MUSIC: The best records of the 1970s
Neil Young
After the Gold Rush
[Reprise; 1970]
After the gold rush of 1960s California rock, most of its main players spent the 70s slowly hippie-twirling towards irrelevance and rehab resorts. Not so for Mr. Young, who was just hitting his stride as the decade turned over, kicking off a run of 11 great albums in 10 years with After the Gold Rush. One of his few efforts that can't be considered either the product of Crazy Horse feedback Neil or sensitive-hayseed Neil, Gold Rush is also one of Young's most consistent records. Holed up in his Topanga Canyon home writing a soundtrack for a never-made Dean Stockwell-scripted film, Young invited his friends to join him on alien-abduction ballads, preachy Skynyrd-provoking jams and lovesick nocturnal country-blues. Unlike so many of his sun-dazed contemporaries, Young had the right kind of eyes to see the high-water mark, and After the Gold Rush is the departure point on his essential decade-long journey away from the fallout of the 1960s.
Joni Mitchell
Blue
[Reprise; 1971]
There are two ways to hear Blue. The first is as a historical document. If you are white, middle-class and liberal-- and, especially, if the spirit of the feminist movement had touched someone in your family-- then Blue encapsulates your mindset in the 70s. Kids who grew up on Sesame Street with Free to Be You and Me on the hi-fi heard Blue wafting upstairs when Mom and Dad had friends over and the living room started to reek of that funny smoke. This was the perfect hippie comedown record for those young adults with families who wanted to move on to more serene and comfortable bohemianism. But aside from its historical markers, Blue is a fine stripped-down record with extremely solid songwriting-- despite the occasionally cringe-worthy lyric. In this way, Blue is like a companion to Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks-- a confessional album very much of its time that endures on the strength of fantastic melodies and musical simplicity.
Neil Young
On the Beach
[Warner Bros; 1974]
For decades, Neil Young refused to release On the Beach (along with a handful of other, equally noteworthy 1970s albums) in digital format, citing what he considered to be the questionable integrity of 1s and 0s. Warner Brothers finally "convinced" Young to drop his objection, and On the Beach's first compact disc plopped onto a conveyor belt just last year, forever rescuing it from the distracting buzz of (what had long been considered mandatory!) crackles and spits. Ragged, contradictory and oddly poignant, On the Beach is a hazy swirl of steel guitar, dobro, Wurlitzer, slide and Young's high, lonesome whine. All of Young's trademark ugly solos, self-implicating lyrics and cantankerous charm remain intact, but the songwriting here is vaguely softer, an almost apologetic (and certainly dissatisfied) homage to nasty, mid-70s America.
Songlist: Songs for the Beginning of Summer
Mushaboom - Feist
One Evening - Feist
Antonelli - Tahiti80
Triple Trouble - Beastie Boys
I'm her Daddy - Bill Withers
For the Driver - Ron Sexsmith
MUSIC: Short Essays on Favourite Songs
[from mcsweeneys internet tendency]
A Song Familiar Like a Look: Ron Sexsmith's Lebanon, Tennessee
You know the way a person's face looks, when they talk about a place they plan to move to. You can see them seeing their whole new perfect life in that place. It's practically playing behind their eyes like a movie, like a Frank Capra movie. I've seen a lot of those looks - I grew up in a pretty poor place, a place that many people end up having to leave in order to find work. I've seen that look on the faces of my friends, I've seen it on the faces of my parents, and on my brother's face, I've seen it on my husband's face, and I know that they've all seen it on mine. Ron Sexsmith's wistful, beautiful, hopeful, hopeless song "Lebanon, Tennessee" sounds just like that look:
I'm going down to Lebanon, Tennessee
From where I stand, it's as good a place as any
I don't know anybody there and
Nobody knows me
There'll be a job in Lebanon, Tennessee
I'll work on a farm, I'll work in some factory
And I'll buy myself a home down there
You can get one pretty cheap
Get off the bus on the border of town
Head in from the East
Walk into a bar, take a seat in the corner
Be a man of mystery.
So far, so good. It seems possible. You want it to happen for this guy, you believe that it can and that it will, even if it hasn't really happened the way everyone expected it to for your friends, or for your family, or for you. But this guy, this guy sounds like he's got a chance. And then, of course, comes the catch. Because there's always a catch and it's always the same one. The place this guy plans to move to isn't just a different place; it's a whole different world:
Folks don't treat you mean in Lebanon, Tennessee
But like a human being, they'll take you in off the street
They'll bring you in their home down there
And give you something to eat
I'm going down to Lebanon, Tennessee.
And now you know why this guy sounds so sad. He's going, though. He's really going. And you want him to. And if you were from where I'm from, and if he were sitting across the kitchen table talking to you about this place with that look on his face - a look like a familiar song - you'd reach out and put your hands over his folded ones, like the two of you were keeping something safe inside there. And you'd smile and you'd nod and you'd tell him that it sure sounds good.
How to disappear completely: Radiohead
The good thing was, Kid A arrived just in time for my twenty-fifth birthday, as though my brother had known precisely how many days it would take a package to get from Los Angeles to the kingdom of Tonga. It meant more that this occurred in Tonga, as virtually nothing there happens on time and even less happens soon enough. More fortuitous: I’d missed the package at the Peace Corps office when I’d stopped in, but a friend of mine had seen it and grabbed it for me before we met at Fua’amotu Airport. We, along with our Tongan counterparts, were flying to Samoa for a one-week workshop on “Capacity Building for Environmental Management in the Pacific.” The workshop itself would be meaningless, but it would get us all out of Tonga and fill our pockets with enough per diem to buy black pearls and war clubs for our parents back home and enough beer to maintain a buzz through the humid evenings in Apia. I was glad to have a new CD to serve as a soundtrack for my first escape from Tonga in more than a year, and gladder that it was Radiohead.
The bad thing was, I’d gotten dumped the day before: my intra-Peace Corps affair had been abruptly euthanized after a soaring beginning. Distance was a problem (sixty miles between our islands), but the deal breaker was her being a rookie who was still loyal to the idea of Peace Corps, whereas I was halfway through and increasingly disillusioned. I wanted to run off with her to anywhere and be in love, which we were. She had the same easy urges at first but had lately come to equate me with something that stood in the way of her self-actualization, or something.
Anyhow, she’d dumped me rather clumsily the previous night and had spent the day dutifully writing a grant proposal to get lawn mowers for her village’s youth group while we jaded Capacity Builders flew to Samoa. I remember nothing about the flight other than getting half drunk on a sugary Irish liquor that Ed from Connecticut had bought from the duty-free shop. We got to the hotel in Apia around midnight. I had a few more drinks with Will from St. Louis, a sympathetic friend from my island whose own psyche was tangled up in a complicated courtship with a Tongan girl, before I retired to my private air-conditioned room to give Kid A a listen.
Within the first couple bars of “How to Disappear Completely,” I knew I was in deep shit. The strumming of the D and F-sharp-minor chords was gentle and distant and sad. The bass line was brooding and stubborn, complementing the denial in Thom Yorke’s refrain: “I’m not here. This isn’t happening.” There was also a mournful effect that sounded like the grieving of a lone humpback whale-an obvious simile at the time because a few weeks before, my girl and I had camped on the deserted southern tip of her island and watched a humpback surface just off the edge of the reef. Ugh.
There’s a specific satisfaction when a sad song comes on amid your own heartbreak. It’s as though the random forces in your corner of the universe were conspiring to take your misery to a cathartic crescendo, having noted that, while your Keatsian heart still likes to handle these things this way, you’ve outgrown the phase wherein you were deliberate about it. In college, my roommate and I would turn off all the lights and listen to Peter Gabriel’s “Mercy Street” in order to milk our suffering for all its worth. I would also walk across the soccer fields at night in order to brood, as there were neither misty moors nor rugged seaside cliffs on campus. At the time, that kind of deliberate orchestration of all things morose seemed like a good idea, but it feels dopey now. Sad songs work best when you don’t select them from a CD, jukebox, or iTunes playlist. (It won’t be long now before we have celebrity-breakup playlists.) And when the song is brand new the effect is amplified. If the first time you hear it coincides with the climax of a personal catastrophe, and your wounds are still damp, there is the added recognition that, from now on, that song will remind you of her, the loss, the rejection, or whatever it was that removed your viscera and pitched them into a gray, gritty snowbank. In time, you manage to gather up your vital organs, shore up your anima, and do it all over again. But that sad song and that catastrophe will remind you of each other for a long, long time. Three years removed from my South Pacific love burn, “How to Disappear Completely” no longer sends me into a self-pitying nosedive, but it does take me back to the hotel room in Samoa: cool linoleum under my feet, a glass of sickly-sweet liquor on the nightstand, and the inescapable awareness that I had lost something huge.
