#321: Nick Drake, "Pink Moon" (1972)

      Black bile // earth — autumn — gallbladder

What are we supposed to do with our melancholy? The very nature of the beast seems to disallow us any access whatsoever to its correction—but so it goes, I suppose, with sadness, with despondency, with lethargy and unspecific restlessness. In order to stop feeling melancholy, you need to ease up on the melancholy, and the only thing that prevents us from easing up is that same melancholy. This is why it feels like a stone, or a sledgehammer, or a coarse iron blanket. This is why it’s difficult for others who aren’t under that same stone or lifting that same sledgehammer to understand. This is why we must remember empathy—this is how our forgetfulness of this holes up in echoing hovels where it decides to rest forever, gnashing and gnashing and gnashing.

“Melancholy” comes from the Greek melas and khole—literally “black” and “bile.” It was Hippocrates who assigned the humor to the disposition, proclaiming depression as the unfortunate effect of an excess of black bile, the darkest clot at the bottom of a sample of blood exposed to open air. Characteristic temperaments include despondency, seriousness, and quiet. There are innumerable types of quiet, though. We know that. The quiet of thought. The quiet of study. The quiet of awe. The quiet of anger or mule-headedness or peace. The quiet of sadness, of course. The quiet of sadness. What are we supposed to do with our quiet sadness? How are we supposed to name it, sit with it, overcome it, share and revel in it all at once? How can we make joy from it, or at the very least normalcy? At the very most art.

Autumn belongs to melancholy—the humorists have wrought it, and it is so. It feels right—the quickening early nights, the sighful memories of summer. Nick Drake recorded the entirety of Pink Moon, the greatest contribution to humankind’s infinite annals of great melancholic art, in the middle of autumn. Three years later, he died nearer to the end of the season, a mysterious death eventually claimed as suicide by antidepressant overdose. He had swallowed thirty at once. I don’t mean to make a joke when I say I imagine his bile most likely had never been blacker. The discoloration of such medicine in such excess, the melancholy to match—one begins to consider Hippocrates more closely.

      Phlegm // water — winter — brain & lungs

What are we supposed to do with our apathy? Its very nature disallows us access to its correction. Disinterest consumes the basest level of what we’re doing here in the first place. Here, that is, on Earth, in life, walking and dreaming and loving or looking to be loved day in and day out. When we lose interest or have difficulty getting going, we translate our movements like ghosts, appearing some place then disappearing without much of a second thought. “I don’t care,” I say all the time. Too often. And I don’t. I mean it. What am I supposed to do? Care?

Humorists attribute phlegm to the brain and lungs, where it was originally believed to have been made and stored. Extreme apathy was understood as the result of an excess of phlegm in the body—measures needed to be taken to release it and restore the balance. Emetics might be administered to force vomiting, typically salt water or mustard water, potentially both, potentially at the same time. In my first year of college, I awoke one morning at the end of February nearly unable to breathe, gasping like a comical fish on land, rubbing a new pain in the center of my chest. Testing revealed that my left lung had collapsed, seized more or less inward on itself thanks to a hole the size of a dime which opened up overnight. The air my lung stored with intent to keep me alive drained slowly, then quickly—it was ninety percent gone by the time I made it in for surgery. No warning, no reason, no logical larger affliction—hence the “spontaneous” in spontaneous pneumothorax.

I’m considering Hippocrates more closely now. When my lung collapsed I was closer to death than I’d been before and have been since, but I wouldn’t say I was necessarily “near death.” When I recovered I wasn’t given a new lease on life or any other such appropriate platitude. But for a little while I did receive attention, much more so than any average someone receives in any average week or two. Educators gave me innumerable extensions coupled with sincere well wishes. Priests from two different denominations visited my hospital bedside. My mother took too much time off work to sleep in a chair and buy me candy from the machine downstairs. Three friends wrote me a get-well song and sang it from the foot of my eternally wincing, prostrate position.

Here is why I mention this: the morphine drip made me vomit over and over again, but there is no better cure for apathy than the feeling that you’ve suddenly and rightfully become the center of the universe. Like all major transitions, freshman year of college is difficult in a hundred different ways. It is difficult to care about anything, and that has at least a little do with the sudden feeling that now, away from home, in larger classrooms, at the bottom of the food chain once again, you mean very little. I don’t know if there is phlegm in my lungs. I do know that the cure for my disinterest came when that humor’s home burst open.

There is no apathy in the short breadth of Nick Drake’s musical career. Three albums in three years: a confidence and vigor in the first, focus and diligent sheen in the second, and a third utterly stripped of ambition, beset only by some unshakeable drive to keep at it despite the odds. You would not think “drive” when you listen to Pink Moon, so downtrodden are the songs within, so tired does Nick sound. It was recorded in two days with one microphone and one guitar and as few takes as possible without sounding like crap. But this is Nick, full of phlegm, fighting through it. Changing things up to try for recognition from a different angle altogether. The record is not a goodbye letter—it is a sign, for sure, but of what is the better question. Of one man’s dogged plea to be heard, to be seen, is the best answer I have.

      Blood // air — spring — liver

Joe Boyd, notorious upstart American producer and Nick Drake’s mentor and friend, describes receiving Nick’s first bedroom demo in 1968: “I called him up….and we talked, and I just said, I’d like to make a record. He stammered, Oh, well, yeah. Okay. Nick was a man of few words.”

There is a video on the internet that has raised a lot of speculation. A very tall man wearing bellbottoms and a dark maroon jacket lopes away from the camera in semi-slow motion. He is in a thin crowd at what appears to be an outdoor festival. The description: Live footage of Nick Drake in the crowd at an unknown 70's folk festival. Got sent this vid by a mate. He reckons the suit jacket, short sleeves long arms and general appearance are a givaway [sic]. What do you think. The comments section is full of debate. The similarities to the Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot footage are eerie. It is the only footage I’ve ever seen of what could even potentially be even a fake Nick Drake in motion.

Nick’s sister Gabrielle, one of his closest confidants, describes the moment she discovered that he’d finished his first record: “He was very secretive. I knew he was making an album but I didn't know what stage of completion it was at until he walked into my room and said, There you are. He threw it onto the bed and walked out.”

After recording Pink Moon, an album his label hadn’t asked for and wasn’t expecting, Nick dropped the master tapes off himself at his boss’ offices. The story goes that he handed them to the receptionist without a word and walked back out. Not angry or sullen, just….inward. Inside himself. Others discount the story, say he handed the music personally to the head of the label, but the point’s the same all the same. Pink Moon was a record for no one from a no one who had one last go in him.

On its release, Nick gave only one interview, for which he needed excessive coercion. The interviewer, Jerry Gilbert of Sounds Magazine: “There wasn’t any connection whatsoever. I don’t think he made eye contact with me once.”

Blood is meant to make us sanguine: lively, carefree, social, talkative, bubbly, out and about, personable, energized. Nick Drake must have been the most bloodless person the record industry had ever seen.

      Yellow bile // fire — summer — spleen

One wonders what Nick Drake’s career might have looked like if it looked more like Kurt Cobain’s. I understand the comparison is imperfect, but listen. Both were on the hunt for fame under others’ assumptions, either posthumously or in their lifetime, that neither wanted fame. The unwilling voice of a generation, we think of it, or at least the sullen next big thing who accepts his fate with hands tied. The story is better this way—but it’s inaccurate, which saddens it. Nick Drake wanted to be heard. He wanted his records to sell. He believed he was a great songwriter and he wanted the rest of the world to know it. And Kurt wanted to be a rockstar. From day one, his idols were the Beatles, the Who, and Zeppelin. The big guns. He wanted to tour every country on earth and see his face on magazines and live in comfort.

Obviously, the former took his own life a disappointed nobody—in his own eyes—and the latter a disappointed anointed god. Kurt got what he wanted and much more than he’d bargained for; Nick tried and tried and tried one last time, and nothing. Third time was certainly not a charm—if anything, in hindsight, and maybe even more so at the time, Pink Moon seems like an unshackled fuck-it than any sort of last ditch grasp at success. But the record is perfect. It is a perfect record.

I think Nick Drake knew it. These songs are not tossed off. They’re meticulous. Some had been written years before, some were newer, but all show the clear signs of having been practiced, played, a thousand times before. The record feels lived in, coddled over, extremely precise. Nick Drake comes across like a watchmaker all throughout—there’s a reason Pink Moon covers are hard to find, and the ones that do exist are lifeless. They are not easy songs, but the way Nick plays and sings is all confidence. Choleric. Energized. Even aggressive.

Yellow bile is meant to bring this out, this lively temperament. And they are not words or ideals that you would initially associate with Nick, or with Pink Moon, I know. But they speak volumes beneath the surface. Talent can be that way. It can grab you by the hand, or the throat. Nick Drake dropped out of university halfway through to make music and see where the road could take him. He wasn’t failing academically, but he recognized his talent and pursued. He expected esteem for his work, as the choleric often do. Pink Moon is what he left to show he’d given up the chase. And no surrender has ever been so perfect.

—Brad Efford

#322: Randy Newman, "Sail Away" (1972)

I woke up in the middle of a song. I woke up in the midst of a sea of sleeping bags, Randy Newman in my earbuds drowning out the snores of my middle school students—all boys. It was the early morning after a lock-in and my iPod had been shuffling as I'd been drifting in and out of sleep, feeling simultaneously sort of off-duty yet still on edge. Resting, but still responsible.

Working at a school, you are often reminded of how unconcerned adults can become about other adults, only because we're all supposed to be self-sufficient now. We went through the wringer and have passed the phase when we get to be inherently fussed over or worried about. I knew that for a few more minutes all the boys would be motionless, but then there would come unbridled chaos with no transition period between. The music was so beautiful, but reminded me that I'm an authority now, no matter what I feel or don't feel like. I'm forever one of the ones they'd turn to if things got hard or things got weird or things went wrong, as they very often always do.

*

I sat with this one for so long that this piece has already nearly-been and not-been a thousand things. It was going to be a snarky skewering of Randy Newman predicated on the idea that his Pixar songs and the caricature of him I saw once in a Family Guy episode (red-headed lady / reaches for an apple / gonna take a bite / nope, she gonna breathe on it first / wipes it on her blouse...) are the totality of what the dude is about. It was going to be a short story about an older divorced man indulging in his wild side with a younger, alcoholic woman just jam-packed with ill-advised tattoos and equally rife with nautical addiction metaphors. It was going to be a glowing paean to the genius that Randy Newman/Good Old Boys/Sail Away Randy Newman was and (possibly?) is. It was going to be a list of my favorite weird-voiced singers (Joanna Newsom and John Darnielle coming in way before Randy or even Dylan). It was going to be an essay in which I convinced myself to quit my job and an essay in which I convinced myself to keep my job and now if anybody out there can send word back and let me know what, in the end, it is, I'd take that feedback gratefully.

*

The best part of Sail Away is that it features the best fictional representation of God—with apologies to Alanis Morissette in Dogma—that I've ever encountered. “God's Song” is narrated by God. It's a monologue, as its subtitle suggests, on why he loves mankind. The ending is the most incredible part. Its beauty and strangeness are what startled me awake, in a few different ways, that morning.

Speaking in the first person, God points out that we are stupid to trust him. I burn down your cities, he says. I take from you your children and you say how blessed are we. A fair point. It's one made quite often and one that has been wrestled with for centuries. It even has its own branch of theology: theodicy. But it's rarely God who points out how much suffering he puts us through and how stupid we are to just sit there and take it. Spoiler alert: the reason that God loves mankind is not because we trust him; our trust makes us seem crazy, actually. But he does like that we're helpless. God claims he loves us because we're crazy, but that's not accurate. In between the final few lines of the song is tucked an incredible little plaintive-yet-satisfied truth: You really need me. The neeeed is stretched out just a touch and he sounds wondering, in awe of his own power.

God as sociopath. God as poor-decision-maker who needs some needing so purely. God as good guy wandering off the path and doing some real, real bad things—whoops!—and getting away with it. God as a thirsty fiend for unconditional love. God as middle school boy, messing up, fessing up, and fearing the day it won't all reset so easily.

*

My iPod shuffled and another song, one I'd never heard before, came on. A boy stirred, went to see if donuts had manifested themselves yet. A boy rolled off the side of his air mattress. A boy barefooted over into the corner to play Magic: the Gathering by himself because his best friends were still sleeping sweetly.

The night before, as kids were being dropped off for the lock-in, I'd hung around and talked to a pair of parents and the head of school, instead of sprinting off to play sports with the boys. My boss shared an anecdote—a story about why not to walk away. A former teacher had sent an email about how little his jobs since teaching have mattered at all. He'd told a story about regret and about weeping in his car after one last, deceitful See ya next year to the students on his last last day. And I cried just a little over the stranger's regret.

My boss said, I'm a big believer in the universe giving you exactly what you need at just the right time and I remember thinking, That's exactly how I don't feel.

*

But that's been bullshit my whole life. Because for as long as I've rejected the idea of fate I have delightfully embraced the idea of synchronicity. Things happen and seem like miracles to me all the time. For a few years I gave God credit, and then one day I just didn't make those tally marks so easily. Why do we need to keep a box score?

I thought that I got my first girlfriend because she appeared on the sidewalk visible from my bedroom window at the exact moment I was yowling along loudly to the Bush song “Communicator.” Wonder if I've met my wife, I sang as she and a friend came into frame. Forget the fact that I was banking on the universe meaning Theresa when it turned out it had meant Jane. Forget the fact that three weeks later (after a popular girl forced our heads together like Barbie dolls to orchestrate our only kiss), it turned out the universe definitely hadn't meant Jane either. Forget the fact that every time I've thought I figured out what the universe meant and why it had decided to give me something I was hilariously mistaken—wrong like the kind of wrong people are only in broad romantic comedies.

