Over the Top and Back

INTRODUCTIONLet’s not begin at the beginning. Let’s start somewhere near the bottom.Early 1983, say. Early 1983 finds me sitting in a drab-colored dressing room in Framingham, Massachusetts, twenty-two miles west of Boston. Once this strip of Route 9 was pig farms and the occasional gas station. Now it’s known as the Golden Mile—Marshalls’ Mall, a Holiday Inn, a Howard Johnson’s, a procession of neon signs along the roadside. “Framingham’s little touch of Vegas,” they call it.And here I am on this Golden Mile, which isn’t particularly golden, if we’re being honest, nor actually a mile. Here I am backstage at the Chateau de Ville Dinner Theater, Framingham’s premier “function room,” home to weddings and sales conference parties and the annual Natick High prom—and tonight, home to Tom Jones, international singing superstar and globe-girdling sex symbol, who must remember not to go too far downstage in this venue or the spotlight at the back of the room won’t be able to reach him through the ornamental chandelier.Here I am in the eighties in the dressing room of a drive-up dinner theater in the American suburbs. Bright lights round the mirror. Stage clothes in zippered covers hanging from a rail. Sandwiches and fruit under plastic wrap on a Formica table. Vase of flowers trying to make up for the lack of windows.Two shows per night, to a predominantly white, middle-aged crowd, seated at tables, eating chicken or premium-plate surf-and-turf. Seven thirty until 8:30; shower and change; then 10:00 to 11:00, plus encores. Thank you. Thank you so much. Good night. And afterward a car back to Boston, moving fast to get there before the good restaurants shut. And then a meal and some drinks—quite a lot of drinks—and eventually a hotel bed.I’m here again tomorrow.After which the caravan will move on to more of the same. One hundred and thirty-four nights like these in 1983 alone: the Circle Star Theater, San Carlos, California; the Holiday Star Theater, Merrillville, Indiana; Pine Knob Music Theater, Clarkston, Michigan. Tom Jones: Live in Concert. Singing the songs that made him famous: “It’s Not Unusual,” “What’s New Pussycat?,” “Green, Green Grass of Home,” “Delilah,” “She’s a Lady.” Stringing them together in a show-closing medley, because that’s what you do in the dinner theaters. Also doing Kool and the Gang’s “Ladies Night”; maybe “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina”—bringing it up to date, or thereabouts.It’s 1983, and I haven’t had a hit for twelve years. Twelve years! Not just singers but entire musical movements have come and gone in that time: prog rock, glam rock, disco, punk rock, post-punk, new romanticism . . . The earth has shifted under popular music at least six times without noticeably impacting upon me or even causing me to break step or slightly change direction.Who’s selling records, as a singer, in 1983? Who do you have to be? Luther Vandross? Lionel Richie? I’m neither of these people. I’m Tom Jones.Not that anybody in the audience in Framingham will seem to mind. They love me here. I’ll only have to walk on, and the place will go up. And then I’ll sing, and it will really go up. And, yes, no doubt there will be some underpants. Because that’s become a ritual. Not peeled off and flung there and then, as in the beginning. But most likely brought in specially and lobbed into my hands or laid on the stage at my feet in tribute, because . . . well, because that’s what you do at a Tom Jones show, isn’t it? Same thing every night. And I’m not complaining, either. Paid to sing. Paid to make singing my life. Paid handsomely for it, too. And brought underpants, albeit now in a kind of low-key, heritage way, with an eye on the upholding of a time-honored tradition. There are far worse jobs. Proper jobs. I know because I’ve done some of them. There is no hardship here. Trust me, the meal after the Framingham show will be a good one. We will dine high, back in Boston: brandy, cigars, champagne. And then maybe on to a nightclub for more of the same. Don’t cry for me Argentina, is right. Don’t cry for me, anybody at all.At the same time, though, here I am in the dressing-room mirror. Spangled bolero jacket. Slashed white shirt. Substantial silver neck-chain. Dark slacks fitting snug to the waist. Belt buckle the size of a manhole cover. Cuban heels. “Framingham’s little touch of Vegas.”Twelve years without a hit. This wasn’t exactly the plan. Assuming there was a plan. Which, coming to think of it, there wasn’t.But does anyone really plan these things? You can’t, can you? You can only do your best to scramble aboard a plane that’s taking off and then see what happens. And in 1983 the path of my flight looks roughly like this: in the beginning, blasted almost vertically into fame’s skies, higher than I even dared to imagine; but since then, cruising. Worse than that: cruising and gradually losing height—but slowly, gently, over the course of more than a decade, so that you don’t notice how close the ground has got until one day (say, in a dressing room, between shows, in a dinner theater in suburban Massachusetts) you turn your head and look down.Two questions, then, in the Chateau de Ville Dinner Theater, Framingham, Massachusetts, in 1983. And two questions for this book.Firstly, how did I get here?And secondly, now that I’m here, how do I get out?