#301: Dolly Parton, "Coat of Many Colors" (1971)

I don’t know how or when I am getting home. This work trip is ill-timed; we manage to arrive in Charleston during the only disgusting part of the year—January—and stay just long enough to catch a winter storm enveloping the greater part of the East Coast, just in time for the weekend. The storm is so big that it hasn’t arrived, but our morning flight out is canceled more than 24 hours in advance. Our airline offers flights two days from now, but can’t guarantee that my two colleagues and I can get on the same plane. We work our evening event and go back to the hotel, where I call up the airline again. The operator gives me even bleaker news, just as we’re getting ready for bed: no flights for three more days. My anxiety is through the roof and I struggle not to panic as I settle into a bed in the room I am sharing with one of my coworkers, because it’s been the kind of trip where there are no moments to yourself.

I can’t sleep. I start looking up rental cars. It is late but I am moments away from a full panic attack, my stomach tied so completely in knots that it is a wonder I don’t throw up. I text my boss and run the idea of a rental by her. It’s only eight hours’ drive. If we leave right when the rental car company opens, we might make the trip north before the storm hits our hometown. I expect my boss will shoot down the idea, but she confesses that they have their car ready and are planning to leave before dawn. I call my coworker in the next room over; we are all in agreement that we’ll only do it if we can rent a car with four- or all-wheel drive. There is one car available at the airport, so we order a taxi.

On the way to the airport, it’s already raining. It’s not even gone 6 o’clock yet and none of us have eaten, or had coffee. We beat the car rental employee to her desk. It is shockingly simple to sign our rights away and acquire the car, which is parked so far away that we are drenched with rain by the time we sling our bags into the trunk. I drive first. In the dark the rain feels like too much, but I white knuckle my way out of Charleston proper with my tongue stuck so hard to the roof of my mouth that it goes bone dry. I’m too nervous to drink water. At some point, I start to wonder if what’s hitting the windshield is rain or sleet. About an hour outside Charleston, we stop at a rest area. I barely make it to the toilet in time to relieve myself, making this the closest I’ve ever come to shitting my pants.

My more confident coworker takes the wheel. I get in the back and take small sips of water. We playfully argue about the radio. The energy in the car is forcefully cheerful. We flip animatedly between the XM radio stations. There’s one that always seems to be playing Adele, and the pop one with all the Panic! at the Disco, and for one really brief moment there’s Dolly with “Coat of Many Colors,” before my coworker in the passenger seat exclaims, “Ugh, I HATE country,” and flips back to the previous channel. There is definitely snow on the road.

We make it three more hours before the road is so thick with accumulated ice that we can’t do anything but coast to the exit with the nearest hotel and roll gingerly into the parking lot, tires crunching. I book one room for the three of us and sit on the phone with a rental car agent what-if-ing about what will happen when we can’t return the car within 24 hours. I learn that we are in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina. I learn that there isn’t much to learn about Roanoke Rapids. It used to be a mill town, but the mills closed. ~16,000 people live here. A cursory Google search turfs up the unemployment rate—“nearly 13%.”

There is one good scandal: Carolina Crossroads, an entertainment development aimed at bringing more tourism to the area. Roanoke Rapids is about halfway between New York and Florida; it’s close enough to Richmond and Raleigh, just off I-95. Back in 2005, they need a guy to be the face of the entertainment area. We’re talking hotels, shopping, movie theater, aquarium, amphitheatre for live acts….$20 million dollars’ worth of plans. They hire Randy Parton, brother of Dolly herself, to manage the whole setup and hand over $3 million for him to oversee. They find out not long after the theater opens that Randy has spent a fair chunk of the money on himself and hosted unauthorized events in the theater, like his daughter’s wedding reception. Back at my hotel, the receptionist calls Randy a “first-class swindler” when I ask her about Carolina Crossroads. I get the feeling it is still something of a sore subject, 10 years later. I ask her what her favorite Dolly Parton song is, and she says “Jolene.”

“Jolene” clocks in at #219 on Rolling Stone’s “Top 500 Songs of All Time,” while Coat of Many Colors only rides the album list down to #301. This album is a short one, and it’s over before you’re ready. None of the songs run over three and a half minutes. The entire record is under thirty minutes long, total. It is small and gutsy and while it’s not lyrically complex, this is not a record that shies away from grappling with issues. In the span of a half hour, Dolly’s childhood and adolescence are over. In the first song, her mom makes her a coat of rags, like Joseph’s; in the second, her mom runs away with her boyfriend. I listen to this album alone in our one hotel room while my coworkers are doing work down in the lobby. I stifle a really stupid sounding giggle when I realize the last lyric in the album is, “Everybody take your brother's hand and sing my song with me.”

I think one of the reasons we make it home the next morning—after spending an hour cracking away at the inch-thick layer of ice encasing the car—is telling stories. We leave the radio off. The plows have tried to work overnight. We know it’s about three hours home and we try to shoot for the gap in the weather on brown, slushy roads that are, in all honesty, barely passable. I sit in the back seat and tell every ridiculous story I’ve ever heard, interrupting myself to suggest that my coworker merge to the other side of the road; it looks slightly clearer over there. I tell them about the episode of 99% Invisible with the pigeon milk. I tell them about DJ Khaled getting lost on a jet ski and using Snapchat to call for help. I tell them about Randy Parton and Carolina Crossroads. The road goes all white about ten miles from our exit.

By the time we make it to Charlottesville, everything is so blanketed in snow that we can’t see the turn for the exit, but we coast into town, rolling past people in the streets on skis, until we get to the garage and park. We’re not dressed for the weather, and two of us aren’t even home yet. My coworkers make tracks to a restaurant staffed by locals happily pouring shots at lunchtime. My partner walks a mile in the snow carrying water, whiskey, and a pair of hiking boots; we make it back home, cold, disbelieving, and just beginning to feel the warmth from the booze.

It’s easy to mythologize the past; you can tell one side of something that happened long enough ago that there isn’t anyone around to tell you no. This holiday season, Dolly Parton will reprise the role of herself in the made-for-TV special, “Christmas of Many Colors,” the story of her humble beginnings sewn into a narrative about a Christmas miracle loosely based in her life’s story. The city of Roanoke Rapids has a Wikipedia page that spends more time dragging its way through the city’s brief association with Randy Parton than on the hundreds of years of history before and a good ten years since. I write down my side of this story without telling my coworkers, because it’s simpler or because I think my version is right, I don’t know. What does Dolly owe to her past, or Randy to Roanoke Rapids (aside from $3 million), or me to these women? I don’t know. But I do giggle when Dolly sings the last line off the last track on Coat of Many Colors, “A Better Place to Live”: “Everybody take your brother's hand and sing my song with me.”

—Helen Alston

#302: Public Enemy, "Fear of a Black Planet" (1990)

Black to the bone my home is your home
So welcome to the Terrordome

                                - Chuck D

There is a particular kind of cold that possesses southwest Virginia in January. It’s not the blustery ague of the Midwest, or the gnawing chill of New England. Instead, it’s marked by quiet unobtrusiveness—damp, seeping, and stealthy in the way that winter often is—already upon you long before you realize it’s come to stay.

The start of that calendar year, marking the midway point of my final phase of graduate school, moved in like a dark glacier. I’d returned to the southwest portion of the state shortly after New Year’s, in hopes of scraping together some weeks to write and think in solitude before having to contend, formally, with my thesis in the spring. At that point, I’d come to accept that the smooth stone of dispiritedness that lived in my stomach had all but become a permanent fixture in Roanoke: though I lived, taught, and wrote there, I knew I did not belong. This knowledge had become as familiar to me as the sound of my own name.

Literature is full of hysterical females—children, the elderly, young women of marrying age—who see ghosts, spirits, the inexplicable and the horrific, while those around them remain unconvinced (or sometimes, convinced but lacking hard proof or personal witness) of what these women claim to see. The responses vary: sometimes they are met with dismissal or outright reproof, while other times they’re met with pity or pity’s slightly more sophisticated cousin, sympathy. And occasionally, there’s vindication or confirmation of some kind by the story’s conclusion. But often, as is the case with any “good” ghost story worth retelling, the incidents in question are usually abandoned to ambiguity. Maybe she was just seeing things, or maybe she wasn’t. We’ll never know.

It is a near-impossible feat, attempting to accurately convey what it’s like to feel displaced because of the color of one’s skin. Some days, the best one can rely on is the precarious tilt of comparison, definition in terms of something else:

such displacement is like slow, precise dismembering

             such displacement is like slow, precise disembodiment

it is knowing that displacement is an anemic euphemism, because there is no noun precise enough to define what it’s like to exist with undiagnosable pain

it is knowing that displacement suggests that there is some “correct” or proper place in which one ought to exist to begin with

it is the impossibility of naming a precise locus of distress, and the expectation to account for it still

it is losing a sense of being fully present in your own body, though your own body is all you’re permitted to think about

*

I first encountered Public Enemy on a freezing night, that interminable winter. It was my first time venturing outside since a heavy snowstorm had buried most of the streets in layers upon layers of pristine sheets of ice, the ridged mounds of snow along the main roads like the arched spine of an enormous, white, sleeping creature. Other than in very brief interludes with my landlords next door (longtime residents of Roanoke who would faithfully extend kindness by bringing me food to ensure I was eating), it had been several days since I’d interacted with anyone. I’d locked myself in my apartment with the storm as my excuse, avoiding the ache of conversation for as long as I could. But for some reason, though the daylight hours were short, I found that on this particular evening in January I could manage to go out and be among people, as long as I wasn’t expected to say anything.

We sometimes speak of music being transportive. We praise its power to move us, however momentarily, out of time and out of whatever location we happen to find ourselves in. But some music works to the opposite effect: not serving as a quick means of escape, but as a grounding presence that renders specific times and places all the more acute in their immediacy.

After a failed night of trying to write in one of the few coffee shops nearby, I decided to call it quits for the day. I pulled up my music library and scrolled through my album selections, having downloaded Fear of a Black Planet earlier that afternoon. I loved the cover artwork immediately, almost irrationally, without even taking much time to scrutinize why the mere sight of it made me sit up a little straighter in my chair. Earphones in place, I clicked on “Contract On the World Love Jam,” its first hymn-like chords clanging out against the record scratch. The album followed me all the way into the night, back out into the dark lit only by a few streetlights and the unyielding drift.

*

In the weeks and months afterward, I listened to this album over and over—a little resentful that no one had told me about it before, and fixating, as I often do, on the handful of tracks that clung to me the hardest. “911 Is a Joke,” “Burn Hollywood Burn,” and “Power to the People,” played on repeat as I shuffled through the drill of routine tasks: making my bed, washing my hair, drinking coffee without tasting it. I played “Welcome to the Terrordome” often as I drove through the cobalt glow of the Blue Ridge—there was something apocalyptic about that word, terrordome. I could see it plainly in my head: Earth’s vaulted ceiling, chaos and panic rampant on the ground, with miles of nothing in the firmament in between. Nothing, that is, but the echoes of clear-eyed protest:

    When I get mad, I put it down on a pad
    Give ya something that ya never had
    Controlling, fear of high rolling
    God bless your soul and keep living

The richness of the plurality of voices in each track followed me, too. Not only through Public Enemy as a collective, but in the wide array of artists, media, and musicians they culled from to sample throughout—all of this creating an album that continues to be great not only for the sum of its parts, but for its ability to assemble everything into something wholly other, and enduring.

*

The more I listened to Fear of a Black Planet, the more it transformed into my own private tonic against despondency. I found that if I shook the quiet of my solitude with something—anything with teeth and a measurable, almost mathematical structure (not unlike classical music, I might add)—it brought something not entirely unlike repose, which I found I needed increasingly more of in my jaunts around Roanoke and its neighboring towns.

Although I had no desire to make sense of a city that, on a large scale, nodded at prejudice, default segregation, and the selective erasure of entire populations, I found that in this album, injustice no longer felt quite so isolating and unseen. Someone understood; someone was listening. Someone, it seemed, had been crying out for me—over twenty-five years ago, and long before I ever knew I wouldn’t have the strength to do it myself. It was as though the album had become a companion, who somehow, as I drove from town to town, daily passing half-buried vestiges of Jim Crow, daily passing by, for instance, the 80-foot-tall Confederate battle flag on I-81, run up by a local man as a public warning to ward off “black people and Democrats”—it was as though this companion knew how to manage to get me back home relatively intact, with these lines pulsing through my speakers:

    They say the Black don’t know how to act
    ‘cause we’re waitin’ for the big payback
    But we know it’ll never come
    that’s why I say come and get some

*

Nearing the end of this partial account—or as I think of it, a small witness of what I owe this music—I realize that I have no tidy, clever, or even vaguely enlightened conclusion to offer. Having since moved from Roanoke, and having long shed the winter, bracing myself for another, I have found, as I should have allowed myself to expect, that these burdens have not diminished in size due to geography. They have only adjusted to accommodate new grief: the painful awakening of coming back into my own body, while waking up most days to news of more rounds of death, body counts tearing through the year like buckshot.

I have spent more time trying to understand fear than probably any human being should—how it governs our internal workings, how it deforms us, both individually and as collective bodies. And I continue to pray, poorly (if such a thing as poor prayer exists), that my own grief and anger and exhaustion and defeat and ardor may be refined in the service of bringing about unyielding peace, however small.

I keep returning to the artwork: the unapologetic block font, the deep indigo of space surrounding planet Earth, moments away from collision with a celestial black body—a literal black planet. Light, in precise quadrants, glows in an X from its center, while the dark surface cracks into blood-hued red. And Earth hangs still, unmoved, though we know this cannot be for much longer.

—Natasha Oladokun

#303: Bob Dylan, "John Wesley Harding" (1967)

William James IV was a friend to the poor. That’s what he told me, anyway. Also an abogado, set against the assembled corrupt powers of Corpus Christi; an injudicious lover, trawling the intersection of Leopard & Vine when he wasn’t pining for his cheerleader girlfriend; a white trash troubadour, ever since he was a young boy in New York State, gifted a jacaranda guitar from the Nicaraguan sugar plantation owned by a friend’s father. Speaking of New York….did you know he passed the state bar before John F. Kennedy, Jr.? Wait a couple cuts; he’d be happy to share.

John Wesley Hardin, he was a lawyer too. Passed the bar in Huntsville Prison, on a 25-year bid for killing a deputy. Pardoned with eight years left, he hung his legal shingle (some sources say in El Paso, others claim Gonzalez), committed his final murder, and took a bullet through his skull. Some seventy years later, Bob Dylan gave him a “g”. It was, perhaps, the only new detail he had to offer: his Hardin has no fixed occupation—door opener? hand lender?—and no fate. He carries guns, he has a female companion, he accrues unknown charges. In an interview published in the liners to 1985’s Biograph box, Dylan told Cameron Crowe that “John Wesley Harding” was “the one song that I had no idea what it was about, why it was even on the album.” No other title was considered for the LP.

In his 42 living years, Hardin appeared, like an itinerant disease vector, in countless towns: in Alabama, Florida, Kansas and Texas. Some of these places are ghosts now, as dead as those dozens Hardin and Dylan insisted were killed in self-defense. As far as I can tell, he never made it to Corpus Christi. He did claim a gunfight with two Mexican men about 45 minutes out of town; he blew one off his horse, he said, and the other rode away after. Neither did Hardin make it to College Station, which was a tiny university outpost during his time, and a thriving university outpost in mine.

