Ricky Martin Stole My Song

We’re renegotiating
our deal. Contrary to popular belief, few bands on major labels make any money
from royalties, due to the one-sided math of the advance/recoupment equation,
but rather through contract renegotiation. It took us like two months to figure
out who we had to call to say, Oi, we wanna renegotiate.

But I have no actual life.
The Rock, she is my lady. So I’ve worked up an acoustic show and
here I am. I spent a bunch of months recording stuff on a cassette eight-track–a
body of work my former road manager Gus refers to as "Sebadoughty"–and
now I’m on my way to Antwerp. The route from airport to airport is a massively
expensive one, straight through the middle of London. We drive past every major
landmark on the tourist agenda, from the Houses of Parliament to the Millennium
Dome. And somewhere between every landmark is a Starbucks.

There weren’t any Starbuckses
the last time I was here. This is alarming to anybody who pretends to care about
culture, but I’m a touring musician, and Starbucks is the best friend of
any touring musician. Besides the caffeine addiction, once you’ve been
on the road for a while you start seeking the comfort of neutral, anonymous
spaces–you want to stay in the hotel, you want to eat at Cracker Barrel,
you want your environment to be the same if slightly altered in every different
city every day. You can ask anybody working at any hotel in any American city
where the Starbucks is and they’ll be able to tell you. The only cab ride
I’ve taken that’s more expensive than this one was in Florida, where
a bunch of roadies and I took a cab 30 miles from a hotel in the middle of nowhere
to a Starbucks in a mall, leaving the meter running as we went in for our triple
grande no-foam lattes. Sure, it’s all fine and good to resist the clutches
of the evil empire and all, but have you ever tried the espresso in a mom-and-pop
joint in St. Louis?

The next day I’ll meet
a guy from a Belgian newspaper for an interview, and he’ll pelt me with
questions about New York, because my professional role in Europe is as a representative
of New Yorkness. And, like all the European journalists who hang on to my every
pronouncement about Katz’s pastrami, he’ll launch into his own little
testimony about his New York holiday last year. And this guy goes: "What
I love most about New York is the Starbucks! There’s one on every corner!
The coffee is so good!" And bear in mind, at the newspaper he works for,
this is the jazz guy.

I’m met in Antwerp
by a guy named Pete, who’s road-managing the tour. Yes, I need a tour manager
for a four-show tour. At this point–six years touring–I couldn’t
find an airport to save my life. Pete’s from a place called Barton-upon-Humber,
in Yorkshire. He kind of looks like Droopy Dog; he’s 40-ish, having started
roadie-ing when punk rock was happening in the UK. To me he is the ultimate
English roadie; polite, deferential and he’s been working with bands on
roughly the same level since he started working with mine in 1994. American
roadies tend to be careerists, jumping from one-van tours to one-bus tours to
two-bus and one-truck tours as the years go by. Pete started out doing hardscrabble
tours in splitter vans, and he’s hauling bands across Europe in splitter
vans today. He sticks hard to his professional habits. He writes out a rooming
list for the hotel and has the desk staff xerox it, despite the fact that there’re
two people in our touring party and it would do just as well for him to simply
tell me he’s in room 219.

The Antwerp gig is in a
big plush hall; it’s some sort of big literary deal. I’m on with a
bunch of Flemish authors reading from their works. The next night is the Paradiso
in Amsterdam, where I play the little room upstairs while The The plays the
big hall. As is more or less traditional in Holland, a big fat drunk guy with
a mustache is thrashing around to my gentle acoustic sounds in the front. He’s
wearing a "One Tequila, Two Tequila, Three Tequila, Floor" t-shirt.

It’s the first time
I’ve ever gone to Amsterdam and not gotten stoned. I discover that it is
no easier to walk the streets of Amsterdam–on which the nonresident is
constantly having bicycle bells rung at him and being cursed out for walking
in the bicycle lane–straight. The audience and I have a chat about this.
I urge them all to move to Den Haag, where the brain-space used to stay out
of the way of the trams can be used for better purposes. Like, say, inventing
cold fusion. The show goes well–the Dutch, being stoned, are easy to amuse–and
that night I’m happy but too jetlagged to sleep. So I stay up in the hotel
room watching Dutch music television, a flashing parade of kiddie-techno videos.
Anybody still insistent on the outdated argument that American culture is the
world’s stupidest has never seen this.