It's kind of scary to believe in the universe instead of a god, because the universe doesn't need me at all. I could stay here, I could go. God, if he is out there messing with me, sending along suffering or relief thoughtlessly, like spam emails at the touch of a button—well, he needs me bad. And the question occurs to me, what do I become now if I go back to being someone without the terrifying power to change the way people feel about their lives? What do I become if I go run away to some place that gives me more of my life to myself but makes me more irrelevant? That's the kind of question you just walk around with for a while. The kind of question you just whisper inaudibly over and over as a song sits in your ears.

*

The night of the lock-in, we played soccer in the dark for over an hour. We had an actual pillow fight and we watched at least six episodes of ThunderCats projected on the wall. At one point, this happened: crouched at the ready, about to start a game of gaga ball, I turned to my boss and said, I think I sprained my butt. And maybe that was a thing that the universe wanted me to say at that particular time, because it certainly wasn't a sentence that I'd thought out and carefully planned in advance. I don't imagine I'll say that or anything like it to another boss again as long as I live. I don't imagine I'll ever cry as much about how awful a job is or cry as much about how wonderful one is. This will certainly turn out to be wrong, but as of now I don't imagine that ever again in my life anyone will need me as much as these boys do.

I guess, if I'm a firm believer in something, I'm a firm believer that the universe occasionally tells us things we need to know. Maybe it's not an elaborate and fated delivery system, but I do think it pays to pay attention. Whether you take your miracles as miracles or as funny little coincidences, I guess sometimes it's simple enough to say that we should listen.

*

Where are we sailing to, by the way? Away to where? Away from what? What is the preferred destination in any given life? I’ve been trying to figure that out for a while now, Randy, and I'm still navigating, tacking around drunkenly in the dark, probably midway through a long, coincidental, transcendent and boring journey through the universe back to where I already was and am. But I hold out hope that in a few hours or days the calm will give way to chaos or vice versa. In a few hours or days I'll hear a song that will make me feel or remember or fear or decide something. I'll lie on my back or walk through the park and sing a soundtrack to this, whatever this is. If somebody or something gives me that I think I have just enough.

—Eric Thompson

#323: The Police, "Ghost in the Machine" (1981)

Two weeks after my brother came home from Iraq in a coffin, I received a letter from him in which he said that if anything were to happen to him, his magic books were hidden in an old Converse shoe box on the top shelf of his closet. My brother—ten years older than me and therefore my idol who I worshipped with an intensity I wouldn’t see again until I discovered whiskey at the relatively advanced age of 22, being a late bloomer in drinking as I was in everything else—was a magician. Not the pulling rabbits out of a hat, sawing coffins in half, escaping handcuffs, death-defying type of magician, in a top hat and suit, standing on a stage in front of an audience of hundreds. My brother specialized in sleight of hand, card tricks, hypnosis, and, his favorite, mind reading. He carried a set of index cards and a permanent marker in his pocket at all times, where he would write down his prediction of what I was going to say. I’d put the folded-up card in my pocket and let him lead me through conversations, always confident that I could outsmart him, only to find, at the end, when I unfolded the card, the items I’d chosen scribbled there.

He’d written the letter the day before the IED hit his tank, killing him and one other. The letter came to me with a note from someone, another soldier presumably, who said he’d found it while packing up my brother’s belongings. He said the letter hadn’t even been put in an envelope yet, and so he’d read it, and thought that since it seemed private, it should come directly to me, rather than in the box of my brother’s belongings that arrived at our house with his body. The note was signed with initials, T.J. Years later—after the discovery of whiskey, at least a third of a bottle in—I’d wonder if the letter had been sealed but T.J. had opened it. I’d wonder if T.J. had been in love with my brother and needed to know what his nearly-last words had been. And then I’d cry for poor T.J., the love of his life killed in an explosion, shipped back in a closed coffin to a family T.J. would never meet, like maybe sending that note to me, the little sister, was his attempt to form a connection with us, and I, being only thirteen, had ignored it.

After I read the letter, I went into my brother’s room. My mother had closed the door the day he’d shipped out and forbidden anyone to enter, like she had somehow known what was to happen, just as my brother had known what numbers I’d choose, and was turning it into a shrine early, though I’d often heard, through the wall that our bedrooms shared, the squeaking of his box spring as she sat on it, followed shortly by the muffled sniffs that marked my mother’s tears. But I knew she wouldn’t come in while I searched for the book, as my aunt had dragged her—against her will—to a grief group after dinner. My father was downstairs, lost in a glass of whiskey. It was just me and the letter and T.J.’s note and my brother’s room, where I dragged his desk chair to the closet so I could reach the top shelf.

In his letter, he’d said the books were hidden, but I found the shoe box easily, stuffed behind an old duffel bag filled with the plastic dinosaurs he’d loved as a child. I pulled the shoebox down and sat on the desk chair, still facing into the closet so my brother’s letter jacket from high school—football and track, both received his senior year so he’d had just one winter to wear it—was inches from my face. It still smelled of leather, and the sleeve hanging in my vision was barely creased. I looked at that sleeve, at the patches for his sports, and I let my hands rest on top of the cardboard box. I was surprised at how light it was; I’d thought his magic books would weigh more. I’d pictured large tomes, ancient volumes of secrets. Even at thirteen, I knew I’d been romanticizing it, but he’d been the typical older brother, never letting me in his room, and so I’d built it into some kind of secret lair in my mind.

I remember, now, that what struck me most, at the time of my brother’s death, was the way everyone kept lamenting how young he was. And he was—his twenty-third birthday had been just two months prior to his run-in with the IED. But for some reason, at thirteen, these sentiments angered me. “So young,” his 11th grade English teacher said at the funeral. “Only 23!” said my aunt through her tears. “He was in his prime,” my father’s best friend said. “It should have been me,” said my grandfather. Every time someone mentioned or alluded to my brother’s age, I wanted to scream. Like younger children didn’t die all the time. Like he was the only 23-year-old to ever be killed. Like we weren’t all at danger, every day, of being hit by a car, falling out of a tree, struck by lightning, the odds of which, to me, anyway, seemed greater than a truck hitting an IED in some desert country halfway across the world that I couldn’t even picture. I think now that what angered me weren’t the lamentations of his age, but the platitudes they came in. They were impersonal, and made my brother feel like he was made of the same cardboard as the Converse shoebox in my hands. I know now that when the worst thing happens, people resort to pithy sayings and clichés because they’re in shock, because they understand that there are no words to describe their anguish, but that saying something feels better than keeping silent, but I was too young then to understand any of this.

What I remember, very clearly, is my decision not to open the shoebox. I suddenly couldn’t stand the idea of my brother’s secrets being revealed to me. For his tricks that so astounded me, even at thirteen, when I felt so wise about so much, to turn out to be mere hoaxes that I could learn myself felt like my brother would die all over again. I pushed the chair out of the closet and, hugging the shoebox to my chest, ran out of his room, down the stairs, past my father in the living room, who looked up at me from his glass but said nothing, through the kitchen, my socks slipping against the linoleum floor, out the back door, dashing across the sidewalk until I reached the big black dumpster in the alley next to the garage. I threw open its lid and set the shoebox at my feet. Then I picked up each book, one by one, and ripped out the pages. I didn’t even look at the titles. There were four books total, paperbacks no thicker than the Patrick O’Brian sea adventures my father loved so much, and I destroyed each of them, threw their words into the cavernous mouth of the dumpster until they were in shreds, all four of them, and then I dropped in the shoebox and closed the lid and sat down on the concrete driveway and cried.

And I thought then not of my brother as he must have been in his last moments before the tank exploded in a burst of heat, not of the way he lifted me off the ground when he hugged me goodbye, not of the fact that his favorite flavor of ice cream was cookies and cream, and he liked Pepsi better than Coke, and he plucked the stray hairs between his eyebrows, not of T.J. and the love he may or may not have borne my brother, love which may or may not have been reciprocated, but of the first magic trick I could remember. I was three, maybe four, in a booster seat in the car on a long ride to somewhere, my brother sitting next to me, our parents in the front, and my brother turned to me and said, “Look, I’ve lost my thumb.” He’d just folded it down, hidden it between his other fingers, but I didn’t know that. I screamed in terror—he’d lost his thumb!—and my mother snapped at my brother and my father laughed, and my brother held up both hands in front of me and said, “Look, it’s just a trick. See, just a trick.” I grabbed onto his two thumbs with my two hands, and they were so big, bigger than my hands, and both real, both there, and I stopped crying, because he was right. It was just a trick, and he was fine.

—Emma Riehle Bohmann

#324: David Bowie, "Station to Station" (1976)

Dear Reader,

When allowed the opportunity to take on David Bowie’s first RS 500 appearance with his 1976 album, Station to Station, I had so many things I wanted to tell you.

I was going to tell you I had been playing his latest album, Blackstar, on a feverish loop in the days prior to his death—the album was released on Bowie’s 69th birthday, January 8, 2016; Bowie died two days later due to cancer. I was going to tell you that more friends called, texted, messaged, and wrote to me when he passed than when both of my maternal grandparents passed away in 2015.

I was going to tell you that a friend called me at 1:01 a.m., as soon as news of Bowie’s death broke, to tell me so I wouldn’t be “blindsided” by it in the morning; that after word of his death I typed “David” into my Spotify app and was beyond outraged when fucking David Guetta showed up first—so much so that I screen-captured it as some sort of relic. And that after the 1:01 a.m. call, I melodramatically played “Girl Loves Me” on a loop as I sobbed thinking about a Bowieless world.

I was going to tell you that on the evening of his death, January 10, I unwittingly packed away a copy of Tracy K. Smith’s poetry collection, Life on Mars, to return it to a friend after I’d held onto the book for well over a year.

I was going to tell you anything I could to constellate my life around his. To form any kind of semblance of meaning.

But after stewing over this piece for four months and nearly 20 pages of single-spaced prose and umpteenth drafts later, I’m realizing that that’s what it’s always been about with David Bowie: redrafting, regeneration, reincarnation, persona. What an original idea—I know.

Call it the obvious: chameleonic. Call it music industry Darwinism. Call it a penchant for “Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide” and resurrection. Whatever you call it, one thing remains simple: David Bowie managed to stay relevant for nearly 50 years in an industry with a typical shelf-life shorter than that of a loaf of bread.

Station to Station is a testament to this as well as something darker about Bowie’s seemingly exponential rate of evolution over the years: a continued fascination with persona, à la the Thin White Duke, as a way of manifesting, controlling, and coping with his family’s history of schizophrenia. Not to mention his own drug-induced bouts with psychosis during the making of StS, due to heavy cocaine use.

Bowie spoke openly about his family’s history of “mental instability” (0:54) and his earliest role model, a half-brother, Terry, and Terry’s psychotic episodes (1:44) that simultaneously terrified and intrigued Bowie. Terry was diagnosed with schizophrenia and institutionalized before he committed suicide in 1985, for which Bowie later wrote the song “Jump They Say” (1993).

Terry’s fingerprints are all over Bowie’s career, especially 1970’s The Man Who Sold the World. The album not only includes sleeve art depicting the Cane Hill psychiatric hospital Terry was admitted to, but it also features the song “All the Madmen,” a track situated in the perspective of an institutionalized speaker. And later, 1973’s Aladdin Sane—a moniker and pun for “A lad insane.” Just to name a few.

However, this element of Bowie’s creative landscape and rhetoric is often overlooked and overshadowed by his groundbreaking thrust of sexuality- and gender-privy personas into the mainstream. But mainstreaming mental illness needs to be added to the long list of reasons why his works transcend the empty and nondescript pop bullshit that’s been an unfortunate staple of the mainstream palate since the beginning of time.

I urge you, if you have not already: go listen to StS and you’ll hear it too. The way Bowie’s, or rather the Thin White Duke’s, cocaine soul hijacks songs mid-verse, like the 10-minute opening title track. In it, a plodding train platform feel emerges as the heavy-ass bass line lolls and dips in and out of the song like a tired dog’s tongue, only to be destroyed almost exactly mid-track and replaced by a piano- and guitar-driven blue-eyed soul landscape, while our trusty guide, the Thin White Duke, assures us, “It's not the side-effects of the cocaine.” But it definitely is.

Cocaine residue is all over the Thin White Duke when he slips into the next track, “Golden Years,” as some kind of jaded urchin of the discotheque scene. And that’s exactly how he appeared when he lip-synched the song on Soul Train in 1975.

The rest of album is equally unsettled as it mutates from blue-eyed soul to a swooping hymn of balladry to the incoherent psychosis of "TVC15," inspired by a bad trip in which his pal, Iggy Pop, allegedly thought his girlfriend was being eaten by Bowie’s TV set. Long story short, in a matter of six tracks, the merciless Thin White Duke has the listener riding his coattails from the desolate train station, past his dealer’s place, through the trip, and then knocks you flat on your ass and deserts you for the comedown as he boards and flies off on a spaceship you can’t tell is real or not. This was Bowie’s ruthless shtick and he was damn good at it.

Case in point: July 3, 1973, Bowie’s first orchestrated “Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide” at London's Hammersmith Odeon. His casualty: the Ziggy Stardust persona.

Burned out by his Starman persona’s “meteoric rise,” he decided to kill Ziggy off while the cameras of D.A. Pennebaker filmed the show. Before launching into the “Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide” finale, Bowie announced the concert as the band’s last. Ever. The crowd went ballistic. But what most YouTubers manage to cut out of the performance is the most important part: the house music Bowie selected to play after the band left the stage for good.

As the crowd swells into hysterics, Pomp & Circumstance, March No. 1 begins to play. Better known as “The Graduation March” played at nearly every high school and college graduation, the song is audible in the last minute of Pennebaker’s recording (4:17-5:17). Bowie, down to the finest of details, executed a simultaneous suicide-graduation for Ziggy Stardust. And he continued to do so with future personas, flavors, and styles present in his creative works—in what some label as a chameleon-like characteristic. But I’d like to think it’s much darker and more complex than that easy and redundant label Bowie’s been plastered with since his untimely passing.

