Rock

About 30 years ago, as an oblig­at­ory part of a New-Jersey-based mis­spent youth, I fron­ted an “altern­at­ive” or “New Wave” band called Artificial Intelligence. We played out a fair amount near the cam­pus of the col­lege I atten­ded per­func­tor­ily, William Paterson. Having con­vinced the man­ager of a bar called The Peanut Gallery that it might be a good idea to host bands, and hav­ing thus cleared the ground that would set the stage for The Trypes, The Willies, and even­tu­ally a reunited-for-the-first-time Feelies, I sup­pose it could be said that A.I. was an import­ant part of the Haledon Scene, which of course ought to be con­sidered an obscure adjunct of the Hoboken Scene. Our music was an attemp­ted hybrid of Pere Ubu and Gang of Four with vari­ous art-rock ele­ments thrown in—our key­board play­er, My Close Personal Friend Ron G., was a very big prog head who was also quite con­vers­ant in film music (I recall he “com­posed” one num­ber that was a blatant and proud lift from one of Steiner’s jungle motifs in the King Kong score). I will leave it to his­tory, such as it is, to render its ver­dict on our work. One of our major dis­tinc­tions was in attract­ing the very great Stanley Demeski, later of the afore­men­tioned Feelies, and then Luna, and now, I’m really happy to note, The Feelies again, to pound the skins for us for a spell, said spell being one of our most fecund and best-sounding periods. 

The band had many problems—its first and fore­most being that I did­n’t know how to sing, at least over our delib­er­ately knotty and loud and dis­son­ant music, and also that I was a com­plete diva asshole a lot of the time, mostly just because I thought that was what lead sing­ers did—but we also had a hell of a lot of laughs, some of them a res­ult of inter­b­and banter, oth­ers deriv­ing from the endear­ing bone­headed­ness of oth­ers of our kind. Once, our Clifton base­ment rehears­als hav­ing worked the last nerve of the woman who lived on the top floor of the house shared by a few of us, we went out to Cedar Grove to work at a more or less “pro­fes­sion­al” rehears­al space in the back of a laun­dro­mat in a strip mall. Frustrated by my gen­er­al inef­fec­tu­al­ity in the group, music­ally speak­ing, I had taken up noise-making with my ex-girlfriend’s Fender Jazzmaster (I know: huh?) when not doing vocal imper­son­a­tions of an agon­ized beached sea creature. The joint we were rehears­ing had this great sort-of apse at stage left with an organ and some synths stacked up; a “key­board nook,” I later called it. So Ron took his place there; rising to the set­ting, he would do vari­ations of Garth Hudson’s intro to “Chest Fever” in between our own songs, which was pretty funny. Our gui­tar­ist Tom, a really inspired play­er in both heavy and noise modes, was doing his thing, as was bassist Doug. I plugged into one of the Marshall stacks and tried to make coher­ent screeches. I don’t think we had a drum­mer at the time.

Anyway, we’re there “jam­ming,” which in our lex­icon meant mak­ing a hor­rible rack­et to see if any­thing could emerge from its res­ult­ant Stygian depths, and in walks this dead-eyed dude with a greasy shag and a chip on his shoulder. One of the joint’s owner/managers, or some­thing. He stands there, with his arms fol­ded, look­ing more than vaguely dis­ap­prov­ing, as our jam goes on, and on, to less and less pur­pose. Finally we don’t so much fin­ish as just stop play­ing, and begin dis­cuss­ing wheth­er or not maybe we’d like to try to play a song or some­thing. Whereupon the dead-eyed dude steps up closer to the stage, and asks no one in par­tic­u­lar, “Which one of you guys is the gui­tar play­er?” And the three guys hold­ing gui­tars imme­di­ately point to Ron in the key­board nook and say, in uni­son, “He is.”

Whereupon the dude goes straight up to Ron and says to him, “Hey, man, don’t mess with any of the con­trols on the Marshall stack there. It’s mod­i­fied.” And Ron, per­haps in dis­be­lief, just says, “Okay.” And then the dude leaves.

Yes, we all still enjoy that story very much, thank you. And we we heartened, a couple of weeks ago, when the mem­bers of Artificial Intelligence recon­vened for a rehears­al in the rehears­al dis­trict of midtown Manhattan, to see that the “don’t touch the stack” men­tal­ity lives on, as wit­ness the Sharpie-penned urgent instruc­tion we found on one of the bass amps: 

“So why was your ‘band’ that you had­n’t played with for almost thirty years rehears­ing a couple of weeks ago?” you may be fool­ish enough to ask. Well, why else would we rehearse except for a reunion, which took place on Saturday at, of course, the Holiday Inn on Rt. 22W in Springfield N.J. Our drum­mer for the occasion—said occa­sion being the 40^th anniversary of bassist Doug H.‘s first gui­tar les­son, which he com­mem­or­ated by reas­sembling a good num­ber of mem­bers of every band he ever played in, or some­thing (I did­n’t quite fol­low the logic, I just showed up to play, man) was the great Daniel B. Our friend Barré D., whom Ron and I helped steer to a career path that even­tu­ally saw him as Patti Smith’s crew man­ager and, of late, music­al stage man­ager of The Tonight Show With Conan O’Brien and O’Brien’s sub­sequent live tour, and soon, O’Brien’s new tele­vi­sion show, came and took a couple of shots with his gizmo, which has an app that makes the things look like Polaroids, which is in fact pretty cool. Problem is these things don’t have very wide lenses, so the band in its entirety is dif­fi­cult to get in one shot. So here’s two. 

That’s the rhythm sec­tion and the gui­tar­ist and stuff. Here’s the key­board player:
 

Oddly enough, in spite of hav­ing had almost zero sound­check, and hav­ing to play a severely trun­cated “set” (two ori­gin­als: “Diminishing Returns” and the immor­tal “Monster Island Dance Party;” we had worked up some nifty cov­ers, includ­ing one of the Bryan Ferry arrange­ment of “The In Crowd”), the gen­er­al con­sensus was that, by some mir­acle (the “Rock Godz” smil­ing upon us?), we actu­ally ended up sound­ing object­ively not bad, myself included. I did my pat­en­ted stage schtick, which includes a lot of limb-flailing and unex­pec­tedly fall­ing in a dead heap and so on, and it seemed “effect­ive.” We all resolved that it would be a fun thing to try again for real des­pite the fact that most of us now reside in dif­fer­ent states. I’ll keep you pos­ted. Maybe.