William James IV did make it to College Station: a Hastings used-CD bin, specifically, alongside Subhumans’ EP-LP and many albums that did not alter my cultural trajectory in any way. It was called Requiem for the Nineties, the title and artist name rendered in severe serif capitals, on either side of a small horizontal photostrip depicting a winter tree. I’d been involved with the campus radio station; the cover ought to have been a dead giveaway for middling execution. But that “IV” looked like a clue. I bought it and the Subs record.

Odds and ends, odds and ends: lost time is not found again. Greil Marcus surveyed the banished lands of Dylan’s Basement Tapes (recorded in the months prior to the John Wesley Harding sessions) and dubbed them the Old, Weird America. He used the same appellation in the liners to Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, the 1951 “occult document” that Marcus linked to the Basement Tapes in his book Invisible Republic. To John Fahey, those that dwelt in this America were, simply, “revenants”: dead citizens with the power to animate at any time, if we choose to hear. John Wesley Harding is lousy with revenants. The titles are a tarot of archetypes: the Hobo, the Immigrant, the Drifter, the Wicked Messenger. Play them in the right time, in the right order, and fate is revealed.

The major arcana of William James IV were apparent on Requiem for the Nineties, and on every subsequent CD of his I found. The Immigrant is there, but as a client, and as an absence. There is the Sex Worker—many, to be exact—and the Cheerleader, the District Attorney and the Piggy. Instead of Hardin or Tom Paine, there is Selena and JFK and JFK, Jr. and Dylan his own self. James is the Artist, the wry barefoot center of town. Power runs through and around him; his battles never end. He is charming and contemptible: an archetype every bit as recognizable as Judas Priest, who likewise knew that everyone has their temptation. As Frankie Lee expires in Priest’s embrace, having run himself ragged through two dozen prostitutes in a house “as bright as any sun,” I find myself thinking: I hope he has a good lawyer.

The Old, Weird America was, of course, once called simply “America.” The mysteries touched by Dylan, Fahey, and Marcus were perhaps not solved, but they were pondered, often by a great many people. Had we invented recording technology in, say, the 1860s, would we still have the Nugrape Twins? And if so, would they sound like John Mayall? Writing about the interstate system in 1984, Lee Sandlin noted that “it is a world that by design touches only tangentially on the actual landscape of America. The goal of construction was never to join distant cities; it was to finish weaving a net that would contain the continent.” John Wesley Harding is a stark document—hermetic and spare, like a Ph.D. candidate’s studio apartment—that tightens the looser strands of the Basement work. He presents a stasis that predicts flux: nervous men read letters and scout from watchtowers, anticipating overthrow. But how, and from whom?

I moved back to Austin and holed up in a second-floor apartment with my brother. I worked at a computer factory for months at a stretch—sometimes the second shift, sometimes overnights—until my temp contracts ran out. I’d buy Bud Ice or Thunderbird on my breaks; when I got home, I’d stash them in the freezer for a bit, then finish them off while dancing to music videos, passing out while the sky was still orange-black. I came home at 3 a.m. one day, when a neighbor was checking her mail. Because she’d never seen me before, and because we lived across a walkway, she wondered if I was following her home to murder her. She still tells this story when we’re at parties. I kept an eye on eBay, and whenever a William James IV CD appeared—not often—I bought it. I got them out of sequence, but he was always the raconteur. 1999’s Love Is the Power found him in rehab, pondering the Kennedy assassination and a motel bust that shook him to his core. (The full story of the bust can be found in “Red White & Busted,” a harrowing, live-tracked lurcher. He gets so het up that he starts screaming at his lead guitarist, Chris Gage: “RIP IT! RIP IT AGAIN, WAS THAT YOUR GOOD SIDE, MOTHERFUCKER?”) 1994’s On the Road to the Sun had “Desolation Arrow,” a full-on Dylan parody, and “The Last of the Believers,” his best Dylan homage ("I saw Jesus down at Wal-Mart / In a Volvo GLT / I said 'Now Jesus, I believe / that Volvo belongs to me’"). 1993’s South Texas Girl got him thinking about making love from nothing at all, as well as the daughter he saw too infrequently. (The cover model is reading Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism.)

Upon receiving Love Is the Power in 2008, I decided to go further. I e-mailed the label head at Club de Musique, who had sold me the CD and whose website has the only worthwhile James bio. He replied the next week: he’d only met James during the Power sessions, and he passed on the e-mail of the producer, who had met James in 1990 and collaborated on a number of his records. In between a recap of his accomplishments—which are many—the producer noted that he and James were “close as brothers,” and he had about 300 copies of his albums, some of which he was willing to sell me. After living for a time with his ex in Corpus, James had decamped for Austin eight months prior. The producer had left messages with him and the ex, but no one replied. “Life is short,” the e-mail concluded. “The story is long. Nice to hear from you Brad.”

I left the story there. I also didn’t buy the producer’s CDs—I was broke, is how I spun it. Three new records for 33 bucks….that wasn’t bad. But I had come so close to the man, only to be turned away: the CDs were a poor consolation. I did another stint at the factory, then lost a series of jobs as a mail clerk, administrative assistant, and a non-profit marketing director. I met Catherine; her orbit of family and friends contained the same strain of vivant, only better tempered, that James presented. Her father was a Texas lawyer, by all accounts a remarkable man. He loved the Four Tops and his daughter, just as I did. Some of her high school classmates maintained a party house and booked the occasional gig at Saxon Pub or Sahara Lounge. Inevitably, they’d reach into their pocket and pull out Dylan’s “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You,” the final cut from Nashville Skyline, his follow-up to John Wesley Harding.

It’s my favorite of his love songs. And it’s a cross between the final two cuts on John Wesley: the passenger-train chug of “Down Along the Cove” and the heavy-lidded parley of “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight.” The album’s final verse is “Kick your shoes off, do not fear / Bring that bottle over here / I’ll be your baby tonight”—will the night be fueled by alcohol, or autonepiophilia? I bet William James IV and I would make the same pick.

Because to me, the era of rock’s first flowering is as much a mystery to me as, say, Nelstone’s Hawaiians must have been to Dylan’s peers. (In sheer terms of elapse, they’re pretty close too.) The prosaic details—the hotels, the overnights in unfamiliar towns, the illicit substances, the assignations—are common to each, but also to many millions from Woodstock to Corpus Christi, from Hardin’s day to now. Until that closing one-two kiss, John Wesley Harding clears a dusty landscape of arbitrary justice and dread mysteries. Dylan and the Band bashed out the Basement Tapes all through the 1967’s Summer of Love—during which, depending on your vantage, the earth was cracking open, or bursting forth. With but four days left in the year, he emerged not with playfulness, but pronouncements. Dylan knew that each is timeless, but decided the time was really right for only one.

After contacting James’s producer, I picked up a bar regimen. On any night—in between karaoke takes on “Father Figure” and “Friends in Low Places”—if I listened hard enough, I could hear a chorus of Dylan’s drifters and renters: sharing setbacks, begging for more time. With enough beers between us, they became William James’s: profane, sly, lustful, stranded. Now I’m married, and my beers come from the neighborhood coffeeshop. It has an adjoining venue—locally acclaimed, hosting the cream of Austin’s pickers and strummers. Every couple weeks or so, you can hear Chris Gage & Friends. I’ve never paid to see him, but they always pipe his sets through the coffeeshop PA. I’ve never known him to make a foolish move.

—Brad Shoup

#304: Jeff Buckley, "Grace" (1994)

Well it’s you I’ve waited my life to see
It’s you I’ve searched so hard for

I.

All my life I have wondered how I will ever come to understand this, for when I think that I know what love is, it transforms into something else, something I can feel but not touch. Perhaps this paradox, and this illusiveness, is really just mercy. Perhaps it’s the divine’s way of keeping us all from burning up.

I know that as I proceed to use love and longing interchangeably, as though they are identical, that this is itself insufficiency: of comprehension, of articulation, as is the condition of my default false god. That is, the augury of translating—attempting to turn language into substance, and substance into lyric. And the attempt of trying to make sense of longing, which is anything but logical, whether or not it is humanly or divinely inspired.

But I know no other way about it than this—submitting to the words and song of those who’ve heard the voice of Someone beyond whatever it is we’ve all called reality. There is no way to argue this experience, any more than one can argue about whether or not we see light, or see by it.

This too is a shortcoming. Often, we call this poetry.

II.

When I told a friend, “I don’t know how to write about Grace,” what I meant was that an undertaking such as this would require honest reckoning with failure. It would mean trying and ultimately failing to name the very thing that, by its nature, defies designation both in art and lived experience. But this is always the case—is it not?—when staring into the bright shadow of God.

My friend listened, and said to me in reply: Love is awe-ful and will wreck you, but is perhaps the only way to let in any good. At this, I could only wonder at the truth. Are we not all made of dust and earth, buffeted about, regardless? Why should grace, then—that great wing of the divine—not also have its turn?

And there’s the hallelujah of it, he said. And there’s the hallelujah.

III.

To listen to “Hallelujah,” not just hear it, is to catch hold of the suffering that undercuts adoration, which undergirds worship and prayer. It is to discern the voice of a man growing old before his time, a man who, when he wrote the words I love you but I’m afraid to love you and I could not wake from the nightmare that sucked me in and pulled me under—was perhaps at that moment less of a prophet seeing his own death than he was a poet on the cusp of defeat. Perhaps, in writing, he too was dissatisfied with life’s excess of the tangible. Perhaps he too was not content with anything less “real” than the glint of the moon, not the moon; the scent of a dress, not the dress; the creak of a gate, not the gate. Perhaps this is the best any of us can wait for, with these bodies.

IV.

Often, throughout my adolescence, I would read the first two chapters of Genesis over and over, searching for a point of connection. Then one day—this prayer—untucking my shirt and lifting the side: Look here, Lord, if I’ve got nothing missing, what is this wound? What, then, did You take out of me?

In a way, I have not stopped asking this question. Art, the divine, the love of another—all have been defined for me in terms of felt absence, redeemed only by the promise of some sort of Word. I believe this Word must be something that means grace, or at least the expectation of it:

    Wait in the fire / Wait in the fire / Wait in the fire / Wait in the fire

V.

Coming to the end of this spring, I could barely compel even one line of writing to follow another. I’d lived in southwest Virginia for two years, feeling as displaced as the lost tribes Exodus takes such pains to chronicle. By then, the act of forcing myself to create was more torture than relief. Empty, I often turned to writing prompts for salvation. Then one day:

Read these abstractions, an exercise instructed. Write down what concrete pictures come to mind. Then create your poem.

    Rage:

The table, flipped over. Wine, in branched streams, slipping down a carved oak leg.

    Ecstasy:

Plum. Every dark shade—

I could get no further. Each of these, a merciless pitch and yaw to which no language could do justice.

And yet, though there was no love, grace, or God on this list, something within me—something I did not know—knew how to dissect etymology: where the spirit could see the body outside herself, in different time signatures—one rendition of me ringing out over another, keeping vigil while my whole head caught into a tongue of flame.

Whether any of this actually happened, or even makes any sense, is partly matter of perspective—like trying to determine which part of a storm cloud is made the most of water. Still, who can say how that unnamable sustenance appeared, as present as a dream: of what might be, and what, then, is already here.

VI.

All my life I have wondered how I will ever come to understand this: the presence of grace cannot be measured only in terms of scarcity or abundance. Like God, it is not a matter of conjured experience, and it is even less a matter of devout or ailing conviction, though it is partly that.

It is a matter of recollection and hunger. We do not remember what we ate on this day a year ago—we remember only that we were fed. And while we are also sustained (or is it driven?) by what we do not yet have, this always exists within the thin mesh between desperation and hope. Often, we call this mesh faith, and this faith, vulnerability.

Is this not what all the great bards and artists have taught us? That however much it may shape us, we do not have the luxury of settling for doubt. That we are burned, but not consumed—that we must risk something in uncovering our most hidden desires. That longing is belief, without the safety of clothes.

—Natasha Oladokun

#305: Lucinda Williams, "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road" (1998)

Not a day goes by I don’t think about you
You left your mark on me—it’s permanent, a tattoo

There is no way to write about a loved one’s death in a self-satisfying way. Most lives we’ve loved are too enormous for that. And death is petty and maudlin. It makes people uncomfortable. Though it remains our singular shared experience, the conversation surrounding it is hushed, held in late-night tones. Perhaps because it isn’t really death we want to keep tucked away, but loss. Perhaps because loss like this is a permanent absence you’re either forced to get comfortable with or go mental trying not to. When someone’s suddenly gone, you feel it much more than you understand it. Rational thought has no place here. Philosophers beware.

Largely, I’m a lucky so-and-so. I can count my losses on one hand. Each finger counted breaks me to the bone, but they are few and I am grateful. Last week was a year and eight months since Lena sent me a text to tell me Claudia had died. I was in the middle of teaching fifth grade Language Arts—I don’t typically check my phone. It must have been the end of class. My students must have been packing up their things. It matters and it doesn’t matter. I want to hang on to every detail of the day because I think of it now as the last day I still lived in a world where my friend Claudia Emerson lived with me.

I knew her before I knew her, if that makes sense. At the University of Mary Washington, it was a little hard not to. She wasn’t our only rock star, but she was the biggest. She’d won the Pulitzer three years before I got there and, miraculously it seemed, had stayed. She said she liked teaching undergrads, that their hunger made her hungrier. Her office door was covered in strange ephemera and what looked like photographs of bright feathers and bird skulls. At the one coffee shop downtown, you could find her writing quietly on her own at a corner table. You couldn’t typically take an upper-level poetry class until junior year, which meant your first two years as an English major were spent with the same hundred questions in your head, all more or less variations on what’s she like?

Writing poetry is a weird thing to do. As a teacher myself now, I always tell my high schoolers not to worry about it if they don’t like it—I cut the unit short if that’s the case. I never analyze lines with them unless they seem like they might want to. The first poem we read is always “so you want to be a writer?” because I want my kids to snicker and I want them not to worry about it. If they’re into it—poetry, I mean—they’ll fall in love on their own. I believe my job is only to hand them impossible, bewitching collections of words and say “Here, give it a try, just in case.” The medium is too fragile. The hackles go up the minute the filthy word is said: poetry. A punchline more than an art. Is it any wonder its foolhardy bearers have chips on their shoulders as big as they are?

Like most, I was force-fed the same dry oats throughout my entire academic career. I understand now the great beauty in language, but why was this my lesson at 12 years old, 14, 16? When it came to me, on its own, in college, it came hard. And, of course, it came from Claudia, who read the hermitic West Virginia poet Steve Scafidi’s “Life Story of the Possible” to the class in the early days of my first-ever poetry workshop. By the last line, she was in tears. Partly, my revelation came from the poem, which remains to this day one of my favorites, though mostly it was Claudia, exposed and open-hearted and laughing about it all at once. A small, cataclysmic response.

It’s hard to say who this is for. Recollections of moments of those who have died seem selfish, or boring at best. But Car Wheels on a Gravel Road is one of the greatest albums ever made—and it reminds me now heavily and only of Claudia, which, to be frank, somehow makes it even better.

I’m not even 100 percent sure that she liked Lucinda Williams as much as I remember, but it’s impossible that she didn’t at least like her a little. Her life, for one, was surrounded by and infused with music every day. She was a part-time lyricist and guitar player on top of the poetry, and her husband’s stringed instrument collection hung on the walls of their home. I keep his business card in my wallet: it says his name and beneath it, MUSIC. The first time I paid them a visit I met their cat, Lucinda. I freaked; Claudia and I talked Gravel Road. What else was there to say? Maybe it’s music that’s our great unifier, the one shared thread, after all. If so, it’s a good one.

