Men Without Pants

Our band was rehearsing Iggy Pop's "I Just Wanna Be Your Dog" in my basement when Tommy, one of our guitarists, said to Steve, the other guitarist and lead singer, "Dude, you gotta sing like you really wanna be her dog!"

"What's wrong with the way I'm singing?" Steve asked, defensive.

"You don't sound like you really mean it," Tommy replied. "You lack conviction..."

Steve looked at Tommy, confused.

Mike, our bass player, interrupted our rehearsal to say to me, "Okay, Tony, what's the name of the band?"

I did a drum roll and hit the crash symbol. Then I shrugged and said, "I don't know, how about Men Without Pants?"

"Okay," Mike replied. "Men Without Pants it is."

Steve and Tommy, the lead guitarist agreed. Men Without Pants we were.

We changed our name a lot because we had trouble getting return gigs. It wasn't like we sucked; the bars sometimes didn't want us back because people couldn't relate to us. So we often played under a different name at the same place and hoped that people would like us better the second time around.

Mike, Steve and Tommy figured out that I was the best at coming up with new names, so that became my department. I came up with names like Dikes on Bikes, Life Sucks and Radio Nazi. The first was from a lesbian motorcycle gang that I had heard of in San Francisco, where my aunt lived. (No, she's not a lesbian, just a former hippy from the sixties — a free spirit.) The second was from you know what— we've all had them days. The third was a term I had for people who crank up the radio so loud while driving by that you can almost see the car shake. But I don't know how I came up with names like Purple Roses or Pushing Up Daisies, except that they had flowers in them.

I got Men Without Pants from a band in Montreal during the eighties called Men Without Hats; they had a song called "Safety Dance" that appeared on MTV for a while. I started from the head and worked my way down— that's how the thought process works sometimes. We got the gig under Men Without Pants.

We weren't terrible musicians. It's just that we weren't really good enough to be esoteric like King Crimson or early Pink Floyd, when Syd Barrett was their guitarist. Back in the eighties, people in the Windsor and Detroit areas were either into speed metal or punk, and we were neither. We were like late-sixties or early-seventies retro. Steve, our lead singer, neither screamed like the heavy metal singers trying to imitate Robert Plant, nor sang like he had a speech impediment like Johnny Rotten. We used a lot of distortion and feedback, like early Black Sabbath. If we had gone to Seattle, we could have easily been a grunge-punk band like Sonic Youth. Or a garage band, if we started out during the first decade of the millennium, when bands concluded that they didn't need bass players. Bass players can be such assholes, you know.

Tommy was the leader of the band, at least on stage. He could play with anybody; he had perfect pitch. He knew instantly which instrument was out of tune and never used a strobe tuner, which guitarists all seem to rely on nowadays. He was into alternative tunings too, like open-G and open-D, which only the Seattle bands were using at the time. When he was in the standard E tuning, he sometimes tuned each string down three semitones so that his guitar was tuned down to C-sharp — which Seattle bands also did. The rest of us shrugged at first, but then Steve and Mike followed suit.

I learned from Tommy that drummers also tuned their instruments, when he said to me one time, "Your snare's out of tune."

I'm like, "Okay, how do you tune a snare drum?"

He hit the A-string with his pick and said, "Try that."

So I tuned to his A-string, and I've been tuning my drums ever since. It made me a better drummer. I tune to the A of a Jamaican steel drum now.

Mike, our bass player, was the best musician. He played piano, cello and guitar, as well as electric and stand-up bass. He later got a doctorate in musicology and ended up teaching at university in upstate New York, or some place like that. We had trouble keeping bass players, because a good bass player can always find a better gig whenever there's any trouble in the band. In the end, we lost him too.

Since Steve got the previous gig there, we sent Mike, afraid that the bar owner might recognize Steve and not give us the gig. I sometimes hustled the gig too, because I could never convince anybody I'm famous. If I change my hairstyle, my wife won't even know me — I'm that anonymous.

We never sent Tommy because he was strange— we were sure the owner would recognize him right away. With his curly blond hair and wire-framed glasses, he was instantly recognizable. He looked like the lead singer of Mott the Hoople at one time. All he needed was the sunglasses and the top hat.

We really rehearsed for this gig, thinking this could be a new start for us. All full of enthusiasm, Tommy said, "Hey, let's practise every day! We would sound a lot better if we practised every day."

