Poor ghost, p.5
Poor Ghost, page 5
In the light from the firepit, the deputy looks like a panicked little boy.
14
In less than ten minutes, the agent who drove you home from the inquisition downtown is standing in your backyard. He is no longer wearing sunglasses, of course, but his eyes are expressionless—he doesn’t really need the glasses.
“That was fast,” the mustached deputy says. “Were you parked down the street?”
The FBI agent ignores the question. “There’s been a fuck-up,” he says. “A miscalculation.”
“Well, no shit,” says the deputy. “I mean, I love their music, but who could have predicted Poor Ghost had so many fans?”
“I should have,” the agent says. “Scoured is the sound of a generation.”
“You’re a fan,” you say, not a little surprised.
“Actually, I prefer Defenestration and Decapitation,” the deputy says to the agent, his face animated, like some college kid in the dorm about to defend his favorite album.
“Eclectic choice,” says the FBI agent.
“Think about the way they use twelve-string guitar with that raunchy electric lead on “The Season of High School Bands.” And “Hanging Out with Bosnians,” I mean, that’s a game-changer.”
“Remember that Sopranos episode?”
“Totally. Also, the new album’s really good: Fear of Everything.”
“I don’t know,” the FBI agent says. “Maybe I haven’t really given that one a fair chance.”
“Excuse me,” you say, pointing at two figures streaking from the side yard down the wooden steps toward the crash site, “but there are people trespassing on my property. Maybe you could continue your discussion after you take care of other business?”
Victoria has joined your little group. “And find my dog,” she says.
15
Soon, your front and backyards are once again thick with law-enforcement officers. Their presence has the desired effect on the Poor Ghost fans, but, when you finally go to bed, you find it difficult to sleep with so many strangers on your property.
With the lights out, you think about Connie. She would have been deeply touched by the deaths, of course, but she would also be coming up with some darkly humorous takes on the commotion. She would have thought the deputy with the mustache was particularly funny; you can imagine her refashioning him as a Schnauzer and the FBI agent as a Rottweiler.
But Connie’s not there, and despite all the voices and lights and occasional blasts of a siren, you feel quite alone.
TEXTS
KS & RA
Wed, Sep 22, 11:03 AM
So? Are you awake? What happened last night?
More craziness. By midnight, police presence got heavier. But I followed one guy who found a path through a neighbor’s yard, and we got about fifty yards from the wreck. It was all lit up, investigators everywhere. It’s mostly in two big pieces and the front part is smashed to shit.
Jesus.
I know. We were getting closer but this cop spots us, starts yelling and we hightail it back to the road.
Where r u now?
I crashed at Alyssa’s.
Alyssa from college?
Yeah. She has this huge house in Montecito.
What?? With that movie producer guy?
He’s her husband.
God. So what’s the plan?
I’m going to hang around, try and like infiltrate that house where the crash was. See what I can find out.
What about the article on PG?
I called my editor. Maybe this is the article.
BUZZFEED
7 Reasons We’ll Miss Poor Ghost
1. “Spaghetti Bolognese and a Can of Coke.” Everybody loves the feel-good song of the mid-eighties.
2. Stuart made it okay to feel sad. When Stuart Fisher was singing about his latest heartache in that sweet, sometimes gravelly baritone of his, you knew that being down was just part of the human condition.
3. What other band do both you and your grandpa like? Seriously, it’s pretty rare.
4. They beat out U2 for a Grammy. Again, seriously, how often does that happen?
5. You lost your virginity to one of their songs. If not you, then you know someone who did. Just ask around.
6. They rocked right up to the end. Have you heard “Sheltering in Pasadena” on Fear of Everything? Gregg’s solo is killer.
7. There’s a new album dropping soon. It’s called Old, but—go ahead and say it—they will always be young in our hearts.
POOR GHOST: AN ORAL HISTORY
1983–1984
September Pears (1984)
US Billboard Peak Position: 2
STUART FISHER: By the end of ’83 we were burned out from touring, and we really wanted to record some new material. Our fans seemed to want it too. We were like: Get us off the road, we have things to say.
