JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Things I might’ve known before I signed on to manage a rock band, that could’ve helped me stick around longer than four months, or at least feel less useless.

(1) If the band was already famous before you joined them, you’re parsley. You’re there to make it look like they have a manager and therefore cannot be messed with, but you’re not actually going to manage anybody.
(2) If you are a fan and consider it a privilege to breathe the same air as the band, you probably won’t be contradicting them much. Later, when they’re comfortable enough around you to fart in your presence, you will reassess your definition of “a privilege”.
(3) You work for the rockstars; you are not a rockstar.

A hotel room in San Francisco, California, April or May 1997. My roommates have gone off to visit relatives and I am alone and stationary for the first time in weeks. It’s two in the morning and I’m drifting into unconsciousness.

The phone rings.

I ignore it. I need my sleep. I just spent a few hours chasing half the band and two roadies up and down Haight-Asbury. They wanted to be photographed next to the street sign, like The Beatles during the Summer of Love. Then the guys scattered. We arranged to meet at the van in a couple of hours. This simply meant that in two hours I would look for them in every store on the street, prise them away from whatever was holding their attention— using force if necessary—and bodily drag them back to the van. Okay, I’m exaggerating— half the band was very well-behaved—but what’s the point of reminiscing about the experience if you can’t make it sound more dramatic than it really was? I don’t have any stories of cars being driven into swimming pools or TVs being thrown out of closed windows, so hyperbole is all I have.

Two hours later the guys piled into the van with minimal wrangling, which was weird. On the drive back to the hotel the vocalist stared enraptured at the billboards. “They’re breathing,” he whispered in awe. One roadie stretched out in the back seat and cried, “Help me, I need a guide, wala na akong maintindihan!” Apparently some old hippie at Haight had offered to open the doors of perception for the band, you know what I’m saying? The business manager and I had a discussion with the promoter, who wisely said he would lock the new friends of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds into their suite.

The blasted phone won’t stop ringing. I pick up. “This is the front desk. Are you with the band that’s staying in this hotel?”

“Yes, I’m their manager.”

“You better come down here,” the man said. “One of your band members is in the lobby, taking off his clothes and howling.”

I throw on a jacket and dash downstairs in my pajamas. True enough, the guitarist is walking round and round the fountain, keening like an old woman at a wake. How he got out of their locked suite, I have no idea. I call him. He runs away, shrieking. Through the glass doors I see a police car coming. I’m not sure if they’re coming for our half-naked guitarist or for someone else, but I take off after the topless howler. As the flashing lights of the police car draw closer and closer, half the band arrives from dinner with their relatives—rhythm section, good timing—and they chase the guitarist. They catch him and hustle him out through a side door and into the van where no one could hear him scream. Arrest averted.

For the record, I still love the band and listen to their albums. To rip off the ending of one of my favorite books: “Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”