I'm rich and famous and an incorrigible, though amiable, reprobate and I got this way playing loud three-chord rock'n'roll. According to my accountant, I blow a hundred grand a year on girls and cars and parties and friends, but I don't care; it just keeps rolling in. A couple times a year I go into a studio in New York or LA or Jamaica with my band and we cut a new album and then go out on a tour for a month or two. Last year a car rental company used one of my old songs in a national commercial and the money I made from that was ridiculous. I've been doing this for over twenty years and everybody's been waiting for me to slow down, but I ain't tired yet.
Don't get the idea that this has all been a day at the beach, though. I've been married and divorced twice, had a heroin habit for a couple of years, and sat naked in the sand on Catalina Island at 4:00 am toying with a Smith & Wesson .38 Special loaded with hollow point bullets and wondering how much longer I really wanted to live. (Until I was 60? 50? Until 4:30?) My musical brother, a guitar player with whom I'd written half a dozen top ten songs, died when his girl friend slit his throat when she caught him in bed with one of my ex-wives. Five years ago I came within a few farthings of going broke when I started my own record label and my partners ran off with all the assets and our accountants kept the money that we thought was going toward taxes. As they say in the music business, the best way to be assured of being able to retire with a million dollars is to start off with ten million. The reason I'm still playing rock'n'roll is because I know there's nothing else I could do that would make me any money. Besides, when it's good, it's real good, and I gotta have it.
When I'm not working I hang out in New York or at my ranch in Montana, philosophize about life and death with existentialist artists and writers, ravish gorgeous decadent women, play be-bop jazz, and collect cars. The cars serve as a tenuous connection to normal life, and I've got twenty five or thirty of them in a fire-proof humidity-controlled garage on the grounds of my palatial hut in the Hollywood Hills. Cadillacs, Thunderbirds, MG's, an Aston Martin like James Bond drove in Goldfinger. But my favorites are my Chevies, and I've got about a dozen of them at any given time completely restored. It's been my goal to have one for each year from 1955 to 1972, but I buy and sell and trade them so often that I've never really got close. Well, maybe someday. I do a lot of the work on them myself and I've got a '61 Impala under reconstruction right now that I hope to finish before I have to go out on the next tour.
Super Chevy magazine comes around every year or so to check out what I've got and I take some of my cars to shows. A lot of them have been in movies.
A couple of months ago I was in New York doing some promo work for my new CD and a reporter from Rolling Stone showed up at my suite at the Waldorf to interview me. The CD was coming out the next day and we were going on a 25-city tour across the US. I had been in training for the big tour, lifting weights and eating lots of fruit and vegetables and trying to cut back on the all-nighters, and had just come back from a jog in Central Park with one of my bodyguards and my drummer and we all sat around my suite drinking bottled spring water and eating raw carrots and talking about the music and the tour.
The reporter was a nice looking dark-haired girl young enough to be my daughter, and when she got around to asking me about my personal life my car collection came up, of course, and she asked me why Chevies were my favorites. I told her Chevies were cool, American, and beautiful and anybody who didn't like them was probably a Communist or a blacksmith. Anybody who grew up in the 60's like I did probably had fond memories of momentous social events that involved Chevies - dates, proms, high school football games, races. My Dad drove a Chevy. I didn't really feel like going into it with her at the time, but there was one Chevy that had been the centerpiece around which a series of mysterious events had occurred when I'd been teenager that had impressed that bow-tie logo indelibly on my mind, and when I read her article a month later waiting for a flight in the VIP lounge at O'Hare I got to thinking about that old Chevy and the memories came flooding back.
When I was 15 I was nuts about cars, and because of one particular 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air out of the 185,562 that were made that year I became involved in a murder mystery. It happened in Calhoun, Ohio, a small town just outside of Cincinnati where I spent a couple of weeks every summer with my Grandparents when I was a kid. Two girls were murdered. A pimp was killed. A man went to prison.and I was one of the witnesses in the murder trial that sent him there. And my buddy Nick Palladino was killed. That was in 1963 and we all thought at the time that the mystery was solved. But we were wrong. That car solved the mystery for us over thirty years later.
The '55 Chevy was Nick's car, and it was the fastest and coolest ride in the whole world, or at least I thought so. They parked it at his aunt's after he was killed. She had it for sale for a while, but ended up just keeping it in the garage, although she didn't even drive, because she couldn't bear to part with it.
Nick and I had had a lot of fun in that car, racing it, cruising in it, drinking beer in it, and and I got to wondering what had ever happened to it. Wouldn't it be cool to find it? Yes, it would. It would be a fantastic addition to my collection, so I called Arnie, my manager, in Beverly Hills the next day, gave him all the information and asked him to find it for me. He was used to odd ideas and requests from me, so he casually made a note and said he'd hire a private investigator and see what they could come up with. A week later he called me in Miami and told me they had found it in Texas.
When Nick's aunt had died in 1979 she still had the car in her garage and it had been sold to a car collector from St. Louis named Loomis, who had died in a wreck trailering the car back to St. Louis. Nick's old car wasn't hurt in the wreck, and it had been stored in Loomis's garage with several other old cars for the next three years until a radio station in Chicago bought it to give away to some lucky listener as a big promotional gimmick. The kid who won it was getting married, though, and his betrothed wouldn't let him keep it so it went to the second place winner, a night club owner in Downers Grove who parked it in the lobby of his club, which was named Chevy's and had a 60's motif. A year later the guy lost the club in tax court and another car collector bought it and took it to Dallas. This guy died of a stroke a few months later and the car had been in his garage ever since. It was in very good shape, the guy's son said, and hadn't even been driven since they'd had possession of it. Amazing, after all these years. Nobody had been driving it, just hauling it around the country.
