Stage Flight

One Fan’s Quest to Get Closer to the Music

By James F. Broderick, Guest Contributor

They jam it in the basements
And crank it in the cars
It’s on the Voyageur
On its way out to the stars
—From “Do You Rock and Roll?”

It’s a crisp spring Saturday afternoon in Georgetown, Ontario, Canada, and the lead guitarist of the greatest band in North America is gingerly pushing his 1978 Mesa Boogie amplifier up a slightly inclined concrete sidewalk. About a block ahead, a small crowd has begun gathering inside the bar on the main floor of the McGibbon Hotel, a scrubbed-brick structure dating back to the mid-1800s that would be at home in a Civil War movie shoot. The din of the dimly lit bar room and restaurant, a homey hybrid that is part hunting lodge, part small-town wedding hall, rises appreciably as a local music promoter pulls raffle numbers for a local charity from a glass bowl and announces six-digit numbers to the crowd of Molson drinkers, who check their tickets and cheer or groan, bathed in reflected faded neon and jostling to get a little closer to the stage.

Back on the sidewalk, I offer to help, and position myself behind the vintage amplifier that sits aboard a set of wheeled planks. I push even more slowly than he did, pausing when I get to a noticeably large crack in the sidewalk. I’m wary of going too quickly, of knocking this deceptively heavy box off its casters.

“Good man,” I hear over my hunched shoulders, and I look up. The guitarist is nodding, apparently grateful for my caution, my reverence for this piece of irreplaceable sonic furniture.

Guitars will also shortly be unpacked from car trunks, basses and keyboards unloaded from another car. But they’ll be carried in the nonchalant style of seasoned musicians, more like appendages than appliances. But this piece of equipment requires special care.

I get to the door, and there’s a steady flow of people coming and going from the bar room. The guitarist is well known here, and he gives the bouncer a wave and enters the bar. I straddle along behind, still pushing. In a clearly redundant gesture that I just can’t keep from making, I look up and tell the ticket-taker, “I’m with the band.”

I have been with the band for 30 years. Well, more accurately, the band has been with me—in my iPod headphones, on my car radio, in the various stereos I’ve bought, worn out, and purchased anew in the last three decades. These guys were with me at quitting time on the first Friday of my first real job as I climbed into my Ford Escort at 5 p.m. in the parking lot of the small newspaper in rural Milford, Indiana, where I landed my first reporting job. I cranked the engine, and then cranked up the radio, a local classic rock station from South Bend. “Hey Judy, Get Trudy. You said to call you up if I was feeling moody….”  blared from the tinny speakers. They were with me as I headed down I-65, years later, rocking out to Chicago’s WLS-AM, on my way to my future wife’s house to finish preparations for our upcoming wedding: “Hey Little Donna. Still wanna? You said to call you up if I was in Toronto….” Years later, when I sat on my stoop in Jersey City, New Jersey, unemployed, waiting for a call, any call, they were with me on the radio: “I have lots of friends that I can ding at any time, Can mobilize some laughs with just one call….” Through two kids, almost a decade of graduate school, and a dozen years of late-night writing sessions that have wrought four books, they have been with me.

Life’s Soundtrack

You know how there are some songs that always seem to crop up at key moments in your life—only you don’t realize they’re key moments while they’re happening? Someone once said life can only be understood backwards, but it has to be lived forwards. That sums up my relationship with this band. It took 30 years—and a weekend—but I think I’m finally beginning to understand the impact they’ve had on me.

“Well, Well, Well…Hello Georgetown!” The show has begun. The thumping bass, searing, knife-like guitar, pounding drums, and staccato keyboard initiate the standard set opener, a powerhouse of a tune called “Unstoppable.” The horseshoe-shaped lounge that abuts the stage is crowded with the curious, who now retreat for their seats, trying vainly to summon a barmaid for refills now that the music is underway. Three women in their early 20s dance un-self-consciously in front of the tiny bandstand. The room is alive, and crowded, and mixed up among some who have never heard of the band, dozens of casual fans, and pocketfuls of diehards. But nobody has come farther than I have, though at the moment, I’m at the back of the room, watching everyone else watch the band. And they are in the zone, rocking out thoroughly. The bass player is leaning forward, screaming into the microphone, his blonde-gray shaggy mane swaying in sync to the backbeat, the guitarist absorbed totally in the music. I’ve been hanging out with him for much of the past 24 hours, but this is the first time he seems truly happy, breaking into a broad smile as he unfurls a circuitous riff.

