(If you don’t know, it might be helpful to read this first.)

This will be by no means a complete or well-thought-out remembrance. As it is, it’s taken me a week to get this far, and I don’t know that anything I would write or say would ever get better.

Last night I finally felt able again to listen to some of David’s music. Driving into Hollywood, I fired up “Trouble on Big Beat Street,” the final Pere Ubu album (save the one to come posthumously) and the very beginning of it shot me through with adrenaline. Because it’s the most recent, this is the Ubu album I’ve played the least; listening to it last night and hearing the dearly departed dead man sing shocked me all over again:  Here was something truly original, something breathtaking in its originality actually, and very soon there would be nothing new coming from this voice that I have cherished and followed for most of my life.

In his singing, David was known for yelping, and howling, and growling, and more, and for most of my life, that voice has been grabbing me by the throat and shaking me.

It was more than his voice, to be sure. It was his sensibility. Certainly part of it was the raw determination that nothing nothing nothing would stop him — no shift in musical favor, no financial setback, no exodus of any band member essential or not, certainly no decline in his health (he put out two more albums after dying twice, and was working on this new one from the hospital); no, it took death to stop him, and somehow I think his music whether with Ubu or solo or in his other bands was just a bold proclamation that dammit he was going to do this no matter what, and he would never stop doing this until he was dead. There is a lot to be said for that. And there’s a lot to be said for the power in his music:  David Thomas music, in all its variety, is never listless or phoned in — no matter the tone, it’s always committed and powerful, sometimes a gutpunch and sometimes an ode to people and places best remembered, whether in your life or his, but despite the different ways it was conveyed, it always demanded attention, and deserved it.

Childhood is always formative, and it was in my late childhood that I found Pere Ubu — kind of. An older mentor of mine lent me a copy of the collected “Ubu” plays (thank you, Grove Press!) as written by Alfred Jarry, who was an impish and snotty high-schooler when he wrote the first one and so was very much someone on my wavelength. When, a bit later, I started publishing and distributing a rock-and-roll newspaper around southern New Jersey, one of my advertisers, an independent record store, listed the sorts of bands they carried, listed among them was Pere Ubu! I got over there quickly, but no, they did not have any Pere Ubu records; for a few years I would just have to content myself with reading the band’s album reviews in the first Rolling Stone Record Guide and then the second Rolling Stone Record Guide, which now had me slavering over ever getting to hear them. Finally, a few more years later when I was living on my own in the winter-abandoned beach town of Ocean City, I found a copy of “390 Degrees of Simulated Stereo” and raced home with it to drop it onto my turntable. As soon as it started up, my hair stood on end and I thought, “WHAT is THIS?” And then, quickly following:  “Whatever THIS is, THIS is for ME!”

(Years later, David was to tell me that in his experience a lot of fans’ first exposure to Pere Ubu was through “390 Degrees.” I surmised that maybe it had better distribution.)

After that, there was no turning back for me, and I tracked down every CD or album or cassette I could, scouring Philadelphia and New York for them. The band broke up for a period, then returned — with what, to me, is the finest album ever made, “The Tenement Year.” Somehow David and Ubu had found a way to marry near-pop with the clamor and clatter of its post-industrial-Ohio sound, for something even more remarkable. As someone who worked closely with dancers and choreographers for two years, I grew more accustomed to seeing how disparate elements separate and come together. I’m sure there are other examples of this in music (perhaps Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” for one), but to me the exemplar is “The Tenement Year.” The production pulls an expert rhythm section (with two drummers), contrapuntal discord from synthesizers, a pop-oriented lead guitar and David’s caterwauling into a seamless whole with the sheen of what should have been popular for the intelligentsia. The band would go further into the pop realm with the next two albums (maybe two-and-a-half), but it was this record right here that showed that musically Pere Ubu could do anything… which they would prove over the next 37 years.

In 1989, I finally got to see the band play live, on the “Cloudland” tour, at the Roxy here in Los Angeles. And from that point, I never looked back. I saw them multiple times in Los Angeles (at the Knitting Factory; at UCLA; at the Echo; in David’s 3-day “Disastodrome” confabulation that included Rocket from the Tombs, the Kidney Brothers, Pere Ubu, Van Dyke Parks, George Wendt, and many other surprise guests and acts; and other places), in San Diego, in New York, Chicago, near-Cleveland Ohio, London multiple times, Canterbury England, Madrid, and God knows where else. Yes, I started following them around because what they had I could not get enough of. 

