good golly miss molly

My brother was in town this weekend, and I think it’s pretty safe to say we had an awesome time. I think between the sparks and the cheeseburgers I have to be at my lowest ebb on a scale of any sort of personal well being…I think yesterday alone I consumed a million billion calories. But, there I go again, talking calories and weight watchers points, sounding like a Wisconsin housewife. Okay, enough of that. Let’s get down to business, and of course, by business, I mean continuing the saga of all my crappy jobs. We left off at the record store, on a positive note. However, as fate would have it, I was gonna still need to have a lot more jobs. What was the next job I had? Dildo salesman? Cleaning up at the dojo? Um…vatman at the fat rendering plant? Those were all later on, and I’m trying to do this in order. I will say though, there’s nothing like the door to door dildo game to really help you connect to the pulse of anytown USA. Sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself. Up next, is I guess when I was the stage manager at the Metro.
Okay, so I wasn’t usually the stage manager. That was usually my friend RL’s job, but if he was ever off, then it became my job, SO, when talking to my parents friends or my inlaws or whatever, rather than saying “I carry amplifiers up and down stairs at a club” I could say, “I’m the stage manager at the metro.” This sounds a lot more glamorous, right? And let’s face it, it’s all about churchin shit up. That’s why people trim their pubes.
Okay, so yeah, I was a loader at the Metro. It was a pretty decent job. I got in fairly good shape running up and down those stairs with heavy shit, and we had this little room with a tv and a microwave and a shitter, and we just got to kind of sit there between load in (anywhere from 10am to 5pm) to load out (anywhere from 10pm to 4am), and we got paid for the whole day. It wasn’t a bad job, and there were lots of good people working there, so that made it pretty bearable.
Because so many asshole wannabe rockstars came in and out of the metro, it’s hard to even pick out a good story as an example of that job. The dude from Guided by Voices tried to get me to fight him on the stage after their last show ever. That was funny. He was a very drunk old man and the whole thing would have been extremely sad if he wasn’t such an asshole. Thankfully, he was, and when he started yelling at me to quit talking to his girlfriend (I had been trying to get around her, so I believe my exact words were ‘excuse me, please’) and I told him that everything was cool, it was a cool show, there’s no reason to get all agro, brah, he said “you’re fucking fired! Get the fuck off my stage!” So I dropped his guitars in a huge clanging pile onto the stage and went to the crew room and drank some champagne. I have no idea how his sloppy old ass eventually got all his crap down the stairs and into his station wagon, but I certainly had nothing to do with it.
One time we had System of A Down at the Metro (and the day after we had Coldplay…and then Garbage later in the week. Metro holds 1100 people, so those were CRAZY shows) and I had to go around and find the singer guy a bathrobe. There were all sorts of real specific requirements, like it had to be linen with a thread count of so and so and it couldn’t have a hood, or maybe it HAD to have a hood. I don’t remember. Anyway, I went all over the fucking city looking for this fucking robe, and when I finally got back with it, one of his assistants (yeah, he had five personal assistants, and still I was the one out looking for the perfect robe) told me that the robe was totally unacceptable because it was made in Turkey. I returned that robe and went to a dildo store and got him another robe, very nice, not in any way associated with Turkey, and, pretty pleased with myself, returned, handed over the robe and was told by the assistant ‘yeah, it doesn’t really matter. He’s not gonna like it no matter what and he’s definitely not gonna wear it.’
Cool.
They kind of sucked, by the way. The lights were awesome and they traveled with their own PA, so the sound was amazing, but they were dull as shit to watch. That guy’s voice is perfect live, but he looks like a toy poodle or something, just posing and preening and all glisteny and curly…bleh. Those guys all look like perverts anyway, so whatever.
When Coldplay played, Gwennyth Paltrow was there, and she nodded her head arhythmically and generally looked like a dork. They were pretty good. That song Yellow is pretty nice. I don’t care what you think of me. It was good. Chris Martin has kind of a big ass, just throwing that out there.
Once, my friend Chris and I were in the Reno airport and it was about ten am and we were sitting in the bar, and suddenly Cub legend Mark Grace comes around the corner with a beer in each hand. He also had a pretty big ass. I don’t know what the connection is, but, yeah.
My mom wrote me a letter recently that said she likes my blog again. I don’t know when she stopped liking it or what’s changed, but my instinct clearly states that her approval probably means the blog is getting lame. Sorry, I guess.
Oh, and just to clarify, I already wrote about meeting Little Richard, but here’s the quick and dirty version. I was at a hotel bar in LA with rock and roll luminaries Chris McCaughan, Mike Burkett and Matt Skiba when Chris said, “hey, dig little Richard over there.” I turned around, expecting to see some flamboyant gay black guy with jerry curl…which is what I saw, but it was the ACTUAL little Richard, not just some random creepy dude with a similar style. I said “man, I’d love to meet him” and Matt said, “dude, I bet he would LOVE to meet you” so I bolted over there, spilled a vodka cranberry on his security detail, and held out my hand to Little Richard. I said something like “I’m a huge fan” which is a lie. I mean, who honestly gives a shit about little Richard? Right? Anyway, that’s kind of irrelavent. His face looked like a fucking Ice cream cake. He was just so chocolatey and makeuppy and fucking bizarre looking. He gave me a book about jesus. Then I tried to shake his hand again and he gave me ANOTHER book about jesus. Thanks Little Richard. Pretty sweet.