At Claudia’s funeral, I stood in the procession filing into the great downtown church. It took a moment for me to realize that Steve Scafidi stood immediately in front of me, shuffling at my same pace, same confused glaze of a look. As much as any writer can, he had changed my life irrevocably. I had never met him—to this day, still haven’t. It was only appropriate I should see him then, there, for that occasion. All links over time break from their chain. It doesn’t mean that they’ve forgotten, will forget.

A few of us decided to get tattoos that night; it hadn’t been an easy day. We wanted to be links connected forever to our chain, we wanted never to forget. Claudia’s tattoo was of an iamb on the inside of her wrist, just below the palm’s ridge. It was she who told me the iamb was the heartbeat of poetry. Nearer to the end of her life, she explained her tattoo by telling others “it means stress unstress.” Both meanings true, both perfect. On an image of the tattoo on Facebook, the poet Mark Jarman told her he and his wife were considering iamb ink of their own. She asked, “For me as a kind of prayer?” and told him to do it.

So we got our own iambs. The needleman asked if that was all we wanted, that it would only take two seconds and we’d still have to pay the minimum, far more than a stress and an unstress was worth. A simple bowl and leaning ladder. The decision felt like a minor thrill, helped pump blood back into our demolished hearts. Today I trace my pinky across the lines just over my pulse. Today I teach Claudia in the classroom. Each time it feels like opening wide a set of locked double doors.

And I listen to Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. When I hear Lucinda, I imagine Claudia. The loss has so tightly tied these together that by now it’s second nature. It’s an album that was written to perfection, labored over for years, held onto for as long as possible, and it shows. A labor of love is still founded on love, still seeks it. Country music has always bartered in the currency of loss. But music is the unifier—the medium, not the message. Music is the unifier. Too cool to be forgotten / hey hey.

via Facebook.com

—Brad Efford

#306: Beck, "Odelay" (1996)

I am fourteen. Newly so. It's my birthday and I want to celebrate even though I look like this. Yesterday at school I slid a flattened straw between my two front teeth to feel the plastic on my gums, but I pulled it out too quickly and felt it catch, felt the tug and then the little corner of tooth floating around in my saliva, spit into my hand. It happened between fifth and sixth period, so I just wiped it into the pocket of my jeans, pressed my lips together and made it through the rest of the day in silence. Now I can't stop running my tongue over my tooth's chipped ridge. It is a pleasant sensation, this altered mouth-scape. It's sharp but not too sharp. Familiar little groove.

*

The tooth has been chipped for years, really. It was the veneer I disturbed with the straw—the fake part. The actual chip happened in a roller-blading accident way back in fifth grade, so I know the drill by now: a trip to the dentist Monday morning, a finger wag for being careless, and then I'll get to look at a lot of cool tools and gadgets, flavored pastes and putties that become teeth and hot blue lights and a straw that sucks on me and I'll have a new fake tooth corner in a half-hour or so. Isn't dentistry surreal? I'll get back to school in time for drama class.

I still want to celebrate my damn birthday.

*

My family has moved, recently, from a split-level rental on a cookie-cutter suburban cul-de-sac  to a big fairytale cottage in an enchanted wood on the other side of town. My little brother has already joined the pack of boys that march around in line like elves, organizing enchanted soccer games. I am way more popular at my new school than I ever was at the old one. It really sucks that I can't have a big party. So many kids would come.

*

Let me tell you about Cathy Tupper, my best friend from my old school. I still want to celebrate my damn birthday and I know she'll be nice about my tooth because Cathy and I got hot together. That means we were ugly and invisible together first, so it would be very uncool for either of us to judge. When we met, in band class, sitting side by side with clarinets in our mouths, we were both the kind of girl you might call mousey, our hotness all hidden somewhere behind the oversized tee-shirts and thick glasses. The ponytails with messy bangs. The lack of mascara. Near the end of seventh grade, though, we both got contacts and started shopping in the Juniors department and suddenly we weren't invisible anymore. Boys started to make jokes about what those clarinets could be.

We didn't realize that becoming visible would mean that boys—men, too—would start saying things like that to us. We didn't know we would have to start "dodging dicks," as Cathy calls it, and we don't know how we're supposed to feel about it. But we sure do like feeling pretty. We are glad that we became hot girls together. We talk about these things, Cathy and me.

*

Let me tell you about Grant Stillman, my best friend at my new school. He will walk over from his parent's fairytale cottage pretty soon. He, too, lives in the enchanted wood, and he will, as usual, bring along some enchanted substance or another that will make us giggle in the backseat of my mom's car all the way to the mall. We are going to see Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet. Grant is one boy whose dick I know I will never have to dodge because he hopes to do some dick dodging of his own someday. We talk about these things, Grant and me. We talk about dicks and vaginas and we showed ours to each other once, like children playing doctor, I guess, except it was just a month ago. When he touched me Grant immediately recoiled, saying "men are like weapons and women are open wounds" and I guess he's right about that. He spent the rest of the night talking to the ceiling about the inequity of heterosexuality while I tried to draw him in my journal.

*

I'm weeping in the theater on my fourteenth birthday, tonguing my chipped tooth and letting the tears slide down my face in silence, feeling safe in the dark. Romeonardo peers through a bright blue tropical fish tank at My-So-Called-Juliet and I am thinking about my first boyfriend, Aaron Butler, and how Cathy Tupper introduced us over the phone, on a conference call from Justin Dwyer's dad's home office. Justin was Cathy's boyfriend at the time and Aaron Butler, Justin's best friend, was about to start going to my new school. Over the course of several more conference calls, we, the four of us, built it up into some kind of new-kids-in-love story and a few days later, via call waiting, in Cathy's voice, translated from the Justin translation of the original, Aaron Butler asked me to be his girlfriend. We didn't see each other face to face until a week later, on his first day at school, when he found me in the cafeteria at lunchtime. Our relationship mostly just consisted of us sitting together at lunch and walking together in the hallways, but now I'm sitting here weeping in the theater on my fourteenth birthday and Desiree is singing about kissing and I am thinking about that one, soft kiss that day before I got on the bus. My first kiss. My only kiss. When will I ever kiss again?

And now Mercutio-in-drag is dancing and I am thinking about the time I refused to hold Aaron's hand in the hallway because I just didn't feel like it at that moment and why did we have to hold hands all the time anyway? And now neon crosses, and now swimming pools and now bloody street fights and Romeo slew Tybalt and Romeo must not live and I am thinking about how Sandy Black stormed into French class that morning with a smirk on her face, like she had just eaten something delicious and she couldn't wait to give me a taste, how she used Spice Girls lyrics to say it at first, something like, "I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want my lover to get with my friends," how I later learned that this alluded to the fact that she had witnessed my very first boyfriend, Aaron Butler, making out with Jenny Konopka on the bus that morning.

My-So-Called-Juliet is ugly-crying, poison-eyeing, and I am digging my tongue into the sharpest point of my chipped tooth, hoping to taste blood, and all that I am thinking is that Jenny Konopka is not my friend.

*

We have to kill some time before my mom comes to pick us up. Grant suggests pizza, but Cathy wants to buy me a present. I smile without parting my lips. I am thinking about how when I asked Cathy that night to ask Justin to ask Aaron Butler why he did it, he said, in Cathy's voice, another call-waiting translation of a translation, "Well, which girl would you want? The one who makes out with you on the bus or the one who won't even hold your hand?" My heart lurches a little.

We loiter around Tower Records for a while and Cathy buys me the CD I have been coveting since the summertime, with the one song that is sure to cheer me up, anytime, always, and presents it to me with a flourish. We listen to it in the car on the way home and my spirits pick themselves up off the dirty floor of my soul. The intro builds up in my gut and the outro assures me, "Awwww, it's all goood." I believe that decrescendo.

*

Jenny Konopka is my friend, sort of? She sidled up to me on the running track during mandatory exercise last week and told me she liked my iridescent nail polish and she kind of hasn't left my side since then? And I kind of don't mind, I guess? We are YMCA counselors-in-training, Jenny and I, and there aren't a lot of us. I guess Jenny decided I was the best fit for the empty slot labeled "Jenny's Summer Camp Friend," because I guess she maybe actually thinks I'm kind of cool, maybe? On Friday she introduced me to my new boyfriend, Brandon Moody, who is best friends with her boyfriend, Tommy Galloway.

Being a counselor-in-training kind of blows. It's just because none of our parents trust us to stay home all summer and we aren't old enough for real jobs yet. I'm pretty sure Grant and all of the other teenagers in the enchanted forest are ordering pizzas and playing Super Nintendo without me every day. But I do really like the things Jenny and I do with our boyfriends just feet away from each other in the little storage room above the racquetball court.

Jenny Konopka has seen me with Brandon Moody's tongue in my mouth and she has seen what I look like when I am thinking about doing it and she probably knows, like Brandon and I both know, that I love being felt-up but I don't want to do any feeling up of my own. Jenny knows all of that about me and she likes my nail polish so I think we must be actual friends, now.

*

Let me tell you about Brandon Moody's dick. I touched it, finally. I tried to avoid it almost all summer, but one day I guess I just gave in and I reached into his pants and I wrapped my hand around it. It felt kind of like a big worm at first and then it changed and I was holding this, like, flesh-rod and it was so weird I pulled my hand right back out. I think it might have been a mistake to touch it because Brandon won't stop talking about doing it now. He keeps trying to get me to sneak off into the woods with him, and he keeps reminding me that Tommy and Jenny did it last week and no one caught them. I said I was on my period for a while, but Jenny called me out after a week of that lie. "Mine only last like five days," she said, "so you should be able to do it now." She said that in front of Brandon Moody, too. Jenny Konopka is not my friend.

*

Brandon Moody and I are sitting at a picnic table playing footsie and he tells me to reach out under the table for his hand and when I do he presses something squishy into my palm. Looking down, I see that it is a condom with a sheep on the wrapper. The ones Grant keeps in his sock drawer don't have sheep on the wrappers and I wonder if Brandon's sheep-condoms are better than Grant's condoms, which come in clear wrappers so you can see which color you're getting. I turn the sheep-condom over in my hand, squeeze it and feel it squish again. I try not to react.

"I'm going to use that with you next Friday," is what Brandon says about it, and I know he means at the amusement park. There is a field trip next Friday. He is trying to be romantic, he says, so that our first time can be special. The amusement park is a special place, he says. Plus it will be easy to sneak off there, to slip the real counselors and then slip it in, he says, and he chuckles. I just keep nodding, not knowing what to do or say back to him. I like Brandon Moody. I really like him. I want him to keep being my boyfriend, so I just keep nodding.

*

Last night I freaked out. I didn't know what to do so I called Cathy Tupper and I told her everything. And Cathy Tupper told me I don't have to go to the amusement park and I don't have to ride any rides I don't want to ride. She said it seemed like a good night for a sleepover. And now it's amusement park day and I am sitting on her couch watching Seinfeld instead, because I want to remain master of my domain. I want my life to be a show about nothing.

*

When I return to the Y on Monday, Brandon Moody is no longer my boyfriend. I learn this first from Lauren Flayme, a pudgy, funny, gossipy girl a year younger than the rest of us. When I see him—sitting alone at a picnic table with his hands folded in his lap, as if he's been expecting me—Brandon explains that Jenny introduced him to her friend Candace at the amusement park and, in my absence, what choice did he have? He wants to still be friends, he says, but at lunchtime he and Jenny and Tommy all sit far away from me. I sit with Lauren Flayme.

As I walk the running track alone at mandatory exercise, I run my tongue over my smooth front teeth and I feel sort of dissatisfied and I realize my stupid heart isn't even broken. I watch Brandon, Jenny, and Tommy, so far ahead of me on the running track that I can see their smiling faces, not their backs. I kick a rock and squint at the sun and I find myself thinking about the night of my fourteenth birthday, back at the enchanted forest, Cathy, Grant and I lying across my bed, full of enchanted substances, listening to Beck and giggling at the ceiling, chanting, "Oh! Delay! Oh! Delay! Oh! Delay!"

—Claire Boswell

#307: The Beatles, "A Hard Day's Night" (1964)

over this music / I make my first real friend / we agree to keep one another’s museums under development / at thirteen when being in agreement has never been more crucial / this band really rings our bell / though we aren’t like those weeping fans in the movies / we appreciate them / the lungs on them / their real face-gripping hurt seems to ache them / to pound the pavement / on the living room floor by the speakers / I love my new friend just for loving / what I love / enough / what makes a person / into a fan / what part of the heart gives over / to what part //

the first chord on this album is a famous alarm clock / its title is a famous mistake / my loyalty is single voiced and simple / like how there’s only one the Beatles / nobody brings this up at parties / in adherence to the rules of discourse at parties / that non-controversial subjects need not be mentioned / unless they can be posited as a guilty pleasure / and defended in a way that makes a person picture sex / as an argument about a band / simple with love / I persist in having nothing to add / but that 1960s teenage feeling / in the 1990s / I’d like to add the feeling the floor makes / when it’s by the speakers //

too green to have met myself yet I stashed some clues about myself inside my friend / for safekeeping / until I could be held accountable / I walked too many times to the record store to prowl the castaways / checked out that one book from the library / that broke each song down into its parts / spelled out who wrote which percentage of “And I Love Her” / clearly mostly it was Paul / I can’t yet be trusted with an idea about process / the idea of people in a room in the past / perhaps with sandwiches / making something that can crawl towards me in time / is also far away from me in time / closer is the considered image of my friend loving the same sounds as I am loving / and that this experience can be repeated / though I’m on a linear surface that only rolls forward beneath me / I can share it also now with you / when I land on a train decades later singing to myself / as long as I have you near me / I burst into it as if predetermined //

loving the Beatles was always absent effort until it wasn’t / until I vowed to learn to play “Blackbird” on guitar the real way / better than the boys / in this way the Beatles also taught me / when you love something long enough you build it a bed beside yours / inside your body / and compete with it //

when I’m feeling young everything I like is a study of seeing myself in it / the art or the enterprise of sitting beside someone else’s work / asking it for answers / this lasts and lasts / though I do in time devote myself to new sounds / with a studious diligence / I try to love “Guerilla Radio” / which is how I learn that sometimes love is work / when I use my mind to lift things / at first / my mind is weak / it wants to use what it loves best to explain itself to itself / what it wants is a vegetable it doesn’t have to try at / but that will contribute nutrients like anything planted / sown in rows for me to pluck easily with my small arms / in my sleep / unaware of much / though I would have said I wanted / everything at infinite capacity / what I was after / was to be surprised by how easily I could love //

this album makes a sound that’s more like the feeling of listening / one experience of a song enters at a time like a single voice / is that why those fans were always crying / because trying to understand how many events is one event / is impossible / kaleidoscopic / it breaks apart and becomes too numerous / in a stadium / where side by side / we recognize ourselves //

I’m uncomfortable with time and assessment / with the bland tyranny of my thinking / but these songs are good because they’re good / and because I love them / I collapse into an uncritical pile of shut up and because I said so / it’s a stunningly bad wedding vow that asserts love is fascist / love is authoritarian / still this hill is where I will live out my days / still whenever I love it’s the same as I want you to know what I’m able to love without trying / without process or the effort of the act / or how I learned to find others by sharing / as long as I have you near me / and how I’m dumbly flammable //

and what is it that makes me pair an ease of loving with an urge to dismiss it / O! I am an underappreciated appreciator of nothing nobody else doesn’t already appreciate / O! I fucking love the Beatles / and listen to them all the time / meaning nothing less than these tunes are in the walls of my body / its spongy absorbent bits / its twig sculpture on the forest floor / the sticky hellos it sends out of its mouth as it passes / to a future more complicated / fortified by this first simple giving over / hello, hello //

—Laura Eve Engel

#308: Frank Sinatra, "Songs for Swingin' Lovers" (1956)

I used to tell you, when you asked me what I listened to, that I hated music.

