Poor ghost, p.3
Poor Ghost, page 3
KERRY CRUZ: The Fab Mab was definitely a turning point. They asked us back, and I think we played four times in ’81 and ’82.
STUART FISHER: The Fab Mab was big, then we were driving down to LA. Al’s Bar, Madame Wong’s, The Masque. We missed a lot of class that last semester, spring ’82.
GREGG MORGAN: We definitely kind of streamlined our sound and dressed the part for those early punk gigs. I mean, we felt it, but there was something more to us. Think about the Clash by that time. They’d already put out Sandinista! Combat Rock was in the works. We felt like that was a direction we could take, but first we had to make the scene, so we just played some kick-ass punk rock that was maybe more melodic than most people were used to.
KERRY CRUZ: I had a cassette of “Teenage Kicks” by the Undertones, and I started improvising those backing vocals that became part of our sound.
After a while, I told my parents, “Look, if we don’t have a hit record in one year, I’ll go back to college. No regrets: I gave it a try, and it didn’t work out.” But if we have a hit, then that was proof we were on to something.
GREGG MORGAN: My parents were just happy I was leaving the house. They didn’t care what the reason was.
STUART FISHER: I was only at UC-Davis for two years, but I learned a lot. I was an English major, so I took creative writing classes and literature classes. A whole class on Shakespeare. That was important. That’s where I came up with the name “Poor Ghost,” obviously. It’s what Hamlet calls his father when dawn is about to break, and his father’s ghost says: “My hour is almost come, / When I to sulphurous and tormenting flames / Must render myself up.”
KERRY CRUZ: Stuart and I took this Shakespeare class together, and we both loved it when Hamlet says, “Alas, poor ghost!”
SHANE REED: Finally, I got us a gig at the Starwood in LA, and that was huge. That was like the Damned and the Germs and the Runaways, but also bands that really made it big like Blondie and Devo and the Go-Go’s. We had that pop sound mixed in there along with the screaming guitars and heavy drumming, and at the Starwood gig we kind of punched that pop thing up, and we were really on fire.
Afterwards, Michael Kinney came up and said he wanted to represent us. Nobody else in the band knew who he was, but I did. He was big shit, especially back then. I knew he’d get us a record contract, and that’s pretty much when Poor Ghost became a real-life going concern.
Small jet carrying rock band Poor Ghost crashes near Santa Barbara; 4 fatalities reported
—AP News, September 21, 2021
A small jet crashed in the foothills approximately four miles northeast of the Santa Barbara, California, airport on Tuesday afternoon, killing at least four people, including Poor Ghost lead singer and songwriter Stuart Fisher, officials said.
The jet left Los Angeles International Airport around 3 p.m. before crashing into a suburban backyard at 3:59 p.m., Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown said.
“The weather was clear at the time of the crash,” Brown said. “The cause remains under investigation.”
The plane, a Cessna Citation 560X manufactured in 1998, was scheduled to land in Santa Barbara at 3:55. The pilot, whose name was not released, and three passengers were killed, Brown said. The band members listed as dead are Fisher, lead guitarist Gregg Morgan, and drummer Shane Reed. Bassist Kerry Cruz survived the crash but is in the Intensive Care Unit at Santa Barbara’s Cottage Hospital.
The crash set off a brush fire, which was quickly extinguished by the Santa Barbara County Fire Department.
Poor Ghost was one of America’s longest-active rock-and-roll bands. Their albums charted in the number one position in the Billboard Top 20 at least once in each of the five decades of their career, an achievement unequaled by any other pop music group.
Caleb Crane, who owns the house at the crash site, said he and his daughter, Victoria Crane, witnessed the plane’s sharp descent.
“We ran straight toward it to see if we could help. We got as close as we could, but there was a fire. There was only one survivor,” he told KEYT-TV.
This story is developing.
4
Before Poor Ghost crashed in your backyard on September 21, 2021, you were simply you—nobody special at all.
