#381: The Beach Boys, "The Smile Sessions" (2011)

I have a few theories about why my sister loved the Beach Boys:

They’re fun to sing along with.

The songs are happy. And they sound happy singing them.

The harmonies, duh.

They take you to the beach—to a different time.

But I have this other cosmic thought. About Brian Wilson’s sandbox, where he sat in 1966 and 1967 while the anticipated album Smile was periled over and never executed and where Smiley Smile was settled on in ‘67. Wilson, like a child, sat on his simulated beach, composing commotion, ordering the orchestras to stop and start again, the swirl and chaos of hundreds of instruments around him punctuated by the false start of harmonies. I imagine how utterly alone he was, though surrounded by so many people who only wanted to see it all work out. Then I think of my seven-year-old sister outside in the neighbor’s sandbox, being fussed over, loved by so many, attended by even more, back when they were trying to save her. As a kid, she wouldn’t have known, the way we do now, about the pain Brian Wilson was living with back then, but maybe, I imagine, my sister heard in Smiley Smile something recognizable. They shared the kind of isolation brought on by suffering—by expectations you can’t uphold. For both of them, it was not possible to command hope into result. But, they lived for the sound of beautiful, ecstatic things.

*

Up and down the stairs of our home—to sleepovers and hospital stays—my sister lugged with her a large trash bag full of cassette tapes. I still remember the pre-song rattle of the tapes clanking against each other, even the bag’s plastic skin, worn soft by the tapes. Among them were Summer Days, Pet Sounds, Smiley Smile, and a handful of compilation hits by the Beach Boys.

As an elementary schooler in the early ‘90s, her friends were singing into hairbrush microphones to Michael Jackson, Ace of Base, and Cyndi Lauper. Like a strange seven-year-old Santa incarnate, she’d throw her trash bag over her shoulder, walk to their houses and insist to choreograph elaborate dance routines to the Beach Boys instead. She wasn’t just hooked on “God Only Knows,” “Help Me, Rhonda,” and “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”—she was a kid into deep cuts. That’s how I know the offbeat, cast-off songs from Smiley Smile. One of her favorites was “Heroes and Villains,” the larger-than-life epic narrative, quite unlike any other Beach Boys single. During one of her birthday parties at this place called Superstar Studios—where you dance, lip-sync and play faux-instruments in front of a green screen yielding all sorts of special effects—she asked for “Heroes and Villains.” They didn’t have that song available.

*

The Smile Sessions came out in 2011, thirty-five years after the forty-one initial recordings were made. Smile, the epic album the Beach Boys labored over and intended to release after the iconic Pet Sounds, was shelved due to ‘internal conflict’ in 1967. Instead, Smiley Smile was thrown together to fulfill their contract with Capitol. Smiley Smile has some overlap with The Smile Sessions, which tells a far more in-depth story of the attempt to bring this life-size—maybe galaxy-size, all-of-time-size—concept to life. On it, you can hear almost a half hour in takes trying to get “Heroes and Villains” right.

*

My sister was diagnosed with a rare form of terminal brain cancer when she was seven years old after having a seizure at school. She was sick, enduring surgeries, treatments and false hopes, for two years. She died when I was five and a half. I have grown up wondering, speculating, what it was about these songs that she attached to. For years I have searched the lyrics for clues—if there was a message provided, straight from Brian Wilson himself. I imagine she lit up when “California Girls” declared east coast girls hip; the boys really digging the styles they wear. I cringe to think of her hearing, asking: Wouldn’t it be nice if we were older… I find solace thinking of her comforted by “Don’t Worry Baby”’s repetition of that line.

But Smiley Smiley’s strange psychedelic songs, many seemingly ironic in their lyrics’ juvenility, don’t lay the path to my sister’s mind. Even though she was young and silly, I can’t imagine my sister around the dinner table singing: I'm gonna chow down my vegetables, I love you most of all, my favorite vegetable. “Little Pad”’s  Dit du du, Da da da do do, dim duh did doo, Did did did doo Dim duh dum did doo Do do doesn’t give many clues, either. There is one song on “Smiley Smile” though, that I know she could relate to.

It hurts to listen to “She’s Goin’ Bald,” knowing she’d known it—surely had it memorized. It is a playful, trippy track with a pinch of their recognizable beachy harmonies at the beginning. Wilson sings, Silken hair, more silken hair fell on her face and no wind was blowin / She's goin' bald / Silken hair, more silken hair lay near her pillbox down at her feet. But the song rockets into a rock opera-esque joke, the punchline its bald subject. On first listen, it feels tacky, tasteless—a “too far” moment for Wilson. But when I think of her hearing it as a child losing beautiful waist-long waves, I wonder if its wildness and bounce, its lack of seriousness and sensitivity, was a relief. That maybe someone far away in space and time was giving her the gift of being the focus of a light, upbeat story—not a sufferer.

*

In 1967, Smiley Smile hit number 41 on the U.S. Billboard charts. It was the lowest ranking that the Beach Boys ever had. Smiley Smile is often regarded as their worst received album to date. By critics, fans, and even members of the band, it was considered a humiliating, cartoonish, plummet for them, especially as a follow up to Pet Sounds. There’s much supposition that Brian Wilson’s mental, physical and spiritual state contributed to Smile’s dysfunctional recording and the chart failure of Smiley Smile. I wonder if this is album he needed to make—one seemingly void of emotional resonance. One not of suffering.

*

Though I remember the oldies that orbited my sister clearly, a lot of my memories of my sister are fabricated, pieced together by clips of home videos or suggested by photographs. This image of her is my favorite: She is on the beach, standing on the sand in front of the boardwalk amusements. A Ferris wheel halos her bare head and she is smiling. The tulip bathing suit she is wearing was handed down to me. By the time I grew into it, she was gone.

I don’t remember this day—I’m not even sure if I was there. But it was a Beach Boys concert in 1993 in Ocean City, Maryland. I think by then the doctors and my parents knew that she couldn’t be saved. They drove her four hours to the beach to see her favorite band, wanting to give her any final, beautiful moments they could.

I envision that day, filling it in with all the things I assume. I wonder if she noticed being one of the youngest diehard Beach Boys fans—that the other kids were not singing along, but building sand castles at their parents’, not ever having considered the other side of life. I also wonder if, by then, she did.

*

The Smile Sessions was released as a box set with almost 400 fatiguing minutes of audio—many 20 second tracks. These clips of chaos and unresolved melodies don’t feel like songs at all. The recordings were made over nine months during eighty different sessions in Brian Wilson’s home studio. Listening to it is an exhausting eavesdrop for those willing to endure frustration for the blessing of bearing witness to these painful, private moments. This album gives a gritty glimpse of why Smile was never produced and its flop replacement Smiley Smile was released instead. Although, it is worth mentioning that since its mediocre reception, many critics and fans alike have recanted harsh reviews of Smiley Smile. Though it didn’t place on the RS 500, it is at least now better embraced.

*

Though I will never know, I decide that my sister initially loved the Beach Boys for the simple, instinctual reasons we love music and that those feelings complicated and evolved as she lived. Maybe the range of high notes warmed by lows offered her heaven-sounds—beckoning her beautifully to a place that, I decide, she believed in.

The Smile Sessions opens with a rough cut of “Our Prayer.” These are the familiar harmonies that I imagine soothed my sister into acceptance. Something that I hope was uncomplicated—just peaceful. As I listen to “Our Prayer,” I sense this is what Brian Wilson was trying to muddle through. That he was trying to coordinate pitches and speed and purpose to find the peace these voices and sounds would offer.

*

I am not sure what Smile would have sounded like if they’d made of it what they wanted. Neither Smiley Smile nor The Smile Sessions give us more than gentle nudges. But here: I am just trying to decode the smiles they provided.

I am not sure what my sister’s story would be if I knew all her truths—why she loved the Beach Boys being only one of the million mysteries I strive to solve.

After toiling toward answers, I realize that maybe I relate more to Brian Wilson that my sister ever did. Like him, I am writing this for a deadline. Like him, I missed it. Maybe in forty years I will be able to release the scribbles of edits, sessions of notes—the evidence that I worked trying to get each of them right.

I think I will always magnify moments of her short life, investigating what was meaningful to her. I will throw together all my labored breaths, re-tries, my visible tensions: the struggled words of trying to do justice to such a gigantic, bigger-than-time story. Smile, Smiley Smile, Smile Sessions—they gave it so many gos. And without shame, I will release my tired 20-second tracks—this is among them. I will try and re-try, making sure like in “Our Prayer”—like in all the tracks— the harmonies synch up and hurt just right. And just like Wilson, through the struggle and strain, in each stab at it I take, I’ll hope for a Smile.

—Elise Burke

#382: The Modern Lovers, "The Modern Lovers" (1976)

What's modern about The Modern Lovers? The question is dumb, but so is the album. So is the building I write this in—it's condemned, full of asbestos, you can't drink from the water fountains, and there's a dead cockroach in the men's room on the second floor. Eventually the building is supposed to get torn down, but for now my office is in it, I hold my office hours in it and I apologize to every student who wonders why the lights are so dim or the stairways so full of mostly dead insects in it. I am pretty sure this building is killing us—me, my students, and now even you, the reader, who has to think about this building and probably knows at least one building like it, or even works in one.

But we were talking about modernism—I mean The Modern Lovers, which amounts to the same thing. Modernism is everywhere on this album, which is one way to answer my opening question. The Modern Lovers is modern because Jonathan Richman's tastes are modern. But that only explains one thing, the tenderness for a womanizing Picasso, the beeline our hero makes for the Cezanne room in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. It explains what Richman thinks about a certain way of seeing from the past, a way of seeing that looked at the arrival of a dizzying array of transformations and in a complicated way tried to deal with those changes. Picasso didn't say YES or NO or even MAYBE exclusively, he had a lot to say and in a lot of different ways. At the end of the day he was a painter. Jonathan Richman is a songwriter.

The big difference between Richman and Picasso isn't really their medium of choice, though. It's that "Pablo Picasso never got called an asshole, not like you." When Richman sings this, it's not clear who the "you" is—is it me? is it some unknown fictional character based on a real person that the song rages against? is it Richman himself? does it matter? No, it doesn't matter, at least not as much as the way this line registers the limits of Richman's enthusiasm. You can love the modern all you want, but it means loving a lot of people who were assholes (even if they weren't called assholes) and loving a lot of stuff that's just not possible to take up, to do again without some kind of modification. Hence in "Old World," Richman says that the old world "may be dead." He still loves it, but it isn't the same world as the one in which he tells someone, ludicrously, that he will be with her "on the astral plane" if he can't sleep with her in real life.

The sentiment is gross; the expression of it totally inane. And yet it is also quintessentially modern, insofar as it attempts to solve a worldly problem by negating the world completely through art. But rock songs don't quite have the same verve as Cezanne's paintings, and Richman seems aware of this as he repeatedly displaces the great spatial and temporal themes of modernity—the railroad! the city! the large-scale industrial development!—with interpersonal dynamics and songs about romantic relationships. The result is more than a little silly, perhaps even embarrassing, but it's also seriously funny. And this is what I mean when I call The Modern Lovers a dumb album: it's a sentimental album, an album that deals with complex feelings that would cease to be complex—or interesting—if they congealed into a recognizable or fixed representation. That's why there has to be a song called "Modern World" in addition to one called "Old World." That's why Richman needs a girlfriend—or GIRLFREN as the song's chorus spells it—to go with him to the museum, but he and the Modern Lovers have to “make the secretaries feel better" by playing a show at the Government Center. There is no way conceivably to represent what's modern.

So "dumbness" names the tone of the album, not its ineptitude or puerility. Indeed, the only puerile thing would be to ask for a recognizable and complete image of the modern, an enumeration of characteristics that contented itself with closure and completion. The Modern Lovers refuse to try to do this, offering up instead an album about living in the ruins of modernity. They are at all points surrounded by the failures of a century that promised to turn the present into the future with its dizzying rate of development, and they feel strange about it, and they want to say so, but they have only the language of those modernists who responded to this situation half a century before them as an example of how to proceed. The older language is silly, dramatic, and, yes, dumb, but Richman and his band have taken it up nonetheless. They have made it into a series of rock songs, with chugging guitars and siren-like organs, with misspelled words and parodies of the Velvet Underground's drug-addled self-glorifications. They race faster miles an hour on highways that modernity made possible, in an attempt to get away from the consequences of that same modernity. They are alienated, and not just in the colloquial sense of kinda-feeling-strange (although there's that too): seriously separated, and they don't know what to do about it except sing a song that sounds silly because it wants on its own to change the entire world, and it knows it can't but here it is expressing the desire anyway. The Modern Lovers say, to the listener who is willing to hear them, they say, listen, Pablo Picasso was an asshole, but he never got called an asshole, not like you, by which we mean us, but also you, and anyway Picasso is dead, long live Picasso, we are Picasso. To be Picasso, not to be like him: this is the gambit of The Modern Lovers.

—David W. Pritchard

#383: Talking Heads, "More Songs About Buildings and Food" (1978)

We were on a mountain in Switzerland when Beth told me she didn’t think she loved me anymore. I don’t just mean we were on a mountain, I mean we were practically on the top. We’d taken that stupid cog train up that passes through the Eiger and the Monch and then lets you out at some exhibit carved into the Jungfrau, an ice cave, really, with lit-up ice sculptures and fluorescent lights hanging from the low ceiling, and then we’d zipped up our parkas and stepped outside and were standing on top of a metal grate, our mittened hands clutching the railing, looking down, when Beth said it. It was the think that got me, like she wasn’t sure, a child practicing her spelling words, saying, “I think it’s an ‘n’ next, I think so.”

“Jesus,” I said, and she said, “Yeah.” I said, “Is there someone else?” and she shook her head and said, “Just me,” which I didn’t understand at the time.

The night before, in our room in the chalet, she had crawled into bed with me and pressed her cold feet against mine and asked me to warm her up. I kissed her, and she’d said, “Not that way. Do something else.” So I slid my hands under her T-shirt and rubbed them against her stomach and breasts, but she pulled away and said, “Tony, I just think I’m losing myself.”

That was something else that hadn’t made sense to me, and so I’d ignored it, rolled over and went to sleep, and pretended not to notice when she got up and went to the bathroom and stayed in there for half an hour, the thin crack of light under the door marked by her shadow. I thought of that crack of light when we stood on top of that mountain, thought that maybe if I’d gone and knocked on the door, she wouldn’t have said it, but I’ve never been one to dwell on what-ifs.