David had a reputation as a curmudgeon. Maybe he was. He was certainly exacting. But from my first interaction with him, in 1999, he was nothing but kind and generous and even grateful. That year I had a play running in London, and I made it part of the deal with the theatre that they’d bring me over and put me up for three weeks, so I set up all sorts of meetings with theatre producers and theatre people… and with David, who was living in Brighton with his first wife, who was English. I found his email address on the web and emailed him saying, essentially, because after all this was the internet, “I’m not a nut or a crank, I’m just a huge fan of your work. I’m coming to London to see my play. Can I invite you out for dinner or a pint?”

And to my astonishment, he emailed me back his phone number. And then when I got to town, I called him from one of those red British telephone boxes we admired, and he answered I just about couldn’t believe it. He took the train in, we met for dinner, I quickly realized I couldn’t keep up (he drank four pints; I quit at one-and-a-half) and then, miraculously, we jointly walked over and saw my play. It wasn’t terrific, but he was nice about it, and somewhere I have a photo of the two of us standing outside beneath the marquee. Thank you for that, David.

I had more experiences with David over the ensuing 25 years, either at shows, or online in emails or video meetups. Several years ago I went to Spain expressly to see his music workshop one night and Pere Ubu the next night, and he kindly joined my daughter and me and David’s manager and later wife Kiersty for dinner. Two years ago, David and Kiersty stayed with me at my house while in town for what would prove to be Pere Ubu’s final U.S. show; my two sons and I proudly helped load in the band at the concert venue and I got to meet the truly legendary Eric Drew Feldman (Pere Ubu, but also part of Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band), the also legendary Wayne Kramer (MC5), and to hang out again with Craig Bell (Rocket from the Tombs) and a bunch of fellow superfans. I will always cherish these memories, as well as the thought of David sitting in my back yard admiring my orange tree, and our discussion while I drove him over to the show (we talked mostly about “Pennsylvania,” to me another in a long list of their recorded highlights), and David having breakfast at my breakfast table, and one of my sons and I struggling to get David, by then wheelchair-bound, up into the main area of my house. You haven’t lived until you’ve lifted and carried the living creator who means the most to you in the world. 

I share that last part because it must be noted just how crucial Kiersty Boon has been to David, to Pere Ubu, and to David and the band’s fans. For several days, both here and in New York, but also in Madrid, I got to see just how much Kiersty put into helping David through all his mounting health issues. Kiersty, who is a wonderful and noteworthy poet and my good friend, was an incalculable boon to David — and to all of us around the world who cared so deeply about his music. Kiersty was the band’s manager, and the person creating the band’s marvelous music videos, and heading the merchandise design, and managing the merchandise tables, and so much more both creative and administrative that it boggles the mind to consider it. We would have had so much less without her. I think there would have been no operation at all without her.

I will always have the music, and as time goes by, I’m sure I’ll be able to focus more on that music and less on the overwhelming sense of loss I have. No, there won’t be any more concerts featuring David Thomas; it’s shocking to realize that that 36-year-period of my life is now over. I’m determined to hold onto the incredible friendships I’ve made through the Pere Ubu network, and I’ve been in touch with many of them. One replied, “Friends always, Lee,” which meant a lot to me, and I hold close to my heart a member of the band, to whom I’m enormously grateful, and Kiersty.

The people close to me are well aware how great a loss David’s passing feels to me. I went to the theatre two nights ago with one of them who had joined me at several of the LA Pere Ubu shows. He said that everything I’ve been sharing on Facebook and in texts to him inspired him to check in on Pere Ubu’s first two albums, the incomparable “The Modern Dance” and “Dub Housing.” He and I have very similar tastes in most things, but most importantly theatre and music, and he said that after finally listening to those two albums, he wondered, “How did I miss this?!?!?” And he got choked up, which got me choked up.

Lucky him, he’s got 19 studio albums to explore, and dozens of live recordings.

They are there for you, too.

In a paradox worthy of Schrodinger and his cat, I’ve now seen the film “Eno” twice — except really I have seen, once each, two films named “Eno.” 

That’s because “Eno,” a documentary about the brilliant music producer and musician of sorts Brian Eno, is constructed anew on every viewing. Yes, every single time it is screened, a computer with the name Brain One (you’ll easily figure out the anagram) pulls from 30 hours of interviews with Eno and 500 hours of film from his personal archive to assemble this latest version of the movie. 

(For more about all this, click here.) 

Meaning that what two friends and I saw in Glendale in March and what I saw with one of those friends, plus my fiancée and my son, two weeks ago here in Los Angeles, are related but different. They’re cousins of the same film.

They were also both fascinating, enjoyable… and uplifting. Because while most of the press has been about the process, the true star is Eno himself:  his disruptive creative process, his interest in both nature and electronics, and his pragmatic optimism. 