The creation of each new persona seemed to be a manifestation of fear about his mental state and lurking family history of mental health issues. With each killing, Bowie was flexing his agency. He was the one in charge. He was the one saying “when.”  He was not a chameleon—there was no reason for him to hide or blend in. He was exactly the opposite. He was an exhibitionist and advocate of opening up conversations about sexuality, gender, mental health, and so many other topics through art.

Bowie is anything but chameleon.

Bowie is denial. Bowie is coping. Bowie is survival. Bowie is exhibition. Bowie is agency. And he maintained his precious agency, and therefore his sanity, until the end, leaving us with Blackstar, his final persona: “I’m a blackstar, I’m a blackstar”…while still calling the shots:

Look up here, I’m in heaven
I’ve got scars that can’t be seen,
I’ve got drama, can’t be stolen
Everybody knows me now

—Emma Murray

#325: Eric Clapton, "Slowhand" (1977)

You remember the first date, the heavy metal show somewhere forty minutes away, expecting the venue to be full of mosh pits and smoke, surprised when there were only three other people there—some old man with a rattail, and a tattooed couple. But you mostly remember holding your date’s hand during band transitions. You remember standing out on a deck with him, looking up at the sky at four in the morning waiting for a meteor shower to come even though you knew it was too cloudy, and, after an hour, realizing that the kiss you both wanted wasn’t going to happen, you remember going back inside the house only to fall asleep together. You remember the first kiss. It was in your basement; you remember how your hands shook. His hands were shaking harder than yours. You remember the time you lay in bed with him and the two of you burst into “Bohemian Rhapsody” and each verse got higher pitched somehow, quickening and intensifying to the point where he headbanged over his air guitar.

And then came the long-distance, which neither of you thought would happen. You’d both agreed to just be really, really good friends who would definitely support one another going on dates with other people. After all, everybody says college is the perfect time to date around, and you’d only known him for a month. But when a girl asked him to be her dance partner, you cried. And he told you later that he’d gotten jealous when you found a guy who played ukulele just like you did. But you didn’t go for ukulele-man and he stopped going to dance classes, and you two started to text more, call more. One day you two decided to start dating. It became your favorite day of the year.

Four months of long-distance, and then it was December first and then it was Christmas and then you saw him again. You ran out of your car and jumped onto him and you kissed him, and then you just let your foreheads touch and said how much you’d missed one another. You wanted to cry, you were so happy, but you didn’t. You couldn’t do anything but smile and squeeze his hand.

He became your first ever New Year’s kiss, sitting on his friend’s couch watching Star Wars, his friend asleep. And the whole month that you were with him he was sick, and you were his bedside nurse, were the one to hold his hand at the doctor’s office, the one bringing him tea that he felt too sick to drink. Sometime that month you fell in love with him. Your very own first love, sleeping in your bed while you made lunch downstairs. Maybe it was during the trip to Baltimore that you fell in love with him, getting lost through the streets alone at midnight, trying to find NyQuil for him, and getting back to the hotel room to find him upset that he’d made you walk alone in a dark, foreign city. Or when he sat in a bookstore for four hours with you and helped you narrow down your book options from fifteen to three. Maybe you fell in love with him then.

But you really started to fall in love when you first met. A bunch of your neighbors were longboarding down your street, but he was the only one you hadn’t seen before, and he slowed behind the others. “Do you want to try?” he asked, and you nodded. He took hold of your hands for the first time and led you down a hill, running beside you as you smiled and screeched when he let go. His friends were further down the hill but he ran to you and led you back up. “No stopping this time, let yourself balance,” he said. This time he put his hands on your waist and you felt his shoulders for the first time. He ran next to you again but this time you didn’t let him go, and he smiled at you. He’s charming, you thought, but don’t get involved. Your previous boyfriend had just dumped you, but this boy on the longboard with his wide smile and Rise Against shirt made you forget about the breakup. He made you smile and laugh and you never wanted to let him go.

Now it’s a year later and you’re sitting in your bed listening to Eric Clapton’s Slowhand, playing “Wonderful Tonight” on repeat and hoping that maybe you’ll stop crying soon. It’s been eighteen hours since the breakup and, god, shouldn’t you have run out of tears by now? But the first two chords of “Wonderful Tonight” keep pushing them out, and you miss him. The breakup was for him though. So that he could figure out his life; it’s hard enough without a relationship, but you know the relationship was hurting him. No matter how much he loves you and cares about you, no matter how much he wanted to stay with you and try to fix things, you realized that he was giving too much time and emotion to you, and you were coddling him, and he just needed himself back.

Will you two be friends? Your friends say yes; last night he said he wanted to. You hope so.

Your mom comes in crying; she’s so sad for you. She says she’ll miss him, and she wanted you two to work out but sometimes you just have to let go.

Your phone dings—the group chat you’re in with him. He’s talking about gophers and you ask a question and he replies and you take a deep breath and turn your phone off. Your very own first love, talking about gophers while you realize you’ll forever associate Eric Clapton with this breakup. You realize you need to stop listening to the music. You don’t know what else to do though.

You repeat the song one more time; you say this will be the last time you listen to it.

The song’s ending now. You hate it when things end.

—Nicole Efford

#326: The Cure, "Disintegration" (1989)

The entire way, you told yourself jump.

Because how could you not?

What would they say about you?

You’d never been to the quarry before. Certainly not with the coolest girl in school, who pushed a curtain of cascading hair from her eyes in the bucket passenger seat of your 1981 Volkswagen Rabbit pickup truck. She sat on the lap of her boyfriend, the best skater in town. He worked next to you in jewelry class.

When you first met him, you waited for the other shoe to drop. You’d moved from your old town intent on shrugging off the daily hipchecks and epithets: a pair of Reeboks and an arsenal of Ocean Pacific would allow you to blend in.

But they didn’t.

Your first day was much the same as the last in your old town.

Over time, after you bought a Sex Pistols tape on the way to church, awestruck that this guy who couldn’t really sing was so fearlessly in command, your wardrobe shifted to Airwalk prototypes, skateboard graphics, band logos, baggy pants. These, somehow, rendered you mercifully invisible to the heckling hordes.

But your rural home had no pavement.

You skateboarded in an empty metal satellite dish rendered traditionally useless when your grandfather clipped it with a snowplow and worried that you couldn’t ollie high enough to warrant the gear. You couldn’t grind a curb. You were a fraud clinging to a life raft of signifiers. Because it was always something.

You spent school lunches in the library, poring over microfilm in search of facts about Dead Kennedys and Johnny Rotten, but you feared all the facts lodged in your head wouldn’t protect you from the label of poser you felt was an inevitability.

But this guy—who could do handrails, you’d heard—helped you as you floundered in jewelry. His rings, pendants were store-quality, and you could barely use a pair of tin snips. But this was no matter: you talked about bands and skaters and marveled, silently, that he wasn’t making fun of you for your lack of manual dexterity, or giving you shit for wearing a Cure shirt even though you never saw them play. He talked to you like you were equals, not like someone who could do kickflips and date girls.

Your contrasty photographs of decaying barnboard sheds hung in the school’s art exhibit, which you attended on your own, driving to school under an eerie overcast sky, the sun blotted out by scaled clouds.

You looked at your pictures, everyone else’s art, did your best to avoid your classmates.

The skater was there.

What are you doing after this?

Going home, you thought, and re-reading skateboard magazines.

I don’t know, you said.

Because some people are going up to the quarries.

I can drive, you chanced, if you know where it is.

The skater’s girlfriend appeared, as if from thin air. Of course you knew who she was: her Sid Vicious shirts and ripped tights were so cool, her half-shaved head. The way she told jocks to go fuck themselves when they made fun of the dog collar padlocked around her neck. She was terrifying and awesome.

Hey, she said. Mind if I come?

This cannot be happening, you thought.

The quarry, the company.

Something would go wrong.

Your truck groaned as they piled in. The skater gave directions, asking if he could put in a tape.

You apologized for your tape deck, which only played at twice normal speed. This made his Bad Brains sound like angry chipmunks. You all laughed.

Here, she said. Let me try.

She hit eject and pulled a tape from her army jacket.

Telltale windchimes, regular speed.

Wait, you said. How did you do that?

She smiled and shrugged. Just lucky, I guess. You have a Cure shirt, right?

I do, you said, even as you marveled that someone—anyone—had noticed something about you for purposes unrelated. But then not just someone.

The wind, blowing harder than any time you could remember, pushed your tiny pickup around as you drove. You made adjustments and waited for commentary which never came.

The skater navigated you to the quarry, on the outskirts of town. As you drove, you worried. You weren’t much of a swimmer, and had no love of heights. But you had to jump. Because the skater and the cool girl would. And you couldn’t—could not—chance their ire.

You parked at a metal gate, chained shut, spraypainted, surrounded by cars plastered with band and skateboard stickers. A paved path led up an incline.

Let’s go, they said.

The sun faded from the overcast sky, leaving a creepy glow behind ominous clouds. As you walked you wondered how you’d find your way back to the gate in the dark.

The sky crackled as you three walked.

What is that?

I think it’s heat lightning, the cool girl replied.

As you walked, you talked about records and bands. You’d seen five rock shows. The skater and the cool girl were impressed you’d seen Fugazi play, Public Image Ltd. All the while, the sky lit bright at irregular, soundless intervals, adding to the unreality.

You mounted a crest to find a loose knot of kids you recognized from school—skaters, girls from the darkroom, the jewelry lab—thronged around a campfire.

In the distance, a splash, which echoed far after impact.

Who was that?

One of the guys around the fire, with long hair—you knew both his names from studying your yearbooks—said Joe.

Someone offered a beer, which you were too scared to drink. You tried to sound as cool as possible when you said you were driving, braced yourself for abuse, received none.

Discussion of bands, skateboards, people you didn’t know.

The sky crackled like the end of the world.

You couldn’t bring yourself to walk to the edge of the quarry. Instead, you ventured as close as you felt comfortable, light fading from the sky, illumination only from fire and the crackling heat lightning. You couldn’t see the bottom.

Back at the fire, you sat next to the skater and the cool girl on a log.

A crackling from the woods. A figure emerged—Joe, you knew from your yearbook.

I almost got lost, he said. It’s so dark.

You turned to the cool girl. Are you going to jump?

She laughed. Oh God, no. The only person crazy enough to jump is Joe.

Now, all this seems so humdrum, almost cliché. But at the time, you wondered if you’d ever have the words to manage to make it all believable, the wonder and import, electricity flaring above you in a clotted sky, bringing things to light.

—Michael T. Fournier

#327: Liz Phair, "Exile in Guyville" (1993)

Guyvilles

—Laura Eve Engel

#328: Sonic Youth, "Daydream Nation" (1988)

There’s a kind of magic in New York City. You walk out of your door on an ordinary day, you go about your business and perhaps, on your commute, at a meeting, at a dinner or party that you tried your hardest to get out of, you make a connection. The degrees of separation are thin. Down corridors and around corners, doors open magically, often ones you didn’t realize you needed to enter. I like to think of these as serendipitous—they always lead to something, even if it’s not what you were expecting.

Sonic Youth’s “Hyperstation”—“Falling outta sleep I hit the floor / I pull on some rock tee and I’m out with the door / From Bowery to Broome to Greene / I’m a walking lizard / Last night’s dream was a talking baby wizard / All coming from female imagination / Daydreaming days in a daydream nation…It’s an anthem in a vacuum on a hyperstation / Daydreaming days in a daydream nation”—sounds like a New York City summer. I imagine that the summer of 1988 must have felt endless, especially if you were just a couple of months away from opening the door to Daydream Nation—one of the most revered albums of all time, one that would join the Library of Congress Archive of Culturally Significant American Recordings, and one that would wind up on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

Daydream Nation was born on October 18, 1988. In the months leading up to the release, the band recorded at NYC’s Greene St. Recording—known primarily at the time for pumping out hip-hop records. The engineer, Nick Sansano, worked with groups like Public Enemy on It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, released in June of 1988, and Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock on “It Takes Two.” On the surface, band and engineer didn’t have much in common musically. Perhaps the common denominator was an understanding of the power of noise.

Rob Base, and DJ E-Z Rock—may he rest in peace—came from Harlem, as did I. “It Takes Two” (from the album of the same name, which dropped in August 1988) was fiery. The song takes me back to creating dance routines with my best friend after school in her parents’ living room. This is a song you heard blasting from Suzuki Jeeps on 125th Street o­n a hot Saturday afternoon, when the thing to do was to walk up and down the avenues to see who was who and what was what. The other song from that album that really moved me was “Joy and Pain.” I don’t know if I was aware of it then, but it encapsulated the complexity of life in four lines: “Joy and pain / Like sunshine and rain.” I was too young to understand the true sentiment, just old enough to recognize the basic tenets—you don’t always get what you want, life isn’t fair, but sometimes it’s beautiful. That undercurrent took it from party song to classic.

Daydream Nation shares this timelessness. It might have been made in the summer of 1988, but it never feels dated or old. Widely considered Sonic Youth’s magnum opus, it was their last record on an indie label before they got their first major label deal—it got them their deal. Digging into their catalogue, the unexpected is the norm. Take their side project with Mike Watt, as Ciccone Youth. “Get in the Groovey,” which riffs on Madonna’s “Into the Groove” is so tongue-in-cheek. It underscored how they made the jump to the sound of “Teenage Riot,” their first “mainstream” hit, which really wasn’t that mainstream after all. It was another way of looking at themselves, at their sound. It set them apart because it seemed so different from what they were already creating, but maybe it was who they were all along. Describing the image of the single candle used as Daydream Nation’s cover art to Rolling Stone, Kim Gordon said, “We wanted to use something that was outwardly conservative looking, just because people wouldn’t expect that. The most radical things outwardly look very conservative.”

