Did You Know that Deborah Sings?

Deborah has quite a number of juicy stories from her illustrious past that she keeps tucked away in her back pocket. Only when the planets are perfectly aligned does she take them out and share them with me. If I get greedy and ask for too many details, or ask her to repeat a particularly interesting part of the story, she clams up. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” she says.

And it’s not just the scandalous stories she likes to keep hidden. For instance, we’d been living together for three years or more before I found out about a three song demo that she recorded while living in Los Angeles in the mid-nineties.

“Do you have a copy of it somewhere?”

Deborah moved around a lot in her youth, often under less than ideal circumstances, and she hasn’t always been able to hang onto things.

“Somewhere,” she said.

“Let’s find it, I want to hear it.”

“No.”

“Aw, c’mon.”

“It’s embarrassing.”

When I finally convinced her to let me hear it, I immediately asked if I could post a song or two.

“I knew you were going to ask me that,” she said.

A year or two later, and here we are:

Smile

I know I’m a little late with my CBGB post, and I’ve actually written this story before, but I’m an old man, so bear with me:

I”ve played in several bands over the years. No surprise, really. I mean, you can’t spit in New York City without hitting someone who’s in a band. (Although you can’t really test that theory without getting your ass kicked.) Anyway, when you tell someone from out of town that you’ve played at CBGB’s they tend to be impressed. “Wow…really? Cool…” et cetera. But the truth is used to be easy to play there. They had a Tuesday night showcase where any untested, unknown band could get a slot. Then, if the band was any good — or rather, if they pulled in a drinking crowd — they could hope to get a booking on a “real” night.

Brian, the singer, got our band, The Greasy Boys, a gig on one of those Tuesday nights.

We were very excited, of course. “CBGB’s, just like I pictured it”. Hanging out in the dressing room, checking out the graffiti, taking our pictures, and finally carrying our equipment onto the stage, all the while thinking about rock and roll history, and fantasizing a place for ourselves somewhere in it.

Aside from me, the band consisted of Matt, drunk, on slide guitar, an even drunker Brian on vocals, a dopey deadhead bassist that we found through an ad in the Village Voice and who insisted on telling bad jokes during the roughly 30 seconds we had for a sound check until Brian grabbed the microphone away, and a heroin addicted drummer with an elastic sense of time. We were trying to be a rock and roll band, so the heroin addict drummer didn’t really work. Speed freak drummers, fine. Cokehead drummers, ok…but heroin addicted drummers? That’s for jazz.

There were 8 bands scheduled. We were number five of six, I think, and set to go on at midnight. Midnight on a Tuesday night is a lame slot to begin with, and to make matters worse, it was pouring rain. Most of the other bands cancelled — knew better I suppose — and we were forced to go on an hour earlier than scheduled. We worried that all the people we’d invited would show up at midnight and miss us, but it was a silly concern, really. No one came. We did our best to suck it up and put on a good show..,and…well, we sucked it up all right. We finished our set and could faintly hear one or two people clapping out of courtesy. And since it’s hard to fake an encore with a response like that, we packed our shit and left the scene. But before leaving, Brian asked the soundman, “So when can we play here again?”

The guy didn’t even look up from the soundboard, and simply said dryly, “When you get good.”

A few of our friends actually did showed up around midnight, but we were long gone by then.

We did play there again eventually, on a regular night, with a different lineup. We played there a couple of times, actually, but I hardly remember any of it.

So now taht CBGB has closed, I hear the plan is to move the whole shebang to Las Vegas. I was listening to NPR the other day. They talking about CBGB’s and asking people to call in with their thoughts, remembrances and reports. A guy called in from New Jersey and said something like, “Yeah, New Yawk is kinda dead now, y’know? And Las Vegas is da new place ta pah-ty.”

The host correctly pointed out that Las Vegas isn’t exactly a “new” place to party. In fact, it was created expressly as a place to party, and has been serving that purpose for decades.

In any case, the Las Vegas move doesn’t surprise me. CBGB has been making most of it’s money from T-shirts for years.