Rivethead - Ben Hamper [108]
The night after our clumsy recording session, Dave and I are sitting in a corner of Mark's Lounge attempting to gather inspirational fodder for our shopera. We've found this watering hole to be a great source of relevant information. At times, I've been able to snatch lines from conversations and use them verbatim in a song. Unfortunately, it's Friday, and that means disco night at Mark's. Neither Dave nor I have been able to completely figure out this hideous phenomenon. As a rule, all shoprats hate disco music. Still it's right back here every Friday. It's an amazing hoot to watch the rent-a-jock tryin’ to coax one hundred baffled shoprats onto the dance floor with loud bait like “Hey, you weekend warriors, let's get it down to some Culture Club!” Talk about your uphill battles. There's maybe five females in the entire place.
As the reflections of the disco ball paint ghoulish images across the faces of my linemates, I can't help but think to myself that this reeks of the moronic effrontery I would expect from GM. Goddamn, doesn't that goofy little rent-a-jock realize that our feet fuckin’ ache? All we needed now was Howie Makem to hit the floor wearing a sequined glove and three dozen gold chains. Needless to say, there isn't much dancing. There is severe drinking, however.
I turn my chair around to escape the vision. “Average man is a myth,” I remark to Dave. I am getting stoned and obnoxious. “They've hired mercenaries to sing his song. The shit on MTV is as safe as strained carrots. Any bastard in this bar could do better. The radio is hopeless, just a holding tank for miserable shits who don't wanna offend or defy or speak the truth. They're too bland to even suck. And in the face of all this deception and betrayal, Michelob Light has the balls to ask us commoners ‘Who SAYS you can't have pinstripes and rock ‘n’ roll?’ I'll tell ‘em who! The peons they've got stuck down in their brewery with six more hours to go before the sweat subsides and the gears quit grindin’. The brewers, the fry cooks, the shoprats—that's who! Pinstripes and rock ‘n’ roll. What's next? Tuxedos and cock fighting?”
Dave just nods wearily. He picks up the bar napkin he's been writing on during my tantrum and reads: “Don Johnson, asshole deluxe, is making a rock ‘n’ roll record. It will no doubt be an enormous hit with his millions of dedicated fans.”
“No doubt.” I laugh.
We grab a six-pack to go and head back to the truck plant's employee lot to see if we can come up with anything. Dave picks up my pawnshop Alvarez acoustic and begins strumming our anthem, “Rat Like Me.” I fiddle with the knobs on the tape machine and fall in on the second verse: “Wilbur lost his teeth one night in the pit/When the track took a jump and the oil pan bit,/Tommy lost a finger to a sheet metal goof/And they fed it to the pigeons on the North Unit roof./Rat…rat…rat…they're all rats like me.” Shit, we missed the amps on this one.
As far as ratings go, I'm not much of a singer. My guitar playing could be described as primitive. Dave is much better, he's at least adequate. Neither of us worry about it too much. We know we can work any damn guitar better than Springsteen could work a month around here.
10
BY THE SUMMER OF ’86, THINGS WERE REALLY BEGINNING to unravel on several fronts. Mike Moore called me out to the Michigan Voice office whereupon he informed me that he was very close to accepting the top spot at Mother Jones. He seemed unusually subdued, almost morose. I felt the same way. I hadn't a clue as to what a Mother Jones even was. Were we talking about a chain of rib joints or a blaxploitation flick?
The damn thing turned out to be a magazine. Apparently, the publication was in dire need of revitalization, having been neutered along the trail and allowed to flounder in gutless yuppie dross. Moore was their choice to restore the rag to its old muckraking intensity. Well, if anyone