How do you make a classic? How do you design an album that captures a mood, a time, a moment, so strongly that it becomes home? How do you create an endless summer or the coldest winter ever? I think Sonic Youth wound up breaking new ground because they weren’t trying to—they were simply open to change. Their attempt to capture the magic of their improv sessions led to the impressive length of the album. The chords layer so instinctively that it’s hard to distinguish where one track ends and the next begins. It’s uncertain, like one of those magic days in NYC where you never know who you’ll run into, or what you’ll get into—all that’s certain is heady, delicious anticipation. There’s a sense of urgency to hold on to the moment, knowing letting go is inevitable, like in “Cross the Breeze,” when Gordon sings: “Let’s go walking on the water / Come all the way please / I wanna know / Should I stay or go? / No need to be scared / Let’s jump into the day / I wanna know / I think I oughta go / Close your eyes and make believe / You can do whatever you please / I wanna know / I think I better go.”

Even after a double album’s worth of songs, the end comes quickly. It feels just like a city summer—hot up in Harlem, crazy down in the village—every summer that is important, monumental, where something is at stake, even if that is just finding a way to make it unforgettable.

—Lee Erica Elder

#329: James Brown, "In the Jungle Groove" (1986)

FELLAS THINGS DONE GOT TOO FAR GONE

Clyde could barely feel the weight of the sticks in his hands; they hung at the ready as he shifted his body. The stool behind the kit was tilted. The walls hung with carpeting kept the sound penned in. There were no windows.

But James’s voice hung like a chandelier in that cramped room. Others chimed in over the intercom as the tape reels began to spin and Jimmy broke out with a bold stroke. The air jabbered. Horns flanked from either side and with a quick eye from the man Clyde laid it down. James took to the rug and got to work.

Soon the room was taken in by the groove—the kicks, snares, claps, and cymbals rode the ebb and kept the pace. It was give and take. Each player sharing the ring, bobbing and weaving, sparring like the prelude to a fistfight, or rather giving each other space to walk it out.

Throughout the session there was no fanfare beyond their noise. Streamers didn’t fall, and by round of applause they were not crowned the winners. But pressed in the grooves, housed in the vinyl, the moment gestured to a time beyond the known horizon; waiting in the crates like a quiet storm.

CAN I SAY SOMETHING?

In The Jungle Groove was not a record in the proper sense. Its intention was to capitalize on a sound that was beginning to gain traction among a burgeoning generation of music consumers. A compilation of tracks remixed and unreleased that captured the shards of funk and soul that went on to be the seeds of hip-hop; if anything, this record was a greatest hits for what would be the foundation of a genre.

Released in August 1986, the album boasted cuts recorded almost two decades prior that had gathered dust, or lacked the grace of a proper pressing. Aimed at “true students of the Godfather” and eschewed for passive listening, what it was was a weapon. In nine tracks and clocking in at just over an hour, what followed was a veritable arsenal of samples: horns, yells, cuts, grooves, loops, and breaks that when pulled tight caught voices in a soft landing.

For MCs that needed training, it was an arena—to run tires and jump rope, to make sense of a world that demanded stillness in the wake of oppression. For producers, it became the hallmark of a sound.

CAN I GET A WITNESS? 

It’s windy and raining. The traffic off the lake hums at midday, the din of engines idles. Inside the record shop, behind walls of glass blocks, the light spills across the crates in dishwater grey. Thumbing through, your hands pause over the image of a man at rest, leg up, in a train station, at a bus stop, in a holding cell. Dressed in all denim with an unlit cigarette. In The Jungle Groove scrawled in graffiti script. You’ve heard of James Brown, sure, who hasn’t, but never this. Stuck to the plastic cover above his profile someone’s written in marker:

“Quintessential”   “An underground number one”   “—a classic”

And before you know it you’re making your way across the store to the listening station.

“Be careful with that one, and no scratching,” the owner punctuates with a nod toward the vinyl in your hand. Scratching? You carefully remove the record and place it on the table. Adjusting the headphones, you drop the needle on side one and wait in cushioned silence. Then that voice: “Fellas, things done got too far gone…” and you’re hit full on with horns, drums, guitar and your mouth slides open without you noticing.

The minutes fall away. You have a sudden urge to feel the record, a tactile desire. To pull back the drums, to walk back the voice, that voice. You look around. You can feel the grooves in your prints circling below; that drag. Shoulder pressed to ear and you lay your tips down on the track like a hand to a lover’s back. And suddenly you bring it back with the angle of rotation on the table like ERREEEHHKK and then the guy from behind the counter pulls you back.

CAN I TELL ‘UM?

When sunsets burned low to the smell of charcoal the heat was the last thing to break: the cooler and bottles sweating, the hydrant cracked open. The layered voices and fading sun caught in blocks by the smoke. Clotheslines hung over the block like banners and flags as children and neighbors hopscotched, slapped thighs, and told stories. From inside the needle on the song spilled a groove into the street; the ricocheted shuffle off the record, the arm jumping with soles on the parquet as plastic forks scraped paper plates.

At the end of the block DIY contraptions and repurposed amplifiers rose from milk crates and garbage cans. RCA turntables pulled from home stereos came together on a broken door set on cinderblocks with power cables running to the streetlights. With everything connected all eyes turned toward the sun and its descent. Falling from full orange roundness to half, to a sliver of light above the buildings, and like a synapse the city grid rushed to fill the encroaching darkness. When the bulb above threw its glow the equipment began to hum, the energy kinetic. Hands up and down the block went up with a cry as the needle hit the groove and sound rushed to the corners of the evening.

PUT YOUR HAND ON THE BOX AND FEEL THIS

The boombox entered the park at shoulder height, held fast by a heavy ringed hand with volume on full blast. It was just after sundown, and the gazebo at the center, old fashioned and weather-worn, hung in a halo of sodium light. Unremarkable were it not for the brothers dragging cardboard, pounding it flat on the wooden floor, milling about, stretching. And with the mounting of steps, the sound amplified naturally under the vaulted ceiling, and the bodies closed in around it. A mesh of chatter and trash talking hung just below the drums.

“Who we got on deck?”

“My man stole fire, you cut this tape?”

“My ol’ man worked late so I copped his stereo.”

“Shit’s hot!”

“Man how you get it to ride on like that?”

“Some cats, they tape up their breaks. I catch mine right every time.”

“Shit man, get outta here.”

“Ha almost copped yourself a foot!”

“When you see a man doing a windmill you stand down.”

Each tight coil of limbs unfurled into the physical embodiment of sound. The legs swung with the sticks, hands working overtime. When the tape faded into hiss the ringed hand would flip sides and it all picked right back up. Entering one by one they took turns, paid homage to the music, and kept it cool as ice.

KEEP ON SINGIN KEEP ON SINGIN KEEP ON SINGIN
KEEP ON SINGIN KEEP ON SINGIN KEEP ON SINGIN
KEEP ON SINGIN KEEP ON SINGIN KEEP ON SINGIN

Never in your life had you been told to fear the pavement. You learned to walk on those sun-hot slabs that scraped away the skin from your knees. Now you’ve had to offer way more than skin. The murmurs that you’d heard, that hate had taken over. It was never real beyond what hung like sour apples in your feed. You think for just a flash about the first place you tasted caramel, the sound of sirens blurred with horns, the word petrichor and how it used to rain.

Ultimately your mind hurtles back to a time when your family went out walking on a Sunday. Hand in hand by the lake and your momma held your hand with her hair tied up like when you said you think of her wearing nothing but that scarf and a smile. How that skin meant the world to you, a hunger for the taste of salt. Pretty soon it’s just dark but the feeling stays to linger.

You worry now just like you used to, but now the film whispers too in place of just you. We move as a team, we never move alone.

So when I say hut motherfucker you run like your momma calling. There’s no room for spare luggage. There’s no ‘I'll meet you there,’ it's a we all go or we ain't moving. I got nothing but love for you baby can you dig it?

—Nick Graveline

#330: Neil Young, "Tonight's the Night" (1975)

In 1975, John Ashbery published Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. In the collection’s title poem is this passage:

How many people came and stayed a certain time,
Uttered light or dark speech that became part of you
Like light behind windblown fog and sand,
Filtered and influenced by it, until no part
Remains that is surely you.

Included with early vinyl releases of Tonight’s the Night are a handful of lines written by Neil Young: “I’m sorry. You don’t know these people. This means nothing to you.”

*

I’ve been stalling on writing whatever this is, as though waiting will somehow make something arrive.

*

If you’ve read Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography, you know that during the recording of Tonight’s the Night—most of it taking place on a single day, August 26, 1973—Young and his producer, David Briggs, subsisted on tequila and hamburgers. “That was the input,” Young said.

*

David Briggs was born and raised in Douglas, Wyoming, 250 miles southeast of Greybull, where I was born, and 135 miles northeast of Laramie, where I now live. Briggs left Wyoming on Christmas Day in 1960 to hitchhike to Los Angeles, then Canada, then back to California. Young was hitchhiking through Topanga Canyon when Briggs stopped to pick him up. The rest, as one is prone to say, is history. Beautiful, fucked up history.

*

It was July, and it was raining in Morrison, Colorado. I was waiting for Young to take the stage at Red Rocks. The stranger to my left was drunk and asking me about my occupation when Young walked out to the piano, sat down, and started playing “After the Gold Rush.” I think of “I was thinking about what a friend had said / I was hoping it was a lie” as a precursor to Young singing “When I picked up the telephone / And heard that he’d died out on the mainline” about Bruce Berry.

*

That shining bit of piano at the beginning of Tonight’s the Night is Young. Behind him are muffled voices, a taciturn hi-hat. You can hear the tape rolling. Three people sing “Tonight’s the night,” repeating it until, at 45 seconds and the first mention of Bruce Berry, everything gets loud. There’s slipshod improvisation. The whole progression’s a mess. And there in the middle of it all you know that doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that technical grace isn’t on display, doesn’t matter that nothing’s in tune, doesn’t matter that voices enter and leave out of sync with each other. What matters is that you feel something immeasurable making its way to you across some kind of restless transmission. It makes sense, then, that the last word sung in the song is an acute Whoa.

*

Bruce Berry died of a heroin overdose on June 4, 1973.

Danny Whitten died from a combination of Valium and alcohol on November 18, 1972. He’d been trying to kick his heroin addiction.

I’m sorry. I don’t know these people. This means something to me.

Danny Whitten played guitar and sang with Neil Young and Crazy Horse. He worked on Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere and After the Gold Rush. On November 18, 1972, Young gave Whitten $50 and a plane ticket back to Los Angeles after firing him from the band. That night, Young received a call from a coroner in Los Angeles. Danny Whitten was dead.

The Farmers Almanac archives say the temperature at Los Angeles Municipal Airport was around 65 degrees on November 18, 1972. No rain reported.

Bruce Berry was a working man. He used to load that Econoline van. He was a roadie for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. And if Wikipedia is to be believed (I’m sorry), Berry was, for a while, a happy man.

Of the historic events noted for June 4, 1973—and there aren’t many—the most annoying event has to be the patent for the goddamn ATM being issued to some guys named Don, Tom, and George.

*

There are so many vehicles in Tonight’s the Night.

Think about it.

In “Come On Baby, Let’s Go Downtown” there’s “Snake eyes, French fries / And I got lots of gas.” Car’s implied. Could be a fart reference too.

In “Roll Another Number” Young sings “It’s too dark to put the keys in my ignition / And the morning sun has yet to climb my hood ornament.”

In “Albuquerque” Young sings about flying down the road, starving to be alone.

In “Lookout Joe” a Cadillac puts a hole in the arm of Bill from up on the hill.

In “Tired Eyes” four dead men are left lying in an open field full of old cars with bullet holes in the mirrors.

And, of course, there’s that Econoline van in “Tonight’s the Night.”

Part of Jonathan Demme’s Journeys, a 2011 concert documentary featuring Young, is spent in a car. Young drives around his hometown, Omemee, Ontario, and talks about his childhood there. At one point, Young drives past a public school named after his father and says, “I tried eating tar off the road. That was the beginning of my close relationship with cars, I think.”

In a 2014 NPR interview about his Special Deluxe: A Memoir of Life & Cars, Young talks with Ari Shapiro and this exchange happens:

YOUNG: …As a matter of fact, I love listening to music in cars.

SHAPIRO: Why do you prefer to listen to it in the car?

YOUNG: Well, because the scene is always changing. It’s the world’s greatest video. And you’re semi-occupied by, you know, driving the car. So your subconscious is wide open. Your conscious is busy, so you’re not thinking about the music too much. You’re just feeling it.

*

When I think of me at my worst, I remember months of weeks of days of hours of not remembering, spaces of time I’ll never recover. At the points where going out into the world seemed feasible, I’d leave Seattle and drive around Washington with my music, drive across a state or two before coming back. Often, the music I was listening to was Neil Young’s.

*

When John Ashbery won the 1975 National Book Award for Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, he said this in his acceptance speech: “For as long as I have been publishing poetry, it has been criticized as ‘difficult’ and ‘private,’ though I never meant for it to be. At least, I wanted its privateness to suggest the ways in which all of us are private and alone, in the sense Proust meant when he said, ‘Each of us is truly alone.’ And I wanted the difficulty to reflect the difficulty of reading, any kind of reading, which is both a pleasant and painful experience since we are temporarily giving ourselves to something that may change us.”

*

In his review of Tonight’s the Night, Robert Christgau wrote, “In Boulder, it reportedly gets angry phone calls whenever it’s played on the radio. What better recommendation could you ask?”

For the record, I think Boulder’s ridiculous.

For the record, I’m glad Young ripped off the Rolling Stones.

*

Young once tried to describe Tonight’s the Night. He said, “When I first started the record, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. But I did get into a persona. I have no real idea where the fuck it came from, but there it was. It was part of me. I thought I had gotten into a character—but maybe a character had gotten into me.”

*

Tonight’s the Night isn’t my favorite Neil Young album. (And does it have to be?) That will always be On the Beach, which was recorded after Tonight’s the Night but released before it. Reprise, Young’s record label, thought the content of Tonight’s the Night was too dark. It took him two years to convince Reprise to release the album.

No matter. The dark makes its way through.