Your little sister died when she was four, which marked you with a certain sorrow, but otherwise your childhood was unremarkable. Though none of your youthful dreams came to fruition, you married well and had a wonderful daughter.
For thirty-two years, you worked as an insurance agent for a company known for its commercials with a comic edge. Home, life, auto: you sold it all. It was a relatively prosperous gig, and, like any job, you got used to it. You were never a natural salesman, but that made you seem more authentic, and you did good business. You had a knack for talking down outraged clients, and you worked well with the underwriters and adjusters.
In short, even if your job often bored you to tears, you were doing all right.
5
And then you quit.
But burnout wasn’t the reason you hired a brokerage firm and sold your agency. You did so because Connie, your wife of thirty years, died of Covid on May 2, 2020, almost a year and a half before the plane crash.
Her death happened fast—three weeks from beginning to end—though, of course, those three weeks seemed like forever. This occurred early in the pandemic, when nobody really knew anything, and the CDC was saying that maybe face masks weren’t necessary.
You think Connie caught the virus in the local Albertson’s, shopping for your dinner.
First it was a sore throat and a fever and a headache, and you both thought, No way can it be this new disease. But then her chest began burning, and she struggled for breath, and her doctor was able to get her tested, and it was, in fact, the new disease.
Connie was petrified. She quarantined in the bedroom, but she liked to have the hall doors open so she could lie on the bed and call out knock-knock jokes, which she had always found disproportionately funny. You made a facemask out of a T-shirt and some hair ties and sat in a chair at the far end of the hall and went along with her jokes:
Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Ash.
Ash who?
Gesundheit. You sound like you have Covid.
She held on for five days at home after her first symptoms appeared, but as she grew weaker and more listless, you felt like the hospital was the only option.
“If I go in, I won’t come out,” she whispered to you as the EMTs in their HAZMAT suits lifted her onto a hydraulic stretcher and wheeled her out to the ambulance.
“Not true,” you told her, though you feared in your gut she was right.
You couldn’t see her in person, of course, so you had to rely on iPads held up to her by the hands of the nurses. Your own hands shook as you held your iPad. She asked if you were freezing, and you said yes, you were. You asked how she was doing, and she said it was like trying to breathe through a straw.
The nurses, suited up like astronauts in their personal protective equipment, played her favorite songs—Lauryn Hill’s “To Zion” and Aimee Mann’s “Lost in Space” and The Magnetic Fields’ “The Things We Did and Didn’t Do.” They stroked her arms with their hospital gloves, and told her that researchers were desperately working on a cure, that she should just hold on and have faith.
She put on a brave front, trying to smile, though her lips were dry and cracked beneath her oxygen mask, but then she couldn’t breathe on her own anymore, and the doctors intubated her, and for the last week you only saw glimpses of her on that fucking iPad, and you knew she was dying, and then, goddamn everything sacred and holy to hell, she was dead.
6
For two weeks after her funeral, you didn’t leave the house, though, with the pandemic on, that wasn’t something that most people noticed.
You stopped Zooming with policy owners, and took a leave of absence, spending a lot of time during the day sleeping, and a lot of time during the night not sleeping.
Mornings, you went on Grubhub and ordered the same breakfast bagel from the same bagel place. In the evening, you ordered the same chicken udon noodle soup from the same ramen place, and the familiarity of those dishes was so comforting that you thought you might never eat anything else.
Victoria was also devasted. Connie had nurtured her daughter through a thousand crises, and Victoria spent most of her days crying, or trying hard not to. You attempted to comfort her, and she did the same for you, but you were both inconsolable.
Nevertheless, Victoria kept driving up on the weekends from Thousand Oaks with her dog, Jackson. She mostly hid out in her old bedroom while you let Jackson sleep on your bed, where he patiently allowed you to pet him for hours.
