This is an old argument — one of the few that threatens our avidly affectionate relationship. Music was always a strong part of our bond; I raised her on Springsteen, Neil Young and the Pretenders. As a 3-year-old she could sing the words to “Born to Run” like she could the alphabet song. But in recent years, she began to rebel. As I was rocking into the future, she started boogying backwards. I think we passed each other around 1975.

This is not to say she has not dabbled in modern rock. One of the first concerts we attended together was Pearl Jam, and we swooned jointly over Eddie Vedder’s screeching charisma. We went to dozens of shows in the next few years — Spin Doctors, Green Day, Soul Asylum, Counting Crows. It was so cool: I didn’t have to try to find a date who shared my love of the mosh pit, and she didn’t mind being seen with me as long as (A) she got to take a friend, and (B) I didn’t act like we were related.

Then things started to change. I blame peer pressure. Someone turned her on to a Bob Marley tape and soon she was hooked. For the first time, I had to close her door when a tape was blaring, fearing that if I heard “them belly-full but we hungry” one more time I would go postal. Then it was the Grateful Dead, then Janis Joplin, then Crosby Stills & Nash, then Bob Dylan. Why, I demanded, would she listen to the atonal wailings of the elder Dylan when the hot and hunky (if challenged in the talent department) young JAKOB was fronting the Wallflowers? Her answer was swift and simple.

“It just seems like modern music is about nothing,” she said unapologetically. “Like nobody believes in anything. When was the last time you heard a song like ‘The Times, They are A-Changin’? It just seems like music used have meaning.”

Aha, I got it. I was cursed with offspring for whom a throbbing beat and flashy guitar wail were not enough. Then again, I should not have been surprised that her Alice in Chains CD was gathering dust. After all, this was a kid who planned to major in Environmental Sciences so she could save the planet. She had outgrown the sophomoric cock-rock that I was still addicted to. How embarrassing.

And it caused me to reflect on my own musical history. At what point did I cease looking for a message in a tune? Perhaps when John “Love is All You Need” Lennon was murdered? Or when Neil Young provided a bitter antidote to the utopian promise of “Wooden Ships” with (Four Dead in) “Ohio”? Or maybe it was when I witnessed the beatings at Altamont? Maybe my own cynicism disallowed me to hear any peppy/preachy lyrics and take them seriously anymore. But Erin was not yet cynical. So, honoring her idealism, I backed off and thought of ways to compromise.

Hearing Rage Against the Machine for the first time at the Tibetan Freedom Concert was an inspiration. I called her at college. “You can’t believe this band! They sing about Zapatista rebellions and military spending and they also RAWK!” She was unconvinced. So I sent her a tape, which impressed her only modestly. But it began a dialogue. She wondered about singer Zach de la Rocha’s political history and I filled her in, told her he’d spent time in Chiapas himself. This fascinated her. Sensing the door was open, I also sent her a tape of Dan Bern, the brilliant and radical new folkie blowing the hinges off that once-cushy genre. And Kula Shaker, the fascinating shit-hot Britpop band who rail against materialism and pledge allegiance to Buddha.

And in turn, she discovered the modern feminist folk-goddess Ani di Franco, and sought to turn me on to her. “She’s really not a man-hater,” she offered by way of analysis. “She’s just very independent and I’m sure that bugs a lot of men. I don’t think she has a lot of male fans. I think she’s amazing.” I listened and fudged a good opinion. When she fell for the Indigo Girls, it was easier to agree to their talent.

The important thing is, I think we’ve found a middle ground. If it rocks, it also has to have meaning or at least history to raise it to a higher level, or my own highly evolved ovum will reject it. This I try to keep in mind as the road trip progresses. “OK, OK, put on Dylan,” I sigh. I can grind my teeth through his wail if she then endures Nirvana’s thrash. They say parenting is an ongoing compromise.