Don't Give Up: Peter Gabriel
Back in the '70s, when Pampers was a revolutionary new product, they used Annette Fitzgerald's baby picture on the box. Annette was a very cute baby. Later, she was the most stunningly beautiful woman I ever held in my unworthy arms. I crushed on her all through school. I gagged every time she walked into a room. It made learning anything difficult.
Then, in 1987, in the face of stiff competition from cheap imports and generics, the people at Pampers decided on a makeover. This amounted to changing the baby on the box. The results were catastrophic. Sales plummeted. Mothers quite simply preferred Annette's picture. For me, the change was symptomatic of a very strange year, a year whose backing music was "Don't Give Up" by Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush....
Cher won an Oscar. So did Sean Connery. Don Johnson was bigger than Bruce Willis, was married to Melanie Griffith, and had a recording contract! Someone paid $40 million for Sunflowers. It felt like silly season in Absurdistan.
It's so strange the way things go. Don't give up....
Liberace died.
Annette asked if I wouldn't so terribly much mind if she sat next to me in geography class. Her girls were distracting her, and her grades were going south. I couldn't unravel my tongue long enough to attempt to discuss her reasoning. Instead, I just nodded my assent.
Ronald Reagan, meanwhile, the then CEO of the Free World, was having a touch of prostate trouble; his sidekick, Mrs. Thatcher, was reelected to a historic third term. In France, the "Butcher of Lyon," Klaus Barbie, went on trial for crimes against humanity, forty years after the event. Berlin was still a divided city. Some people still used semi-colons; correctly. The first intifada began. What a year.
The whole sad shebang.
Don't give up, I know you can make it good.
Shortly after I failed my third consecutive geography test, Annette told me the acne on my forehead resembled the Great Bear constellation in the northern sky. Recognition. I wasn't just the geek that sat beside her. No, I was the geek with The Great Bear Acne Constellation. A couple of days later, I spoke my first full sentence to her: "The capital of Brazil is Brasília." It took a lot out of me. Soon after, Sugar Ray Leonard outboxed Marvelous Marvin Hagler. Hill Street Blues departed. The Simpsons arrived. The stock exchange crashed. And Al Gore still hadn't invented the Internet, yet. 1987. Fusion was all about atoms, and had zip to do with food. Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" was everywhere. And Pampers was rumoured to be the target of a takeover bid from a Korean producer of sanitary towels. Only Christmas could save us now.
Whatever may come, and whatever may go, ... Don't give up.
But no, it wasn't over yet. The year was looking like a complete washout. Joseph Campbell, master comparative mythologist, passed on/changed address. Peter Tosh was murdered. On death row, Earl Edward Johnson's last words were "Please let's get it over with."
When things get rough, you can fall back on us. Please, don't give up.
And then, Annette Fitzgerald put her tongue in my mouth.
I readily acquiesced, didn't so much as offer the semblance of resistance. The end of a long crush? Would I, after all, spend my life pampering her? It was New Year's Eve, and we were slow dancing at Karin Daly's seventeenth-birthday party. Two days previously, the FDA had given its stamp of approval to a drug named Prozac. Annette and I were the last two wallflowers, and only danced at Karin's insistence. Nobody was sitting this one out. That song. We began by holding each other at the elbows, then biceps, triceps, and shoulders, until finally we became interlocked about the neck. Someone later commented that we resembled a reverse full nelson.
There's a place where we belong, it's gonna be all right.
For one fragile, fleeting moment, I actually believed it would be.
As we danced, Annette whispered to me that she was a direct descendant of the earl of Fitzgerald, the once (but probably not future) king of Ireland. As she nuzzled my ear, I let slip that I was the only surviving heir of that great warrior, Conn of the One Hundred Battles. It seemed a heavenly, if somewhat tribal, match. Seemed. No such luck. About two minutes after the kiss, her father arrived to take her home, and on January 2, the bastard emigrated the whole family to Van Diemen's Land.... Grinch. Nineteen eighty-eight was not getting off to a good start. I was never again to witness Annette at such close proximity. With a continent and two oceans separating us, it was unlikely that we would ever be an item. Damn you, road to Oz.
I just never managed to give up.
Spring came, and with it much change. Annette came back! At least, that is, to the shelves. Pampers had a new head of marketing whose first random act of kindness was to revert to the packaging of old.
And there she is to this day, a classic on the bottom shelf, beside the Johnson & Johnson shampoo, below an array of new Italian-pasta baby food.... Sometimes I have to stop and smile. Last week a staff member asked me if I needed assistance. Mostly I just hurry by.
Muzzle: Smashing Pumpkins
For most of the decade that was my twenties, my life consisted of enduring ennui-inducing deprivation. No TV or popular music. No alcohol or animal flesh. Two hours of swimming every morning to stay fit. I didn't socialize much with my peers, choosing instead to spend time with Wittgenstein, Frege, and my older Dutch professor. My life had become tidy and elegant, just like the linear proofs full of lambdas and deltas I wrote. I was going through this charade under the belief that if I proved myself enough as an adult, my wayward adolescence would magically disappear.
It didn't work. I awoke in the summer of 1998 to find myself living with my mother in Las Vegas, Nevada, after hastily dropping out of a Ph.D. program in linguistics and breaking off my engagement to the professor. When I left the East Coast, I had a vague feeling I was doing the right thing, but I didn't know why or what to do next. Consequently, I filled my days by working for the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository Project in a secure position I was morally opposed to on many levels. But what else could I do? Nothing, I believed. And so I dutifully showed up every day in my ironed dresses to help seal Nevada's fate as the keeper of the nation's hot shit.
Even worse, I was hurtling toward my thirtieth birthday in an old Ford Taurus I had bought from my Aunt Maisie because of its high safety rating. I passed the commute time by systematically working through the great rock bands of the '90s. I had missed grunge completely. I put in Stone Temple Pilots, Nine Inch Nails, and Nirvana, and let 'em rip. I'd rock out to songs about alienation and love gone wrong. Yeah! I got it. Or so I thought.
Then I put in the Smashing Pumpkins. I listened to the first half of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness as I drove to work and was stunned by my reaction.
I fear that I'm ordinary, just like everyone
I was ... jealous. I sat in a DOE parking lot and listened to "Muzzle" over and over again.
my life has been extraordinary
blessed and cursed and won
time heals but I'm forever broken
by and by the way ...
have you ever heard the words
I'm singing in these songs?
I became acutely aware of my staid existence. To me, the song depicts a moment similar to the one that is said to happen right before death, where a person sees their whole life flash before them.
and in my mind as I was floating
far above the clouds
some children laughed I'd fall for certain
for thinking that I'd last forever
but I knew exactly where I was
and I knew the meaning of it all
and I knew the distance to the sun
and I knew the echo that is love
As I listened, I knew that if my death were imminent, I would not see such a landscape. It'd be dark, and small. A parade of dreams unfulfilled, loves kept at a distance, and choices borne from fear. A "safe" life.
At age six, I taught myself how to play piano using the Liberace Big Note Songbook that I had begged my mother to buy after seeing it advertised on TV. (Don't laugh-it worked.) Clarinet lessons followed. I joined sixth-grade band and learned flute, saxophone, and oboe. In seventh grade, violin and cello. I could play any instrument I picked up within weeks, exciting even the most jaded band teacher.
It was the same with writing. I completed my first screenplay at age thirteen and sent it in to a production company. I received a rejection back from a kind producer who told me to keep writing, that I was off to a good start. (Don't laugh-he wrote back.) My first print publication came at age fourteen in a national magazine with a glossy cover. I never cashed the check.