Jackson was a rescue dog, part Saint Bernard, part Golden Retriever, and part something else big and lazy—possibly a Newfoundland. He was clumsy, but gentle and sweet, and you routinely referred to him as your “Granddog.”
He loved to be scratched behind the ears, and you and Jackson spent a lot of time together, staring at each other with sad eyes.
7
Connie had been that rare creature, a successful cartoonist. Not quite as successful as, say, Roz Chast or Lynda Barry, but in the next tier down, and her work inhabited the same general universe of good-hearted cynicism. Reading her cartoons, you felt that even if the world was deeply imperfect, we were all in it together.
She often anthropomorphized animals—dogs were her favorite—and they would have surprisingly sophisticated conversations, about Hegelian dialectics, or the origins of the universe, or the state of the economy, but there would always be something supremely silly puncturing the gravity of their exchange. Connie hated pompous people, and she was a master at taking them down a peg or two, or three.
She’d published three successful collections with HarperCollins, and sold quite a few cartoons to the New Yorker. Some of her most famous ones—the Pekingese chastising the Siamese cat for her comment on Sino-American relations, the bulldog huffing at the squirrel for spilling his cup of tea, the ostrich sticking his long neck down the throat of a basset hound—are framed and hang on your walls.
Periodically, you think of taking them down, it is so painful to be reminded of her loss, but ultimately you decide that their absence would be even worse than leaving them up.
8
One of the other things that keeps you from wallowing completely in despair in the summer and fall of 2020 is the fact that your eighty-eight-year-old father is living alone in his house—your mother died three years ago. With the virus everywhere, he is emphatic that he does not want to go into assisted living, though he needs help badly. Even he will admit that sometimes.
Other than Meals on Wheels and Victoria, your father doesn’t have any visitors except you. You’ve told yourself you have to keep your shit together for your father—and for Victoria, of course, and maybe a little bit for Jackson too.
Your father is a Trump guy, naturally. Old and white and angry at the way his body and mind are falling apart.
All day and night he watches Fox News. He falls asleep in his recliner, and no matter how long his siesta lasts, when he wakes up they are blathering the same garbage. It is all just one continuous promo for the president, and excuses for whatever foul deed he’s done most recently—but what else is an old infirm man to believe?
Not surprisingly, you don’t like stopping by, though you also feel guilty for not being with him. Therefore, you drive over twice a week, on Tuesdays and Sundays. You insist on turning off the TV and refuse to discuss politics, but since politics is all he hears and thinks about when you aren’t there, your conversations are generally pretty brief, which neither of you seem to mind.
Your talks inevitably follow the same pattern:
“How are you, Dad?”
“I’m not well.” And here he will catalog a litany of ills—from poor eyesight to arthritis to his bad lower back, which has been aching for decades, to his inability to taste food—before moving on to the state of the Union, which will fall apart without Trump’s profound leadership.
You skip the politics and go straight to the care issues: “Dad, there’s a lot of help available over at The Meadows”—the least expensive decent senior facility.
“I’m not going to any damned meadow. I’ll leave this house when I’m good and dead.”
“That’s kind of an extreme statement, Dad.”
“You want to try ‘extreme,’ boy, just try growing old. That’s ‘extreme.’ ‘Extreme’ as hell.”
9
Then Biden is elected, there’s the insurrection at the Capitol, vaccines become available, and it’s the one-year anniversary of Connie’s death.
Time takes the edge off some things, but sharpens it on others, and when the plane carrying Poor Ghost—a band you’ve listened to but never really loved—crashes into your backyard on the afternoon of September 21, 2021, you are a financially solvent, more or less functioning, if often unhappy adult man in late middle age. You go grocery shopping when you are out of food. You cook your four meals—spaghetti cacio e pepe, meatloaf, vegetable stir fry, and baked potatoes with all the fixings—and you bathe regularly and once in a great while you even socialize with an old friend from the insurance company.
Yet you are mostly empty inside, and while, as an insurance salesman, you can hardly imagine the paperwork you are going to have to fill out after having a plane crash on your property, you are, strangely, ready for something to happen.
