Lucky Stars

You want to hate Sage, you really do, but you just can’t do it. He’s a trust-fund kid whose also the big man on campus and the life of the party and the luckiest son-of-a-bitch I know. Deciding to try his hand briefly at acting, he was immediately cast as an extra on both Beverly Hills 90210 (in an episode about doing drugs at a rave, no less) and in the Richard Attenborough (that’s Sir Dick to you) film Chaplin. He’s hysterically funny, smooth and sauve, an outstanding musician and songwriter and can make absolutely anybody feel at ease. He is as comfortable talking to small children as he is to heads of state and vampyre lesbians on acid. He has a unique ability to really connect with everybody he comes in contact with and makes them all feel special. Guys want to be him and girls want to be with him. Like Bugs Bunny, he’s everything you want to be but can’t. And he’s just so darn nice it makes you sick. If I didn’t like him so much, I’d really hate that bastard.

Sage went to Hampshire, and formed, with my future bandmate Matt, the popular local band Beatrice, which was a punky-pop band with very funny songs, such as the hysterical Marcia Brady or the porn send-up Harder Faster or the memorable and anthemic Prophylactic. I don’t remember if it was Sage or a friend of his, but one of them was travelling around Spain and stopped into a bar one night to have a cerveza and some tapas and a local band took the stage and, out of nowhere and for no apparent reason, played Prophylactic en espanol. This is what I’m talking about – this shit happens all the time. Like the fact that there’s a postcard that the Colorado Tourist Board still sells at one of its National Parks that features a young Sage riding a horse.

While at Hampshire, Sage quickly threw together a legendary video one weekend that was so clever and so funny and so well done that it made those of us who had labored for two years on our pieces of crap want to just go jump under a train.

He moved out to LA about the same time that Matt and G and I did, and the apartment that he shared with Hampster and longtime (platonic) friend Maura became the official hang out pad for newly transplanted Hampshire alums, and remained the center of that hip Silver Lake/Los Feliz crowd for years (I was a peripheral member of that scene, but never a core participant on account of how cool I’m not). Once in LA, he formed a country band called the Toughskins, which played like, I don’t know, six shows or something, but one of those shows (the only one I managed to get to) featured an opening spot by some rambling neo-hippy folk weirdo who sang long, surreal narrative rambles in a Guthrie/Dylanesque mode. Nobody much cared for him at the time, but a few months later, he recorded a little ditty called Loser in his friend’s kitchen and suddenly he was all the rage and on his way. See? This is what I’m talking about. Sage gets a band together for a few minutes and who opens for him? Beck.

The Toughskins didn’t work out, but he quickly formed The Lucky Stars to try again. The Lucky Stars was a much more thought out concept than the Toughskins, which was mostly just a sprawling excuse to play music with his friends. Sage loves country music, and Western Swing in particular, and the Lucky Stars is a painfully accurate recreation of a Western Swing band. So accurate, in fact, that he forbade his piano/mandolin/accordion player Whitey from bringing an electronic keyboard to a gig and insisted that he hauled around a real upright piano to every date, even though Whitey could’ve easily gotten the same sound from a much lighter instrument. It wasn’t authentic and was anachronistic to the period, so Sage forbade it (which may have had something to do with why Whitey left the band right after they recorded their first album). Recording was another area where Sage’s sense of proper respect went a bit far, in that he forbade overdubs (‘cause that’s not how they did it back then, you know), even though it would’ve saved countless hours and would’ve been undetectable by human ears.

Anyway, that’s Whitey’s gripe, not mine.

In addition to outfitting his band appropriately, Sage is also a master at writing songs in that particular honky-tonky style. This track is a perfect example, filled with clever wordplay and groaning puns and spicy little starts and stops. The whole album is full of these kinds of gems and is well worth seeking out. I quickly tired of the neo-swing scene that blew through town awhile ago (the film Swingers was so accurate and filled with so many people and locations I knew that it was downright spooky), but I’ve never tired of the toe-tapping sounds of the Lucky Stars.

Years ago, Maura invited a bunch of his friends over to the apartment to celebrate his birthday with a poetry reading. He had let slip that he hated nothing more than poetry readings (his Hampshire video was a sideways slam to that whole concept of creative self expression), and so, being a good friend, she decided to organize a reading for him. She implored us to find the worst poems we could dig up and we all came ready to stink up the place. The reading was a big success and it quickly turned into an institution. Every year for a good decade after that, Sage would have a talent show for his birthday. He would accept no presents, but demanded that people pay him respect by performing for him. Once again, nobody but Sage could get away with something like this. If anybody else demanded that people came over and dance for him, they wouldn’t do it, but not only would people willingly put themselves on stage for Sage every year, they’d work out these really elaborate routines complete with costumes and props and musical accompaniments. There were obscene shadow puppet dances, faux-synchronized swimming routines, monolgues, songs, juggling exhibitions, improvised limericks, grooming demonstrations, fake game shows and all manner of unclassifiable weirdness. So popular was this annual event that one year he tried to cancel it and his friends got so pissed off at him because they had been working all year on a new routine that he had no choice but to uncancel the show.

Improbably, Sage and Maura lived together in that apartment for thirteen years, which is longer than I’ve ever lived anywhere. That pad marked many significant moments. It was on the roof of that apartment that we sat and watched the city burn during the Rodney King riots. It was on the same roof we’d go to toast the new year and listen to the automatic gunfire erupting throughout the neighborhood in celebration, and we’d drink champagne and hope nobody would get hit by a stray bullet. It was in that apartment that I spent my last evening of bachelorhood. For years, it was our home away from home for Thanksgiving, all the stranded friends who were too far away to go home for the holidays would come and contribute a dish from their past. G would always make garlic mashed potatoes and pie, somebody would bring ambrosia (affectionately known as “clown puke”) that nobody would eat and Maura would overcook the turkey. And every year, Sage and Maura had a formal Christmas party, in which everybody would dress up in their finery and sip eggnog and which would occasionally end with Christmas carols, accompanied by Sage on the ukulele and Matt on the trombone. It was with great bittersweet sadness that Sage and Maura finally broke up the place recently and went their separate ways, and we had one last party there for all the old guard to mix and mingle one more time and to say goodbye to both and apartment and an era. It was a very special place, and I feel privileged to have been a part of it, even if I did spend most of the parties there upstairs in Maura’s room reading a book.

Sage is one of a kind, the kind of person that makes you feel special for knowing him. Generous, funny, warm, refined, caring, his band is aptly named. If anybody I know was born under a lucky star, it is Sage. That fucker.