Imaginary Friends

In Marion, Ohio in 1967, two teenagers who had just graduated from high school were hanging out and listening to the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, enraptured by the groundbreaking arrangements in the band's latest work.  The teenage boys, Robert Sims and Kevin McClaine, had been in a high school rock and roll band and had played numerous school dances and events before the band broke up in advance of taking their senior finals and graduating.  Now, that summer, they had few prospects of their own.  "Robbie," as Sims was called by his friends, was less academically accomplished than his two younger sisters, and his father, frustrated by Robbie's middling grades, wanted him to work in his walk-up insurance office downtown on West Center Street, and Kevin had no immediate plans for college.  Sims, who played guitar and sang, and McClaine, who played guitar and bass and also sang, were working at part-time jobs wondering what to do next.  The more they listened to Sgt. Pepper - and, when released in the U.S. later that year, Jimi Hendrix's debut album, Are You Experienced? - the more they were convinced that they should form a new band.  Inspired by the new "power trio" concept epitomized by the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Cream, they found Eric Martin, a local drummer, and got him to join them.  Soon they were headed for Cleveland to take part in the burgeoning rock scene that would eventually include the James Gang and the Raspberries.

Sims had been influenced by the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and folk and country music, while McClaine had drawn inspiration from the Rolling Stones, Motown, and bluesmen like Howlin' Wolf.  "Kevin introduced me to the blues," Sims later recalled, "and listening to guys like Muddy Waters and Mississippi Fred McDowell shaped and inspired me as a guitarist."  Eventually, they settled on a permanent name, the Streamers - "it was the only available name we could think of that we all hated the least," McClaine said - and with an expanded lineup that included keyboardist/vocalist Joe Wood (below) and second guitarist Tim Wright, they released their self-titled debut album on a small label in the spring of 1971.

The Streamers' first album sold poorly, and Rolling Stone dismissed it as "the debut from a pop band from Ohio that think they're the Byrds but are really more like the Partridge Family."  But with grit, determination, and a desire to improve, the Streamers secured a recording contract with Capitol, the home of their heroes the Beatles and the Beach Boys, and released A Whole New Tradition, their second album, at the end of 1971.  With a Top Ten single, "All Of Her Love," spurring sales, the Streamers forged ahead and came out with one classic album after another throughout the seventies.  Buckeye Country, a more roots-oriented rock record, came out in 1972 ("We listened to Stephen Stills' first Manassas album and essentially told our producer, 'We want to make a record like this!'," Sims said), followed by their ambitious 1973 concept album about life on the road, Playing Tonight, which generated their haunting single "Turn Down the Volume." (The Playing Tonight sessions and a concert at the Petrillo Bandshell in Chicago's Grant Park yielded a documentary movie, Playing On Film, considered to be one of the finest rock and roll documentaries ever produced.)

The Streamers soldiered on thorough the decade, recording their first album in their own studio in Cleveland, 1976's Welcome to Cleveland, as a double set, with Glyn Johns producing; "You Won't Get Very Far" was the album's big hit single.  It was a real coup to get Johns to work with them in the States, especially in Ohio, the heart of the Rust Belt.  The burgeoning punk scene in Ohio, which included Pere Ubu, a band Sims and McClaine respected, inspired them to strive for artistic boldness while maintaining commercial relevance.  Life With the Mannequins, released in 1978, was a shock to listeners who thought that the Streamers had drifted into unchallenging AOR fodder, but it was a hit just the same; the follow up, 1979's Screen Test, surpassed Life With the Mannequins in popularity, with critics declaring it their best work ever.

Not surprisingly, however, the band drifted toward decline.  Derailer, from 1980, contained many fine songs, but Sims had been drinking more and become more insolent due to a nasty breakup with his girlfriend, and often he was absent from the studio; when he was there, he and McClaine would have bitter arguments.  When Sims was away, McClaine and Wright had to play guitar parts in his stead.  Sims quit drinking and entered Alcoholics Anonymous, and he and his girlfriend reconciled and married, but the Streamers as a band had peaked.  Recognizing the freshness of new bands on MTV such as the Go-Go's and Men at Work, the Streamers concluded that a breakup was necessary.  Their final album, 1983's After Geography (a title considered by the Beatles for what became Revolver) was supported by a farewell tour.  Sims went on to a moderately successful solo career.  For twelve years, the Streamers had hit all sorts of highs and lows, befriending many of their contemporaries along the way; they counted Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Peter Frampton, the black rock band Bloodstone, and John Lennon and Yoko Ono among their friends.  It had been quite a ride.   

So how come you never heard of this band?  Because I made it all up.  (And the picture of "Joe Wood" is in fact a picture of an anonymous actor from an old Coca-Cola commercial who looks like what I would imagine "Joe Wood" to look like.)

 *

What you just read is an elaborate outline of a novel I've been wanting to write for years -  decades, even.  It's about a fictional seventies rock band from Ohio that uses real people as supporting characters and would be constructed to read as if I were writing about a real rock and roll group.  The idea is that the book, while purely a work of fiction, could be picked up and read by someone a hundred years from now and mistaken for a legitimate biography, with interview quotes and all that.  To make it seem even more like an actual work of nonfiction, I'd even have an index and a (fake) bibliography.