—Shannon Tharp

#331: The Beatles, "Help!" (1965)

The drummer has the lights in his eyes and his clothes have been painted red. He’s standing on the beach and he’s wearing a suit and the suit has been painted red and his face has been painted red and he’s in the Bahamas for the first time in his life and it’s cold in a way that he never expected. The water is invisible, though, and the sky is a color he’s never seen before. He’s up to his shins in the cold Atlantic and he shivers with a memory of coldness, of the cold seeping in under his skin and filling the spaces between his bones, even the tiniest bones of the tips of his fingers. He was cold, always: cold before he was a drummer, cold before he had a name, cold when he crunched sugar in his teeth in a bomb cellar while the world shook dust into his hair, cold when he was nobody but a child who was dying.

The drummer is on a soundstage that looks like Buckingham Palace and he is flubbing his lines. The drummer has been smoking grass for hours and is trying to say his words and to put them all in the proper order but everything is a smear and no one is taking any of it seriously. The drummer doesn’t read so well because he spent most of his time as a child who was dying, his mind far away, on a hill covered in thick grass, floating like a spore, then coming to rest on the soft bed of a treetop, warmed like a blister in the weak English sun. Someone brings tea to the soundstage. Later, they’ll pretend to sing their song about wanting to be loved.

The drummer is tied to a bed on the deck of a sailboat bobbing in the frigid waters of the Bahamas. They’ve ruined another suit—they’ve ruined so many. Painted it red. He doesn’t think of the waste anymore, and he doesn’t think about how he doesn’t think about it. The child who was dying owned two shirts and two pairs of short pants and one pair of socks and one shitty pair of shoes, but tonight the drummer will eat shellfish and conch, pigeon peas and pork. He’ll drink rum and Coke. He’ll peel off his ruined suit and slide into a fresh one, he’ll break the paper on the shirt himself and he will not think about what it means, and tomorrow he’ll put the ruined suit back on and he’ll watch as it is ruined even more with red paint and salt water. Later, they’ll pretend to sing their other song about wanting to be loved.

The child who is dying has the lights in his eyes but he is far away and it doesn’t seem to bother him. His body is exploding like a supernova. It crackles and pops but there isn’t any music in it. He understands nothing about it and it doesn’t mean anything. It’s just the thing that happened. Later, he’ll eat Heinz beans. He’ll drink powdered milk from a clouded glass. His bedclothes will turn gray as he looks at the pictures in a comic book and he will be absolutely nobody, shivering under a blanket.

The drummer climbs into the boot of a car. The drummer waves an empty wine bottle at a tiger. The drummer plays the drums in a field in the freezing English countryside under an Earl Gray sky, surrounded by tanks and haystacks. This is what he’s doing. He shivers and he laughs at the shiver and they keep that bit in the film and when he watches it, much later, at the premier, he’ll remember the chill and he’ll see it on the faces of the others, his brothers, whom he loves. He will not remember the heat of the fever that nearly killed the dying child, because who would want to remember such a thing if they didn’t have to? He only watches as they pretend to play their song about hating yourself and feeling desperate and it is just like any other song except it isn’t.

The child who is dying does die and then is reborn. The child who is reborn starts all over from nothing and has nowhere to go but goes somewhere anyway. He has no name so he picks one.

The child who is reborn has the lights in his eyes, and it is the light of the Bahamian sun, and he is up to his shins in the frigid Bahamian waters and they are painting his suit red and they are painting his face red and his brothers are standing next to him and they’ve all been smoking grass for hours and laughing and it’s all the same as it always has been but it’s all becoming something else. The drummer has a belly full of shellfish and conch and he is thinking about the rums and Cokes he will drink when this is finished, and he nearly thinks about the child who was dying but he doesn’t, he thinks only of the water he is standing in now and how far it is from where he came from and how clear it looks—how mercifully free of filth and silt, how absolutely transparent in the most astounding way—but how cold it is, how surprisingly cold.

—Joe P. Squance

#332: Richard & Linda Thompson, "Shoot Out the Lights" (1982)

            “Remember /
                        when we were hand in hand?”
 

But no, no—I don’t want to go there.

This is not a breakup album.

So many of the pieces on this site about rock and roll are about lost love, cruel break-ups, drift-outs, sappy, hapless exits. So many of the first lines are laced with bittersweet nostalgia:

            “My mother listened to Springsteen’s ‘One Step Up’ when she left my father.” (#467)

            “We were on a mountain in Switzerland when Beth told me she didn’t think she loved me anymore.” (#383)

            “That I loved him there is no question, I can say that now that he is gone.” (#425)

            “The last time I saw Tiff…” (#471)

            “Where the fuck was she, anyway?” (#460)

            “We were about one year in, and I’d already learned not to open myself up to your judgment. But I wanted someone
            to help me choose new glasses.” (#355)

            “At some point in college I acquired a Smiths album.” (#473)

            “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.” (#400)

            “But then her cat died.” (#354)

            “Most of all, he remembers her scent.” (#384)

            “Is it fair to love an album for its last song?” (#395)

I had an anti-romantic image in my mind of what my first contribution to this project—this website about rock and roll!—would be. It would be baroque and unrelatable. It would not be about youth. It would not be about loss or college. It would be inedible.

A wild futuristic fuck you!

An anti-punk arabesque snake temple for old people!

If there needed to be cybernetics, there would be cybernetics!

And then my turn came, and Shoot Out The Lights was up for grabs, and I salivated and snatched it up. —I love this album! —It’s about taking aim. And darkness. —And Richard Thompson is on the cover looking smug. —And there’s only one light bulb left in the spaceship! —And he’s shooting it out!

And having chosen this flickering force field on which to map my progressive essay not about love and not about loss and not about heartsickness or my 20s or 30s—

I caught the cool eyes of Linda Thompson, looking down at me warily from her portrait on the peeling wall, and I remembered what this album is. Or, what it’s supposed to be: One of the great albums about the end of a marriage. One of the great albums about love in its death throes.

Maybe, definitely, like, the 3rd greatest late-70s/early-80s rock and roll breakup album.

And what could be sadder and lovelier and more bitter than Richard Thompson writing lines like “Don’t use me endlessly / It’s too long / too long to myself” and getting his soon-to-be-ex-wife Linda to sing them?

And what could be better nostalgia-fodder than an undeniably great love letter lost in the iPod shuffle (despite its greatness) behind those cooler, flashier “see ya” albums Blood on the Tracks and Rumours?

And so I’m tempted to write a narrative of love and loss and young romance that would pit this album against Dylan’s bleeding heart, and give Stevie and Lindsey a run for their witchy money. To write a romantic gut-punch that gives Richard and Linda’s story the 20th century gravity it deserves…

But I’m not going to do that.

Because this is not a breakup album, okay?

This is an album with the lines “The motion won't leave you / won't let you remain, don't worry / It's a restless wind / and a sleepless rain, don't worry.”

And it’s an album with the lines “In the dark who can see his face? / In the dark who can reach him?”

And even the most beautiful, heartbreaking song on the record—a song that’s obviously about Richard and Linda’s fraying love affair—

“I’m walking on a wire /    
                                                     I’m walking on a wire…”

—calls to my mind a narrative not from my past, but from the other side of the world’s precarious sci-fi present:

In the last shot of Jia Zhangke’s film Still Life, we see Sanming, one of the two main characters, turn to face the jagged silhouette of the buildings he has been helping knock down.

Sanming is a coal miner from northern China, who has come far south to the Yangzi River to find his errant wife and daughter. While he searches for them, he finds work on a demolition crew. He spends his days tearing down the houses of Fengjie, an ancient city which, in a few months, will be completely submerged by the waters of the Yangzi as they rise behind the Three Gorges Dam (the enormous weight of which, it’s been calculated, will shift the earth’s poles and slow its rotation).

On his way home, Sanming looks back at his day’s work and sees a tightrope walker, calmly stepping through the air on a line strung between two half-destroyed buildings.

There is no explanation for any of this: the artist’s exercise, his risk and his flourish, as he balances between the two buildings doubly doomed by hammer and water. Sanming’s speechless watching. Our watching them both work their endlessness into the scar-scape. The film is over.

When Richard and Linda sing “I’m falling” together for the last time, they sound triumphant. It makes no sense.

And in the last moment of “Walking on a Wire,” when all he has to do to end the song is pluck his guitar one last time and bring the pain to a close, Richard Thompson hesitates.

The previous note is fading; the moment to act seems lost.

And when he finally ends it, too late, he knows damn well that with that pause and with that moment’s sweet tension, he’s embedded in our muscles the longing to hear it all again.

                        “Do it all day, the backstreet slide…”

Why do we want to write about our past when we write about music?

Is it an essayistic privileging of the music’s placement (its lyrical aspect, what it means to us, what it means to the culture) over its displacement (its geometrical aspect, its bullet in the brain, the lights it shoots out)?

This need to distance ourselves from a piece of music by “putting it in its place,” and comparing it to other, better (or worse) musical experiences—it’s the conceit that’s given order to this whole project. But does it come from the same hierarchical function of the brain which, as we get older, loses its nuance, keeps elevating one arbitrary set of memories over the rest, and eventually rigidifies into nostalgia?

                             “Oh, you've got to ride in one direction /
                                                                                 Until you find the right connection…”

Maybe the only way to do justice to loss is to never lose.

I think I could listen to “Walking on a Wire” for three hours on repeat and feel a thrill from it each time.

But if I distance myself from the music (and in the end, I have to distance myself) it should be by substituting space for space, sensory field for sensory field.

Writing can do this, if it’s got rhythm. If its presence hurts more than the absence it describes.

                              “Let me ride on the Wall of Death /
                                                                                   one more time.”

I listen to a rock song and I want to write. What’s happening to me?

It’s like reaching into clear river water to wash your hands and wanting to tattoo them. Like living and wanting to live.

So is it fair to love an album because its last song is called “Wall of Death?”

But no, no—because “Wall of Death” isn’t even a part of the album it nominally brings to a close. It transcends everything before it. There are those steely grinning, rising and falling, opening chords—and this is not a breakup album, and it never was.

This album is a carnival spaceship with a thousand light years to go! And only one light bulb left blurring—

—and in the star-scape of warp speed, Richard asks his estranged wife Linda to

sing with him a heroic ode to daring, to fear, to the wish to be as far away as anyone can imagine from security and domesticity.

It will be the last song on the last album they will make together.

But despite the love I have now, despite knowing I’ll remember it as love, I still want to write my anti-memory essay, my empirical orality play, my skin-tight depth-charge...

You can waste your time on the other rides, but I want the future, with its knife-edge and its garden hose running miracle blue! Its tangelos! Its speech bubbles shattering against the surface!

You’re going nowhere when you ride on a carousel, but baby, this website is a wall of death.

And through the steel cage I catch glints of where we’re headed:

#305: “The ghost of Lucinda Williams walks through Lake Charles. She’s blindfolded, holding a plastic bag with two goldfish in it. One’s the past. One’s the present. ‘Big Swirlie,’ she calls out to whoever will listen, ‘and Little Swirlie.’”

#235: “Her cabinet stands around her, their hands nervously twitching…but President Patsy Cline’s finger hesitates over that big red button. ‘Why should our destruction be mutual?’ she muses. ‘Why shouldn’t you have to survive, to watch me burn?’”

#206: “That little red corvette stays double-parked forever, collecting blue traffic tickets…”

#157: “The ‘again’ in the chorus of “Love Will Tear Us Apart’ suggests that love might also keep those two together.” – Graham Foust

#26: “In the future, time travel is possible. Your mission: go back to 1982, somehow get to Stevie Nicks. Tell her not to do anything else with this song, to just leave it like this forever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPEhIoKeTg0”

#16: “Bob Dylan’s in limbo, recovering from a carriage accident, his leg up in a yellowing cast. The cast, his living will and testament, has been signed by IBM’s robot overlord board of directors. ‘He’s left all his legacy to us,’ the e-board e-sings. Their hard drives have been uploaded directly from Dylan’s brain. But from a floral shadow in the corner of the hospital room, Woody Guthrie chuckles. ‘Take another look, knuckleheads,’ he says. ‘You’ve signed that cast in invisible ink.’”

#1: “Richard asks Linda to sing ‘Just the Motion’ with him one more time, ‘for the memories.’

              ‘What memories?’ they laugh.

              They look back at Earth and sigh. How much of it, really, was about the music?

              ‘It’s clear that the Beatles are the only thing holding up the planet these days.

              But…what’s underneath the Beatles?’

              Richard grins. It’s an old joke of theirs.

              Linda gives him that look. ‘Man, it’s Beatles all the way down.’”

—Joe Lennon

#333: X, "Wild Gift" (1981)

In retrospect, of course your tour was short. At the time you didn’t think anything of it, so mesmerized were you by a constellation of dust in sunlight seeping through translucent curtains.

You didn’t see much of the two back rooms. One tenant still slumbered at noon on the left, and a dirty litter of kittens avalanched from the room on the right as the owner shoved them back with a tasseled loafer.

These were obvious red flags. Yet you ignored them with an “It will be fine,” focusing on a copse of trees across the street, the cheap Asian market across the intersection. And the price, the lowest online.

Your wife had corresponded with the owner’s, who expressed a desire for a quiet, responsible tenant. You projected this terse email onto the place, transforming it into a haven from a town packed with youth away from home for the first time and all the dumb shit that rides shotgun—dumb shit the two of you had gotten out of the way almost twenty years prior.

The phone call from your wife, who went down a week early: this place is smaller than we thought.

Back room roof eaves, both sides, limiting headroom. The sleeping dude, the mewling kittens.

But it would be fine. You were there, doing it together.

The truck you booked was way too big and utterly terrifying to drive, no replacements available on a booked Labor Day weekend. You backed the mammoth over the lawn and destroyed the front staircase railing with the back bumper as a hurricane loomed in the distance. Sheets of hard rain pelted windows overnight.

The symbolism, you thought, was perfect: the storm clouds lifting just in time for triumphant arrival.

Post-move and pizza and beer with your friends, the first full day dawned, and with it the realization why the place was so cheap.

Some of it, anyway.

Your downstairs neighbor worked maintenance for your landlord’s properties. You learned the names of his two yippy dogs within minutes because through your thin floor every bark, every whine was audible.

