THE AMAZING POWER OF GENE

I was eating breakfast in public, a thing I do from time to time. Whenever I do this, I see others doing it too. To my left, to my right, and presumably behind me as well, Americans are eating breakfast with a bunch of other people around. I can’t help but think that there must be something “going on,” or something “behind” this. Whenever I’m in the mood for a little anthropological and socio-cultural analysis, I pick up a book about some rock album, because books of this nature are guaranteed to be packed with it. Unfortunately, in this particular area, they’ve let me down. I’ve read books about everybody from Toto to Sonic Youth, and rock writers are eerily silent on the subject. It can’t be because they’re embarrassed to discuss something they don’t know anything about— we have to get that out of the way immediately— so perhaps they just sense, with their quivering rock critic ganglia, that it’s not the right time to get into it. 

  But, in the absence of a rock writer’s “take” on this phenomenon, I find myself at a loss. Sure, I’ll speculate about it, but this leads nowhere. When my speculation peters out, it’s dangerous for me to overhear a conversation, because I’m more or less begging to be distracted. If a stranger is talking into a phone, I’m always drawn to it, as a moth to a flame. This is due to my constant amazement that the cell phone has made possible one of the most impressive breakthroughs of modern times— the newfound ability for a pair of blowhards to simultaneously annoy people in two different geographical locations. This was the main reason satellites were invented, in fact, and it was worth every penny. 

  In Olden Times, a group of blowhards of any size— be it two-top, trio, fourpiece, quintet, half dozen, giant muttering mob, what have you— was at the mercy of science’s grave limitations. Sometimes technology enabled blowhards to extend their zone of annoyance (I’m thinking of the bullhorn here), but it would still have been a stretch to describe even, say, the giant mud farm at Woodstock, as more than one location. People died there, and babies were born, and Sha-Na-Na played their history-making set with the forty-plus-minute version of “At The Hop,”
but it was all basically within the same zip code. 

  So, when a blowhard in my peripheral vision took a phone call this morning, I first played the “What does the blowhard look like?” game. “Baby Huey” is generally a safe answer, but you never know. Anthony Scaramucci, the blowhard who burned across the American sky like a comet a few news cycles ago, was built more along the lines of a brilliantined Lothario. Oldsters reading this may recall that The Mooch’s eyes always glowed with the intensity of a dying star, and that most analysts of the era assumed those eyes were the source of his boundless energy. 

  In the case of my blowhard this morning, “Baby Huey” was the horse that paid off. He was dining with a companion (blowhards never eat alone, unless it’s some sort of post-apocalypse scenario), and telling this lucky fellow about how he’d bested a bunch of people who thought they had his number (turns out, they didn’t), or got the better of some chump in a big deal that went down, or something, when his phone rang. 

  It was evidently someone he knew, because he listened to them, briefly, and then said, “If anyone gives you any shit about it, just tell ‘em you talked to Gene, and Gene said it was ok.” 

  And, just like that, it was over. Gene never looked back— he moved on to the play-by-play of another personal triumph— but this got me thinking. 

  It must be pretty great to be Gene. Others quiver and cower, afraid that every knock at the door could be the knock of a person who’s come to give them shit, but Gene barrels ahead, barely breaking a sweat. Not only does he possess the authority to straighten out any and all naysayers by telling them something is ok, thus rendering all objections null and void, but he’s organized his life so that he rarely, if ever, has to even confront the objector face to face. He has people who can pass along the information that Gene said it was ok, and that’s all there is to it. A dead stymie! 

  I like to picture these objectors, walking away grumbling, looking down at the ground with their hands in their pockets. They came here expecting to have their objections taken seriously, and they didn’t expect to be clotheslined by the news that Gene was ok with it. They’d made the fatal mistake of assuming they knew that Gene would NOT be ok with it, not at all, and their confidence hinged on that assumption. 

 Speaking of people having the wind taken out of their sails, I read, in a book about rock, that the Beach Boys were once asked to come to a meeting with the record executive who had signed them to a contract years after their hits had dried up. “Kokomo,” arguably the best song ever to be named “Kokomo,” was years in the future, and as soon as this new contract had been signed, the Boys had been gettin’ busy releasing an unbroken string of flops. Everyone knew this, except, apparently, the Boys. According to legend, they assumed they’d been invited to the meeting in order to be handed some sort of Secret Award, that the record company had been cagey about so as not to spoil the surprise. It’s a tossup as to who was more deluded in this case, the serial flopmakers or the man who bet on the flopmakers, but however you feel about that, when they settled into his office, they’d only just had time to take off their sunglasses, when the executive said, “Gentlemen, I believe I’ve been fucked!”

  This is perhaps my favorite rock and roll anecdote, as it deviates from the typical rock and roll anecdote more thoroughly than the halves of Mike Love’s septum. Usually a rock anecdote is about hijinks and escapades, almost never about rock stars getting their comeuppance. We’re always hearing about rock stars shitting in closets, rather than in the receptacle hotels provide, or about Stevie Nicks demanding that her personal assistant use a straw to blow cocaine up her ass. Stevie’s ass, if you follow me. I couldn’t figure out a way to say it so there was no chance of confusion. If E.B. White were here, he probably could have come up with something. 

  When I think about this thing a little more, though, I’m not sure being Gene would be all beer and skittles. Have you ever read, or seen, or heard of, King Lear? I haven’t either, but with my great knowledge of the lives of kings, I imagine Lear’s day to day existence would have its share of grinding misery. Tons of headaches involving the internecine warfare of your scions (this is common with scions, if you didn’t know that), people approaching you for a handout all the time— and you can’t just lop off all their heads! That’s one of the first things you learn when they make you king. And the pressures associated with awesome responsibility, god, it just never ends. If you’re self-absorbed, that shit doesn’t get to you, but this kind of self-absorbed person almost never gets handed that level of unfathomable power. The crown weighs heavy on the head, as they say, but it’s not always literally a crown. In Gene’s case, it was a cap that said “Surf Naked.”