Not Like Any War

 

As a general-interest reporter, you have to cram knowledge and then discard it to make room for the next story, and you have to move on. 

But at a book reading in Greenwich Village last night, I was bracingly reminded why some stories you do just matter more, and stick to your guts. Most of my tenure was spent covering pop culture, which certainly is important to a lot of people, but is rarely life-or death. 

Not so this story. 

My first meeting & demonstration

I just dug up a paper pocket calendar to find the date - November 6, 1989 - (right) that I first attended a weekly meeting of ACT UP - the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power - which had formed in March 1987. 

I had been assigned to write a longform piece by Rolling Stone. I think one of my editors, Susan Murcko, had brought in a clipping about the group from the Village Voice. Or maybe the Times. 

I wanted to suss out who was who and what was what, and the best way was to attend the open, democratic, freewheeling, sometimes fractious, often cruise-y Monday night forum at New York's Gay & Lesbian Community Center at 208 West 13th Street. It was run by "facilitators" and everything was decided by majority vote, after kicking off with the request that any undercover cops identify themselves (none ever did). 

The facilitator, Ann Northrop - a lesbian former debutante and TV news producer - described ACT UP to those in attendance as "a diverse, nonpartisan group of individuals united in anger and committed to direct action to end the AIDS crisis."

All true. 

A few weeks earlier, in September, seven members of ACT UP had donned fake IDs and worn suits to infiltrate the New York Stock Exchange, chaining themselves to the VIP balcony and unveiling a banner saying "SELL WELLCOME," a reference to the pharma company Burroughs Wellcome which made the only approved AIDS drug at the time, and had priced it at $10,000 per patient per year. Meanwhile compariots outside staged a "die-in" blocking traffic. Many traders angrily screamed things like 'Die, faggots!' and 'Mace them!'

Wall Street, Sept. 1989

But a few days later, Wellcome lowered the price of its drug by more than a third. 

This -- was impressive. 

It turned out that the leader of that action, Peter Staley, knew what would be impactful because he had worked on Wall Street as a closeted gay man and had been participating in ACT UP secretly until his t-cell count got so low that he quit to become a full-time activist. 

Staley was exactly my age - 28 - charismatic, impassioned, articulate - and in the fight of, and for, his life.  

Just two days later, I attended my first demonstration, and my story was off and running. 

A month later, I was with ACT UP inside St. Patrick's Day Cathedral for their choreographed "Stop The Church" interruption of mass led by Cardinal John J. O'Connor, who had opposed teaching of safe sex in schools and condom distribution. 4500 protesters showed up outside, and 111 were arrested. 

The impact got muddied when, during communion, a renegade member threw a wafer angrily to the ground, which enabled critics - and President George H.W. Bush - to say they'd gone too far. But they of course got more publicity for it. 

As I continued to report, I naturally found myself focusing on individuals -- most of them leaders, like co-founder playwright Larry Kramer, Staley, and Northrop, and Mark Harrington and Jim Eigo of the "Treatment and Data" committee, who were monitoring the status of medications and trials. 

But I also found interesting Natasha Gray, a 25-year-old Bryn Mawr grad who hadn't known anyone with AIDS, who had gotten involved through the issue of housing for the homeless, many of whom were now becoming infected. Gray talked to me both about how empowering the group was in terms of self-education, but also about how she now was dreading losing her new friends to the illness.  I decided to include her as a point of entry for readers like her. 

Fauci 

I also interviewed the NIH's Dr. Anthony Fauci, who

The Steagle Saga, a/k/a "How it is done to you"

This is the myth-worthy saga of a low-budget movie you've never heard of, that few people have ever seen, that failed miserably both artistically and financially - and about which I have been unduly curious for half a century, because it was the first movie set I ever visited.

Stories of failure have always been fascinating to me. Partly because they don't get told nearly as often - George Lucas would much rather talk about Star Wars than Howard the Duck or Willow. But he started all those projects with a vision and a script, and nobody knew in advance which one would produce generations of progeny.