We had held hands on the train coming up the mountain, but we didn’t on the way back down. We still had three days left in the Alps, and we spent it making awkward conversation about mundane topics. We spent the entirety of the five hours it took us to hike to Trummelbach Falls debating song covers: who did it better, Talking Heads or Al Green, Johnny Cash or Depeche Mode, Beck or Bob Dylan, Jeff Buckley or Leonard Cohen. We argued while trekking past clusters of pine trees clinging for life in thin altitude, making our way through cow pastures, always sure to close the gate behind us, stopping every mile or so for water and to snap a few photographs of the view, which to me looked no different than the view the mile before. By the time we left Switzerland, I was tired of discussing music.

When we returned to the States, we stayed together until baggage claim. Beth reached for her suitcase, a big red duffle bag that I had made fun of when I first saw it but that she had said was easy to find in a crowd, and the veins in her arm popped out like she was having her blood pressure taken. She hoisted the bag over her shoulder, said, “See you around,” and then headed to the cab line. I couldn’t follow her, I didn’t have my bag yet, so I just watched as she weaved in and out of people, the red bag occasionally bumping a shoulder, and then I couldn’t even see the bag anymore. I picked up my suitcase and rode the bus back to my apartment. She hadn’t left anything at my place, which made me wonder if she’d known, before we left, that she’d be ending it. All told, it was easy, or at least as easy as a breakup can ever be. Part of me was surprised at how easy it was, given the whole mountaintop location.  I was sad for a few weeks, and then I moved on, or at least I told myself I did.

The truth is, the breakup didn’t destroy me, wasn’t the worst I’d ever had, wouldn’t even still be memorable if it hadn’t taken place on a mountain in Switzerland, which was so goddamn cliché it made me want to vomit. I looked through the holes of the grate at our feet to where the ground dropped away, and heard Beth say she didn’t think she loved me, and a part of my mind went, Jesus, I’m at the edge of the fucking world, literally, and even the thought made me want to cringe at the dramatics.

I don’t think about Beth much anymore. For a while we kept in touch, e-mails to touch base every few months, but eventually those faded. But every so often, that mountaintop comes into my mind. There are some things in life, I’ve learned, that don’t ever leave us, and Beth is one of those. There’s no reason for it—I don’t feel like I have unfinished business with Beth or that she broke my heart and I never fully recovered or that she holds some great lesson I’ve yet to learn—but I’ll hear a mention of Switzerland, or experience vertigo looking out the window of a tall building, and then there’s Beth, standing on that grate, holding her hand out over the railing, palm up, like she’s catching snowflakes or raindrops, even though the sky was clear. I guess you could say she haunts me a little, shows up as a nagging in the back of my head, like that feeling that you’ve forgotten something, only it’s just Beth, saying, “I don’t think I love you anymore,” over and over.

I try to ignore the little Beth voice in my head. When she’s there, when I can’t stop thinking about her, which happens maybe once a year, I try to shut her out. I buy a six pack, and I get drunk watching football, and I tell myself that Switzerland doesn’t matter, mountains don’t matter, and I can get caught up in the game and almost believe it. But after four or five beers, when I close my eyes, all I can see is Beth’s hand resting on the wooden bench of the train, her mittens off, her fingernails bit down to the quick, and as I watch, she rubs her index finger along the side of her thumbnail and picks at a piece of skin that’s come loose, and she tugs at it until it breaks off, leaving behind a tiny dot of blood.

—Emma Riehle Bohmann

#384: The Who, "A Quick One" (1966)

Most of all, he remembers her scent. When he is driving, he smells only soot and grease, livestock and stale coffee spiked with whiskey. The whiskey, he hopes, will help him forget her scent.

He doesn’t really want to forget her scent.

If he really wanted to forget her scent, Ivor wouldn’t spend so much time trying to remember it—at first, her delicate, floral perfume, easy and light, like he could breathe it in and feel it dancing in his chest, and then, later, that other thing, earthy and humid, like he could breathe it in and feel it dripping, sticky from his ribs. When he’s driving his train, Ivor thinks of her scent and breathes deep through his nose, fills himself with soot and grease, livestock and stale coffee spiked with whiskey, and he can’t believe he ever smelled anything as sweet as she.

*

In the days after their brief encounter, when his train stopped at stations near her town, Ivor asked after the woman. Did her man ever return? If so, did she tell him about what she’d shared with Ivor? How did the man react? Did he leave her? Did he hit her? Did he forgive her for the infidelity? Did she forgive him for leaving? Ivor imagines the man a brute, a cold, callous beast, undeserving of the young woman who had once, not so long ago—but oh, so long ago—missed him desperately and longed for his return. Ivor imagines the woman left her man for having the audacity to leave for so long, imagines her waiting by train tracks, still, after all these years, for the sight of Ivor in his engine’s cabin as the brakes grind.

*

Of course, Ivor knows the man was neither a brute, nor a cold, callous beast. Ivor knew the man from a pub in M_________ they’d both sometimes visit—Ivor, on nights off after delivering freight, the man while traveling the northern half of England selling knives or vacuum cleaners or encyclopedia sets or whatever traveling salesmen sell. Ivor didn’t know the man that well—they’d simply shared a few pints and swapped stories a handful of times. No, the man was neither a brute, nor a cold, callous beast, but that doesn’t mean he was a saint, either. Of the stories the man told Ivor, more than a few involved his occasional infidelities with stray bar maids or customers with whom he was trying to make a sale. Ivor believed the stories for a while, but soon stopped, after the two men, piss drunk after a night at the pub, hired a prostitute to share.

Upon reaching Ivor’s hotel room, after the money had changed hands, the engine driver and the prostitute began undressing and touching each other. Upon noticing that the salesman was sitting on a chair in the corner of the room, still fully clothed, Ivor asked if everything was OK. The man said he wasn’t feeling well. Ivor gestured to his own genitals and said, “Intimidated?” The man, clearly flustered, said, “No. No. Not that.” And Ivor said, “Suit yourself.” The prostitute said, “You want to watch?” And the man said, “I think I should be going,” and then he showed himself out, leaving Ivor to enjoy the prostitute on his own.

When Ivor thinks of that night, he doesn’t think of the prostitute or her scent—cigarette smoke, he thinks he remembers, mixed with something else, something like flat beer—but of the salesman who left and the woman who was undoubtedly the cause of his departure.

*

Because of the drinks, Ivor can never remember if it was that night, or another, on which the man first told him of his love back home, but he knows that the salesman, on at least one night, spoke of his girl and how she struggled with his constant absence, as he was six months into a trip that was set to last for close to a year. When Ivor asked why the salesman needed to be gone for so long without stopping at home, the man referred to travel costs and his desire to make money so the two could marry at the end of the year. But that was just the first time Ivor heard of the girl.

*

After the first time Ivor heard the man talk about his girl, when staying over in towns in the northern part of the country, he’d hear tell of a woman who had grown despondent in the absence of her man. At first, Ivor thought these were different women, all missing their men. The stories placed the women all in different cities and towns across England’s northern half: there was a woman in D______ who had cried for six months straight, her eyes always red, her cheeks slick; a woman in H______ who had grown so despondent that she stopped eating, causing the locals to bring her gifts and food in an attempt to cheer her and keep her healthy; a woman in W______ whose moans of despair had grown so loud, and lasted for so long that, not just the city’s residents but the residents of neighboring cities, grew accustomed to the reverberating thrum of her voice off the buildings and streets around them; a woman in S______ who missed the touch of her man so greatly that her neighbors believed the only way to keep her alive was to find a temporary suitor to satisfy her womanly needs and make her forget, if just for a while, about her absent lover. Ivor chalked these stories up to tall tale and fantasy—engine drivers and other traveling men often tell stories like these when they’re on the road, in part because they like the idea that some young woman might be pining for them, and in part because they like the idea of encountering a young woman hungry for the affections they might offer her.

*

Here’s how Ivor eventually came to know that the stories he’d heard were true, if somewhat hyperbolic, and that they were all about one woman: Ivor was introduced to the woman while staying the night in W_________. He was introduced to the woman, and her eyes were red, and she looked sick, looked weak and, most surprisingly, looked young. Though the stories of the woman were not specific with regards to her age, Ivor had always imagined that, if said stories were true, the women at their centers were old enough to understand the passion and desire they were feeling for their absent men. But this girl—and she was a girl—couldn’t have been a day older than seventeen, reminded Ivor of the Girl Guides he’d seen roving cities in packs, dressed in their blue uniforms, in search of good deeds to perform or whatever it was they did.

Another woman made the introduction, a neighbor and friend of the girl. First, she pointed to the girl across the room, then she informed Ivor that the girl was in need of companionship. Ivor told the neighbor that the girl was too young, that she should seek solace with her family, or perhaps her church, but the neighbor was persistent. Ivor agreed to meet the girl, and the neighbor left to retrieve her.

*

Ivor never told anyone what happened after introductions were made and the neighbor left. Patrons who noticed the pair that night all saw that the girl sat on the engine driver’s lap for a spell. What they talked about, no one knows for sure, because Ivor never told anyone that, once he realized that this girl was, in fact, the love of the salesman he’d spent time with in M_________, he told her that he was certain her man would return to her, and that the man loved her very much.

After an hour or so sitting with the girl on his lap, Ivor led the girl out of the bar and they retired to the room where he was staying.  When asked about that night, Ivor tells people that he and the girl had a nap, nothing more—nobody ever believes him—and then he remembers the way the girl smelled. Then he wonders where the girl is now, what her life has been like. He suspects, but he doesn’t know, that she forgave her lover for his absence and, if she told him about Ivor—and he wouldn’t be hurt if she didn’t, but he likes to think that she did—Ivor suspects, but doesn’t know, that he forgave her for the intimacy they shared.

When Ivor thinks of forgiveness, he is at peace because he believes he has nothing for which he needs to be forgiven.

—James Brubaker

#385: Bob Dylan, "Love and Theft" (2001)

September 11, 2001. There is a giant walking down a highway in Mississippi. He is a hitchhiker. He might be a king. He is working his way to me. The words he has written come to him as music and follow behind him on the air like an invisible cape that floats from his shoulders. He’s not sure they’re his, these songs, once they’re alight in the world, but they came from him, he does remember, the way a spider remembers spinning an egg sack.

He’s inside one of them now, a song grown big-bellied like a world. All of his creatures are there. They are full of roads, are his songs, arterial branching routes of tongues and vines and perpetual reaching after other roads and other songs, songs about someone fuckable and edible and lovable and credible. He is working his way to me. Where am I?  I am at the end, where the needle hits the label and starts to bounce. LOVE AND THEFT says the label, like those are the only two things in the world, a duality that needs no explaining.

But first the road, where his creatures run up to him like children to Santa Claus. Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee stop throwing knives into the trees long enough to pant alongside. Neither one gonna turn and run. “The Master’s voice is calling me,” says one to the other but the Master hasn’t said a word, only smiles beneath his white Stetson as their fat little legs give out and he pushes on through Mississippi past picnics and weddings, hot summer days full of hundreds of demons that are but iridescent bubbles blown across a summer’s green lawn and that blink out one by one on the warm air.

The giant is a small man with a pencil mustache like a cartoon villain, and he’s driving the flats in a Cadillac car now, eight carburetors and using them all as he roars out of Mississippi north and west, down boulevards of cypress trees from the heat into the damp. He made it to Kansas City, Twelfth Street and Vine, but I wasn’t where I said I’d meet him. When we finally hook up I see his wizened profile against the yellow streetlights and knock on his car window, saying, “Somebody’s got to climb out of the window and take a look around, somebody’s got to decide where to go next. It’s tough out here.” I float like a mermaid in oily water at an intersection with a church on one corner where he had preached peace and harmony and a police station on another.  I want to treat him kind, to be the one to paddle the car to high ground, to let the worn-out star rest, though there’s high water everywhere.

He wonders aloud, in a voice that doesn’t often admit to doubts, why he made this world. He remembers hot coffee and Mozambique, more hospitable environments, but even those were stories. He thinks how nice it would be to be the sort of person who just lives in the day, lives in his physical environment, knife and fork and car and cable, how that person would feel time like the body of a snake slithering past him, straight and unimpeachable, and would know himself like a sure thing. It was never so with him—when you’re a storyteller, you’re in the stories as much as the stories are in you, and time is like an electron cloud suspended in the air around you, past, present, and future all at once and all reachable. And that’s a pain in the ass. That’s hard. I know. Because reality and the stories intersect and you have to figure out sometimes—is this a story? Or is this real? If I act like this is real, will I look crazy? I can write you poems, make a strong man lose his mind, but can I tell the difference from the outside and the inside of a story? He thinks about these things as he travels. He travels through a world of people he made but it is the loneliest world.

Restless sleep takes him in the Palace of Gloom under 800-thread-count sheets of Egyptian linen, or in cheap motels with swimming pools outside the rooms casting blue shimmer across the smoke-stained walls and witless, careful art: barn and hay bale, sea and coastline, snow-capped mountain and Alpine cottage. He walks up to hobo camps, shares a bottle and lies down among his new friends on the hard ground. His feet are always cold, he pinches his nose for warmth; he kicks off the covers when it’s hot and sleeps on hilltops for the breeze. It doesn’t matter, his mind flies out when he sleeps and that is when his pity is most fierce. “Poor boy,” he mutters in his sleep. “Things will be alright by and by.” So gentle, but I know what he’s capable of and so I ask: is pity just hatred without the respect? You have to decide with him—it is always something you have to decide.

Maybe empathy is the better word. He empathizes and wakes with images that disappear like writing on a fogged mirror. So he writes them down. Corny vaudeville jokes, sometimes—calling room service to order up a room. Naked and heading into the woods, he’s hunting bare. Get it? Bare? He laughs the laugh of someone who has left home with plenty of money and never expects to return. His laugh extends to the horizon and everything inside it is part of him, free game in his own rage for order, at least until this day. Fuel, fodder, all of it inflammable on this day. But someone else lights the world on fire. It happens in New York and D.C. and in the skies over Pennsylvania. Not him. He just wrote the soundtrack, the last word of the sunset.

*

Stalking over yellow fields, trailer parks, and the kind of small towns with bells that still toll, he carries two songs separate, old songs on their own black and red CD. They’re old songs, some of his oldest. “I Was Young When I Left Home” and “The Times They Are a Changin’.”

