I recently got caught up in a wild drama that resulted in me being offered a book deal by one of the biggest American publishers, Schiffer.
Ghosts and Ballyhoo: Memoirs of a Failed L.A. Music Journalist will be published sometime next year. I have to write it first. It'll be about my ten years in the cesspool of the Los Angeles music and entertainment world; the sabotage of my career in music journalism; my descent into a maelstrom of bottomless rage that eventually blew out my immune system and left me with an incurable illness; my loss of nearly everyone and everything I loved; my obsessive pursuit of Scott Thunes, one of the greatest bassists who ever lived; and my eventual coming to terms with all that happened, resulting in my unhaunting.
The memoirs were entirely unplanned as of a month ago, but events conspired to persuade me to pitch the idea to the publisher, and now a book contract has been offered. My memoirs will be structured as an anthology of short stories, with two competing narratives hidden inside: The descent of Thomas Wictor the music journalist and military-history writer, and the ascent of Scott Thunes, both as a person and as a musician.
Here is Thunes playing live recently. Put aside 15 minutes of your time to watch his sublime mastery of the instrument, and marvel that he didn't play live for almost 15 years. He's lost nothing of his talent, an amazing achievement.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlmFW21ypMEScott Thunes has agreed to participate in my memoirs, and has granted me permission to include excerpts from the massive, unpublished interview I conducted with him in 1997.
A sample story from
Ghosts and Ballyhoo:No Mutants Allowed
A bassist invited me to a birthday party thrown for him at his friend’s house. It was full of musicians, past and present. I recognized a lot of them. Surprisingly, it was a terribly dull party because the people there were awfully timid and said nothing to me. I was the only one there with facial hair, and this seemed to throw them, as though they were 1950s frat boys seeing their first Beatnik. That, and my K-Mart clothes and my girth. Another characteristic about life in L.A. is that people can talk only about themselves or their mutual acquaintances. If you know neither, you're out of luck. You'll just get lots of long, nodding silences and lips compressed in an expression of meaningless understanding.
Not drinking is a definite strike, too. I wanted to tell people that it wasn't a value judgment. It's just that when I drink, I'm going to smoke cigarettes again, which will lead to smoking pot again, and then I’m going to start doing coke and meth again, and in L.A. that means getting hooked up with people like the Crips, MS13, or the Zetas. I'd rather just read a good book.
At one point, the bassist who invited me announced he was going to find me a babe. I almost screamed at him not to. I didn’t mind standing there in silence. These were people I’d never know or like, so why pretend? Thank God he was immediately distracted and forgot about it, because that would've been one of the most humiliating anti-quests ever. The babes, as he called them, were exactly that. Girls. I was already 35 and long past being interested in girls. And what kind of ambitious babe at a party full of L.A. musicians would latch onto a fat, bearded, non-drinking music journalist in a K-mart T-shirt?
I did try to join one conversation: A guy was talking about being a member of a Russian wolfhound rescue society. I didn't know there were so many such beasts being abandoned in L.A. that they needed a rescue society, but I told him about the time I was walking on a beach in Portland, Oregon, at about seven in the morning, and this young woman came strolling toward me. She was friendly and we stopped and chatted. I finally asked her if she felt worried out here alone in the dunes; she smiled, said no, and whistled What looked like a polar bear came tumbling out of the high grass beside us. I realized it had been paralleling us in silence. It trundled up to me, sniffing at me with its monster head three times the size of my own. Its shoulder came to my waist.
"What is it?" I asked the woman as this terrifying animal went over every inch of me with its nose.
"He's a Russian bear hound," she said. "Take it easy!" And they went strolling on down the beach, this pretty girl and her guardian.
"I've never heard of a Russian bear hound," I said to the guy in the Russian wolfhound rescue society. "Have you?"
"No," he said, and turned right back to his companion to talk about their friend Mike. He never even looked at me again.
After a couple of hours of pretending to be a part of other conversations so that the bassist wouldn't feel bad about having invited me, I told him I had to go. His wife gave me a nice long kiss, thanking me, and then the bassist gave me a nice long kiss, thanking me.
When I next spoke to the all-male staff of Bass Player
at the NAMM show and mentioned how the party ended for me, there was the ear-splitting silence that I imagine follows the detonation of a terrorist's fertilizer bomb. All those grown men went a toadstool gray contemplating this image, and someone finally croaked out, "You always have such, um, interesting stories to tell."
I omitted the final detail, that getting kissed by a man doesn’t feel any different than getting kissed by a woman. They’d reached their limit and had begun deliberately shutting me out of their awareness.So: I've set up a Google Group to post the progress of the book. The publishing contract will be sent to me next week, and I've already organized about a third of the material I need.
If you want to join my Google Group, drop me a PM with your e-mail address and I'll send you an invite. The group is used as a bulletin board, so there's no need to post responses. In fact, it'll be easier for me if you don't. The Group settings have made it impossible for spammers to get your address. This Group is just to keep any interested musicians--especially bassists--up to date on what will be one of the best music memoirs ever written. NOT because I'm such a stud, but because of the stories happened. The memoir will be about my experiences, not me, and it'll be about overcoming loss and failure that I thought would kill me.
Thanks.
Tom Wictor
