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| From | <nonstoppop@cox.net> |
| Subject | Re: Close Encounters of the autograph kind |
| Date | Fri, 4 Jun 2004 10:43:01 -0400 |
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>Thought I'd try to get a thread going on the topic of autographs and close encounters...
>has any auditeer had an autograph encounter with a "star" and actually been able to
>exchange a few words?...
Well, my all-time most embarrassing moments came courtesy of Elvis Costello and the Little River Band...during separate incidents, of course.
Elvis was the first famous person I'd ever met, and the encounter was during my first-ever time backstage at any concert, so I was doubly nervous...so nervous, in fact, that I didn't realize until after the fact that Tommy Stinson of the Replacements (the openers) had been milling about my general vicinity the entire time I was waiting to talk to Elvis. When my friend Jim and I finally got up to him, Jim said something along the lines of, "Great show, Elvis." Elvis replied, "Thanks, thanks a lot. It was bit hot, though; I probably should've taken my jacket off." And I offered up the line that haunts me to this day: "You're a genius." I was starstruck, I was in awe of meeting a guy whose music I'd come to love, and I meant it as a straightforward, if over the top, compliment. Unfortunately, coming as it did after his comment, it came across much more like, "Way to go, dumbass," which, ironically, is now the phrase I hear in my head when I re-live the moment. Elvis took his leave of us at that point and began chatting up someone else, and we never managed to get either an autograph or a photo. But God knows I'll always have the memory...whether I like it or not.
With the Little River Band, my friend Tanya and I ended up in conversation with Peter Beckett, where he was discussing his then-impending solo album, observing that he was preparing to release the first single, a cover of "Brother Louie," which he said he hoped would get "tons of airplay." At the time, I was extremely frustrated with the state of our local radio stations and their tendency to play some songs something like a dozen times a day, and I said, "Just as long as it doesn't get played into oblivion, to the point where people get sick of it." Before I could explain what I meant, he turned cold and said, "I'll take too much airplay over not enough, thanks," then walked away. Oops.
Alternatively, however, my two greatest moments came courtesy of Ian McCulloch, of Echo and the Bunnymen, and Richard Butler, of the Psychedelic Furs.
Echo and the Bunnymen played at the 9:30 Club in Washington, DC, and Jenn and I drove up there to see them, since their tour wasn’t bringing them any closer than that to us. I’d interviewed Ian McCulloch not long before that, so his management had no problem setting it up for us to get backstage to meet him and his partner in crime, Will Sergeant. There was no formal backstage list, though, so it was really just a matter of hunting down their tour manager, whose name I’d been given by the publicist. I found him before the show, and he said, “Come stand near the entrance to the backstage area, and I’ll come out for you afterwards.” Well, we went to stand by the entrance…but we weren’t the only one. There were easily twenty or thirty others doing the same thing. But we were resigned to hanging out and waiting, since the fellow had seemed pretty confident about us going back. When he appeared, however, he scoped out the audience, then spotted us and pointedly waved just the two of us over! He took us back by ourselves and introduced us to Ian, with whom we had a private audience for about five or ten minutes. He asked if this had been our first time seeing the band, and Jenn said she thought she might've seen them before, but she wasn't sure. "Oh, you haven't, then," he said. "If you had, you'd remember." He was a great guy. He called Will over to us, and the pair of them signed our Echo CD.
Jenn and I got also got backstage and met the Psychedelic Furs. The back-story here is that, years ago, Jenn and her friend Michele saw the Furs at Chrysler Hall, in the front row. At some point, Richard Butler, the band's lead singer, touched Michele's hand, and the ring she was wearing was immediately renamed "The Richard Butler Ring." Jenn told me this story, and I related it to Butler when I did a phone interview with him. He said, "Well, you'd best bring the ring to the show, then, so that I might re-bless it." Michele lived in California at the time, but, as soon as Jenn told her about this, she promptly found the ring, put it in a box, and mailed it to Jenn. So when we got backstage, Butler, looking for all the world like a college professor, asked us to remind him of the anecdote, as it had been a few weeks since the interview. But he remembered as we were telling it, so he promptly took Jenn's hand (she was wearing the ring), kissed the ring, and said, "Well, there's that, then," with a smile. We talked for a few more minutes, telling him how we were going to be married soon and were going to the UK for our honeymoon, then, as he went off to talk to a few other folks, Jenn said, "Sweetheart, we should probably go. We don't want to feel like we're just schmoozing here." But before we could exit, Butler came back over to us and bent our ear for a few more minutes about how, if we were going to the UK, we absolutely HAD to see the Tate Gallery while we were there, as it was unmissable. Very cool.
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