Alan Black, the head of San Francisco’s thriving Scottish Cultural and Arts
Foundation (no kilts here — just revolutionary plays, music and
literature), is a mate of Welsh’s. He witnesses this bacchanal each time
the 37-year-old author’s in town. No
cause for alarm. “He’ll get his 10th wind pretty soon, you’ll see,” he
chuckles. Sure enough, Welsh steadies himself and soon is seen in the DJ’s
corner, spinning platters — something he does all over London when his
busy life allows. Next stop: the 11th Street club corridor, an after-show
party for the Chemical Brothers, more celebrities on Welsh’s endless list
of pals. I have to beg off. I didn’t do any ecstasy and mere mortal energy
is exhausted. I’ve been trying to keep up with Welsh for two days — a blurred period that will forever after be
known as the Lost Weekend of the Great Scots tour.

The four-city book-flogging junket was set up by Norton Books
to showcase Welsh (whose most recent novel is “Marabou Stork Nightmare”),
rising young lit star Duncan Maclean (“Bunker Man”) and the venerable and
incisive James Kelman (who won the Booker Prize for “How Late it Was, How
Late”). The carpet had been unwittingly rolled out for the visiting Scots
by the British electorate: The night before the authors’ arrival, every
Tory in Scotland was getting his ass kicked and the mood was ripe for
revolution. At Edinburgh Castle, a pub that’s the hub for the city’s sizable
Scottish population, punters howl at the good news. Black and his cohorts hurl limes at the TV screen every time a
deposed Conservative appears. “Fuckin’ right-wing hypocrites,” Black
growls.

The next night, Saturday, the tall and slender
Welsh makes his way through the sweaty, packed crowd of hipsters, who crane
their necks to see The Man. Welsh, who is there with Kelman and Maclean to do a reading, thrills them by doing, for the first time in years, a selection from
“Trainspotting” — the notorious scene where Spud “messes himself” in his
girlfriend’s bed, wraps the mess in the sheets, then haplessly catapults the assorted bodily fluids onto her parents at
the breakfast table. Leaning into the microphone, looking up at dramatic moments, Welsh reads brilliantly.

Chatting later over a Guinness, Welsh beams. The
tour’s been great, he and the other lads are getting on famously. The only
sticking point: his own hedonist tendencies. “I’m tryin’ to be good. Duncan
is quite wholesome and hearty, and Jim is pretty dignified. I don’t want to
be the bad apple who drags their names through the mud!” Soon after this, Kelman and Maclean depart, leaving Welsh to his own devices. He proceeds to belly up to the bar numerous times, greeting fan after fan warmly as he goes.

The event’s other purpose was to launch the Scottish Cultural and Arts
Foundation’s new online zine, Razor’s Edge, which bolts from the gate with short stories by Kelman and three other promising Brits.
Asked if his infamous Q&A with Rebel Inc.’s Kevin Williamson, during
which they both took ecstasy and recorded their sensory impressions in a
hilarious, rambling dissertation, will appear
in “Razor’s Edge,” Welsh laughs. “I dunno, maybe! You know that was the
first time Kevin took it. I had to ram it down his throat!”

Welsh, raised in the projects, seems to be always amused by life and fearless of
its consequences. He had nearly missed his plane in New York City the morning
before, after being up all night with a Scottish comedian. “Yeah, I was
kinda fucked up,” he shrugs. “We went down to the Lower East Side and ended
up at what was basically a crack house. It was pretty wild. And I didn’t
get any sleep. But I made it!” he says cheerfully. I wonder what his
publicist thinks of his candor about his fondness for all things
illicit. An appearance on National Public Radio’s “Fresh Air” was vintage Welsh. He offered responses like, “If you came from a certain place
at a certain time, you couldn’t help being part of the (drug) culture, in
Edinburgh especially. The behavior was archetypal; if not heroin then it
was alcohol.” Later in the broadcast he joked about someone being a “smart cunt.” The
censor didn’t catch it. “Hey!” he protests later, “They said no ‘fuck’ –
nothing about ‘cunt.’”

