Death, Drugs, and Rock N’ Roll… By Whitney Farmer – Un Pop Culture

August 19, 2011 Whitney Farmer 2 Comments

Whitney runs a rock music venue on the beach in L.A.. She has an M.B.A, and is moving by the water.

Jani Lane of Warrant was found dead at a Comfort Inn in the Valley on August 11th. He was staying there until he was finished with some renovations on his home nearby.  While friends were driving to his service on Sunday, they got a call telling them that another musician friend had died the night before in a partying mishap. This other musician, Bernie, could play anything and he played with everyone in town as a studio musician, and collaborated as a songwriter and producer. One of the stranger side projects he did was play with an Elvis/KISS tribute band that once put so much juice in their fog machine that I couldn’t see the stage from seven feet away. Everyone has gone quiet, but I expect that Bernie was partying after a big Saturday night show. After all, isn’t today the 34th anniversary of the death of Elvis Presley?

Jani used to come to the club, but I only knew him in passing. I knew him as a friend of Julian’s, and he usually sat next to him in the second chair in the VIP room. Jani was found with a bottle of alcohol and prescription drugs in the hotel room, and the media implied that he overdosed.  But there comes a point when a person’s body just stops being able to process the poison, and even a freshman amount can be too much.  A bit over a week before when Jani performed in public for the last time, he had maybe two drinks and felt it. So, he cut himself off.

Bernie confused me because I would see him performing with different bands on different nights.  At first, I would look at him and knew that we had met, but couldn’t figure it out because it was the first time that the particular band had played. Plus, off the stage he seemed quiet around me, so it took time to be able to strike up conversations and finally make the connections. Maybe he was shy because everyone around him were overt rascals: trying to recruit a threesome while I was trying to settle on their contract, sneaking behind our back bar where they were having a business meeting and getting hammered, getting arrested while still dressed as Elvis… I think that the last time Bernie and I spoke we talked about how we both liked to wear our big, black-rimmed glasses because they provided protection if something got thrown at us. Plus, people assumed we are brainy. Considering that he was wearing gold lamé and I was wearing fishnets at the time, glasses were a welcome prop.

I lost two this week. There were no symptoms, no foreshadowing that tipped me off that this was coming. I didn’t catch them before they fell. And as I look around the room this week, I still won’t be able to recognize who will be next. But I want to.

On the day that Jani died, my dad was in the hospital.  He is 83 with a pulse rate in the 40s and blood pressure around 110/65. But his pulse that day had increased to around 70 and his blood pressure to 120/70. It was still in the range if he was 30 year old, but it was different for him.  So we went to his cardiologist. There, they discovered that his atrium had developed an arrhythmia and would need to be shocked back into a proper rhythm. I told him, “Just like James Bond in ‘Casino Royale’…” as my mom and I left the pre-op room. Afterwards, the nurses were surprised to find that he had kept his 501s on during the procedure under his hospital gown under the blankets.  They were probably appropriately concerned about what damage could be caused by all of those brass rivets when the electrical current zapped his heart back into order.

The procedure worked, and tomorrow I’m taking Dad to a follow-up appointment at 11:15 with his cardiologist. He will probably wear his 501s.

Pop culture should glorify becoming old, not dying young. Today, Dad and I had In-N-Out burgers. That’s something to sing about.

Quote of the Blog, from Ed, Dude of Light and Fog: “Brave people make me nervous.”