One of my biggest regrets as a journalist was that I never got to write up my Rolling Stone-sponsored visit to the set of Texasville, Larry McMurtry's sequel to The Last Picture Show, with struggling director Peter Bogdanovich returning to the scene of his 1971 triumph in 1990 - the same year Coppola was making Godfather III and screenwriter Robert Towne had written the Chinatown sequel The Two Jakes.

When laboring on the originals, those filmmakers didn't have any foresight that they would become classics; indeed, if you listen to Coppola's commentary on the Godfather DVD, he was under constant worry that he was going to be fired. And when they tried to recapture the magic two decades later, they certainly didn't set out to make thin, soulless retreads. I never wrote up my Texasville reporting, because the Rolling Stone movie critic saw an early screening and - correctly - declared it bad, and the magazine (like most) was not geared to giving space to long features on duds.

But it would have been a much more interesting story than one of a success.

Which brings me to my earliest set visit, to The Steagle, a movie released 50 years ago this month.

In early May, 1970, the cast and crew were filming at the train station in Scarsdale, my hometown, for a scene of star Richard Benjamin getting off a commuter train. 

My mother, then 32 - only a year older than Benjamin! - having somehow learned about it, dragged me and my two younger brothers to the station to watch the dull, repetitive act of a train slowly arriving and a man getting off and being greeted by his wife (played by Cloris Leachman, unknown even to my fangirl mom - The Mary Tyler Moore Show wouldn't premiere until that fall, and although Leachman's performance in The Last Picture Show that would win her an Oscar had already been shot, it hadn't yet been released).


The under-10-year-old set visitors, Scarsdale RR station, May 1970

I had dutifully brought along my recently-obtained autograph book, which mostly contained New York Mets, and with my mother's nudging, obtained Benjamin's signature. As you can tell from the photo, I had no idea who he was - since his movies had all been for adults.

Me and Dick
My interest in The Steagle was recently rekindled by a Facebook post by a guy from my high school whose dad had done locations for the 1969 Benjamin movie Goodbye, Columbus, which reminded me that its tennis scenes had been shot at the Scarsdale High courts. I wondered - wait, what about that other movie Richard Benjamin shot in Scarsdale?

Even in the streaming era, The Steagle is nowhere to be found, despite the fact that Benjamin was in the peak of his career after the troika of Goodbye, Columbus, Catch-22 and Diary of a Mad Housewife.

I finally tracked down a crappy bootleg DVD. Though

Confessions of a 20th & 21st Century Bootlegger

 

"All you bootleggers out there in radioland, roll your tapes!"

-- Bruce Springsteen, the Roxy, Los Angeles July 7, 1978

Thanks to Covid quarantine and ease of technology, I recently backslid into a vice from my youth - bootlegging a favorite musician. 

Back when I was in high school and college in the 70s and 80s, obtaining live music by your favorite bands was exciting - and somewhat fraught, because it was, of course, illegal. Concerts would be duped endlessly and traded among fanatics, through a kind of underground network - I can't even remember how. 

The origins were often radio broadcasts (including ones I made myself, if I happened to hear about a show in advance), as well as audience members sneaking in with a tape recorder. 

I taped a couple myself, too, just as souvenirs for myself and friends - until a friend and I got nailed at an Elvis Costello show in L.A., ushered into a back room by security and handing over our precious tapes, a la Richard Nixon, so we could get back to the performance.

Occasionally, a great show would even be turned into a bootleg LP set, which you could find in the right record stores if you knew where to look, but that was even more contraband-y, because people were now selling it (both manufacturer and store) i.e., making money off an artist without paying any royalties. 

So the record labels would be untraceable one-off names pretending to be in places like Germany and the Netherlands to avoid copyright laws. Sometimes they'd bother to make actual album art and look like a real release, but they could also be in a white cardboard liner with a color xerox insert. 