So were the bellows of the maintenance man’s wife. You’d met her in passing the day you signed your lease, and, later, saw her working the convenience store adjacent to your shared place. The maintenance man, you learned, was partially deaf, requiring every communication between them to be in all caps.

It wasn’t the kittens or sleeping tenant that abbreviated your tour.

A curtain of paranoid silence descended after you told your wife the pizza was almost ready. You heard the neighbor first tell her husband that the neighbors were having pizza, then remark that they should, too. The whole thing gave you the creeps.

Her son visited on weekends, parking his tricked-out hot rod behind their shared beater. You had a hard time believing your wife when she’d stand silently next to one of the nigh-useless heating vents and point, face a rictus. But before you dated, she’d briefly lived in an apartment where spoons disappeared. She would know.

Temperatures below fifty turned the apartment into an icebox, you discovered in mid-October. Your oil heat offered brief comfort before going—where? You tried to trace the lack to a leak before the realization that the apartment was virtually uninsulated. Your dad arrived some weeks later with thick sheets of rigid foamcore and a power saw. You propped these sheets against the eaved bedroom’s flat walls, tacked thrift store blankets where you could. After dark, you’d push foamcore into the windows. These comforts were more psychological than physical, and heavily backloaded: you’d pry insulation from the mansards each morning, greeted by the same sun that had so captivated you initially, and think that you’d made it through another day.

You got used to it.

In the spring, you heard the neighbors bellowing about cleaning products, boxes. You texted your wife immediately: they’re moving.

A few glorious weeks of silence and beautiful weather later, you met the next roommate, a mild-mannered college kid, sweet and quiet. Your life was no longer a chorus of yips and hollered queries about pizza toppings.

And the smell went away.

Another hurricane loomed, this one with your adopted home in its sights. You worried that so much as a glancing blow from a tree branch would crumple the whole building and made arrangements to stay with friends. As you readied to leave, you met one of your two new neighbors, a kid being moved in by parents in a BMW. Seemed nice enough.

Your apartment didn’t so much as lose power through the storm. You returned to find the new neighbors installed.

At least the prior tenants had a schedule: they’d watch cop shows on TV for a few hours before bedding down by nine, both leaving the house before you woke.

The new neighbors were not entirely unlike the maintenance man and his wife: they, too, spoke in bellows, but for no reason. And at all hours. You’d be falling asleep before your ninety-minute-each-way commute only to be woken by shouts about pizza rolls being ready. Some nights this would happen at eleven, others three-thirty.

You realized the assertion the landlord and his wife made—that they were looking for quiet, responsible tenants—was complete bullshit. You should have realized this much earlier.

But it was far easier not to.

You went downstairs and asked them to keep it down. We can hear everything, you said.

Okay, the kid replied, eyes bloodshot.

The next weekend, they invited thirty friends over.

Look, you said on your shared porch, we just want to know when this is going to end. So we can sleep. We can hear every word. There’s no way to escape the noise.

If you don’t like it, the kid replied, you should move.

You went back upstairs, where your wife wore earplugs in an attempt to blot out the noise. You couldn’t help but think: our whole fucking life is a wreck.

                     For Kat

—Michael T. Fournier

#334: Graham Parker, "Squeezing Out Sparks" (1979)

I teach English at a private high school with a one-to-one model. One student, one teacher together in a (small) classroom. It’s a full-time school set up like tutoring and intended to allow to disappear completely that seemingly inevitable gap between what a student needs and what a teacher is under obligation, under contract, to give. Lessons become conversations built around questions firing off from both sides. Inside jokes ricochet off the walls the longer the year goes on. If a kid’s having a shitty day, everything can stop. You can catch up on the academics later. Relationship, emotional health, growth over all else.

Given this opportunity, I’ve recently started ending my semesters with a very particular assignment. First, I ask the student to make lists of their favorite books, movies, TV shows, and bands. Then, I ask them look at those lists and see if any themes pop up among and between them. We discuss at length what they’ve discovered, and the results are typically two-pronged: the student has a definite “taste,” and the student’s taste is all over the map. They like bands within a single genre (usually emo/screamo/goth) but like movies of a different genre altogether. They might be into a couple shows with dark or supernatural themes (like, well, Supernatural), but might like three different shows with entirely different purposes, as well.

The point is this: everyone makes their own story from the art they ingest, and that story is allowed to mutate over time. I’d say it should be encouraged as natural, in fact. Especially in high school, and especially-especially early on in those years, most humans are trying to figure out what the hell they’re doing and who the fuck they really are. In my classroom, I want these particular humans to be honest with themselves about themselves. I want them to see their own story laid out before them, and I want them to watch it change. I want them, above all else, to take ownership over this story. It is theirs. It is them. That’s empowering.

Or at least that’s the hope. I feel a little bad about hijacking this piece on Graham Parker to write instead about Prince. But tbh I don’t feel too bad. I’m sure Graham Parker has his place in music history and I’m sure he has his fan base that will roil from the injustice. But as the editor of this project, I pushed for others to write the Parker thing for months and no one was interested. And now Prince has died. And I know these things aren’t related, but they’re also unavoidable. Once I watched This is 40 and in it Paul Rudd represents an aging musician who no one remembers or wants to go see on his reunion tour and I thought that musician was fictional. It was Graham Parker, playing himself. I’m sorry if it seems unfair to bring this up. Some histories are bigger than others. Someone write the Graham Parker piece this piece should have been—I will read it. I want to be educated. But Prince has died.

A lot has been said about Prince both while he was with us and in the week since he’s passed on. I don’t have much to add beyond another story, another familiar perspective. I always teach my students what Joan Didion taught the world, that “we tell ourselves stories in order to live,” and what DFW then flipped on its head, that we tell each other stories to “become less alone inside.” So all I can do is try and live, try and be less alone. This is what Prince and his music is for a lot of us, too. A reason to live, to try, to connect, and in living, try to connect at all costs.

I’ve started getting my students to flay themselves open so their own stories become apparent to them, and so they can dispense with any foolhardy, outdated notion of shame toward themselves and their interests. One student listed Marvel superhero blockbusters as her favorite films and then quietly went on with the addendum: and it’s embarrassing, but The Lion King is actually my favorite movie though. I made her write it down at the top of her list. I should have made her circle it three times and underline it in red pen. It’s beside the fact that The Lion King is a good movie—it could have been The Guilt Trip or North or The Room, and it still wouldn’t have mattered. Ownership is everything. Confidence is only the start of it.

Prince is infamous at this point for saying “I can’t be played. A person trying to play me plays themselves,” and I want it printed in all-caps on high school diplomas. Your story belongs to nobody but you. The power to comprehend that story, to shape it and brand it and live it out the best way you can figure out how, is in your hands. That isn’t just important—it’s everything.

And this was Prince to a lot of people. It was Bowie to a lot of people. Believe it or not, it’s also Kim Kardashian to a lot of people. All three of them, and about a thousand others, are that for me. I make lists sometimes to remind myself of myself. I find it rejuvenating, even essential. What are my favorite foods, my favorite music, my favorite words? Who am I and where did that come from? How have I changed, and is this evolution or devo? It isn’t easy to remember, on a regular basis, who you are. It isn’t easy figuring it out in the first place. But it starts with influence, it ends with a mirror, and everything in between should be true.

So I’m sorry-not-sorry for neglecting Graham Parker. He doesn’t factor into my story. Of course I listened to this record, Squeezing Out Sparks, a number of times through. It sounded like Elvis Costello, which doesn’t sound like much to me. But it might to you, and you should ask yourself about it. Question the themes that got you there, and if you like the answers then print your name on them, all-caps, size 72. Find your Prince, even if it ain’t Prince. Maybe someday it could be, and maybe not, but go looking. Don’t quit. Don’t hide. Go looking.

—Brad Efford

#335: Soundgarden, "Superunknown" (1994)

In the beginning, sound was all there was. Before the word, a mouth. Before the gardeners, a garden.

There was a thought, and the thought had a song, and the song was growing: stir-scrabble-shudder-slink-climb-out-upward-sink-shudder-quake-burrow-slow. A soft begin. A creeping go.

Now the earth has no ears, except those canals that worms carve, so before worms the dirt heard nothing, and knew nothing of the song. The trees have no ears, except for those holes that beetles make, or woodpeckers bore, so without bugs and birds an aspen heard nothing of its own quaking.

The ocean’s ears it cast up from itself.

The north wind has ears, of course, little knots where it ties the trunks of pines, but the wind’s story is many seasons in the telling—it has no time for secrets other than its own.

Listening was born slowly.

But oh, we humans liked it.

Music was the earliest form of storytelling. In fact, we told our very first stories to our mothers with our heartbeats. What they heard from us enchanted them, and they carried our little rhythms with them wherever they went, sometimes exclaiming, sometimes urging others to listen, to hear with their palms, their seashell ears, our overtures. Our Movement Is.

Later, we made instruments outside of our bodies. Whatever else we’ve done, we taught the stones to speak; we turned trees into their own tongues, stroked the stretched skin of our animal brethren until the voice of the dead thundered among us.

When the wind sawed through our teeth we heard it whisper—but through a whittled flute, we heard our own souls clearly for the first time. They were so beautiful, caves relaxed into tunnels. Swamps eased to rivers. Lakes leapt in joyful hives of steam.

That’s probably why we’re in this mess, if I’m honest. We fell in love with the sound of ourselves, and we never looked back.

Forgive me father, for I have sinned—last week I listened to Vance Joy’s “Georgia” thirty-six times on Monday alone. Work was terrible and lobotomies are a rather permanent coping strategy when you’re twenty-six and still nominally charming to non-relatives.

On Tuesday, I blared Japanese theme songs in my headphones for three straight hours and then blamed my headache on a lack of sleep. Yes, I’m aware gluttony is one of the seven deadlies. No, I do not think turning the volume down would make much of a difference in the long run.

Wednesday was a hard day. Morning and afternoon passed in a haze of horror, while I sorted image after image out of a manuscript at work. My employers publish criminal justice textbooks—their authors have a fortitude I lack, fearlessly engaging those subjects at which I can hardly bear to glance.

There is a grimness to the slump of a body bag that suggests there will be no victory over the grave. I sat, poring over the broken teeth of a bombed-out bus, the ache of a shattered elementary school window, until Tchaikovsky wrestled me from my chair. In the bathroom, I hunched at the sink and felt the spines of a million feathers needle into my flesh. I don’t care what the DJ calls it—Swan Lake is never “easy listening.” In fact, that whole term is misguided. Listening is hard.

On Thursday I wrote an essay about music. It wasn’t a very good essay—I’m not much of a musician—but if Eudora Welty is right, and the voice that speaks in your head when you read is really the voice of the story, then writing is a kind of listening, sure as anything. Maybe that’s why writing about writing is so difficult; it’s a way of eavesdropping on the eavesdropper: reflexive, chaotic, and generally fruitless.

More often, we’re better off listening to the stories the world is trying to tell us. The ones that stick, like little bits of pop tunes, hanging around our brains. When we concentrate on those stories, whether it’s to hear the reader-voice, or just to catch the last notes of that sweet, lingering tune, something amazing happens. We shut the hell up for a minute, and remember that we’re part of a story.

I’m not going to lie—this is a fucked up time we live in, and a fucked up time we leave behind. Stories of transformation are so often plagued by tragedy or violence—not every curse is lifted; not all who suffer are freed. But our story—the song of humanity—doesn’t end in darkness. I was resting in the garden when the north wind told me so.

—Eve Strillacci

#336: Radiohead, "In Rainbows" (2007)

I spent the summer of 1999 the way I spent most summers as a kid: bored, on the swing set in our backyard, waiting by a boombox. When the right song came on the radio—“All I Wanna Do” by Sheryl Crow, or maybe “Fly” by Sugar Ray—I pressed record on the tape deck. It got me high, to capture a fleeting moment like that on tape. I’d rewind it and swing, listening to the music Doppler back and forth in my ears, drunk on the melodies. It’s hard to describe the pleasure I’d get from this without resorting to cheesy drug metaphors. These tapes made me feel good, plain and simple, like some god of my backyard-size universe.

I don’t remember how NOW That’s What I Call Music Vol. 1 entered this picture. I know that it wasn’t always there, because it eliminated the need to wait by the radio. All my favorites were now on one handy compact disc: “Together Again” by Janet Jackson, “I Will Buy You a New Life” by Everclear, “As Long as You Love Me” by the Backstreet Boys. It had one undeniable classic (“MmmBop”), the weirdest one-hit wonder of the decade (“Sex and Candy”), and the high water mark of the swing revival (“Zoot Suit Riot” by the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies, a band whose repulsively bone-headed name I never understood until now). It was truly a slice of late-‘90s radio; the only thing missing was a Third Eye Blind song. I loved this stuff. Passionately, indiscriminately, in a way that only a child with one CD probably could have.

NOW 1 had some dead weight though: K-Ci & Jojo, Imajin, “Barbie Girl,” by Aqua. Usually I skipped over these, but if my older brother was around, we let “Barbie Girl” play out. We thought it was funny to parody the lyrics in an affected, girly sing-song. I’m a Barbie Girl, in a Barbie World. It’s fantastic, dressed in plastic. You can brush my hair, undress me everywhere. In a way, it was funny: two boys with a prepubescent grasp of irony, parodying a parody. The song that followed was less fun. It was sluggish, full of eerie piano chords. The singer sounded like he was moaning the way you do when you’re sick and you want someone in earshot to feel bad for you. As the youngest, it was my job to descend from the swings, walk over to the radio, and press my index finger on the skip button. That song was “Karma Police” by Radiohead.

What Radiohead, the face of anti-corporate art rock, was doing on a record that could be accurately described as the essence of a Wal-Mart music aisle, is a good question. I don’t remember hearing them on the radio. “Karma Police” might have been popular on college stations, but on the Billboard charts that determined what I listened to, it peaked at a lowly 69. Even to my ears now, it doesn’t meet NOW 1’s accommodatingly broad definition of pop music. It has an interesting melody, but it lacks momentum and charisma—the stuffing of any decent pop song.

