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July 12, 2009I’m sorry, ladiesCruel, I knowTO LEAVE YOU SUSPENDEDin air my last column, but I wanted to reserve my comments on the American Idol Tour’s Portland show until I saw the Tacoma show and the Oakland show. I often find, with a symphony, or film or such, that I have to experience it at least twice before I can appreciate the fine points of the entirety of the work, and I wanted a refresher. Plus I was writing on the fly between fireworks and roast pigs, train rides and concerts. I was also avoiding telling you what you don’t want to hear. [Readers: This column, which was originally published on July 12, 2009, was revised by me, the author, July 17, 2009 to better reflect my genuine feelings for Adam’s gift and his decency. Though my reactions to the show, as an audience member, were valid at the time, the bad review I gave it reflected not the quality of his performance, but a hollow disappointment that he didn’t connect more with the audience - AJ] LADIES, I’M SORRYAdam did not meet my sky-high expectations that he come down from the stage and carry me out of the Rose Garden like in “A Rock Star and a Gentleman,” starring myself as The Lucky Woman. I’m not a tour bus stalker, so the most I could expect from the guy would be a spark of recognition, a nanosecond in which his field of vision included me. He scanned but did not land. Plus every time he came near me the elbow attached to my neighbor would appear in my face. He seemed rather distant to me, that he was not engaging the audience as the other idols had, but perhaps that’s just his style, and that’s just my perception. Should I fault him because I wanted more? PLENTY OF PELVIC ACTIONand thigh massage, but I for one didn’t catch any overt crotch grabbing. In fact, the phalanx of pretty young things—blonde pre-teens—in front of us had me thinking, Adam, whatever it is, don’t do it. Their mother was counting how many people were wearing black nail polish. I found myself annoyed that I was being defined in terms of someone else I was supposed to be copying. I was wearing black nail polish before he knew he was gay. I’ve been wearing black on black since they invented black. Oddly, I stumbled across a picture of me in 2004 wearing pretty much what I’m wearing today, black sweater, jeans and jacket. “I’ve come so far!” I told my friends. My friend who preferred Kris thought Adam was an over-the-top actor, not genuinely emotionally involved in his songs, that he often over-sells a song and is lacking subtlety. “Here I was waiting to hear if your fantasy came to life,” she emailed of my aborted Portland review. “What fantasy is that?” I asked. “If Adam Lambert is as good in person as he is in your mind.” Uh, well…the guy can sing! And he’s without doubt a major star presence (but he didn’t carry me off-stage). WHAT DID I EXPECT?An awesome show, and it was an amazing set, though he seemed to be trying different voices on for size. Maybe it’s all about the connection. Perhaps I was underwhelmed because there wasn’t one. Perhaps that’s the crux of the problem here (the “Adam problem” we all have), ladies—each of us feels connected to someone who’s not connected to us—at all. But that’s a physical and logical impossibility. It takes two, baby. You’re stuck holding the bag. I don’t like holding the bag. Whatever my problem was, sometime during the night, I divorced the guy. Adam Lambert cured me of Adam Lambert! I’m not one iota less a fan. I was just delivered of the delusion we all have that somehow we have to complete the connection, that I have to have anything at all to do with the guy (in real life). Na. Ga. Ha. What a relief! I had the opportunity to stand back and observe how foreign and remote this guy’s life is from mine. He’s extraordinarily talented, handsome and sexy—but now I can just enjoy it, not take it personally. OF COURSEI enjoyed the show—Adam is nothing if not a spectacle. Nothing compares to hearing those crystal clear notes right out of his own throat. I will take immense intense pleasure in looking at and listening to him for the rest of my life. But the fact remains, I am now outside the crush, even though I fully know what’s with us women. I can regard the crush now as its own entity, separate from me, and it’s pointless. It doesn’t serve me, it frustrates me. Out it goes! HE LIVESin a different world. He has entered the Club of the Famous, and is one or two degrees of separation from all of them. Would he have made it into Madonna’s apartment a half-year ago? (All the famous need for access to the other famous is their mutual fame, or another famous person to intercede on their behalf.) They can go up to any other famous person and have an “in” to strike up conversation. If Adam ever runs into violinist Pinchas Zuckerman, or basketball player Kobe Bryant, or (former) Governor Sarah Palin in an airport, he can approach them and say, “Hi. I’m famous, too.” SO, PORTLAND.Alone with your TV set and your reveries, you can come to feel like you know a celebrity, that you love him like a friend. I do know, if I felt, as a fan, that I “knew” Adam, I now feel that I don’t, because literally, I don’t know him. I can’t claim to know someone I’m not friends with. He is exactly himself. My assessments of him have nothing to do with what he is. “HE BURST MY BUBBLE,”I told friend Dave later.