We knew he was right, but he typically got geeked up for gigs. The problem was: Mike was going to school full time while Steve and I were working full time. Steve was a janitor at the Ford Plant in Ford City, while I ran a lathe in Wyandotte, Michigan; I also had a wife and a two-year-old daughter. Steve was still trying to save his marriage, before his wife ran off with some other guy to the reservation on Walpole Island; she was part Ojibway. So we didn't practise as much as we should have; we only practised two or three days a week, about nine or ten times before the gig. The gig was about three weeks after we booked it.

Tommy didn't have a steady job, and he was smoking a lot of pot. His mother was apparently willing to let him sit up in his bedroom all day and practise. She was either a saint or as loony as him— maybe both.

What happened during one of our rehearsals was a sign that Tommy's head wasn't in the same place as the rest of the band artistically. He tuned his guitar to some funky tuning of his own invention and made it sound like a sitar; he had recently heard some music by Ravi Shankar that his mother had. His parents were both right in the middle of all the craziness during the sixties, only his father apparently never came back; his parents were divorced around the time he was born, 1968, I think it was. His father was living in California or Florida. His mother was still a free spirit.

Tommy played melodic lines on the high strings and used the lower strings as a drone, very Eastern; it sounded like he was playing two guitars. Since Indian and Middle Eastern music is based on a system of microtones rather than the twelve-tone system of seven natural notes and five flats and sharps, he probably wouldn't have sounded authentic to somebody from India or the Middle East. But to us, the flowing lines from his guitar sounded exotic, Middle Eastern. We all had a passing acquaintance with Middle Eastern music, having heard it from the open windows of passing cars driven by Arabs and Pakistanis down Wyandot Street in Windsor, where all the Indian and Middle Eastern restaurants are, if nothing else.

The problem was that nobody knew where he was coming from. Mike was able keep up with him because Tommy played diminished and harmonic minor scales over a two-chord vamp, but Steve never knew when to come in. We jammed as a trio— Tommy, Mike and me — with Steve looking on like a spectator. I felt later that that some congas would have been better than the Pearl drum set that I was playing, but I could keep up. It was a tabla rhythm, nothing elaborate — something like: one-and-uh-two-and-uh-three-and-uh-four-and. It was just that the stress fell on the second and third beats instead of either one and three or two and four. I never thought I was getting it right.

We stopped after about ten minutes. Tommy smiled like he had just discovered a new dimension besides those of time and space. He said to Steve, "Well, what do you think?"

Steve expressed an enthusiasm that I was sure he didn't feel: "Hey, that was real good!"

"Well, see if you can come up with some lyrics," Tommy replied.

But Steve never came up with any lyrics, and we never played that song again. Since we had recorded it on my four-track, I later added some bongos. Tommy dubbed an acoustic guitar tuned the same way as his electric and used it as a drone, never stopping his strings with his left hand on the neck. He explained to me that that was how the tambura, a stringed instrument of northern India, was played: without stopping the strings. His mother had hiked through Europe and the Middle East to India with him on her back; she had seen live Indian music performed numerous times in India.

As the time for our gig approached, Tommy starting acting more and more strange. He missed a couple of rehearsals and Mike delivered an ultimatum to me and Steve : "If he misses anymore, I'm out!"

Steve was better at massaging the egos of other musicians than anybody I have ever known. We're still friends, me and Steve, though we don't play in bands together anymore. He was a kind, decent person— a real prince of a guy. He once found a replacement band after we had to cancel on short notice— something he wasn't legally obligated to do. We were unable to play the night of the gig because we had lost a lead singer and bass payer just before the gig, but he didn't want to leave the bar without a band.

He was a sheep in wolf's clothing in a cutthroat business. Since he was our manager, we might have lost some musicians because they thought he wasn't cutthroat enough. We often played for as little as three-hundred and fifty a night when we could have possibly made five-hundred or more. We played in some real dives where the acoustics were shitty and the patrons were rowdy. We never played in a real redneck bar, but we once had somebody come up to us and say, "You boys mind playin' some country?"

We knew that Mike was serious about quitting the band, so Steve and I went to talk to Tommy. We drove to Tommy's house across the Detroit River to Windsor, Ontario. When I found out that Tommy lived in Windsor, I said, "Hey, I didn't know he was Canadian!"

Steve replied, "If people know you're from Canada, you're not really Canadian."

He had a point. I'm from Hawkesbury, Ontario, but not a lot of people know about it.

First, we stopped at a Harvey's near the Ambassador Bride, where Steve had some poutine for the first time. Then we drove to Steve's place. He lived near the corner of Riverside Drive and Joseph Janisse Street, a three-bedroom red brick Canadian bungalow with a loft from the early twenties on the south side of the street. The place look immaculate from the outside, like his mother had nothing better to do but do the gardening all day, weather permitting.