If Kelman and Maclean resent being upstaged by Welsh’s audacious behavior, they
keep it well hidden. All are good friends; all are beneficiaries of the world’s
current obsession with Scottish writing — jump-started when Kelman won the
coveted Booker and “Trainspotting” changed the way British young people
related to literature. Lured by tales of spat-upon junkies thumbing their
noses at the world, copies of “Trainspotting” were passed hand-to-hand at
raves and sold on record store counters. Suddenly, video-holics were
discovering books could be, as Kelman described it, “a relevant art form.”

All three are embarrassed by the “Great Scots” title attached to their tour. The 50-year-old
Kelman, who does not suffer idiocy gladly, says that to emphasize the
Scottish national angle “is to continue to marginalize the culture.”
Welsh, bucking the solemnity, has his own spin: “My idea of a ‘great Scot’
is Scotty on Star Trek!”

By the end of the Edinburgh Castle gig, Welsh has hooked up with his local
friends and danced himself into sweaty exhaustion. Of course, it’s only temporary.
He stretches out on the covered pool table, grins. What’s next? he asks.
They slip out into the night.

The following evening is the weekend’s most formal appearance — a reading
and panel discussion at the Cowell Theatre — and Welsh has not slept at
all. He is bleary-eyed with exhaustion. Halfway through, however, he
straightens up and practically glows with alertness and wit — the result
of dropping a tab before going onstage. His reading selection: a depraved
chapter from his novel “Ecstasy” (no irony there), dealing with the effects
of crystal meth on one’s erection. Before the oral dissertation, he tells
the crowd, “This won’t be my normal reading tonight; I’m off my tits.”
While a nervous chuckle ripples across the lit-hip crowd, he also offers:
“People always ask me why I write so much about sex and drugs, but you
write what you know.”

The reading is fine, rich with characterization and humor. But when the
crowd peppers the three authors with questions at the close of the
evening, Welsh’s sponsors and pals hold their collective breath. What do
you think of the impact of the drug ecstasy on the young? he is asked.
“Well, it’s working pretty great for me right now!” he laughs. When asked
why the working class is so underrepresented in literature, he offers a
long and rambling discourse that does not satisfy the questioner. What
does he really mean? “I MEAN,” he emphasizes, “That books are written BY
rich cunts FOR rich cunts.” Then he laughs, and the audience laughs with
him.

Sometime later that evening, in the dark confines of Deco’s architecture,
Welsh ponders the weekend. “I fuckin’ love it here. I always have a good
time. I mighta done a little too much this time, though.”

Myers is only 33 but has already invested 15 years in showbiz comedy
(Second City Toronto and Chicago, the Comedy Store in London, “SNL”), creating an army of colorful personas along the way.
There’s Linda Richman, host of the show “Coffee
Talk,” a big-busted, long-nailed Jewish woman who worships Barbra Streisand.
There’s Simon the bathtub boy. There’s Dieter, the cold, black-clad German aesthete who
hosts the talk show “Sprockets.” And of course there’s Wayne Campbell, who
as the long-haired, short-on-IQ host of “Wayne’s World” unwittingly rammed
a whole new teen-speak down America’s throat. (“Party time! Excellent! We’re not worthy!”)

And now he’s created a new hero: “Austin Powers, International Man of
Mystery.” Right at home in his time, the swinging ’60s in London,
Austin is a fashion photographer by day, British intelligence agent by
night. He has moves no Cold War enemy can beat, no free-love chickie-baby
can resist. But when he’s cryogenically frozen and then defrosted in the ’90s,
Austin discovers he’s an eight-track tape in a CD world. He finds the world
a different place politically, and he’s always on the incorrect end.

“Bring on the sexy stews, man!” he hollers boarding a plane, before being told that “we’re
called flight attendants now.” Suggestions that co-star Elizabeth Hurley
might like to “shag” are met with cold indifference — at least at first.
But Austin is undaunted, cheerily refusing to give up either his
swashbuckling, free-love behavior or his crushed velvet bell-bottoms. Think Maxwell
Smart crossed with Mick Jagger, circa “Satanic Majesties.”