“Yes,” I tell him, “both of those things are true, you know.” I visit him in different guises, I fill his tank, his coffee cup, swipe his credit card, trim his moustache. “What do you mean,” I ask, “holding those songs separate like that? Their own CD? To show you how far you’ve come? How good you were and still are? Or, I know, maybe how the more things change the more they stay the same?”

He won’t answer and, I tell you, those old songs fill me with jealousy like what the youngest child feels for the eldest. Why wasn’t I there back then, before the family legends were legends and were instead just what happened today? You could say he was warming up for insulting me way back with “Idiot Wind.” Me with my lack of brains, according to him. I don’t think so, though. Sugar Baby is Sugar Baby, my own diminished thing, the lady born on 9/11. There were ever the great women, Queen Jane, Isis, the Girl from the North Country, but he’s working his way to me and I suffer from the comparison. Like it’s my fault he’s old and can’t believe. Like it’s my fault the world is on fire. I don’t like his attitude, you want the truth. I don’t care for it, but here he comes and I guess we’ll just see.

“Sugar Baby,” he says, “Sugar Baby, get on down the road.”  

“But I am down the road,” I say, “I am the down of the road, your destination. I’m the last song, the last sound on the album. Don’t you remember your own album?”

He tells me I ain’t got no sense, but I say, “Whose story is this? You’re in my story now.”

He’s a giant in a white Stetson, his shadow falls across my face. He says, “You went years without me, might as well keep going now.” So I will, and he will, too, heading down a darkened street under falling ash to what comes next.

—Constance Squires

#386: Steely Dan, "Pretzel Logic" (1974)

Steely Dan is the most uncool band of all time. Even in a post-Yacht-Rock world where Hall & Oates are once again selling out large venues, the kids just aren’t vibing with the Dan. Maybe it’s because we all saw Say Anything, where high school dream date Diane Court’s father, played by Frasier’s dad, grooves HARD to Pretzel Logic opener “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number.” He is driving to Diane’s high school graduation, gently singing and tip-tapping his fingers on the steering wheel. What a square, man. His car (a new sedan), his music (Steely), his attire (collared shirt) are all juxtaposed with lovable loser Lloyd Dobler's $500 rust-mobile and funky funk-rock (Fishbone?). The message is clear: Teenage Lloyd, beat up cars, loud funk-rock = cool / Frasier’s dad, new sedans, and Steely Dan = uncool.

And though I love Steely Dan, I can kind of see where the movie is coming from. Because if you need music for the uncoolest of the uncool, the hopelessly unhip, the Dan is your jam. And I’m not talking about those quirky, fun, socially malleable people existing at the fringes of culture. Those people are kind of cool, ya know? I’m talking about the uncool of your worst parents. Not parents in the general sense where yeah, sometimes they can be pretty cool, Jimmy’s mom let us watch horror movies and stay up late, she is awesome. No. I am talking about your worst parents. So, imagine your parents, imagine your mother and father, imagine them existing in infinite universes and then find the most embarrassing pair of the bunch. Those two are huge Steely Dan fans.

What we are dealing with in Pretzel Logic is weaponized uncool. The record incorporates all the pomp and schmaltz that irony-fueled tastes can handle. Then the Dan adds additional sarcasm, inside jokes, aggressively inscrutable musicianship and druggy drug drugs. If the Doobie Brothers are the high, Steely Dan is the comedown. Sure, you can have a fun time and dance to Michael McDonald. You can sing that fun falsetto and don your captain’s hat. But if you’re listening to Steely Dan, you have to weigh the joyous musical smoothness of “Through with Buzz” against its actual lyrics. Which are, more or less, about an addict lying to themselves. Your yachty margarita doesn’t taste so sweet anymore, does it?

And with its easy conceit and waiting room piano, “Through with Buzz” might be one of the lighter tracks on Pretzel Logic. “With a Gun” is about murder. My own interpretation of “Parker’s Band” is it’s a song about musical theft and exploitation. The titular track, “Pretzel Logic,” has a verse loathing the American southeast. “Barrytown” is about the rift between progressive students at Bard College and the wealthy townies who occupy the city of Barrytown, NY, nearby where Bard is located. In the middle of the record, the band covers Duke Ellington's “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo” which at face value isn’t a grim song, but is made disturbed and clownish by the context of the album.

Murder, class struggles, Duke Ellington, drug addiction, sounds pretty sexy right? Well, don’t worry, because this is Steely Dan. So they’re going to veil all those subjects in metaphor and humor. Then they’re going to compose the most inoffensive, hoaky, and catchy music imaginable. The tunes, sweet as they are, will alienate the young, the cool, and relegate the Dan to niche rock.

One common critique of the Dan and their music is that they play too much inside baseball. This is, by and large, true. One can hardly get through a single sentence in a favorable Steely Dan album review before the author mentions the genius of chord changes, their studio mastery, or the expertise of their session partners. Also, the word Jazz gets thrown around a lot. Ugh, you can def tell these are the kind of people who like Jazz way, way too much. Steely Dan are obsessives. Tale upon tale and story upon story rambles on regarding their intense recording standards and near insane naval gazing. It is fair to critique them for existing in their own bubble. But if you can get inside there, if you can get find a way to approach the contrast between sound and subject, Pretzel Logic is a hugely rewarding album. It is pure, uncut, don’t-give-a-fuck nerd music. A sound to be ignored.

—Steven Casimer Kowalski

#387: Wu-Tang Clan, "Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)" (1993)

For a lifelong music learner, the pattern’s almost always the same, familiar at the very least: early on, after you’ve decided music means something more to you than daily soundtracking, after you’ve started questioning your own taste and (of course) the tastes of others, after you’ve clocked a few hours flipping through too much shitty vinyl, too many shitty used CDs, largely useless yet oddly romantic cassettes, after you’ve given in, surrendered, raised the white flag of obsessive collecting without even realizing it….early on, a trustful someone hands you a record and says, simply enough, Here. You need this. And it feels this simple because it is. A few words, a few songs, the beginning of a new avenue so cast until now in complete shadow that you’ve walked right past it again and again without even know it existed.

Throughout my ninth grade spring semester and the following summer months, this must have happened to me two or three times a week. I had made friends with music heads, had started hanging out after school at the record store across the street, spending as much time eavesdropping on what in hindsight were very record-store-y conversations—primarily debates about who or what was better: Parliament or Funkadelic, Springsteen or Leonard Cohen, Fun House or Raw Power—as I was clocking hours alphabetizing backstock and changing out cracked CD cases. (Quick aside: one day, I ejected the CD that had just stopped playing over the store’s precariously-wire-strung sound system in order to put a new one in. The second I placed the old disc data-down on the counter instead of immediately back in its case, all three half-stoned fellow employees hurled some serious obscenities my way. So. It was that kind of place. In short: a record store.)

Anyway, I was a smart enough student during the school day, but the minute I walked into this sacred hole of mysterious carpet stains and sun-bleached Cure posters, I had my education cut out for me, and I knew it. More importantly, I was hungry for it. So I listened. Whether or not someone was talking directly to me, I listened. When Marvin the timid-maybe-zonked first-pressing jazz collector came in for his weekly check up through our carefully tended jazz racks, I listened. Sun Ra. Jimmy Smith. Ornette. Out to Lunch and Electric Bath and On the Corner, the last of which would soon after change my life in that visceral, urgent, grossly unfair way life-changing records all have. When red-eyed beatsmith Rich hunted through a customer’s incoming collection for breaks, studiously lowering the needle on any number of seemingly inglorious records, making notations and great chuckles of joy when the search proved fruitful, I listened. When anyone handed me something on my way out the door at the end of the day and said, Here. You need this, you’re damn right I listened.

36 Chambers wasn’t my first hip-hop record—that would be The Low End Theory, one of three CDs I took home as payment for my very first day of record schlepping, and the one that blew the doors of the genre wide open for me, as well as, yes, about a billion other curious middle class white high-schoolers throughout time—but it was definitely my first unabashedly weird one. First off, the cover was bizarre, with its title and subtitle kind of squished into one corner and its blurry, poorly-cropped photo of masked persons looking largely like it was accidentally selected over the better quality one that must have surely existed, one where everyone made it into the photo and the cameraman’s hands weren’t shaking. When I popped the case open, popped the album in, and the music itself started up, though, the cover art quickly became the least of my worries.

No matter how many times you listen to it, the best part about 36 Chambers will always be the voices. There are nine of them—nine!—and right there on first play-through each is distinct and distinctly really fucking weird. RZA sounds like a furious, unhinged demon, even when just dropping in for the chorus. Method Man’s having a blast, rhyming words together that almost definitely wouldn’t rhyme in any other context, and clearly grinning against the mic. Inspectah Deck sing-songs in ways that sound somehow equally terrifying and rhythmically right. ODB, of course, breaks down every structural expectation, stopping everything in its tracks the minute he starts spitting. And GZA, the Genius, simply sounds like one, last on every track when he’s not flying solo so no one will have to follow. There are the rest, too, obviously—Rae and Ghost pitching high and low, U-God and Masta Killa hardly there at all, really, but leaving scorched impressions in the earth with the time they’re given—but the point is more this: this is ‘93, and we’ve got no guest spots, no cross-breeding, no other voices beyond the Clan, the inducted, the family Voltroning again and again and again. When you consider the size of this particular clan, that’s not just impressive: that’s really fucking weird.

And perfect, somehow, in a hundred intangible ways. The production seems sloppy, but sloppy-on-purpose. The cadences accidental but brilliantly so. Everything about the enterprise feels on the verge of either falling apart or blowing your mind at any given point and it’s a bona fide capital-c Classic because, miraculously, it’s that exact tension where the magic resides. And again, even more miraculously, all of this is immediately clear on first listen.

If you’re inclined toward the damaging, edifying life of a music nut, the pattern’s almost always the same: someone hands you a Here, you need this record, and it changes everything. But here’s what’s supposed to happen next: that record gets you going, introduces you to Horses or Rain Dogs or Free Jazz or whatever the hell, but you grow up and out of these, and the rest of the legwork’s up to you, and it’s the result of that legwork that will really lead you to the gems you possess for yourself due primarily to the thrill of self-discovery, the songs and bootlegs and B-sides you either dub or swap or keep guarded for the rest of your life.

For just about everyone who comes across it, though, 36 Chambers is something else entirely: each and every time you listen, the thing only gets deeper, and better, and way fucking weirder. Chalk it up to the unpredictable production, to the nine voices, to the lyrics that seem to either open up for you or lock all the way down depending on the day you’re listening. It’s not the only album like this, but it’s one of only a few. They’re a special breed, inalienable in the purest meaning of the word: no one can take their power away from you—not even you. Try as you might, you won’t find another record that sounds quite like the Wu debut—not even the first listen will sound like the second, or the eighteenth like the thirty-fourth. It lives, shifts, educates. In a sense, it’s no different from a record store: too many voices that, for the ready and insatiable, always seem like never enough.

—Brad Efford

#388: The Indestructible Beat of Soweto (1985)

No one who worked in Music thought the job was cool, but most everyone who worked in Music was cool. Our manager played bass in a local punk band. One of the clerks played bass in another local punk band. Another clerk played keyboards in a Thrill Jockey-esque band. I didn’t play anything, but I could at least talk the talk with them in between stocking the racks and ringing up customers.

I worked in the music section of the downtown Seattle Barnes & Noble in the late 1990s, the perfect time for the job. The bookstore chain (and its main rival Borders) offered city dwellers and suburbanites a replacement for the libraries that, at least in Seattle, seemed to have been ceded to the homeless. Come in, they said. We’ve got coffee, and comfy chairs, and you don’t have to buy anything. Male booksellers wore collared shirts and ties, and the two floors of the store allowed for enough space to stock plenty of books. The chain aspired to be a money-making machine dressed as a haven of intellectualism, an ersatz Viennese café culture based on sales of bestsellers.

The music section worked the same way. The national corporation had enough buying power that we could stock the shelves with our obscure favorites, but no one bought them. Instead, our jobs were buoyed by a raft made of middle-aged favorites: pop opera stars like Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman, throwback acts like the Squirrel Nut Zippers (who we actually liked, too) and the Buena Vista Social Club soundtrack, and international CDs, usually the Putamayo series, which each featured a brightly colored cartoon cover. Napster was still a few years off, and the iPod, much less the iTunes store, had yet to exist. People came in and bought music, and we stocked a ton of CDs.

Armed with a label maker, I took it upon myself to organize the racks to an obsessive degree. No longer would there be simply a “Bach-Piano” card; now there would be a “Bach-Goldberg Variations” and “Bach-Partitas” and “Bach-Concerti,” and within those, any artists with three or more discs in stock would get their own cards, too, so “Bach-Partitas-Gould” and “Bach-Concerti-Brendel.” It passed the time, and working full time, I had a lot of time.

I worked through Classical Composer, then Classical Artist, then Classical Vocalist. I moved on to Jazz and broke out dozens of artists. Then I reached International.

At the very beginning of the section, a few hundred CDs were jammed into a section with a single card at the end: “Africa.” Armed with the label maker and a few books I’d snagged from the bookstore side, I set to work. And I suppose this might be the point of this narrative where I do the standard “white kid is amazed by the scope of African music, thereby recognizing his own limited worldview” and where the discovery of a compilation called The Indestructible Beat of Soweto proves to be the catalyst for a lifetime of discovery. But that didn’t happen. Either the store didn’t stock it or I passed right over it in my mania for organization. I wouldn’t hear that particular album for years.

But here’s the thing: I could have found it then. I could have picked it up, wondered at its cover, looked at the back, used my 20% employee discount, and listened to it that night at home. My world would have expanded a little bit more a little bit sooner. Or I could have found albums by King Sunny Ade or Miriam Makeba or Abdullah Ibrahim and listened to those. Or I might have found discs in “Argentina” or “Greece” or “Middle East” that could have changed me.

A few years ago, Barnes & Noble opened a store in the town where I teach, in a space vacated when Borders went under. They followed their new store design, which has plenty of space for books and DVDs, games and toys, and a café, but there’s no music section any longer. The stores that still have music sections have shoved everything into the space that Classical Composer used to occupy.

Sure, the indie record shops are still there, but there’s something about the vanishing of the corporate music sections—at Barnes & Noble, at Best Buy, at a dozen other giants—that I miss, because what I love about places that sell music, even the uncool ones, is that somewhere in those stacks and racks might be the record that will change my life. Electronically, I go directly to what I want, but physically, I browse. Somewhere in that pile is the sound I want to hear, indestructible, waiting for the needle to land in the groove, waiting for the heads to read the magnetic tape, waiting for the laser to strike the first ones and zeroes, waiting for me to hear it and say whoa, what’s this? or this seems interesting or simply yes.

