I work at a desk in an office. I spend 7.5 hours a day (give or take)
staring at a computer screen that's 30 inches from my face. I'm
nearsighted. Every day I wear a button-up collared shirt. Some days I
wear a suit and tie. I am the antithesis of the rock and roll lifestyle.
Yet for two glorious weeks on a tour of Western Europe, I was a rock
star. A children's rock star.
Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images
Like this, but with less dignity.
I was a
Party Animal,
a member of a rock and roll band for kids that's so not famous that
Google will think you're fucking with it if you try to book it. We
dressed up in costumes and danced around to prerecorded music in the
general direction of children, or, to put it another way,
we touched rock glory.
And while nothing can ever truly prepare you for the hardcore,
take-no-prisoners, live-fast-die-young lifestyle of a kids' rocker,
there were a few things that took me completely by surprise. Things like
...
#5. You Don't Actually Have to Play an Instrument
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Like every single person in Los Angeles ever, I was once an actor.
And like most actors in Los Angeles, I was poor, hungry, and desperate
to pay the bills. Since stripping was not an option (thank you, Irish
skin ... oh, and unimpressive physique ... oh, and general
weird-lookingness), I turned to the next best thing: rock and roll (for
kids!). A friend of a friend of a friend had put together a show that
consisted of four performers, each playing an instrument, singing,
dancing, and teaching kids about basic everyday interactions, like how
to be a good friend ... or some shit. Whatever, kids will like anything.
Even though it was a rock band in the loosest sense of the term, it
still suffered from the age-old problem of every rock band: They needed a
drummer. In a freak accident that would rival Spinal Tap, the drummer
had sprained his back doing a flip off of a trampoline
during the show.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Unlike Spinal Tap, our amps only went to 10.
When I auditioned for the role, the director assured me that I would
not be expected to flip off of a trampoline, which was good, because
that was at the top of the list of things I was completely unable to do.
The very next item on the list was "play the drums." Not a problem.
Also, this character was a surfer. I am paler than a freshly laid egg on
a bed of new-fallen snow. Again, not an issue. What I did have was a
passable impression of Spicoli from
Fast Times at Ridgemont High and a keen knack for ... wait, no, that was basically it.
Universal Studios
Good luck, bro.
Despite being seemingly wrong for the part in every conceivable way, I
was cast in the role. I spent a week learning the choreography and how
to fake playing the drums. All of the singing was done over a
prerecorded track. I learned to dance, fake drum, and fake sing all at
once without poking myself in the eye while spinning my drumsticks --
just in time for a 14-day, five-country tour of Europe. Oh, and did I
mention that we performed as giant anthropomorphic animals? No? It must
have slipped my mind. I was a lion, of course, because lions are
nature's drummers (duh). Lance was my name, and according to a bio that I
had absolutely no part in writing, I liked spending my down time
"working out at muscle beach or meditating in Malibu."
So.
Pretty cool guy.
#4. You Will Have Real, Actual Fans
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Our first show was in Belgium near Brussels. We performed in the rec
room of what amounted to a community center. We entered the "stage" from
a door that led directly from a kitchen. As I waited nervously
backstage among the dirty plates and day-old lasagna, I wondered, "Who
could possibly be coming to see this show?" Our band, the Party Animals,
was by no means a household name. This was only the fifth show the
group had ever performed. Yet as I emerged from the kitchen singing to
the prerecorded heavy bass line of the opening track, "It's Party Time,"
I was greeted by the screaming faces of a sea of children. And my God
were they excited. One young girl who was no more than 6 years old was
desperately trying to reach over the small crowd of children just so she
could ... I don't know what ... touch us or something? It was like we
were the Beatles coming off of a tour bus as rabid tweens pushed and
shoved just for the chance to touch greatness. Who was I to deny this
child her chance? I reached out and gave her a high-five. She fainted.
Her mom promptly picked her up, took her to the back, and revived her
with some apple juice.
Liquidlibrary/liquidlibrary/Getty Images, Stockbyte/Stockbyte/Getty Images
Too much hard rockin'.
The show went on. Every time we announced the next song in our set, the kids would scream and yell as if
this
was the one they had been waiting all night to hear. After we closed
the show with "Rock the House," having indeed rocked the house to its
fullest potential, we stayed to sign autographs. I signed "Lance the
Lion" on a number of photos, programs, and other paraphernalia,
wondering if the kids would be disappointed if they ever found out that
the original Lance was laid up back in Los Angeles with an injury and
the signature they had just acquired was a fake. lol
Polka Dot/Polka Dot/Getty Images
You're welcome.
#3. You Will Live the Rock and Roll Lifestyle ... Sort Of
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After the show, I thought the whole thing must have been an anomaly.
Fans? In Belgium? Clearly we had just accidentally found kids so
deprived of any and all entertainment that seeing four people wearing
colored wigs and fabric tails blew their minds. I was wrong. Every show
was like the first, and each was bigger than the last. No big deal, we
were pros. Rock and roll was in our blood. We worked the crowd. We knew
exactly when to "high-five," when to "down-low," and when to "too slow."
The kids ate it up.
After a while, I started to believe in the myth. How could I not? A
performance in Germany had a "Lance" fan section, a group of tweens so
enamored with a surfing lion that mine was the only autograph they
requested after the show. We spent the evenings carousing and drinking.
We rode from town to town on a double-decker party bus with satellite TV
and a bar. I stopped in Amsterdam, participated in local legalities at a
coffee shop, then again at a bar, then on someone's lawn. I then spent
an hour watching an organ grinder on a boat on the canals play music for
pocket change. It was the most beautiful song I've ever forgotten.
No seriously, this guy was amazing... I think... I can't remember.
We were young, famous (among the 6- to 12-year-old demographic), and
reckless. We drank with the locals in Brussels. Hooked up with
bartenders in Stavenger, Norway. Then we performed on a 25-foot elevated
stage for a pit of screaming children (and their mothers) in Ansbach,
Germany. We even picked fights with soldiers at Ramstein Air Base. And
by "picked fights," I mean quietly acquiesced when a group of enlisted
stole our taxicab. But the retorts I came up with six weeks later were
excoriating.
Visage/Stockbyte/Getty Images
So excoriating.
Every minute we weren't performing, we were partying. But we did it
all on a kindergartner's schedule. Since our shows were for kids, they
were usually in the afternoon or early evening. That meant the partying
got started around 6:00 p.m. and we were safely tucked in by midnight
(1:00 a.m. at the latest, Mom, jeez). We were golden gods.
It wasn't until our final night in the sleepy resort town of
Garmisch, Germany, that we were reminded what real partying was. After
the show, we went to a nearby dance club where the locals gave us a
lesson in staying up all night drinking and performing highly aerobic
dance moves to techno music all while smoking your way through that
evening's third pack of cigarettes. Needless to say, there was a
dance-off. We'll call it a draw.
