A Night With The David Rose Orchestra

It was a starry night in West Egg
And every name rang a bell
But even the belles had to beg
To be let inside the ball

There were lines of broads
With their portly hubbies
And Bowtied waiters
Serving flutes of bubbly

But X was nowhere to be seen

When I was assigned the task of covering a David Rose Orchestra performance, I shuddered at the prospect.

“Whatever on earth for?” I asked my editor. “He is a pathetic has been and a washout.”

He informed me that Rose had a new album coming out on Sony in a week’s time and rumor was it was a tour de force, a real return to form. I had heard the same thing about every mediocre album the man had released since 1977’s lackluster “Two for two” and just like every time before I took the bait. It can’t be helped; his superlatively deep and rich early discography has earned him the right. Besides, I was told that the performance was to be at the palatial West Egg estate of mysterious robber baron X. The whole thing reeked of the kind of glorious decadence and cracked mirror glamour that hasn’t been seen since an aging Elvis played the legendary Howard Hughes parties in Los Angeles. I packed my bags and took the first flight out to New York.

At the Eggstate, as X’s estate is affectionately called by locals because of its status as a local landmark, lines stretched for blocks. The glitterati and those trying to pass for them, the Hamptons blue bloods and the Bridge and Tunnel sect, both stood around eyeing each other uncomfortably. X is notorious for the mixed set that he cultivates. Word is he is some kind of social alchemist - an eccentric curator of diverse peoples who likes to observe their crude attempts at intermingling from hidden niches in his home. At least that’s what I have heard.

Once inside, I avoided the bar and headed straight for the ball room where the Orchestra was sound checking. I remember when David Rose needed just a drummer and a bassist to accompany his rumbling baritone and silver and blue Les Paul. Not anymore. He is now backed by a full horn and string section, and not two or three but six soul singers, with tambourines and maracas. He also has two pianos, two bassists, three backing guitarists, one of them acoustic, two sets of drums played by suitably grizzled looking drummers, and a keyboard player- just in case your ears weren’t stuffed yet.

What followed was a travesty that I will never forget. One guitar player started the familiar loping opening riff to “C Train Boogie Woogie”. David walked on stage to a thundering ovation and bowed low, at least as far as his portly frame would allow him. He was dressed in a white tuxedo. When he smiled his painted on face creased painfully and threatened to crack and shatter. He no longer slings an axe. He doesn’t choke the ‘phone for he is now electronically wired with a little mouthpiece straight out of a T.V. talk show. Not that any of this mattered. We always knew that was just the show biz side of him. He never wrote any of the guitar parts on his albums anyway, though he played them magnificently on stage, attacking his axe like an out of control thresher. It was that precious voice that we cherished more than anything, that soaring wounded roar that reverberated through clubs, dance halls and later, arenas, threatening their walls with its sonorousness. That plangent howl has been reduced to a husky croak that can barely sustain the bottom end necessary to carry off songs like “Girl Trouble”. On rollicking numbers like “NYC ABC” it hits the high notes only by mistake, like an amateur marksman who gets lucky.

All those layers of mushy strings, dripping over his voice like over sweet cordial, and those idiotically yammering horn lines, unnecessarily interjecting its raspy flow, only served to disguise the fact that its majesty and grace had gone. It had been gone for years now, but you never could tell from the albums because they have been cosmetically altered with pro – tools and other modern studio trickery. I always thought that David had lost his song writing genius temporarily and hoped he would regain it after a few years in the wilderness like many others of his generation. I cherished that hope, believing that when he regained it, he could once again combine it with his sublime voice to write and sing true songs. My hopes were shattered today. If this was a new paper article, this would be my caption beside David’ portrait–

David Rose, onetime teen idol and later rock and roll’s most reliable hit maker, now finds himself playing society gatherings for six figure paychecks. The man who wrote classic songs of teen rebellion and love now plays schmaltzy adult contemporary versions of his old tunes for crowds of aging, nostalgic boomers.

Oh how the great have fallen! Is that really you David Rose? Are you the same man who wrote “Withering kiss” and “Drenched in your tears”, with their innovative use of multi tracked vocals, multi part harmonies, baroque string arrangements and wall of squall harmonics? Are you the man who invented the Duck Shuffle and the Sour Puss, making every adolescent girl over 13 swoon at your dimpled cheek and awkwardly dance at the same time? No, it cannot be. You cannot be the man I idolized when I was 8. It is not your face that smiled at me from 154 posters that crammed every inch of my bedroom walls, many of them purloined from library copies of magazines for whose defacement I paid with months’ worth of my paltry allowance.

I would call you a pale shadow of your old self, except that you are now so bloated that there is nothing shadowlike about you anymore. Once you were a shadow of your present self, a sleek, flitting God who slid on shards of glass like it was a field of ice. You, who choked microphones and girlfriends, threw percussive fits on the ivories and violent boozy ones at the pub, now wear a bowtie and tuxedo and schmooze with the Queen. You, who courted arrest to protest war, poverty and racism, now send checks to the Republican Party because you don’t want to be taxed for the money that we, the adoring masses, gave you by the barrow, because you once courted arrest for us. You, who famously called Jesus “a stick figure, on a pair of crossed sticks”, now confess to the pope and rail against “abortionists”, which isn’t all that strange now that I think about it, for you always were a misogynistic knucklehead. But, at the least you were an entertaining thug. You were my favorite thug and I, in my youthful callousness, forgave you your flaws back then for you always had a ear for the perfect hook. Even the courts let you off with a slap on the wrist, for justice may be blind but it is not deaf. Besides, we knew the hell you went through at the hands of your fanatical parents and the sadness you pushed back deep inside every time you came out to play for us. Now, I hate you for your so called virtue and your hypocritical self righteousness. Your pretend purity turns my stomach like curdled milk.

The only true purity you ever had was in that vocal box that once vibrated at the frequency of angels. It has been corroded by your pandering and lies. When you sold out your voice left with your conscience, and all that is left now is a feeble distorted echo.