The Grateful Dead legendarily encouraged such bootlegging, but some artists - notably Springsteen - did try to pursue and shut down the practice with lawyers. I, of course, found this annoying: Look, we are buying all your legit releases and concert tickets - why not let us celebrate you and promote you? Especially considering on one of the cassette dupes I had obtained of a broadcast from LA's Roxy in 1978, he had literally teased, "All you bootleggers out there in radioland, roll your tapes!" before launching into a never-released instrumental led by Clarence Clemons on sax, "Paradise by the 'C'."

Then in the mid-80's Springsteen finally released an authorized boxed set of live work covering the decade from 1975-85, structured to mirror a single concert. It may have been a great intro for the uninitiated or casual fan, but for the crazy diehard, it was a little lackluster and hodgepodge. Absent was the amazing Darkness tour version of "Prove It All Night," yet throwaway songs were included, and only a handful of cover songs. 

Side note: The one and only time I met Springsteen, 1993 backstage at the final NBC Late Night with David Letterman, I decided to use my moment with him not to get an autograph or a photo, but to try to convince him to release "Murder, Incorporated" a hard-edged early-80s outtake I had gotten ahold of in college on a 100th-generation muffled cassette bootleg - so muffled that I couldn't really decipher the lyrics.

Bruce demurred, saying "yeah, yeah, there's a lot of good stuff" in the vaults, but I persisted, saying it sounded so different than everything else. 

Lo and behold, when he released a Greatest Hits album in 1995, among the previously-unreleased tracks was... "Murder, Incorporated"! 

I felt like the most powerful fan ever - until I read the liner notes, in which he credited its release to the nudging of a fan who had apparently followed Bruce from show to show holding a handmade banner bearing the song's title. Ok, whatever. 

With the CD revolution it became way easier to make copies of the music without losing quality (or needing a pressing plant). Concerts that had been hard to find suddenly became much easier, and I started piling up so many that I could no longer really listen to all of them, and it lost its luster.

Some fans go nuts for the archival or developmental aspect of bootlegs of songs-in-the-making, or discarded demos - Bob Dylan has officially released so many of these I can't even count. For me, I found, unless it's the Beatles, I don't have the patience; usually there's good reason they didn't see light of day. (And interestingly, "Murder, Inc." seems to have faded back to obscurity and is not typically part of Bruce's set lists. Maybe I was wrong?) 

There's a different bootleg grail that I found myself gravitating towards - covers. Once you've started to stockpile live bootleg shows, there's only so many versions of "Radio Free Europe" or "Jungleland" or "Pump it Up" you're gonna sit through. 

(REM Mission of Burma cover)

But a cover of an oldie, while sometimes becoming an every-night thing for one tour, or even appearing on an album, was a cool, rarer souvenir, whether in person or on bootleg - hearing Costello do the Beatles' "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away," or Springsteen do Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Who'll Stop the Rain" or Aimee Mann doing Steely Dan's "Dirty Work" (which I still can't find a copy of anywhere, but I swear I heard her play it once).

When CDs first happened, somebody went to the trouble of assembling every Springsteen cover of an oldie they could find - despite varying quality of recording  - and assembled a whopping 3 boxed sets of them. It was almost too much - like eating an entire half-gallon of ice cream. 

From 1994 boxed set, "Covers Story" allegedly made in Italy

Free bootlegs! 

Then, like most, I gradually stopped listening to CDs, and opted for YouTube, where you could find videos of entire vintage concerts, and then Spotify, where, I discovered, Springsteen has been releasing huge amounts of archival live material, including all-cover collections (right), rendering even my bootleg boxed sets obsolete. (In the best way - he includes covers as far-ranging as "Rebel Rebel" and Lorde's "Royals," for chrissake.) 

*     *     *     *     *     * 

Cut to the pandemic. 