We rang the doorbell. A few minutes later, the door was answered by a wraith-like middle-aged woman in a long, tie-dyed cotton skirt and a woollen shawl around her shoulders. Her gun-metal grey hair was down to the small of her back in a pony tail. She looked like a grandma, but she smiled very pleasantly and said, "He's upstairs!"

When we arrived at the top of the stairs, where Tommy's bedroom was, Steve knocked on his bedroom door. We heard a muffled voice say, "Go away!"

"I think he's depressed," Steve said to me confidentially.

I rolled my eyes and I was like, "Great — a head case!"

Steve knocked on the door again and said, "Tommy, we need to talk."

Tommy told us to come in; he was still in bed. His bedroom wasn't super messy, but it was getting there. It was small, with just a cheap dresser made of particle board, a bed, and a coffee table with a roach clip in the ashtray. In a few weeks, we would have had trouble finding him under all of that stuff on the floor, if he let all of his clothes and everything else pile up. There were clothes all over the floor.

"We have to talk," Steve repeated.

Tommy rolled over on his stomach and buried his head under his pillow. "Life sucks," he cursed.

"We already played under that name, remember?" Steve joked.

Then he said, in all seriousness, "We're about to lose another bass player."

Then he looked at me and added, "Tony said he wants to quit the band too. If you don't get it together, we're not going to have a band, Tom."

Tommy pulled the pillow off his head, rolled over on his back, and stared at us, his expression betraying nothing. His ratty, shoulder-length brown hair and almost peach-fuzz beard gave him the look of a hermit who had spent some time in a cave. The truth was that he sometimes holed himself in his bedroom for days at a time, having to work himself into a frenzy just to pick up his guitar. Music was work for him as well as play. If he wasn't rehearsing or playing gigs, he was like a workingman who had just been laid off; his life was without purpose.

For Tommy, music was a reason to get up in the morning, which typically started about two o'clock in the afternoon for him. He had no other ambition in life but to be a performing musician. Extended vacations are not good for you, even if you can afford not to work. An idle mind is the devil's workshop, and idle hands his tools. Unfortunately, we thought we could already hear the devil hammering away in the workshop that he had set up in Tommy's mind.

"We play our gig next week," Steve reminded him. "I want to get two or three more rehearsals in before we play. Are you going to be at the rehearsal Thursday, or are we going to have to find somebody else?"

Tommy looked at him for a moment, then replied, almost croaking like a frog: "I'll be there."

Tommy was true to his word; he didn't miss another rehearsal before the gig. However, we found out later that he had a drug problem that was far more serious than any of us had realized. His drug of choice was acid— mushrooms, purple microdot or mescaline. He liked Ecstasy too, though I don't think he ever took it during a gig.

He later confessed that he had done acid over a thousand times since junior high, and that he used to time his trips before a gig or a rehearsal. He would start tripping a day or two before a gig or rehearsal and play while on the tail end of the trip. He sometimes played brilliantly, but sometimes he didn't. Tommy was seldom obviously stoned, since his drug of choice wasn't the normal one for drug users. We didn't make the connection right away; we thought he was just flakey.

Steve only stayed with him as long as he did because when Tommy played well, few guitarists could touch him. It was just that when he didn't play well— when he sucked— bars didn't want us back and musicians quit our band.

Since Tommy didn't have a car, Steve and Mike left it to me to make sure that he got to the gig on the night we were supposed to play. I picked him up at his mother's house, and he was ready. I took that as a good sign. Tommy had two guitars with him rather than one. The black guitar case with the bumper stickers all over it protected his beloved white Stratocaster from the elements, but I had never seen the brown case before. It was all beat up, like it had been abused by a troop of mountain gorillas in the Congo.

Interested, I laughed and I asked, imitating a red neck, "Where did you get the guns, John?"

That was from an old song by The Guess Who, and he knew it. He smiled with a crazy gleam in his eye and said, "I picked it up a pawn shop. It's just a Fender Mustang, nothing expensive. I just wanted a different sound."

From the look in his eye, you could tell that something was up. Something told me I had better hold onto my you-know-whats because, tonight we were going to be in for a wild ride.

We were scheduled to go on at ten-thirty and play until two o'clock, when the bar closed. The bar that we were playing was somewhere on Holbrook Street in Hamtramck (that's "ham-tram-ick", not "ham-tramk"). It was better than a dive, but not the classiest place that we had ever played. At this point, however, we were happy to be playing anywhere. We set up and ran our sound check.

The gig started off well. After the first song, we had no major problems with the sound, though we had no soundman of our own running the board; somebody from the house was running it.