“You needed your bubble burst,” said he. TOUCHÉ.Of course I’m not throwing Adam over. I’d love to know him. I would like to be the Grace to his Will, all right? I wish I were on the tour bus talking into the night, getting to know him and writing a book called Forget Eve! This is All About Adam! But there’s no longer anything dreamy about it. Actually, the only thing I would want from Adam now (he’s no better a singer than I am a writer)–is that he like my writing as much as I like his music. But that’s a doubtful prospect. As it happens, I’m not one of a million fans Adam doesn’t know exists. Adam does know I exist, because someone at a fan club printed out my “red wine” column and follow-up and delivered them right into his hands. Yeah. Most likely, it was a blip on his radar screen, with the life he now leads, just one more busybody thing written about him, and I’ve no idea what he thought, but if he wanted to hear anything else about himself out of my self-important know-it-all mouth he’d be following me on Twitter. Perhaps he was offended by my slam on the language skills of his fans. The guy tweets like a teenager (actually most people do), but there is tremendous intelligence in his body language. Sometimes the tiniest gesture lends depth to a song. Strange mix. ”IT IS AN ON-STAGE THING ONLY”Adam said to an interviewer who asked him to do some of his choreographed Bowie moves backstage. “No,” he refused. “You’ll have to wait and see. I’m not giving away my moves backstage. It is an on-stage thing only.” I think perhaps a lot of things about Adam are on-stage only. I’ve seen him in lots of interviews, and with the performance switch turned off, he just strikes me as a good-looking nice guy, someone’s 27-year-old son, and so very young, not at all the sex bomb beckoning to you from the stage. (He looks all of 18 in “Born to Be Wild,” running wild on the streets in his skinny jeans, hightops and tough jacket.) You can witness the switch going off at times, most vividly at the end of “If I Can’t Have You,” as if he has to knock himself upside the haid and come out of a trance to respond to the applause. Oh yeah, I’m on stage at American Idol. Like at the end of the soft-porn video “Whole Lotta Love,” he blinks and boom, he’s back smiling. IF I DIDN’T KNOW,I would think the on-stage Adam and the off-stage Adam were two different people. Maybe it’s that way with all performers? But some have more of a persona than others, and Adam seems to have a new one for every song. I think James Taylor’s pretty much himself both on and off stage. Who is this guy on stage? I suspect you can’t access the on-stage Adam from the on-the-street Adam. It’s a on-stage thing only. Perhaps he needs performing to express certain aspects of himself we wouldn’t otherwise see? I KNOW WHERE HE WAS COMING FROMwhen he said about himself in an interview, “I’m not hot.” He’s used to himself. He appeared almost dorky on 20/20. I was thinking, hey, bring your sexy brother out, the twin who goes on stage for you. The AI tour is still a G-rated audience, so we don’t yet know what Adam would bring to his own show, partly because he’s still singing other people’s work. He doesn’t bring anything new to Mad World (Gary Jules), Feelin’ Good (Muse), even the controversial “Ring of Fire” is someone else’s arrangement. In “Starlight” (Muse) I thought I caught him mimicking the singer’s weird pronunciation of “styarlight” and again in “Life on Mars” he uses what must be his Bowie voice. As a reader of Rolling Stone wrote in, Adam is “nothing more than a caricature of whomever he is trying to portray in any given evening.” Well, no one is “nothing more than” anything. I ran across an I-hate-Adam website (some people devote a lot of their time to hating Adam) and there’s passion on both sides of the fence. Not everyone loves Adam, but if you don’t care about someone, you don’t spend time thinking about him; if you hate someone it’s because they provoke something in you, enough to start a damn website about. My friend Saand suggested she’d like to see Bowie mentor Adam. Not to be the next Bowie, but to be himself, whatever that might be. We’ll learn a lot from his debut album about who that is. IN TACOMA,I had a mildly pleasurable experience. I was too far away to see faces well, and was able to just enjoy the music and spectacle for entertainment value. I enjoyed it more than the Portland show because I knew what was coming and appreciated it more, but the seats were not up to my standards, leaving me feeling rather neutral. HOW MUCH IDOLATRY CAN ONE WOMAN TAKE?Well, ladies, tonight’s my third and final show. I’m on the couch with Adam and the cats, getting just a little bit stoned and zoned. I decided to upgrade my ticket at the last minute, and sprung for 2nd rows seats. But the tickets arrived and they’re for the front row. I’ll suffer through it, along with friend Peggy, currently exempt from the “Adam problem.” I have just received an email from Café Gratitude with the Question of the Day: What outcome are you hanging onto? THIRD TIME’S THE CHARMThe Oakland show blew me away, because I gave myself up to enjoy whatever was presented to me with no judgments and expectations. Even the performers not named Adam Lambert showed me a great time. A favorite bit was the bottom-6 rendition of The Four Seasons’ “Beggin’.” I was beggin’ right along with them. For some things, first row seats are so worth it. There was ample room to dance and jump between the chairs and the metal stage guard keeping us rowdy