Too Weird for Ziggy Read Online Free PDF

song brought tears to my eyes, I swear to God. Best thing you’ve done. I’ve got this superb rhythm section I’m working with,” adding, as if he’d just that moment thought of it, “you’d be so fucking cool together. And I know an amazing keyboard guy—been on eight top fives in a row. You two would relate. You know,” he said softly, “he lost a brother too—carjack down in Venice Beach, I’m not shitting you. I talked to him about working with you on your comeback and he came in his pants. He loves you.”
    â€œDid you like the song about the horses?” asked Cal. “That’s my favorite. It’s the first one I wrote when I came back. ‘
Those big strong horses sure are sweaty
,’” he sang quietly. He sounded like an angel force-fed D. H. Lawrence novels and Gauloise cigarettes. BB threw Joel a look that said that right now sweaty horses were list-topping VH1-unfriendly, and if he did like it he should unlike it, immediafuckingmente.
    â€œCool,” Buddha Boy grinned. “We’re ninety percent there, Cal. Like I said, I love what you’re doing and I’m with you all the way. All it wants is to be a little bit more
now
, you know what I’m saying? What I’m seeing is a Crosby Stills and Nash-meets-Public Enemy kinda vibe, a kinda double-edged protest deal, a cry from the heart, but with
harmonies
, you got me? Not so in your face. Hard but
heart
. Your music
was
the summer. Now it’s the
fall
, you know what I’m saying? You’re a living legend, you’ve been through it, man—everybody knows what you’ve been through, the drugs and the breakdown and all the crazy shit—and you’ve come out the other end, thank God.” (Not God, Cal thought. ThankHank, his therapist, cowriter, hairdresser, guru, his best—his only—friend. Cal Alone Days sucked donkey dick.) “And there’s so many of your contemporaries who haven’t, Cal, I don’t need to tell you that. And everybody wants to hear all about it—they’re all rooting for you out there: the critics, the public, a huge fucking demographic. They’re
eager
. In this business, I can’t tell you just how
sweet a sound
that is, man. This—I hate the word ‘comeback’—album is gonna take you onto a whole other phase.”
    Cal already had his new phase figured out, and he knew what it was and he knew it was right because he’d been through so many wrong ones. It was his David Letterman phase. David Letterman, he told his shrink, is the most admired and imitated man in American culture today. He’s all ego and no ego. He wears smart, dark suits and makes them look like he showered and shat in them. And word on the street is he’s one of the best-endowed men in showbiz too—up there with Lyle Lovett and Tommy “T-bone” Lee. Cal bought a suit, same cut, same color, and in his visualizing sessions now he fixes on Pammie and Julia, their big shiny mouths all wet and salty, opening up for him like two great tins of sardines.
    â€œWell, whadda you say, Cal?”
    Cal was actually busy thinking. About some of his wrong phases. Like that one when he tried pretending he was pregnant, that was pretty crazy, though no crazier, as Hank pointed out to him, than a rockstar pretending to be a normal guy. He would bend over the toilet every morning with his fingers down his throat. When his sisters tried to coax him out of his bed and back into the studio he’d pointat his bloated belly and shake his head. Over the years, people had made all sorts of attempts to bring him out of retirement. There was a vogue for a while of young popstars dragging all these oldies back into the limelight, like the Pet Shop Boys did with Dusty Springfield—Cal liked Dusty. There was one guy, he’d forgotten his name—he was a big hit with teenage girls in England for singing miserable