iowa, where in 1959 a small plane crashed into a frozen field, killing the Big Bopper, Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens. "For unadulterated freak-out potential, nothing usurps death by plane crash," Klosterman quips. A tiny metal cross marks the site. It's littered with beer cans, empty cigarette lighters and somebody's Blockbuster card. He stayed for ten minutes.
Back in the car, he listened to Radiohead's 'Lucky', a song about trying to understand if surviving a plane crash is good luck (because you lived) or misfortune (because you were on "a plane that friggin' crashed"). Waylon Jennings, for example, a member of Buddy Holly's band, was supposed to be on that flight but at the last minute decided to drive. Jennings died in 2002. This raises a profound question for Klosterman: why do we want to live? He's still trying to find the answer, he says, rattling the ice in his vodka.
It's a thought that haunted him as he reached Seattle. "Lots of dead people here. If rock musicians were 16-ton ivory-bearing pachyderms, Seattle would be America's elephant graveyard," he writes. The list of corpses includes Mia Zapata, the punk musician abducted, raped and murdered by a sociopath; Kristen Pfaff, Hole bassist and heroin addict who died in the bath; and Alice in Chains singer Layle Stanley, who may or may not have overdosed on heroin, or possibly from "huffing paint".
"You may be wondering how I know where all these people perished," says Klosterman. (A guided Seattle death tour, courtesy of rock writer Hannah Levin, he explains.) "Of course, these deaths were really just a precursor to the Xanadu of modern rock deaths: the mighty K C."
So Klosterman stepped into what used to be Kurt Cobain's backyard. "The greenhouse where Cobain swallowed a shotgun shell was torn down in 1996; now it's just a garden. When we arrived, there were four guys staring at a sunflower."
Cobain's death changed the history of the living, he believes. "Suicide gave sorority girls depth; nihilistic punk kids a soul; reformed metalheads a brain. He was the popular-yet-unpopular kid who died for the sins of your personality."
Klosterman's last day on the road took him to Aberdeen, Washington, Cobain's home town. He walked beneath the bridges the dead musician never lived under. "It doesn't matter if Kurt Cobain never slept underneath any of them; what matters is people believe he did, and this is something they want to believe. Maybe it's something they need to believe, because if they don't they will be stuck with the mildly depressing revelation that dead people are simply dead."
Returning to his car and preparing to drive back to the land of the living, Klosterman was thinking back to the conversation he had with the man who runs the Chelsea hotel. "And it occurs to me that I am not a serious person, and that I do not have any understanding of death, and that I am looking for nothing."
• Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story, by Chuck Klosterman (Faber & Faber, £10.99) is published next month
JACKIE MCGLONE
THE voyage into darkness begins when Chuck Klosterman hails a cab in midtown Manhattan, amid the stupefying heat of a New York summer afternoon. He is heading for the notoriously eccentric Chelsea hotel, to search out some death. The shabby-chic hotel, filled with an eclectic clutter of period furniture and paintings signed by famous artists, often in lieu of their rent, has been home to generations of bohemians, who have lived, loved and even died here on West 23rd Street.
Lillie Langtry, Jack Kerouac, Tennessee Williams, Jane Fonda, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Vladimir Nabokov all stayed here. This is where Dylan Thomas drank 18 neat whiskies, his last. Arthur C Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey at the Chelsea, while Bob Dylan produced a record and a son here. And Sid Vicious - "the fabulously moronic bass player for the Sex Pistols" - allegedly stabbed his girlfriend in room 100, the room that Klosterman wants to check out, if not in to.
The gangling and geekish gonzo rock journalist is working on what he calls "an untitled death project". He plans to ask people at the Chelsea about the 1978 murder of Nancy Spungen, girlfriend of the notorious punk icon Sid Vicious. The demise of Spungen still intrigues him. "Sid and Nancy's relationship forever illustrates the worst part of being in love with anyone, which is that people in love can't be reasoned with," he says.
Describing Spungen as "a drug-addled groupie", Klosterman recounts the story of her last days. After two months in the Chelsea, where the couple planned to stay high forever, Sid ("almost certainly") stabbed Nancy, who was wearing only her underwear, and watched her bleed to death under the bathroom sink. Vicious overdosed on heroin a few months later, just before the case went to trial.
When he finally walks into the Chelsea, Klosterman can't decide if he is impressed or underwhelmed - "I can't tell if this place is nicer or crappier than I anticipated." He asks one of the two men behind the reception desk if anyone is staying in room 100, and, if not, can he see what it looks like. "There is no room 100," the guy replies. "It was converted into an apartment 18 years ago. But I know why you're asking."
For the next five minutes, the bespectacled journalist has a conversation with the pair about Vicious, "mostly focused on how he was an idiot". Lots of people disagree with them, however, and make pilgrimages to the hotel in the hope of staying in the same room. The staff are not thrilled by this tradition.