overeager fans that safe distance from the idols. When Adam came out, I was able to totally relate to him as a phenomenal individual completely separate from me, and fully appreciate his act. IT WAS MY LAST SHOW,so I did wait around at the tour bus; Adam was the last one out and was just trying to quickly sign as many autographs as possible—I didn’t need one—and sped down the lengthy line of waiting fans, not stopping to talk much. As he passed me I said in a normal conversational tone: “Adam, does the name Alexandra Jones mean anything to you?” He either didn’t hear me or didn’t want to hear me, but I didn’t make any extra effort to get his attention, so I did not meet him, and was able to observe how handsome he is in ordinary repose, sparkling with bejeweled eyes, in T-shirt and jeans and his reptile boots. What a creature of God! I HAD THE WEIRD SENSATIONof all the million pictures I’ve seen of him on the web flashing through my mind, and it was easy to see that this guy was that guy, that he’s been and done all those things we’ve seen and read about, toured Europe in “Hair,” sang in “Wicked” and “The Ten Commandments,” posed in all those getups and guises, got high at Burning Man, held hands with an interior designer, kissed a guy with his purple hair swept back with sunglasses, competed on TV and won himself a career, that all those things belong to his life, not ours, leading to this harried moment outside his tour bus at the venue in Oakland. His strawberry blonde origins revealed themselves in his fair, freckled arms as he signed the photos and programs held out to him. Once again I was able to distance myself from personal involvement with him. It was after midnight by the time I got back to BART and after one by the time I got home, where I messed with this column while listening to Bowie’s “Life on Mars?” a couple dozen times on continuous loop. It will forever remind me of Adam. MY AI TOUR 2009Portland: Adam did not deliver some mysterious element I was seeking, but did deliver the only awesome set of the night. For my price of admission, he didn’t owe me any more than that. Nevertheless I invented a scenario of his being unreachable even in person, that would distance him from me and disillusion me of my useless wasteful crush. Tacoma: Worst seats of the series, but enjoyed anticipating parts I liked. Took more notice of the performances on the second round. Oakland: Blown away. To me the most important element of a theater experience is the seat. The farther away from the stage the seat, the farther you are from experiencing the work at its source. In the front row, you are more or less responsible for representing the audience, so I was very involved and responsive. And at this show I was free of wanting anything from Adam but a display of his phenomenal talent. That’s why I was able to relax and completely open myself to experiencing it. Wow! Although I spent much of his more raucous performances mimicking his moves and singing back at him, dancing and pointing directly at him in my tails and 21 pieces of jewelry (added two since Portland), I still couldn’t tell whether he was seeing me, or just looking out at the audience. AT ALL THREE SHOWSit was clear Adam was the acknowledged star of the show, with the most intense audience response and rock star production values to his set. As reader Mary put it, following Adam’s Bowie set with Kris is “like having a cigarette after great sex!!!” I so thoroughly enjoyed this frenetic July 4th holiday I created for myself. The flight to Seattle for the 4th, the train to Portland for the kick-off show, the train back to Seattle for the Tacoma show, and the flight back home, leading up to the Oakland show. Done for fun, and mission accomplished. STATE OF AFFAIRSI am ever-as-much inexorably in love with the incredible phenomenon of Adam Lambert, but I do not have a crush on him. Phew! There is no outcome I am hanging onto. I’m still listening. I downloaded “Want,” whether Adamically Correct or not (it was a single released without his blessing from an album of old demo tapes coming out this summer, scooping the release of his “real” debut record this fall), because I love it; despite the cheesy instrumentation, the youth in his voice, the innocence of not knowing his future, twists my heart in a knot. It’s already climbed to No. 4 on my ITunes Top 25 Most Played list. ONE MORE THING,ladies, I’m sorry about—I doubt I will have much more to say about Mr. Lambert, save some closing thoughts. He will continue to intrigue and fascinate me, until he doesn’t; he will be my favorite singer until the day he’s not, but this forum is needed for other things. Because American Idol is off the air, and my Idol tour holiday is over, and those readers outside of the crush who are for some reason still reading, have been wondering for too long, what is with that woman? Will she give the Adam thing a rest? Well, she’ll give herself a rest, anyway.
The author’s cats on the couch with Adam. [If you thought the author would waste one second of eyeball time looking through a lens instead of at Adam, you’ll be disappointed to know she didn’t take front row pictures. She’s with him on cameras: “Why can’t you have the experience without taking a picture of it?” – Ed.] ------------------------------------------------------------ This page
It's reality that will bring you joy copyright Alexandra Jones 2009 |
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