My friend Trey and I are decades-long fans of Brian Eno and his work, as a founding member of Roxy Music, as a solo artist, as a collaborator with David Byrne, John Cale and others, and as a producer for Talking Heads, Devo, U2, Ultravox, and countless others. We also, some years ago, went to see Eno’s installation at California State University Long Beach  of “77 Million Paintings,” which featured endlessly randomly generated paintings with endlessly randomly generated music by Eno himself. We also caught his talk about that and other things (like his Long Now movement).

So we are fans. Big fans.

After seeing “Eno” a second time, we both walked out saying we’d like to see it again. Unfortunately, it usually involves getting to the right place at the right time — because Brain One has to be onsite to work its magic.

Until now.

Now we, and you, and everyone, can see “Eno” thanks to this special showing:

On January 24^th, there will be a global streaming event, “Eno 24.”  Anyone, anywhere in the world, including viewers in any time zone on the planet will be able to watch multiple iterations of the film and much more.

Here’s the link:  https://www.ohyouprettythings.com/new-products/eno24

With apologies to the band Oasis for paraphrasing one of their album titles, I will definitely maybe (not) be seeing them on their reunion tour.

That’s because I saw one of the two Gallagher brothers in the band, the far less talented one, Liam, five years ago at the Hollywood Bowl, as the opener for The Who.

I wrote about that experience — including paying forty-eight dollars for two pretzels and two beers! — back here, but figure I’ll quote my appraisal then of Liam:

Let me just say, whoever booked Liam Gallagher to open is a genius, because he and his band are so terrible that they make The Who look all the more brilliant! Large barnyard animals sing better than Gallagher and bring more to a stage presence as well, and his band did nothing to hide this fact. He seemed to have two drummers on stage — one of them also named Gallagher, so I’m assuming that particular drummer isn’t on the tour purely on talent — and I’m reasonably certain I can play drums better than they… and I don’t play the drums.

I’m shocked that, ten years after the final death knell of Oasis, Liam still has a career. Of sorts.

I well remember enduring Liam’s off-key (well, flat) delivery and his utter lack of stage presence (him bent over unmoving like a broken-winged crow for the entire 45 minutes) until finally my friend Bridget and I just started laughing about it. I’ve seen many bad acts in my life (have I mentioned late-stage Meat Loaf lately?), but Liam is the only one of them mounting a mega-reunion under the false pretense that he can hit a note.

Meanwhile, as I noted yesterday, I saw (Jeff Lynne’s) E(lectric) L(ight) O(rchestra) on Saturday night, and having just seen that phenomenal show that was Well Worth The Fee I Put Out For It (for two tickets rather close up on the floor), I have no intention of squandering any ducats on Oasis, no matter how much I happen to admire a song or two despite Liam Gallagher’s undeserved high self-regard.

To those who admire Oasis, have at it, especially my friends in the UK and Ireland and Europe; I have no judgment. I honestly hope you enjoy your champagne supernova.

Meanwhile, I’m mystified that the far superior Blur, arch-nemeses to Oasis, were reduced to playing the Glass House in Pomona, California recently, capacity 800. It’s perhaps best to remember, Don’t look back in anger.

I had dinner last night with my good friend Shanna at a place with amazing Thai cuisine. (And that’s the restaurant’s name:  Amazing Thai Cuisine. So, yes, there sometimes is truth in advertising.) I had last been to Amazing Thai Cuisine just days before, with my fiancée, bringing a bottle of chardonnay for myself and ordering spicy duck salad with brown rice on the side. Tonight, feeling adventurous, I ordered the spicy duck salad with brown rice on the side, but brought a different label of chardonnay.

Discussion with Shanna turned to Martin Mull, who had died earlier that day, breaking my heart.

I loved Martin Mull. As a kid in the 1970s, I watched him on “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” “Fernwood 2Night,” America 2Night,” and in various television or film appearances over the years, and bought all his records. One year, for Chistmas, I bought myself his album “Normal,” which remains my favorite, and then unwrapped my presents and found that my sister had bought me the same album. No doubt we both bought this because my love for Martin Mull was well-known in the family and because the album was available as a discounted cutout at the local Two Guys department store for a buck-ninety-nine. “Normal” was chockful of clever sing-along-able songs told from the point-of-view of a smart, sarcastic, judgmental 30ish man forced to suffer among rubes, but who wonders if it wouldn’t be easier if he were less clever and just went along to get along, swallowing his wit and urbanity. In other words, the Martin Mull character.  As a 15-year-old desperately not wanting to live in southern New Jersey with its greenhead flies and snapper turtles and traffic circles and dirt roads, who ached to get to wherever the cool intellectuals were with their impregnable aesthetics, this was exactly how I felt. Martin Mull summed it up in the title track, which I haven’t listened to in decades but can still summon up at will:

What say you and I get normal
We don’t have to be that formal
We’ll just sit and watch TV like others do
We’ll eat meat and mashed potatoes
Cut our hair so folks don’t hate us
Life is nuts enough just livin’ here with you

Let’s see who can be most borin’
You do the dishes honey, I’ll start snorin’
Get a mower, do some mowin’
Spend all mornin’ gettin’ it goin’
We’ll show everyone in town we’re not deranged
What say you and I get normal for a change

(Here’s the rest of the song.)