Salon sat down with Myers in Los Angeles, where the Canadian native says he eschews the Hollywood scene, sticking
close to home and the comforts of his wife (writer Robin Ruzan) and their three
dogs, fanatically playing ice hockey in his spare time.

You had several nude scenes with Elizabeth Hurley in “Austin Powers.” Was Hugh Grant
jealous?

(Laughs) You’ve seen me naked and you still want to ask me that question?

Now, now. Elizabeth said that you as Austin were, and I quote,
“very, very sexy.”

(Blushes) Well that’s sweet of her … I think if Austin is sexy it’s
because of his self-confidence. Quite the fantasy role for me!

Were you worried about the feminist response to lines like, “Come
on, baby, let’s shag!”?

No, because we really took it over the top so everyone knew how archaic
it was. I mean, Austin’s first line when he was defrosted pretty much said
it all. (In Austin Powers cockney): “As long as people are still having
promiscuous sex with many anonymous partners without protection while at
the same time experimenting with mind-altering drugs in a consequence-free
environment, I’ll be sound as a pound, baby!”

You’ve been described as shy but you’re also something of an
exhibitionist. You manage to either do strip-teases or have bun shots of
yourself in every movie you’ve done.

There’s the through-line to your story! Yes, there’s a long tradition
in English and Canadian comedy of male nudity. Whether it’s John Cleese in
“A Fish Called Wanda,” or the Kids in the Hall getting “naked for Jesus.” We just
love to dress up as women or be naked. I think there is a cultural
repression at work. Those things are so taboo that they are delicious.

Well, you seem to be very good at it, or at least very at ease.

It’s just so … silly. It’s not like I’m ever going to take myself
seriously as a sex symbol so I have nothing to lose. Not hurting the
franchise because there’s no franchise there.

The first time I saw myself projected on a big screen, all I could see was no chin and acne scars. Tremendous video death.

So is there anything about yourself that you like?

(Grinning) My ass! I want to see my own ass. I’m only happy if I can
see those two moons shining down at me. “Nice Ass — Shame About the Face”
should be the title of this article. But seriously, sometimes I take a
writer’s pride in things I’ve written. “That was a good joke.” Like that.

Who do you think the audience for “Austin Powers” is going to be?
Fans of “Wayne’s World” wanting to see their hero in a crushed
velvet suit?

I really don’t know. I make stuff to make myself laugh and put it out
there to the universe. We never thought “Wayne’s World” would be a hit and
it made over $100 million. I think anybody can come to “Austin Powers” and
enjoy it. There is no required reading. There will be no quiz afterwards.
And you don’t need to have experienced the ’60s.

So you’re not worried that kids who never watched a “Laugh-In” show
might not get it — the fashion, the pop-art sensibility.

It doesn’t matter. The mail I got for Linda Richman, for example, was
from all kinds of people. You didn’t have to be a 52-year-old Jewish woman
from Queens to get the humor.

She’s a good example of one of your “Saturday Night Live” characters
who has become part of the popular lexicon — “I’m getting verklempt!” Do
your creations follow you around? Is it odd when someone asks you to “do
Dieter,” for example?

Not at all! I’m always flattered that anyone should care at all.
As an artist you can’t have any expectations of anything. You
don’t go to a laboratory and say, let’s mix the right ingredients to come up
with a hit character. You’d never come up with a guy who runs a TV show
from his basement or a sexually ambiguous German aesthete.

I have to ask you where you got the idea for Dieter.

There was a guy in Toronto who was an exchange student. He worked at
our favorite bar. He’d come up to you and say, “I vill take yoh ordah NOW.”
And I’d say, “Yeah, I’d like the hot dog with …” And he’d say, “Yoh ordah
has gwown tiresome! Now is the time for me to dahnce.” And he would drop
his tray and dance. He’d also say, “I want to tell the specials for da
night but fuhst I must tell you that I am a silly bitch.” And you’d say,
“Okaaaay, I’ll have some fries.” And we befriended him, you know? And he
took us to this art gallery installation, with a giant penis protruding
from the wall, with the word “empire” written on it. Instead of pubic hair,
there was barbed wire. He’d look at it: “Eet’s breathtaking!” We exchanged
phone numbers when he left and I was supposed to visit him in Stuttgart, but
I never made it. I even took that “I Can Speak German, I Really, Really
Can” course. For a whole summer, it was like: (an unintelligible stream of
German), which translates to “I see the dog, the dog is big!”

