Shooting Star T-shirts, caps, posters, stickers, even a special-edition Shooting Star telescope. Suddenly, the press was all over us. Interviews all the time, which was flattering at first. People cared enough about us to read what we had to say.
But a weird thing started to happen in interviews.
The reporter would sit the band down together, ask some perfunctory questions to us all, and then turn the microphone or camera on me. And I tried to open it up to the rest of the band. That’s when reporters started requesting interviews with just me, a request I uniformly turned down, until it suddenly became impossible for us to do interviews any other way.
About four months into the tour, we were in Rome.
Rolling Stone had sent a reporter to spend a few days with us. One night, after a show, we were closing the hotel bar. It was a pretty mellow scene and we were sitting around, decompressing, pounding grappa. But then the reporter starts firing away with all these heavy-duty questions. All to me. I mean, there were about a dozen of us in there — me, Liz, Fitzy, Mike, Aldous, some roadies, some groupies — but this guy was acting like I was the only person in the room. “Adam, do you see Collateral Damage as having a single narrative? If so, can you elaborate on it?” “Adam, do think this record represents your growth as a songwriter?” “Adam, you’ve mentioned in other interviews you don’t want to go down ‘that dark rock star path,’ but how do you keep from suffocating on your own fumes?”
Mike just lost it. “You hijacked the band!” he screamed at me, like it was just the two of us in a room, like there wasn’t a reporter right there. “This isn’t just the Adam Wilde Show, you know. We’re a band. A unit. There are four of us. Or did you forget that, on your way down the ‘dark rock star path?’” Mike turned to the reporter. “You wanna know about the illustrious Adam Wilde? I’ve got some choice details. Like our rock star over here has to do this crazy voodoo shit before each show and is such a prima donna that if you whistle backstage before a show he has a tantrum because of the bad luck—”
“Mike, come on,” Liz interrupted sharply. “All artists have their rituals.”
The reporter, meanwhile, was scribbling away, eating all this up until Aldous diplomatically said that everyone was tired and shooed everyone but the band out of the bar and tried to get me and Mike to make nice. But then Mike just let loose for round two of insults, telling me what a spotlight-hogging asshole I’d become. I looked over at Liz to come to my defense again, but she was staring intently at her drink. So I turned to Fitzy, but he just shook his head. “I never thought I’d be the one to say this, but grow up, you two.” Then he left.
I looked pleadingly at Liz. She looked sympathetic, but tired. “Mike, you were out of line in there,” she said flatly. But then she turned to me and shook her head.
“But, Adam, come on. You’ve got to try to see it from his perspective. From all of ours. It’s tough to be big about this, especially when you’ve retreated from us. I get why you have, but that doesn’t make it any easier.”
All of them — they were all against me. I waved my hands in surrender. I ran out of the bar, strangely close to tears. In the lobby, this Italian model named Rafaella, who’d been hanging with us, was waiting for a taxi. She smiled when she saw me. When her taxi came, she gestured with her head, inviting me inside. And I went.
The next day, I checked into a different hotel from the band.
The story hit RollingStone.com almost immediately and the tabloids a few days later. Our label freaked, as did our tour promoters, all of whom warned of the various forms of hell there would be to pay if we didn’t honor our concert commitments. Aldous flew in a professional mediator to talk to me and Mike. She was useless.
Her genius idea, a legacy that continues to this day, is what Fitzy refers to as “The Divorce.” I would continue to stay at one hotel for the remainder of the tour, the rest of the band at another. And our publicists decided it was safer to keep me and Mike separate in interviews, so now reporters often talk to me solo. Yeah, those changes have helped a lot!
When I got back from the Collateral Damage tour, I almost quit the band. I moved out of the house I’d been sharing with Fitzy in Portland and into my own place.
I avoided those guys. I was angry, but also ashamed. I wasn’t sure how, but I’d clearly ruined everything. I might’ve just let the run end there, but Liz stopped by my new place one afternoon and asked me to just give it a few months’ breathing space and see how I felt. “Anyone would be going a little nuts after the couple years we’ve had, especially the couple of years you’ve had,” she’d said, which was about as much as we acknowledged Mia. “I’m not asking you to do anything. I’m just asking you to not do anything and see how you feel in a few months.”
Then the album started winning all these awards, and then I met Bryn and moved to L.A. and didn’t have to deal with them much, so I just wound up getting sucked in for another round.
Bryn’s the only person who knows how close to the edge that tour pushed me, and how badly I’ve been dreading this upcoming one. “Cut them loose,” is her solution. She thinks I have some sort of guilt complex, coming from humble origins and all, and that’s why I won’t go solo. “Look, I get it. It’s hard to accept that you deserve the acclaim, but you do. You write all the songs and most of the music and that’s why you get all the attention,” she tells me. “You’re the talent! Not just some pretty face. If this were a movie, you’d be the twenty-million-dollar star and they’d be the supporting players, but instead you all get an equal split,” she says.
“You don’t need them. Especially with all the grief they give you.”
But it’s not about the money. It never has been. And going solo doesn’t seem like much of a solution. It would just be out of the frying pan and into the fire. And there’d still be touring to contend with, the thought of which has been making me physically sick.
“Why don’t you call Dr. Weisbluth?” Bryn suggested on the phone from Toronto, where she was wrapping her latest film. Weisbluth’s the psychopharmacologist the label had hooked me up with a few months earlier.
“See if he can give you something a little stronger. And when you get back, we need to have a sit-down with Brooke and seriously talk about you going solo. But you have to get through this tour. You’ll blow your reputation otherwise.”
There are worse things to blow than your reputation, aren’t there? That’s what I thought. But I didn’t say it. I just called Weisbluth, got some more scripts, and steeled myself for the tour. I guess Bryn understood, like I understood, like everyone who knew me understood, that in spite of his bad-boy rep, Adam Wilde does as he’s told.
TWELVE
There’s a piece of lead where my heart should beat
Doctor said too dangerous to take out
You’d better just leave it be
Body grew back around it, a miracle, praise be
Now, if only I could get through airport security
Mia doesn’t tell me what the next destination is. Says because it’s her secret New York tour, it should be a secret and then proceeds to lead me out of Port Authority down, down, down into a warren of subway tunnels.
And I follow her. Even though I don’t like secrets, even though I think that Mia and I have enough secrets between the two of us at this point, and even though the subway is like the culmination of all my fears. Enclosed spaces. Lots of people. No escape. I sort of mention this to her, but she throws back what I said earlier in the bowling alley about context. “Who’s going to be expecting Adam Wilde on the subway at three in the morning? Without an entourage?” She gives me a joking smile. “Besides, it should be dead at this hour. And in my New York, I always take the train.”