—Colin Rafferty

#389: Don Henley, "The End of the Innocence" (1989)

I’ve come to my parents’ house to write about Don Henley.

It’s not the house that I grew up in, even though the address is the same. They’ve recently purchased a new sofa and redone the carpet in the TV room, which was once a porch, then my parents’ room, then my room, then my brother’s room. The pictures on the wall are different, the little ceramic things that decorate various shelves have rotated through the years. Their record collection, though never very large, is now whittled down to a few college recordings that live next to the photo albums. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, New Riders of the Purple Sage, the First Edition, Simon & Garfunkel, Harvest—all the records that once made me realize my parents were young, before me—all gone. It’s their house now, though I’m still trying to find what I once knew here, something to cling to.

After a purge a few years ago, none of my things are here any longer either. I came to pick up a tub of mementoes, and proceeded to shove the tub whole hog into a closet in our new house, 40 minutes down the road, to be pored over in whatever free time I could muster. In it, I know, are multiple giant rolled-up posters from my walls, notebooks from various classes I took with scribbled doodles in the margins, band names gracing various surfaces. There are postcards from a trip to Europe, grandparents’ birthday cards from when I turned 10 (a nice round number), and a duck purse given to me in college by a famous DJ. The kinds of things that live in tubs in closets.

How do we decide what belongs to us as adults and what must forever reside in the closet tubs that are our youth? I’m constantly trying to contextualize music with memory. There’s no other way around it. I hear songs today that used to turn up at school dances of yore, when we curled and sprayed our bangs and wore puff-paint shirts and Guess? Jeans and lined the walls of a community center room, the lights dimmed, the DJ playing the hits, waiting to get up the nerve to ask Todd to dance even though you know he’ll probably say no.

I did get to dance with Todd once. It was an awkward song for dancing—something a little bit fast, something like “The End of the Innocence.” It probably was “The End of the Innocence.” Difficult to slow dance to, but we had no choice: Todd said yes. Out of obligation and politeness, but yes. I was short, but he was short too, so I was able to reach my hands up just enough to link around his neck. I remember that his hands barely touched my waist as if he was merely holding his hands out to show the size of a fish he’d caught, and I happened to be there in between them. Instead of moving side to side as most people did at middle school dances, Todd’s legs simply bent at the knee—left, then right, then left—without his feet ever leaving the ground.

It was magical.

What did that song mean to someone who was an adult back then? Was she out late, driving her truck home from her boyfriend’s house, window cracked to let out the smoke from a cigarette, while I was awkwardly slow-dancing in a community center with Todd? Was she ecstatic, or sad? What did those words mean to her?

I’ve come back to Ohio as an adult. I’ve tried to contextualize everything around me differently. It’s where I grew up, where my childhood memories took place, but I have to form new relationships with everything as an adult, with roads and restaurants and landmarks. Trying to find that space between my memory of something and my current experience of it.

I live here and watch my parents get older, watch them purge their things, the things that were my youth. I meet and befriend women who are younger than my mother, but older than me, and realize they could be that woman in the truck that I imagined. They were the ones those Don Henley songs were written for; they have a love of Don Henley from being there, not from remembering him in a nostalgic haze. But with this nostalgia comes a different love, the love of a romantic distance, of an imagined woman driving a truck late at night listening to these songs.

What does Don Henley mean to me? Back then he was an older guy in a suit who made songs that were just too fast to slow-dance normally to. I’d never heard of the Eagles; they weren’t a part of my parents’ record collection. To me he existed in the late 80s just as he was, hair long, as if held in aspic. It’s the same way we first heard David Bowie and Mick Jagger: two older dudes dancing in the streets in suits. They were all wearing suits and singing bluesy pounding power ballads over synths. We had no other context in which to understand them. We weren’t there for Ziggy Stardust. We weren’t there for “Satisfaction.” (To us, that was the Justine Bateman/Julia Roberts movie.) We weren’t even there for Hotel California.

Of course, after the suits came off in the 90s and we stumbled our way through adolescence and into high school, we came to Scary Monsters and Sticky Fingers, and then, probably more recently, like reaching full adulthood, we finally arrived at the Eagles. We’re all listening to it, eating up old concert footage on YouTube, dipping our toes in a lake of 70s nostalgia as if it can bring us back to a time when our parents were young, even as we watch them age. Listening to the Eagles is like looking at that photograph of your mom in an old photo album with a beer bottle in her hand, hair tied back in a scarf, tan, glowing, before you. Or your dad without a gray hair, loose-limbed, goofing off on a beach, before you. My generation and the generations that followed now call this music “Dad Rock,” it’s become associated so extricably with our parents, or with being a parent. But we have no memories of being there ourselves. Everything we know about Don Henley and David Bowie and Mick Jagger is in the context of hindsight. We know their full stories: their arcs. We came to them when they were already established, acclaimed. But the late 80s stuff: that was always part of us. Like The End of the Innocence.

I love this album now. I love that it’s nostalgic for me, even though I only experienced it liminally. I love how the lyrics of the title track describe something intangible in the past…

Remember when days were long
And rolled beneath a deep blue sky
Didn’t have a care in the world
With mommy and daddy standin’ by

…how the soprano saxophone sounds like another time. How Henley sounds weary, his voice lived in. He sings the blues over broad new-agey synth chords. None of it made any sense to me back then—how on earth is a thirteen-year-old supposed to understand “all these trumped up towers, they’re just golden showers” or relate to “there are people in your life who’ve come and gone, they let you down and hurt your pride”?—but now it’s everything. At its heart, The End of the Innocence is an album about America’s false love affair with capitalism, which I understand much better now, but to me it’s also become an album about growing older. Because of the context in which I knew it then, because so much of the past is embedded in it, and yet because its lyrics require me to be older to understand them. It exists in a world between then and now, and is everything that I am: a combination of then and now and all the times in between. (And so goes a certain bridge: Time, time, tickin’, tickin’, tickin’ away…)

I can own it now, understand it. Life makes everything clearer the more we live it. We may offer up our best defenses, but we’re adults now. We’re getting older. Our parents are getting older. We own the past romantically, remotely, but it’s still a part of us, even when relegated to closet tubs. And, at the heart of the matter, that’s a good thing.

—Zan McQuade

#390: The White Stripes, "Elephant" (2003)

What I remember now is not Jack White’s voice but my steps changing tempo song to song to match Meg White’s steady percussion, walking to and from school every day, listening to Elephant on a bright yellow Discman. I listened incessantly until all the sound that once crashed me like a cymbal dissolved into background noise, until I made it familiar. The album was, in turns, tender and violent, like a kid who scribbled crayon on a white wall. It contained its opposites. It made me feel braver than I actually was.

I particularly loved “I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself”—though it’s meant to be a breakup song, it was for me a song about identity, a concept I didn’t understand how to navigate. To me the lyrics reinforced that it was okay not to know, and that it was permissible to be restless and uncomfortable with not knowing. It’s a Burt Bacharach cover, and it doesn’t totally surprise me to learn now that it was Meg’s idea to include it.

We replay music we love over and over, and once we’ve moved past the possibility of possession, the repetition has turned it into something different—a little boring, a little tired, but sweet—a shadow of ourselves.

*

In high school I was cripplingly shy around people who didn’t know me well. I couldn’t look new acquaintances in the eye. Whenever I gave presentations, my notes shook in my hands, which in turn caused my knees to tremble, which in turn prompted me to speak so fast no one could understand me.

All the words are gonna bleed from me and I will sing no more.

Meg White is perhaps as famous for her shyness and her anxiety—her anti-public profile—as she is for her drumming.

Even writing this feels like an intrusion.

*

In middle school I’d watched what happened when people made themselves public, which is to say, vulnerable. Someone printed out a series of AIM conversations with a girl who divulged a lot of personal information. The conversations were quickly circulated throughout the school, the girl’s social life ruined. Early versions of blogs sprang up, devoted to trashing different students—essentially online smear campaigns. It wasn’t lost on me that girls were mainly the ones in the line of fire.

But my cautiousness also kept me too reserved, too unwilling to share anything about myself. Once when I mentioned one of my favorite albums was Elephant, one of my best friends stared at me and said, “You know that album?” as if it was beyond her recognition that I even had taste in current music. I had no idea how to articulate myself to myself, let alone to other people.

I don’t what do with myself, just don’t know what to do with myself.

*

Around the time Elephant came out, some friends and I made LiveJournals for fake personas so we could follow the journals of other people at our high school but avoid the vulnerability that came from writing our own. We created entire narratives—fake crushes, fake friends, fake parents. Fake (but very palatable) drama. We masqueraded as these fabricated friends to comment on each other’s posts to more thoroughly build this pretend social circle.

Eventually, the entries turned into a LiveJournal parody, and then, an Internet-diary soap opera. Damien, one of many love interests, was murdered by Jamie’s grandmother’s aunt’s daughter’s cousin’s grandchild/mailman. Jaime writes that Jenna is pregnant, though Jenna refutes this via comment on the accusatory post. The principal is sleeping with someone’s mom.

It did not occur to me then that I could modulate my own identity—and therefore, how others saw me—through writing my own blog, perhaps because I thought “being seen” would allow misinterpretation, which conversely led, in my mind, to a loss of authority over myself. The lines between the interior world of the self and the exterior world of anonymous perception were too confusing, and I didn’t want those spheres to cross-pollinate. So I kept those worlds too definitive—which is to say, limited.

*

YouTube video, “Meg White – I’m Quiet,” uploaded Feb. 24, 2013

Jack White: “Meg, can you finally tell the whole world, once and for all, that people who think I never let you talk during interviews, can you tell them? . . .”

Meg responds, “I’m quiet.” She’s almost inaudible, and Jack laughs, saying, “She can’t even answer this question!” (Though she did.) Her speech is marked with subtitles. I find this somewhat insulting though it’s true I wouldn’t be able to understand her otherwise.

“So for the record, you mean to say that Jack doesn’t always hog the interviews . . . or talk over you?” Jack refers to himself in third person as if Meg is a child watching Sesame Street, and as Meg attempts to respond, “I will say that for the record, I will say that for the record,” Jack, incredibly, raises his voice over her and continues, “What would you say about this—”  here he touches her on the shoulder in a gesture of I’m talking, stop responding to my question—“people who say Jack won’t ever let Meg talk, what would you say to that?”

Silence.

“I would say that you have nothing to do with it,” she laughs.

*

A pause—a stretch of silence—is another kind of beat, of percussion. When used well it can communicate as much as a noise can. (Though of course, the intent of that silence can be dangerous—more open to interpretation than words are.)

*

Because as a kid I thought I wanted to be a musician, I was in a couple pretend bands growing up. By “pretend,” I mean that these bands had names and I recruited my friends for different roles and we wrote weird songs for fun, but didn’t take it seriously since none of us actually owned the required instruments. In my fourth-grade band, the Sisters, I played drums using chopsticks on an exercise ball. I long now for this sort of play, this sort of performative indulgence in whims, which is no longer as acceptable, or perhaps just no longer enjoyable in the same way.

I always wanted to play the drums—drummers were the loudest members of the band but the least visible. The spine of the band, the glue, the one tucked in back that got the least attention.

The least attention, unless you’re a really fantastic drummer.

*

John Bonham always appeared to be losing control during his drum solos: in videos of old Led Zeppelin concerts, his jaw seizes open and shut, his head tosses like a flower on a stalk in a storm, his arms flurry over the set. But of course, what he’s really doing is keeping the beat precise, controlling the rhythm.

*

Many people have criticized Meg’s drumming as “primal,” minimalistic. In response, she’s said: "That is my strength. A lot of drummers would feel weird about being that simplistic."

*

If Meg White is on one end of the spectrum of public profiles kept by famous musicians, Taylor Swift is on the other.

In a recent piece on Swift’s 1989 World Tour for the New Yorker, Curtis Sittenfeld wrote, “If there was a single millisecond of spontaneity in Taylor Swift’s live performance, I missed it.”

I’m fascinated by female performance, because I feel on some level we’re always performing. And what’s wrong with an absence of spontaneity? I guess I’m uncertain if true spontaneity exists in performance, when often the way we enact it becomes its own kind of choreography.

As a former figure skater, I think about this a lot. Through rehearsal— repetition—complicated steps turn to familiar ones. The challenge is keeping something familiar imbibed with energy. Michelle Kwan did this so well, especially in her highly-choreographed footwork—by the time she performed these sequences in competitions, they were pure rote movement, but the joy she experiences while skating them is so genuine that it almost makes her performance seem improvised. Her intimacy with her choreography allowed her to let some part of herself go.

In high school, spontaneity was valued above all else. Pulling over in a parking lot, throwing the car doors open, and having a dance party. Swimming in a public fountain at three in the morning. Spontaneity has a certain Kerouac-ian charm. If used well, it makes one irresistible. But I’m suspicious of spontaneity. When I think back at the times I have done something spontaneous, it arose out of a desperate boredom, an urge to be spontaneous—spontaneity is so often a curated impulsivity.

Like stars that are only really bright when you look at them askance, an action ceases to be entirely spontaneous once it is named so. Otherwise, it’s just a beautiful moment.

One of the most powerful things a performer can do is give the illusion of spontaneity when they’re actually in control.

*

“When [Swift] floated above the audience in her high, high heels on that lighted dock, facing a stadium of sixty-eight thousand people,” Sittenfeld writes, “how could she feel anything except either a messiah complex or profound loneliness?”

Many things perplex me about Taylor Swift, but this passage seems misdirected at best. Those are really the only two emotions one could imagine her feeling? What about pride at the image she’s built for herself? Can a woman be powerful and proud without being accused of the highest form of narcissism?

And can she be reserved without being equally shamed?

*

YouTube video, “Jack White urges Meg to speak louder,” uploaded January 1, 2012

Backstage after a show, Jack sits on a couch wrapping cords back up. Meg says softly from the other room, “Sorry, I wasn’t really on top of my game tonight.”

“‘Sorry,’ WHAT?” Jack asks. She repeats herself, softer this time, as she walks into the room. Jack yells, “Nobody can hear a goddamn thing you say!” He’s smiling, like maybe he’s sort of teasing her, but the whole exchange is cringe-worthy. The clip is from a documentary, and he’s clearly putting on a little act for the cameras.

“She doesn’t say it loud enough, then you ask her to repeat it, then she won’t repeat it,” he says to whoever is filming, throwing his hands up.

