Dear NME,
I was born
on Feb. 29th, 1964, in Wisconsin. The number one song in a America
was “I wanna hold your hand.” An apt tune, considering I would spend much of my
life chasing girls, getting them, losing them, recovering from all that, then doing
it all over again. I was sent to the
principal’s office for looking up the teacher’s dress in Kindergarten. I
remember it well, we were all sitting down, in a semi-circle, around the teacher,
and she was reading to us or telling a story, something, who listens? I was kind
of rocking back and forth, in a semi-lotus position and each time I would sort
of tilt my head a little more as I got closer. I’m sure it was obvious, but I
thought I was being stealthy. Then, success, I got a glimpse! And a stern hand
on my collar, yanking me to my feet for a forced march to the office. All for
some granny panties forced over some nylons. It was worth it.
That was in
Indiana, where I lived from the age of two through twenty-one. My first year
was spent in Pennsylvania, the time there notable only for the fact that I ran
away from home, disappearing into the woods, to the horror of my parents, who
found me hours later, two subdivisions over. Over the years I’ve filled in the
details of this journey with my imagination so many times that it feels like a
memory instead of an old family story. I spent my second birthday there, or
non-birthday. I imagine my mom pushing me around in a stroller, with the
Temptation’s “My girl” (which was number one that February of 1965) playing on
the radio whileshe sang along. She sang to me a lot, she says, The Beatles, the
Stones, anything with a nice melody.
From there our
family (which now included my brother Dave) moved to Indiana. At first we
stayed at the Travelodge, a little motel near the Wabash river, a block from
the future site of the Levee Plaza Skateboard Park, where I would meet Bill
Bailey and Jeff Isbell, as well as many other people who never became famous, and probably never wanted to. The Travelodge,
where I would lose my virginity years later, and where I would take the
occasional girl even more years later, picking them up at the shitty college
bar that was erected on the site where the skatepark had been.
We were
staying at this little motel because my dad had taken a job at Purdue
University, as a professor in the Industrial and Physical Pharmacy dept. Put
simply, in his words, he taught people how to better deliver drugs to the body.
Hey dad, how about a syringe? All my friends will really like them years from now.
My mom was
a housewife, for the first ten years of my life, anyway, then she went back to
work as a pharmacist. There was a little shopping center at the edge of campus,
maybe a mile or two from where we lived. I tend to think of suburbs as those
vast, cookie cutter developments like you see in ET. We lived in the country,
down a little lane that ran off the main road, which itself had branched off of
the county highway that had a long time ago stretched all the way up to
Chicago. It was still the suburbs.
The Purdue
Service Center, where Goodnight’s Pharmacy was, was also home to a supermarket,
a laundromat/pinball arcade, a Burger Chef, and LMG Records. LMG, which stood
for Lick My Grooves, was where I first heard Can, among many other oddities.
Once my mom
went back to work, my brother and I were on our own. We hadn’t been allowed to cross
the main road before this; now were allowed to ride our bikes all the way into
town, opening up whole new worlds to pollute with our evil imaginations.
You might
as well call me Epistle Larry, because I’ve decided to tell my life story, in
letter form. Letters to you, NME! Someday I’ll collect all the letters in a
book and call it, “I used to rollerskate with Axl.” Scratch that, you can still
call me Danny Sirens.
Danny
Sirens, Faraway Sirens, San Francisco
P.S. Here’s a link to a song by my first band. We formed in
1979 or so, and only ever put two songs out.