Liberace and Eddie Vedder: BFF
You think you’d like to share a beer with your fave rock performer, guess what… you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t have a damn thing to say to them -if it’s a him and you’re a chick lie down and say please, if it’s a chick and you’re a he be cool while all her bodyguard will do is bounce your ass to New Jersey.
I had lunch with Rock NYCer Brett Jensen and we got onto how loathsome politicians are which lead us to agree that the Prez is closer to McCain than he’ll ever be to us. The same is true of rock stars. You know Eddie Vedder -has a real good Pearl Jam album out right now? Well, guess what, he has much more in common with Liberace than HE WILL EVER HAVE WITH YOU. We don’t know the lingo, we don’t know the life. Liberace picked up his mink coats and his candelabras and his boyfriends and HIT THE ROAD. It’s the same for Eddie (well, not exactly but you know what I mean).
This is how your heroes spend their days: they wake up hungover, they get in a bus, they travel all day, they get out of the bus, they play, they get drunk and drugged and laid, and they do it again. What do you have in common with that? Any time you work night shifts, just working nights at a bar, you’re out of step with everybody ese’s world but when you have that strange see-saw of low-high-low you’re body is a mess of adrenaline fuck headjob rush. You go from god to nobody at the stroke of a light in your eyes on a stage. And like new love you feel like a fraud BECAUSE you know where all the bodies are buried and nobody knows that far from wanting to be worshipped you need to be flogged to death for being the biggest hypocrite since Judas.
And that’s not the half: Liberace and Eddie get off tour and go into the studio and rehearse and record songs where they discuss the sound with the producer and listen to playbacks and work all night and then go on TV shows to push the product and talk with folks like Austin Scaggs and if Austin writes with Rolling Stone they’ll give him some tidbit over red bulls and absolute about how their daddy was a drunk and their mama a saint or vice versa. And Austin thinks he’s their buddy but he ain’t and neither are you or me because when you see Eddie on the street and tell him how “Jeremy” changed your life you’re the TENTH PERSON TODAY TO TELL HIM THAT and he’d rather be getting fucked up on rice wine with Liberace than have you staring dumbly in his face expecting him to be something he isn’t even nearly. Remember when Brittney was having her meltdown and some clerk in a store ran up to hug her and Britney barked: “Get the fuck away from me. Who do you think I am? I’m not who you think I am,” Britney was exactly who she was. You know Taylor Swift? Never hurt a fly, right? You know why? Because she has fifty foot handlers who’ll fucking pull the flies wings off and stuff em down its throat if it comes within a million miles of her.
Conor Oberst ain’t your pal. I am. You see me in the street and I am me, see Conor and there is an impenetrable shield around him. Thought you had cliques in High School? Fuck that. This is worse than the worse clique in High School because it is part of the entertainers job to suggest an intimacy where NONE EXISTS. Conor Oberst is Zac Ephron with a better haircut. We’re all chickens stuck in a pecking order and it’s the worst sort of a con being perpetrated because we are doing it to ourselves.