I also suspected that Mull, who was good-looking and whose character dressed well in a stylish but somewhat sleazy manner that said he knew what to do with a woman, was having lots of sex. So 15-year-old me was very interested in whatever I might learn from him, or at least from what I could learn from this character he kept portraying on TV and records.

On “Fernwood 2Night,” where he was a dimestore version of a local talk show host, Mull’s character, Barth Gimble, frequently got phone calls from what you’d assume were beautiful women, with us hearing only his side, which dripped innuendo. I always was trying to figure out what the woman was saying, trying to slot into my brain her side of a quick call centered around sex.

I shared all this and more with Shanna, and then she surprised me:  Martin Mull had been her client. “He was a very nice man,” she said. Shanna works at an accounting firm, largely for the well-known and the well-off, and Martin Mull had been a client.

The first time he came in, she said, she saw him coming and went to greet him in reception. He put out his arm and she thought, Wow, really nice, he wants to hug me! So she went in for the hug and he hugged her, and it was very nice, and then when they parted she realized that he’d actually been reaching for the door. Mortified, she ducked away and went and hid in the file room until he’d left.

But for years after, whenever he came in, he’d hug her. Now it had become a thing. And he’d add a kiss on her cheek.

I’m not 15 any more, but I still love Martin Mull’s act from then and in all the years since — but 46 years later, I also love this story about him, which was not an act… except of kindness.

Every year, New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof shares the good news in what seems otherwise to have been a bad year. 

“[Even with Gaza, Darfur, Trump, and climate change], something else is also true: In some ways, 2023 may still have been the best year in the history of humanity.”

Two factors he lists: In 2023, global child mortality reached a record low, and extreme poverty also reached a record low (about 8% of people worldwide). 

It’s easy to overlook the positive, as Kristof notes:

“None of this eases the pain of those who have lost their children in 2023, nor is it a balm for those caught in war or climate catastrophes. Yet at year-end, it’s worth acknowledging this backdrop of progress — not to distract anyone from all that is going wrong, but to offer a reminder that when we try hard enough, we can accomplish amazing things. Right now, looking at the anguish worldwide, I’d say we’re not trying hard enough.”

In that spirit, and in recognition of the good luck I’ve been blessed with, and also with recognition that many people haven’t, both among my circle and elsewhere in the world, I have to acknowledge that I’ve had a good year. Maybe it also helps to be older, and wiser, and to recognize good happenings when they happen to you. 

Here are just some of the highlights.

Romance

In May, I met and fell in love with my girlfriend. Instantly. I don’t understand how this happened, but when she showed up at the restaurant where we’d agreed to meet, I was struck by a thunderbolt that told me, “This is it. This is the woman.” I’d had many dates, and two previous actual girlfriends, over the course of two-and-a-half years, but this was instantly different, because she was and is instantly different. I’ve been in love before, and vividly recall how I felt when at age 20 I met my now ex-wife, but I don’t know if I ever before knew what romantic “butterflies in my stomach” meant. And every day since then, I ask myself what I can do to do even better, to keep this going, and if possible to keep it going for, oh, the next three decades. She tells me that she loves me too. I can’t believe my good fortune.

So, right there, that has made for a damn good seven months. Long may it last.

Music

2023 was a terrific year for music, with spectacular new albums from old-timers like Yo La Tengo, Peter Gabriel, Blur, John Cale, and Pere Ubu. Even the Rolling Stones put out a new album that I think is pretty good — and I don’t generally care for the Rolling Stones.

Lots of great concerts in 2023, too, most memorably Yo La Tengo (!!!) at the Teragram Ballroom, and Devo (even more exclamation marks) at the YouTube Theatre, at which I got so excited that my girlfriend caught me on video pogoing along to the music.

It was an honor to host two members of Pere Ubu at my house this summer (!), and for my sons and I to help the band load in and load out for their fine show here in Los Angeles. And I enjoyed meeting up with other longtime Pere Ubu fans for drinks after the show in New York, which I flew in to see.

