Marc Spitz

I didn’t really intend to write about Soupy Sales dying, I mean I don’t expect this blog to turn into a sort of clearinghouse for shout outs to those who ate the salmon mousse but after some consideration I realized that he was one of the very few pop icons who both my mother and father and I all identified with. That’s to say he was famous when they were kids and famous when I was a kid for the same reason. When my mother gave me a stack of Beatles records, beginning if memory serves with Live at the Hollywood Bowl for some reason and then, more eventfully of course, the White Album (hours just staring at that pull out poster) it was a case of parent and child agreeing that something was good and worthy and interesting. We could share the Beatles but they had already essentially split by the time I was born. They weren’t active, whereas Soupy Sales with his goofy red shirt and authentically strange face, his odd frosty hair, was still going strong. My mother told me that he got into some trouble for asking kids to each send him a dollar bill. That sounded like a good idea at the time, and come to think of it, still does. If each of you readers send me a dollar bill… I could probably pay… half my Verizon bill. Land line. Not cell. A lot of great artists are shit with money, but not Soupy. Respect. Another reason why I think it’s relevant to pour out some liquor for the man is that I interviewed one of his kids for the Bowie book. Hunt Sales, and it’s one of the stranger and more hilarious bits in the book. The dude is a quote machine and I’ve been doing this long enough to truly value that shit. I mean I once passed around a copy of Spin at a round table with Interpol in the Tribeca Grand Hotel during a particularly dull interview, pointed to the cover story (forget which band), identified the best quote in that story and said, “This is a PULL QUOTE. Now I am going to go around the table and I want each of you to give me a PULL QUOTE>” If you don’t believe me, you can ask Nils Bernstein. Hunt Sales played the drums on “Lust For Life.” He didn’t just play them, he INVENTED that shit, with a little help from the “Peter Gunn Theme”, as he admitted to me. And maybe Gene Krupa, but you get the idea. If it weren’t for Soupy Sales, there would be no fucking drums on “Lust For Life.” For that, alone I’d send him my dollar any day, and send my sincere condolences to Bros. Sales. Hunt, btw was also of course, a full fledged Tin Machiner. Good stuff on that as well from him in the book, which is out Tuesday. I have not succeeded in drinking my anxiety dreams away, I’ve just pounded them into straight up six hour blurs (four hour blurs when the dogs are here and not at the exes) like some psycho chicken paillard. I have commiserated with other writers, did so with Jonathan Sherman last night actually post-play. We know this happens. It’s Apollo 13 shit. Once back in the atmosphere, the books or plays all launched, the book party over, the reviews come and gone, the promo shit come and gone, you just chill the fuck out, move to Berlin and “dream it all up again<” or whatever Bono said in ‘89. You do it again. And you sleep. And you’re not back at Bennington or wherever the fuck you went to college. Bard. You dream of trains. Dream of blue turtles. You have a wet dream and see the sunshine. But as of now, they’re still driving me insane, those men inside my brain.

Go Yankees, anyway.