As I've previously mentioned here - and to any friend who would listen - during the long lockdown, the thing that most sustained me - as well as a few thousand other "clients," as we've been sarcastically/affectionately dubbed - are the live shows Wilco leader Jeff Tweedy started streaming in March 2020 from his Chicago house on his wife's Instagram page, co-starring his 20-something sons Spencer and Sammy, with occasional guest star family members, band members, and friends, all filmed by off-camera wife and mother hen, the tireless, tummeling, cancer-survivor-warrior Susie Miller Tweedy, who used to run the legendary local music bar Lounge Ax.

(The comment stream)

For the first 100 shows or so, I mostly ignored, or couldn't keep up with, the live running commentary of viewers who were providing not just a Greek-chorus to what was happening onscreen, but also side discussions ("what was your first live show?"), song requests, one-on-one chats, in-jokes, compliments, occasional attacks (on a Jeff footwear choice, e.g.), that Susie would often quote, in an amazing display of multitasking. 

But I was mostly there for the campfire songs by an insanely talented bunch of people, and the generous-of-spirit, warts-and-all family gathering that I was missing from my actual life. They cried about sad news events. They were there to comfort people in distress with a song in Hebrew. 

My only interactivity, such as it was, was to occasionally clip a song after the fact and post it on the Facebook Wilco fan page, or on my own, for people without the patience, time, or fandom to sift through it all. 

As time went on, I was especially embracing of - surprise, surprise - the covers. When I saw Wilco do an amazing all-covers show at the opening night of its bi-annual Solid Sound Festival in 2013,

The Last Time

 

In pre-pandemic times I prided myself on living a pretty hyperthyroid cultural and social NYC life - perhaps justifying to myself why I would choose to live in the city of hardship, by taking advantage of the upsides even as I never escaped the feeling of FOMO.  Would I ever get to DiFara's again before the old guy making the pizza dies?  That touted big MOMA show that's closing next weekend? 

Looking back at my calendar for January and February 2020, I can't believe our pace. And how much of it happened to be celebrating our friends' work. 

But by the Ides of March, I would be tormented about whether to even attend my best friend's wedding.

In the weeks leading up to pandemic panic, we had enjoyed Courtney Barnett concert at Levon Helm's Woodstock Barn. Painter Nicole Wittenberg's gallery opening. Two or three plays a week, including Ruth Negga at Hamlet at St. Ann's, Erik Jensen and Jessica Blank's Coal Country at the Public, a long-gestating oral history of a coal mining disaster with live music by Steve Earle (that my daughter had helped transcribe some interviews for). Syd's college classmate Blair Underwood tearing up A Soldier's Play on Broadway. 

Then there were readings -- Cathy Park Hong's Minor Feelings at Books are Magic, Rebecca Traister interviewing Peggy Orenstein about Boys & Sex at the Strand, playwright Brooke Berman's screenplay reading in a theater basement, an ACT UP gathering in Brooklyn, a Columbia writing class taught by Sam Freedman with guest Min Jin Lee. 

More: A meal in a tiny midtown Italian joint with my octagenarian aunt and uncle. Popping in to a gallery to witness Patrik Graham live-drop a soft clay bust of his head to make his flattened art for a school fundraiser. Practicing my latest volunteer tour of Central Park on some patient friends. 

As March hit, this pace didn't exactly come to a screeching halt -- more like a creeping horror movie one. These adventures, as well as more mundane, everyday activities that I took for granted -- sitting with an editor in a bay at CNN (hell, going in to the offices at CNN) -- meeting a friend at a coffee shop -- riding a subway train --  gradually had an underlying drumbeat of fear that grew louder and louder. 

