Probably the single thing taking up the most space on my hard drive is photos of Kate Hudson and Chris Robinson, back when they were together and playing out all my personal fantasies in real-time, in front of flash bulbs, where I could later cut them out of pages and hoard them in my journal. This habit carried with it a sort of frenetic urgency—I wasn’t collecting them out of pure worship (for him, maybe, not for her)… it was more like I was gathering bread crumbs. Clues. Each picture was a place on a map I could mark while trying to catch up and figure out how to make that my life, too. Just had to get that squash blossom, or that kimono, and I’d be a little closer. Nothing seemed impossible.
Then they broke up. And I wasn’t too busted up about it, more just closed the book on things. I dropped the scent—unpacking the mental bag I had waiting, ready to hit the road.
Every time I find out something is over, kaput, donezo, I recite this line:
“Aw, goddamnit, man, the Doobie Brothers broke up.”
So, it was a little like that when they hit the skids.
I used to walk to work in Chicago when it was warm enough. Sometimes down Wells, sometimes down Dearborn or State, but lots of the time, down La Salle. And when I took that route, I always passed this one white house that had this fourth floor aerie (you can sort of see it through the trees, set back off the railing in the above psycho stalker Google street view picture)—a sort of glassed-in room up top that I imagined filled with sunlight and had a big mattress right on the floor, with silk robes and platform shoes and vinyl records and shit strewn around. I’d look up there every day and kind of pretend Kate and Chris were there with nothing to do that day but be someone’s muse. Then I’d walk to work and listen to the Crowes’ Live in London record with headphones on and play the air guitar on my computer mouse—usually at the exact time my manager was standing in my cube trying to get my attention.
It was also then that this article came out, and I had it tucked in my bedside table. I hadn’t read it in probably 5 or more years until last night—I went looking for it after re-listening to this bit on Stern Monday while I was parked outside the pet food store.
Apologies in advance if you’re a Blues Traveler fan (yeesh… please say you ain’t), but man, it must just suck to be John Popper and be in a feud with Chris. Advantage: cool, when it comes to feuding rock singers. Popper just is not a cool guy. He will never be cool. Not cool.
But I digress.
Felony 1: “I watched Almost Famous and the only sad thing in that movie is she lives that every day, because he is like a 70s rock star.”
Considering that’s all I ever wanted, I slapped the mat three times and turned off the car. When I got home, I poked around the interwebs until I found this article again. I just wanted to disappear in that old, familiar daydream—give it another go. Roll me like a tumbleweed in Eden.
These days, I maintain aspects of that place I wanted to be, and keep them firmly planted in my current reality. And I think it’s why I’m so happy, and Rob and I are so happy. We’re living our own little dream in this kooky house, regardless of what happens on the clock. This sounds naive, and a little desperate, but when you’re not living your particular dream, the easiest way to make it feel just out of reach is to keep certain elements of risk in your life. You gotta put things on the line, even if it’s not for that dream. We’re lucky to be in a position where we can both fumble toward our own dreams: Rob’s chasing wine, and I’m chasing down (and flogging thoroughly on most days; yea!) a dream of being my own boss and writing for a living. Putting weird shit in my house, choosing wine over water, over-budgeting for records and concerts, surrendering a steady job for the man with comfy benefits and regular hours, wearing bathrobes in public and sunglasses in the produce aisle—that kind of flimsy shit that makes a nice list in a blog post, but not your whole identity. Because that’d be sort of stupid.
Oddly enough, I never look back on my 24 yo daydream for the future with embarrassment. It was tinged with a lot of romance, and the idea that the road ahead was going to be peppered with interesting people and cool experiences (not drugs and money). It doesn’t help that I was dating a singer in a band back then, just a soulful dude who knew I was crazy and, in a way, sort of had the same dream I did. It’s just that my dream hinged on his, and those things always fall apart. Like the Doobies.
[Cool kimono, woman.]
You should go read it in full, but if you want the Cliff’s Notes, see below.
Seen from the front yard, Kate Hudson and Chris Robinson’s house in the Pacific Palisades has an air of tidy East Coast propriety. It suggests cashmere twinsets, roast beef dinners and a subscription toThe Wall Street Journal. But walk through the front door and the mood changes, as if a band of bohemians had arrayed their parents’ house with souvenirs of a world tour. Graphic paintings of the Kama Sutra hang near a Georgian mantelpiece in the living room, and the dining room’s traditional table is illuminated by a large—and vaguely sinister—all-black Murano glass chandelier. A whiff of incense emanates from the pool house out back, which, with its blaring rock music, pulses like the hippie heart of the establishment.
Inside the small cabana, a thick sheepskin rug covers the floor, records and CDs crowd the shelves and, dead center, beneath a rustic candle chandelier, is an oversize Edwardian sofa covered in dark leather. It’s one of the only things from Robinson’s bachelor life to find a place in their conjugal home, because, as Hudson explains, it has a very particular sentimental significance to the couple.
“When we first met, this here is the couch that Chris had in his New York apartment,” she says. “It’s the couch where we first actually—” Hudson interrupts herself in the name of discretion and quickly recalibrates her explanation. “It was the only piece of furniture in his apartment” is how she decides to explain its role in their early courtship. “So we held on to it.”
Boom!
Just then, Robinson lopes in, wearing tattered jeans and silver polish on his toenails.
Even though Hudson bought the house as a retreat from her and Robinson’s peripatetic life, she admits that they spend only a fraction of their time there. The couple also rent a town house in downtown Manhattan, but most often they’re traveling. The day after this interview, they hit the road for an ongoing Black Crowes reunion tour.
Hudson seems totally at ease amid all the flux, and she is devoted to touring with her husband.
“I kind of feel like I live vicariously through him,” she says, adding the unexpected comment that her lifestyle on the road with Robinson is “more [who I am] than what I do for a living.” It’s the one subject she won’t elaborate on, saying that her private life on tour with Robinson is “something in my life that nobody will ever really know.”
The couple has been together for almost six years now. They married on New Year’s Eve 2000, just nine months after meeting in New York. “My mom always said I was the little girl who would jump in the deep end when I didn’t know how to swim,” says Hudson. “That’s kind of how I got married. I jumped in the deep end and figured he wouldn’t let me drown. And he hasn’t yet.”
The starlet—rock star marriage may seem like a combustible pairing—and, in fact, rumors circulated last year that the marriage was in trouble—but Hudson says that what she and Robinson experience are the expected ups and downs.
“We’re pretty well suited for each other,” she says. “We’re not perfect. I don’t think any relationship is perfect, but we appreciate each other and respect each other. Your greatest hope and desire is that you’re with someone for the rest of your life. Is it possible? I don’t know. But even if, God forbid, we didn’t make it, he’d always make me laugh. It’s a beautiful thing.”
At the end of the interview, Hudson heads upstairs to finish her house tour with a visit to her bedroom. But before she gets there, she stops at the wainscotted landing atop the stairs and points out Robinson’s collection of vintage rock photographs. Surrounded by images of Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones at their apex is a more recent snapshot, one of Hudson and Robinson on tour, stretched out in the back of a limo in all their bohemian finery. They’re both laughing.
And then, it ended. Because heaven can wait. And, not to glorify this any further, but the eerie thing? This quote from a later interview—“On why it ended: “We had Ryder, and we both sort of looked at each other and went, ‘Something’s off.'”—suggests that they were already totally screwed when that article came out. Creepy.
So the daydream shifts. And I believe at the heart of mine is what Kate loved: living vicariously through the man she loves.
I think mine will just have to be a vineyard, not a concert tour. But you won’t hear me complain.
-C.
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