Theatre

Let’s be honest:  It’s always a dice roll going to see a new play. Jukebox musicals may be idiot-proof (enlist some great singers to do classic songs you love against the backdrop of a thinly concocted narrative), but the successful production of a compelling new play is a true highwire act. Forty years of attendance has taught me that if you expect a 90% failure rate, you’ll never be disappointed. There were other plays I enjoyed, but these were the two standout productions this year:

“Heroes of the Fourth Turning” at Rogue Machine, an intellectually honest look at extreme-right-wing evangelicals and their worldview, brilliantly written, acted and directed, was a production I doubt I’ll ever forget. I don’t go to the theatre to be entertained, I go to delve; one way I can be sure I’m in the right place is if a few disgruntled fellow attendees leave mid-scene. In this particular case, success! Those of us who stayed were riveted.

“Kill Shelter” at Theatre of NOTE, about a struggling single mom who also has to daily euthanize dogs who have no future, was both heartbreaking and uplifting — and, somehow, occasionally comic. When each puppet-dog was put down, I cried, even though it was a thing of wire and felt; to someone who has spent 45 years in the theatre, that was epic suspension of disbelief. The play also offered an even-handed defense of kill shelters, a subject I’m sure most people would rather not hear about. Ashley Rose Wellman is a young playwright of talent. I wish I’d seen this earlier in the run, because I would have gone to see it again.

Life and Death

My mother died. That might not seem like a good thing, but it was. She was 98, she figured her time had come, so she lay down, slept for a few days, and passed away. Making her, right to the end, an inspiration. If you pray to a god, you should pray to that god that some day you’re so strong and wise as to be able to do the same. Almost none of us will get this kind of death. Will I miss her? Absolutely. My father died 31 years ago, and I still miss him. But they both left me a lifetime of instruction, so I’m grateful.

Family and friends

I took my son to London for 10 days, my other son came to join us for Thanksgiving, those two plus my daughter and I were all together for my mother’s services, my great-nephew has come to stay with me twice, and I got to spend five days with my whole extended family back East both in September and earlier this month. It’s been a good year for family.

It’s also been a great year for friends, both new friends, and friends of 40 years. 

If you’re lucky, your romantic partner will have quality family and friends of her own, and mine sure does. We’ve been having dinner and playing cards with her sisters and her brother-in-law (and at some point, I will win). We’ve gone to lots of events with her circle of friends — what I’ve started calling her Legion of BFFs — and always had a great time, whether it was the Pops in the LA County Arboretum, the holiday light show, a country-club fundraiser, dinner and drinks, or seeing the Barbie movie. Good people attract other good people. 

As for my own friends, the level of caring some of them dropped on me when my mother died, as well as the heartfelt way they embraced my new love, said everything about their friendship. Friends I hadn’t seen in decades showed up at my mother’s viewing to pay their respects. Others called me more than once just to make sure I was doing okay. My friend Ski single-handedly cooked and catered an entire evening for all attendees at my sister’s house the night before my mother’s funeral service. True friends show up for you even when it isn’t fun.

2023 and 2024

If you haven’t had a good 2023, I’m sorry.

I’m sharing all these successes because I know I’ve been lucky. And because I know luck runs out. Not every year will have as many bright spots. More people will die, you will meet with misfortune, your health will fail, some despicable figure might make a comeback.

But when you have this much love dropped on you in a year, you must acknowledge it. Both to get through the bad times, and because you want to do right. Only a churl would let good times go unrecognized.

My best to you in the new year. Even when trouble befalls – and it will — pick up on the positive.