MICHAEL KINNEY: I know the band will complain that I kept them touring all through ’83 when they wanted to get into the studio and record the next album, but there was a method to my madness. First off, they were still a pretty new band. Sure, they’d gigged around for a couple of years while two of them were in college, but that’s hardly the 10,000 hours the Beatles put in at the Cavern Club in Hamburg. A great band is like a great sports team—they anticipate each other’s moves, they cover for each other when one of them has a weakness. Putting Poor Ghost out on the road was probably the best thing I ever did for them.
GREGG MORGAN: Sometimes I think that year on the road was the worst thing that ever happened to us. We had so much creativity flowing, and it all just went into the same old songs, with the exception of those one or two new originals Stuart would bring out every night. Mentally and physically, I think that was the most exhausting year of my life.
KERRY CRUZ: That was a tough year, all the touring after Alas, Poor Ghost! We’ve always gotten along pretty well, but there was definitely some stress, some squabbles. Maybe the three of us sometimes resented Stuart getting most of the attention. I don’t know. Still, it also gave us some money. When the new year came, and we sort of stuck our heads out and looked around, we were not rich, but we could afford to buy things. Like a house. I bought a two-bedroom place in Mar Vista, and I felt like a king.
SHANE REED: One of the reasons the band’s been together so long is that Stuart is a generous guy. Right from the first album, he insisted that even though he was writing all the songs, we’d all split everything four ways, equally. He said the songs wouldn’t be the same without us playing on them, and I think that’s true. It wasn’t in a contract or anything, it was just something he wanted to do.
GREGG MORGAN: That thing Stuart did, with sharing the earnings from his songwriting credits, definitely cemented us together. Whenever we recorded one of his songs, it felt like it was a song we’d all co-written.
MICHAEL KINNEY: I’d like to make it clear that Val Garay did a great job with their first album. Millions of people will agree. But I wanted to take Poor Ghost to the next level, so toward the end of ’83, I started asking around—very subtly, mind you—who liked what the band was doing, and Steve Lillywhite’s name kept coming up. And I thought, “Well, yes.”
KERRY CRUZ: Steve Lillywhite was already one of the biggest producers around. Peter Gabriel, Psychedelic Furs, Boy and October and War by U2. And two albums with XTC—we were big fans of theirs. It felt like they never got their proper due. So, it was flattering that he wanted to work with us.
STEVE LILLYWHITE: I had produced Sparkle in the Rain by Simple Minds the previous autumn, and I was looking for a band that had more of a guitar sound, but I wanted catchy tunes and literate lyrics. I won’t lie: I wanted another hit, but I wanted it with a band that was still up and coming. I liked Alas, Poor Ghost! and I thought I could make these guys a band that people had to talk about.
GREGG MORGAN: I’m not a huge fan of Sparkle in the Rain—too much echo and synthesizer—but after being on the road so long, I wanted our hard work to pay off, and who’s going to say no to Steve Lillywhite?
That said, I felt like my guitar got lost in the mix on that album. Not so much muddied as spread out. I could hear what Steve was trying to do—get that kind of wall of sound the Edge was making on War, but I like a crisper vibe. One guitar, one guitarist, not a guy pretending to be an army of guitarists.
SHANE REED: Steve got a big drum sound for me. I liked that, of course.
KERRY CRUZ: Since the beginning, I’ve always had little ideas about how to make Stuart’s really good songs just a little better, and Steve was a good listener, especially if he thought it would make something more radio-friendly. That horn chart on “A Million Reasons Not to Tell the Truth,” that was my idea—and, to be fair, Stuart did give me a songwriting credit, even though I came up with the part after the song was basically complete. I also played the Farfisa organ on “The Lyon Brothers.” Especially during the bridge, I think that was an important addition. And then I played piano on “September Pears.”