During this discussion, an unabashedly annoyed man interrupts Klosterman. He is Stanley Bard, manager of the Chelsea for more than 40 years, and he does not want the Spin magazine writer, whom he invites into his first-floor office, quizzing his staff. "Sid Vicious didn't die here," Bard says. "It was just his girlfriend, and she was of no consequence. The kind of person who wants to stay in room 100 is just a cultic follower. These are people who have nothing to do. If you want to understand what someone fascinated by Sid Vicious is looking for, go find those people. You will see that they are not serious-minded people. You will see that they are not trying to understand about death. They are looking for nothing."
At this point, Bard invites the sandy-haired scribe to leave the hotel. "And after we shake hands, that is what I do."
Thus began Klosterman's ghoulish 6,557-mile journey, chasing rock'n'roll deaths from New York to Mississippi to Seattle. The road trip is chronicled in his latest sharply observed book, Killing Yourself to Live.
Despite being spun out of an article for Spin magazine, his third memoir (the others are Fargo Rock City and Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs) has had some US critics comparing his work favourably to that of Nick Hornby and Dave Eggers, although it's actually Hunter S Thompson's shadow that stalks the 240 pages. Indeed, one reviewer thought the book a homage to the late writer. Klosterman is a 'me' journalist - of the that's-enough-about-me-what-do-you-think-about-me? school - but he writes with style. "Klosterman is acutely, humorously self-conscious... The book's road-trip intimacies and myopic, hair-splitting arguments are rendered with sharp precision," wrote New York Times critic Janet Maslin.
The first thing I ask Klosterman when we meet over a couple of drinks in downtown New York is why he didn't start his exploration of places where rock stars died - "the greatest career move any musician can make is to stop breathing" - at the Dakota building on West 72nd Street, the exclusive apartment block where John Lennon was assassinated in 1980. "Yeah, part of me is still wondering that too," he says, raising his voice to shout above the deafening jukebox in Hi-Fi, the Avenue A bar that used to be a favourite watering-hole for thrusting young rock critics - until it became too popular. Indeed, two giggling Japanese teenagers are busily photographing each other nearby. A Central Park bench across from the Dakota might have been less exposed.
Which brings us back to Lennon. "Oh, sure, his killing is undoubtedly the most famous murder in rock history, and it's something I actually know about: I know how many Beatles tapes Mark David Chapman had in his jacket when he shot Lennon in the chest (14), and I know the score of that evening's NFL football game, when Howard Cosell announced the assassination on air (Miami 16, New England 13, in overtime)."
He also knows, for example, that Chapman slowly came to believe that he actually was John Lennon, "going so far as to marry a woman of Japanese descent who was four years his senior".
He even remembers his dad dismissing the murder at supper the following evening, bemoaning the fact that a musician's death somehow warranted more publicity than the unexpected death of Pope John Paul I. "As an eight-year-old, I was confused," writes Klosterman, "mostly because I could not understand why everyone was so enamoured with a rock band's rhythm guitarist; for some reason, I was under the misguided impression that Paul McCartney was the only member of The Beatles who sang."
The older Klosterman gets, the more crazy Lennon's murder seems, "but not necessarily more tragic". He has never been moved by the death of a famous person, he sighs, although he does wonder what might have happened had Lennon not died before he got old. But I digress - and digression is catching when you read and then talk to Klosterman. He has turned the tangent into an art form. For someone who spends his life writing about the hip and the cool, the Brooklyn-based writer comes across as unhip - despite having 2,233 CDs in his collection. Dressed in a beige sweatshirt and nondescript trousers, he could be described as the archetypal anorak - he spent three hours deciding which CDs to take on his journey, finally narrowing it down to 600.
Anyway, after being requested to leave the Chelsea, Klosterman hit the road. His assignment: to write an epic story about famous dead rock'n'rollers. "This is probably because I think about death all the time," admits Klosterman, adding that dying is the most interesting thing everybody does. "That's absolutely true with celebrities... Dying is the only thing that guarantees a rock star will have a legacy that stretches beyond temporary relevance."
DEATH rides a pale horse, but Klosterman drives a silver Ford Taurus down the eastern seaboard, across the Deep South, up the corn-covered spinal cord of the Midwest, and through the burning foothills of Montana - finally coming to rest on the cusp of the Pacific Ocean, underneath a bridge Kurt Cobain never slept under, although he liked to claim he did. It's an odyssey that Klosterman carefully draws on a map for me, showing me the intersection in Macon, Georgia, where two members of the Allman Brothers band died in motorcycle accidents almost exactly a year apart. He also points out the site of the Lynyrd Skynyrd plane crash in rural Mississippi. Unfortunately, he never did find the swamp where Ronnie Van Zant was "driven into the earth", because the ground was alive with poisonous cottonmouth snakes and Klosterman didn't fancy getting bitten.