1. I can attest to this: The movie “Cocaine Bear” is loads of fun if you’re seeing it for cheap on a Tuesday night with a friend who is sitting next to you in the movie theatre howling with laughter. But I can’t imagine watching it at home alone, or as anything other than a goof — which it is 100% intended to be.
2. It has been raining in Los Angeles pretty much every day since December. This being the eve of March, enough is enough. Whoever schedules these things needs to do a better job. On Sunday night, I went to see a concert and thought, “Wow! It isn’t raining!” But when I left the concert, it was pouring while I scurried off to my car, having left the umbrella in the car because, well, it hadn’t been raining. This morning when I woke up the day was bright and blue and the air crisp. Over the course of the day, the sky darkened and I thought, “Oh, fuck, it’s coming again.” And it did.
3. Over the course of all this, I’ve had a team of roofers out to my house eight times. Eight times. At some point, either they’ll get it right, or maybe they’ll just outlast the rain.
4. I had assumed that the excellent noisy indie band Yo La Tengo would tour with additional musicians, being a three-piece band with a dense and complicated sound, especially on their excellent new album, “This Stupid World.” Nope. Sunday’s show revealed that the three of them are multi-instrumentalists who sample some of their sounds live and then set them to repeat while they go off to play other things, and that they generally move into different stations of the stage throughout. Don’t be surprised if the drummer takes center stage to sing, and the bassist is now also playing keyboards, and the “drums” are being handled by the guitarist on what sounds like a Casio. My first thought, watching this: Hats off to them for saving all that money on adding a touring musician or two!
5. By the way, structurally the hero of that cocaine-sniffing bear movie is the bear. I’m not kidding. In the late parts of the movie, it’s the bear that’s the protagonist.
6. Eight months ago for my birthday, a friend gave me a $60 gift certificate to a used bookstore in Pasadena. My current lady agreed to accompany me even though I warned her what I could be like in bookstores: relentless. I was rewarded by learning how remarkably patient she can be. Something else I learned: Sixty bucks can get you a big whopping bag of books, including three novels by Thomas McGuane, a favorite of mine, that I’d never read, plus two business books, novels by Joyce Carol Oates and Kim Stanley Robinson I’d been meaning to get to for some time, and assorted other things, including a Marvel comics giant I had as a kid, and was now able to get in near mint condition 45 years later for the bold price of $4.50. I wasn’t in any danger of running out of books to read around the house, but now I’m even better armed.
7. I’ve been thinking lately of two writers in particular, Harlan Ellison and Ray Bradbury. Because each of them wrote a science-fictional short story about rain that wouldn’t end. Right now, outside my window, I can hear Noah pounding nails into his big new boat. I like London enormously. I just never expected to be living there in Los Angeles.

I saw guitar hero Jeff Beck, who died today, play live in 2013 here in LA. He opened for Brian Wilson — and, um… I thought he was kinda dull. I didn’t wish him dead, though!

He might have wished some harm to Brian Wilson & Co., though, given what he later said about that tour, in an interview that may provide a clue about Mr. Beck’s underwhelming performance.

Brian Wilson, by the way, sang off-key. I am second to none in my love and admiration for Brian Wilson and his music, but when Mr. Brian Wilson (!) sings flat, that’s the night I call it quits in seeing him “perform.” And that’s exactly what I did: told my friend who’d accompanied me that I loved Brian Wilson so much that, no, I could never again go see him perform because I’d never forget the sound of Brian Wilson ruining his catalog for me.

On a happier note, Roger Daltrey of the Who remains in fine fettle, and is somehow still a dynamic singer at age 78. You may feel reassured and ready to enjoy his live shows with abandon. Ditto Micky Dolenz, a mere 77, who still has the pipes, and is on a never-ending tour where he now sings “Hey, hey I’m the Monkee…”

If there’s a rock n’ roller you want to see play live, especially an elderly one, I wouldn’t wait. And given the rock n’ roll lifestyle, it’s amazing that some of them are still around.

The former front man of the Sex Pistols, best known for “Anarchy in the UK,” has released a single that’s a ballad about his love for Hawaii. 

The pages of the next issue of Woof just weren’t flowing well. On some pages, the graphics were bumping up harshly against other graphics. On other pages, whole vistas of white space held just a tiny carryover paragraph of text — what would fill the rest? The freshly transferred press-apply lettering (ah, Letraset) was peeling in more than one place, and I suddenly had a flash of insight that I’d completely forgotten to mention more than one important thing — like my playwriting workshop! — that was relevant to one story and that presented a real signup opportunity! I also wondered: Was it permissible on one page to run a list of names of subscribers whose addresses I’d lost? “Have you seen these people?” might be the headline, in the hopes that others would know them and would contact them.

As I paged through the mockups, all of them lovingly crafted by hand, with rubber-cemented columns of type and illustrations, and lots of Liquid Paper applied, I wondered if I could fit in any more comics from Rich Roesberg. I’d already used the good ones, but I still had that white space, and I could dig further into my archives of “just in case” illos from him.

I wasn’t even sure the pages were flowing correctly. Where was page 20? I turned to the small staff helping me — two other people I now can’t identify — and shrieked, “Who laid this out?!?!?”

The answer, of course, was ME.

Then I woke up, my heart thrumming, my mind churning, scrambling desperately to figure out what I was going to write to fill that white space.

Gradually, as light started filtering into my bedroom from the sun rising outside, it dawned on me that there was no new issue of Woof, and that there would be no new issue of Woof, and that there had been no new issue of Woof in more than 40 years.

My publishing empire was no more.