Of course, what I really hated, and still hate, is the posturing about the music you listen to, about your superior tastes, your enlightenment. As if the length of your fandom, the level of obscurity in your collection, correlates to the substance of your character, the goodness of your soul.

You have an archive of 30,000 mp3s. You own rare records, talk about LPs, your bootlegs, what machines and conditions you need for ideal sound quality. You used to make CDs with songs you’d found on the weird parts of the internet that you would put in our CD players, actually snapping in half and throwing out whatever you were “saving us from.” If we had been ten years older, you would have spent hours telling us about the art of the mixed tape. You lose interest in bands once they’ve done this thing that they call “making it,” and you call “selling out,” because you’re angry that you’ve lost them, that you have to share them with others.

Sometimes, I try to talk to you about Frank. You don’t have as many strong opinions about him—he’s earned the kind of old-school chops that get him a passing nod, but maybe not all of your attention: you don’t know his songs, know vaguely that he was maybe in the mafia, cool with Louis Armstrong. You give me the benefit of the doubt, like it is some ironic thing, like wearing your D.A.R.E. T-shirt while you smoke pot. You let it slide.

But the truth is that I love pop music—Old Standards especially, that glorious weird cornball stuff about grand romantic gestures set to a full orchestra. And Frank, Frank was the King, the original pop star, full of sentimental phrasings that put Hallmark to shame, a person who felt comfortable describing what he did for a living with the verb “to croon.”

Songs for Swingin’ Lovers wouldn’t make it past whatever Cool Kids Test you have for albums you own, because it opens with “You Make Me Feel So Young,” a song that gives “overplayed” new meaning. You’ve heard it ballooning over thousands of romantic comedy montages of when-things-first-look-good-between-the-love-interests-before-the-main-conflict-drops. The lyrics liken the couple to an archaic synonym for children that your grandmother doesn’t even use: “You and I are just like a couple of tots / running across the meadow picking up lots of forget-me nots.” When he belts how “you make me feel there are bells to be rung,” the orchestra rings out some actual bells. It ends with a horn sigh that is the transitional sound for every upbeat 60s television program. It is the final word in Cheese.

“I’ve Got You Under My Skin” features a classic storyline for the films Sinatra starred in for most of his career—an extended meet-cute where the couple starts off by hating each other, and then, like Eliza Doolittle and Professor Higgins, find that they are accustomed to one another in a way that necessitates their first face-smashing smooch (hashtag TrueLove). This theme is so popular in the films and musicals where many of these songs originated that it is revisited in the Most Romantically Titled Song “You’re Getting to Be A Habit With Me,” which features the line: “I can’t break away / I’ve got to have you every day / as regularly as coffee or tea.” Then there is a big orchestral interlude for the couple in question to get to dance their feelings out in a swaying, furniture-leaping waltz.

And I love it.

You might again mistake all of this as irony, but it’s really closer to the same impulse that makes me love Twizzlers, a candy that is both candle-wax and medicine-flavored: deep-rooted, hardcore nostalgia. Because this album is not the album that showcases Sinatra at his most powerful—nowhere do we get to hear the instrument of his incredible voice give way to the pervasive sadness that haunted his efforts in music that even you might find moving. This album is the cheeriest of Christmas elves, whatever nod the songs make to longing or lost love belied with the buoyant orchestral promise that all will be well in the end.

What’s interesting about Songs for Swingin’ Lovers is the significance in its part in the Great Divide, or the battle against the new animal that was rock ‘n’ roll. This album, a breakout for Sinatra at a time when his career had taken a hit, paired him for the first time with Nelson Riddle, a collaboration that resulted in a Hit Factory Machine for the next three decades. But what was so interesting about Songs for Swingin’ Lovers is that they didn’t make an album of new songs to defend the honor of pop music; instead, they revived old favorites from as far back as 30 years, using the sheer genius of Riddle’s arranging prowess with Sinatra’s killer vocals to carry the genre to greatness. And it was a swing and a hit. (badum-BUM!)

I don’t think a revived Cole Porter jam is a cop-out. I don’t think lyrics that contain every cliche in the book (nightingales, love by bewitchment, stars in your eyes) are even damning here. Because it is this absolute commitment to moonlit love swoons that has me on board. There is a necessary suspension of disbelief here, a full-throated allegiance to all the trappings of the earliest, dumbest, and most desperate symptoms of Love Potion #9. What is the experience of falling in love, if not a series of familiar desires? It is madness, but it is genuine madness, carried out by arguably the inventor of pop icon swag. “And holding hands in the movie show / when all the lights are low, may not be new / but I like it,” Frank sings in How About You. This is a man who makes “lover” sound upbeat and not just the grossest bummer ever, whose conversational lines about “makin’ whoopie” and “swingin’ down the lane” have me, even at my most cynical moments, singing along. Even if I can’t ever imagine tattooing the lyrics along my rib cage the way you have with your ride or die anthems.

It’s partly the weirdness that makes me love it, the affected romance, the performative nature inherent to proclamations of love. Sinatra called Elvis’s music “a rancid-smelling aphrodisiac,” saying, “It fosters almost totally negative and destructive reactions in young people.” For someone notorious for his moods and violence, not to mention for saying things like “you’re much too much / and just too very ‘very’,” that’s a fairly rich accusation. And maybe here is where I’m wandering into the stuff that might help you find your Sinatra love—his wild persona, the skinny street kid with the chip on his shoulder, the classic anti-hero. And maybe even, you might be swayed by his civil rights work, the industry feathers he ruffled insisting on his integrated band at a time when venues were barring people of color, when hotels would burn the sheets after the musicians had left the building. But what I’m telling you is that these are songs that don’t need footnotes for me—this is the stuff that I can sing in my sleep, where the crescendo of Frank’s voice is a swooping breath in my diaphragm, a—dare I say it?—tug on my heartstrings. And I’m done trying to make sure you think it’s cool.

—S.H. Lohmann

#309: Creedence Clearwater Revival, "Willy and the Poor Boys" (1969)

Willy and the Poor Boys is a strange album. It boasts two instantly recognizable hits—"Down on the Corner" and "Fortunate Son"—the latter of which seems to be the very archetype of the North American antiwar rock song of the 1960s and 1970s. But these two songs persist, not solely because they are transcendent works of art, but because ad campaigns (for Walgreen's and Wrangler jeans) have used them in ways that fully neutralize their protests. The inversion of the content is so neat, the irony so precise, that one would be forgiven for thinking a prize-winning novelist named Jonathan planned the whole thing as an allegory for the way that mass culture degrades and thwarts human experience. These songs are the information we have from the outset as we approach Willy and the Poor Boys, which makes things a little more like a detective story than a prize-winning novel by a guy named Jonathan. They are isolated snippets of information that we gradually come to understand as part of a larger, dynamic unity. Except we end up, not with a crime, but with an expanded view of the tone or feeling of protest that attended our Jonathanesque cynicism in the first place.

In fairness to cynicism, I am a little bit cynical. I think it's important to be, at least to a certain extent. There's no way to will away the truth of the culture industry, which is precisely that you can use a song that sneers at the American ruling class for blithely perpetuating imperial war to underscore the "Americanness" of blue jeans made in sweatshops on the other side of the globe (it's worth noting that we went to war in the first place to make sure that reserve army of labor was secure). But I don't think that this means protest is cheap, short-lived, or pointless: far from it. In art as in life, I cannot think of anything more important than protest. I would love to bring back another beautiful p word, propaganda, to designate this feeling in the cultural sphere. But it ultimately doesn't matter what we call it, so long as we concede that, no matter how co-opted or contained or dehisced from its initial foment it has been, this feeling persists, it agitates, it expresses a desire to somehow remake the world. And we should be heartened that the culture industry has to resort to selling us knockoff Utopian knickknacks because it can't deliver on any of the promises it makes, and it knows it, and it knows we know it.

Heartened, but not triumphant: this is how I would characterize Creedence Clearwater Revival's performance on Willy and the Poor Boys, which seems to protest against an inculcated cynicism as much as it does against the government. The result is a potent ambivalence that furnishes an expansive way of seeing. The album begins, in "Down on the Corner," with people flocking into the streets; it ends, in "Effigy," with the burning of an effigy of something extraordinarily big. Are the people who take to the streets to dance at the end of the working day, outside a courthouse no less, the same ones who watch something gigantic burn to the ground by album's end? And what of those who can't pay the buskers, where do they stand on effigy-burning? What does a group of people really want: a dance party or a mass movement? what's the difference between the two? when does the line begin to blur?

Expansiveness is not just a matter of bodies accumulating in the streets. It also factors into how CCR figure the relationships between core and periphery, or urban and rural spaces. "It Came Out of the Sky" begins with a farmer in Illinois ("just outside of Moline," sings Fogerty) and ends with Hollywood, the Vatican, and the White House all clamoring over what to do with the UFO that plops in that farmer's field. Eventually the farmer refuses all summonses and offers and says he will sell the UFO for seventeen million dollars. A little later, in "Feelin' Blue," the speaker laments that his time has come, but gives no real indication of in what sense he means this, only that he must be moving on. Has he been drafted? Has he lost his job to offshoring? Both seem reasonable responses, especially given the direction we receive to "look over yonder" in the lyrics. Both would certainly result in the feeling that gives the song its name and its refrain. But then for all that the music is flippantly upbeat, a mid-tempo affair that concludes with a call-and-response of sorts between the vocals and the guitar. It is as if the ability to sing and to play intervenes against melancholy, or at the very least prevents sadness from hardening over into melancholy.

All this comes to a head in "Fortunate Son." The song's refrain, like that of "Feelin' Blue," seems to revel in the capacity to make distinctions in language, but now there is a more explicit political edge. "It ain't me" derives its power from its negativity, which ends up being the more expansive way to chart solidarity than any kind of affirmative mode. There are a lot of us who are not millionaires, senators' sons, fortunate ones, etc., just as there are a lot of us who are expected to fight for the benefit of the ruling class, who profits from but does not suffer in war. To see in those terms is to see in terms of collectivity. It is to grasp the scope of who might be showing up to dance in the street in "Down On the Corner." And it is to recognize that the people who have cannon pointed at them during "Hail to the Chief" vastly outnumber those who pay for and fire the guns. But in this there is a final, tragic ambivalence: the class with the cannons—in 1969 as today—are the ones who do the killing, even as they blame the people they shoot at for perpetuating bloodshed. Willy and the Poor Boys has no solution to this problem, but it tells us where we can find one: down on the corner, out in the street, where the cynicism of the prize-winning novel finds itself transformed into a refusal so big it could swallow the whole world, or at least burn it in effigy and build something more beautiful out of the ashes.

—David W. Pritchard

#310: Red Hot Chili Peppers, "Blood Sugar Sex Magik" (1991)

Nicole is waiting under the bridge for her friend Cass, kicking at the empty beer cans that have piled up with the rocks and leaves, when she sees the man with the notebook. He’s about ten yards below her, sitting on a rock near the sagging chain link fence just above where the ridge drops down into the river, and though it looks as though he’s writing, there’s nothing in his hand. She disbelieves this at first, squints and leans closer, almost losing her balance on the steep slope, but no, there’s definitely nothing there, though his hand moves across the page and his fingers are poised in grip around an invisible pencil. He looks up at her and she drops her gaze back to the beer cans.

She should be in school right now. It’s 11 a.m., and third period is just starting. She should be in English, sitting at her desk behind Jason Pierce, who is blonde and on the swim team and never turns around, but whenever he reaches one hand behind him to scratch at a mole on his neck, she stares at his fingers, the nails chewed down to the quick.

The man closes his notebook and stands. He waves to her and says something that she doesn’t hear. She half-lifts one hand in response. He seems to take that as an invitation, for he climbs up the ridge to her. He stumbles over a tree root, but doesn’t fall. He stops below her, making her taller than him. Close up, she can see that, though his hair is graying, though lines surround his eyes, he is younger than she’d thought, maybe only in his fifties or sixties. He’s wearing a parka, the same shade of forest green as the notebook, which he has tucked under his arm. He smells the way her friend Cass often smells these days, the way her mother smells, and so Nicole knows he has been drinking.

“I said, shouldn’t you be in school?” he says.

“I’m eighteen,” she says, which isn’t an answer.

“That’s nice,” he says, and from the half-smile he gives her, she knows he knows she’s lying. She’s sixteen.

She shifts her weight, taps one toe against a can. A few splashes of liquid slosh inside as it rolls away from her. She crosses her arms. She wishes she had a cigarette. She usually only smokes with Cass, and then just a puff or two, but she feels the need, now, for something to do, a reason to be standing under the bridge.

As if reading her mind, the man says, “Cigarette?”

She shrugs. “Okay.”

He taps two out of the pack and holds one out to her. When she takes it, the tips of her fingernails scrape against his palm. He doesn’t flinch. She puts it in her mouth and leans forward, careful not to fall, for him to light it for her, like she’s seen Cass do when she’s trying to impress the seniors that like to skate around the steps of the elementary school, practicing their ollies and kick flips and rail slides. The smoke catches in her throat as she breathes in and she lets it out in a small cough.

The man smiles. “I was new once, too,” he says, and Nicole feels herself flush.

“Whatever,” she says, which is what she thinks Cass would say. She wishes he would leave.

“I mean it,” he says. “Shit, I used to play hooky all the time.”

She takes another drag on the cigarette. It doesn’t burn as much this time. She’s remembering how this works.

“I’d hang out under bridges, just like you, smoking, drinking, getting fucked up,” he says. “That’s all my life was, for a while. I was in this band, and we weren’t even shit, we’d had albums drop, they’d done pretty well, people knew us, but I didn’t care about any of that.”

Nicole wishes now she hadn’t taken the cigarette. Her throat is already sore, and now she has to listen to the man. She should’ve climbed up the ridge and back onto the street as soon as he’d approached her. Not that there’d necessarily be anyone there—this neighborhood, the neighborhood that Nicole and Cass had loved to explore as children, was dead. Cass was always complaining about it—but at least she’d be more visible. If Cass had been on time—but Cass was Cass, and never on time once in her life, and Nicole should have known that when Cass said to skip school and meet her under the bridge at 11, what she really meant was that she’d show up when she felt like it, and Nicole would need to be waiting when she did.

“I got clean, though,” the man is saying. “Hardest goddamn thing I ever did in my life.” He stares at her like he’s trying to tell her something with his eyes. She looks at the cigarette between her fingers. It’s burning down, and ash drops onto her shoe. “I wrote a song about it,” the man says. “You probably know it.” He hums a few bars.

“Yeah,” she says. “Maybe.” She doesn’t recognize it at all.

Up above, she can see a person’s head round the corner, heading toward the bridge. Cass. Late, as always, but she always showed up. Nicole drops the cigarette and stamps it out with her shoe. “I’ve got to go,” she says. “My friend.”