Was it for sale? Well, they really wanted to sell the whole collection, which included some other old Chevys, a Hudson Terraplane, and a '32 Ford roadster, the son said, but they'd had no bites, and were at the point where they would consider selling the cars off individually. He started the bidding at $6,500 and Arnie settled on $5,500 and sent off a check and arranged to have the car hauled to LA. I resisted the impulse to tell Arnie to call the guy back and see how much he wanted for the Hudson.
It was cloudy and cool, like the last time I'd seen that car at Nick's aunt's house in 1963 when I went back to Calhoun for the murder trial, that October day when my leased tour bus rolled back home up Interstate 5 to Los Angeles from San Diego, which had been the last gig on the tour. After six weeks of buses and planes and hotels and balls-to-the-wall rock'n'roll I felt better than Keith Richards looks without eye-liner, but that didn't mean I felt good, and my girl friend and I staggered off the bus and into the house. The first thing we did was jump into the hot tub. The second thing we did felt even better. The third thing we did was go out to the garage to see the car.
They'd parked it next to the '61 Impala that I'd been working on. I walked around it, inspecting it. Nick Palladino's old car, sitting in my garage. I couldn't believe Arnie had found it. I knew everything about that car - I had helped Nick work on it enough to be acquainted with every bolt and nut - and I looked at it closely. It was the same car, all right.
"Ooh, it's all nasty looking," Shanna, my girl friend said. She was a film student at UCLA, and had flown up to Seattle to be with me for the last week of the tour. She was used to BMW's, Porches, and pristine Chevies.
"You won't recognize it in six months," I said as she ran around it snapping "before" pictures with her Nikon.
The candy-apple red paint, which was cracked in a million fine lines, had changed to a dirty gold color, except for around the edges of the doors and hood and trunk, and the perimeter of the windshield was opaquely discolored. The tires, cracked with age, were low, and there was rust on the chrome reversed wheels. The upholstery was cracked, and the carpet was rotted.
But there was no major rust on the body; it was definitely restorable. It started up with puffs of oil from the dual exhaust when I gave it a jump. The engine sounded strong, but the tailpipes were rusted through in a few spots and it was pretty loud. It squeaked a lot, too; the bushings would all be dried out.
Arnie came over later with some execs from the record label for a little post-tour schmoozing and we had drinks and catered shrimp and lobster. I sneaked away while they were in the projection room with Shanna watching one of the eerie black and white existential films she liked to produce and got me a Bud and went out to the garage. It was downright cold out now, by Los Angeles standards, and I wore a Lakers warm-up jacket. I turned on the radio in the garage. It was set on KRTH, an oldies station, and appropriately, Jan and Dean came on singing "Surf City", a song I had heard with Nick the day of his sister's funeral.
I opened the Chevy's door, inhaled the aged mustiness, and got in and sat behind the wheel, putting my beer between my legs and gripping the wheel with my left hand and putting my right hand on the 4-speed Hurst shifter. It felt so familiar. I had never driven this car; I didn't have a driver's license at the time, but I had sat behind the wheel a lot and dreamed. I wondered if the radio was still set on the Cincinnati stations we used to listen to.
No tape players in those days, or FM radio, either, to speak of - WSAI was our favorite. They played great music - Dion, Elvis, The Shirelles, The Flamingos.... I still loved that music, and I had "The Wanderer" on one of my recent CD's.
We all hung out at a drive-in hamburger joint near Calhoun called Dino's back in that summer of 1963. All the guys brought their street rods and custom cars down there to show them off, but Nick's Chevy made them all look slow and shabby.
There was a teen dance club called the Top Deck where we went on Friday nights, and I fell in love with a little black-haired girl named Shauna Hughes who worked at the concession counter. I wondered how she was doing these days.
I had ridden with Debbie Shelton in this car. Debbie lived in Calhoun just down the street from my Grandparents' and I tried to fool around with her every year. But the summer of 1963 was the year I finally got somewhere with her. I knew how she was doing - she had moved to LA when she graduated from high school in 1965 and worked in a couple TV commercials and had a walk-on in a movie named "Head" starring the Monkees. I was living in Venice at the time in a one-bedroom apartment just down the street from Muscle Beach trying to get my music career going and we saw each other a few times, but she was killed by stray gunfire in a Hollywood apartment in 1973 when a drug deal went wrong.
Calhoun was a rickety little river town in southwestern Ohio near Cincinnati next to a refinery that had been built there after the Depression. My Grandpa worked there, as did most of the people in Calhoun. He was a telegrapher, and worked in a tiny white shack in the shadows of the huge gas-filled tanks. Calhoun had about 1200 people, I guess. It was just a few hilly tree-lined streets and alleys clustered around a Post Office and a saloon and a grocery store. The stop sign at this busy intersection had to be resurrected on a fairly regular basis, the patrons of the saloon being uncommonly hard on it Saturday nights. The pungent aroma of the refinery wafted over the town when the wind blew from the north; when it blew from the other direction it brought dust from the nearby gravel pit. In the summertime little kids ran around in dirty white underpants. One family had a real lion in a trailer in their back yard. The summer of 1963 was the most memorable I ever spent in Calhoun. Hell, it was the most memorable I ever spent anywhere.