From a young age, I knew exactly what I wanted to do: I wanted to play music and make movies. So how did I end up working at a nuclear-waste dump? I asked myself that many times as I listened to "Muzzle."
I had been an angry teenager. I was mad at my parents for giving away my dog, mad that they sent me to live with their friends in Los Angeles when they divorced. I quit band in high school. I started doing drugs and sank into despair, finding solace only when I'd lose myself in the writhing crowds of Grateful Dead shows or the occasional slam pit.
Contrite, I sobered up and entered college a few years late. It's no accident that I studied linguistics. For most, it's a beloved pursuit. But for me, it was an exercise of the old joke that linguists are people who never got over the fact they could talk. I was muzzled, afraid of what might come out if I stopped talking about talking and started talking. Afraid of myself.
Ultimately, I decided: so what? I couldn't kick myself for giving up. Otherwise, what had I learned? There was only one purposeful way forward-I had to pick up where I left off. I resigned from the DOE, replaced the Ford with a high-maintenance, unsafe-but-fun-to-drive Volkswagen, picked up a guitar, and got to work. My mother labeled it an early midlife crisis.
I finished my first (adult) screenplay before I turned thirty and sent it straight into a drawer. I wrote a second one while taking a screenwriting course at a local university. It was a farce about a late-twenty-something girl going through a life change, aptly titled She's Got Issues. When I first heard my words read aloud by the class, a chill went down my spine. My fellow students were laughing so hard they were crying. Who knew nuclear waste could be funny? I've been hooked ever since, turning all of my dumb choices into comedy.
Almost six years later, I'm no longer jealous when I hear "Muzzle." I can play guitar and sing along with it. None of my screenplays have been produced yet, but I've come close enough to know it's only a matter of time if I stay focused. Now the only moment I feel fear is when I think of how close I came to never finding this place.
It was the plaintive voice of Billy Corgan that inspired my own. He's my muse. He's my favorite rock star!
Don't Worry, Baby: The Beach Boys
Little Ed is now eighteen months old and I have embarked on a program of musical education to broaden his horizons beyond the Top 40 radio and Wiggles CDs he subsists on.
While I am now a respectable, upstanding member of the community, much of my early twenties were spent working in a dingy secondhand record store, where I was paid each week with a crumpled handful of small bills and an armful of vinyl. The legacy of those years is thousands of albums cluttering up our apartment, arcanely filed and catalogued. Sounding familiar? High Fidelity stands as a cautionary tale of where, but for the grace of God, went I. To my small credit and the great relief of my wife, I have now reverted to amateur-status-collector scum, instead of professional know-it-all record-store clerk. You can take the boy out of the record store, but...
I'm standing staring at the shelves of vinyl lining the hallway thinking "Where to start?" Little Ed is a pretty happy kind of kid with a short attention span, so we won't be spinning any of the angst-ridden miserablism or difficult-listening records that make up much of the collection. Or prog rock (hock, spit). What I'm after is pop, bright shiny pop music.
I don't think it is too controversial to state that the greatest letter in the pop alphabet is "B"; the Beatles, Blondie, the Byrds, the B-52's, not to mention Bowie, Beck, Beastie Boys, James Brown, etc., etc. And, of course, the Beach Boys. I select a compilation of their earlier singles ("20 Golden Greats", a midseventies budget release on the Capitol label for those of you playing at home) for an overview of their greatest pop moments.
So we're halfway through side one when a song started that I had never really noticed before? "Don't Worry Baby." It originally appeared as the flipside to the "I Get Around" single in 1964 and is a lesser song from Brian Wilson's best pop year, which makes it twenty times better than most songs you'll ever hear. It has a great falsetto verse, where the singer complains that he's been bragging about his car and now he has to race some local hoodlums to prove he's not a complete pussy. Real adolescent whining, tone perfect. But then there's the chorus: he recounts how his girlfriend tells him "don't worry baby, everything will turn out all right." The phrasing is beautiful, flowing freely over the lush backing harmonies, which are mixed almost criminally low. The contrast between the pettiness of the verses and the calm reassurance of the chorus is staggering.
I'm lying on the floor playing with Little Ed, listening to this track, and tears come to my eyes. I can't believe it. It has been years since a song has moved me to tears by its sheer beauty. I am whisked back to a conversation that I had with a friend during those angst-ridden early twenties. It was about 2:30 a.m., and we were drinking whiskey, playing Tom Waits records, and bemoaning the pitiful state of our respective love lives. She described her ideal vision of love. "I want to fall asleep each night with someone stroking my hair and whispering, 'Don't worry, everything will be alright,' and to really believe it." I understood that longing, just as Brian Wilson obviously understood it.
It is a relief to realize that I have (mostly) outgrown being that whiny adolescent needing constant handholding. But even more, I realized that when Ed trips and bumps his head on the coffee table, as he inevitably will, I can hold him, whisper "Don't worry baby," and stroke his hair, and everything will indeed be all right.
Dark December: "Hello it's me" by T. Rundgren
I'm ten years old, nestled in a striped seat on the Greyhound with my mom and older brother, heading north to the safety of Maine, Christmas, and Nana and Grampy. Tucked under my leg are Mad magazine, Archie comics, and 16-reading material I cajoled out of Mom in a cramped drugstore at the Port Authority. (We ate at the lunch counter there, too, even though it was 8 o'clock at night... some kind of grilled sandwich cut in sharp triangles, and shakes from the gleaming silver vessel of the mixing machine, taupe foam hissing as the counterman streamed it into my glass. Blowing bubbles through the straw, until Mom told us to cut that out. Nervous giggles of a trip about to begin.)
I've taken in all I can about Betty's eternal struggle to snag Archie away from that snot Veronica. (She's blond, for crying out loud! What, is Archie blind? This confuses my brown-haired self.) Wondered how anyone could ever stand Reggie with that black helmet of a head and snide demeanor. Already folded Al Jaffee's two-way trick picture on the last page of Mad, having read a satire of The Sting that was way over my head. And I now know all about the Hudson Brothers and their tragic childhoods, as well as Donny's valiant search for the right girl despite the pressures of touring. (She must like the color purple and consider becoming a Mormon, if she's not one already. Oh well, I do love purple.)
I switch off the little circle of light above me and stare out at nighttime New England: big-windowed store façades, factories, neon neon neon, scatterings of houses, deep blackness. My mother's head nods against my arm as the bus bumps and sways, and across the way my brother is occupying two seats, lying curled up under his coat. Me, I'm a laser of wakefulness. We're three rows away from the restroom-always in the back so Mom can smoke.
Behind us is a group of young people, also interested in smoking. Their legs are bent toward one another in jeans and they're sharing a transistor radio, bathed in the smoke-diffused glow of the reading lights. They are teenagers, I think. Not quite hippies; I'm scared of hippies, for some reason. Maybe these are college students. I can't tell, but I envy their camaraderie in the middle of the night, when both of my companions have long since deserted me.
And then: a song comes on their radio, floats down the aisle, inescapable, as if I am hearing it before anybody else-churchy piano, minor chords piled one on the other, regretful lyrics, plaintive yet assertive, hope against hope when love is lost. Entirely mine, this song. Not even my brother, my authority on which songs are cool, is hearing this. I'm burning to know what song this is, who's singing it, but I set that aside to bask in the final chorus with its near-falsetto, shimmering chords: "... 'cause I'd never want to make you change for me-e-e-e-e..." and then the gospel modulation: "Think of me, you-oooh-oooooh, you know that I'd be with you if I could...."
Todd Rundgren sings of the newfound distance between lovers, the end of something and the beginning of something else. He is a man who thought enough of his ex-girlfriend to let her know how important her freedom was to him, and who crafted a masterful pop song to disperse those sentiments. A song about separation, reason, and acceptance, glistening with tantalizing hooks. I'm still playing with Barbies. What do I know about these things?
It's not just what I knew then, but what I would know; I was transported to the future place where such yearning emotions would dwell in me. A touchstone from a tinny radio in dark December on a Greyhound bus. Every time love-lost feelings arise, I press that stone into my palm, its cool, smooth assurance getting me through, and its pain-shifting chords saying everything better than words.