The Second City (comedy troupe) in Toronto was your first job — hard to
believe since you were just out of high school.

Right, my last exam was at 9 a.m., I was hired at Second City at
3 that afternoon. So I never went to college.

Is that something you regret?

Yeah, and I intend to go at some point. But I read a lot. I just
finished a book on Orson Welles, and “The Ballad of the Sad Cafe” by Carson
McCullers. “Candide,” by Voltaire. And “100 years of Hockey Heroes.” I am a
reading rainbow, a virtual library on wheels.

And a certified hockey fanatic, it seems. What’s up with that? Are
you a wannabe Toronto Maple Leaf?

I’m actually a really crappy skater so when I took a year off, I learned
how to power skate. Hockey was sort of my therapy.

You disappeared there for a while. Why?

Right, I took a year off and then another year to do “Austin Powers.”
Why? Because after six years on “Saturday Night Live,” three movies, a
bestselling book, three prime-time specials, three MTV specials, getting
married, my father’s death and my brother-in-law’s death, I needed to do
something for myself, something that had no real usefulness. And it was
great. I played hockey four times a week. It was on the advice of Bill Murray. On
his time off he studied at the Sorbonne. And my equivalent was skating.

But where do you do something like that in L.A.?

There are some rinks. I was in a public pick-up game, and then some
friends have pick-up games, and I took lessons privately. There are a lot
of Canadians in exile.

Do you surf the Net?

Every night. This is for the Internet, right? That fancy-schmantsy
cultural magazine, right? (Grins)

Yes. You also play a lot with your dogs.

I have a life now. I have a home with my wife and three dogs. I have
two labs and a dog we liberated from the pound. It was of utmost concern to
Robin and me that they have a yard and that they have friends.

So do you arrange little doggie play dates?

Yes, we invite their friends over. They love their friends. And they
have a couple trees that they love. It’s become for us our nest. We’re
finally out of our futon phase and now we’re in our dog phase.

You sound like a couple who really needs to have children.

In two years. We’ll have the requisite 2.5. I’d like to have twins,
actually — get it over with. I’ll take them to hockey practice. Robin
always jokes that I want to have kids so I can play with their toys.

What’s your next project?

I don’t know. There’s this old saying that the fox knows many things
but the turtle knows one thing really well. I’m happy to wait until
something really perfect comes along.

a perverse scene, even a faintly scandalous one, would unfold shortly after 9 each morning in the newsroom of the Suburban Trib: Reporters and editors, each in the employ of the Chicago Tribune, no sooner reached their desks than they dived avidly into the pages of the rival Sun-Times. Checking to see if they had been scooped by the competition? No. They were engaging in a communal rite larger than any such schism — reading Mike Royko’s daily column.

I was one of those journalists back then, almost a generation ago, who regarded Royko with the same longing as I did the Chicago skyline. On a clear enough day, I could see it from the parking lot of our unremarkable two-story office in Hinsdale, 35 miles from the Loop, pricking the eastern horizon, taunting me with its odd combination of proximity and distance. Royko seemed every bit as looming and inaccessible. His death on Tuesday only sharpens the memory.

Royko was the king of Chicago journalism, deflater of the almighty Mayor Daley, champion of the lunch-bucket masses and the inspiration to us ink-stained rookies who rode to work not on the El but the Tri-State Tollway and bought our morning coffee at a gas station’s convenience store.