For a long time I never realized that Radiohead was on NOW 1. Like the other duds that weren’t “Barbie Girl,” “Karma Police” never made enough of an impression to register. It wasn’t until I was a full-fledged Radiohead fan in college that I rediscovered the jewel case and realized what I’d been skipping over all those years. A weird moment of cognitive dissonance followed. On the one hand were my childhood musical inclinations; on the other was my collegiate fixation with Radiohead. Somewhere in between my music taste did a 180. What happened?

*

During the early half of high school, I was into “screamo” music. “Screamo,” for anyone who didn’t attend high school in the mid-2000s, sounds like what you think it does. Imagine a sentimentally-charged punk song (an emo song) jacked up on drop-D metal riffs for dummies, punching a hole in the wall of a suburban basement. This was music written by and for intense teenagers, most of them white, male, and dressed like myself: tight jeans and band T-shirts. The one key I owned (to my Mom’s house) dangled from a neon green carabiner over my right butt pocket. I’d never been drunk or high, but I Sharpied black Xs on my backpack to let everyone know I was above all that. The shows were weird, comic affairs: angsty teenage boys screaming about girls and death (like they were synonymous) in traditionally hushed settings—a church, a library, occasionally a suburban back yard.

I met Andrew in the parking lot of a Baptist church after one of these shows. I recognized him from geometry class, where we sat near each other, but had never spoken. Andrew was not a “screamo person.” I was surprised to see him in this crowd. I was even more surprised to learn we had bands in common. Emo bands, for sure, but not the kind my brother and his screamo cohort went for. These were bands who chose to sing instead of scream, to employ chords and melodies in lieu of dissonance. Andrew knew them all, and then some. He couldn’t believe I hadn’t listened to Radiohead. We made plans to hang out and burn each other’s CD binders.

Andrew turned me onto a slew of bands in the years that followed, but Radiohead was not among them. He burned me copies of OK Computer, Kid A, and Hail to the Thief. Amnesiac, too, I think. It doesn’t matter; none of them stuck. I skipped through them in a desultory haze, hunting for that dizzy high I expected music to deliver. That was back when I had a job cleaning preschools on the weekend. I didn’t have access to the internet. I definitely didn’t read music blogs. The only context I had for these Radiohead records were the toilet bowls I scrubbed while listening to them. I remember thinking I’d stumbled onto an apt soundtrack for doing that.

The song that finally kicked down the doors to the kingdom was “There There (the Boney King of Nowhere).” It took a while to find it. It’s buried deep on Hail to the Thief, where it emerges from a cloud of glitchy studio wonkery, riding an actual analog drum beat. I can’t think of another Radiohead song that grooves this urgently. Every time I hear it, it takes a saintly act of self-restraint to not drop what I’m doing and start banging air toms. I was hooked even before the chorus, which featured the first complete sentence in a Radiohead song I actually understood: “Just ‘cause you feel it, doesn’t mean it’s there.”

How Radiohead, that use of a vague pronoun. Just ‘cause you feel it? Just ‘cause you feel what, exactly? Love? Anxiety? Hope? My teenage ear understood that it to be the feeling you get when a song guns it to your core. Maybe you get chills down your spine, or maybe your head goes weightless. I tend to get goosebumps on the back of my forearms and a cold tingling on the back of my neck, like someone has placed a damp cloth there. Whatever it is you feel, I had the impression that Radiohead was saying it didn’t mean shit. This was a decidedly anti-emo thing to sing. From a screamo standpoint, this was blasphemy.

It feels a bit contrived to hold one line in a Radiohead song responsible for a sea change in my music taste. The truth, of course, is that it happened gradually, for a lot of reasons. I made more friends like Andrew, with CD binders of stuff I’d never heard of. One of them introduced me to Pitchfork, where I discovered sarcastic takedowns of my favorite emo bands alongside fawning reviews of Radiohead records. Pretty soon the old me, the screamo me, was buried under a mountain of cultural detritus. By the time I left for college, screamo was an embarrassing phase best left unmentioned, like a LiveJournal account you forgot to deactivate. Real art, I might’ve told anyone who had the misfortune of talking to me around this time, was more than just a vessel for emotion. It had something important to say about society. It was inherently difficult, and if you didn’t get it, well, you didn’t get art. I remember listening to that robot voice in “Fitter Happier” talk about “getting on better with your associate employee contemporaries”while I walked to the campus dining hall to eat food I wasn’t even paying for. That was the same year I paid $80—a small fortune in undergraduate expenses—to see Radiohead play a huge amphitheatre show. I literally called them “the greatest band on Earth” in my campus newspaper.

*

Looking back on my life as a music listener is a good exercise in embarrassment. From about middle school onward, I was—to borrow a popular word from middle school—a poser. The music I liked said more about who I wanted to be than who I actually was. Consider one of my favorite songs, “Title Track” by Death Cab for Cutie (more girls and death!), which has a line about tasting a girl’s lipstick on the filter of a cigarette. I was 14 years old when I heard this song. My lips had never tasted a cigarette filter, nor a girl’s lipstick. But something about that line left a profound mark on me. I wanted to identify with it, more than I actually did. It was this same yearning that drew me to Radiohead, I think. I liked the cover of Hail to the Thief more than I liked most of the songs on it. I wanted to care about the dehumanizing effects of modern life, long before I’d even filed a tax return.

The funny thing about these postures is that by the time my actual identity caught up with them, the music had lost its luster. My affinity for screamo dried up quickly after my first girlfriend. Those songs were all histrionics and emotional fireworks; they had little to say about the day-to-day banalities of an actual relationship. Graduating from college had the same effect on Radiohead. Songs about the soul-sucking corporate world, it turned out, weren’t that great a soundtrack to actually work to. I currently spend the 9-to-5 hours of my week in a windowless cubicle of an office building; the last thing I want to listen to is a record about it.

If I go back to Radiohead at all, I go back to In Rainbows. In Rainbows is not an experimental record about the demise of western civilization. In Rainbows is a pretty basic rock record for adults with feelings. I like to think of it as OK Computer Lite: “Subterranean Homesick Alien,” with all the “Fitter Happier” bullshit stripped away. When it came out, many critics noted that Radiohead had put out a love record. That seems like a lazy generalization to me, but “House of Cards” is a love song. “Reckoner” has some of the most emotive moaning of Thom Yorke’s career. “Videotape,” a piano ballad about an old timer pulling out old VHS tapes of his life, might be the most sentimental thing they’ve ever recorded. Even “There There,” with its skeptical chorus, wouldn’t sound out of place on In Rainbows. Because that’s the weird thing about Yorke’s knock on feelings: it’s dripping with feeling. Each time Yorke sings it, he stretches the syllables out a little further, loading them with all the sentiment they can handle. Juuuuusst ‘caaaaause yoouuuuu feeeeel it, doesn’t mean it’s there.

I could go on, but the basic gist of it is this: In Rainbows still puts goosebumps on the back of my forearms, and their other records don’t. I’d say there’s even a chance that tiny, ten-year-old me might not have skipped every song on it. But that’s hard to say. Sometimes I pretend I can still regress back to being that little kid on the swing set, communing with the angels over “MmmBop,” but I don’t think it works that way. Once you’ve handed over your music taste to older siblings, or friends, or the internet, it’s a bit like a faustian bargain. You don’t get to take it back and start over. A part of me, I suspect, will always be like that one-key carabiner guy at the screamo show, trying to prove something to somebody. When a song like “There There” totally bowls me over, the best I can do is tell that guy to shove it, and wait for the tingling in my forearms. That might be the only way you know it’s not another posture, that it’s actually there. Just ‘cause you feel it.

—Ryan Marr

#337: Jethro Tull, "Aqualung" (1971)

Days after I moved to Minnesota for college, my roommates and I sat in a circle on our dorm room floor and shared our testimonies. Wrapped in animal-print fleece and brightly colored pajamas, we’d just finished a box of Kraft mac ‘n’ cheese, toast, and grapes we’d proudly shopped for and prepared ourselves. After dinner, we sat in a circle and conjured up the holy emotions we were supposed to feel when invoking the divine. We’d been taught that to share your testimony—to talk about when you accepted Jesus, how it made you different and how you stayed the same—was to glorify God. Sharing felt like a big deal then, but it was nothing new. I’d shared my testimony at youth group overnighters, Cheeto dust still on my fingers; before bunk beds of girls in lantern-lit camp cabins; on mission trips around the world, in Mexican migrant camps and Czech orphanages and South African slums, where we’d used flannel graphs and face paint when words didn’t work. I’d done it again and again, with reverence, even as I trembled.

It’s a long road that brings a kid to that place on the floor. It goes back all the way to diaper days and feels as natural as breathing. You hear the same story every week, you trace the rims of hundreds of plastic communion cups, and you believe.

I don’t remember what I said that night to my roommates, but I remember, for the first time in my life, being afraid I had nothing to testify.

*

Many people call Jethro Tull’s Aqualung a concept album, and although the band itself doesn’t approve of the label, the themes are plain: God vs. religion, the corruption of the church, Christian hypocrisy and idolatry—all familiar topics I’ve wrestled with a lot over the years. As a convalescing Baptist, you can never really get away from them. But lately, if I think about them at all, it’s with a quiet acceptance.

Maybe that’s why the spiritual songs on Aqualung don’t resonate with me nearly as much as the ones that land on the human side of the divine. “Cheap Day Return,” one of the shortest songs on the album and a departure from the overall style, is a tiny acoustic snapshot in which Ian Anderson stands at the train station after visiting his father. Then you sadly wonder, does the nurse treat your old man the way she should? She made you tea, asked for your autograph, what a laugh. And though it sounds like the story should continue, there’s only a short instrumental break before the song tapers off, and you’re left, mercifully, wondering what’s unsaid.

*

A block from my apartment in Roanoke, Virginia, there was an old southern church building, all brick and triangular, with a neon red sign overhead, simple capital letters that read JESUS SAVES. The church was on top of a hill and the sign was visible from far enough away that I could see it every night driving home. Sometimes it said JE US SAVE or ESUS AVES and sometimes the lights flickered. It was always the important parts that burned out.

In some of the album’s most memorable lyrics, Ian Anderson sings: If Jesus saves, well, He'd better save Himself from the gory glory seekers who use His name in death. But between save himself and the rest of the line, there’s a break just long enough for the chords to strike and for you to imagine all the things Jesus better save himself from. The first time I heard it, I wished they’d cut it off at the break. Every time after that, I wished for mystery just a little bit more.

*

Sophomore year of college, I drove my roommates to Iowa for fall break. About 30 miles outside my hometown, a multi-car pileup on I-380 stopped all traffic and we were stuck in my Volkswagen Beetle for more than an hour, gridlocked with the headlights off. Although it was cold for October, we opened the sunroof to let the stars in.

We started talking about the semester and about Jesus, and ended up on the topic of how much we wanted to say the word fuck. By then we’d completely adapted to our sterilized campus. None of us had realized how much we’d needed out, or, for that matter, how inconceivable and ridiculous it was to have spent nineteen years avoiding all profanity—especially fuck, the big kahuna. So right there in the midst of all those stopped cars, we breathed deep and screamed it into the night. Fuck this and fuck that and fucking fuck and motherfucking motherfucker, too, just for good measure. Jesus doesn’t fucking care if you say fuck! one of us said in joyful revelation, or at least one of us meant to.

*

One of my favorite songs on the album is “Wond’Ring Aloud.” It’s a simple love song, the kind I’m a sucker for, where you can picture the scene exactly as described, down to the buttery toast, and it’s so damn sentimental in the best possible way. But when Anderson sings, We are our own saviors, you can’t help but take what might be a throwaway line in a different context as significant within the framework of the album. Here, it’s not God who saves—it’s you, it’s me, it’s the love we have for each other, it’s the crumbs left forgotten in the bed.

—Lacy Barker

#338: Big Brother & the Holding Company, "Cheap Thrills" (1968)

// She knows this goddamn life too well so we best listen up. But what’s a rasp really good for? Can a breathtaking break in a woman's voice cast glass, shatter spells, shake off sadness? Let me stop myself right there, save us from overanalysis, let me just say this: yes.

The kind of person who doesn't like a little mess in their magic is the same kind of person who, beaten down by their sterile-voiced dentist, insists on drinking Sunkist orange soda through a bendy straw. If you listen to Janis at a certain time of before-morning with the right amount of sugar in your tea you will be transformed, transmogrified from distracted to superlative; you'll become one of those stubborn numbers you always envied—the ones greater than or equal to something else. Well, here are four gentlemen and one broad, as the emcee calls her, who'll make you feel like a story problem that is finally solvable. Close your eyes and clench your throat. Feel her warble wiggle in your toes. Each little vocal catch a catechism, every breath and every cataclysm whistling past the bones of your own nose. She says she needs a man to love and maybe you're not feeling man enough right this minute, or maybe you're no man at all, but still, don't you think you could be what she's moaning over? Don't you want to screech this little blues rock thing and be a man to love, just now, just for a moment this morning? Let her make and re-make you over again, into a sleek and elegant thing, into a chapter in a charming adventure novel, a refined equation that is more than the sum of your paltry, mismatched parts.

\\ Janis isn't making anyone, no one's making Janis. The scream queen. What we dug “rasp” up for in the first place. What we hear on entering heaven, on spelunking deeper into hell. She is both, the dichotomy materialized, a freshman year college course on duality. Which is to say: human. She is human. A gut-feel for the blues and the strange insistent blackout of the turn of the decade, the terror and love and anger and love and war and peace and love and love of the upside-down America of the sixties. Not without the hat-tip to Tina Turner, to the girl groups, to the stage show semi-freakouts of Elvis and Little Richard and the incomparable Mr. Dynamite. She says living’s easy in the summertime and we’ve heard it a thousand and one times before and we’re hearing it for the very first time: that’s how sublime, how twisted she’s got tradition, and history, and this goddamn broken broken-record decade. You can say it again, it’d stay the same: if she ain’t the voice of the generation, she’s no doubt one of them.