“So . . . I can tell there are two cameras here,” Meg says, and it’s unclear whether she means she doesn’t have to repeat herself because the cameras will have picked it up, or if she doesn’t want to repeat herself because she feels vulnerable with cameras around.

“When there’s cameras on you and someone asks you to repeat it, you even MORE SO should repeat it,” says Jack.

There’s no home for you here, girl, go away. There’s no home for you here.

*

Like Meg, I’m usually not a loud talker, largely because I don’t want to be overheard by someone for whom the conversation isn’t meant—I feel like it trivializes it.

It’s true there is a joy in learning how to be loud, how to share yourself with others, to accept misinterpretation—of course, all of this makes you stronger because you learn how you can see yourself despite how other people see you. This is what I’d tell my shadow, that fifteen-year-old girl walking to school, wearing out the White Stripes on her yellow Discman. But of course there’s a joy, too, less acknowledged, in keeping yourself for yourself, in removing intention or obligation to perform your self for other people.

I’m glad that I listened to Elephant so much. I’m glad my body so thoroughly absorbed Meg’s drumbeats. For such a quiet person she was so loud, so fierce and steady. Steady, which can also mean: confident. Reliable. There is power in that. This is why I loved figure skating, too: it allowed my body to be loud. It was another way of talking.

Just now I curled my hand under my jaw, and my pulse announced itself against my knuckles. Oh, I thought, no wonder I love the drums.

*

But there’s this image that endures. The cover of Elephant features Meg wearing a white dress, facing away from Jack, who looks in the other direction up and off to the distance, like some Meriwether Lewis figure dreaming of westward expansion and the power that comes with it. Meg has her hand to brow, as if she’s crying. A length of rope tied to her ankle.

—Lena Moses-Schmitt

#391: Jackson Browne, "The Pretender" (1976)

    It was hard to abandon
    My History of What Might Have Been
    (I was well into the ninth volume)
    But when I looked out the window one morning
    To see the hands had fallen
    From the clock tower
    And lay still as Zeno’s arrows
    In a bed of heliotrope
    I knew I had no choice but to leave unfinished
    My lifelong study of regret
    And begin work instead on this
    Short history of the present.

—Prologue to A Short History of the Present by Erik Reece, Larkspur Press, 2009
 

On one of the last properly brutal summer days in Kentucky a few weeks ago, I was working the beer tent at a street fair in my neighborhood, sweating, smiling, getting sunburned, talking with old friends and drinking for free all day. I went to grab a couple of big bags of ice from the cooler and ran into a young gal I’d worked with before. We helped each other slam bags on the concrete to break up the ice and chatted perfunctorily about how there was a good crowd at the flea market, how it was nice to see everybody out, but damn, this heat. After a while, and apropos of nothing, she looked at me—like, looked me up and down, noting, I’m sure, the stiff white whiskers that streak through my beard these days and the low-profile pleasure-craft ball cap I’ve inexplicably started wearing— and said, “Are you a dad? You look like somebody’s dad.” I wasn’t surprised by this because it’s not the first time I’ve heard it. It happens all the time, actually, because somebody’s always telling me how much I look like my dad. And I do; I look exactly like my father, who’s a good man and a comrade. He’s intelligent, generous, and even-keeled in ways that I aspire to be. I’m always flattered by the comparison.

I told the girl that no, I wasn’t a dad, but I sort of knew what she meant, and that it was sweet of her to say so. I said, “It’s sweet of you to say so,” then I humped the bags of ice over my shoulders and walked back to the beer tent feeling sort of pleased but tender, and a little confused.

A buddy of mine, a guy I played in hardcore bands with in the 90s, always referred to artists like Jackson Browne, the Eagles, America, Linda Ronstadt—any Levi’s-boot-cut-desperado-jams—as “Dad Rock.” While it certainly collated and glossed over important particulars about craft and approach, I recognized some truth resonating in the quick pejorative the same way that one can understand intuitively, almost by touch, that “Yacht Rock” means acts like Christopher Cross and Michael McDonald, and that “Lawyer Rock” gestures up the turnpike toward Billy Joel and Steely Dan. While the jagged, shorthand judgements of youth against age are never entirely inaccurate, they necessarily suffer from an as-yet incomplete survey of the territories, the world falling off the edge of a map.

My buddy’s assessment of Dad Rock had less to do with being a father, than the vague presentiments—inherited by every generation—that, beyond the next ridge, in the realms of adulthood, some nebulous, debilitating compromise looms like a storm front over an arid desert of mediocrity. He has a ten-year-old son now, and to my knowledge has not come around to Jackson Browne, still preferring Fela Kuti, the Fat Boys, Devo, et. al. I’m thirty-eight with no kids, I don’t feel particularly grown up, and I don’t sense that I’m deflating into some senseless obscurity. I have to confess that the fears of adulthood we discussed as young men, fears of complacency and unfulfilled designs, about the prospect of a slow attrition of the will, are still very present; it’s bleak stuff, and it scares the shit out of me actually.

It’s these sort of predictable, broad-spectrum anxieties that were Jackson Browne’s lyrical coin in trade through the entire decade of the 1970s. Seriously, you can drop the needle into pretty much any groove on any of his records at the time and count on hearing one variety of sentimental, aphoristic presentiment or another, coddled inside his signature thoughtful melodies and breezy cadences which are propped up against existential dilemmas, most frequently, “How the hell did I get here, and what am I supposed to do now?” Don’t turn it into a drinking game; it would be lethal.

What’s aggravated me so much this week as I’ve listened to The Pretender again for the first time in a while, is that while it stimulates my youthful distrust of ambivalence, I’m also powerless against its treacly, sentimental pap—thick and sweet as condensed milk, bearing the faintest whiff of a stink—that I understand fully. It bugs me that I understand this record so clearly.

There’s always some low-octane uncertainty in the lyrics of Browne’s pre-1980s records.  It’s another entry in the soundtrack of nostalgic regret that, as a young man, I took as received wisdom, drank up like cough syrup and smeared on my chest like Vicks VapoRub. There’s always some pensive reflection on not knowing what the future holds, or discomfort with past decisions. There’s never a shortage of presentiment from the Slim-Fit Introspector General, and his sentences hinge on negations like can’t, hardly, haven’t, won’t, never; they issue forth from a language of scarcity and are spread over root-deep bass lines and a constant stream of bottleneck slide guitar. Jackson Browne’s always sitting down by the highway somewhere, running down the road, or staring off into “a long distance loneliness blowing out over the desert floor.”

    No matter where I am I can’t help thinking I’m just a day away from where I want to be.

Browne’s narrators are uncertain. They’re starting to wonder if there’s any such thing as trajectory. They gaze deep within themselves, shrug, and try to play it cool when they discover large, airy, empty caverns there. They’ve drunk the pool water at the Hotel California and have learned to disguise their mediocrity as ambivalence, pretending until they forget they’re pretending, like undercover agents who’ve gone native: boring-native, given-up-native.

    I'm gonna be a happy idiot and struggle for the legal tender
    Where the ads take aim and lay their claim
    To the heart and the soul of the spender
    And believe in whatever may lie in those things that money can buy
    Though true love could have been a contender
    Are you there? Say a prayer for the Pretender
    Who started out so young and strong only to surrender

Assessing the fakers who are faking it all the way to the grave, into the arms of Thanatos itself, it sometimes feels like Browne’s observant narrators may yet be exempted:

    Everybody’s going somewhere, riding just as fast as they can ride.
    I guess they got a lot to do before they can rest assured
    That their lives are justified, pray to god for me babe, that he can let me slide.

Look, The Pretender is not a very good record. To borrow an interpretive mode from John Sullivan, “it fails to be excellent.” It is an interesting record, though, because it demonstrates, almost as an object lesson, the paradoxes of incautious, youthful genius speculating  on what could follow. The roots of The Pretender’s in-excellence are addressed directly in the record itself: it’s a mediocre record about avoiding mediocrity, and it tries, at times diligently, to distill an antidote from its own poison. Sometimes it’s like we’re watching Browne or his narrator claw at the walls.

    Though the years give way to uncertainty
    And the fear of living for nothing strangles the will
    There’s still a part of me, though it’s sometimes hard to see,
    Alive in eternity that nothing can kill

All of the fears addressed in Browne’s 70s catalogue—loss, failure, death, etc.—are inextricable from the human psychic make-up, they’re standard issue, totally fertile if well-trod ground for poetry and song. My real dilemma, my new dilemma, is not any fault of Jackson Browne’s in particular. I think of him, at the tender age of twenty-eight, juggling with the same fears that I and my buddy fretted over during cigarette breaks at band practice. My questions about Jackson Browne speak to a larger, newfound suspicion of the entire misty-eyed nostalgic trajectory of Sentimentalism and Romanticism. One that telescoped, directly and necessarily, from the 18th century through and beyond the earnest, milquetoast, singer-songwriters of the 70s who were in so many ways my schoolmasters. I’m a little ashamed to admit that this is the first time I’ve ever really questioned or scrutinized capital-S Sentimentality. It’s about damn time, I guess, and I sort of object to it; I think I’ve had enough, I think I’ve absorbed the lesson fully. I’ve recited my catechisms faithfully, and now I have a toothache.

I spent some time the last few years considering the economies of nostalgia in pop music. I put my thinker on the best I could and became convinced that the pervasive presence of nostalgia in our culture was, at the very least, some type of popular engagement with the past, some expression of historical imagination, and that there was an almost medicinal effect of the pathos and longing, that it moored the present to the past. It’s a claustrophobic chronology though. I’m unconvinced of its usefulness now, and that feels like a good thing to me, like progress finally, like maybe I’ll hear some new songs, songs that seek to address this present moment. This one, right now.

—Joe Manning

#392: The Beatles, "Let It Be" (1970)

I stopped having fun the day I learned to count, when moments became finite and routine thrust me forward. Two more bites. Bedtime in five. I’ll tell you when you’re older. But when the needle landed on my father’s turntable, melodies sat suspended in the air. No fast forward, no pause, no screen to scold how little we had left.

Music is an attempt to manipulate time, stretching and crumpling each second. The right song can take you back to that state of mind, before anticipation spoiled everything. The right song can free you from increments.

I was never introduced to the Beatles. From birth I was saturated, predisposed to a decades-old mania. Born in the 1950s, my mother and father came of age as the band did—the shift from wanting to hold your hand to just… wanting you. I grew up in a house with Beatles posters on the wall, coffee table books, Yellow Submarine clothes hangers, and of course, the records, a shelf of original pressings I was not allowed to touch. Beneath blue suburban skies, the Beatles joined us for Christmas mornings, tooth fairy visits and after-school snacks. I heard the music, but I never heard the story.

My childhood impressions skew quite a linear narrative—by and large the most significant evolution in the history of song. My eight-year-old self could hear the difference between “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” and “Love Me Do,” but she couldn’t tell you which one came first and why that mattered. The Beatles were just the Beatles, wide-ranging, but a constant nonetheless.

Like someone who grew up in the church finally reading the Bible cover-to-cover, I’ve listened to all twelve studio albums in chronological order, tracing the progression, trying to pinpoint exactly when the THC kicked in (1965, Rubber Soul: those inhales during the chorus of “Girl”). The story of John, Paul. George and Ringo has been told and retold, cataloged by the song, by the day, by the haircut. A basic plot has fastened, beginning at a church garden party in Liverpool, England in 1957. But the ending is not as clear. Scholars and fans disagree on which album should be considered the band’s final; Abbey Road was the last one to be recorded, Let it Be was the last one released. Does the narrative lock when a song is sung, or when it is heard?

My father, an accomplished air pianist, always points out a sore chord in the final verse of Let it Be’s title track (at 2:59, on the word mother). What he calls a “mistake,” I call a dissonant variation in harmony. In 2003, Paul McCartney released Let it Be…Naked, a cut of the record stripped of Phil Spector’s overwrought production, supposedly the album Paul intended to make in 1970. The Naked tracks mean to revise the last chapter, guide us back to the place we once belonged….and leave us there. In the stripped version of the song “Let it Be”, the rogue chord is gone—the progression in the final verse matches the two that that came before it. My father owns Let it Be…Naked on CD, but he hardly plays it, favoring the original, slightly scratched LP. For him, the story had already been told.

The film Let it Be, though currently out of print, is available on a Japanese streaming website near you. Along with raw footage of tense recording sessions and implied bickering, the documentary captures the Beatles’ last live performance, an iconic surprise concert on the rooftop of Apple Records. The camerawork misleads us as it flashes back and forth between close-ups of the band and a flabbergasted crowd forming in the London streets, suggesting an intimate exchange. But the impromptu stage sat atop five stories, their view obstructed by the surrounding crop of skyscrapers. The band couldn’t see their audience, and their audience couldn’t see them. In their final performance, the Beatles could superimpose whatever reaction they wanted. At least in that moment.

There’s a story I’ve been telling myself for years, about a ten-year-old girl who sang “Let it Be” in the fifth grade talent show, to an audience of schoolyard bullies and mean girls. I write myself as a victim, vindicated to the dismay of those kids who teased her for liking “parents’ music.” (Basically the plot of every episode of Glee.) I wore a much-too-big evergreen gown, its straps hovering like handles over my freckled shoulders. Squinting in harsh lighting, I craned my neck up to the microphone. I sang:

“When I find myself in times of trouble…”

But it isn’t really a story, is it? It’s a moment, a moment I’ve jammed into a cheesy formula. The narrative crumbled once I sat down and realized what really happened: sure, I sang a Beatles song in my elementary school’s talent show. But the audience wasn’t entranced; it was a freakin’ elementary school talent show. They were monitoring the paper programs in their laps, counting down the acts until it was time to go home. I vaguely remember applause, though I’m sure it was out of politeness and not awe. The action only rises and falls in retrospect. I still got teased afterward. Mother Mary never came.

But even without a lightning strike of redemption, I still feel pride and triumph when I hear the opening chords of “Let it Be” descend. Perhaps I’ve framed this moment with delusion, but I take comfort not in what came immediately before or after it. Sixteen years ago, for three minutes, I sang loudly to the white void in front of me, superimposing whatever reaction I wanted. I forgot about endings.

—Susannah Clark
Recorded by Dillon M. Hawkins

#393: M.I.A., "Kala" (2007)

“A sense of belonging.” A phrase used so often, yet honestly, I don’t even know what it means, or if it even means something good. When did “belonging” become synonymous with the idea of comfort?