It had started in my adolescence, with Amazing Comix, a fanzine about comics that I published out of my parents’ basement using a hectographic printing system. “Printing system” while, technically true, is putting it kindly. With a hectograph “machine” (ha!), one would create an original on a master, carefully imprint that negatively on a tray of jelly, then lay each individual copy of a blank piece of paper onto that tray of jelly, pulling up a positive imprint. This is a process still used for making temporary tattoos, it’s long obsolete for printing on paper, but, in its heyday was, as Wikipedia notes, useful for printing “small runs of school classroom test papers, church newsletters and science fiction fanzines.” I don’t remember from which of those sources I learned this process, but somehow I got a hold of a hectograph kit and started printing fanzines. The hectograph was cheap and easy, yes, and thrilling as a way to launch the publishing empire of a kid in the 1970s. It was also messy, printed everything in lavender ink, and would sometimes leave globs of jelly on the pages, which I’d carefully try to pluck or scrape off.

You may wonder, “Why use hectograph and not, say, Xeroxing?” Well, in the mid-1970s, black-and-white Xerox copying cost 25 cents a copy. That was in 1970s money, when a full 32-page comic book in glorious color on newsprint with a glossy cover cost between 25¢ and 35¢. Xerox copying cost the equivalent of $1.25 a page. (I share this as a reminder for those who think that prices go only up. I also share that the first computer printer I bought, which printed on 4″-wide strips of what was like aluminum foil, circa 1980 cost an astonishing $800. Nowadays you can get a printer for about free because they just want to sell you the ink.

I don’t remember how many issues of Amazing Comix I put out, and no, I’m not going to look right now, and I don’t know how many copies, either. Given the tedium of the process, I’m thinking I might have done 100, which makes my constant monitoring of the fanzine history sites on Facebook, in the hopes that one of my old publications will turn up, ludicrous. Still, I did have readers, and contributors, and I may have done six or seven issues. I can’t remember. Somewhat fewer than 10. My contributors and included writers and artists around the U.S., and England (!), and so did my readers. One of the readers who became a contributor was a gentleman named Richard F., who was active military, and who came to visit me when he was on leave. There we were, in my parents’ basement, me at age 14 and he at around 27, were he gifted me with $40 to help with publishing some upcoming issues; when I demurred, he said that if I didn’t take it, he’d just “spend it on whores.”

So you see, publishing was an educational endeavor for me, too.

Prior to the publishing wing of my enterprises, I had started a comic-book retailing company, Dungeon Ventures (again, because it was run out of my parents’ basement — and thank God for basements!). I had talked a local bank into giving me a checking account by lying to them, saying it was a “Christmas club account.” A Christmas club account was where someone would save money to buy Christmas presents at the end of the year (and, I add, with the insight of an adult, the bank would gather interest without paying any out). Once I had the “Christmas club account,” I ordered checks in the name of Dungeon Ventures. Now that I was a publisher, I had business cards made with my name on them, the company name, and “Publishers/Retails in Comics.” The card is a blur of mixed messages — bad company name, having nothing to do with Dungeons & Dragons, with which it was constantly confused; publishers and retailers; poor branding — but, still, it screamed “legitimacy” when your main facial feature was acne.

At that point, while in high school and running my comic-book business (now with a slightly older business partner I’d met through the pages of a comic-book letters column) and working 20 hours a week at The Atlantic City Press taking classified ads over the phone and gloriously exploring the world of teenage girls, I started adding titles to the publishing house. I don’t remember the second one (wow) or if it even got off the ground, but I do remember the next three. One was Axes, a rock-and-roll newspaper with professional newspaper printing and actual distribution and ad sales that was distributed around southern New Jersey, mostly to record shops and clubs. One was the aforementioned Woof, which was a Xeroxed (!) humor publication, and one was the ill-fated Screw Iran Coloring Book, for which Rolling Stone rejected my ad buy because they thought I was trying to capitalize on the hostage situation in Iran — an understandable but questionable ethical leap from them, considering the flagrantly illegal sex-and-drugs ware they were admitting into their ad pages. For the full story of the Screw Iran Coloring Book, look here, then here. (And if you want to order one because they’re highly collectible, let me know, because I’ve got a few left — and Dan Stumpf, I still need to send you yours!)

Axes lasted three issues, not being the first new publication to collapse due to advertising and distribution problems. I also did several comics catalogs, cheerily illustrated by Roesberg (who remains my favorite cartoonist) and in my files somewhere. And then I stop publishing at some point during college, when to work writing and editing for the Gannett newspaper chain, then became a copy editor and production editor at the not-cleverly renamed Press of Atlantic City, then moved out here to Los Angeles to go to grad school.