I bring this up because, while I am obsessed enough with this fictional band from the Midwest enough to write their story, at least I know they are fictional . . . and then there is the case of Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York, who constantly refers to a couple who lives out on Long Island that Schumer says embodies the typical centrist suburban voters that Democrats must appeal to if they want to win elections as he has.  The couple, Joe and Eileen Bailey of Massapequa, are an insurance salesman and a doctor's-office staffer, respectively, who make about $75,000 a year between them.  They're typical suburbanites who enjoy watching TV and going for walks like any other couple.  They rarely go out for dinner but always go to the local Chinese restaurant when they do, and there they always order kung pao chicken.  They're patriotic - Joe likes to remove his hat and sing the national anthem when he's watching the start of a New York Islanders hockey game - and they have had concerns like Eileen's father's battle with prostate cancer.  They're socially liberal but fiscally conservative.  Despite being swing voters, the Baileys both voted for Trump in 2016 and 2024, and while Eileen voted for Biden in 2020, Joe cast his ballot that year for Trump "with misgivings."

And, like the Streamers, they don't actually exist.
Schumer completely made up these two constituents to represent the type of voters who are prevalent in the Long Island suburbs and elsewhere for his 2007 book "Positively American: Winning Back the Middle-Class Majority One Family at a Time," which was meant to be a lesson in how Democrats could remain competitive with swing voters who lean more Republican than Democratic.  Schumer mentioned the Baileys 265 times in 264 pages - one mention a page, with at least one page mentioning them twice.  

It is not uncommon for politicians to use fictional, generic people that fit a demographic study to make their case on what the voters want and expect from their public servants.  Some politicians have even cited real people.  At least two onetime Republican U.S. Senators, Phil Gramm of Texas and John McCain of Arizona, would cite, respectively, Dickey Flatt, a professional printer from Mexia, Texas, and an Ohio plumber named Samuel "Joe" Wurzelbacher (Joseph was Wurzelbacher's middle name).  But for Schumer to make up a couple with an entire backstory and also make up their children as well as their own details - and let's not forget Eileen's dad - is only acceptable behavior if you're a novelist.  Personally, I think Schumer missed his calling and should have chosen a career in literature instead of politics.  Or he could have been a TV writer and invented bios for the writing staffs of sitcoms to follow to preserve continuity (and don't you just hate it when a sitcom character's offscreen wife suddenly has a different name or when his late mother is revived to appear in a later episode - probably played by Joyce Bulifant?) 

Schumer (pictured above) isn't completely insane.  He never claimed that the Baileys were ever real and said that they're only a composite of the typical suburban voter he says Democrats should pursue.  But Schumer has also said that he takes guidance from them, as if he were talking to them - and he even admitted that he is. “I have conversations with them," he once said, apparently not speaking metaphorically.  "One of my staffers once said I had imaginary friends to the press, got me in some trouble."

This is the most powerful Democrat in Washington?

Schumer's obsession with a composite couple representing a specific demographic is screwed up for reasons other than speaking of them as if they were real human beings.  First, the type of centrist white swing voter the Baileys represent is an exclusive, insular demographic that excludes elements of the increasingly diverse American electorate - blacks, Hispanics, urban residents, the working poor, progressives . . . and some Americans are in any or all five of these groups.  Second, Schumer would rather rely on a dated and particular voter profile from the George Walker Bush administration than find out for himself who today's voters are and what they think.  If Schumer were like that one-shot character in a 1981 "Taxi" episode, the childless, unmarried business executive whom Elaine Nardo briefly works as a secretary for, who keeps on his desk a picture of models posing as a family that came with the frame (because guys in the executive suite who have no families of their own get talked about), he would be harmless.  Pathetic, but harmless.  A man so clueless about his constituents as to invent them isn't just pathetic; he's dangerous.

Anyway, the tipoff that the Baileys don't really exist is because no one with an Anglo-Saxon surname  like Bailey likely lives in Massapequa. Everyone from Massapequa seems to be either Jewish or Italian - or, thanks to intermarriage, both. The place is known as "Matzo-Pizza."  Bailey is one of those all-American names associated with all-American towns like the fictional Bedford Falls.

Or even Marion, Ohio.

It's time Schumer stopped relying on the Baileys to "guide" his decision-making, because his composite prototypical couple - like Schumer himself - are now in their seventies, and they're not so relevant.  As for my fictional five-man classic rock band, they would all be in their seventies now and the type they represent hasn't been relevant since the seventies, so if I actually want to write their story, I'd better do it now.  It was always my intention to have all five of them still alive at the end, which would be the present day.  Of course, you have to live before you die, and like Schumer's fictional couple, they never did, but even fictional characters grounded in reality have to face the actuarial tables, and I'd rather not have my characters die at my hand.

And if Schumer doesn't want to kill off the Baileys, perhaps he should do the sane thing and retire from the Senate.  Then he can move to Bedford Falls and have a wonderful life.