Alison: Elvis Costello
I once expressed to a friend my desire to be able to erase from my memory all of my favorite songs so that I might have the experience of hearing them again for the first time. It seemed to me that if I listened to a song I loved too often, I ran the risk of wearing it out. I was afraid that eventually it wouldn't move me in quite the same way. I would still want, maybe even need, to hear it, but the level of emotional intensity simply wouldn't be as high. With every listen, I would be looking for the magic and it would be gone. The passion would be traded for a friendly laugh, some small talk, and a pleasant goodbye until I felt like meeting up again. I have come to realize this is not so with the really great songs, the ones that are new every time, the true loves. It is certainly not so with "Alison."
Every time is the first time with "Alison." Always tender, always awkward, always violent. It is impossible not to be lured in by the opening bars. She's swaying in the corner, looking unimpressed, wondering if he's going to come over and ask her how she's been. I try to walk away, change the station, press stop on the player. I can't ever resist her, even though I know it would be easier that way. The drumbeat is quiet and steady, the guitar riffs small, beautiful embellishments. Elvis Costello's voice is the perfect blend of compassion and haughtiness. At first glance, she's all sexy slow dances, dresses removed by other men, a string of imagined lovers accepted and rejected while he stood apart. Costello and his backing band get fired up. Cymbals crash, another voice joins in.
A lifetime flashes by while he's speaking to her. Years pass in moments between the chorus and the second verse. Memories are relived, anger and jealousy and the saddest kind of love dredged up. No matter how many times I sing along, I always think I've missed some lines. Youth and sexiness have been traded for anguished reflection. It doesn't get much more haunting than the image of "pretty fingers lying in the wedding cake." And now maybe she's going on about whatever, in that way the most intimate strangers sometimes do, and he just wants her to shut the hell up. When Costello sings, "Sometimes I wish that I could STOP you from talking when I hear the silly things that you say," all the background sound drops away, and that "STOP" slaps me in the face. Without fail, I flinch, stung but also grateful. I couldn't take anymore either.
As Costello murmurs "my aim is true" repeatedly over the guitar fade, I have envisioned a number of things happening-a man reaching out to touch her face, throwing his head back and crying her name, getting down on his knees and begging, or pulling a gun from his jacket. At the song's close, I am left torn up, disappointed that it's over, and longing to know what comes next. I've fallen for "Alison," too, and I hate her for leaving us this way.
Get me away from here, I'm dying: Bell & Sebastian
During a period of some despair, involving a girlfriend with a drug habit, Midwestern winters and the realization that I didn't really want to write a PhD dissertation, this wee slip of a song came flitting through my radio. Waking up late on cold mornings with condensation from the radiators on the window, I'd listen to the song in bed, unable to figure out who performed it because the radio station, WHPK, a local college station, had a tendency to play fifteen or more songs in a row. At the conclusion of these sets, an undergraduate DJ with a low voice would mumble his way through the playlist for five minutes in no easily discernable pattern.
Many of the DJs clearly felt as I did because the song was in heavy rotation. Determined to find out who sang it, I would count off the songs in one of these long sets and then count the playlist as the DJ went through it. Through trial and error, I discovered that Belle & Sebastian were the artists responsible for "Get Me Away from Here, I'm Dying." I later learned that the station also kept reasonably accurate playlists online, but for some reason, I'm glad to have found out who the band through obsessive behavior.
Chicago, where I resided, is blessed with only two seasons, summer and winter, neither of them pleasant. Every day as I walked to the library to spend hours reading academic theory that bore little resemblance to the world around me, something felt oppressive, whether it be the humidity, the cold, the grey skies or the bare trees. The library, a Brutalist concrete and glass affair, appeared designed by the East German civil defense authority, and I sat in the basement every day for at least eight hours at a stretch trying to imagine my life as an academic, mostly to no avail. It made me feel like Stuart Murdoch when he sings, "From where I'm sitting, rain washing against the lonely tenement has set my mind to wander."
At night, I would walk home to my girlfriend, a lovely woman with many, many problems, not the least of which was her reliance on weed for simple activities such as sleep and eating. At night, she would hold me tightly, like children might a toy, and I felt that if I left her, she might do something rash. Even though I realized after a long time of pretending otherwise that I didn't love her, I stayed out of fear of provoking something, something I preferred not to think about.
And then I heard Belle & Sebastian sing, "Get me away from here, I'm dying, sing me a song to set me free," and it gave a voice to my feelings of dread and unease. Not to stretch an analogy but I think that slave-owners frequently tried to prevent slaves from learning to read and write because they were afraid that once their chattel was able to articulate their oppression, they would revolt. Upon hearing the line, "Get me away from here, I'm, dying," I realized I felt that way too, and that the only solution was to flee.
Leaving Chicago, graduate school, and my girlfriend with the drug habit, I listened to this song. I crossed the state line into Indiana going east on I-80. Amidst the urban decay, fireworks warehouses and miles of mobile home dealers that define Gary, Indiana, I heard them sing, "At the final moment, I cried, I always cry at endings."
"Ooh! get me away from here I’m dying
Play me a song to set me free
Nobody writes them like they used to
So it may as well be me
Here on my own now after hours
Here on my own now on a bus
Think of it this way
You could either be successful or be us
With our winning smiles, and us
With our catchy tunes and words
Now we’re photogenic
You know, we don’t stand a chance
Oh, I’ll settle down with some old story
About a boy who’s just like me
Thought there was love in everything and everyone
You’re so naive!
They always reach a sorry ending
They always get it in the end
Still it was worth it as I turned the pages solemnly, and then
With a winning smile, the poor boy
With naivety succeeds
At the final moment, I cried
I always cry at endings
Oh, that wasn’t what I meant to say at all
From where I’m sitting, rain
Falling against the lonely tenement
Has set my mind to wander
Into the windows of my lovers
They never know unless I write
This is no declaration, I just thought I’d let you know goodbye
Said the hero in the story
It is mightier than swords
I could kill you sure
But I could only make you cry with these words"
Oh my Sweet Carolina: Ryan Adams and Emmylou Harris
A long time ago, when I was still teaching English to foreign students in a London language school, I gave private conversation lessons to an unhappy man who called himself Edward, even though that wasn't his name. Edward was an African living in Rome, where he was a foreign correspondent for his home-town newspaper, and he was unhappy because he was going through a divorce. But he was lucid in his unhappiness: he talked with regret, of course, but also with insight, and enormous intelligence, and his melancholy took him off to all sorts of interesting conversational places - places I never normally got to visit in the normal run of things. I remember the concentration our talks required, and the stillness and intensity they engendered; I knew that he was in pain, but when our fifty minutes were over I felt invigorated and inspired. When it was time for him to return to Rome, he asked me to go and stay with him, and I accepted the invitation.
But when I got there, a few weeks later, he wasn't unhappy any more. He was revelling in his status as a single man, a status that, apparently, required very little self-reflection or intelligence: on the night I arrived, I found that he'd fixed us up with a couple of call-girls. I copped out, in my prissy English way, but he disappeared for forty-eight hours (leaving me with sole use of a beautiful apartment in the centre of Rome); when he came back, he told me he was engaged.
Some people are at their best when they're miserable. Ryan Adams's beautiful Heartbreaker album is, I suspect, the product of a great deal of pain, and "Oh My Sweet Carolina" is its perfect, still centre, its faint heartbeat, a song so quiet that you don't want to breathe throughout its duration. (It helps that Adams got Emmylou Harris, the best harmony vocalist in the history of pop music, to sing with him on it.) On Adams's next album, Gold, he seems to have cheered up, and though that's good news for him, it's bad news for me, just as it was when Edward stopped being miserable. His upbeat songs are fine, but they sound a lot like other people's upbeat songs (you can hear the cheeriest incarnations of the Stones, Dylan and Van Morrison all over Gold); his blues gave him distinction.
What rights do we have here? Are we entitled to ask other people to be unhappy for our benefit? After all, there are loads of us, and only one of them. And how can you be happy, really, if you are only ordinary in your happiness, but extraordinary in your grief? Is it really worth it? It sounds harsh, I know, but if you are currently romantically involved with someone with a real talent - especially a talent for songwriting - then do us all a favour and dump them. There might be a Heartbreaker - or a Blood On The Tracks or a Layla - in it for all of us. Thanks.