Where I re-emerged as a publisher, putting out 75 issues of The L.A.. Gang Bang, a ‘zine about the personal lives of four transplants (myself and my roommates) to Los Angeles. In all the hubbub of the 1990s zine craze, we got somewhat known for it, were frequently reviewed in other publications, had hundreds (hundreds!) of subscribers and readers in the U.S. and Europe, got written up in the Los Angeles Times, and didn’t get a book deal out of it (as others did) because I was either distracted or stupid. Or both.

The L.A. Gang Bang wrapped up 28 years ago and, with it, my publishing career. I did put together seven or 10 bound copies of samples from my work, which I called Wrench and distributed to close friends and family members, but that also was in the neighborhood of 30 years ago. And we self-published our programs at Moving Arts during the 10 years I was artistic director (with intros written by me), but I stepped down 21 years ago.

After all this time, there’s something I miss about being a publisher. I loved putting together the issues. I loved going to the mailbox and seeing what subscriptions had arrived, and what letters of comments, and how much money. I loved the smell of it all, even of the funky hectograph ink and jelly. Even after awakening, fully awakening, I thought: Maybe I could do another issue of Woof. The 40th anniversary next issue. In time for my 60th. Because I miss publishing.

And then I realized that my publishing career has actually continued. Because I’ve been publishing this blog since 2004.

Three weeks ago, a friend and I saw the surviving members of the Monkees in their final performance. However much my friend and I tried to wish it otherwise, it was a melancholy affair, given the sad state of Mike Nesmith, who died today.

Micky Dolenz, it must be said, remains a vital performer at age 76. Dolenz is one of the great unheralded pop singers of the past half century, someone with a terrific voice who is also a natural showman — he’s able to hit all the notes, still and as always, and his stage energy is miraculously undiminished. At this point I’ve seen many rock and pop performers in their 70s, and to my ear and eye, Dolenz is the best preserved. A few years ago I told a friend during a concert that this had to be the last time I’d see Brian Wilson, because I never expected Brian Wilson, of all people, to be off-key, and I didn’t want my fond memories of the Beach Boys tarnished. If you have a chance to see Micky Dolenz, who undoubtedly will continue touring, take it — he’s a wonderful performer, he’s glad to entertain you, and you’ll be glad you’re there for it.

Sadly, the same couldn’t be said of Mike Nesmith. Just three years earlier, he’d been in fine form in another performance, again with Dolenz, at the Orpheum in downtown Los Angeles — playing guitar, singing well, buoyant and happy to be there, shimmering with all the love the audience threw at him. Their duet on “Me and Magdalena,” absolutely the highlight of the Monkees’ penultimate (and transcendent) album “Good Times!” was delivered with all the keening heartfelt emotion required. But tonight, at the Greek Theatre, we were stunned to see that not only couldn’t Nesmith play guitar, or even hold one, he could barely stand. At strange moments, he would absentmindedly shuffle off-stage or simply wander around the stage in ways that had many of us in the audience worrying that he’d fall over; at other times, his expression made clear that he wasn’t sure where he was or what he was doing or even perhaps who he was. At one point, he cried awkwardly; at another, Mr. Dolenz had to call for him to return to the stage: “Nez! Nez! I need you for this song…”.

It has been a hard couple of years for many people. For Mr. Nesmith, perhaps harder. So when I learned today that he had died, I was saddened, but, given the evidence, not surprised.

It isn’t easy to say this, but here goes: He shouldn’t have been on-stage. When your audience spends a concert deeply concerned about your health, there’s something wrong with the event.

I don’t know how one could ever know when a performer should retire. One of my favorite performers, Dame Edna, retired a few years ago, still at her (his) height. While I wish I could see that act again, I recognize that that was a very high-wire act, filled with smart rapid-fire improv and audience-involved repartee that was doubtless growing more difficult for an octogenarian. When David Lee Roth hung up his tights a few weeks ago, I congratulated him on Twitter because it was quite evident that he could no longer sing, and if I had seen all the mocking videos of his recent performances, I’m sure he had as well. I wish him a happy retirement. Performers like to perform, and we like to see them do so… but we don’t want to see them when they shouldn’t be doing it any more, and I’m sure they don’t truly want to be seen in that light either.

While part of me is glad that I got to see Mike Nesmith one last time, and during his very final concert, a greater part of me wishes the last time I’d seen him was in 2018, when he was still radiant. I’ve always liked the Monkees (I’ve been seeing them in concert for 30 years), and I’ve always liked Mr. Nesmith’s singing and his songs. I’m grateful for all the music and all the good times. But the previous final tour should have been the final final tour.

When or if you have the chance and the interest, go see the last Monkee, Micky Dolenz. He’s still got it. For now.