Poor Ghost Memorial
11,210 Tweets
Stephen Malkmus
Those guys were basically from the same place we were from. Their sound is the sound of trying to get the hell out of somewhere and not always succeeding. When I was writing Slanted and Enchanted, I was channeling Stuart Fisher.
Rivers Cuomo
There would be no Weezer without Poor Ghost. Everyone knows that. I am beyond heartbroken.
Mike Campbell
First Tom, now this.
Jack White
I only met him once, but Gregg Morgan taught me how to play guitar. If you were a kid and you could get the licks down from those first three albums, you could pretty much do anything.
Iggy Pop
These plane crashes, man. If they had planes back in Van Gogh’s day, he would have been in one for sure.
Rob Baker
The American version of The Tragically Hip. I think that says it all.
Jeff Tweedy
Critics still ask me if Stuart was an unattributed co-writer on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. He wasn’t, but I can understand why they ask.
Henry Rollins
Forget Shakespeare, give me Stuart Fisher any day.
Elvis Costello
Stuart once said he learned a lot about songwriting from me. Well, same.
Sir Paul McCartney
I would say they were the Beatles of their generation, but they went through so many generations.
Joni Mitchell
Stuart Fisher was one of the few lyricists of the last thirty years whose work I found admirable on the page.
Bono
September 21: the day the music died.
POOR GHOST: AN ORAL HISTORY
1982–1983
Alas, Poor Ghost! (1982)
US Billboard Peak Position: 17
MICHAEL KINNEY: That first night I saw them at the Starwood, I knew I wanted to be their manager. I know they were the openers, only on for half an hour, but I don’t remember who else was on that night. I wasn’t really paying attention, because as soon as they finished their set, I went backstage to sign them.
Naturally, I started talking to the lead singer, to Stuart, but it turned out the drummer was the business guy in the band—there’s always one. There has to be, or the band’s not going to make it. So, yeah, Shane and I we formed a kind of connection right away. He knew who I was, and that impressed me because for most of those bands back then, it was a point of pride not to recognize the “suits” who were making things happen offstage. But Shane, although he was just this working-class kid from Sacramento, he already had something like a business plan in mind.
SHANE REED: It was a good show, I remember that. We were locked in.
MICHAEL KINNEY: What I liked most about Poor Ghost was the fact that while they were clearly riding the punk wave, and they obviously had that passion that I associate with punk, there were all these weird countercurrents running through the music. Like the lyrics being so literate. Stuart was kind of a nascent Joni Mitchell doing this punk sneer. And then the little harmonic touches in the bass and backing vocals that came from Kerry. Shane was already a capable drummer, and he would just keep getting better, as it turned out, and of course Gregg could really shred. His solos were short, but they weren’t just the truncated scales most of the punk guitarists were doing then. You could tell he took pride in every note, and, given a little room to stretch, he might do some very interesting things.
STUART FISHER: That night we were all four staying in some shitty hotel on the Hollywood Strip, and Shane was just manic. He was, like, “Guys, we have to do this. We have to sign with Kinney. He’ll make us famous.”
GREGG MORGAN: We all wanted to be famous, so I don’t remember there being any big disagreement. The next day, we went over to Kinney’s office and signed a contract, and before we’d even left, he’d booked us time in Record One in Sherman Oaks. It was this really bland-looking office building on the outside, but inside, oh man, state of the art at the time. It was a quantum leap up from the auto repair shop in Davis.
KERRY CRUZ: It was August of 1982 when we got in the studio, and Val Garay was our producer. He’d just done that Motels album All Four One with “Only the Lonely” on it, so he was kind of a hot producer at the time. I’m not entirely sure if he got what we were trying to do—I mean, he was no George Martin—but he was a pretty good listener, and he seemed to respect us. He heard us out when we had an idea, even if he didn’t always use it.
