Mix It Up and Do the Do

I was a teenage groupie. Which isn’t so unusual, really. Music is one of the easiest ways to forge, or at least latch onto, an identity when you’re young. (Or even when you’re not so young). It’s a way to connect to a ready-made tribe. Being a groupie gives you a sense of belonging, and a sense that if you just try a little harder, or make a better impression, you can become part of that group you’re so obsessed with.

By my junior year of college, I had already done New Wave and Industrial. I was maturing out of my ska phase and developing an appreciation for a wider array of microscopic subgenres, but for a while there wasn’t much that hit the spot. I wasn’t angry enough to be all that punk, and the exploding grunge scene just didn’t do it for me. I wasn’t clubbing enough to care about dance music yet, and I was still too self-conscious to accept how much I really liked ’70s music. I was yearning for something to grab me.

One night my best friend Dave and I went to a show at the student union. It was a decidedly unhip venue for a city with a music scene like Boston’s, but it was cheap and we were poor. The band hit the stage, and I saw an 8-piece sideshow of fun. The singer/trumpet player wore Muppet-fur pants. The keyboard player wore a stuffed bear’s head for a hat. The horn section was awesome, and everyone in the band was a natural showman. They were silly, they had the funk, and I was dancing my ass off within seconds.

“These are my people,” I thought.

And so I got hooked on Chucklehead. Dave, my regular sidekick in my music adventures, got Chucklehead the way I did and accompanied me to nearly every show of theirs I ever saw. We dragged other friends along on a regular basis, because a Chucklehead show was always a good time, but at the very least we had each other for company. He was super fun, but I had learned at all those raucous ska shows that Dave was practical to have around, too. As a short guy, I like to get up front so I have an unobstructed view of the stage, and a taller, more solidly built buddy like Dave was a good human shield to keep me from getting smashed by the crowd behind me. He was like my sidekick, my comic foil, and my bodyguard wrapped up in one.

I have no idea how many Chucklehead shows we saw, but it was a lot. Now, I’ve always been shy around people I admire, but even then, I knew that taking pictures was a great way to overcome my shyness, and a great excuse for talking to people when I’d otherwise be too paralyzed to make small talk. So I used my camera as way to get to know the guys in the band. I asked if I could take pictures at shows in trade for giving them some prints. (Apparently there was a very protective band girlfriend who usually handled the photos, so it was wise of me to ask first.) I did a bunch of studio portraits, too, including some interesting ones of the drummer in his underwear. (You see, some of the guys were roomates, and were pestered by a mouse who ate through the pee spot of all their underwear. He thought it would be funny to have pictures as evidence.)

So I had some regular contact, regular reasons to chat them up at shows, and even reasons to occasionally run over to Chucklehouse, the apartment some of them shared near my own place. I donated absurd thrift-store hats to the keyboard player’s collection, and enjoyed a few shout-outs from the stage when he’d put them on. Dave and I would chat with some of the band girlfriends at shows, and try not to show how starstruck we really were. At the time, after all, they were a band, our favorite band. They were not, as it seems so obvious when I look at pictures now, a bunch of fun guys who happened to put together a great act and get a few breaks in the local music scene.

The summer before my senior year, Dave and I took the ferry from Boston to Provincetown to meet up with my folks, who were visiting some friends on the Cape. Now, the crazy thing about the Provincetown ferry is that it featured a Dixieland band. I like a good horn section, so this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, but we suspected it was going to be corny, and it was. A New England tourist trap wasn’t going to get a Dixieland band with a lot of swing, but it did get one that was very warmly received by the many senior citizens on the ferry. I was baffled by the way all the old folks got up and started to dance in formation when the band played, and guessed it was some kind of group activity that was all the rage in the local senior centers. They shuffled, they clapped, they two-stepped, all in time to the Dixie beat and its modest pace. It was weird, but cheesy enough for me to enjoy as a spectacle.

It was a low-key weekend on the Cape, overall. It was, really, the kind of weekend you and a friend will have when you hang out with your parents and their friends in a summer house. One afternoon, though, Dave and I walked down to the corner store for some ice cream and saw a flyer. For a Chucklehead show. That night. Just a few towns over.

Yes! How awesome it would be to see them in a new setting! To surprise them by showing up far from our regular turf! To get out of the house for a few hours! So we made arrangements to borrow some bikes and head on over to the Captain’s Nest, or the Beachcomber, or whatever trite seaside name the place had. It was a slightly more arduous trip than we expected, but fun. We pushed ourselves on with the anticipation of the great Chucklehead adventure waiting for us.

And then we discovered that it was at a bar, and we couldn’t get in because we were underage. That sucked, and we felt like dorks. We didn’t want to leave, though, because it was Chucklehead! On our vacation! Also, it would be another hour to ride back, and my folks couldn’t pick us up for another few hours. So we sat around trying to figure out what to do, feeling ourselves deflate once and for all.

