Anti Diva by Carole Pope

Author:Carole Pope [Pope, Carole]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2023-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

ROAD KILL

I like driving in a van with the boys after I’ve played a gig. It’s pitch black outside and your eyes follow the hypnotic white line of the highway. The conversation covers the spectrum from childlike monosyllabic grunts to esoteric revelations. Then there are the garish orange walls of a Ho Jo’s. The mattress that sinks in the middle. The one channel on the TV, and somebody hot-wiring it so you can watch free porn. Or the good hotels with the king-size beds that make you feel empty. The flat endless prairies. You wonder how anyone can live out there, so isolated and alone. An airport at six a.m. when you’ve been up all night partying and your eyeballs feel like they’re bleeding. The sound checks at the venue, the soundman who always says it will sound better when the club is full of people. Having a total fit onstage because you can never fucking hear yourself above the band. You’re not singing, you’re screaming. The stench of the dressing room. The floor of the stage, which you really don’t want to look at too closely.

There’s something addictive about performing in a dank beer-soaked bar where you’re afraid to touch any surface for fear of contracting a new strain of legionnaires’ disease that mutates in Naugahyde. We worked in so many of those places. Some nights, the audience would stare at us like slack-jawed idiots, their eyes glazed over in a state of incomprehension, but most of the time we became ecstatically one with the crowd.

People were aching for something new, shocking, sexual, intelligent—something that touched a chord. And we delivered.

The dark side of this was the stalker fan. Jittery, sweaty people with no lives who became obsessed with you. God forbid they would find out where you lived. The microphone was my prop, my lover. I caressed it. I slid my cunt up and down the mike stand in a not-so-subtle form of masturbation. Kevan was always covered in a layer of sweat, switching from guitar to keyboards and back. We worked with a virtual smorgasbord of musicians. Each one came with his or her idiosyncrasies. If they had wives or possessive girlfriends, there was angst to be had, played out in a series of ball-breaking confrontations. When we toured, our road crew picked up girls by asking them if they wanted to meet me.

One of my favourite kinds of fans are the disgruntled straight girls. The best pickup line I ever heard was “I’m here with my boyfriend, but I don’t really like him.” Another line that annoyed the band was “I really like your organ player,” to which we’d all reply in unison, “We don’t have one.” Once we played at the Sea Way Motel, and Clive Smith brought his friend Eric Idle to the show. They were working on a project together. Between sets, they came to our cruddy dressing room, and Eric decided to make an understated punk statement. He lit the paper ice bucket on fire.

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