Neil Young
After the Gold Rush
[Reprise; 1970]
After the gold rush of 1960s California rock, most of its main players spent the 70s slowly hippie-twirling towards irrelevance and rehab resorts. Not so for Mr. Young, who was just hitting his stride as the decade turned over, kicking off a run of 11 great albums in 10 years with After the Gold Rush. One of his few efforts that can't be considered either the product of Crazy Horse feedback Neil or sensitive-hayseed Neil, Gold Rush is also one of Young's most consistent records. Holed up in his Topanga Canyon home writing a soundtrack for a never-made Dean Stockwell-scripted film, Young invited his friends to join him on alien-abduction ballads, preachy Skynyrd-provoking jams and lovesick nocturnal country-blues. Unlike so many of his sun-dazed contemporaries, Young had the right kind of eyes to see the high-water mark, and After the Gold Rush is the departure point on his essential decade-long journey away from the fallout of the 1960s.
Joni Mitchell
Blue
[Reprise; 1971]
There are two ways to hear Blue. The first is as a historical document. If you are white, middle-class and liberal-- and, especially, if the spirit of the feminist movement had touched someone in your family-- then Blue encapsulates your mindset in the 70s. Kids who grew up on Sesame Street with Free to Be You and Me on the hi-fi heard Blue wafting upstairs when Mom and Dad had friends over and the living room started to reek of that funny smoke. This was the perfect hippie comedown record for those young adults with families who wanted to move on to more serene and comfortable bohemianism. But aside from its historical markers, Blue is a fine stripped-down record with extremely solid songwriting-- despite the occasionally cringe-worthy lyric. In this way, Blue is like a companion to Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks-- a confessional album very much of its time that endures on the strength of fantastic melodies and musical simplicity.
Neil Young
On the Beach
[Warner Bros; 1974]
For decades, Neil Young refused to release On the Beach (along with a handful of other, equally noteworthy 1970s albums) in digital format, citing what he considered to be the questionable integrity of 1s and 0s. Warner Brothers finally "convinced" Young to drop his objection, and On the Beach's first compact disc plopped onto a conveyor belt just last year, forever rescuing it from the distracting buzz of (what had long been considered mandatory!) crackles and spits. Ragged, contradictory and oddly poignant, On the Beach is a hazy swirl of steel guitar, dobro, Wurlitzer, slide and Young's high, lonesome whine. All of Young's trademark ugly solos, self-implicating lyrics and cantankerous charm remain intact, but the songwriting here is vaguely softer, an almost apologetic (and certainly dissatisfied) homage to nasty, mid-70s America.
Songlist: Songs for the Beginning of Summer
Mushaboom - Feist
One Evening - Feist
Antonelli - Tahiti80
Triple Trouble - Beastie Boys
I'm her Daddy - Bill Withers
For the Driver - Ron Sexsmith
MUSIC: Short Essays on Favourite Songs
[from mcsweeneys internet tendency]
A Song Familiar Like a Look: Ron Sexsmith's Lebanon, Tennessee
You know the way a person's face looks, when they talk about a place they plan to move to. You can see them seeing their whole new perfect life in that place. It's practically playing behind their eyes like a movie, like a Frank Capra movie. I've seen a lot of those looks - I grew up in a pretty poor place, a place that many people end up having to leave in order to find work. I've seen that look on the faces of my friends, I've seen it on the faces of my parents, and on my brother's face, I've seen it on my husband's face, and I know that they've all seen it on mine. Ron Sexsmith's wistful, beautiful, hopeful, hopeless song "Lebanon, Tennessee" sounds just like that look:
I'm going down to Lebanon, Tennessee
From where I stand, it's as good a place as any
I don't know anybody there and
Nobody knows me
There'll be a job in Lebanon, Tennessee
I'll work on a farm, I'll work in some factory
And I'll buy myself a home down there
You can get one pretty cheap
Get off the bus on the border of town
Head in from the East
Walk into a bar, take a seat in the corner
Be a man of mystery.
So far, so good. It seems possible. You want it to happen for this guy, you believe that it can and that it will, even if it hasn't really happened the way everyone expected it to for your friends, or for your family, or for you. But this guy, this guy sounds like he's got a chance. And then, of course, comes the catch. Because there's always a catch and it's always the same one. The place this guy plans to move to isn't just a different place; it's a whole different world:
Folks don't treat you mean in Lebanon, Tennessee
But like a human being, they'll take you in off the street
They'll bring you in their home down there
And give you something to eat
I'm going down to Lebanon, Tennessee.
And now you know why this guy sounds so sad. He's going, though. He's really going. And you want him to. And if you were from where I'm from, and if he were sitting across the kitchen table talking to you about this place with that look on his face - a look like a familiar song - you'd reach out and put your hands over his folded ones, like the two of you were keeping something safe inside there. And you'd smile and you'd nod and you'd tell him that it sure sounds good.
How to disappear completely: Radiohead
The good thing was, Kid A arrived just in time for my twenty-fifth birthday, as though my brother had known precisely how many days it would take a package to get from Los Angeles to the kingdom of Tonga. It meant more that this occurred in Tonga, as virtually nothing there happens on time and even less happens soon enough. More fortuitous: I’d missed the package at the Peace Corps office when I’d stopped in, but a friend of mine had seen it and grabbed it for me before we met at Fua’amotu Airport. We, along with our Tongan counterparts, were flying to Samoa for a one-week workshop on “Capacity Building for Environmental Management in the Pacific.” The workshop itself would be meaningless, but it would get us all out of Tonga and fill our pockets with enough per diem to buy black pearls and war clubs for our parents back home and enough beer to maintain a buzz through the humid evenings in Apia. I was glad to have a new CD to serve as a soundtrack for my first escape from Tonga in more than a year, and gladder that it was Radiohead.
The bad thing was, I’d gotten dumped the day before: my intra-Peace Corps affair had been abruptly euthanized after a soaring beginning. Distance was a problem (sixty miles between our islands), but the deal breaker was her being a rookie who was still loyal to the idea of Peace Corps, whereas I was halfway through and increasingly disillusioned. I wanted to run off with her to anywhere and be in love, which we were. She had the same easy urges at first but had lately come to equate me with something that stood in the way of her self-actualization, or something.
Anyhow, she’d dumped me rather clumsily the previous night and had spent the day dutifully writing a grant proposal to get lawn mowers for her village’s youth group while we jaded Capacity Builders flew to Samoa. I remember nothing about the flight other than getting half drunk on a sugary Irish liquor that Ed from Connecticut had bought from the duty-free shop. We got to the hotel in Apia around midnight. I had a few more drinks with Will from St. Louis, a sympathetic friend from my island whose own psyche was tangled up in a complicated courtship with a Tongan girl, before I retired to my private air-conditioned room to give Kid A a listen.
Within the first couple bars of “How to Disappear Completely,” I knew I was in deep shit. The strumming of the D and F-sharp-minor chords was gentle and distant and sad. The bass line was brooding and stubborn, complementing the denial in Thom Yorke’s refrain: “I’m not here. This isn’t happening.” There was also a mournful effect that sounded like the grieving of a lone humpback whale-an obvious simile at the time because a few weeks before, my girl and I had camped on the deserted southern tip of her island and watched a humpback surface just off the edge of the reef. Ugh.
There’s a specific satisfaction when a sad song comes on amid your own heartbreak. It’s as though the random forces in your corner of the universe were conspiring to take your misery to a cathartic crescendo, having noted that, while your Keatsian heart still likes to handle these things this way, you’ve outgrown the phase wherein you were deliberate about it. In college, my roommate and I would turn off all the lights and listen to Peter Gabriel’s “Mercy Street” in order to milk our suffering for all its worth. I would also walk across the soccer fields at night in order to brood, as there were neither misty moors nor rugged seaside cliffs on campus. At the time, that kind of deliberate orchestration of all things morose seemed like a good idea, but it feels dopey now. Sad songs work best when you don’t select them from a CD, jukebox, or iTunes playlist. (It won’t be long now before we have celebrity-breakup playlists.) And when the song is brand new the effect is amplified. If the first time you hear it coincides with the climax of a personal catastrophe, and your wounds are still damp, there is the added recognition that, from now on, that song will remind you of her, the loss, the rejection, or whatever it was that removed your viscera and pitched them into a gray, gritty snowbank. In time, you manage to gather up your vital organs, shore up your anima, and do it all over again. But that sad song and that catastrophe will remind you of each other for a long, long time. Three years removed from my South Pacific love burn, “How to Disappear Completely” no longer sends me into a self-pitying nosedive, but it does take me back to the hotel room in Samoa: cool linoleum under my feet, a glass of sickly-sweet liquor on the nightstand, and the inescapable awareness that I had lost something huge.