The star of Jagged Little Pill who we didn't see. 3/4/20

Looking back, my first conscious awareness of the shift was Wednesday, March 4 - what turned out to be our last Broadway show, Jagged Little Pill. We sat cheek by jowl in the packed house, but Syd brought hand sanitizer. We saw an understudy for the the lead actress, Elizabeth Marshall - her first missed performance of the run -- which is always exciting, because you can feel the cast supporting the understudy - -but Marshall would later hypothesize that she had the coronavirus.  (A week later, the show, like most plays, would be forced to shutter.)

The Plot Against America panel, 92nd St. Y. 3/6/20

Two nights later, we attended a premiere screening of HBO's The Plot Against America at the 92nd St. Y with creator David Simon and stars John Turturro, Winona Ryder, and Morgan Spector. More signs of the new abnormal. Co-star Zoe Kazan had stayed in California instead of getting on a plane. The meet and greet with the cast in the lobby after was cancelled. We sat near the back. 

When a person coughed, the whole room turned and stared. 

The following Monday, more creeping caution. I took and passed my Central Park Ramble Tour test - but instead of shaking hands with my proctors, we rubbed elbows, semi-ironically. 

That night we had a dinner party with two couples we had wanted to introduce to each other. Nobody was masked -- they hadn't warned us to do so yet. We all half-joked if this was the last time we'd get to do so for a while. 

Little did we know.  

Tenement Museum tour, 3/10/20

The next day I took a Tenement Museum walking tour of the Lower East Side. The participants stayed socially distanced.

Then I met a friend in town from Nashville for lunch. We had planned to go to Katz's Deli, but that seemed like it would be thronged, including many out-of-towners - at this point the warnings were about the virus coming in via planes and boats, remember? -- so we opted for a small place. 

The waiter wore a mask. When he offered to grate parmesan on my pasta, I remember hesitating -- was his hand going to give me the illness?

That would be my last meal in a restaurant to date. 

Then came Friday the 13th. (I know!)

I wore a suit to CNN that day for the first time, because I planned to go right to the Brooklyn wedding of my college roommate/bestie - his third time. The first marriage had ended in divorce, the second with the tragic cancer death of his wife. I wanted to be there for him and his three kids, but also, for his wife, who is in her 50s and for whom this was a first wedding. I didn't want her to feel the night was cursed or wasn't worth celebrating.  

Syd demurred shlepping all the way from Harlem and back and I couldn't argue with her. I was happy that my subway car was fairly empty, and sent her a selfie as reassurance. (I now see some panic in my face.) 

But after arriving at the venue, I sanitized repeatedly, stayed away from strangers. I participated in the ceremony by reading something and applauding from the front row, I was incredibly moved - from the back of the room - by the newly united family's group hug -- and I skedaddled before the meal was served. 

On my walk back to the subway, I ran into a former co-worker from ABC news jogging with her dog. We hadn't seen each other in years. We bumped elbows. 

That kind of random encounter, too, would become nearly non-existent for the next year. 

The next day would be my last in the office for the rest of the year (and more). I was issued a "work from home laptop." I haven't been back since. The job has been doable remotely, thankfully we had worked together long enough that we knew the drill. (I can't work in person with an editor any more, though so there's a lot of additional back and forth via email.) I don't get to be in the control room during the show, so there are a lot of texts, phone calls, emails, and ragged nerves. 

Our past life has turned into Zoom simulacra: video with family instead of birthday and holiday gatherings (even college graduations). Virtual catch-ups with friends instead of dinners or flying to see them. Video "plays" instead of being in an audience. Many anticipated events have been cancelled or postponed. (Elton John's farewell concert from 2020 pushed to 2022! Stay healthy, Reg!)

So I was happy to qualify for a vaccine (I have a "co-morbidity," suddenly an asset) this week, though there are some questions about whether it will take because of some meds I'm on. 

Will it be the last time? Or will we end up needing shots every year? Will we be able to gather in groups without the cloud of suspicion and fear? 

One thing I know that the Year of Living Covidly has taught me: there were times a year ago that I thought I might be doing too much, because I feared it all might blur together. 

Nope.