“Sure,” the man says. “Well. It’s been nice talking to you.”

“Thanks for the smoke,” she says.

“Anytime,” he says. He pats the notebook under his arm. “I’m around.”

Now, on the verge of her departure, she feels guilty for leaving. “What are you writing?”

“Poetry,” he says. “Songs.”

“For your band?” she asks. She wants to ask how he writes them without a pen, but doesn’t.

He looks at the notebook, then back at her. His smile is more of a grimace. “For redemption,” he says. He drops his cigarette butt. It glows against the leaves and for a moment, she thinks they might light from its embers, but then it fades into nothing.

Nicole scrambles back up the ridge to the sidewalk. Cass is there, scraping the bottom of her shoe against the curb. “Fucking stepped in gum,” she says. Her voice is so annoyed, so sassy, so Cass, that Nicole crosses her arms to keep from hugging her. “Who were you talking to?” Cass asks.

“Just some old bum,” Nicole says. “He gave me a cigarette.”

Cass wrinkles her nose, though Nicole doesn’t know if it’s at the man or the state of her shoe, pink strings now dangling between the sole and the curb, like she’s a cartoon character stuck in place. “What a perv,” she says.

“He was actually pretty nice,” Nicole says, which she realizes now is true. “He said he used to be in a band. I guess they were famous.”

“Really?” Cass says, and Nicole can see her interest peak. “What band? How famous?”

Nicole shrugs. “He wasn’t, really,” she says. “He’s just lonely.”

“Whatever,” Cass says. “Let’s go then. Who gives a shit about some old man?” She hops back onto the sidewalk, her attempt at fixing her shoe abandoned, and takes Nicole’s arm. “You remember Drew Hanes? He graduated a couple years ago? He’s in town with his band, a real band, not some fucking imaginary one, and he invited us to watch them practice. Come on.”

But Nicole turns and looks back down the ridge before they walk away. She’s expecting the man to be watching her, for him to wave, but he isn’t looking at her at all. He’s sitting back on his rock, staring out at the river, at its current that carries all manner of objects south. And Nicole knows somehow that he is more interested in the leaves, branches, fish, beer cans, plastic bags, needles, bodies, all manner of detritus trapped in the river’s current than he is in her, and she knows, too, that he will stay there, under the bridge, watching the river and writing his poems and songs until his fingers are too cold to grip his pencil, and then he will close the notebook and climb up the ridge, and set off down the road, where there will be more bridges, more rivers, more poems, but no redemption, no saving grace for him to find.

Cass yanks gently at her arm. “Hey,” she says. “Coming?”

“Sorry,” Nicole says, and she turns away from the man, and, her arm still linked with Cass’s, she walks away from the bridge.

—Emma Riehle Bohmann

#311: The Sun Records Collection (1994)

James Brubaker is touring America and communing with dead musicians. The cross-country séance started when James visited his friend Dillon in West Virginia and stopped by the Rainbow Road, a small country bar along the WV-VA state line, and James conjured the ghost of Patsy Cline. Knowing the history of the bar, Dillon dared James to go into the women’s restroom, lock the door and turn off the lights, and sing “Walkin’ After Midnight” into the mirror. He did, and Cline appeared.

On the strength of his account of the experience, and the weight of the discussion that took place between spirit and flesh in that cramped bathroom, that being whether or not “Blue” was written by Bill Mack for Cline or not, James was able to procure a book deal with Random House under the stipulation that James would travel the United States and talk to its late national musical treasures. He would ask them questions and then transcribe and share their responses with the public at large. The title of this book, which will be designed and marketed as an expensive coffee table publication, is tentatively called The Specter Collection, a play on innovative music producer Phil Spector’s name, that being a homophone for “specter,” or another word for “ghost,” and that James is anthologizing interviews with the spirits of dead musicians, much in the same way record companies anthologize the music of late great artists.

*

On the first of June, after meticulously plotting the course for his research (a research project that would consist of many trips, this first leg focusing primarily on the south and the midwest), James piled into his Toyota Camry with a Wal-Mart-bought Ouija board and struck out from his home in southern Missouri to encounter the dead. The project, though, was failing from the beginning. James’ first stop was Okemah, Oklahoma, where he wished to talk with Woody Guthrie and get his take on the state of American politics. However, the legendary folk hero only wanted to rant about company man Tom Morrello and his use of Guthrie’s signature “This Machine Kills Fascists.” Afterward, James travelled to Lubbock, Texas, to converse with the spirit of Buddy Holly, but despite James’s best efforts in steering the conversation toward his prescribed questions, Holly deflected each, clearly having an axe to grind: Gary Busey’s portrayal of him in the 1983 film The Buddy Holly Story. (That Busey was nominated for an Academy Award did not sway Holly.)

After visiting New Orleans and having a rather contentious conversation with dead jazz greats King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton (the two were still arguing an eighty-five-year-old bar tab), James traveled up the Mississippi River to Memphis, Tennessee, to visit Sun Records, an institution in the history of American rock and roll. There, James hoped to commune with the spirits of Johnny Cash, BB King, Howlin’ Wolf, and, most importantly, Elvis Presley, in the hopes of salvaging his slowly sinking project.

James considered staying past close in order to conjure the dead musicians, slipping into the bathroom of Sun Records and hiding in the ventilation shafts like in a comedy caper, but after some reconnaissance, the plan proved faulty. Disappointed, James rented the community center across the street from Sun Records, hoping to speak to the multitudes of dead musicians there, each spirit having to take a number and wait their turn before finally meeting with the author. This was not ideal for James, though. Being across the street and not inside Sun Records limited his chances with the spirited greats. James believed that being outside Sun Records would only attract the outsiders, the peripheral spirits. He wanted and needed to be inside.

*

The following are excerpts from James Brubaker’s controversial Sun Records interviews, a session conducted using EVP, or electronic voice phenomenon.

James: Number 4!

Subject #4: Hey there.

James: Oh, hi. First, I want to say thanks for participating.

Subject #4: No problem.

James: So, you’ll have to forgive me. I don’t think I know who you are.

Subject #4: Ha. Of course. Name’s Pat. Pat Hare.

James: Thanks, Pat. So, what’s your claim to fame at Sun Records?

Subject #4: What’s my claim? Well, I recorded “Cotton Crop Blues” with James Cotton there.

James: Oh, James Cotton.

Subject #4: You know him, huh?

James: Yeah. He played with Muddy Waters.

Subject #4: Hmm. Well, some cat with Rolling Stone—yeah, even us dead folks still read the press—said my work with Cotton “anticipated elements of heavy metal.” But that’s—whatever, man. I just liked the raw sound of that distortion through the tubes, know what I’m sayin’?

James: Wow. I didn’t know that. Did you record any songs of your own at Sun?

Subject #4: Yeah, a cover of Doctor Clayton’s “I’m Gonna Murder My Baby” in ‘54.

James: Don’t think I’ve heard that one before. Here, let me write it down so I can give it a list—

Subject #4: And then I did it.

James: I’m sorry?

Subject #4: Murdered my baby. I murdered my baby.

James: What?

Subject #4: Yeah, I was playin’ with Muddy Waters at the time—did you know I played with Muddy Waters too?—and I had myself a real bad drinkin’ problem. Real bad. Got into a fight with my girl one night, see, and I shot her dead.

James: …

Subject #4: And then I shot the police officer when he came to the house. Spent 16 years in prison. Died there in 1980.

James: Shit, man.

Subject #4: King, Wolf, all them cats just sang the blues. Hell, most of them boys at Sun were products, packages wrapped up by Sam himself. I actually lived it.

…

James: Hi. State your name for the record, please.

Subject #13: Carl Lee Perkins.

James: Thanks, Carl. Now—

Subject #13: Did you know I wrote “Blue Suede Shoes?”

James: Wait, what?

Subject #13: I said, did you know I wrote “Blue Suede Shoes?”

James: No, I thought—

Subject #13: Son of a... Presley. You thought Presley wrote it.

James. I mean, maybe? I don’t really know if I even kn—

Subject #13: I wrote it. I wrote the song in October ‘55. Recorded it in December and Phillips released the single in January ‘56—before that sumbitch Presley recorded it. You know what happened?

James: No… Man, it got really cold in here. Let me get my sweater.

Subject #13: Me and the boys in the band were on our way to New York, gonna perform “Blue Suede Shoes” on Perry Como’s TV show, but we were in a car accident. Stuart was driving that night. Poor guy drove all night. Dead tired. He fell asleep at the wheel and hit a truck. Our car took a couple rolls and into a ditch full of water, about a foot deep. I was flung from the car. Found a few yards away, face-down in that water. I woulda drowned if it weren’t for ol’ Fluke. He pulled me out. The driver of the truck Pinkham hit, he died, though. My brother Jay, too. I had some fractured vertebrae. A concussion, cuts and bruises to boot. Spent a hell of a lot of time in the hospital. Needless to say, we didn’t perform on Como’s show. Presley sent a get well card. His boys visited, but not him. Just the card. About two weeks later, still holed up from the wreck, you know what I saw? Presley performing “Blue Suede Shoes” on Milton Berle. Yeah, that television appearance. The one that put everybody up in a tizzy, him shaking those hips, moving them feet all about. From then on that song wasn’t mine no more. That song was his. The song was his.

James: I didn’t know that.

Subject #13: I was a member of the Million Dollar Quartet. Me, Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Cash. And yet, somehow, no one seems to remember me. I mean, don’t get me wrong: I was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, sometimes called the King of Rockabilly and all that, but Elvis. That guy, that car accident. Fate. I never stood a chance. No one did up against him.

James: I’m sorry.

Subject #13: See that guy over there?

James: Who is that?

Subject #13: You don’t know who he is?

James: …

Subject #13: Of course you don’t. That’s Malcolm Yelvington. Wanna know his story?

James: Sure?

Subject #13: Malcolm is the unlucky bastard to have his first single released at the same time as Elvis’ first single. Ol’ Phillips was never a big fan of Malcolm. Saw potential, though. Gave him a shot. But when Elvis came along, no sir. Malcolm was left to the wayside. Phillips promoted “That’s All Right,” but not “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee.” Left Malcolm the chore of promoting his own single. And when Malcolm got fed up, he went to competitor Metro Records. But he hadda go by a different name: Mac Sales and the Esquire Trio. All on account he was still under contract with Sun—the very label that wouldn’t give him the time of day. You know what he did after that? He quit. He quit music.

James: Oh.

…

James: And you two are?

Subject #23: Elsie Jo Miller.

Subject #24: Mildred Miller.

Subject #23 & #24: We’re the Miller Sisters.

James: You two were on Sun Records?

Subject #23: Yes, shortly.

James: Shortly? What happened?

Subject #23: Elvis.

James: I’m starting to see a theme here.

Subject #24: Sam liked us well enough, but we were too country. Music was moving to rockabilly at the time. Elvis’ first single hit stations the same week we recorded our session. And then nobody wanted country anymore. Because of that, Sam didn’t release much of our music. Couldn’t sell us, he said.

James: So what did you do?

Subject #24: We travelled around a bit. Played some fairs, some bars, but nothing ever really happened with us.

Subject #23: Gave up the act in 1960. How could we keep going?

*

James continued to research throughout the rest of June, visiting other cities, like Nashville and Chicago, before returning home to his cats the first week of July. He spent the next couple of weeks transcribing the interviews with the help of a few graduate assistants from the university where he teaches and plotting this next round of research: the west coast. He’ll start in San Francisco and work his way up to Seattle. Then, after completing that leg, he’ll tour the east coast, hoping to catch Patsy Cline again because it was such a pleasant conversation they had.

Around the time James returned to his home in Missouri, footage began to circulate from Graceland’s security cameras of a person—looking very much like James—standing at the gates and both flipping off and shaking their posterior in the direction of the estate. Authorities at Graceland could not identify the trespasser because of video distortion. Some online users, though, upon slowing down the footage, claimed to see the outlines of at least a dozen other figures around the trespasser, prompting many in the online community to believe the footage to feature ghosts. Graceland has not commented on this speculation.

For James Brubaker, on the occasion of his thirty-something birthday

—Dillon Hawkins

#312: Jane's Addiction, "Nothing's Shocking" (1988)

Jane’s Addiction’s big reunion show at the Aladdin Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas in ’97? The Aladdin was to be razed shortly thereafter; a promise of epic debauchery, ripping seats from the floor, carrying away the very foundations. Sticking my head out the window of the dusty beige hotel room and gazing out over the dusty beige strip. “Hey!” came a call. “Hey you purplehead!” (My hair was a Manic Panic eggplant at the time.) I looked down toward the distant parking lot to see a guy I went to high school with in suburban Washington D.C. He was staying two floors below and similarly peering out his window, happened to look up. There was a reunion—three of us McLean High School kids of the sort who were into (me—worshipped!) Jane’s Addiction. A casino, lights, drugs, girls. Dave Navarro in the elevator said, “You guys can come to the after party if you bring ecstasy.” That part may be a dream, but I have told the story before.

The guy we rode with from Denver was totally bonkers in a nerdy, milk-allergy kind of way. Even more so after I had sex with his girlfriend. Not my fault, I swear! On the drive home he stopped in the middle of the fast-moving highway in a fit of cuckolded pique, shrieking like a maniac. My friend C. threatened to kill him if he did it again (poor kid) and for the rest of the many hours ride home he sat silent and terrified, hands at ten and two. (Why was he even driving?) To make it worse, these idiots listened to Weezer nonstop, or maybe it was Ween. I met them at my community college outside Boulder, Colorado. We needed a ride to Nevada.

High-school circa ‘93: Up the Beach/Ocean Size. Smoking weed in the playground behind my friend’s apartment building, lying out on the grass, swinging on the swings, sliding on the slides. LSD.

My psychiatrist in high school gave me Perry Farrell’s movie The Gift as a gift. I had a bit of a drug problem at the time. There is quite a lot of drug use in this film. Casey, Perry’s girlfriend, ODs and he arranges her dead body with a bunch of flowers. In retrospect, my suicide attempt was unsurprising. I had some dad issues too.

Casey doesn’t think well of Perry anymore. She hasn’t seen much profit from those years, despite her services as muse and collaborator. (IMO she’s entitled to a cut.)

I took every pill in the medicine cabinet, in every medicine cabinet, in the house, and drank a quart of vodka and crawled under a bush near the high school to die. I wrote bizarre things in a journal that was discovered muddied and smeared after a winter’s thaw. By some unholy mix of the chemical interaction I ended up hallucinating for three days, but was otherwise relatively okay (I later desperately tried to recreate the effect in a smaller, more manageable dosage, but never succeeded). When the cops found me the next morning I was sitting on a curb in some suburban cul-de-sac having a conversation with several people who weren’t there. By that afternoon I started to learn how to control the hallucinations/was aware I was hallucinating, and could manifest objects at will. In the car on the way from the hospital to the psychiatrist’s office (The Gift guy) I covertly lit and smoked a cigarette that wasn’t real, blowing imaginary smoke at the back of my tearful mother’s head.

Camera’s got them images / Camera’s got them all / Nothing’s shocking.

Pulling out of the parking lot from the psychiatrist’s office, I once rammed a Mercedes with my ’84 Pontiac (the bumper stickers were Bad Brains, Pixies, and Jane’s Addiction). I don’t really remember why, but it was intentional. The guy was understandably aghast and jumped out of his car and ran up to my window screaming. My face was twisted with piercings and angst, Nine Inch Nails blared from the speakers as I sped off. He was Pakistani I think and told the police my face was made of metal.