The next day Pete and I
fly to England. I was dating a limey lass, so I myself sort of lived here–I
say sort of because that year I spent eight months on the road and four over
here with her. It was a deep and heady year–the apex of drum ’n’
bass and the debut of the Spice Girls. I mean, I was there when The Sun–the
newspaper that evidences dumbness as more than a U.S. phenomenon even better
than Eurodisco–came out with their nicknames Posh, Baby, etc. And it was
an all-consuming hipster phenomenon. Absolutely everybody had a favorite. They
were giddy with it. I was giddy with it too. After all, here was the death of
super-serious Vedderism, the triumphant return of pop, but this time coolly
aware of its own kitsch, sly and sarcastic! Little did the Brits know that the
Spices would be the last UK pop export to make it in the U.S. After the Spice
Girls, boy bands from Orlando would blow huge while English boy band mainstays
like Boyzone would barely register.

The relative value of the
U.S. as an export market for British music is a subject of much obsession over
here. Because if a band breaks in the U.S. it’s selling enough records
to make a living, whereas breaking in Britain isn’t nearly so much of a
windfall–to sustain themselves, bands have to break France and Germany
and Benelux too. And each country has its own record company and market to negotiate.
It’s not easy in the least. (Not that breaking the U.S. is simple; limey
artists tend to be bewildered at the amount of grassroots touring you have to
do to break the U.S., coming, as they are, from a country where if you get on
the playlist at BBC Radio One you’re superexposed throughout the country.
They fly over, play New York and L.A. and San Francisco, and puzzle over why
the single didn’t catch.)

When I was in London, jungle
music was at a dizzying pinnacle. The girl and I would go down to the Blue Note
in Hoxton Square on Sunday nights, when the Grooverider was kind of the Radio
One of jungle; anybody in the country who cut a dubplate would submit a copy
to Grooverider, the don of dons, and if it was good–and good at the time
was fucking great–he’d play it at the Metalheadz Sunday Sessions.
The records we heard that year–"Shadowboxing," "Rock the
Funky Beat," "It’s Jazzy," "Warhead"–were
just astounding. I have never been party to a more exciting scene, a scene with
more glorious promise.

Of course, by the next year
Roni Size would win the Mercury Prize, and then everybody was charging tens
of thousands of pounds to remix Sarah McLachlan songs, and the promise quickly
dissipated. That, and jungle never really came up as the next flavor in rap
music, as everybody anticipated. Timbaland clearly listened to a shitload of
jungle when devising his skittery typewriter-funk sound, but by taking out the
neck-breaking 16th notes on the tamborine he took out the jungle. Nowadays two
out of three promos on BET are synched to jungle tracks. And they all share
the same two or three snare drum sounds that everybody was using in 1997.

I play Birmingham–the
English town that makes Philly look like Florence–and then Pete and I take
the Virgin train (Richard Branson gives out Virgin mortgages through Virgin
financial services over here, too) to London. I play the Water Rats that night.
I have a particularly satisfying exchange with a heckler. He kvetches, I kvetch
back. Then a guy next to him yelps, "He’s the NME writer!"
Meaning the notoriously bitchy English music weekly. "You’re not supposed
to be here, man," I say. "You’re supposed to be in the next room,
at the bar, with your notebook."

We end up the evening drinking
at the Columbia Hotel, a terrible, stinky rock institution with the distinction
of having a 24-hour bar. There’re two other bands getting drunk in there
at 2 a.m., one of which I discern is Mogwai. Then sleep. The next day I try
to resist, but there’s no way I could; I’m out the Columbia’s
doors and headed to the Starbucks on Queensway. I bump into Pete in the lobby.
He’s been out shopping; he’s toting a Gap bag. I feel tremendous guilt
going to Starbucks, and resist inviting him along–not wanting to burden
a non-American with a Starbucks habit–but he asks where I’m going
and I break down and invite him.

When we get there, the girl
behind the counter is an American. The purple couches–identical to every
other Starbucks–are packed with English yuppies stuck to their mobile phones.

"Triple grande no-foam
latte," I tell the girl.

"Uh, I’ll have
what he’s having," says Pete.