Attempting Normal by Marc Maron

those parties where a family had just moved out of a house and one of the kids got hold of the keys and had half his high school over to destroy the house. I’m not sure what the band was called at the time. I think we were Change. Our regular bass player, Lee, wasn’t available to play that night. He was a sweet guy who wore a floppy hat. He always seemed to have a good time bouncing around smiling like a teenage hippie clown. I think we played four times with him total, so it wasn’t like he was irreplaceable. The other bass player we knew was this guy Monte. He said he could fill in for the gig. We all got to the house and Monte had a lot of equipment. He had a bass, an amp, and a couple of other large console components that I didn’t recognize. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days. He had dark circles under his eyes. He was wearing a big down jacket and chain-smoking Marlboros. I had never met him before and I can’t seem to forget him. He laughed out of context.
    I remember we were in the basement playing our four songs:“Takin’ Care of Business,” “The Needle and the Spoon,” “Sweet Emotion” and “Tush.” Monte was great, better than the rest of us. We put our instruments down and we all disappeared into the drunken throng to try to make out with girls, drink keg beer, and/or help destroy the house. About five minutes had passed when an explosive sound came from the stage. It was jarring. Everything stopped, as if something horrible was about to happen. Then there was a thunderous cacophony of rapid-fire bass notes that began to loop and echo. The house was literally shaking. The source of the sound stood solitary in the corner of the basement where we had been playing. It was Monte. The assault of bass went on for about fifteen minutes, building layers of looping bass noise that peaked like an earthquake. Nobody knew how to process it. I had never seen anything like it. When he stopped no one clapped. No one talked. He put his bass down and walked through the crowd and out of the house. I followed him. We stood outside. He lit a cigarette and started laughing and said, “I’m on acid.” It was one of those moments when I knew there was something out there that was wild, unmanageable, and accessible to me; if I hadn’t been paralyzed with fear of it I would have been there in a flash.
    I used to buy Guitar Player and eventually became something of a gearhead, one of those guys who hangs around guitar stores. I was fascinated and obsessed with equipment. I had gear that I didn’t know how to use, really: wah-wah pedals, distortion boxes. I’d save up a ton of money and get something custom-made. I took the neck from my Telecaster and I put it on a Schecter Explorer body and had the guys at the shop refinish it. I finished it off with some fancy pickups, but I could never play that thing beyond my basic knowledge. I could never live up to my guitar. When I was sixteen I wished I was a wizard, but I never had the focus.
    I eventually put the Tele back together, had it painted candyapplered, put a brass pick guard on it and two humbuckers, and just loved looking at it. I still had that guitar in college, when I sold it for drug money to a guy who used to sleep on my couch. It was his first guitar and he loved it so I didn’t feel so bad. He was a genius, just not a guitar genius. He’s a pretty important poet and cultural critic now. I went to a reading he did at the New School in New York, and I was like, “What happened to that guitar?” And he said that his buddy’s daughter’s in a lesbian punk band, so he gave it to her. I felt pretty good about where it ended up.
    More than a musician, I’ve been an obsessive fan. Throughout high school I was obsessed with the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Tom Waits, Bowie, Eno, Muddy Waters, Iggy, Skynyrd, and on and on. Sometimes I would just become obsessed with an individual song. I would play the records over and over again, the music like an