It's funny how things become associated inside a person's brain. Like recently I have been replaying Tales of Symphonia on my Gamecube. At the same time I've just gotten my hands on a copy of Def Leppard's 15 year greatest hits CD. By combining the two together I have created a connection inside my brain that I hadn't seen coming. Now whenever I hear Def Leppard on the radio, I can immediately think of Tales of Symphonia. Do they go together? Not really, although Def's high vocals and music style seem to go well with some of the characters.
This happened to me before when I was playing Grand Theft Auto II. I ate a lot of licorice and drank a lot of orange juice while playing that game. Now all three of those things are linked together in my brain. The problem is that orange molotov cocktails with twizzler straws don't taste very good.
Then there's what I think about when I eat pizza. Everytime I eat pizza I can't help but think of Mick Jagger and the Stones. See, back in '65, when I was traveling around with the Stones, we ended up in New York City one night. Now, I should probably explain what I mean by 'traveling with the Stones'. You see, I had met the guys and known for a while, but hadn't until recently done anything with them. This was the first real time that I was spending a considerable amount of time with them. Things were as crazy as they would become later, but they had a number of hits under their belts and had made for themselves.
But anyway, we were in New York, right? We were sitting in our hotel room when all of a sudden Mick decides he wants a pizza. 'I've come all this way to New York, so why shouldn't I have some of their pizza?' he siad to me. Something you should know about Mick: he's always been the type of guy that wants to get his way, even before he hit the big time. So at that moment, when he had enough money to buy a pizzaria, even though I didn't think it was a good idea to be buying a pizza at midnight, I didn't try to stop him.
But you can see the problems with trying to buy a pizza so late. Mick, he gets on the TV and starts looking for commercials advertising for pizza. He just kept flipping through the channels. He must have seen a commercial for everything on that set: some Billy Mays predecessor was seeling bleach, a preacher was calling on our souls to join his church, a couple movies were on, and a cowboy was selling cigarettes (which I remember as being weird because I always saw cowboys and liking chew more, but whatever).
Now, eventually Mick got really frustrated with the TV, so tells me to get on my coat; we were going to find a place to get pizza. Thinking I would be in deep trouble if I lost the biggest upcoming star in rock & roll, I followed. Mick hailed a taxi, and we drove around the for the next 2 hours just looking for a place that would sell us some New York style pizza. All the while Mick was getting more and more angry and more and more frustrated. Finally we came across a sign that had the magical words: "24 hour pizza delivery". Mick pretty much screams at the driver to pull over. We get out of the car and head to the door just as a girl comes out and starts locking up. Mick asked, in a few choicer words, what was going on, that this was supposed to be open all day. The girl said that the owner had come down on some hard times and had sold the place just that day to new management. She said that if he really wanted pizza from there he would have to come back in a week or so. Seeing this as a sign from above Mick gives up and we went back to the hotel.
About a week later, after a rather righteous party, Mick brought me a new song he had been working on. He called it, (I Can't Get No) New York Pizza'. Despite my reservations with the title, I looked the words over, more or less just to humor him. Turns out he had a real winner, or at least I thought so. So I told, you gotta think of a better title, something catchy. Like what? he asked me. So I thought about it, and said, 'Why don't you say satisfaction instead of New York pizza? Then it's still true, but it has the innuendo in there so it'll catch more people's attention. He agreed. Keith Richards, who had been black out drunk during all of this, suddenly sat up and grabbed his guitar. He hashed out a few notes that eventually became the basic melody of the song. Luckily I was there with my recorder, or else he wouldn't have a remembered a single part of it.
Yeah, I helped Mick out a bunch of times while I was with him. Like this one time when we were in New Orleans. We had just finished a show, and Mick wanted to go out, so we went to celebrate at a bar. When the bar closed Mick wanted to keep going, but me, being the good little boy I was, I went home so I could get up for church in the morning. So Mick went out by himself. The next morning I got a call from Mick saying he needed a ride. I said sure since I was worried about the guy, and I went to pick him up. When I found him he looked absolutely terrible. I wanted to ask him what he had been up to, but we had an unspoken rule not to ask if the person didn't want to tell, and I knew that Mick didn't want to talk about it, so I let it go.
About a month later, Mick came back to me for advice on another song. This song's title was bad too, but in a different way than Satisfaction. Let's just say that it dealt with the abilities of a certain female companion available in New Orleans. Still, the rest of the song was good, I tried to help. Eventually we settled on Brown Sugar so that the context of the song wouldn't be lost.
You know, I never minded helping out Mick and the boys. My only problem was that I was never compensated or credited for my efforts. To this day the Stones deny that I was ever with them. Maybe they forgot, maybe not. Well, I haven't always been denied credit; sometimes I just gave it up. Like that one time with Michael Jackson.
Everybody knows that Thriller was one of the most expensive music videos ever. Few people know why. The real reason is because they used real zombies, imported from Haiti, to do all of the scenes. I was one of the lead advisors on the project, so I pleaded with Michael not to use them for a couple reasons a) the zombies were hard to train to dance b) zombies eat people, and paying all of the families restitution would be expensive, and c) zombies don't like to be put back in the ground once they're out. But Michael insisted; he said he wanted realism. So I quit the project with only a month left to go. I was one month away from having my name on the credits. Oh well.
So anyway, it's very strange how things get connected in the brain.