Dave Navarro’s mother was murdered by her boyfriend when he was fifteen. He believes this relates to his subsequent drug addiction. Following the breakup he joined the Red Hot Chili Peppers and now does lots of reality TV.

Eric Avery didn’t participate in the Vegas reunion as he and Perry still had some unresolved issues. It’s understandable! I saw him playing bass for Peter Murphy in 2000 or so and he seemed happy. I know he also played with Garbage for a while, was in that documentary trying out for Metallica. I gather he got back with Jane's at some point on their more recent excursions but didn’t stay long.

Stephen Perkins stuck with Perry the whole time, including Porno for Pyros. I think it’s because he was the laid back one who didn’t use heroin.

I am the killer of people / You look like a meatball / I’ll throw away your toothpick and ask for your giveness.

Lollapalooza the first. ‘91. I still have the T-shirt somewhere: Jane’s, Siouxsie Sioux, Living Colour, NIN, Fishbone, Ice-T with Body Count (remember “Cop Killer”?), Butthole Surfers, Rollins Band. What a show. Some field in Maryland. My friend R. and I got a ride with the lifeguard from the pool (neither of us were old enough to drive). I remember I was exhausted by the time Jane’s came on and just went back to the blanket and lay looking at the night sky, the lights, listened.

“Summertime Rolls” was always a mixtape standard for me. I pine for long lost nineties courtship rituals. “Standing in the shower thinking and I’m pissing on myself.” I always liked that line. Pee is good for your feet. “Mountain Song.” This, of course. “Idiots Rule.”

I lived in the Lower East Side, on Rivington Street, when 9/11 happened. I was standing on 8th Avenue looking straight down at the Towers when they fell. I had just gotten off the subway on my way to work and walked above ground to a flaming sky, then a collapsing explosion of glimmering diamonds as the buildings folded in on themselves. I stared, dumbfounded. “I’m gonna be late for work!” I said to no one in particular and scurried off, eventually coming to my senses and returning to my neighborhood, finding my friends. As a recent IV drug user, I couldn’t donate blood. Perry’s influence is at least partly responsible for that phase.

That night at the bar, numb faces watching Bush on the screen: I know you’re an idiot, but please don’t fuck this up (spoiler alert). In the near-term aftermath, Perry did a DJ set at the Mercury Lounge, a club near my apartment. He wanted to do something, he said. We waded through the sorrow and the smell of burning bodies and burning computers and burning plastic to the show. Afterward he was talking to people and I was quite shy but my friend pushed me forward to introduce myself to Perry, who I had idolized for many years. I shook his hand and said, rather abruptly, “You are the first man I ever truly loved.” He had probably heard this very line a million times before and simply looked me up and down appraisingly. “You have great style,” he replied. I grinned and sheepishly backed away, bowing gratefully. For the following many months I drew pictures of people, animals, and Hindu deities jumping from burning windows. My therapist said it was normal.

Pig eats shit, but only when he hungers.

In high school there was a girl from a neighboring school who had supposedly made out with Perry. One year, at Beach Week in Ocean City, I drunkenly made out with her on the boardwalk. It was a great victory for me as not only was she very hot, but I felt as if I too had made out with Perry.

Yeah, so roses are red, I made up the rest, if you got some big fucking secret, then why don’t you sing me something?

Meeting Perry in New York was strangely when my fascination with the man ended; my interest in the band had been on the wane. He was just a guy and that part of my life was over, almost (though I have often been forced to sort and sift the wreckage). I haven’t even ever listened to the new records; I didn’t even know about the newest record until just now scrolling through Spotify. XXX, Nothing’s Shocking, and Ritual is more than enough. In truth, I haven’t listened to those much in a decade either. It was a long moment that seemed so desperately important, but then wasn’t.

When I was 16 I had an acid trip that was so bad my friends locked me in the basement. We were at a house in the middle of nowhere and they were afraid I would run out into the countryside and injure myself and die (or get them in trouble more like). I had taken eight hits of a decidedly powerful vintage of LSD and I don’t remember much about it—though I have heard many stories—but I do remember sometime toward the end (as I was locked in the basement) I was bartering for my life. It was some desperate attempt to find worth in my otherwise meaningless existence, to decipher something I cared about when I cared about so little. I racked my brain, running through every possible concept, idea, love, as the demons threatened to pull me down, promising my extinction. My very existence depended on the answer. Finally, inspiration struck and “Perry!” I screamed aloud, “Jane’s!” and the demons, knowing truth, relented and I was finally able to sleep.

—Erik Wennermark

#313: Nirvana, "MTV Unplugged in New York" (1994)

Armchair Friendly Page Turner

“All in all is all we are.”
    — Kurt Cobain

Nirvana’s 1993 MTV Unplugged session took place about five months before the death of Kurt Cobain. As an eleven-year-old, I was on the bus to school when I found out he died. I sat down on that stiff, greenish-grey, plastic-y seat, complete with portions reupholstered in duct tape, and looked over to her. She wasn’t just upset. It was like her whole world had ended.

“Are you OK?” I meekly asked.

“Kurt Cobain died,” she said.

Her display of emotion was like the sting of a gadfly. Nirvana was the music I kept myself company with at home, and a shared experience with my dad and my sister on any car ride. But Kurt himself—Kurt who once said, “If you're really a mean person you're going to come back as a fly and eat poop;” Kurt who said, “I'm a much happier guy than a lot of people think I am”—he wasn’t real to me. Death wasn’t real to me. I didn’t know what to do with either of these facts. With age and maturity, I came to better understand Kurt’s death and what he lost in dying. And what we who did not know him lost. Death, on the other hand, is still a mystery to me. Like the Buddhist finger pointing to the moon, we can only conjecture about what death really is until we actually arrive there.

This is a bit tangential, but have you heard “Scentless Apprentice” lately? It’s so damn good. I love screaming-his-head-off Kurt. Kurt who spit into the cameras on stage. Kurt who once wrote, “I would only wear a tie-dyed T-shirt if it were dyed with the urine of Phil Collins and the blood of Jerry Garcia.” Kurt who once performed a modification of “Come As You Are” by replacing all the words of a verse with the word “hey.”

“Scentless Apprentice” would have been a hard one to play unplugged. Which must be true of many Nirvana songs. At most unplugged sessions, bands play their hits. But nearly half of Nirvana’s set, per Kurt, was cover songs: three songs were by the Meat Puppets (accompanied by M.P.’s two Kirkwoods), one each by David Bowie and the Vaselines, and one traditional song as arranged by Lead Belly. They performed eight of their own songs: four from Nevermind, three from In Utero, and one from Bleach.

Many of us on the Gen X/Millenial cusp can thank Kurt’s version of “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” for bringing us to Huddie Ledbetter. And the (somewhat) unplugged version of “The Man Who Sold the World” was so culturally significant that for many years, young folks hearing Bowie perform the song would applaud Bowie—Bowie who thought Kurt’s rendition was “heartfelt” and “very honest”—for covering a Nirvana song (says Bowie: “I think, 'Fuck you, you little tosser[s]!’”).

I think a good cover song is like a reincarnation—a spirit, stripped of its former identity yet with something essential sustaining, born again in new flesh. The material is not incidental to the immaterial. If the body is not honored, then the spirit fails to rebirth and the result is mere mimicry—something like what a parrot does—a poor substitute in absence of a more perfect original. There are countless bad covers of Nirvana songs. There are a handful of pretty damn great covers.* And a few covers which make me wonder if the spirit of Nirvana’s lead man hasn’t temporarily seized/been seized by some foreign body. One of these for me is Brad Mehldau’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

Directions for listening to Brad Mehldau, “Smells Like Teen Spirit”:

Step One: Collect a thick blanket with which to cover your extremities.

Step Two: With the lights out, lay supine gazing at an unadorned ceiling.

Step Three: Give yourself permission to wail, swear, and whisper “fuck yeah” into the ether-register that is the fabric of spacetime.

It’s a little mad, isn’t it? Does it do the thing to you that it does to me? If I were standing, at about 3:56, my knees would buckle. Oh, Kurt—there you are. Still here. It makes me think of what Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh says about clouds: “When you look at a cloud, you think that the cloud has being. And later on when the cloud becomes the rain, you don’t see the cloud anymore and you say the cloud is not there. You describe the cloud as non-being. But if you look deeply, you can see the cloud in the rain. And that is why it is impossible for the cloud to die. The cloud can become rain, snow, or ice. But the cloud cannot become nothing.”

As much as Kurt is there (Kurt who once, to an MTV Headbanger’s Ball interview, wore a yellow dress that looked like Belle’s and Maleficent’s dresses got a little kinky together), Mehldau is there, too. Which tells us a little something about flesh and maybe reincarnation. This is no mere possession. The vessel is vital.

Patti Smith’s version of the same song is probably the only other Nirvana cover I feel this strongly about.

Directions for listening to Patti Smith’s rendition of “Smells Like Teen Spirit”:

Step One: Plug it into your got-damn jugular.

Do you feel it, too? Especially as we roll around to 3:27 and she starts making shit up like “sleepy, illiterate, fuzzy little rats, haunted, paint-sniffin’, stoned out of their shaved heads, forgotten, foraging, mystical children, foul-mouthed, glassy-eyed, hallucinating.” How can Kurt be vanished, when I hear him again in the voice of an approximately sixty-year-old punk rock legend? Good cover songs, man. In valuing the flesh, they make the spirit live again.

Of the Unplugged covers Nirvana played, I return the most to “Oh Me.” It strikes me that Kurt never could have written the pure, simple sentiment expressed in the song’s second verse: I don't have to think / I only have to do it / The results are always perfect / And that's old news. Nirvana’s lyrics were never so direct (“Most of my lyrics are contradictions. I'll write a few sincere lines, and then I'll have to make fun of [them].”) I do think one can be contradictory and sincere at the same time though, because I think the truth often contains contradiction. Kurt didn’t like to say things directly. He did and he didn’t. Kurt who wrote Take your time / Hurry up / The choice is yours / Don’t be late. On this odd, omnisectionable plane, at least two opposing things can very well be true in any given moment. One can be both married and buried. About selecting “Nirvana” as the band name, Kurt supposedly said, “I wanted a name that was kind of beautiful or nice and pretty instead of a mean, raunchy punk name.” Contradictions. After looking, they make us look again.

If Buddhist reincarnation is real, we can be almost certain that Kurt would still be stuck in samsara, the cycle of birth and death that is only escaped through nirvana, the end of suffering and desire. And so Kurt may now, in this very moment, be a slender, shy doe, hooves marking up wet forest soil. Some versions of reincarnation allow for rebirth as animals. Perhaps he’s a black swan, often homosexual creatures, or a bisexual bonobo, just to stick it to all the homophobes (“At this point I have a request for our fans. If any of you in any way hate homosexuals, people of different color, or women, please do this one favor for us—leave us the fuck alone! Don't come to our shows and don't buy our records,” said Kurt, because morality > money).

Or maybe Kurt was reborn last week, the fourth and final child to a husband and wife who will live their whole lives together, deep in love. And tiny Kurt, with a new name, she’s doing just fine, at home surrounded by this family of painters and engineers. Dad worries more than mom and always has with the arrival of each of their children. Mom’s never felt more secure in the health and wellbeing of her newborn as she does this time, Mom who has become a master swaddler. She wraps her daughter just firmly enough in a thick cotton blanket. Her daughter loves to be swaddled, held close, coos more than any of her other children did, coos like humming. Rockabye Baby: Lullaby Renditions of Nirvana plays in the background—“All Apologies,” Mom’s favorite. “In the sun / I feel as one,” she always sings at the right time. All I wish for this new Kurt is that, in this lifetime, she be surrounded by all the kinds of soul mates that make life so worth living.

Have I said enough about the album itself? Well, it’s kind of like what Kurt said: “It’s all in the music, man; it’s all in the music. It’s all in the meat.” Let me be the finger pointing to the moon:

Directions for listening to Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged:

Be at a party. At a rave. In a mosh pit. Scream at the top of your lungs. Turn it up in the park. In your bedroom, in your earphones, on the floor, pressed up against a cool wall. Reclining with your head upside down off the couch. Standing and staring out the window. Over tea. In your car while someone else drives windy streets, yell “No recess!” yell “Hey, wait! I got a new complaint!” yell “I love you–I’m not gonna crack!” Listen coming in and out of sleeping, in the sun. Feel as one. With your friend. With an enemy. Yesterday and tomorrow. Today and next week.
 

*A beginner’s playlist of great Nirvana covers:

Charles Bradley & the Menahn Street Band, “Stay Away”
Sinead O'Connor, “All Apologies”
Herbie Hancock, “All Apologies”
Will Dailey, “Territorial Pissings”
Foxy Shazam, “Drain You”

—April Gray Wilder

#314: Lauryn Hill, "The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill" (1998)

It’s 2003 and I have just entered Liberty Middle School, where I have met Amy Sue Williamson. Amy is one of the coolest girls in school and my new bus buddy, and this Saturday she is coming over to my house to hang out. Amy is one of the “cool girls” for many reasons but the main reasons are her huge farm with horses, her pot-smoking parents, and a very attractive 17-year-old brother who everyone wants to date. I am one of the “not cool girls” at school, with one younger brother who loves World of Warcraft and parents who won’t let me go see Michael Bublé in concert when I’m 16 because it’s on a school night. But here is my moment to shine, a chance to rise among the ranks of the cool crew and reach the ultimate goal, the goal everyone is after, the goal of dating her brother.

All the power snacks were bought for this very important social hang, including BBQ potato chips, Swiss Cake Rolls, and Fruit Roll-Ups. I have pimped out my room to look like the inside of Oriental Trading Company’s most recent catalog. There is a large neon blue star on my bedside table, a green lava lamp on my desk, and ice cream shaped rope lights dangling from my bedframe. Plus the crème de la crème: my purple inflatable chair, with ottoman, perfectly placed in the center of my room. As I am lighting candles to set the “I’m cool” mood, my mom shouts upstairs, “Marie, Amy’s here.” I race downstairs with anticipation and sweaty palms. Maybe her brother dropped her off? I think. I then see it’s only her patchouli-soaked mother.

I lead Amy upstairs to Studio 54 where she stops short at the door, giggling, “Marie, should I stop or go?” My confused look prompts her to point out the traffic light glowing on the wall. I give a panicked laugh, thinking, Did I over do it? She hasn’t even seen the bubble machine. We quickly get settled in da club and Amy opens her Jansport.

“Marie, I brought my favorite CD,” she says, “I thought we could listen to it.”

Um yes we can listen to it…duh, whatever you want!

“Sure. What CD is it?”

“It’s Lauryn Hill, Jake gave it to me.” OMG JAKE! The brother! Yes!

I pull out my Samsung CD player and Amy requests track five, “Doo Wop (That Thing).” She immediately starts dancing, completely uninhibited by her unfamiliar surroundings and amount of candles. I am in awe. She pulls me up and we start twirling together. The song fades out to a conversation between an adult and kids our age:

We’ve got a lot of intelligent women in here. Do you think you are too young to really fall in love?

As we keep listening to the CD, I am profoundly struck by this language of love paired with this language of female empowerment. It is the first time that I’m hearing such a strong female voice articulate such universal and basic human emotions in music. I grab the CD booklet to read some of the lyrics. Amy catches me reading through her twirls. “Aren’t her lyrics awesome?” She sits down beside me and we begin to talk about all the different verses. “Superstar” is Amy’s favorite.

