Originally published on Facebook March 5 2014.
My pal George Peterson informs me that narrative dreams are not dreams, but actually tales we come up with in a semi-waking state based on the unconnected frag…ments of the night before.
I absolutely buy this. It makes sense. And it dovetails with personal experience.
It still *feels* like I’m dreaming this stuff.
Like last night, and I apologize for this in advance. It’s gross.
I dream what I am aware is a SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE skit. I am aware throughout that what I am watching is late night comedy, and it turns out to be a very low humor but a very extended joke indeed.
We get an establishing shot of a marquee at Shea Stadium. THE KNICKERS! SUNDAY APRIL 12th SOLD OUT!
Then an aging rocker in his dressing room, looking depressed. A stagehand opens the door and shouts, “Forty minutes to showtime!” Our rocker waves him off.
Another rocker dressed the same way comes in and says, “’Ey, we got word, mate, Scarlett Johannsen’s in the front row. She wants to come backstage afterward and party with us.”
Our rocker says, “Whatever.”
He is SERIOUSLY jaded and depressed.
We establish that these guys are bonafide legends. I mean, in the sixties, it was the Beatles, the Stones, and the Knickers. But something’s wrong with this guy, the lead singer and bass player.
“I just…don’t feel like doing it tonight.”
“Like doin’ what? Mandy? We can’t skip our number one song, mate?”
“No, the song’s okay…I just don’t want to…”
“Want to what?”
You get the sense this is a discussion they have had before.
“I don’t want to…shit my pants tonight.”
“What you talkin’ about? We can’t have a Knickers show without you shitting your pants! Two hundred dates a year, for forty years, ten grammies, a place in the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, you’ve ALWAYS shit your pants during the second encore! It’s what people come for!”
It transpires — and I mean, I saw all this dramatically, coming out in dialogue — that this act of pants-shitting is the thing that made the act famous. They sing soulful ballads, they sing power anthems, their music defines a generation, but it always ends, where it ends. The few times he refrained, like in the notorious Melbourne show of ’76, the audience nearly rioted. And the lead singer has been doing it from his twenties to his seventies, and he’s had enough of it. They bring in the manager, (“ere, what’s all this then? Mr. High and Mighty don’t want to shit his pants?”). They bring in the promoter, they argue and cajole and wheedle, they show him the new tour t-shirts with a graphic of soiled pants, they tell him to think of the fans. Turns out that when he lets go, the most loyal of them do too — thousands of them in a show like this, and many of them have so physically prepped themselves that they suffer the torments of the damned holding it in for the proper moment.
The singer finally laments,
“Seven years we played those clubs and dives, looking for our big break! ONE friggin’ NIGHT I have a bad burrito and I have to pay for it for the rest of my BLOODY career!”
“We’ve talked about this before, buddy boy! The GREATEST inspiration always arrives by accident! Your burrito fifty years ago was what put us over the top, and you are NOT going to go out in front of those twenty thousand fans and not give them what they expect!”
More. He tried to branch out once. Turns out he has a fine operatic voice. Agreed to play the lead in a production of Faust, at the met. Even there, the audience rebelled when he failed to deliver as expected. All his music, all the heart he pours into every song, is just the buildup to what he does during the second encore. Honestly one of the greatest songwriters of his or any generation, a guy whose lyrics and bass playing can break your heart, he’s in a hell of his own making. He’s defined by a moment of incontinence, decades ago.
We hear the stadium crowd chanting their names. “KNICKERS! KNICKERS! KNICKERS!”
“Come on, pally. Think of the crowd.”
“I’m trying to,” he says. “But I just don’t think I have it in me anymore…”
At which point I woke up.