Marc Spitz

Excerpt: In which an Andrew W.K. related news bite on Pitchfork becomes a Proust cookie, taking me back to the days of print rock gossip, my first gray hair, and a reckoning with the end of the teenage dream (whatever happened to the teenage dream anyway?).

There was a time when I wrote a MONTHLY gossip column. When I think about that now, I can’t help but smile. I was actually worried about getting “scooped,” by Rolling Stone’s Random Notes (which published twice a month) or N.M.E. and Melody Maker. I can’t speak for the Random Notes ed. Circa 1999-2004 or so, but I wasn’t too concerned about being scooped by the web at the time. Billboard’s site was too straight, Pitchfork, back then seemed too indie. Now, of course, it’s virtually the establishment. I read the latter every day, and recently came across an item about the 10th anniversary tour of Andrew W.K.’s debut I Get Wet. I believe, and feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, that I was the first American journo to interview Mr. W.K. Introduced the hard line according to A.W.K (in March 2002 Spin should you try to disprove this claim). I remember it well, actually.

That interview became a sort of anti-touchstone for me: the moment when (after five years as a well paid music journalist, two books under my belt, and basically living the fantasy) I finally exhaled and realized that one day, probably soon, I would grow weary of this. I would be too old for it all. I was, back then, the writer who prided himself on being crazier than the rock stars I covered; taking a cue from the Nick Kent guide to making your by line notorious (in a good way), I drank and did more drugs than my subjects, I got into fights, I wore big, black Lou Reed glasses. But Andrew W.K. was crazier, and younger and more violent and funnier than I was. He was like a pony on the mark, just ready to run and kick, and I could tell as he ranted into the end of my phone about smashing himself in the face with a brick to get the right sleeve photo for I Get Wet (the right amount of blood, that is… in the end he resorted to pig blood) I was like, “Okay, yeah, it’s been a good run, Spitz but it’s over. End soon come.” If you snapped a photo of me at that moment, I’m sure I would have looked a little like Avon Barksdale when he first laid eyes on Marlo Stansfield. “This is the music of being alive!,” W.K. raved to me like a cross between Tony Robbins and Tony Montana. “This music is an open invitation to every human being on the planet to celebrate being alive! It’ll be there for you every morning when you wake up, like a best friend who will never leave your side!” It’ll be in beer commercials! I’m not saying W.K. wasn’t right. That album was genuinely exciting; remember this was still the era of Matchbox 20 and Creed here (the Strokes were in ascendance but hadn’t really arrived yet) and Travis and Starsailor in UK (no Libertines or Dizzee Rascal just yet). And I think taking it out on tour again is a great idea. I may even show up. I described him, rather lazily as a guy from Detroit, his music: “think Def Leppard meets Nine Inch Nails meets Daft Punk meets Ron Jeremy.” What does that even mean? “WK is into bodily fluids. He lets the semen, urine, and blood flow all over I Get Wet. That’s just the language of me getting out of the way. I sound middle aged. Like Greg Allman calling rap “short for crap,” in the 80s. Backstage Pass, my column (in Spin in case that wasn’t clear or you are new to this blog) usually used the royal “we” and referred to itself in the third person like a rapper. It was a style choice, but there was no we. There was only me and my editor Tracey Pepper, and we were both over 30. We both spent 9/11 on the roof of her Chelsea apartment together watching the pile smoke. We both remembered all the original bands that the coming wave of bands were biting, from Talking Heads to Blondie to Joy Div. And the writing was on the wall for both of us. She’d leave the game inside of three years and me inside of four. So what does it mean when something that marked the end of one’s rock and roll “pink cloud” (to use “Room speak”) is now 10? I guess it means I’m getting up there, but weirdly, I have more of a curiosity about and an appetite for new music now at 42 than I did back then when I was, at 32, already dangerously jaded and ready for pasture (even though it would be another two years before meeting Morrissey, I’d already met Marr… and Mike Joyce).