For some, knowing what really belongs to you, or what you belong to, is something that only becomes clear once someone forcibly takes it away. What really awakens the anger and passion can be not just someone taking it away, but someone taking what’s yours, then making it “theirs.” The struggle that then ensues, to take back what was once yours, without the feeling of a need to make friends along the way—now that’s a feeling.

It was early on in my childhood that I came around to understanding what I belonged to. A child of immigrants, born and raised in a small town in South Carolina in the early 90s, there was no lack of opportunity to be reminded of my “other-ness”. My fierce mother made sure that though our peers didn’t see us as one of them, as Americans, we would learn and know exactly what it meant to be Nepali.

Perhaps it was a false sense of belonging that Maya Arulpragasam felt, successful internationally due to the amazing response to her first album, Arular, and settled and comfortable at her second home in Brooklyn. So one can imagine the rush of anger and confusion that flooded her mind when she couldn’t even pass through a security clearance at the U.S. embassy to obtain re-entry access to return to her adopted home.

For any kid educated in American public schools, the concept of colonization is taught under very rosy pretenses. It’s what the British did to us Americans, they’d say. And proudly, they’d follow: we knew better. We declared our independence.

But colonization still happens, Those who were colonized are doing the colonizing. It’s seeped through land, and now materializes in fashion, music, language, food, design—you name it.

Something as small as tika, a cultural adornment worn by men and women alike in the Hindu community, to signify a “third eye” representing spiritual sight, has been neatly packaged by Western capitalism. It’s flashy, it’s oh-so-exotic. Give it six months and the entire capitalist food chain will soon present its finished product to your nearest Urban Outfitters: a pack of colorful and glittery, stick-on tika for only $9.99. Kind of ironic to think that it was probably processed in some discrete factory, shy of any labor codes, tucked away in a street corner in Mumbai.

Next thing you know, it’s 1996 and Gwen Stefani is wearing one on stage, and I’m confused.

So what is Kala to me? It’s what I think Kala was to M.I.A.: an angry and emotional response to the colonization of sound, of the culture of the global south. It’s a big fuck-you to the first world authorities that tried to colonize her and limit her movement. But, most importantly, it is an act of reclaiming what belongs to her, and what gives a sense of belonging to me.

Big on the underground / What's the point of knocking me down? / Everybody knows / I'm already good on the ground.

The quick tabla beats in “Bird Flu” and the sampling of an old Bollywood film in the album’s “Jimmy,” paired with a flash of soca, creates a spiraling record that showcases sounds proudly put together by contributing DJS and instrumentalists, and M.I.A. herself, who all tapped into their version of belonging to create belonging for listeners like me. It’s comfort in all the right ways.

“Kala” means “art” in Sanskrit, but then again language is a curious thing. Translating can be tricky: how can you derive the purest meaning of what a word means in another language that perhaps cannot even grasp the idea for which it stands? The closest interpretation I can come up with is a “melodious expansion of the eternal potencies of the fine arts.”

Kala itself is more than just a piece of art—it is a symbol of the eternal nature of the global south’s music and culture, and M.I.A.’s appropriately abrupt, angry, and enlightening call to the world to wake up and reclaim what was once ours.

I wonder if all those kids yelling the lyrics to “Paper Planes” in the club on a Friday night know that.

—Prarthana Gurung

#394: Randy Newman, "Good Old Boys" (1974)

Growing up in Virginia, you end up spending an inordinate amount of time walking through battlefields. If your father possesses even one iota of interest in the war between the states, or if you see your grandfather even semi-frequently, or if you attend public school, you will, not just periodically but frequently, take a stroll through some battlefields. Again and again and again. Sometimes the same battlefields, reading the same numbers and names on the same bronze placards and even though they will feel the same always, they will always be slightly different. Because you will be slightly different. Every time. If you’re a savvy enough southerner, you can start charting your maturity based on battlefields.

I grew up and later went to college in Virginia, didn’t make it out of the state until after graduation, and for my last two years of higher ed, lived in a big white house three blocks from a battlefield. It meant nothing, and when I took the time to walk through the thing, it meant everything. About who I was, about what I thought I stood for, about what I thought could and couldn’t creep me out. One Sunday my senior year, mid-nap, cannonfire shook my house. The windows clattered like in a hurricane, the walls vibrated, the sound felt catastrophic. Between the second and third blast, I finally found online (by Googling my city’s name then “cannon” and the day’s date, of course) that cannons were going off just down the street in celebration of the battlefield’s birthday. Of course. Two more percussive explosions, then respite. It was like living near a battlefield. Because I was. And the land couldn’t not keep reminding me.

Nostalgia’s a mighty funny thing, the way it recolors and warps. Growing up in Virginia, you end up walking through a lot of battlefields—and for what? To remember. To remember what? The fallen. Who fell for what? And on and on. It feels icky to question it, but that’s all part of the game, isn’t it. To “live” history is to do the heavy lifting of understanding its undulations and patterns, of finding themes throughout the way you would of Faulkner. So what are we learning walking through battlefields? What undulations are we working to understand? For me: the limits of my patience, and not much more.

When Randy Newman began work on his important, unimpeachable Good Old Boys—my favorite album most days these days--he was thirty years old. Thirty years old with nostalgia like a Civil War vet, none of whom would have been kicking even then, in ‘73, but you get what I mean. By and large, the record’s a topical melange, but its A-side is purely conceptual: one southern man’s voice in all its recognizably backwards, whip-smart, purely glorified glory. Prideful and proud—not the same word exactly, but close—and heavy with great stories for the telling. From “Rednecks” to “Guilty,” again and again and again we hear the voice of the fictional Johnny Cutler, a character invented for the record but abandoned by name in the early goings. Instead, the thing came out just sounding like Randy Newman. Because was there ever any way around it?

Thanks to the nineties, Randy’s now got that Pixar sound, rather than the other way around. Rather than spicing up some animations with heavy irony and subtle winking wit, all we’ve got now are generations raised by Uncle Randy’s gentle bullfrog voice. And where’s the harm in that? If all goes well, one day those kids get curious and buy some Randy off iTunes for the hell of it and discover his perfect foursome of sardonic, beautiful early records. And Good Old Boys is the diamond on that crown, so full of careful, consummate songwriting, so big-hearted and dark-hearted all at once.

Why does its second side begin with a three-song concept suite based on the life and musings of slimy and brilliant Louisiana governor Huey P. Long? There is no answer, other than that that’s what Randy wanted, and that’s what he pulled off. They sit right there alongside a song called “Naked Man,” which is, yes, about the travails of a naked man just looking for love in a terrified world. And that sidles right up to “A Wedding in Cherokee County,” a song so funny and so romantic and so twisted you won’t know whether to laugh or weep or turn it off. But, no, I’m short-changing it. It’s better than that.

Here I am, trying the best I can to write something coherent and worthy of Good Old Boys, almost certainly the greatest southern record of all time, and very likely one of the few absolutely perfect albums ever put to wax. How does one do such a thing? Maybe by talking about walking through battlefields.

So look: listening to “Rednecks”—the opening track, for god sakes—is a little like walking through a battlefield. Every feeling you’ve felt about growing up a Virginian at heart and by blood but with a brain that sees all the history’s filthy bits, sees the petty anger, sees the rebel flags still waving in the front yards, sees everything you love existing only because and despite of all the bits of it you want to tear apart—every feeling is a part of it. All those bits are the same as all the good ones, the prideful and the proud conversing like a potluck. And can’t that be the whole point? Maybe history needs to be history, and that doesn’t mean maybe it should go away. Maybe it needs to stay real close, right here, next to the songwriters and the poets and the terrible men, too—always men—who want to hoist up all their evil like a shield that will forever protect them against the songwriters and the poets. Maybe that evil’s not a shield: maybe it’s a mirror. And maybe that mirror needs a good cracking every once in awhile. And maybe other days you need to let it catch the sun and glare.

—Brad Efford

#395: LCD Soundsystem, "Sound of Silver" (2007)

Is it fair to love an album for its last song?

I’m not saying that I don’t like the rest of the album, or even that “New York, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down” is Sound of Silver’s definitively best song, but it’s certainly true that my particular positive feelings about the album hinge entirely on that song. It’s a song I listened to late at night or in the early morning or on long and quiet afternoons. I lived in Charlottesville, Virginia, when I first encountered it. There was a blog I read by a girl who lived in New York—she was funny and charming and smart and literary-minded, and I looked forward to her posts, and I’m almost positive it was in one of those posts that she linked to the song, wrote some things about it. It seemed, then, like a song I should know—she talked about it as if it were common knowledge. Probably because it was common knowledge, I thought. LCD Soundsystem seemed like a big band among people who knew more about music than I did.

There’s something about being lonely in a familiar place. I was getting my Master’s degree in a fifth year, after four years of undergrad at UVA. Most of my friends had graduated the year prior, and left town. Charlottesville is nothing like New York, that’s true. It’s smaller and brighter and cleaner and less anonymous. There are a lot of people there who all look the same. The girls had shiny hair and North Face jackets and Hunter boots. I loved it dearly but also resented it. I loved it dearly and thought I should be happy but wasn’t, exactly, happy, and wasn’t sure why.

I had a poetry teacher once who explained the meaning of ambivalent. People often use the word in conversation as if it’s synonymous with apathetic, to denote something they’re indifferent to, something they don’t care much about either way. But that’s not what the word means. If you feel ambivalent about something, it’s making you feel two opposing feelings—love and hate, say—simultaneously. Belonging and isolation. Fear and joy.

When my teacher taught us this, it blew my goddamn mind. There was a word for it! For that thing! That nameless restless thing. That in-betweenness. Call it complexity. Call it life.

I was in love. (I am always in love.) I mention it only because love really lends itself to that sort of thing. I also wanted to be a writer. (Sometimes, now, I feel like a writer.) I mention it only because language really lends itself to that sort of thing. Both of those longings—the love-longing and the language-longing—come, I think, from a very human sense of isolation. There has been no reason, not really, for me to feel so other for my entire life, and I knew it, and yet. And yet. And yet!

“New York, I love you but you’re bringing me down.” Could there be a more perfect way to describe living in a place like that? A place where everything is both amazing and terrible. The crowds! The dirt! The subways! The choices! A place where you can do anything at any given time would sometimes be exciting and sometimes be paralyzing and probably, often, be both. If you had to pick just one place on this planet to exemplify ambivalence, it would be New York City.

And the song is the anthem of that feeling—this thing that is so great is also terrible. Here I am, feeling melancholy about a thing that brings me such joy. I’m sure I’d feel that way if I lived in New York, but I love the song because I’ve also felt that feeling living in other places. It’s not just about where you live, though. Other songs on the album embody a similar emotional register—a wistful loneliness, an isolation you don’t have to be alone to feel. Is my life what I wish it was? They do this, often, by using refrain to great effect. Sound of Silver is a repetitive record, but the repetitiveness within the songs fulfills a function, and culminates quite purposefully. This happens both lyrically and musically.

“And it keeps coming, and it keeps coming, and it keeps coming ‘til the day it stops,” in one song. In another: “Where are your friends tonight?” The same notes pounded over and over on the piano. The same synth beat. Of course, all songs repeat, but the shortness and simplicity of the sequences repeated draws real attention to them. This is, of course, purposeful.

This manic repetitiveness also embodies the chaotic, frenetic environment of New York City (or even just of a busy life, a busy brain—isn’t it remarkable how New York becomes a metaphor). And the songs have a lot of components layered on top of one another—so even if the components are simple and repeated, the multitude of them and the ways they rub against one another creates tension and complexity.

I went to a poetry reading recently where the poet, in his in-between-poems banter, addressed the ways he’d edited his poems and the manuscript comprised of them, and he cited specifically a couple of decisions he’d made to “weird things up,” which had ultimately made the poems more successful and the manuscript publishable. I have tried, sometimes, in my writing, to make less sense. To be stranger and less linear. I’ve never quite managed to be successful in that endeavor. But I enjoyed hearing him talk about his process precisely because I haven’t, yet, figured out what about that makes things work when it works. And I so much respect art that makes good use of chaos—that knows how to harness it.

LCD Soundsystem unquestionably does this on Sound of Silver. The songs are upbeat and melancholy in turn, and through the successful deployment of chaos manage to embody an entire range of simultaneous and opposing emotions. And so, it is fitting that the album concludes with “New York, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down,” a song that does all of these things—that really embodies, to my mind, what the album is doing as a whole. The song starts melancholy and gains energy, and crescendoes to chaos—everything gets louder, the piano more emphatically pounded, the drums going crazy, James Murphy pushing his voice to its limits. And then, after a brief pause, a little musical interlude serves as denouement—a simple, reigned-in melody to bid us goodbye, on a composed note. Like tidying the room after you’ve thrown a tantrum. The reestablishment of boundaries, rules. Life continuing. Terrible sometimes and wonderful sometimes and only life, after all.

—Katelyn Kiley

#396: Roxy Music, "For Your Pleasure" (1973)

The band history of Roxy Music lends itself to a number of those “what if” scenarios historians and others alternately deplore or ponder. What if Robert Fripp had selected Bryan Ferry as King Crimson’s vocalist? Roxy may never have existed and, also, what would a Ferry/KC have sounded like? What if Eno hadn’t left Roxy after For Your Pleasure? How different would the ensuing albums sound? And—to reference a scene from This is Spinal Tap—what if For Your Pleasure’s cover had featured Amanda Lear on a leash held by Ferry instead of Lear walking a chained panther with Ferry looking on as a boyish chauffeur? To extend the Spinal Tap (il)logic, there’s such a fine line between clever/stupid and sexy/sexist. Yet, fine lines are one of the things For Your Pleasure is about. It constantly shifts modes, tones, melodies, and boundaries—and rarely in the manner one might think.

There are those who consider Roxy’s first two albums their most ambitious or best, with For Your Pleasure serving as the better of the two. I am one of those people. Opinions on music, as with all art forms, are highly subjective, however I happen to think the objectivity of my perspective on For Your Pleasure benefits from the facts that it appeared before I was born, that no one I knew listened to Roxy, and that I heard it for the first time over two decades after its release—amid the grunge/techno/rave menagerie of the mid-1990s. I believe this temporal remove is largely responsible for my own reactions to the album often seeming at variance with those of music critics from the 1970s/80s.

Critics of previous generations, for example, have celebrated or at least recognized a sexiness of sound and appearance. I experienced neither. I’m not sure I can define a “sexy sound” in music and although I find Amanda Lear beautiful, the album’s cover shot is not unlike what one might glimpse inside the pages of any number of fashion magazines in a doctor’s office waiting room.  Another discrepancy is that while earlier critics focused a great deal on Bryan Ferry, I had never heard of him before. The only musician name familiar to me was Eno and I remember wondering if he was in fact the same guy who was making U2’s albums sound progressively weirder. So much for Generation X backtracking and ignorance.