Don't Give Up: Peter Gabriel
Back in the '70s, when Pampers was a revolutionary new product, they used Annette Fitzgerald's baby picture on the box. Annette was a very cute baby. Later, she was the most stunningly beautiful woman I ever held in my unworthy arms. I crushed on her all through school. I gagged every time she walked into a room. It made learning anything difficult.
Then, in 1987, in the face of stiff competition from cheap imports and generics, the people at Pampers decided on a makeover. This amounted to changing the baby on the box. The results were catastrophic. Sales plummeted. Mothers quite simply preferred Annette's picture. For me, the change was symptomatic of a very strange year, a year whose backing music was "Don't Give Up" by Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush....
Cher won an Oscar. So did Sean Connery. Don Johnson was bigger than Bruce Willis, was married to Melanie Griffith, and had a recording contract! Someone paid $40 million for Sunflowers. It felt like silly season in Absurdistan.
It's so strange the way things go. Don't give up....
Liberace died.
Annette asked if I wouldn't so terribly much mind if she sat next to me in geography class. Her girls were distracting her, and her grades were going south. I couldn't unravel my tongue long enough to attempt to discuss her reasoning. Instead, I just nodded my assent.
Ronald Reagan, meanwhile, the then CEO of the Free World, was having a touch of prostate trouble; his sidekick, Mrs. Thatcher, was reelected to a historic third term. In France, the "Butcher of Lyon," Klaus Barbie, went on trial for crimes against humanity, forty years after the event. Berlin was still a divided city. Some people still used semi-colons; correctly. The first intifada began. What a year.
The whole sad shebang.
Don't give up, I know you can make it good.
Shortly after I failed my third consecutive geography test, Annette told me the acne on my forehead resembled the Great Bear constellation in the northern sky. Recognition. I wasn't just the geek that sat beside her. No, I was the geek with The Great Bear Acne Constellation. A couple of days later, I spoke my first full sentence to her: "The capital of Brazil is Brasília." It took a lot out of me. Soon after, Sugar Ray Leonard outboxed Marvelous Marvin Hagler. Hill Street Blues departed. The Simpsons arrived. The stock exchange crashed. And Al Gore still hadn't invented the Internet, yet. 1987. Fusion was all about atoms, and had zip to do with food. Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" was everywhere. And Pampers was rumoured to be the target of a takeover bid from a Korean producer of sanitary towels. Only Christmas could save us now.
Whatever may come, and whatever may go, ... Don't give up.
But no, it wasn't over yet. The year was looking like a complete washout. Joseph Campbell, master comparative mythologist, passed on/changed address. Peter Tosh was murdered. On death row, Earl Edward Johnson's last words were "Please let's get it over with."
When things get rough, you can fall back on us. Please, don't give up.
And then, Annette Fitzgerald put her tongue in my mouth.
I readily acquiesced, didn't so much as offer the semblance of resistance. The end of a long crush? Would I, after all, spend my life pampering her? It was New Year's Eve, and we were slow dancing at Karin Daly's seventeenth-birthday party. Two days previously, the FDA had given its stamp of approval to a drug named Prozac. Annette and I were the last two wallflowers, and only danced at Karin's insistence. Nobody was sitting this one out. That song. We began by holding each other at the elbows, then biceps, triceps, and shoulders, until finally we became interlocked about the neck. Someone later commented that we resembled a reverse full nelson.
There's a place where we belong, it's gonna be all right.
For one fragile, fleeting moment, I actually believed it would be.
As we danced, Annette whispered to me that she was a direct descendant of the earl of Fitzgerald, the once (but probably not future) king of Ireland. As she nuzzled my ear, I let slip that I was the only surviving heir of that great warrior, Conn of the One Hundred Battles. It seemed a heavenly, if somewhat tribal, match. Seemed. No such luck. About two minutes after the kiss, her father arrived to take her home, and on January 2, the bastard emigrated the whole family to Van Diemen's Land.... Grinch. Nineteen eighty-eight was not getting off to a good start. I was never again to witness Annette at such close proximity. With a continent and two oceans separating us, it was unlikely that we would ever be an item. Damn you, road to Oz.
I just never managed to give up.
Spring came, and with it much change. Annette came back! At least, that is, to the shelves. Pampers had a new head of marketing whose first random act of kindness was to revert to the packaging of old.
And there she is to this day, a classic on the bottom shelf, beside the Johnson & Johnson shampoo, below an array of new Italian-pasta baby food.... Sometimes I have to stop and smile. Last week a staff member asked me if I needed assistance. Mostly I just hurry by.
Muzzle: Smashing Pumpkins
For most of the decade that was my twenties, my life consisted of enduring ennui-inducing deprivation. No TV or popular music. No alcohol or animal flesh. Two hours of swimming every morning to stay fit. I didn't socialize much with my peers, choosing instead to spend time with Wittgenstein, Frege, and my older Dutch professor. My life had become tidy and elegant, just like the linear proofs full of lambdas and deltas I wrote. I was going through this charade under the belief that if I proved myself enough as an adult, my wayward adolescence would magically disappear.
It didn't work. I awoke in the summer of 1998 to find myself living with my mother in Las Vegas, Nevada, after hastily dropping out of a Ph.D. program in linguistics and breaking off my engagement to the professor. When I left the East Coast, I had a vague feeling I was doing the right thing, but I didn't know why or what to do next. Consequently, I filled my days by working for the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository Project in a secure position I was morally opposed to on many levels. But what else could I do? Nothing, I believed. And so I dutifully showed up every day in my ironed dresses to help seal Nevada's fate as the keeper of the nation's hot shit.
Even worse, I was hurtling toward my thirtieth birthday in an old Ford Taurus I had bought from my Aunt Maisie because of its high safety rating. I passed the commute time by systematically working through the great rock bands of the '90s. I had missed grunge completely. I put in Stone Temple Pilots, Nine Inch Nails, and Nirvana, and let 'em rip. I'd rock out to songs about alienation and love gone wrong. Yeah! I got it. Or so I thought.
Then I put in the Smashing Pumpkins. I listened to the first half of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness as I drove to work and was stunned by my reaction.
I fear that I'm ordinary, just like everyone
I was ... jealous. I sat in a DOE parking lot and listened to "Muzzle" over and over again.
my life has been extraordinary
blessed and cursed and won
time heals but I'm forever broken
by and by the way ...
have you ever heard the words
I'm singing in these songs?
I became acutely aware of my staid existence. To me, the song depicts a moment similar to the one that is said to happen right before death, where a person sees their whole life flash before them.
and in my mind as I was floating
far above the clouds
some children laughed I'd fall for certain
for thinking that I'd last forever
but I knew exactly where I was
and I knew the meaning of it all
and I knew the distance to the sun
and I knew the echo that is love
As I listened, I knew that if my death were imminent, I would not see such a landscape. It'd be dark, and small. A parade of dreams unfulfilled, loves kept at a distance, and choices borne from fear. A "safe" life.
At age six, I taught myself how to play piano using the Liberace Big Note Songbook that I had begged my mother to buy after seeing it advertised on TV. (Don't laugh-it worked.) Clarinet lessons followed. I joined sixth-grade band and learned flute, saxophone, and oboe. In seventh grade, violin and cello. I could play any instrument I picked up within weeks, exciting even the most jaded band teacher.
It was the same with writing. I completed my first screenplay at age thirteen and sent it in to a production company. I received a rejection back from a kind producer who told me to keep writing, that I was off to a good start. (Don't laugh-he wrote back.) My first print publication came at age fourteen in a national magazine with a glossy cover. I never cashed the check.