The song ends and then, tardily, Ryan Parker, a DJ from Toronto’s Q107 classic rock radio climbs onto the crowded stage and introduces what he calls “one of the best rock and roll bands on the planet!” Give it up, he implores the crowd, and make it loud for them. The ovation is sincere. Beer bottles are raised, cat calls and whistles are unleashed. Fists are pumped. The camera lights flash, the crowd screams, the drummer drives the kick-pedal furiously.

Ladies and gentlemen, The Kings are here.

Once upon a magical time (the early 1980s), like hundreds of other rock and roll bands, The Kings had it all: a song on the Billboard “Hot 100” for more than six months, a featured appearance on Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand,” a North American tour that saw them opening for the likes of such rock luminaries as Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, and the Beach Boys, and gigs at such famed music venues as the Whiskey-a-Go-Go in Hollywood. All this on the strength of their infectious, propulsive breakthrough song (really two songs stitched together as one) “This Beat Goes On/Switchin’ to Glide.” The song never quite made it into the Top 10 nationwide, but in cities like Chicago, it became a staple of AM-radio in the early 80s. I’ve often thought that if a Martian ever came to Earth and asked what rock and roll was, you’d want to hand him a copy of “This Beat Goes On/Switchin’ to Glide.” But I might be an imperfect judge of the song’s actual artistic merit because my reaction has always been more visceral. I absolutely fell in love with it the first time I heard it. (It didn’t hurt that I was in my junior year of high school when the song debuted, and I was in a really bad—but loud—garage band. “Beat/Switchin’ ” seemed to me like the song the guitar was invented for.)

The song was the brainchild of The Kings’ songwriting duo and original members Mister Zero (the guitarist) and Dave Diamond (bass and vocals). They’ve written more than a hundred songs together, recorded a half-dozen CDs over the past 30 years, and played countless live gigs, first with original band mates Sonny Keyes (keyboards) and Max Styles (drums), and most recently with current keyboardist Peter Nunn and drummer Todd Reynolds. But it’s “Beat/Switchin’ ” (or what they call “the Segue”) that made their musical names. The song was playing in my iTunes library on my laptop a few months ago when, fueled by nostalgia and a cheap bottle of Cabernet, I decided to go online and send a fan letter to The Kings through their website. Three decades of admiration, bubbling up to the surface in barely-contained euphoric prose. After I sent it, I felt both exhilarated and embarrassed. I had told the composers of one of the songs I love most in this world just what their music has meant to me, and I was thrilled to think they might read it. Yet I also felt the slight sting of fanboy fanatacism. Surely, though, I’m not the first to tell them how great their music is?

A quick scroll through the message board at The Kings website reassured me I wasn’t alone. Not by a long shot. Hundreds of fans from around the world—from their teens to their late 50s—had posted similarly gushing messages to the band. The Kings’ following might be relatively small, but it is devoted. All the people who posted were unanimous and un-self-conscious in expressing their love of The Kings’ music. And most of them wanted to know what happened to the band that created one of the great songs in the rock and roll catalog.

The story of a
one-hit wonder

In broad brush strokes, it’s the story of numerous “one-hit wonders.” The “segue” was the one hit from the band’s 1980 debut album, The Kings Are Here, a collection of raucous but catchy power pop songs produced by the legendary Bob Ezrin, fresh off the triumph of producing Pink Floyd‘s The Wall. Encouraged by the enthusiastic response to their initial hit, the band was ushered back into the studio to create the follow-up hit(s) necessary to ensure additional airplay and exposure.

The result was the much maligned (by critics, fans, and even the band) album, Amazon Beach. This time around, Ezrin and the band had some disagreements about the sound The Kings were going for—but they deferred to their esteemed producer. After he made several changes to the songs The Kings had been working on for months (such as adding motorcycle sound effects), the tapes were sent to their record company, Elektra. The execs there hated it, but the band felt compelled to stand with their producer and Elektra agreed to release the album, which never went anywhere, torpedoing the band’s rise—and chances at even greater exposure.

Every band that put out a monster hit and then seemingly vanished from the airwaves forever probably has a variation of that story. Like those bands who still tour solely on the strength of their one-hit wonders, The Kings did not go down quietly. But unlike many of their fellow one-and-done bands, The Kings continued to produce some remarkable rock and roll. To date they’ve put out six albums—but since they’ve been forced to issue their music on their own label and sell it through their website (though the catalog is now available on iTunes), their exposure has been mostly limited to fans who already knew about them and were eager to acquire their latest release.

