The 'Days Between Stations' columns, Interview magazine 1992-2008: Roger Clinton
October 1992
Bill Clinton's half brother: the Party Popster
"I can't look at Bush," said Linda Perry, singer for 4 Non Blondes—three women, one man, and, on the night of August 15, a huge Uncle Sam hat on Perry's head. "Have you ever looked at that guy? Clinton—I could look at him, maybe three years."
That seemed an apt summation of the mood you might have expected at a Bill Clinton benefit staged at the I-Beam, a seedy-glitzy postpunk nightclub in the Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. A plainly suspicious audience wouldn't have been a surprise in the place, let alone a sense of hipper than thou. There wasn't much of that around, though. People seemed happy to be there for the chance to change the country—there's no cool way to say that. And, along with a slew of local bands, there was the top of the bill, Roger Clinton, Bill Clinton's black-sheep half brother. You got the feeling this might be the closest any of us in the I-Beam might get to the next presiÂdent, or the last blown chance. Attitude was in short supply. The place was packed, and there was a long line outside that didn't go away even after the doorÂman said his last no.
Two fantasies ruled the night for me. First, that this was some sort of GOP dirty-tricks masterpiece, using double agents in the Clinton campaign to set up hapless Roger for secret videotapes of him posing with Buck Naked (of Buck Naked and the Bare Bottom Boys, performing this night with Pearl Harbor) and God knows what other San Francisco demimonde atrocities. (In fact, when the Interview photographer tried to shoot Clinton with Enrique, the two-man drag team emceeing the benefit, somebody tried to call a halt.) Second—well, the second fantasy perhaps touched the sentimentality that lies behind both rock 'n' roll dreams and elecÂtoral politics. As I was heading for the I-Beam, the radio turned up Foreigner's "I Want to Know What Love Is"—still, after eight years, an expanding universe of a song, passion bleedÂing out of corniness, the finale of Jennifer Holliday screaming "ONLY LOVE IS REAL" making you believe the story that when Ahmet Ertegun first heard the record he wept. Well, then, why shouldn't Roger Clinton, a thirtyÂ-six-year-old white R&B singer with a demo tape, hit the stage, fill his lungs to bursting with "I Want to Know What Love Is," and send everybody home with the certainty that not only can the world be changed, it will be? Hell, stranger things have happened.
Inside the I-Beam, I tried out the scenario on a friend. "Well," he said, "maybe that, or maybe he'll be a political version of the Elvis impersonator: people will act like he's the real thing."
"Maybe he'll be the new Lee Atwater," I ofÂfered hopefully.
"Yeah, sure," said my friend. "Or karaoke."
There was a feeling, as Mordred finished its set and Roger Clinton walked through the crowd on his way to the stage, that the whole happy illusion—that the country would change, that it would be fun to see Bill Clinton's brothÂer sing—was about to collapse. The underÂcurrent of bitter determination that seemed to power most of the talk I heard—talk that went, I don't like Clinton that much, I don't like Tipper at all, but I'm not gonna live through four more years of this shit—was about to slam into the crowd's inability to sustain the night's illusions, or Roger Clinton's inability to exÂtend them.
What actually happened may not predict who will win in November, but it did suggest that people are no longer as embarrassed as they used to be to say they want to live in a different country. Backed by the LimbomaniÂacs, an expert white soul band with a good horn section, Clinton opened with Traffic's "Feelin' Alright," followed with Rufus Thomas's "Walking the Dog," produced a reggae version of Blues Image's "Ride CapÂtain Ride," which he opined had hit potential, and then went into Gino Vannelli's "Down with Love."
The material was as bland as could be, with edges coming only from the band. Clinton looked like Mickey Dolenz, mugged like FranÂcis the Talking Mule, and oozed smarm. ("That Clinton trait," someone said, "wanting to be liked.") Clinton fluttered his fingers at all the wrong moments and everyone in the crowd grinned without boredom. When, for his last number, Clinton tried Sly and the Family Stone's "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)," he left the crowd wanting more. He didn't seem to understand the song, which is about fatalism and defeat—"Thank you for the party/ I could never stay"—but he made it work, and the audience didn't care whether he understood the song or not. They cared whether he was putting whatever it was he had into it, and clearly he was.
Because, you see, the Bill Clinton for PresÂident benefit at the I-Beam was at once inÂfinitely important and not a big deal, and evÂeryone seemed to understand that. It was a small, congenial moment in a very large, unÂwieldy story—a moment in which people turned out mainly for themselves, to attest that they too had reason to take part. There was anticÂipation in the room, eagerness, friendliness, atÂtentiveness—when Ann Powers, columnist for SF Weekly, gave a speech about censorship, Tipper Gore, and the First Amendment, the noisy crowd cheered in all the right places—but no tension. Maybe it was the human scale of the event; maybe it was that the person repÂresenting Bill Clinton, who may soon be forÂgotten but who this night seemed very big, was someone as small as you or me.
Originally published in Interview Magazine, October 1992.