MICHAEL KINNEY: Stuart always had in mind that “September Pears” would be the title track, and it would close the album. It’s a beautiful, if simple, ballad in A minor that was probably the most moving piece of music he’d written up to that point. There’s all the imagery about the September pears falling to the grass and “White-tipped butterflies alight, / As sweet rot bloats the fruit.” I also like the line “mottled corpses scattered amid pinestraw.” Kind of a memento mori song, which was pretty heavy for a twenty-two-year-old.
SHANE REED: Our first three albums, we recorded those all pretty quickly. For September Pears, we had ten songs that we had been playing on tour—one or two of them each night, but they felt like a group of songs by the time we got into the studio. We knew how all the parts went, and our first take was usually the best take, although Steve would have us rerecord, and of course he wanted the sonic palette to be a bit more complex. Not just guitars and bass and drums. But it went pretty quickly. In less than a month, Steve had mixed it, and the music was headed off to wherever they sent vinyl albums to be manufactured in those days.
STUART FISHER: I know from the many times they’ve told me, for fans of Poor Ghost, September Pears is an album that means a lot to them, for whatever reason. It sums up some heartache they were going through, or there’s an angry snarl in there that allowed them to stand up to someone who was bullying them, or it’s just a record that served as a soundtrack to their life for a while.
All that’s great, and I am proud of the album, but then there’s “Spaghetti Bolognese and a Can of Coke.” Jesus, I wish I could take that one back.
STEVE LILLYWHITE: The story of “Spaghetti Bolognese” is similar to that of “Trane in Vain”—“You say you stand by your man,” that song—on the Clash’s London Calling. The album was essentially finished—both are really great statements of American art, if you ask me—and then a song appears at the very end of the recording process—a kind of accident, really—and that’s the big hit.
What happened was this. Stuart was fooling around on his guitar in the studio. Everyone else was kind of shooting the shit in the control room, not paying attention. He had already come up with that famous hook that you only have to hum a few bars and everyone knows it. But he didn’t have any lyrics, and he was just singing whatever came into his head. Then he started making up this little story about this white-trash couple that wants to go out to dinner on a Saturday night, but they can’t afford it, so they just stay home instead, and the song implies that it’s okay not to always be in the limelight. Sometimes you just take what’s at hand, and it’s enough to make you happy.
Suddenly, everyone in the studio—the band, the engineer, me, their manager Michael—we were just “What is that?” It was so catchy.
Michael talked Stuart into writing down the lyrics, and that afternoon they laid down the basic tracks. In post, I doubled the guitar lick with a synth, with the band’s grudging approval, but I think they would have to agree it’s part of what sold the song to the masses.
MICHAEL KINNEY: I feel like there’s always a moment in popular music when people are going to be attracted to some offbeat lyric, and then suddenly everyone’s singing it. So that would explain “Getting hazy, getting crazy, and it ain’t no joke / Spaghetti Bolognese and a can of Coke.”
SHANE REED: When “Spaghetti Bolognese and a Can of Coke” went to number two, I mean, that was crazy. My mom heard it on her car radio, and I think she finally thought we were doing something that might actually have legs.
GREGG MORGAN: We had the number two record in July and August of 1984. We would have been number one, but first it was Prince’s “When Doves Cry,” which I honestly didn’t mind losing to. But then coming in second to that stupid Ghostbusters song? That was brutal. Still, we were part of what people of a certain age remember about that summer: “Getting hazy, getting crazy, and it ain’t no joke / Spaghetti Bolognese and a can of Coke.”
MICHAEL KINNEY: After “Spaghetti Bolognese,” Stuart insisted on releasing “September Pears” as the second single, in September, of course—much to the consternation of Warner Brothers, which thought “The Lyon Brothers” could at least chart as a respectable follow-up. But Stuart was threatening to quit, to blow the whole thing up. He hated having a novelty song as a hit, so the execs just said, “What the fuck, we already have our hit, go ahead.”