Though still a potent drawing card in certain venues in Ontario, The Kings mostly play local festivals, private parties, and gigs promoted by longtime fans, some of whom know the band personally. The Kings have given up hope of recapturing the North American limelight in which they once basked. Now they play for the purest of reasons, the love of the music and the belief that there is more music to create, new fans to reach. Mister Zero says he discovered long ago that the music business has little to do with music, a theme that recurs throughout our brief time together. As he told me:

The rejection of something doesn’t mean the thing is bad, it just means that it has been rejected. There is no shame in that, it just comes with the territory. I’m sure there are a lot of success stories that start with multiple failed auditions or whatever, but the key in those cases was they never gave up their belief in what they were doing. That is why I haven’t hung up my skates. Fans like you and others make us want to keep at it regardless of the outcome. So I don’t worry about that. I worry about playing well and sounding good and working on new stuff and finding the good in that.

Such is the case this afternoon at the McKibbon Hotel, where a longtime fan named Craig Teeter put together this charity event to raise money for cancer patients. Like dozens of people in the place, Teeter has a Kings story:  “I was sitting at home. I was 19. And I heard this amazing album called The Kings Are Here, and it changed my life.” The Kings seemed happy to oblige his request to perform, and though the stage is small, and there’s a pole right in front of David Diamond, and a blinding shaft of sunlight bifurcates the bandstand, The Kings are pouring it on. Old hits, recent songs, even a debut composition called “Party Shack” have kept the room churning. If an A&R man for a major label could see them right now, he’d be crazy not to sign them up for a new album and a North American tour, I think to myself. Then I pause for a reality check: The Kings aren’t 19 and hip and the next big thing. Yet they shame most bands half their ages with their gusto and their musicianship.

The gig is going great. I always imagined the band would be killer in a live setting. This is really what I came here to get, a firsthand glimpse of my rock heroes in action and The Kings don’t disappoint. But they do sometimes surprise.

The first surprise came when Mister Zero responded to my email, thanking me for my fan letter. His response was eloquent and thoughtful (which I discovered later, to my delight, was consistent with his personality. Could there be anything more deflating than meeting one’s heroes and discovering the people you’ve always admired are really a bunch of self-absorbed assholes?) Encouraged by his response, I pushed it a little further, and wrote back, telling him I had some questions about The Kings and the arc of their musical journey, and it might be easier to discuss those questions over the phone than through e-mail. Remarkably (to me), he called me at home, and after a lengthy and unexpectedly warm conversation, I had talked my way into joining the band for their next gig as a kind of visiting fly-on-the-wall. I told him I was intrigued by their story, and thought it would make a great article, or even a book. It was only a couple of weeks from that first e-mail, sent in the wee hours of the morning from my Glen Ridge, New Jersey living room until I found myself in a hotel room across a coffee table from Mister Zero himself, who was politely enduring a two-hour interview on all matters, from Canadian Broadcasting restrictions to his favorite authors.

I was still trying to get my head around the fact that here, in my hotel room, was the guy whose guitar work is now fused into my DNA, when Zero took this rock-and-roll fantasy to the next level: Let’s go grab some dinner, he said.

To most Kings fans, it’s lead singer David Diamond who is the public face of The Kings, his raucous, defiant fist-shake graces the cover of both their DVD and live CD. So of course, I was hoping to meet him and talk to him as well. I had sent Diamond several messages before my arrival, telling him about my plans to come up to Ontario, and to meet him and catch their gig, and hopefully ask him a few questions, on the record. But I never got any response. “He’s not an e-mail guy,” Zero warned me. Maybe that’s it—or maybe he thinks I’m some obsessed fanboy or scandal-seeking muckraker. Actually, The Kings do have a term for fans like me, who feel compelled to seek them out and watch them play: “mashed potato people” (taken from the spaceship-obsessed character played by Richard Dreyfus in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, who is subconsciously driven to build models of Devil’s Tower, in Wyoming, out of mashed potatoes—a compulsion he can neither stop nor explain.)

Later Friday night, after chowing down with Mister Zero over half-a-chicken in a basket at a popular local eaterie, he drives me to meet David Diamond (or “D.D.” as he calls him). He’s apparently at a neighbor’s house, at a backyard party. I felt a bit awkward crashing. I hadn’t even gotten so much as a terse e-mail from him agreeing to answer some questions, and here I am, walking across a stranger’s sloping lawn in Burlington, Ontario, at 10 at night, with a notepad in hand and a running digital recorder in my front pocket, red light blinking.