          Now tell me your philosophy
          On exactly what an artist should be
          Should they be someone with prosperity
          And no concept of reality?

As we make our way through the album, we begin to discuss big topics, topics like feminism, love, destiny, concepts in which I had never really discussed with any of my other friends. We aren’t talking about these issues with any particular grace or tact, but in a very honest, unrestrained way nonetheless.

Along with our deep discussion, I start to notice a certain laissez-faire attitude in the songs toward the end of the album. This tone doesn’t seem negative, but in fact seems empowering, freeing. “Everything is Everything” is the first song to grab hold of me.

Who made these rules? (Who made these rules?)
We're so confused (We're so confused)
Easily led astray
Let me tell ya that
Everything is everything

Once I heard this track, I stood up with the same gusto that Amy had twirled around with earlier. Lauryn was right: “After winter, must come spring. Change, it comes eventually.”  Later in life, other tracks like “Nothing Even Matters” and “Every Ghetto, Every City” would provide this same boost of freeing confidence.

As we hit track 16, the last song on the album, a rush of emotions takes hold. The freeing confidence collides with the language of love and feminism in “Tell Him” and I am prompted to just tell him. I must confess my love to the older brother and truly become the coolest girl in school.

          Tell him tell him I need him
          Tell him I love him
          It’ll be alright

In hindsight, this song is clearly religious, but my 13-year-old self hears only the universe shouting, “Here is your opportunity!” So as our epic, empowering hangout comes to a close, my confidence soars, longing to open the front door to her god-like brother and render him speechless with my Lauryn Hill knowledge and sexy sophistication.

The doorbell rings.

“Marie, Amy’s ride is here,” my mom shouts from downstairs.

I hear a man’s voice. Could my dreams be coming true? Am I about to woo this older man and take the popular throne? I take a deep breath and follow Amy as we head downstairs.

There he stands, wearing a double-layered puka shell hemp necklace, a man bun, and an empty guitar case around his back. I go to hug Amy goodbye before I make my big move.

“Marie, I had a really fun time,” she says. “Thanks for having me. I really feel like I can be myself when I’m hanging with you.”

At that moment I remember Amy’s favorite song “Superstar” and how, within those verses, Lauryn challenges personal perception and the glorification of individuals. Amy is more than the “cool girl” and the sister of a hot brother and hippie parents. Two hours prior I was perpetuating an identity, which turned out to be completely false. She’s just looking for a friend who she can be herself around and who isn’t trying to use her for her coolness.

I decide to simply wave goodbye to Amy and her brother and walk upstairs to my groovy pad feeling more empowered than ever before. Because, like Lauryn says, “It’s silly when girls sell their souls because it’s in.”

—Marie Sicola

#315: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, "Damn the Torpedoes" (1979)

I sat down to write this without a glass of wine. This is an essay about music, not food or drink, and I made a rule for myself that I wasn’t going to write about my diet—and so, naturally, I’m opening by mentioning my diet. I can’t help it—it’s my newest challenge, my game with myself, the current self-improvement project at the center of everything. Anything can remind me of it—it exists, nonstop, in my thoughts, on a hum level.

I’ve started the Whole 30—if you’re not familiar, it’s a pretty restrictive elimination diet, designed to last for thirty days. The idea is, you go without a bunch of foods that fairly commonly cause inflammation or digestive issues or general malaise, only eating vegetables, meat, seafood, eggs, fruits, nuts, and healthy fats for long enough for those other foods to work their way out of your system. Then you reintroduce the problem foods, one by one, to get a clear idea of how each one affects you. You can’t know how the foods affect you without first doing the elimination diet, the logic goes, because the effects of what you eat regularly just become part of how you think normal feels. The Whole 30 is designed to show you a new, better normal, so you can be a new, better person.

I am a sucker for attempts to be a new, better person.

And so, now, I am listening to Tom Petty sing on Damn the Torpedoes and he is testing the limits of my willpower. Something in this music really makes me wish for a drink—the jovial, relaxed kind of drink. The drink you pour and take out on your porch with a book in the late afternoon on a mild summer day. Or the beer you crack as you laugh at someone’s joke at a barbecue. (Do you know what else I’d like? A chemical-filled hot dog in a corn-syrup-ey bun—yep, I said corn syrup, because that’s what’s in those things—and a handful of potato chips, and an ice cream cone.) (I am making it sound like I enjoy this diet less than I do, though. Tonight for dinner I am topping a Portobello mushroom with sautéed kale and an olive-oil fried egg, and eating it with a tomato-basil salad, and if I’m being honest all of that sounds pretty excellent to me, which is the real reason I’m undertaking this whole enterprise. It’s something I want to do, something I’m finding I enjoy doing. Right now, at least. In my current mental state. Except for when I’m missing the drink I’d prefer to be having.)

Tom Petty sounds like the rebellion of our fathers. Rebellion in sepia tone. A rebellion of nostalgia, at a far enough remove to have lost the danger and the fear that is part of a rebellious upheaval—a rebellion you’ve already lived through, so you know you make it out in one piece, and in memory it becomes safe.

I think that’s part of what I’m trying to do with this ridiculous diet—grow up and banish all irresponsibility to the past. Insulate myself from it, transform it into something more muted and containable. Not even permanently, really, but I feel a deep-seeded need to, at least for awhile, prove to myself that I can act like I always envisioned adults would act.

For awhile I thought I would have children, and I figured that the hazy future when the children came would be the thing that would make me grow up, the thing that would catapult me into adulthood and force me to make better decisions. But I find myself wanting to make better decisions without that inciting event (or maybe with a series of different and subtler inciting events—the gradual creeping change in what we desire). I feel more capable of having my shit together than I ever have, which makes me want to do it. And my life is in flux in many ways—I owe it to myself, I think, to seek stability and self-care when any opportunity for those things presents itself. And, also, to make it one of the projects of my life to create those opportunities whenever I can.

As I decide not to eat toast or coconut shortbread cookies or sharp cheddar cheese, as I decide not to drink chardonnay or a screwdriver or even Diet Coke, as I cook each meal for myself every day from a selection of food delivered to me by my local CSA—as the cutting board takes up near-permanent residence on my counter—I say to myself, you are doing the hard work of creating new habits and standards, habits and standards that will serve you well as you deliver yourself into adulthood.

Damn the Torpedoes was Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ third album, and their first to go platinum. It came out in 1979, when Tom Petty was 29. This is the same age I am today. Something in the symmetry of this pleases me, even though the feeling his music embodies for me is something I no longer feel like I live inside. Not living inside it allows me to love it more.

Tom Petty sings like English is another language. But it isn’t—just our own made foreign with an emphasis on the guttural and murmured. It is visceral and dramatic, the way that youth is. It tastes of risk, of heartbreak—not just the kind that happens when we open ourselves to others. The ways we break ourselves. Don’t do me like that.

There were years when, after several drinks, I’d head out to the porch and bum a cigarette and inhale. For a time I liked it. I didn’t want to become addicted, and took care not to do it often, but I cherished the lightheadedness and the ease and the excuse to talk to a man. It gave me something to do with my hands. I felt worldly, and like I had purpose, in a way that you can only feel when you are playing at a thing rather than being it. When I think of that past self, I feel such tremendous affection, in a way that I only can because I feel so very far from her now. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers live with her and her cigarettes and the cheap frat house whiskey and the bars we shut down whose floors were sticky with beer. They stay up all night for no reason, these past selves, and eat pizza and french fries for dinner, they eat nachos at 3 a.m., and they sleep with all the wrong people—they feel very lost and scared but it’s all part of the excitement. There is plenty of time for them to figure out what serious things they want to do sometime later. And we love them dearly for it. They remind us that we have muddled through.

—Katelyn Kiley

#316: The Velvet Underground, "The Velvet Underground" (1969)

“Turn the faucet to the left ‘til it’s the temperature you want it,” I say. Fran looks so much smaller now.

I put on The Velvet Underground on my iPod; it’s soft, like a lullaby.

Today was too much. Lullabies are good. Fran gets in the shower and I sit on the ground next to the tub.

        1. “Candy Says”

I tell her, “Take a deep breath. Okay, think all the bad things now and get them out of your head. It’s okay to be angry.”

She sighs and says, “I guess I’ll just get the big one out of the way: Adam hates me because it’s easy. Hates me because it’s easy! And then he blames me for being dramatic and emotional, God, when he’s the one who’s asking my friends to stop hanging out with me? When he’s talking about me behind my back? What did I ever do to him that was so bad? God, fuck this, I don’t need this shit in my life. He promised he’d always be there for me. He promised he’d never say anything bad about me and he would never be like Henry.”

I let my head lean on the wall. “Okay, okay, do not think about this. This is something you’re just not going to deal with and it’ll be fine.”

Her shadow’s sitting on the floor of the tub, “I hope it’s fine.”

I say, “It’s going to be fine. Tell me more things—other things.”

“Marty told me I was a good person today; he said I would find love again. But then Marty told me he thought about drinking bleach tonight, and, God, why does anybody ever want love when everybody’s so depressed because of it.”

She pauses. “I don’t think I’ll ever forget Henry saying he just didn’t think of me as ‘somebody who could be loved.’ How does somebody bounce back from that?”

I don’t know what to say so I just sit there while she starts to cry. And then the song is ending and I say, “Okay, Fran, the song is ending. You got everything out and you are going to relax now, okay? You have to relax.”

        2. “What Goes On”

The song switches and I say, “Okay, tell me anything about anything other than boys.”

“This soap smells good.”

“Good start to the positive thinking!”

“Why don’t cucumbers actually smell like this? Ah, it’s cucumber-lime. I wonder if I could get a cucumber to smell like this with genetic engineering or something. Or I could just rub a lime on the sides of a cucumber. That’d be easier LOL. This is a long song.”

She’s standing up now, her shadow’s rubbing the soap over her body; the bathroom smells like cucumber-lime and it’s hot in here.

        3. “Some Kinda Love”

“I’m going to smell so cucumber-y. This is going to be great. Is this still the same “What Goes On” song? Wait. It’s not. Ah, fuck this song. Fuck love! Right?”

“Right,” I say, “fuck love.” I change the song for her.

        4. “Pale Blue Eyes”

“Deep breath, Fran,” I say when I see her sitting on the tub’s floor again. “Grab the shampoo, okay? Isn’t this song better?” She nods and I ask, “What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking that I feel like a robot. Pick up the shampoo. Put the shampoo on my hair. Rub-a-dub-dub.” She giggles, “God that was a stupid thing to say, but being stupid is kind of fun. I don’t actually feel like a robot. I don’t know.”

“Deep breath.”

“Why do all these songs sound the same?” The shadow of her hair starts to form bubbles. Her body’s so thin. “Macy, I don’t like this song,” she says, and I skip to the next one.

        5. “Jesus”

“My mom told me that she listened to the Velvet Underground after all of her breakups and it always made her feel better,” Fran says, but now she’s sitting again. I don’t know what happened to her when she started dating Adam but he really took something out of her. I guess that’s what good guys can do to girls in pain. And then she felt guilty for breaking up with him and I had to check her into the hospital. God, I was so scared. I thought she’d actually killed herself.

Today’s her first day home; she told me to stay with her, to help her. I snake my hand around the shower curtain and her hand meets mine. We sit there for a little while and I ask her what she’s thinking about again. “I like this song,” she says. “Mom said it helped her. All I have to do is forget about today and forget about yesterday and forget about the last year. My mom said something about these songs helping her lose track of time or something.”

“Okay, well, the best way to lose time is to stop thinking. Let’s not think together, okay?”

Her shadow’s head nods.

        6. “Beginning to See the Light”

Fran gets up as the song changes. “Oh, this one is so upbeat! It’s like my head involuntarily bobs. I feel like I’m on some 70s talk show!” And I imagine the old Fran surrounded by bright yellow and pink flowers, sitting across from Johnny Carson:

             Interviewer: We would like to welcome Miss Fran Lune onto the stage!

             Fran: Hi everybody!

              [The Crowd goes wild]

Fran: Oh, stop it!

Interviewer: So, Fran, tell me: are you beginning to see the light?

Fran: Oh, stop it, you! Of course I am! And that light is the Velvet Underground! I mean, c’mon, these young men are so talented. And so cute too; I could just eat them all up!

Interviewer: Oh no, boys! Did you hear that?! You got yourself another fan.

Fran, as each member of the band comes up to kiss her hand: Enchante.

But that would be pre-Adam Fran, the traditional girl-next-door whom everybody

involuntarily liked.

        7. “I’m Set Free”

“Another good song! That’s the way to think about all this, really. I am set free. No more drama, no more intense emotions, no more late night phone calls. I am free and Adam is free and I am still me and I am okay! His loss! I bet the Velvet Underground would love me. I bet they would fight over me. I am a hoot. I am a catch. I am so tired. Why do all of these songs sound the same?” Fran says. I stay quiet, waiting for her to crash.

        8. “That’s the Story of my Life”

“Oh, it’s like that One Direction song! Let’s play that song instead!”

I get up and switch over to One Direction.

        Interlude: “Story of my Life”

Fran sings so loudly to this song. Nothing else happens; she just sings.

        9. “Murder Mystery”

“Oh man, Macy, that was so fun. I didn’t think at all!”

I smile, “Good! But I think it’s back to the Velvet Underground now. Do you want me to change it back to pop?”

She doesn’t reply. I think she’s listening to the music.

A few minutes pass, and then Fran rushes her words: “I wonder what would happen if I died. What would people do? I guess people would be sad. When would they get back to their lives? What about my exes? The relationships that ended badly—how would those guys feel?” I wait for her to finish. “God I wonder if I’d ever actually get so desperate as to do it,” she says.

It feels like all the blood rushes away from my head. God, what if she tries again? What if I had to take her back to the hospital? I stand up. “Are you okay in there, Fran? I’m not afraid to get in the shower with you if I have to.”

She ignores me. “I would want white roses at my funeral. With a mahogany-colored coffin. And I’d want that bitch Josie from work to be there and think about how she treated me, and I’d want her to cry. And I’d want Henry to read about it in the obituaries and have, like, a mental break down and regret telling me I couldn’t be loved.”

I wait to see if she has anything else to say.

She mutters, “I don’t think dying any other way would have the same effect.”

“You have to relax,” I say, leaning against the bathroom door, “or I’m coming in there.”

        10. “After Hours”

“Okay, it’s time to relax,” I say, more for myself than for her. “Breathe in, breathe out.”

All the people are dancing and they’re having such fun. I wish it could happen to me, too, Velvet Underground.

But if you close the door, I’d never have to see the day again.

By the end of the song, Fran and I are sitting back to back, the tub separating us.

—Nicole Efford

#317: Pixies, "Surfer Rosa" (1988)

The only song I ever learned to play on the electric guitar I bought in college, a Japanese knock-off of the Stratocaster, was the Pixies' "Cactus," a lament for a lost lover. This is no great accomplishment—the song is extraordinarily easy even by the DIY standards of the time—but the first time I hit the chord progression correctly, I felt the kind of magic that I imagined drove musicians to pursue their art, that realization that you yourself could make the music you loved.

Not that I learned any other songs on the guitar. Nick Hornby has a great sentence in High Fidelity, one that I love so much I've committed it to memory (which guarantees I'm misquoting it): "Barry's all-consuming desire to play Madison Square Garden had never led him to do anything so mundane as learn how to play an instrument." That was me. I wanted to be in a band, but I didn't want to do anything to become the kind of person who was in a band.