And then the Chucklevan drove by. I looked up just as a couple of the guys in the band recognized us, just as surprised as we thought they might be, although it was a more run-of-the-mill “Hey, it’s those guys” kind of surprise than a “Oh my god, it’s our favorite fans” kind of surprise. Still, they got a kick out of our story, and they gave us the ardent fan’s most coveted opportunity: we could get in as their roadies. We could go in the stage door because we were with the band. Lugging a few guitar cases and amps was an awfully small price to pay for the feeling that we had finally crossed into the inner circle of funkitude.

Inside, though, it was a horror show. It was like a J. Crew catalog jacked up on gin and tonics and Spring Break reggae. A total preppy throw-down. After years of limiting myself to ska, punk, and goofy funk shows, I had no idea what to make of so many besotted, blonde, khaki-shorted, polo-shirted rich kids. How would they react to my beloved Chucklehead? To the irreverent use of George Bush and Alex Trebek samples? To the funk? To the bear hat and the Muppet pants? And, wait…what were they all doing? Why did they suddenly all just jump and race to the dance floor? Why are they all dancing in formation, like those senior citizens on the ferry? How do they all know that same set of weird steps? What the fuck?

And that, my friends, was the first time I ever encountered the Electric Slide, and realized that white people are basically sheep.

The drunken crowd had no trouble getting into Chucklehead, and there was plenty more dancing that night, but thankfully none of it happened in choreographed lines. We had a blast, we go to hang out with Chucklehead, and then we called my dad to come pick us up like we were 14-year-old nerds. Which, of course, Dave and I have always been deep down inside.

The pinnacle of our adventures in the inner circle came when we were invited to a Chucklehead birthday party. It was pretty awesome to get an invitation to a private party for someone in the band, and there was no way we were going to miss it.

Bear in mind, this was all happening during the same time was I was taking my first tentative steps out of the closet. Dave was made privy to this information earlier than anyone else, so for a while he was the only person who really understood that I thought some of Chucklehead were also fantastically cute. This sort of innocent crush on the band was totally part of my fixation on them. Oh sure, they were funky, but they were also cute, and nerdy, and goofy. I was helpless. And, of course, insecure enough about the whole gay thing that I was both hyper-sensitive about people realizing my deal, and clueless enough to think they didn’t already get it.

So Dave and I get to this Chinese restaurant, and realize that the birthday party isn’t some huge shindig, but instead it’s just a crowd for dinner. And the crowd, it seems, is all of Chucklehead, the Chucklehead girlfriends, their sound guy, Dave, and me. Now, this seemed pretty awesome at first. We were the only non-band people there. Clearly, we were no longer just groupies or freakishly devoted fanboys. We were in.

What I realized, though, is that what we really were was harmless. The first epiphany came shortly after Dave said something about how we had been at a big dance our friends had organized for their gay/lesbian student group. One of the Chucklehead girlfriends said something about how cute we were together. With a lot of blushing and probably a fair amount of comic stammering, we pointed out that we weren’t…and Dave certainly wasn’t…and I am, but… And the pieces fell into place.

Sure the Chucklehead guys liked us and knew who we were. They’d talk with us, and they’d let me take pictures, and they liked the crazy hats we gave them. But it was the Chucklehead girlfriends who invited us to dinner. They organized the whole thing, and figured we were already on the inside, since we talked to them all the time. Besides, we were the kind of groupies that could be safely encouraged. We weren’t girls. We weren’t going to fuck their boyfriends behind their backs. And they also thought we were a cute, wacky, young gay couple who were fun to have around! And we were, except for the gay couple part. Even if I had a big crush on anyone in the band, which I totally did, I was completely not a threat to their own status as Chucklewives.

Things changed before long, albeit slowly. Chucklehead’s line-up shifted as a few members drifted off and were replaced by others. They put out records, we graduated from college and dated people and got jobs and lives of our own. There were many other Chucklehead shows for years to come, and they were all awesome, but it’s harder and harder to play the rabid fanboy when you’re busy cultivating a life of your own. A few years later, after I’d moved back to New York, and I ran into Chucklehead’s guitarist one day and found out that he had also moved back to New York. The band hadn’t actually broken up, but I can’t say it was much of a surprise when they finally did a few months later.

While I was getting ready to pull these stories together, I dug out those old Chucklehead photos to post them along with what I wrote. I’d forgotten how good the pictures turned out, and how young we all were at the time. I always thought of the guys in the band as older and more glamorous, but really they were just kids compared to where I am now. I googled some of the band members and offered them copies of the pictures I’d taken about fifteen years or so ago, and was happy to hear back from a few of them. Like me, and like Dave, they’ve gone on to do other stuff, some of which is probably very different from what they once expected. Writing back and forth with these guys I once idolized feels different now, because I’ve had adventures and successes and even heard some applause of my own. More than anything else, it feels like our stories just happened to intersect for a while. I was never with the band, really, but hell, they never really got to be with me, either.