From a young age, I knew exactly what I wanted to do: I wanted to play music and make movies. So how did I end up working at a nuclear-waste dump? I asked myself that many times as I listened to "Muzzle."
I had been an angry teenager. I was mad at my parents for giving away my dog, mad that they sent me to live with their friends in Los Angeles when they divorced. I quit band in high school. I started doing drugs and sank into despair, finding solace only when I'd lose myself in the writhing crowds of Grateful Dead shows or the occasional slam pit.
Contrite, I sobered up and entered college a few years late. It's no accident that I studied linguistics. For most, it's a beloved pursuit. But for me, it was an exercise of the old joke that linguists are people who never got over the fact they could talk. I was muzzled, afraid of what might come out if I stopped talking about talking and started talking. Afraid of myself.
Ultimately, I decided: so what? I couldn't kick myself for giving up. Otherwise, what had I learned? There was only one purposeful way forward-I had to pick up where I left off. I resigned from the DOE, replaced the Ford with a high-maintenance, unsafe-but-fun-to-drive Volkswagen, picked up a guitar, and got to work. My mother labeled it an early midlife crisis.
I finished my first (adult) screenplay before I turned thirty and sent it straight into a drawer. I wrote a second one while taking a screenwriting course at a local university. It was a farce about a late-twenty-something girl going through a life change, aptly titled She's Got Issues. When I first heard my words read aloud by the class, a chill went down my spine. My fellow students were laughing so hard they were crying. Who knew nuclear waste could be funny? I've been hooked ever since, turning all of my dumb choices into comedy.
Almost six years later, I'm no longer jealous when I hear "Muzzle." I can play guitar and sing along with it. None of my screenplays have been produced yet, but I've come close enough to know it's only a matter of time if I stay focused. Now the only moment I feel fear is when I think of how close I came to never finding this place.
It was the plaintive voice of Billy Corgan that inspired my own. He's my muse. He's my favorite rock star!
Don't Worry, Baby: The Beach Boys
Little Ed is now eighteen months old and I have embarked on a program of musical education to broaden his horizons beyond the Top 40 radio and Wiggles CDs he subsists on.
While I am now a respectable, upstanding member of the community, much of my early twenties were spent working in a dingy secondhand record store, where I was paid each week with a crumpled handful of small bills and an armful of vinyl. The legacy of those years is thousands of albums cluttering up our apartment, arcanely filed and catalogued. Sounding familiar? High Fidelity stands as a cautionary tale of where, but for the grace of God, went I. To my small credit and the great relief of my wife, I have now reverted to amateur-status-collector scum, instead of professional know-it-all record-store clerk. You can take the boy out of the record store, but...
I'm standing staring at the shelves of vinyl lining the hallway thinking "Where to start?" Little Ed is a pretty happy kind of kid with a short attention span, so we won't be spinning any of the angst-ridden miserablism or difficult-listening records that make up much of the collection. Or prog rock (hock, spit). What I'm after is pop, bright shiny pop music.
I don't think it is too controversial to state that the greatest letter in the pop alphabet is "B"; the Beatles, Blondie, the Byrds, the B-52's, not to mention Bowie, Beck, Beastie Boys, James Brown, etc., etc. And, of course, the Beach Boys. I select a compilation of their earlier singles ("20 Golden Greats", a midseventies budget release on the Capitol label for those of you playing at home) for an overview of their greatest pop moments.
So we're halfway through side one when a song started that I had never really noticed before? "Don't Worry Baby." It originally appeared as the flipside to the "I Get Around" single in 1964 and is a lesser song from Brian Wilson's best pop year, which makes it twenty times better than most songs you'll ever hear. It has a great falsetto verse, where the singer complains that he's been bragging about his car and now he has to race some local hoodlums to prove he's not a complete pussy. Real adolescent whining, tone perfect. But then there's the chorus: he recounts how his girlfriend tells him "don't worry baby, everything will turn out all right." The phrasing is beautiful, flowing freely over the lush backing harmonies, which are mixed almost criminally low. The contrast between the pettiness of the verses and the calm reassurance of the chorus is staggering.
I'm lying on the floor playing with Little Ed, listening to this track, and tears come to my eyes. I can't believe it. It has been years since a song has moved me to tears by its sheer beauty. I am whisked back to a conversation that I had with a friend during those angst-ridden early twenties. It was about 2:30 a.m., and we were drinking whiskey, playing Tom Waits records, and bemoaning the pitiful state of our respective love lives. She described her ideal vision of love. "I want to fall asleep each night with someone stroking my hair and whispering, 'Don't worry, everything will be alright,' and to really believe it." I understood that longing, just as Brian Wilson obviously understood it.
It is a relief to realize that I have (mostly) outgrown being that whiny adolescent needing constant handholding. But even more, I realized that when Ed trips and bumps his head on the coffee table, as he inevitably will, I can hold him, whisper "Don't worry baby," and stroke his hair, and everything will indeed be all right.
Dark December: "Hello it's me" by T. Rundgren
I'm ten years old, nestled in a striped seat on the Greyhound with my mom and older brother, heading north to the safety of Maine, Christmas, and Nana and Grampy. Tucked under my leg are Mad magazine, Archie comics, and 16-reading material I cajoled out of Mom in a cramped drugstore at the Port Authority. (We ate at the lunch counter there, too, even though it was 8 o'clock at night... some kind of grilled sandwich cut in sharp triangles, and shakes from the gleaming silver vessel of the mixing machine, taupe foam hissing as the counterman streamed it into my glass. Blowing bubbles through the straw, until Mom told us to cut that out. Nervous giggles of a trip about to begin.)
I've taken in all I can about Betty's eternal struggle to snag Archie away from that snot Veronica. (She's blond, for crying out loud! What, is Archie blind? This confuses my brown-haired self.) Wondered how anyone could ever stand Reggie with that black helmet of a head and snide demeanor. Already folded Al Jaffee's two-way trick picture on the last page of Mad, having read a satire of The Sting that was way over my head. And I now know all about the Hudson Brothers and their tragic childhoods, as well as Donny's valiant search for the right girl despite the pressures of touring. (She must like the color purple and consider becoming a Mormon, if she's not one already. Oh well, I do love purple.)
I switch off the little circle of light above me and stare out at nighttime New England: big-windowed store façades, factories, neon neon neon, scatterings of houses, deep blackness. My mother's head nods against my arm as the bus bumps and sways, and across the way my brother is occupying two seats, lying curled up under his coat. Me, I'm a laser of wakefulness. We're three rows away from the restroom-always in the back so Mom can smoke.
Behind us is a group of young people, also interested in smoking. Their legs are bent toward one another in jeans and they're sharing a transistor radio, bathed in the smoke-diffused glow of the reading lights. They are teenagers, I think. Not quite hippies; I'm scared of hippies, for some reason. Maybe these are college students. I can't tell, but I envy their camaraderie in the middle of the night, when both of my companions have long since deserted me.
And then: a song comes on their radio, floats down the aisle, inescapable, as if I am hearing it before anybody else-churchy piano, minor chords piled one on the other, regretful lyrics, plaintive yet assertive, hope against hope when love is lost. Entirely mine, this song. Not even my brother, my authority on which songs are cool, is hearing this. I'm burning to know what song this is, who's singing it, but I set that aside to bask in the final chorus with its near-falsetto, shimmering chords: "... 'cause I'd never want to make you change for me-e-e-e-e..." and then the gospel modulation: "Think of me, you-oooh-oooooh, you know that I'd be with you if I could...."
Todd Rundgren sings of the newfound distance between lovers, the end of something and the beginning of something else. He is a man who thought enough of his ex-girlfriend to let her know how important her freedom was to him, and who crafted a masterful pop song to disperse those sentiments. A song about separation, reason, and acceptance, glistening with tantalizing hooks. I'm still playing with Barbies. What do I know about these things?
It's not just what I knew then, but what I would know; I was transported to the future place where such yearning emotions would dwell in me. A touchstone from a tinny radio in dark December on a Greyhound bus. Every time love-lost feelings arise, I press that stone into my palm, its cool, smooth assurance getting me through, and its pain-shifting chords saying everything better than words.
