Shut Up and Give Me the Mic Read Free Page A

have become popular. If I had been popular, my road to becoming a rock ’n’ roll star would have been cut short.
DEE LIFE LESSON
    Popularity = attention.
    Attention = socializing.
    Socializing = the end of motivation.
    It’s a fact: popularity kills creativity and drive. Why sit in your room working on your craft if you can be out getting laid? Show me truly great-looking entertainers and I guarantee that for somereason they weren’t popular and partying and were, instead, holed up in their bedrooms and practicing their craft.
    My favorite example of this is the time I met an eighties Canadian pop/rock sensation on The Howard Stern Show . I used to spend a lot of time in the mid to late eighties hanging out on Howard’s show, and this guy came in one morning to promote his new record. He had striking, James Dean good looks, so, during an extended commercial break, I asked him what had happened in his youth that kept him from using his “handsomeness” to hang out, party, and get laid. His face dropped and he looked at me as if I had psychic powers.
    “How did you know?” the heartthrob asked, truly unnerved by my query. I quickly explained my theory to him, and he spilled his guts.
    When he was just six years old, dead in the middle of a brutal winter, he was invited to the birthday party of a girl in his class; all of his classmates were invited.
    He was excited about going, especially because his mom had bought the girl a cool gift: a live, baby painted turtle, completely set up in a bowl with gravel, a rock, and a fake plastic palm tree. Though illegal to sell in many places now, back in the sixties this was pretty much the ultimate gift you could get a kid. His mom wrapped the bowl—turtle safely ensconced inside—and dropped him off at the party. When he entered the house, the little girl’s mom took the gift and put it with the others, on top of the radiator.
    The party was going great, and when it finally came time for the birthday girl to open her gifts, all of her classmates gathered around to ooh and aah. His classmate finally got to his unopened gift, and he pushed through the crowd to the front, proudly exclaiming, “That one’s from me! That one’s from me!”
    The excitement in the room was palpable as the little girl excitedly tore off the wrapping paper, revealing the turtle bowl . . . with a dead baby turtle hanging out of its shell inside. The blazing-hot radiator had cooked the poor thing alive.
    Well, the birthday girl screamed, children cried, and from that moment on, he was known to all as Turtle Boy. He grew up an outcast and the brunt of jokes, and no matter how handsome he got,no matter how talented he was or what he did, he was always just a loser to the kids in his town. So, he sat in his room alone and . . . you know the rest. Lack of popularity = creative development and ambition.
    Meanwhile, back at my personal humiliating, life-defining moment, my popularity was crushed like Hammy’s fingers, and I sank further into my dreamworld of becoming a rich, famous rock ’n’ roll star.
    Funny how things work out.

“this boy can sing!”
     
    W ith the options of being the tough kid, the cool kid, or the popular kid removed from my class-hierarchy choices, I opted for another position . . . class clown. Mildly disruptive and at times entertaining, this job gave me some needed attention (albeit often negative), and the girls kind of liked it. Plus, it beat the hell out of being a nothing.
    To add insult to my new school injury, the Baldwin school district was at that time one of the top-rated school districts in the country. My effortless A’s in Freeport turned into effortless C’s in Baldwin. My parents were less than pleased. One of the few ways I could get special attention from them had dried up. I had to struggle to get decent grades pretty much the rest of my time in school. It wasn’t that I wasn’t smart, I just didn’t want to “apply myself” (as just about every one