In the course of his cross-country trail of death, he has stood where 119 people have fallen, "almost all of whom were unwilling victims of rock's glistening scythe", and spent an evening snorting cocaine in a graveyard. "I am not a cocaine person; I am a marijuana person. This is a critical distinction... When you snort cocaine you allow yourself to become foolish in the hope of seeming cool, and that is the worst choice any smart person can make."
The graveyard is one of the most poignant stops on his journey into the dark heart of rock'n'roll tourism. It's in West Warwick, Rhode Island, where 100 people burned to death in the Station nightclub while watching the heavy-metal band Great White. "What used to be a tavern is now an ad-hoc cemetery - 101 crosses mark the scene. Almost every night mourners go there to get high and talk about how they keep living in the wake of all this sadness," he says. A man who lost his uncle in the fire offered Klosterman the cocaine. "I took it because somehow it seemed reasonable."
Klosterman was there in 2003, within six months of the tragedy. "The people who died weren't celebrities, just normal people who lived in the town. It was in West Warwick that I started to understand death. I went back later and listened to a lot of survivors talking about what happened. Apparently it took only 58 seconds for the whole building to become an inferno. I was told that one of the kids who died was only 21 and a great golfer. Firefighters on the scene compared it to seeing napalm dropped on villages in Vietnam, because that was the only other time they had ever seen skin dripping off bone."
WHEN Klosterman made it to Grace-land, where Elvis Presley's heart stopped beating while he sat on the toilet, and to Mud Island Harbour, on the Mississippi, where Jeff Buckley, "a well-regarded but relatively unfamous avant-garde musician", drowned on May 29, 1997, he began to think about why death alters the music canon. "Buckley's death made him a star, an almost messianic figure. As for the King, Elvis never meant shit to me," says Klosterman. "I dislike the idea of Elvis Presley, and that idea is what keeps Graceland in business. It's the religiosity of garbage culture; it validates the import of tabloid aesthetics, and it makes our society look stupid."
America, says Klosterman, is a confusing place, both for the living and the dead. "That's why Graceland exists, and that's why 20 million Elvis fans can, in fact, be wrong."
ON THE 11th day, Klosterman pointed the silver Taurus towards Clear Lake, Iowa, where in 1959 a small plane crashed into a frozen field, killing the Big Bopper, Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens. "For unadulterated freak-out potential, nothing usurps death by plane crash," Klosterman quips. A tiny metal cross marks the site. It's littered with beer cans, empty cigarette lighters and somebody's Blockbuster card. He stayed for ten minutes.
Back in the car, he listened to Radiohead's 'Lucky', a song about trying to understand if surviving a plane crash is good luck (because you lived) or misfortune (because you were on "a plane that friggin' crashed"). Waylon Jennings, for example, a member of Buddy Holly's band, was supposed to be on that flight but at the last minute decided to drive. Jennings died in 2002. This raises a profound question for Klosterman: why do we want to live? He's still trying to find the answer, he says, rattling the ice in his vodka.
It's a thought that haunted him as he reached Seattle. "Lots of dead people here. If rock musicians were 16-ton ivory-bearing pachyderms, Seattle would be America's elephant graveyard," he writes. The list of corpses includes Mia Zapata, the punk musician abducted, raped and murdered by a sociopath; Kristen Pfaff, Hole bassist and heroin addict who died in the bath; and Alice in Chains singer Layle Stanley, who may or may not have overdosed on heroin, or possibly from "huffing paint".
"You may be wondering how I know where all these people perished," says Klosterman. (A guided Seattle death tour, courtesy of rock writer Hannah Levin, he explains.) "Of course, these deaths were really just a precursor to the Xanadu of modern rock deaths: the mighty K C."
So Klosterman stepped into what used to be Kurt Cobain's backyard. "The greenhouse where Cobain swallowed a shotgun shell was torn down in 1996; now it's just a garden. When we arrived, there were four guys staring at a sunflower."
Cobain's death changed the history of the living, he believes. "Suicide gave sorority girls depth; nihilistic punk kids a soul; reformed metalheads a brain. He was the popular-yet-unpopular kid who died for the sins of your personality."
Klosterman's last day on the road took him to Aberdeen, Washington, Cobain's home town. He walked beneath the bridges the dead musician never lived under. "It doesn't matter if Kurt Cobain never slept underneath any of them; what matters is people believe he did, and this is something they want to believe. Maybe it's something they need to believe, because if they don't they will be stuck with the mildly depressing revelation that dead people are simply dead."
Returning to his car and preparing to drive back to the land of the living, Klosterman was thinking back to the conversation he had with the man who runs the Chelsea hotel. "And it occurs to me that I am not a serious person, and that I do not have any understanding of death, and that I am looking for nothing."
• Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story, by Chuck Klosterman (Faber & Faber, £10.99) is published next month