STUART FISHER: They had this monthly series of piano sheet music made easy, Top 40 hits mostly—it went out in a little magazine—and they featured “September Pears” in one of their issues. That’s always made me happy. I picture ten-year-old kids forced to do their piano lessons memorizing that song, and then, later on in life, they sit down at the piano and trot it out from memory, and it makes them happy, in a melancholy sort of way.
JERRY DIMGARTEN: I reviewed September Pears for Creem, and overall I gave it a great review. I thought the wordsmithing was first-rate, Shane’s drumming was just cataclysmic on “Lawnmower,” and, of course, the title track can still break your heart, even after all these years. I was not a fan of “Spaghetti Bolognese,” though, and I warned the band about getting so caught up looking for a hit that they ignored their own hard-won artistry. In retrospect, it was a piece of advice that they have usually taken, though not always.
STEVE LILLYWHITE: That was the one and only time I worked with Poor Ghost, but it was definitely a highlight of the ’80s for me. My next project was the Stones’ Dirty Work. A whole different animal, but that’s a story for another day.
NEXTDOOR
RANCHO DE LAS PUMAS • 25 SEP
Maria Moss
Deluge of Poor Ghost Fans. Hello, neighbors. I am so distressed right now! Doesn’t it feel like our neighborhood has been overrun by fans of Poor Ghost? Every night, there’s someone in my backyard, climbing the fence to get down to the orchard so they can go to that crash site and do whatever it is they do. Ever since the sheriff pulled their deputies, it has been a NIGHTMARE! I have called the sheriff’s department many times in the past few days to say they need full-time people here still, but they just say all they can do is increase patrols in the area. I would gladly chip in to hire a private security contractor, at least until these nutjobs go back to whatever rock they crawled out from. I am truly sorry about this tragic crash, but it is ruining my life. Help!
Pat Lewis
I am having the same problem. They mostly seem homeless to me. I feel sorry for them, this is the only thing they have in their lives, but stay off my lawn and stay the blank out of my backyard. I do have a registered shotgun, but of course I don’t want to have to use it.
Todd Osborne
So you’re saying you would shoot the bereaved fans of a rock band?
Pat Lewis
They are not “bereaved.” They are a nuisance at best, criminals at worst.
Olivia Torres
I haven’t seen any of them around my house, but we’re a few streets away from the crash site. Sorry for your trouble, neighbors.
Elizabeth Hamilton
I live on Camino Palomino and they are up and down the street all night. Keep your cars parked in your driveway, all your doors locked, and keep your outside lights on all night. That seems to help a little.
Pat Lewis
The next one I find climbing my fence is going to be “bereaved” all right.
Nicole Meadows
During the day, they are stealing the mail. I saw one grab a handful of mail and just run down the hill. I called the sheriff, called the post office. “Can I ID the person?” No, I CAN’T ID the person. I just saw his back while he was TAMPERING WITH FEDERAL PROPERTY.
Danielle Turner
Hope they are caught!!
Kendra Lozano
Stay vigilant! I used to be so trusting, but these people are making me wish I’d never moved here.
Lisa Patel
I wish we could all get along better. I actually gave some food to some young kids that were sitting on my lawn. They were playing acoustic guitar and singing “Driving a Black Mercedes at Midnight While Two People Have Sex in the Back Seat,” and it really brought me back to my early twenties, when we used to sit around the stereo and listen to that first album—remember albums!—and sing along and try and interpret the lyrics. Yes, all these people in the neighborhood right now are pests, but they are human beings and they will go away soon. I think we should try and put ourselves in their place. Someday they will be the homeowners and hopefully they’ll be generous to the generation that comes after them.
Brian Case
I WANT to try and sympathize, but it’s not like Jesus Christ’s plane crashed in our neighborhood. Let’s be honest, it was just a rock band whose best songs were behind them.