Alison: Elvis Costello
I once expressed to a friend my desire to be able to erase from my memory all of my favorite songs so that I might have the experience of hearing them again for the first time. It seemed to me that if I listened to a song I loved too often, I ran the risk of wearing it out. I was afraid that eventually it wouldn't move me in quite the same way. I would still want, maybe even need, to hear it, but the level of emotional intensity simply wouldn't be as high. With every listen, I would be looking for the magic and it would be gone. The passion would be traded for a friendly laugh, some small talk, and a pleasant goodbye until I felt like meeting up again. I have come to realize this is not so with the really great songs, the ones that are new every time, the true loves. It is certainly not so with "Alison."
Every time is the first time with "Alison." Always tender, always awkward, always violent. It is impossible not to be lured in by the opening bars. She's swaying in the corner, looking unimpressed, wondering if he's going to come over and ask her how she's been. I try to walk away, change the station, press stop on the player. I can't ever resist her, even though I know it would be easier that way. The drumbeat is quiet and steady, the guitar riffs small, beautiful embellishments. Elvis Costello's voice is the perfect blend of compassion and haughtiness. At first glance, she's all sexy slow dances, dresses removed by other men, a string of imagined lovers accepted and rejected while he stood apart. Costello and his backing band get fired up. Cymbals crash, another voice joins in.
A lifetime flashes by while he's speaking to her. Years pass in moments between the chorus and the second verse. Memories are relived, anger and jealousy and the saddest kind of love dredged up. No matter how many times I sing along, I always think I've missed some lines. Youth and sexiness have been traded for anguished reflection. It doesn't get much more haunting than the image of "pretty fingers lying in the wedding cake." And now maybe she's going on about whatever, in that way the most intimate strangers sometimes do, and he just wants her to shut the hell up. When Costello sings, "Sometimes I wish that I could STOP you from talking when I hear the silly things that you say," all the background sound drops away, and that "STOP" slaps me in the face. Without fail, I flinch, stung but also grateful. I couldn't take anymore either.
As Costello murmurs "my aim is true" repeatedly over the guitar fade, I have envisioned a number of things happening-a man reaching out to touch her face, throwing his head back and crying her name, getting down on his knees and begging, or pulling a gun from his jacket. At the song's close, I am left torn up, disappointed that it's over, and longing to know what comes next. I've fallen for "Alison," too, and I hate her for leaving us this way.
Get me away from here, I'm dying: Bell & Sebastian
During a period of some despair, involving a girlfriend with a drug habit, Midwestern winters and the realization that I didn't really want to write a PhD dissertation, this wee slip of a song came flitting through my radio. Waking up late on cold mornings with condensation from the radiators on the window, I'd listen to the song in bed, unable to figure out who performed it because the radio station, WHPK, a local college station, had a tendency to play fifteen or more songs in a row. At the conclusion of these sets, an undergraduate DJ with a low voice would mumble his way through the playlist for five minutes in no easily discernable pattern.
Many of the DJs clearly felt as I did because the song was in heavy rotation. Determined to find out who sang it, I would count off the songs in one of these long sets and then count the playlist as the DJ went through it. Through trial and error, I discovered that Belle & Sebastian were the artists responsible for "Get Me Away from Here, I'm Dying." I later learned that the station also kept reasonably accurate playlists online, but for some reason, I'm glad to have found out who the band through obsessive behavior.
Chicago, where I resided, is blessed with only two seasons, summer and winter, neither of them pleasant. Every day as I walked to the library to spend hours reading academic theory that bore little resemblance to the world around me, something felt oppressive, whether it be the humidity, the cold, the grey skies or the bare trees. The library, a Brutalist concrete and glass affair, appeared designed by the East German civil defense authority, and I sat in the basement every day for at least eight hours at a stretch trying to imagine my life as an academic, mostly to no avail. It made me feel like Stuart Murdoch when he sings, "From where I'm sitting, rain washing against the lonely tenement has set my mind to wander."
At night, I would walk home to my girlfriend, a lovely woman with many, many problems, not the least of which was her reliance on weed for simple activities such as sleep and eating. At night, she would hold me tightly, like children might a toy, and I felt that if I left her, she might do something rash. Even though I realized after a long time of pretending otherwise that I didn't love her, I stayed out of fear of provoking something, something I preferred not to think about.
And then I heard Belle & Sebastian sing, "Get me away from here, I'm dying, sing me a song to set me free," and it gave a voice to my feelings of dread and unease. Not to stretch an analogy but I think that slave-owners frequently tried to prevent slaves from learning to read and write because they were afraid that once their chattel was able to articulate their oppression, they would revolt. Upon hearing the line, "Get me away from here, I'm, dying," I realized I felt that way too, and that the only solution was to flee.
Leaving Chicago, graduate school, and my girlfriend with the drug habit, I listened to this song. I crossed the state line into Indiana going east on I-80. Amidst the urban decay, fireworks warehouses and miles of mobile home dealers that define Gary, Indiana, I heard them sing, "At the final moment, I cried, I always cry at endings."
"Ooh! get me away from here I’m dying
Play me a song to set me free
Nobody writes them like they used to
So it may as well be me
Here on my own now after hours
Here on my own now on a bus
Think of it this way
You could either be successful or be us
With our winning smiles, and us
With our catchy tunes and words
Now we’re photogenic
You know, we don’t stand a chance
Oh, I’ll settle down with some old story
About a boy who’s just like me
Thought there was love in everything and everyone
You’re so naive!
They always reach a sorry ending
They always get it in the end
Still it was worth it as I turned the pages solemnly, and then
With a winning smile, the poor boy
With naivety succeeds
At the final moment, I cried
I always cry at endings
Oh, that wasn’t what I meant to say at all
From where I’m sitting, rain
Falling against the lonely tenement
Has set my mind to wander
Into the windows of my lovers
They never know unless I write
This is no declaration, I just thought I’d let you know goodbye
Said the hero in the story
It is mightier than swords
I could kill you sure
But I could only make you cry with these words"
Oh my Sweet Carolina: Ryan Adams and Emmylou Harris
A long time ago, when I was still teaching English to foreign students in a London language school, I gave private conversation lessons to an unhappy man who called himself Edward, even though that wasn't his name. Edward was an African living in Rome, where he was a foreign correspondent for his home-town newspaper, and he was unhappy because he was going through a divorce. But he was lucid in his unhappiness: he talked with regret, of course, but also with insight, and enormous intelligence, and his melancholy took him off to all sorts of interesting conversational places - places I never normally got to visit in the normal run of things. I remember the concentration our talks required, and the stillness and intensity they engendered; I knew that he was in pain, but when our fifty minutes were over I felt invigorated and inspired. When it was time for him to return to Rome, he asked me to go and stay with him, and I accepted the invitation.
But when I got there, a few weeks later, he wasn't unhappy any more. He was revelling in his status as a single man, a status that, apparently, required very little self-reflection or intelligence: on the night I arrived, I found that he'd fixed us up with a couple of call-girls. I copped out, in my prissy English way, but he disappeared for forty-eight hours (leaving me with sole use of a beautiful apartment in the centre of Rome); when he came back, he told me he was engaged.
Some people are at their best when they're miserable. Ryan Adams's beautiful Heartbreaker album is, I suspect, the product of a great deal of pain, and "Oh My Sweet Carolina" is its perfect, still centre, its faint heartbeat, a song so quiet that you don't want to breathe throughout its duration. (It helps that Adams got Emmylou Harris, the best harmony vocalist in the history of pop music, to sing with him on it.) On Adams's next album, Gold, he seems to have cheered up, and though that's good news for him, it's bad news for me, just as it was when Edward stopped being miserable. His upbeat songs are fine, but they sound a lot like other people's upbeat songs (you can hear the cheeriest incarnations of the Stones, Dylan and Van Morrison all over Gold); his blues gave him distinction.
What rights do we have here? Are we entitled to ask other people to be unhappy for our benefit? After all, there are loads of us, and only one of them. And how can you be happy, really, if you are only ordinary in your happiness, but extraordinary in your grief? Is it really worth it? It sounds harsh, I know, but if you are currently romantically involved with someone with a real talent - especially a talent for songwriting - then do us all a favour and dump them. There might be a Heartbreaker - or a Blood On The Tracks or a Layla - in it for all of us. Thanks.
posted by D @ 2:28 PM
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