On the positive side of all this, I think if a person comes to an album with virtually no prior knowledge of it or the band and comes away impressed, then chances are there’s something rather unique and distinguished about that album. Such was my reaction to For Your Pleasure. Listening to it for the first time over two decades after its initial release, my observations, in no particular order, broke down as follows: 1) This singer reminds me a lot of David Bowie, only with stronger pipes; 2) The rhythm section really drives the hell out of these songs when it wants to; 3) This lyricist has some convictions and something serious to say; 4) The guy working synth and effects is incredible. Looking back, I think the last of these points is the most interesting. Hearing Eno’s work on that album for the first time during an era in which a lot of his innovations had been incorporated into digital machines for rap, techno, and trance music, it amazed me how ingenious, warm, and alive his effects sounded using comparatively primitive analog equipment.

For all the glitz and sexiness critics seem to have associated with Roxy and, especially, Ferry, For Your Pleasure, as a whole, is a rather dark, haunting album. The song “Beauty Queen,” for example, laments how the lovers “never could work out” and that even life’s patterns are drawn in sand. Moreover, despite bearing the label of artsy pop band, no single was released from For Your Pleasure, though the album rose as high as #4 on the UK charts. Lastly, it’s the only Roxy studio album that contains a nine-minute song, the end of which includes a Judi Dench voiceover.

Like a lot of strong writing, much of For Your Pleasure’s musical power and achievement stem from its contradictions. The listener does indeed experience pleasure from the songs, even though the lyrics themselves hardly speak of it. Ferry’s usually conventional melodies are alternately complemented or foiled by Eno’s sonic experiments (it is unfortunate, though not surprising, the two found it impossible to continue working together). Even selecting Amanda Lear as the cover’s female sex symbol is misleading, given that she was born a male and spent time performing in various European transsexual clubs. The album also reveals a sense of humor, however macabre, as underscored by its love song for an inflatable sex doll (“I blew you up / but you blew my mind”).

There’s a traceless quality to good enduring art, regardless of the medium, which eludes articulation. Based on the slick Chris Thomas production quality of the album and not having glanced at the liner notes, I remember during my first exposure thinking For Your Pleasure must have been recorded in the late 1980s. So there I was, listening to the album in the mid-1990s, assuming it was from 80s, and subsequently shocked to discover it had first appeared in 1973.

Sitting here, absorbing the album in 2015, I’m struck again by its timeless innovations and contradictions. Roxy would move on to make other strong albums. Even Eno himself admitted his departure allowed the band to become more focused and commercial. I agree. More focused and commercial? Yes. More artistically innovative and ambitious? No. It’s also no coincidence Eno would move on to work on what I consider David Bowie’s best albums: Sound and Vision and “Heroes.” What Roxy lost in Eno became the gain of numerous others.

As guitarist Phil Manzanera recalls of the album’s development, “We found ourselves being successful and having a lot of expectation. We said: let’s go and do something different, something weird and wonderful. Let’s explore.” And, for what may have been the final time, the band did just that. Don’t believe me? Go listen to it—for your pleasure.

—Casey Clabough

#397: Massive Attack, "Blue Lines" (1991)

continued from #438: Boy’s Don’t Cry

I must’ve gone snooze again ‘cause I wake up in the kitchen sink now, water dripping down the crack of my ass and a gat jammed in my temple, some Tricky Kid with a rainbow grill slobbering in my face.

“Whar da soz’s at?”

Through slumbering head clouds I don’t rec the speak but don’t see him a tealeaf anyhow. “Hey pal, wallet’s yours. On the table,” I say, bargaining seconds like a turbaned bazaar vet, reaching back quiet for the wire scrub brush—for that caked on grease, so the dame in the pitch viz says anyway.

“Oi, ain’t inerest’d inat. Gettin’ a Visa card nowadays isn’t hard.”

I acknowledge his point with a shrug before bringing my arm around hard and jamming the brush in his eye; my other fist swinging pendulum-like wrapped ‘round a sudsy mug I picked up München way back. My souvenir stein crashing into his mouth and twisting his face up into a bloody tunnel of budding orthodonture; 52 pick-up with many-hued teeth.

“Feckin’ murderin’ bastard,” he screams through eyeless/toothless agony and I push myself out of the sink onto the floor where I land a kung fu chop to his solar plexus, followed by a knee to his now bent-over noggin, messing my slacks with some ocular leavings. With the pain and the blow to the head, he’s out. I tie him to the kitchen chair with some cord from the cupboard, wipe the sweat off my brow and walk over to the window, lean out into the drizzle, hands on the sill. A Blue Razr parked across the way speeds off. I nod to myself, tuck back out of the rain, spark a Morley’s and puff, collecting on my next move.

*

“Hey Momma,” I say into the vizcon. Trendy Wendy stares back though a brick wall of mascara: ‘coons must be the new thing in Dogtown. “I got a package for ya,” nodding my head at the drifting bloody dingbat leaking on the formica.

“Creepz Bobby, what’d he do?”

“Boy interrupted me from my Palmolive usings whilst waiting on a client. Damned hard to reach spots and streaky drying. Chapped my hands.”

“You sure enough did a number on ‘em.”

“Yeah, well, dukkha. I was hoping you could send one of your boys down for cog and disposal. Remove some toenails, Guantanomize, the like. Get to the prize of this particular Cracked Jack.”

“Sure thing Bobby, Judo Jonny be over in twenty, no problemo. Let you know what we find. Who’s the client anyways?”

“Some rich dame, who knows. Eyah Brusha here coulda been looking for her or come in her place; I’d reckon the former, making it more complicated than the easy few Cs I was counting on this gig.”

“Ain’t that always the case.” Trendy Wendy blows a kiss and signs off and I sit down to wait for Judo Jonny, smoke a fag or two, and meditate on the grievous prospects ahead.

By the time Judo gets the boy cleared out and bleaches the floor, I’ve gone through a pack of Morley’s and a bottle to boot. I lay my buzzing head down and finally drift off as the sun peeks out between the curtains, dreams of falling into a huge sandstorm, a bloodied Arab, an endless caravan, sand spinning ever ever ever.

*

The buzzing vizcon shatters steamy harem visions, perking me out the cot. Have to bend over sideways to take a leak.

“What is it,” I scream from the loo. Trendy’s on the screen again. I catch her grin tweaked and me covering my privates as I race by, her face made up in some newday perversion.

“Why good morning sailor,” she says, laughing. “Just wanted to let you know what we found out about One-eyed Willy here… Not much.”

I grumble from the commode.

“But, and fair warning on this one, he appears to be one of Ter Mojave’s goons.”

I raise my head and peak out the loo. “Ter Mojave?”

“Yup.”

“Damn, that do plant a tick in my tenders don’t it?”

“You could say.”

I zip up and walk over to the screen. I can see now Wendy’s latest trip: a diorama of raised scars and implanted hillocks make a map of her face.

“Cute look.”

“You like it? It’s the newest thing from Ney Tokyo.”

“Sure thing babe, cheers for the data.”

Winsome Wendy, lips bearing curious around new bolts and designs into concern, “Hey Bobby, just get away with dem gangsters, we don't want it.”

The screen goes black.

*

Ter Mojave has a Cadillac the size of an aircraft carrier, TV antennas in the back, sunroof top, and a collection of 30 Eurasian twinks whose only job is to spit shine the windows. Restricted to a diet of aloe and lilacs, their sputum makes clean and fragrant. This Sally who paid me a visit the prior eve not one of that lot, obv. Ter’s business spiderweb in need of as many toughs as poofs.

Dig this scene: rumor is Ter’s a mutant. Nobody seen his face since the aughts when Mommy or Daddy covered his egg with a burlap sack and shoved a sawed-off in his tiny mitts. Wound up the toy soldier and pushed him into a Circle-P whereby he enacted his first, of many to come, criminal enterprise. Such compassionate education led predictably into pimping and usury, drugs, arms, a whole sandbox of toys for the bobbing babe. He’d ditched the burlap some years back for a more fetching skintight balaclava, but lingering rumors of mutation persisted, facial deformities, wolf eyes, cleft palate. Still he stands tall.

If my visitor was one of Ter’s cast of characters, and he was after my client, a dame I’d seen but the one time she come strutting and waving her sallow Benhameens, I had more trouble than I thought. I guess I could forget the whole shebang, take a trip down Barbados for a few weeks, live life as a fever dream of shuffleboard and piña coladas, but she’s already left a deposit after all. A man’s gotta do.

The place to start if Ter was involved was the Sheik Mansour Supper Club, a posh joint in Lil’ Da Nang for the hoi polloi and layabouts of the sweeter set. After a pot of coffee and a round of cigs, I put on a dinner jacket over my gat and stride out to catch a Johnny Cab. It’s early yet, but the lunch crowd at the Sheikh Mansour would be a little easier to handle; no need to go in all musket balls and ramrods.

*

Elvis Phơưng’s doing a soundcheck up on stage, while lunch patrons slurp phơ and smoke black Gitanes. Bạn không là gì, nhưng một con chó con chó săn, đung đưa tất cả các thời gian. His voice more gravel than his namesake, guitars jangly and loose. The maître d’ in his monkey suit looks down on me like King Kong perusing an abused gaggle of Skull islanders on a lunch buffet.

“Could I see your identification sir?” he says over the backbeat and slurps. I feign chagrin at his thinking me heat all duded up and all. His face shines no sympathetic crag.

“Hey hey,” I shuck, “don’t call me an officer. This ain’t official business or nothing.”

The beefcake is unimpressed and I flip a card on the podium like some Lost Vegas card sharp. He continues unimpressed and disdainfully tweezes it between two grinding meatsticks, peering quizzical at the raised Lucinda Grande on Bone Alabaster. Tiki Taka falling deaf on the ogre, I go Route One.

“I’m looking for Ter Mojave.”

“And your relationship with Mister Mojave.” Not a moment’s breath and all focus on the Mister.

I harrumph and jaw, “We’d a been book club pals, Edith Wharton and whatnot, come what may. Err… boy’s school locker room hi-jinx, some youthful experimentation if you get my drift. Snapping towels, rape-lite. We go way back, the Mister and me.”

His meaty nostrils flare a meat minute, clenching up fists the size of my sorrowful bean. Eyes protuberances of ripe fruit peeling away layers of sweat and melancholy. I momentarily reckon perhaps my tactics were in error.

“Yers a greeby fuckstain ain’t ya?” his door manners dropping like trousers in a Re-Orleans nutlounge. “May I oughta learn yous a thing or two bout…”

I don’t wait to suss his teachings and instead plump my Taze-o 5000 up under his equally greeby armpit and let go a mean buzz. All hmmsss and hoiiisss, he burbles to the floor spurting pee and snot; Elvis and his cohorts carry on uninterrupted. I straighten my dinner jacket and step over the hulking island at the foot of the podium—the harder they fall—scanning the room for Ter Mojave.

Horus Birdface joins Elvis on the stage and they duet something nice.  

Light at day, the lady’s lay,
Broken, cray, this baby’s pay to play,
Marzipan love and sugar pop dove,
She stove my heart with a hearty shove.
The big wheel do keep its turn
Unfinished and unsouled.
Will be for all time,
The end of time,
All time.
End time.

Up on the stage, one man struggles, another relaxes.

—Erik Wennermark

#398: ZZ Top, "Eliminator" (1983)

“Them weeds growin out them cracks must live off coolant or some shit.”

“You reckon? Oil just as good a juice as any.”

“Ain’t no way, thicker than sorghum and slick as a good time, ain’t no way nothin’ll catch hold in that.”

“Well either that or we got ourselves a new breed done come loose.”

“Coolant at least got some water innit.”

“That’s true now Marty, that’s true. But I still got my doubts.”

“Like hell you do. Pass me another one a them suds hey Cole?”

“Mmhmm.”

Normally there wouldn’t be no drinking this early in the day or ever for that matter but today there was no bosses to swing nothing so there stood Marty and Cole having a couple in the late morning sun. It was that pale kind of light that starts to fall when September moves into its later parts and leaves are all in a rush to lose their luster, just the right amount of breeze and the early-to-deathers falling in slants across the sky and spinning as if whisked wherever the wind catch. It was the type of day where folks feel genuinely thrilled to be alive and waking. But leaves, trash, and the occasional scavenger aside, Muscle Mike’s Used Cars and Garage was without patronage.

Marty coughed and swirled the last contents of his Schlitz before knocking it back. Clearing his throat he pressed a loose fist to his mouth and turned to Cole.

“You bring that radio again?”

“Mmhmm”

“How’s bout fixin it so we can hear some music?”

“I reckon that can be arranged. But don’t go funny on me.”

Cole rose from a squat and sauntered to his truck, knees popping and cracking with each step. Marty doubled back into the open hatch of the garage towards the fridge and swung back the door, removing two more bottles from the breath cloud of cold air.

“Hey we may need to make a run here in a minute if this here don’t pick up,” Marty shouted from the back of the garage as Cole fitted the radio’s plug into the orange extension cord usually reserved for the shopvac.

“Well I brought the last sixer so you gon have to do somethin bout them next few,” Cole said, as he adjusted the frequency knob with hands coated in yesterday’s grease. Marty came up beside and leaned over Cole’s shoulder to read the numbers on the dial, then shifted his weight and motioned towards the cigarette pack in his front left shirt pocket. Extracting one and placing the filter to his lips, he lit the tip against the wind as Cole centered in on a station. Drums and guitar cut the silence.

“You ain’t still smokin, are ya?”

“Only when I’m drinkin.”

“But you always drinkin.”

“You sure got a keen set on you. How ya say bout once this place tucks in we head on up 18 to…”

Just then tires rolled in onto the gravel, cutting Marty short and shaking dust over the lot, then lulled to a stop. Marty took a long drag and exhaled into the coming cloud and placed the butt filter and half the white on the edge of Cole’s radio. The opening riff of ZZ Top’s “I Need You Tonight” came through as the engine noises faded and Marty winced and Cole stood up and removed his cap to rub the sweat away from his receding hairline with a worn blue hankie. A V of geese passed over heading southeast as a man walked out from the dust haze and caught sunlight.