From a noisy and brightly lit Tiki hut in the backyard, a silhouetted figure pushes open the door, raises his arms wide and shouts out to Zero and me: “Who’s got Party-itis?!” (referring to the jaunty dance song on their first album, “Partyitis”). Like an idiot, I raise my hand. (Maybe I’m lucky and he didn’t see me.) Zero nudges me forward and commences with the introductions. Dave’s gripping a beer and he’s smiling widely, so I take a chance and give him a bear hug. “Great to meet you,” I mumble over his shoulder.

“Glad you could make it!” he says, sounding sincere.

Meeting Mister Zero face to face a few hours earlier was a thrill for me, but it was encumbered by far less suspense. Zero had been e-mailing me, we had talked on the phone several times, and I expected the gracious welcome I received. D.D. was the unknown factor.

Throughout my 48 hours in their company, I really dug watching these two, Mister Zero and David Diamond, interact. They are so very different, it’s remarkable, I keep thinking, that they’ve been able to sustain a musical partnership, and friendship, for three decades. Zero is circumspect, quiet, intellectual. He strikes one as cautious in his word choices. He punctuates his conversation with pauses, asks lots of questions and seeks clarification (even during small talk). He has a professorial manner, but he’s not pompous. When I made a passing reference to a guitar I once owned, and got the year wrong, he quickly corrected me. But it wasn’t a “gotcha” moment—he was merely correcting the record. Zero is a noticer. (One example of his eye for detail: later Friday night, after the temperature had dropped several degrees to more winter-like weather, and all I had was the spring jacket I had brought up from New Jersey, we met up to walk to a bar. His first words when he saw me: “Your jacket is too thin.”) Zero maintains the band’s website, schedules their gigs, sells the mail order CDs and T-shirts. He’s got his hands on the entire Kings universe as nimbly and commandingly as the fretboard of his sunburst Les Paul guitar.

David Diamond seems to me to be less bothered by the vagaries of business, or life. He moves through the world in a more intuitive way, drink in one hand, cigarette in the other, jacket waving in the breeze. It’s impossible not to like David Diamond upon first meeting him. You can imagine he must have been one of the most popular kids in school. And Mister Zero seems like the kid everybody copied off of because you just knew he had the right answers.

The gig is going great, but it’s almost over. And everybody knows it, so we’re all waiting for what we know is coming. As Mister Zero breaks into the opening chords of “This Beat Goes On/Switchin’ to Glide,” the dance floor in front of the band becomes flooded with frenzied fans already mouthing the chorus to the song. I’m still in the back, watching. The crowd revs, and David Diamond now calls out from the stage—to me.

“C’Mon Jimmy, get up here! You came a long way.”  Throughout my brief stay in Canada, I had tried to be professional—interviewing the band, taking copious notes, doing on-site research, acting (I hoped) more like a professional writer than a sweaty-palmed teenager. So you might have expected me to hesitate, at least briefly, before rushing the stage to join The Kings in their finale. But David Diamond was right—I had come a long way, from the cornfields of Indiana, a lifetime ago. And so suddenly, out of nowhere, there I was, gripping a mic stand like a rock star and shouting the words I had heard a million times in my headphones—“Switchin’ to Gli-i-i-ide!”—while a throng of Kings fans pulsated and pumped their fists in front of us. It was as close to the music as I’ve ever gotten in my life, as close to the music as one can get maybe.

It’s Sunday afternoon, and I’m boarding the plane to return to New Jersey. As I’m dragging my carry-on bag to the very last seat on the Continental Express jet, I pass a large family trying to settle into their seats. The mother has two small children who can’t be more than two years old, and she’s trying, with some frustration, to get them situated. The father is jamming things into the overhead compartment. There’s a young girl, maybe seven or eight, helping her mother, and an older boy who I take to be about 12.  He’s got his earphones in, and he’s listening to his iPod. He’s totally oblivious to the chaos engulfing his parents. I settle in my seat and look down the narrow corridor of seats, and I can still see him, his head rocking up and down, his fingers tapping the armrest of his chair. I put on my iPod too, and I lean back in my seat, preparing to take off, and I feel a kinship with that kid. I hope the music he’s listening to is great, music that will make him forget the turbulence of the journey, music that will move and sustain him through life. I hit the play button on my iPod. The plane slowly begins to taxi, but that kid and I have already started to soar.

James F. Broderick is a writer and music-lover who lives in New Jersey. The author of four books (currently at work on his next), he also teaches journalism at New Jersey City University.

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