We were, in other words, not of Royko’s generation, nor of his demography. Most of us had grown up in suburbs like the ones we were covering. While Royko was the son of an immigrant saloonkeeper, a street kid who had dropped out of college and lied his way into his first newspaper job, we had trod a newer career path, majoring in journalism at the vast public universities of the Midwest and then reporting on the doings of school boards and township highway departments.

Chicago’s white, middle-class population had made a similar sort of migration — to the tract houses and shopping malls — and the Tribune was astute enough to provide them with coverage superior to anything the parochial weeklies could muster. It was honorable work. Our editor had exposed the abusive treatment of migrant farm workers. We investigated poverty and political corruption. Big city newspapers like the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Miami Herald, conscious of white flight from their own circulation areas, sent study teams.

Still, there was no pretending we were comparable to our betters downtown. Ever in search of “reader service,” our management would devise a weather map covering a single suburban county. Our columnist, a brilliant satirist named Bill Geist, wrote about strip malls, leisure suits and garage-door art. Readers knew us as “the Little Trib,” and, as our superiors regularly reminded us, it was corporate policy never to transfer reporters from the suburban operation to the parent paper.

So we read Royko for a connection to a world we feared we would never inhabit: the Chicago of ward heelers, mob bosses and unmeltable ethnics like his fictional alter-ego, Slats Grobnik. But he was no sentimentalist. Of all the Royko columns I devoured during three years on the Suburban Trib, the one I saved was his tribute to “you wild, crazy Chicagoans” for electing Jane Byrne over the machine’s incumbent mayor, Michael Bilandic, in the 1979 Democratic primary. Years later, trying to describe the way New York state’s Democratic machine assumed the Election Day loyalty of black voters whom it detested, I remembered the phrase Royko had used to describe the contemptuous view Bilandic’s crew had for blacks in Chicago — “deliverable darkies.”

Every so often, we suburban reporters tried to cross the divide between Royko’s world and our own. We went drinking at Billy Goat’s, near the Sun-Times building, occasionally eyeing Royko from across the room, never daring to approach him. Once, a journalism group held a festival of films about newspapers, starting it off with an open-bar reception. Heady with the free drinks, I grabbed Bill Geist and pulled him over to Royko.

“This is Geist,” I blurted. “He’s good.”

“You young guys,” Royko said, waving us off, “you think you’re gonna take over.”

We never thought anything so arrogant. We only wanted to be part of the tradition Royko so lustily embodied. We wanted a piece of the journalism that maddened the mighty and cheered the powerless and then had a shot and a beer. Like listening to Sammy Lawhorn play the blues in Theresa’s, like sweating in Saul Bellow’s favorite bathhouse, reading Royko gave us a momentary purchase on Chicago. It made us feel less like poseurs.

Ultimately, the Tribune shut down the Suburban Trib and hired some of its best people. One of them, editorial writer R. Bruce Dold, won a Pulitzer Prize. Bill Geist — rechristened William E. — became a columnist for the New York Times. After Rupert Murdoch bought the Sun-Times, Royko himself moved to the hated Tribune.

In the last year or so, living on the East Coast, I read articles about the supposed change in Royko. Arrested for drunk driving, he had insulted cops with an anti-gay diatribe. He was turning into a crank, it was said, he was turning conservative.

Well, it had always seemed to me as a reader that Royko had plenty of the curmudgeon in him. And if his spirit had indeed turned ugly toward the end, then he would not be the first liberal firebrand to turn crotchety in his dotage. None of Royko’s alleged crimes against sensitivity can dim his example. Blunt, funny, fearless, he belonged in the pantheon of Chicago writers, stretching from Hemingway through Algren to Mamet.

Most of all, though, Royko brings to mind James T. Farrell, author of the Studs Lonigan trilogy, the epic of Chicago’s working-class life. Farrell once described his genre of writing as “bottom-dog literature,” and Royko practiced its nonfiction equivalent. He preserved what was big-hearted and transcended what was small-minded, in Chicago’s famously clannish neighborhoods and elsewhere. Even the rank novices that we were on the Suburban Trib, we understood each morning that Royko was singular.