“Mornin fellas. Hope I’m not interrupting nothin here but there’s an awful funny sound I’d sure appreciate for one of y’all to take a look at, if it’s not putting you out none,” the man said, removing his sunglasses and tucking them into the front of his denim shirt, pulling his beard aside to do so.

“Not at all mister, Cole here wouldn’t be put out none to see what’s the matter with your vehicle, ain’t nothin getting past him today.”

“Pull ‘er on in and let’s get ‘er up,” Cole said, casting a sideways glance as he placed his cap back on to hide his eyes.

Marty crouched and fit the filter tip back into his mouth as the bearded man got back into his truck. Engine noise filled the air again and the tires moved into the empty bay and came to a halt. Marty exhaled a plume and moved a coarse hand through his thinning hair. The radio played on in the background. The bearded man slammed the door shut and exited the garage towards Marty. The radio played as they stood.

“The darndest thing, I was out at Mel’s yesterday, having a few and visiting my girl Evelyn and this same song came on all ghostly like out of that jukebox. Can’t say I’d heard it before since who knows when.”

“What you mean ghostly?”

“Like I says. Like it don’t need money to play no music. It just plays what it will.”

Marty shifted his weight, holding the smoke in the right corner of his mouth, palms suddenly wet.

“You never been out by Mel’s off highway 18 near the Citgo? With the haunted jukebox?” the bearded man asked Marty as he moved his hands to his back pockets.

“Well sure. Cole and I have been known to take up residence there from time to time.” He didn’t recall no haunted jukebox.

“Mostly a haunt for drifters and such, but helluva fine establishment.”

“Well I’ll be. But now you says you know Evelyn?”

“I should say I know her, she’s fixin to be my wife here before winter. She said she’d always fancied herself an autumn bride.”

“You don’t say,” Marty stooped low and stubbed his cigarette out amongst the loose bits of gravel. He rose slowly, placing a hand on the weatherproof siding of the garage in an effort to keep his balance. He felt faint suddenly.

*

Truthfully it had been a long while since Marty and Cole had been out to Mel’s on account of the last time they’d all been in. On account of how Marty’d composed himself. He had had more than a few, this is without debate, and it had been that type of day where neither Marty’s mood nor drinks was sitting well with him. It had also been after Evelyn had said she’d rather not go round with Marty no more.

They’d come through Mel’s on Marty’s insistence. Approaching the empty bar, Marty craned his neck back to where a 40-watt bulb hung illuminating the storeroom and right then Cole knew he should’ve steered Marty elsewhere. A caged ceiling fan spun overhead filtering the traces of cigarette smoke curing in the air above them. Marty lit up and put his wallet on the bar. From the back came some rustling and soon enough Evelyn strode elegantly into the afternoon light. Her steps tapered as she recognized the patrons. Cole braced himself. A few loners drank in silence.

“Hi Cole. Marty. What can I do for you boys?”

“Ma’am.”

“Evelyn! After looking at this asshole all day you my dear are a welcomed sight!”

“Easy, Marty.”

“Easy yourself! How ya been sweetheart? You always look better than I picture you. That dress holds you like I used to.”

“Marty, look, maybe we should…”

“A beer for my friend here and a taste of something special for us. What’s your poison, Evelyn?”

“Marty easy, stop yelling.”

“I’m not Cole I’m not! Can’t a guy buy a pretty lady a drink? What’ll it be? Huh, Evelyn? Huh?” Marty stood abruptly and caught his foot funny on the barstool to his left and went down hard. The few day drinkers paused and looked towards the noise. Sprawled and screaming, Marty cursed high and low. Across the way a light flicked on in the old Jukebox and CD’s shifted and “I Need You Tonight” came blasting through at full volume.

“Get him outta here Cole!”

“Marty, come, let’s get.”

“Fuck off me, Cole! Our song, Evelyn! It’s our song!”

*

ZZ Top finished up and gave way to a commercial about fabric softener. A car sped past on the interstate blasting the same advertisement, yellowed leaves trailing in its wake. Back in the garage the hydraulic lift kicked on, lowering the car back to ground level and Cole stepped into the now high sun.

“Just some loose bolts. Nothin a couple turns couldn’t fix.”

“You’re shittin me? Well if I’d a known I wouldn’t a troubled ya. What’s the damage?” the beard said, sliding his fingers along his wallet chain until they found purchase. Marty took out and lit another cigarette, turning away from Cole and the beard towards the road.

“Well with time and labor should be bout…”

“Don’t worry about the bolts mister,” Marty interrupted, staring into the distance where the long-passed car glimmered faintly beyond the county line.  “It’s on Mike.”

—Nick Graveline

#399: Tom Waits, "Rain Dogs" (1985)

LETTER TO CASEY WAITS

This is the month we turn thirty. We’ve never met but our parents were pregnant at the same time so maybe the first sounds we ever heard were the same. Maybe our mothers weighed the same with us inside them.

The year we were born your dad was making a record in a vault in Lower Manhattan. How the city has stretched and grown inside itself in the thirty years since has been well documented by all kinds of great minds. I’m on the train uptown to see my father for the first time in nine years, which nobody else’s research has prepared me for but your dad is growling at me through the headphones. His yell is almost protective. The decade of our birth lays itself over this one like a long grey transparency.

Going up to Harlem with a pistol in his jeans.

Going up to 86th & Lex with an iPhone in my purse.

At least September feels right for a birthday, the trees in their back-to-school clothes. My nine-year estrangement is a fourth grader. Something about this being the truth makes it seem less like my own life, like a poster on the side of a bus. Is that what it’s like to have a famous father? I tell you all my secrets but I lie about my past. People like to bring that up to him, don’t they, that he sang that once.

When I bob my neck and slap my thighs along to “Big Black Mariah” on the train the lady next to me moves away. Thunder that the rain makes when the shadow tops the hill. I hear a hurricane hit the coast in 1985 and three days later I came.

Thirty—how’s it sitting with you?

You and I both know what 1985 was really like: impossible to remember. It disappeared behind big grownup hands. The leaves fell when we were born. Ships skated out of their moorings and a bass drum tumble stowed away on the back end of the beat. Tumble-stow, tumble-stow. The two people who experienced my birth most closely never worked with their hands. When the rain came they got indoors to wait it out. Your mom co-wrote one of the songs on the record, “Anywhere I Lay My Head,” and my mom had a tape of your dad’s in her car. One time she said it wasn’t appropriate for kids my age, which is our age. Maybe the rain came down hard that year too, like a tarp thrown over all this.

Our parents’ activities in January of 1985 made me this kind of a person and you that kind of a person and Lower Manhattan the home of a vault where your dad made a record. I grew in a regular way tucked behind the reference desk at a medical library in Connecticut into a person who imagines you grew underground at the rate of nineteen tracks per album per year. What about being young led you to hit stuff with other stuff for a living? How blue is music as a job? My parents were musicians once, they met that way, over music, which is exactly also how we met only we never have. I think the lady who wants not to be sitting next to me on the train must not know anything about music or being almost thirty or fearing recognizing yourself in a much older man on the steps of an austere museum or listening to your favorite record by someone’s dad who could have been yours. I like stomping my feet in public. Could I have been a drummer? Do you have any idea what your parents were thinking? It hums in the front inside compartment of a life like an engine.

And you spill out over the side to anyone who will listen.

What weird alchemy it must be to expand like that in an instant, making a kid, making a record. To go underground and emerge with something somebody else will eventually hopefully fall in love with, with something that will sneak into other people’s homes, ride the train without you, meet you for a drink 29 years later. These are things we need to consider at our age, Casey. Will the kids we might in time make ourselves be loveable? And yet the older I get the better I understand that it’s ridiculous to claim my age as a justification for anything I think I know.

None of us want to be remembered for our fathers no matter how great and some of us don’t remember much about them anyway but what I like most about this record is that it’s easier than the uptown errand I’m on. It’s like a laughing anger lumbering. I can take anything laughing but my father doesn’t laugh. He doesn’t get the joke which is that we’re related but you get it don’t you Casey? We were made at the same time as each other and as this record so we must be connected. It makes about as much sense as that we should be connected to the people who made us, their studios, the myth of their having existed in any other form before the leaves fell and we came into being. Anyway to be connected to anyone ever is to brave the assumption that you can understand them enough to say how you’re connected and you and I understand this much: that drummers and poets are magnificent failures at keeping it all together.

There’s a joke about this. It goes

Q: What’s the difference between a pizza and a drummer/poet?
A: A pizza can feed a family of four.

You and I are connected because about you I can say whatever I want. About my parents I can say almost nothing.

Where is the straightforward exposition of this errand I’m on? What’s a deft description of the circumstances? My father left me is a sentence I have no practice writing because I’m pinned like an insect to accuracy. That I left my father is no more direct a hole through the center of the apple, the brain’s guts get everywhere.

This is a joke too. It goes

Q: What do you call it when two people leave and stay exactly where they are?
A: All the doughnuts have names that sound like prostitutes.

But if you have the temperament and the means you’re soon up and over the border of your little life with great relish. The countries that took me in after were full of stories and I could pick whichever ones I wanted off the shelf. In this one we’re partners, Casey, we grew up together like cousins in different cities, we had the best jokes and the same dark curls and long summer visits that came around just often enough to learn what it feels like to have to miss a piece of your own family, which is how you learn there are some things inside of you that are also outside of you, which is how you learn you are a you and not something entirely different. Those were good summers, just before the leaves began to fall. I’d watch your parents back out of the driveway with you in the backseat banging with chopsticks on your father’s headrest like a drumset and try to remember what missing you felt like so it wouldn’t take me by surprise this time, so this time I wouldn’t cry.

—Laura Eve Engel

#400: The Temptations, "Anthology" (1995)

In graduate school, a common seminar move was to say, “I think we need to talk not about [singular noun] but about [plural noun]”—not sexuality, but sexualities; not the public, but publics, etc. In that spirit, I think we ought to speak not of the Temptations’ Anthology, but of Anthologies. The Temptations’ Anthology exists in three different iterations: a triple LP from 1973, a double CD from 1986, and a revised two-CD package from 1995. The three versions have different artwork, different formats, different contents. Five post-1973 songs were added in 1986, and the 1995 set switched out about 25% of its content. My hunch is that the listmakers at Rolling Stone did not carefully collate the various editions but simply chose the one that was currently available.

Their inclusion of Anthology (an Anthology) acknowledges the greatness of the Temptations and lets them bow in the direction of Motown, a label that produced scores of immortal songs but no memorable albums before What’s Going On. (I see that Smokey Robinson & the Miracles’ Going to a Go Go is ranked #273 on the big list, but I disagree.) We used to fret a lot in high school about whether Best-Ofs counted as “real” albums, but without such compilations a lot of hugely important and justly beloved music falls out of the canon. Even with compilations, the Rolling Stone 500 is missing much Motown: no “Money,” “Please Mr. Postman,” “Shop Around,” “My Guy,” “Dancing in the Streets,” “Shotgun,” “Reach Out, I’ll Be There,” “I Heard it Through the Grapevine,” “I Want You Back,” etc.

We need to speak of Anthologies, too, because the original Temptations Anthology in 1973 was part of a series of triple-album anthologies released by Motown after its sale and removal to Los Angeles. These were lavish affairs: double gatefolds with glossy booklets and generous song selection. (Sometimes too generous. Six sides are a lot to fill, and “lesser” artists who got only four sides sometimes benefitted.) The look was somewhat standardized. The covers all had the word Anthology at the top, with the group or singer’s name below it, encased in a lurid, oblong rainbow of green, yellow, red and purple. The covers were color coded: yellow for the Marvelettes, blue for the Four Tops, orange for Jr. Walker and the All Stars, etc.. I bought a few of the Anthologies, although it was usually easier to find cheap, used copies of the older Motown “Greatest Hits” LPs from the mid-sixties, which had less filler. The Temptations had two of these Greatest Hits: Vol. I (1966) and Vol. II (1970).

Thus we ought to speak not of Temptations but of Temptationses. The Temptations, too, existed in different versions, marked not (as Joni sings) by lovers and styles of clothes, but by producers and lead singers. There were the early, jaunty, lovelorn Temptations, with David Ruffin and Eddie Kendricks singing lead and Smokey Robinson writing and producing (e.g., “The Way You Do the Things You Do”). And there are the later, angry, socially conscious Temptations, with Dennis Edwards singing lead and Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong writing and producing (e.g., “Ball of Confusion”). There’s plenty of overlap, however, since Eddie Kendricks and his crazy falsetto straddle both periods, and Ruffin and Whitfield collaborated in the middle (e.g., “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg”). There’s great music from all phases of their career, or at least from the first, golden decade of it, but it’s hard to find a through-line from “My Girl” to “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone.”

Here’s a question we didn’t ask much in graduate school: how good is this work of art? How does the music of the Temptations[es] hold up? Is it better or worse than other music? These are questions that I sometimes waver on with respect to the Temptations and Motown more generally. I’m never quite sure if we undervalue or overestimate Motown. For certain rock critics, particularly Dave Marsh, Motown is the pinnacle of black popular music. When I discovered soul music in the early ’80s, however, I preferred the rawer, churchier Atlantic/Stax artists: Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, etc. The funkiness of the Funk Brothers was hard for me to hear, especially on those early, hand-clappy, finger-snappy, tambourine-happy Motown recordings like “Jimmy Mack” and “Baby Love.” And I was scornful of the subsequent Motown revival, sparked by The Big Chill soundtrack and the California Raisins, limited as it was to a few, overplayed songs. But there are riches in the Motown catalogue—plenty (I suspect) that I don’t yet know about. And re-listening to the Temptations this past week, I was reminded that they have a deep and deeply soulful repertoire.

I’ll single out two songs. “Since I Lost My Baby” (1965) has an aching lead vocal from Ruffin and a clever, economical lyric from Smokey Robinson describing how a happy world looks through the lens of heartbreak: “But fun is a bore, and with money I’m poor.” The arrangement is stately, and the vocal is restrained but no less impassioned than anything Otis Redding recorded. Three years later, they released “Cloud Nine,” their first song with Dennis Edwards singing lead. It’s a crackling, taut recording with a fierce, communal vocal inspired by Sly and the Family Stone. It’s presumably an anti-drug song, only pretending to praise the singer’s escape from the pains of this world: “I’m doing fine / On cloud nine.” But unlike many later songs on this theme, it avoids preachiness; if the singer is deceiving himself, he is capable of deceiving me as well. And then when I go on YouTube and see their clothes and choreography, it makes me think I’d give all my Anthologies to have seen them perform it in person.

—Will Pritchard