One Ten + Ten

2016 and now

Ten years ago tonight, I awoke from a badly needed nap.

Or did I?

Two days earlier, on David Bowie’s 69th birthday, and the release day for his 25th album, Blackstar, I was catching up on the phone with an old friend, Paulina Victoria in Chicago, when she received a call from Kim D, just as I was about to ask about her long-time love, my friend Brett Smiley. He had visited me in the desert a few years earlier and performed up at the Pappy and Harriet’s open mic up that I hosted. He charmed us all with his sweet, bitter voice, tousled good looks and easy-going charisma. I’d gotten to play his scathing anti-war song. “I Won’t Be Home for Christmas” on Radio Free Joshua Tree and a bleeped version on the local music show on Z107.

When Paulina came back to me, she was in shock and could barely get out the words. After years of successfully battling HIV and Hepatitis C, gallantly carrying on, in art and life, indefatigable in the face of the social status of an almost-never-was, Brett had fallen and succumbed to a bump on the head in his apartment in Manhattan.

Breathlessly Brett.

That was the name of the album, produced and then shelved by the Rolling Stones former manager, Andrew Loog Oldham.

Brett had been a pop star to me when I was starting out. We met at Kenny Malloy’s tiny house, perched one rickety flight of stairs above the narrow, winding Laurel Canyon, just a few bends north of the Canyon Store.

I was in my first band - The Eighties - and Kenny and his business partner Randy were to become our managers.

A few years my elder, we had in common a modicum of childhood fame and he had gone on to be ‘discovered’ by the Stones ex-manager, who produced an album for him that was left unreleased for many years. He was set to be LA’s answer to T.Rex and Bowie but it never really happened like that.

Brett had recently co-starred as the Prince, with his girlfriend, the barefoot angel of the canyon, Cheryl Rainbeaux Smith, in a low budget, erotic musical adaptation of Cinderella.

The Prettiest Stars of late 1970s Underground Hollywood.

Like me, Brett was born in Indiana and worked as a child actor, but he worked on the stage, playing Oliver Twist on Broadway for four years while I was growing up in Hollywood, working in the studios. We spent many hours at Kenny Malloy’s in the late 70s.

Once upon a Time called 2016

The year started with my ten-year-old son Sage having his first official drum lesson, on Friday, the first, from Leslie Mariah Andrews at the Beatnik Lounge in Joshua Tree. Leslie and I had first become acquainted through her appearances at the two weekly open mics I was hosting, at Pappy and Harriet’s and Joshua Tree Saloon, She always made a splash with her exciting guitar work, at times playing behind her back like Jimi Hendrix, then falling to the ground, legs up, to expose her bloomers.

Leslie had been playing all those open mics for a couple of years already, and while others may have seen her as nothing more than a wild Trans woman with a lot of rock’n’roll flare, simply taking a “fashion risk,” I got to admire her excellent songwriting, her beautiful lead guitar playing and her ability to jump on to bass, drums or keys, at any time, as needed. I also got to know her as a good friend, with musical knowledge, a great wit, enthusiasm for learning songs and boundless generosity toward Sage and me. We were all three excited to get started on the weekly drum lessons Leslie had given Sage as a Christmas gift.

On Friday January 8th, for Sage’s second lesson, we celebrated David Bowie’s and Elvis Presley’s birthday - and all Capricorns - by playing some of their tunes, as had become a small tradition over the years. Blue Moon. Heroes. Leslie could do Under Pressure completely by herself.

Sunday the tenth, I was home alone for the first time since receiving the news of Brett on Friday and I fell asleep to something on Netflix. I hadn’t had the proper time to process the loss when I woke up later that evening, to a message on the computer screen from my friend, Robyn, one of the owners of Pappy and Harriet’s, which blared: “BOWIE!”

Another glaring message, from Kevin, read “I can’t even imagine how you must feel right now.” I put the two together and knew it wasn’t good.

I tuned in to Rodney on the ROQ for confirmation. Rodney and his Sunset Strip English Disco introduced Bowie’s music to the West Coast when I was a young teenager so I knew he would have the correct information. What I heard was Brett’s voice singing a favorite early Bowie song, “Kooks,” a touchstone and a guide to parenting for Sage’s mom and me. When the song ended, a depleted-sounding Rodney acknowledged the loss of two special friends, Brett and David, describing the loss as feeling like a hole in his stomach.

The next night, January 11th (or “1.11’) at the Open Mic a woman I never met in person brought me twenty or so hand-made lightning bolt necklaces she’d made that day and left them with one of the servers, some of whom wanted one as a keepsake, to be given out to anyone who played one of his songs. I know a lot of people did but besides Leslie and myself, I can’t remember who or what the songs were.

I told Sage about that evening at Pappy’s the following day and he suggested that I always play a David Bowie song whenever I perform - and for a long time I did. Somewhere close to 100 times after that. Sometimes with him on the drums.

The months to follow were surreal to me. I thought about the impact of Bowie on my aesthetics, my sexuality, my spirituality, psychedelic reality, a personal-feeling memory of a remote artist’s influence on a teenager coming of age to his breathtaking music and fearless example. Instead of hearing Let’s Dance as a commercially driven pop hit of less worth than his heavier, earlier or more experimental work, it suddenly became a call to rise up and to return movement to our bodies. I called Bowie my Avatar. “He was your Spirit Animal,” one friend wrote.

“Something happened on the day that he died.”

A decade later, it is surreal to be living in this most dystopian America, which has only seemed to become stranger and stranger by the day since David Bowie died, the stuff of the darkest science fiction of another time, too closely resembling even some of Bowie’s bleakest visions of the future, with masked agents rounding up and even killing those the state deems “illegal,” and “alien,” on the streets of America, whether they have legal status or not, with no due process. Lawless government thugs, roaming neighborhoods with zero accountability. Lies presented as the truth. Protections for the planet we share being decimated. Science being denied. Knowledge being hidden. Children being starved, separated and otherwise abused by hypocrites who preach morality. Wars being threatened and waged upon imaginary enemies. Was he so keenly aware of the dangerous path we were on as human beings, “alienated” from each other and ourselves, that he was providing a starmap of exploration and change, as opposed to conformity and adaptability?

We have arrived in a new America, a new world, not much like the one we had just a year ago. Or ten years ago, when the thought of the current President seemed laughable. None but a very few are laughing now.

How we have always needed your artistry, your music, your vision, your voice and how it sustains us all through our lives, Mr. Bowie.

I remember thinking then, as now, that the three most generous, most essential words in all of David Bowie’s music are to be found in the refrain from the grand finale of his epic Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, Rock’n’Roll Suicide:

“You’re not alone!”

David Bowie

January 8, 1947- January 10, 2016

Brett Smiley

September 25, 1955-January 8, 2016

Kenny Malloy

August 25, 1955- December 22, 2024