Meeting famous people is easy...?

John’s comment on the lifetime gigology thread made me start thinking about times I’ve met people I really admired.

A lot of people who know me at all know that Stephen Malkmus is probably one of my all-time favorite musicians and personalities. The Malkman is tall and thin; he’s smooth in an accidental way, and easily one of the most sardonic talents out there. In the geeky world of indie rock, Malky is an unabashed sports fan who loves to substitute the names of local athletes into his songs when performing live. “Baby C’mon” became “Gilbert C’mon” at the Black Cat in 2005; “(Do not feed the) Oyster” was “Do not feed Joakim Noah / Under the post…” in Chicago, and so on.

And of course, the Malkster is a five-tool songwriter, a focused Dadaist storyteller, who can wring heartbreak out of the story of Jenny and Shawn (the Ess-dog), who try their hardest to make it but who can’t survive her move to Boulder for college. “Give it a day,” back in the Pavement days, uses Cotton and Increase Mather of “The Crucible” fame to liken the spread of Puritanism to a virus, one that ultimately infects the speaker of the song. Written in the mid-1990s, “Give it a day” anticipates humanitarian and political strife with lines like, “Years and years have passed / since the Puritans invaded our soul / just like those Arab terrorists you’ll never know…” and “The word spread just like small pox in the Sudan / the gentry cried, ‘Give it a day, give it a day…’” while a more recent tune like “It Kills” handles the issue of aging with a surprising level of maturity: “Nine times out of ten / I’m not the guidance type / I’ve been sitting on a fencepost for the brunt of my life / And now I need some time to find out what I feel / It kills...the time” and includes the chilling (to me) line, “There’s more to you than what you think and read.”

So, I have what Ms. AC teasingly calls a man-crush on the Malkster. Hell yes I do. So much so, in fact, that when he toured behind “Face the Truth” in 2005, I decided I would see him perform four times in four nights – in DC, Philly, Boston, and New York. To make a long story slightly less long, I had a chance to meet him in Boston – awkwardly, it turns out, in a men’s room, where I barely summoned up the courage to say anything of consequence to him. In New York, however, I found out early in the evening that I would be visiting backstage after the show, which gave me a whole night’s worth of time to agonize over what to say, how to behave.

The truth is, I completely blew it. Malk was even wearing his “Malk-a-tastic” shirt (a famous white tee that says “malk-a-tastic” on the back) and he was in a good mood. I’d imagined he might be difficult – after all, this was the man who famously dissed the Stone Temple Pilots and the Smashing Pumpkins in the space of a few seconds in the same song (more recently, he and Kim Deal of the Breeders seem to have some beef.)

We exchanged a few pleasantries, and I did my best to avoid a Chris Farley/Paul McCartney moment. He grabbed his laptop and was showing some of us pictures of his daughter. I told him I had just seen a picture of him at a gallery opening in New York, carrying his daughter in a papoose. I told him how much I enjoyed seeing the picture of him being a real, normal dad, and that the picture just seemed so wholesome to me. He seemed genuinely moved and thanked me, and that’s about as much as I remember. I actually had a few other acquaintances backstage, so we hovered and occasionally glanced over to see what the band was doing.

But what did I want, what did I expect? Did I want to talk about my fantasy baseball team? Be buddies? I have no idea. In hindsight, I think I probably was trying to be too hip, too knowing. And of course, on the opposite end of the spectrum is the exchange I had with Seymour Hersh in a Petco store, of all places. First of all, there’s the fact that, much to my surprise, I recognized Sy Hersh. I actually asked myself, “Is this happening? Am I really the kind of person who sees Seymour Hersh in a store, recognizes him, and then gets starstruck?” As he checked out, I said something like, “Mr. Hersh, I’m a big fan of your writing.” He looked startled for a second (startled to be recognized and fawned over?), and then graciously thanked me.

All of which comes back around to meeting Gillian Welch and David Rawlings - probably one of the nicest encounters I’ve ever had with any famous person (I would put the few minutes of conversation I had with Dar Williams as a close second.) For some reason, at that particular point in the night, Welch and Rawlings were sitting alone. My brother and I came by and I told them how much I enjoyed “Hell Among the Yearlings” – a dark album of guitar and banjo duets that deal with murder, rape, addiction, death, and other cheery topics. They just seemed so happy to hear that someone enjoyed their work. We actually had as close to a normal conversation as I’ve ever had with anyone whose work I admired that much.

There are a number of other people whom I admire, whom I would love to meet – Gilbert Arenas probably tops the list at this point, with a number of close seconds. But I still can't answer the question of why I want to meet them. What do I want to get out of it? It’s not a natural situation, and the psychological power imbalance is so severe that I’ll end up feeling like an idiot no matter what I do or say. So why do I want to put myself through that again – because trust me, I’ve kicked myself a number of times for not being more “myself” when I was backstage with S-Malk in NY…? I don’t know. Maybe I hope to witness another exchange like the one I did between Brendan and D-Mac, which got me a cameo on Wizznutzz. And, as I often do, I'm hapring on the negative: after all, there is that giddiness, that excitement, when you get to stand in front of someone whom you greatly admire - it's immature and juvenile and totally authentic. Now if I can just try not to shank it so badly next time, maybe I'll have one less thing to regret in life.