Air-Heads: Behind-the-scenes at Air Supply’s Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony
Design by Sophie Parrish
By Charlie Desjardins
It’s a few minutes before 10 on a Thursday morning, and from a certain distance, it looks like two people are about to tie the knot outside Hollywood Boulevard’s Fonda Theatre. Rows of white foldout chairs sit underneath mammoth canvas awnings, and a steel ramp leads to a red velvet riser with microphone and podium. Sweet orchestrations float through a speaker. Official-looking people look official-looking. A small line of elderly forms to the east.
“What’s going on over there?” asks a man in another line across the street, waiting for an autograph signing at the Funko flagship store.
“Air Supply’s getting a star on the Walk of Fame,” answers another Funko lover.
The man takes a beat. He’ll soon be buying a big-headed action figure made to look like the bully from A Christmas Story.
“And who’s Aaron Supply?”
I’m not of the right generation to answer this fella’s question, but I’ll give it my best shot: Air Supply are an Australian and a Brit, Russell Hitchcock and Graham Russell, who — after some gentle ribbing from two Very Special Guest Speakers — will be receiving the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce’s 2,859th terrazzo-and-brass star, the largest indicator that you’ve “made it” as royalty in this town.
Or that you’ve paid enough money. According to Deano Mueller, a bigwig photographer I’ll meet within the hour, it’s likely all $85,000 of this star has been footed by their record label as promotion for Air Supply’s brand-new, eighteenth studio album, A Matter of Time.
He’s shot over 70 of these events, so he knows a thing or two or three.
“I like Air Supply,” says Mueller, a Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair alumnus. “I think they’re part of a generation beyond me that’s incredible. I know a lot of my woman friends love them.”
I get what you’re thinking — no, Mueller didn’t mean that last part disparagingly, and even if he did, it wouldn’t really matter. Air Supply is one of history’s best-selling pop acts, and masters of the romantic ballad in a way that few have ever mastered anything. During their heyday from 1976-1985, they were “Lost in Love,” “All Out of Love,” and then — puzzlingly, given Lavoisier’s Law of Conservation of Mass — “Making Love Out of Nothing at All.”
“Their music is just a little bit ungrammatical,” says former Wheel of Fortune host Pat Sajak, a friend, and one of the event’s guest speakers. “Take the song, “Two Less Lonely People in the World.” Grammatically, it should be “Two Fewer Lonely People in the World.” I have talked to Graham repeatedly about this, but he said something about syllables or meter or something.”
And yet, even on album number eighteen, Hitchcock and Russell still “Want Your Love,” some 51 years after they first met during a production of Jesus Christ Superstar. They look more like two members of the Mamma Mia! cast now, but they’re as virile as ever in a respectful, roses-and-champagne type of way, and their fans respond by being as committed as ever.
I suppose you’d have to be committed to wait outside in the veritable beef smoker that is Los Angeles at the moment; as guards from something called Strategic and Professional Event Coverage pace back and forth, “feels like” temps climb into the mid-90s. Heat bounces off the Walk of Fame asphalt and creates sweat waterfalls where sweat waterfalls shouldn’t be.
“I grew up with this music,” says Lynda Guzman, a younger fan from Peru who joined me outside the barricades at around 10:11. “I like it because it’s really soft and romantic.”
I’m inclined to agree with Lynda, even if our meeting at the top of N. El Centro Ave, right by the LA Fitness, is probably the least “soft and romantic” environment imaginable.
I’ve spent the last few days entrenched in the bombast of Hitchcock and Russell’s world, and when this music soars, it really freaking soars. Take “All Out of Love,” their mega-hit, which I assumed I’d heard too many times but found myself completely invested in while making a breakfast burrito in the Emerson Los Angeles kitchen. There’s something about the mixture of Hitchcock’s voice and Russell’s lyrical declarations that makes you want to run down a busy street and tell the one you most desire how much you desire them — not in a creepy way, but in an end-of-romcom-realization way.
Throw in impenetrable walls of strings, some piano and guitar, and you’ve got a soundtrack that is, according to fan Crystal Martinez, pretty damn “timeless.”
“I came from San Antonio just for this,” says Martinez, a fan who’s story caught my ear from the opposite end of the sidewalk. In keeping with the open-armed beauty of her favorite band, she’s introducing her “better half and daughter” to the total strangers in line beside her, including one excitable woman, Beth, who shows me her printed-out Air Supply photo because she’s kicking it “old school.”
“We have the best fans,” Martinez continues. “We call ourselves Air-Heads.”
And so, at the stroke of 11:06, I and about 50 other Air-Heads are ushered into the belly of the beast and made to stand behind metal barricades that separate us from the beautiful people on Air Supply’s guest list. I’m in the middle, where tensions from the heat begin clashing with tensions from autograph seekers. Beth really wants a photo of mega-songwriter David Foster — the other Very Special Guest Speaker — and maybe I’m imagining things, but I swear I spot Pat Sajak mocking her and her fellow screamers in the peanut gallery.
“I have never met anyone who cares more about their fans, or is more deeply and sincerely grateful for the support of those fans [than Air Supply],” Sajak says at the podium. “And you are great fans.”
After he squeezes his way to the patch of empty barricade beside me, another “great fan,” Paul Wyld, makes small-talk with me for the rest of the ceremony. He informs me that the event’s emcee, Lisa Foxx, is a radio “legend,” and that he used to live in Boston but left because it was too cold, and that he’s wondering if Sajak brought Vanna White with him.
“I saw Air Supply in 1983,” says Wyld, a published author and singer-songwriter. “I had all their albums. I was 12, but I was a sensitive kid.”
When Hitchcock and Russell finally appear on stage and give thanks for their fans and families and soberness, some of that sensitivity leaks out once more. Maybe it’s the fact that both men look pretty dang good for their age — to paraphrase Wyld, “It’s hard not to when you’ve got all the best stylists in the world” — but my new friend turns to me and takes a moment to note how surreal this timeline is, when a band you loved 40 years ago is still kicking and recording and dyeing their hair.
“To my Air Supply partner Graham,” says Hitchcock, sporting a lipstick kiss tattoo and a half-shirt, half-blouse. “After all these years, this moment belongs to both of us. We began this journey together, we’re standing here together because of your music, our amazing friendship and the belief we shared from the beginning.”
One would think these guys would be out of love by this point, or at least sore in certain places from giving out so much of it. Right here on steamy Hollywood Boulevard, there’s a wealth of evidence to the contrary. Besides, Hancock and Russell have played well over 5,000 shows, and they’re not stopping; Wyld is seeing them at the Greek two days later, sandwiched between two Air Supply shows in Napa and Saratoga.
Today, they’re kneeling on a strip of cushioned velvet and smiling like children as they reveal the star that will keep them alive indefinitely, or until an alien attack levels Los Angeles.
“Thank you for making Air Supply a part of Hollywood history,” says Hitchcock. With the amount of camera lights that explode at that moment, even the aliens would likely be scared away.