More "Chosen Madness"....Madness - LOL :D

by **TRAGChick** » Mon Jun 28, 2010 10:00 am

http://chosenmadness.wordpress.com/2010/06/04/363/

Lunch With Steve Perry!
June 4, 2010 at 5:08 pm (Amirite?, Madness, Vulgar Curiosity, Yahrite!)

Once upon a time, I might have entertained any number of fantasies about Steve Perry, but now of course I am an Olde Lady of 41 and too happily married for such fancies to appeal. Much. Sorry, Stevie.

Nowadays my red-hot fantasy about Steve Perry is to have lunch with him and talk about lyrical phrasing, of which he is an absolute master. More about this in another essay.

Of course I know full well that I am never having lunch with Steve Perry, nor will I get a call out of the blue from his lawyers to find out if I am who I say I am (I am — you can’t make this stuff up) because he would like to talk with me about ghostwriting his autobiography and would I sign this NDA please? (Happily! Show me a check and it’s “Steve Perry who?”)

And why will I never have lunch with Steve Perry? Well, first of all, seriously, would you want to have lunch with me? I mean, I love to write all this blather but as I’ve said, in person I am disappointingly normal.

But mostly I will never have lunch with Steve Perry because… I write a blog about Steve Perry! And come on, if you were a big ol’ shiny star would you want to hang with a blogstress — no matter how intelligent, charming, talented, and flat-out adorable she might be — who writes all about you? Of course not. That’s a crazy person, clearly!

And it’s all YOUR fault, dear readers, for sending me crack… I mean, compliments about my writing. Same thing. I write something in the middle of the night (cuz that’s how I do) that seems utterly trivial and ridiculous, I post it, I wake up and think “Good Lord, what have I done?” and there are a bunch of comments and contacts and re-tweets about it. “Well!” I think, “I guess I must be onto something with the two-in-the-morning approach. I’ll just stay up, watch the A&E Hoarders* marathon, and write me another bushel of bull!” Then you LOL all over me again, you magnificent enablers, you!

Sigh. It’s tough. It’s a tough life.

So, no, I am under no delusion that I will ever meet, or have lunch with, or share a mystical “we-were-meant-to-be-together-I-can-help-you-learn-to-love-again-call-the-police-immediately” connection with, or sing backup for Mr. Steve Perry, Unemployed Musician. (What? He is!)

BUT.

If ever I were to have lunch with Steve Perry, here are the things I would ask him:

Question 1
Who in the hell is responsible for the time signatures in “Dead or Alive”? The verses seem to be something normal like 4/4 but what is that bridge, 12.5 /Pi? Did you intend to make the thing unsingable? I’ve tried to count it many times and somewhere along the line I always end up on 7. Honest to God, you people were crazy.

Question 2
The first line of “Can’t Stop” goes: “If I touched you there, what would you do?”

Just where, exactly, is… there?

Ooh, sassy! OK, maybe a little too sassy, so how about…

Question 2
When you first joined the band, you were on tour for 5 years straight, 180 shows a year or something stupid like that. And I’ve seen video, you guys were working, under hot lights, in formalwear.

That means you were drenched in sweat for the equivalent of two and a half years. How were you not reduced to gibbering madness? Personally I would lose it after five minutes (which is why I live in a place where it’s below 40 for nine months of the year thank you very much) or get all passive aggressive and start surreptitiously changing lyrics: ”She loves to move, she loves to groove, she loves perspiring…!”

And the only actual question I’d plan on — because the best conversations are living things and wander where they will…

Question 3
How do you go about developing lyrical phrasing for a song? Is it different for studio and stage performances? My favorite example, for those who have been paying attention, is “Still They Ride” — a relatively simple studio version that turned into something really amazing on stage, specifically at Budokan, 1983.

More specifically, this absolute waterfall of a word (“thunder”) at the end of the first chorus.

And because I am obsessed with phrasing as a vocal skill (as separate from range and intonation and timbre and all the other bits and pieces that create the noise that comes out of our faces) I started writing about that word “thunder” and realized that I was headed full tilt boogie down yet another path less traveled by (because that’s how I do) so I’ll leave it here except to ask…

If you were having lunch with Steve Perry, what would you ask?

Now, we’re rejecting out of hand any questions that begin with “what was it like…” or “is it true that…” or most especially “what happened…” because come on, certainly we’re more interesting than that! And hell, you can get those answers anywhere and by and large they suck. So on the assumption that if no one else has gotten the answer to those kinds of questions, we’re not going to get them out of him, complete strangers that we are. So why bug the guy — ask something you’d ask someone you happened to meet at a dinner party. In California. At some ridiculously, nay, immorally ostentatious house full of big ol’ shiny stars. Because if we’re having lunch with Steve, might as well go all the way to Yahrite City!

++++++++

* Hoarders is one of A&E’s “These People are Crazier Than You” programs, a category that also includes Obsessed, Intervention, Addicted, and my current favorite show which follows the progress of six people going through an OCD bootcamp program. I am absolutely fascinated with the human brain, and when I say “These People are Crazier Than You” I’m poking fun not at the subjects of the shows — that stuff is no effin joke — but at the audiences, because you know that’s what you’d tell someone if they asked why you were watching.

Anyway, A&E likes to have marathons of these shows that run all night, the perfect quirky backdrop to my imperfect quirky writing process.