We played a mix of originals and cover tunes. Tommy did a credible job of singing Jimi Hendrix's "Foxy Lady," playing the solo with his teeth. He had worked on it hard during rehearsal so that it would sound like he knew what he was doing on stage. There isn't a lot that's left to chance in the music business, you know.

After a twenty-minute break, we came out for the second set. Tommy sang another Hendrix tune, "Manic Depression," on which he also did a credible. Mike on bass and Steve on guitar played the signature riff an octave apart while Tommy took the solo. Tommy threw everything into his solo, like he did with all of his solos, but he only got a tepid response from the audience. That happens sometimes. No matter what you do, the audience will not respond.

Until the third set, the most memorable event of the evening was Mike getting telephone numbers from three different women. Mike used to stand up on stage, looking cool and unruffled; women like that aura of confidence, you know. Since we never had a front man, a lead singer, for any length of time in our band, the bass player usually got the most chicks.

I was like Ringo, who was more or less the Beatles' "special effect," because of his big nose. Since I was already married, I had found out that one woman was more than enough for me to handle anyway. Steve felt the same way, though his wife obviously was handling more than one man. But that's another pair of sleeves, Steve's marital problems.

The women mostly ignored Tommy, possibly because he looked barely twenty-one and he had a ragged peach-fuzz beard. As well, he looked crazy in a goofy sort of way— not like Charles Manson. Only there's a fine line between goofy and Charles Manson, I guess.

Teenage boys may like to see guitarists jump around and play the high notes up past the twelfth fret, but it doesn't seem to impress the women. If it did, Tommy would have got the most chicks hands down.

The third set began much like the previous two sets, uneventfully. Then Tommy put his beloved Strat on his guitar stand for the last song of the set and put the strap of his new Fender Mustang around his neck and shoulder. The song that were about to play was Hendrix's version of "The Star Spangled Banner."

Tommy dedicated it to the service men and women sent to protect the people of Iraq and Afghanistan from Osama Bin Ladin. There was plenty of "rockets' red glare" and "bombs bursting in air" in Tommy's rendition of "The Star Spangled Banner" that night; he was able to replicate Hendrix's whirling dive bombs and thunderous explosions, no problem.

Then, for the last explosion, he threw up his guitar, stepped back, and watched it crash to the stage. The guitar landed bottom end down and then rolled over to one side. I was afraid that he might throw it into my drums, so I stepped to side, a voice screaming in my head, "Oh no, not my beloved Pearl drum set!"

Instruments have souls, you know, but Tommy had no intention of smashing an expensive drum set, no more than he would have demolished a top-of-the line guitar like a Strat. Instead, he grabbed his Mustang by the neck and brought it down to the floor hard a couple of times like a firefighter chopping a burning piece of furniture.

Then, after the neck broke off, he grabbed a plastic bottle of some lighter fluid, knelt before the helpless guitar's prostrate body, and poured some of the fluid all over it— a big mistake. Every light in the house came on as a couple of guys built like trees grabbed him by the arms and violently jerked him up to his feet.

He had the look of a drunk about to be tossed out of a bar for reasons that he didn't understand. Tommy didn't understand that he was playing inside a bar with a sprinkler system rather than an outdoor venue like the 1967 Monterrey Pops Festival, where Jimi Hendrix gained rock and roll immortality by setting fire to his guitar.

Hamtramck has a fire code, you know — as well as all the other cities in the Detroit area.

We were all thinking, "This can't be happening!" But it was. The owner threatened us with prosecution, but we got off with a warning. He kicked us out and told us not to come back. We hauled off our equipment to the jeers of some of the patrons. I vividly remember one guy gleefully shouting, "You guys suck!"

I will never forget it if I live to be a hundred years old; it felt like being spat upon and then shat upon.

After we finished packing, we all wanted to kill Tommy— even Steve. Humiliated, Mike quit the band on the spot. After a couple of days to think about it, I did the same. Men Without Pants wasn't fun for me anymore; it was not worth quitting my day job.

Steve still plays in bands while Mike is teaching music somewhere in the US where the unemployment rate isn't as high as it is in Michigan. Steve told me later that Tommy was arrested for possession of an eighth of an ounce of marijuana at the border by US customs, but we don't know what happened after that; he joined the world of missing persons, more or less.

Hey, it's only rock and roll, right? If you can make a good living at it, like the Rolling Stones, fine. If not, it can be an expensive, even dangerous, hobby.

Men Without Pants disappeared into hyperspace like a computer file when somebody hits "delete" rather than "save." It may be better to burn out than to fade away, but we faded away.