Bedrooms and Broomsticks: The Bedroom Legends and the Man With a Hard Heart

More often than not I find myself trying to escape this rockroll writing thing anymore. Trying to walk away from it and forget how much it twisted my life all up in its mess of lies, regrets, and emptiness. I just want to find an end game to it all and finally move on from what feels a curse…five exhausting years of this rockwrite schtick has been more than enough. I think I’ve said all I have to say. Anything more would be overkill. Sink a drink, tip the hat, and just disappear, fading out, drifting into the ozone along with the tangle of noises that most often let  this wretched man down. Every day now I just want to be done with it all.

But I can’t. God, how I want to. But I can’t…yet.

1 a.m. is paltry stuff for the rockroll initiated. Hell, it’s a downright early hour to be sure. 6 a.m., however, is the hour of sorrows. The hour of regrets. Regrets of time spent the night before as it comes around to collect on your debt. It is a lost, lonely hour that greets you only when you wake up for work – the buzzing silent alarm of another toll being exacted on a life. Every life. Waking up to the job you don’t want but need. Waking up to participate in a system that you were groomed into I suppose. One you always daydream about chucking, but probably can’t figure out how to do it and survive. Trapped.

Where did rockroll salvation go? Wrapped up in dollar green suits and daydreams of limousines? Lost in a get rich quick scheme that has no heart? Or merely gone…a forgotten relic of another time? Was it all a lie? A dream? A waste of time? It took nearly twenty-five years Mr. Rotten, but, yes, I do finally feel cheated - by everything. Not just rockroll – because that was supposed to be the way out. A promise not kept in the sounds of desperation. Catharsis.

Chris Allen’s face is all bunched up. It’s a grimace; a baby about to bawl; a man alone and in pain; a pissed off patron stuck waiting…waiting…waiting. Always waiting. It’s a face frozen in time (and my mind) – like a still photo of someone who has just been shot, or has just seen someone shot. It’s a wince when frozen. Set to ‘pause’ it says too much to comprehend; press ‘Play’ and it explodes. Rage, furor, energy, escape, release, redemption. Holding on to his guitar for all that’s left to live for; Allen leads a band of brothers into their moment. "I don’t wanna -die before my time," Allen froths at the mouth, his face now luminous in Replacement's cover song revelation (which explains much of the Legends own sound). "I already used eight of my lives." EIGHT OF MY LIVES! And he has. And he knows it. And he has sinned. And this is the only confessional he’ll go to: a microphone, standing behind a guitar, with those who support him all around. And he pursues something that he probably knows isn’t really their – but isn’t that what the faith is all about?

The Bedroom Legends are born.

I guess The Bedroom Legends are somewhat of a supergroup where I hail from, all four of its parts coming from other bands with their own individual renown, but there is truly a different feel to this band. Feel. Feeling – it’s what this rockroll music is and has always been about. Not contrivances, nor technical prowess; not perfected melodies, harmonies, nor any such musical nomenclature; but rather that pure, high white feeling that THIS is the only way out. At its best rock and roll is desperation; desperate music for desperate people with nothing left to lose. It’s a way out, not the way in that its become.

Sometimes it’s difficult to remember the way that things were when cynicism wasn’t King. But lately, as I’ve found myself wanting to get as far away from the rockwrite thing as I possibly can, I often get lost in these inexplicable recurring daydreams where my mind seems to go blank for minutes at a time and nothing happens at all. Nothing that I can consciously remember that is, but I believe that when it happens I am hearing music. It’s never very clear. In fact, I often come back around wondering whether I had really drifted off or whether I merely thought I had – but these moments, these time-slips, always dissipate in a euphoric rush that I only remember feeling when I was so much younger than I am now and first ‘discovering’ the music that would rule my life. And when I do "wake up" from these daydreams I feel euphoria being displaced by a certain sadness - and I always - always – want to go back to that place where I don’t know where I am.

Brooding in the dim of the nightclub I am there – at that place once again. In front of me are bodies, all moving. Some up and down, some side to side, some simply dancing. On the stage the Bedroom Legends are pouring it all out. Four faces rapt with the possibilities of their two guitars, bass, and drums – as though these were both there crosses to bear and their noble white horses to ride. Allen, the bands front man and main songwriter, a quiet, reserved, what you’d probably call ‘average’ guy away from his rockroll is now all sweat and angst and roar on the stage. Beating away on his guitar, and running, perhaps, from that goddamn ‘average-ness’, trying to find that place that his songs tell you he knows doesn’t exist, but never stopping to contemplate the possible futility in such an endeavor.

I’m at the show with friends and I spend the first half of the show standing with them. But then, about halfway through, something hits me and I want to be alone. I stroll off mumbling something about going to take a piss and settle in at the back of the room facing the center of the stage. People are bopping all around me like flotsam after a stormy shipwreck. I look to the stage and see the boys in the band start to loosen up while the music tightens up. It’s only there fourth or fifth gig and the music is new to my ears having just picked up a copy of the record barely a week or so beforehand, but it all seems so fucking right at that moment – as if I’d known the songs all of my life and the band had been playing them just as long. Allen’s constant exorcism of the life he leads away from his music continues, like a kid curiously picking at a scab, as brothers Doug (guitar) and Dave (drums) McKean look to be playing the exact same part as Allen: a coupla kids who, somewhere along the way, figured that rockroll was the better bet. Better than work, or school, or a life cut out like so many useless cookies – indistinguishable, safe, and utterly bland. Along with bassist Bill Watterson the band looks like a bedraggled bunch of hoods that came to rockroll for many of their own reasons, but also with a common and unyielding need to set the life that they know waits for them outside of rock and roll’s persuasion completely aflame for a few hours.

Standing there, wondering to myself why I’d felt the urge to find a spot on the floor and to go it alone for the rest of the set, I started to realize that maybe I’d begun to find my way out of this rockwriting racket. I’d moved away from everyone else because I wanted to feel loose and free, to just stand there and smile and absorb the relentless barrage of unholy and pure rock moments that the Legends were hurling my way. I’d become a rockroll cynic and now had traveled down its river to find and kill my own dark, black hardened Col. Kurtz-ian heart.

Epiphany? This wasn’t a revelation by any means. This wasn’t destined to be one of thoses nights when I was going to walk away from rockroll a revivified and revitalized Apostle. This was a night about redemption, personal redemption - self.   About carving a scaborous cancerous doubt from my feeble heart and finding out why I loved music in the first place. For me. This isn't the time to be the Rah! Rah! guy for a band or their music – I’m just gonna leave it that these boys in the Bedroom Legends were able to help this poor fellow out in a time of desperate need. I will tell you all that their music, their spirit, their obvious sense of camaraderie, and their unpretentious approach to exorcising their own demons through this thing called rockroll did allow me, for a fleeting moment or two, to feel alive again. That their record and live gig stripped a layer of rancid callous from my sick heart. And that, while I’m not sure how much longer I’ll keep doing this rockwrite thing (they didn’t make me feel any different about that, and in fact probably convinced me of why I need to keep working on a way out) when I do finally escape it I’ll know who to turn to and thank.

back