No. Bullshit. She’s the voice of the whole generation. Stationed out satelliting in an orbit around the romance and the distrust. No one’s making Janis. How could they? How’d that work? You think she’s susceptible? You think she’s a product? Sure we’re all products, but you think she’s a product? You think she’s from Earth? Serious questions, all with answers, no good ones.

There is a tortoiseshell shorthair your little brother’s leashed with your father’s old belt and set on fire for the hell of it. Watching it squirm is beautiful and awful and nothing you’d ever want to see again. It makes you sick. It makes you mad. It ignites. Janis isn’t making anyone.

// Let's not dress her up too pretty, then. (She favored grubby men's shirts and tights.) Let's not fancy her a posthumous god, as gods don't generally overdose when they're twenty-seven. Seems like we need our “voices of generations” to be so hungry they falter, overdo it, fuck up a little more and sooner than anybody meant them to.

But let's get one thing clear: the effect her sound has on us is not just because she didn't live long enough to lose the gut-fire and cut a lifeless 80s record. If you crack open some stuffy biography you can bet your ass it says despite her untimely death, Janis….and in another book that same sentence begins with because of. Yes, she was drenched in duality, heavens and devils swallowed down like medicine and fired back up gleaming and twisted as one. But let's call her singular, too. Janis didn't die because she sounded so good and she didn't sound like that because she was bound to die. She wasn't startling just because she was the antithesis of Judy Collins. Listen—she'd have startled anyone in any age throughout space and time. She was just a regular young human who could sing, in some ways; yes, we can hold off on the hagiography.

Maybe make is the wrong word, but Janis was capable of causing things: causing a mosh pit, causing a car wreck, causing a punk kid to pause in the middle of a subway tunnel and cry. She had duality but also singularity. Singularity, as in a distinctiveness so distressing as to be beautiful. And also as in the spacetime kind, when the quantities used to measure a body's gravitational pull become infinite in a way that does not depend on a single goddamn thing.

\\ How smart is it by the way to frame this thing as live? The people lost it at Monterey watching Janis and her Holding Co. tear through tunes like a wet chainsaw, so much so that it was infamous that day, that minute, even quicker. Some groups, when they hit the stage, they just don’t got it. No heat, no noise, no soul. Not so with Janis, not so with the whole Holding Co. We got the Internet. The whole thing’s down on tape.

“Combination of the Two”’s got the whole band sharing vocals, woo-woo-ing down there all together, Janis howling an octave above the boys, taking the rightful spotlight every time she opens her mouth. “Ball and Chain” they even ripped live for the record, that’s how magnetizing. That’s how possessed that voice, that spirit. And look: I just clicked the wrong thing, got sent to the clip of the band reunited, sans Janis, at Monterey in ‘07. That’s 2007. It is not good. It is old-blood bar-band covers of the blues. The new Janis has the rasp, but she is not Janis. Obviously. Without the hunger that comes with being 24 years old, being strung out, being raised in the Texas high desert, being one with the time, the people, the black magic incantation the wizard recited to give it all to you, to take it all away: what even are you?

Shit. I fell again into the sermon. Look: listen. The music, it speaks for itself. All the rest is feedback echoing the vibes that were good enough—no, better—the first time around.

—Eric Thompson & Brad Efford

#339: Tom Waits, "The Heart of Saturday Night" (1974)

Side 1

    “New Coat of Paint”

My mother still swears by a color of paint she calls “Hubert’s white,” a mixture of white, yellow, and gray, which a man—named, appropriately, Hubert—used to repaint the house my parents and I lived in when I was a child. It was a ranch-style house on a cul-de-sac within walking distance of Lake Michigan, a real Midwestern idyll of a place with a trim front lawn, a wooden play set, and a back deck for entertaining. The house was dusty blue when we bought it, with cream trim and a front door done in demure red. I half think my parents picked that house because of its massive basement, which we would never have had in England. Basements are far less frequent there—something to do with flooding, I imagine.

Our immigrant story isn’t exceptional. We moved for my dad’s job when I was small. I must have asked where my grandparents were, or when we’d see them next, but I was too young to remember much of anything and there wasn’t really much to miss. England is fairly close to the U.S., culturally if not geographically. I had watched different television shows than my American friends, and read different books, but at least we spoke the same language. I learned early on that I said some words “wrong” and I learned to correct myself. By the time I was nine, I was indistinguishable from any other solidly middle class Midwestern schoolkid, and I was peeved that my parents wanted to repaint our house, then sell it.

We were moving again, this time to Virginia, once more for my dad’s job. As a nine year old I could name all 50 states, but I wouldn’t have been able to point to Virginia on a map. Being 4,000 miles from my hometown in England didn’t mean anything to me when I was four, or five, or even nine, but the 800 miles between our home in Wisconsin and our future house in Virginia was a real gut-wrench. I was used to weekly phone calls with my relatives, to recording all our birthdays and holidays on film for our grandparents as my sister and I aged, but I couldn’t conceive of my life without my friends, or the tree outside my bedroom window, or our blue house.

My parents insisted that the house would need to be painted for it to be sold. Dusty blue didn’t look fresh enough in a market that was already chock full of saleable homes in sensible neighborhoods. Enter: Hubert and Hubert’s white. Hubert’s son and his other assistant were kind to our dog, and to my sister and I, so they were okay by us. We would play outside near where they worked when we could, but we liked to pretend to be scared of Hubert, who was Polish and had a strong accent. I think my mother gravitated toward him because he was also foreign, and we pretended to fear him for the same reason. The painters finished their work and the house sold not long after we moved.

Of course, Virginia was nothing like Wisconsin, because I wouldn’t let it be. At age 10, I was insistent that my childhood was done. Our new neighborhood’s 4th of July parade had nothing on the ones we used to go to. In Wisconsin, we got to play in fire trucks that reeked of carnauba wax and diesel. We ate our first hot dogs and waved our first American flags. There was a big picnic and we got to drink whole cans of Squirt and gorge ourselves on homemade fudge. It was as American as me mishearing “for which it stands” as “for Richard Stands” in the Pledge of Allegiance, then convincing a friend that my version was right. This Virginia 4th of July was one long parade of oversized trucks filled with middle-aged people I didn’t know, throwing Tootsie Rolls to the people watching by the roadside, cheering for something I didn’t know or recognize.  

Side 2

    “Fumblin’ with the Blues”

I want for The Heart of Saturday Night to gel with my memory of life in Middle America, but I don’t feel it. I don’t feel much of anything when I listen to this record—no “haunting innocence” or “restlessness,” as Rolling Stone’s Stephen Holden experienced when he reviewed the album back in 1974. When I hear The Heart of Saturday Night, I’m waiting for a chord Waits never strikes—one of sincerity. More than 40 years of music has been recorded since, and maybe it’s the worn out cassette tape sound that’s getting to me, but putting these particular clichés on repeat hasn’t gotten me any closer to the sentiment of this album. I’m fumbling with something, but it’s not “the Blues” or even sadness. I want for Waits’s Midwest lonely to feel the same as my Midwest lonely.

It amuses me that this record went Gold in the UK, a place that I also think of as home, full of people whose lives are far away from Tom Waits’s, as far away as I feel from this album. The sound and the lyrics must have come together to ring something like true to them. I wonder if they heard “The Heart of Saturday Night” and thought about apple pie in truck stop diners and believed that’s what the United States was, that this was the quintessential “American experience” that everyone talks about. Being both inside and outside American culture, I feel strongly that there’s no such thing. Maybe distance is what allows us to cozy up to something outside our own experience, and to love it, without looking too closely.

It’s not as if Waits wrote with me in mind. The album was released almost exactly 16 years before my birth, and it’s for folks whose memories are places full of road noise and truck stops and past-midnights. Beyond sheer time and geography, Waits also cites Jack Kerouac as one of his major influences, a rootless misogynist with little regard for anything outside the narrow lens of his own experience (read: women’s lives and feelings). For all that I feel I’m always attempting to broaden the scope of my compassion, my heart really flatlines when I hear Tom Waits sing about women on this album. It’s not a delight to hear about his women, rendered, as they are here, in two dimensions.

I wanted this album to mean something to me. I wanted “Midwest dreaming of a Wisconsin bed” to be about my life, and my differences, and my desire for music to be the puzzle piece that bridges the gap between my feelings and experiences. All the classic barriers to entry are present in this album: I’m not a man, or old enough to consider myself an expert on any kind of sadness, or working a blue collar job—a rare instance where my circumstances are a hindrance rather than a gateway. But I struggle to think of anyone for whom this record could ring true. The closest I get is that someone out there must feel the same way about night driving and cigarette smoke hanging in the low light over a bar as I do about fire trucks and grapefruit soda and the 4th of July.

—Helen Alston

#340: Black Flag, "Damaged" (1981)

Smoke swirling off the tip of Jay’s Marlboro Light coats the plywood on the floor. It soaks into the leather couch and blankets the walls of the studio, mingling with rows of framed concert posters, oil paintings, one-shot cutouts. Jay takes a long drag then a heavy step towards the palette on his left. He mixes the flesh tones with his paintbrush, exhales and adds broad strokes to the skate deck canvas. Inhale, step, exhale, mix, paint, repeat.

Each 185-pound step causes a ripple in the unfinished flooring; each ripple causes the needle of the record player to skip. I was born with a bottle in my mouth. Skip. Six Pack. Now I got a six so I’ll never run out. Skip. Six Pack. Jay sings along, obviously not annoyed enough by the skipping to step lighter in the garage-apartment-turned-art-studio. I’m annoyed, but not annoyed enough to pick up my magazine proof spread across the couch and relocate from the studio back to our house.

“Oi, red or black background on this one?” Jay turns toward me and asks, the long ash from his cigarette drifting to the floor without even a flick of his wrist.

“Black.”

His nod turns into head-banging, his unspiked mohawk and worn leather jacket syncing in movement to the inflections in Henry Rollins’s voice.

I continue watching the rhythm of the smoke, the painting, Jay’s movements, before going back to looking for the rhythm in the fine art and design magazine I’m editing: Local Hotspots, Global Reach, Traveling Exhibits. Inhale, step. Exhale, mix. Paint, repeat.

“Should the text be larger on this page?” I ask Jay, who shakes his head no while singing: I know it will be okay. I get a six pack in me, all right.

This song was easily Jay’s anthem when we first met in fifth-hour freshmen biology thirteen years ago. My earliest memory of him: a drunken cheek-piercing episode during class that led to a punctured facial artery. As I watched him run out of the classroom bleeding that day, I had no idea that five years later, we’d begin dating or that thirteen years after that, we’d still be together, living in a house long made a home. He ran out of the classroom that day yelling, “Everything’s fine.” He had a six pack in him, and he was all right.

Jay doesn’t have a six pack in him now as he stomps to the back of the studio to grab black paint—the needle skipping, skip, then gliding through the grooves to bring about a fast, heavy, melodic bass line from Chuck Dukowski. These days, Jay only drinks a fraction of what he used to. The drumbeat mirrors the bass’s established rhythm and leads to a guitar build up. This feeling haunts me. Behind these eyes, the shell seems so empty. Though I wonder if anything lives inside. I finish making my edits to the Hot Spots layout.

Just as “Six Pack” commemorates a fair portion of Jay’s youth-to-earlier-adulthood experiences, the song “What I See” represents a fair portion of my hormone-filled teenage years spent flipping through pages and pages of journaled emotions of self-angst. Now, I simply flip through pages and pages of magazines, newsletters, and other publications for which I write and edit.

In one month Jay will be featured in his fifth art show (he sold out at two of his last four), I will be finalizing edits with the design team for the second issue of the magazine I oversee, and Henry Rollins will continue to write articles for LA Weekly, speak out in regards to the 2016 presidential race, record podcasts, tour internationally, and star in a new movie. Thirteen years ago Jay was constantly drunk and doing reckless things. Thirteen years ago I was self-destructive and looking for an outlet. Twenty years prior to that Henry Rollins was loud, aggressive, combative, and recording the album Damaged. Fifteen-year-old punk rockers don’t recognize that they will one day get older, possibly even grow up. Fifteen-year-old punk rockers just think they’ll be dead by twenty-seven. Then one day they turn twenty-eight.

I move on from editing Local Hotspot to Global Reach. From Global Reach to Traveling Exhibits. Jay moves on from painting the background to clear-coating the skate deck. The needle moves on from “TV Party” to “Thirsty and Miserable.” From “Thirsty and Miserable” to “Police Story.” From “Police Story” to “Gimme, Gimme, Gimme.” Jay and I both look at each other when we hear the drum hit it off with a one, two, one, one, two. One, two, one, one, two. Jay burned this song on a CD for me right before we started dating. We used to drive around fast, the music turned all the way up, seeking out a liquor store that would sell to us even though we were underage. We used to sneak into abandoned buildings and discuss conformity. We used to scale fire escapes and the rooftops of vacant buildings and share the things that bothered us. We needed an angry yet empathetic voice.

A lot of punk icons died before they hit Jay’s and my current age. Darby Crash: suicide. Sid Vicious: drug overdose, possibly intentional. I’m sure that’s the route a lot of family members thought Jay and I were going when we were fifteen. I know a handful of people from when I was fifteen that went that route.

Jay steps back from his painting, two-thirds of the way through “Gimme, Gimme, Gimme,” where the guitar and bass halt and leave just the drums and Henry Rollins’s voice. “I think I’m calling it,” Jay says, looking at his finished piece.

“It looks really good,” I say, honestly, nearing a stopping point in my evening’s project. The needle glides to the end of side A before the arm of the record player automatically picks the needle up and moves it to the side of the vinyl. Jay signs the bottom of the painting. We both decide to head back to the house. We have more work to do tomorrow. We’ve watched throughout our years as Henry Rollins has continued to do more and more work. We turn the light out behind us before locking the studio, not flipping the record to side B because we’re already there.

—Angela Morris