I'm writing this in Ho Chi Minh City, which everyone still calls Saigon. I spent today the way I usually spend the first day in a new city: I walked around, past coffee shops and noodle bars, fancy hotels and backpacker hostels. I saw tourist sites and buildings that still held the traces of French colonialism on their facades. After a while, though, I was past all that, across the bridge of the Thi Nghe Channel, into a different part of Saigon.

In the weeks leading up to this trip, I've noticed all the things around me that were made in Vietnam. Clothing, tools, even the backpack in which I'm carrying everything for this trip, all made somewhere here. And when I crossed the bridge, I suddenly found myself in the land of Made in Vietnam. Men tooled car parts in stalls, welded ornamental gates using torches with lights brighter than the sun. I passed one stall in which a man was carefully applying plaster to make a cherub, one of a dozen dancing on the headboard of a bed.

I think writers have a fascination with manual labor because we're never quite sure if we're making anything. I mean, there are books and contributor's copies of journals, but a writer spends a long time just to produce a Word file, a bit of digital ephemera. Is music the same way? Did Black Francis hold the master tapes of Surfer Rosa in his hands and think "that's it?"

I'm in Saigon to work on a book, doing research so that I can theoretically make a thing somewhere down the line. And I walked around the city all day today with the songs of Surfer Rosa in my head—the bad Spanish and the loud-soft-loud construction, the weirdness of the "you fuckin' die" segment, the way the album feels so perfectly made to me that I could listen to it on any day. I thought about how on every new copy of the CD at the record stores someone had always tried to pull off the sticker over the bare breast on the cover (these were pre-internet days, folks). I thought about how Apple used "Gigantic," a song about spying on a man and marveling at his oversized penis, in an ad campaign a few years ago. It was easy to be horrified by the inappropriateness of choosing that song for a garage band of teenage girls to sing in order to sell expensive electronics, and yet, speaking as a guy who puzzled out the four chords of "Cactus" many years ago, singing along softly in his room as the song came together, I also kinda loved it.

Maybe we're all trying to figure out how to make something in our lives. Not "make something out of our lives," which is a whole other consideration, but how to make something, a physical thing, in our lives. Maybe we make a Word file or some master tapes for a short but perfect album. Maybe we make car parts or metal gates. Maybe we make plaster angels that will fly over someone else's head.

Tomorrow I'll walk back into the city, trying to find something, I don't know what, that will help me write. I'll look for clues and remnants among the endless river of motorbikes. I'll stop and think for a while, trying to figure out how to make the thing I want to make, and as I do it, a little corner of my brain will repeat "your bone's got a little machine" or "hey Paul, hey Paul, hey Paul" or "bloody your hands / on a cactus tree / wipe them on your dress / and send it to me," and even if my hands have forgotten the muscle memory to make the chords, I will still remember the joy of making them.

—Colin Rafferty

#318: The O'Jays, "Back Stabbers" (1972)

In October of 1972, one year and two months before the Wailers released Burnin’, the O’Jays dropped Back Stabbers.

In my last year of college, I experienced a 70s obsession. I took a class aptly called “The 70s.” I’m not sure if that’s what set it off, or if I was already on my way and signed up to feed my curiosity. I think it was a little of both. My parents played a lot of soul music when I was growing up, and along with all the Jay-Z, Biggie, and Nas that my roommate and I faithfully blasted from our first-year dorm room, the Isley Brothers and Al Green were also in heavy rotation. By my fourth year, what started off as interest morphed into a full-blown fixation. I listened to as much 70s soul, rock, and (especially) disco, as I could get my hands on.

I worked in our theater department’s costume shop, surrounded by beautiful vintage clothing which inspired me to search thrift shops to hunt down and collect my own vintage pieces. They became the canvas for the soundtrack I was creating. I watched Saturday Night Fever, Urban Cowboy, and Cooley High (technically a 60s theme, but made in the 70s) dozens of times. As my 70s renaissance emerged, I wondered what was so damn fixating about this period that I was determined to go there in my mind.

I knew parts of who I was and who I wanted to be but it was all still coming together. Embracing a decade that was so full of confidence, the “Me” decade, as it was called, was a gateway to discovering more about myself. I think I wanted to be close to the carefree glamour, happiness, and confidence that I associated with the era.

There’s a video of the O’Jays performing “Back Stabbers” on Soul Train and as the camera pans first to the crowd of people moving on the dance floor, then back to the O’Jays, it’s almost as though the group is moving on water. They dance in unison, they are fluid, and while the crowd around them seems to move faster and faster, they just float across the stage. Afterwards, Don Cornelius—and his beautiful afro—tells singer Eddie Levert that he has one of the greatest voices ever. Levert smiles shyly, then explains that the group started in Ohio in high school, made some records, made some more records, and now, working with the “Fantastic Gamble and Huff (in Philly), recorded some hit records.” I think they are wearing the same suits as on the Back Stabbers album cover. Everyone, from audience to singers, is effortlessly cool.

That cool is what I sought in my 70s moment. It all seemed so shiny and beautiful on the surface. I wanted to dance in the Soul Train line. I saw photos and movies and read stories about celebrities at Studio 54, and I wanted to be there. I wanted to dance with Michael Jackson and Grace Jones and Bianca Jagger. I wanted to have conversations with Warhol and Basquiat. And yet I was always aware of the other side of the glamour—it was tinged with sadness. Many of those social fixtures, and others like them, died from drug addiction.

Growing up in New York, there were always those two sides to every coin. One side of the street was safe to walk on, and one wasn’t. Kids could play safely outside until the streetlights came on but were careful never to step on a needle in the park. The city was full of life and energy and we had the world at our fingertips, but we knew always to be careful, and never to go too far, literally and figuratively. Too many of us knew someone the city had chewed up and spit out. So many people were lost that way. “Keep your wits about you,” my dad would say.

The 70s were rife with stories of brutality everywhere, and there was nowhere to hide. Violence lurked on NYC street corners, but it was also hiding in suburban neighborhoods and in secluded areas where serial killers like Ted Bundy and the Hillside Stranglers preyed on victims. The country mourned those lost in Vietnam and wondered why we needed war. The 70s were a dichotomy between danger via violence, sex, drugs, and war, and freedom via revolution, love, and empathy. “When the World is At Peace,” “Back Stabbers,” and “Love Train” bookending an album is a testament to the climate—a sign of the times. In the 2012 PBS documentary BrotherMen, producer Kenneth Gamble said, “People were looking for something. People were almost dead inside.”

Music has always been a form of protection. “Back Stabbers” warns us to be careful who to trust—perhaps it’s a shady lover but maybe it’s big brother? America was rife with suspicion and fear. Watch out for the government, serial killers, muggers, slashers, and cheaters. “What they do? / They smile in your face / All the time they wanna take your place / The back stabbers.”

Music has always been a form of escape. “Love Train” encourages us to join hands, and get on the train. “Please don’t miss this train at the station / ‘Cause if you miss it, I feel sorry, sorry for you / Well / People all over the world (Sisters and brothers) / Join hands (join, come on) / Start a love train (ride this train, y’all), love train (Come on).” The song is even used in The Martian, which details the ultimate escape—of a man from Mars.

The era brought about a new genre—the Philly Sound. A lot of work went into that sound, which to the ear is smooth, seamless chill. In an interview with Terry Gross, Leon Huff describes the famous piano roll opening of “Back Stabbers.” He says it reflects the drama of the title. Gross describes it as a “big, produced, orchestral sound.” Gamble says it was their dream to play so many counter melodies. “Radio was everywhere, it went from mono to stereo, it was more soothing, filled up more space. The music was not only funky, it was classical.”

“When the World’s at Peace” reveals the worry beneath the cool. This song could have been written today. We are still fighting for freedom. We are fighting for acceptance and for love. We are fighting to be seen and heard. We are fighting to matter.

I can see the day when it’s safe to walk the streets / When we learn to care for those lost in poverty / There would be no need for our daughters and our sons / To march up and down the streets singing “We shall overcome” / (do-it-to-me-now) / When the world’s at peace will it still be in one piece? / I pray for the day when the bombs and the bullets cease / Come let’s make a change, or leave the world in dust / Let’s be the world of love for the ones that follow us (do-it-to-me-now) / If we learn to love the way we learn to kill / then love will rule the world and hate would soon be still / Some may say they love, but love’s a sacrifice / Love is not a state of mind / Love’s a fact of life

Back Stabbers is still hopeful. The Philly sound production and instrumentation evokes strength, love, and sadness all at once. It created a timeless soundtrack for what was going on then, and now.

My 70s obsession was a mystery to me for a while. Now, I know that I was ushering in some major changes in my life. I was figuring out who I was, and I was moving away from some ideas that previously defined me and toward others that I didn’t yet understand. I was creating space in my life for creativity and a career that I didn’t have a blueprint for. Embracing a creative culture that was sophisticated, worldly, inventive, and complex, allowed me to feel that I was, too.

—Lee Erica Elder

#319: The Wailers, "Burnin'" (1973)

Burnin’ asks us to consider what we all want most: freedom and love. Over and over the Wailers task us with understanding the sacrifices necessary to make these elements manifest. On Burnin’ we hear the heartbeat of the new Jamaica, freshly independent from Britain in 1962. These songs tell the birth story of reggae music. They represent transition. The album is fervent, filled with the possibility of growth and revolution, while recognizing and acknowledging the barriers ahead.

“Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery; none but ourselves can free our minds.” This is Bob Marley’s famous “Redemption Song,” from Uprising, the last album he appeared on before his death in May 1981. He paraphrases Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican leader and orator whose black nationalist, Pan-African, and black empowerment philosophy influenced the spiritual beliefs of the Rastafari, of which Marley is one of the most well-known. Garvey said, “We are going to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery because whilst others might free the body, none but ourselves can free the mind. Mind is your only ruler, sovereign. The man who is not able to develop and use his mind is bound to be the slave of the other man who uses his mind because man is related to man under all circumstances for good or for ill.” Many Rastafarians regard Garvey as a prophet. Marley too, is often thought of this way. Nesta Robert Marley (later changed to Robert Nesta Marley) had many names throughout his life—Nesta, Robby, Bobby, Tuff Gong (so given for the way he defended himself in the streets of Trenchtown, Kingston, Jamaica), natty dread, and natural mystic (perhaps because he was rumored to have read palms as a child). If Marley is a prophet, Burnin’ is the prophecy of his life’s meaning and work, later realized on Uprising.

There’s a song on Burnin’ that I always return to, and it’s actually a re-recording of an earlier Wailers song, “Small Axe.” It’s inclusion with this volume is no coincidence. The Wailers had moved out from under the system that raised them—the management of legendary producer Coxsone Dodd. It was a right of passage and a necessity—Dodd was not paying the band very much, despite their growing success, and there were rumored issues with the direction that the Rastafari faith was taking the band’s message. “Small Axe” is a metaphor for revolution—a declaration of independence against the systems that were in place, the big tree, or big three record labels that dominated Jamaican music. The Wailers are the small axe, or small acts, underestimated at one’s peril: “So if you are the big tree / We are the small axe / Ready to cut you down (well sharp) / To cut you down.” It takes commitment, faith, and belief to know that your singular changes will add up to something meaningful. Many want to be the big tree, but you need honed precision to wield the small axe. It is the most beautiful kiss-off to believe in oneself enough to know that starting small will ultimately make you stronger. No weak heart shall prosper.

Burnin’ is about control—who has it, and who gets to use it. “Burnin and Lootin” asks, “How many rivers do we have to cross, before we can talk to the boss? / All that we got, it seems we have lost / We must have really paid the cost / (That’s why we gonna be) / Burnin’ and a-lootin’ tonight / Burning all illusion tonight.” Did Marley’s staunch commitment to evolution, to an emotional Exodus, give him the strength to follow through even when it meant leaving behind old structures—burning down illusions? He did this again and again—when he left the small country town where he was born, Nine Mile in St. Ann Parish, to move with his mother to Kingston, when he left Kingston to work in America, and when he came back because he wanted his freedom. Perhaps one of the most significant transitions was when original Wailers members Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer (Bob’s childhood friend) departed the band and he formed Bob Marley and the Wailers with a new lineup. Burnin’ was the last album they made as the Wailers.

Control isn’t just who takes up the most space, it’s about whose message is strongest. On Burnin’ it is confident, brash, and often understated. It’s So Far Gone-era Drake saying, “Diss me and you’ll never hear a reply for it.” It’s cocky, but not unrealistically so. It’s a quiet storm. On “Duppy Conqueror” Marley lets us know in no uncertain terms that no “duppy,” or evil spirit, real or imagined, will hold him up, or hold him back from his destination. In the end the warning was the truth—he would not be stopped. Not even when gunmen shot him in his own home over political beef. He got on stage to perform a concert for his people just two days after. He wasn’t dedicated, he was dedication. Get up, stand up, don’t give up the fight.

You can’t put a price on freedom. There’s a CBS Australia interview with Marley and reporter Gordon Bick, who could barely conceal his disdain and disgust at the Rasta lifestyle long enough to conduct the interview. Bick questions Marley’s reported wealth and asks him if he’s rich. Marley looks at him, tough as nails—Tuff Gong—and asks a rhetorical question. “Possessions make you rich? I don’t have that kind of richness. My richness is life.”

Trying to understand what makes this album so visionary is like trying to speak a language that can only be felt. A mix of genres—Ska, soul, R&B, rock, Mento, and Calypso—come together to create this sound and signify something new. It’s easy to just focus on the musicality, because it’s lush and hypnotic. You can’t not dance when “I Shot the Sheriff” comes on. I could barely stop moving long enough to write about it. The breakdown at 2:35 gets me every single time. Marley wails, “If I am guilty I will pay,” and pay reverberates until the drums start back up, foreshadowing dancehall riddims.

Music in the 70s took on a darkness and a militancy that reflected the signs of the times—political turmoil, sexual revolution, violence, civil rights, and war. In Jamaica, warring political factions, warring gangs, racism, and poverty demanded to be heard and understood. Bick got one thing right when he said, “Reggae and reggae bands like Bob Marley and the Wailers have become a musical rage throughout the world.” Maybe that rage was purity of intent. The ability to create meaning, moment by moment, and then suddenly, you’ve created a movement, a recognition of a people and ideologies and there’s no turning back. Sheriff John Brown always hated me / For what, I don’t know / Every time I plant a seed / He said kill it before it grow / He said kill them before they grow / And so / Read it in the news: (I shot the sheriff) / Oh, Lord! / (But I swear it was in self defense) / Where was the deputy? (Oo-oo-oh) / I say: I shot the sheriff / But I swear it was in self defense (Oo-oh) Yeah!

At Bob Marley’s funeral, the prime minister of Jamaica said, “Bob Marley was never seen. He was an experience which left an indelible imprint with each encounter. Such a man cannot be erased from the mind. He is part of the collective consciousness of the nation.”

Reggae artist Gary “Nesta” Pine was the lead singer of the Wailers Band during the late 90s–mid 2000s. I had the chance to see him perform recently at Shrine, in NYC. Watching him was transcendent. He channeled an energy that shook the floors and took over the entire room. He flipped his nearly waist-length locks and told us to “Get Up, Stand Up,” and we listened. No one sat down for the rest of the set. He said his performance was a conversation between him and Bob. In that moment, he encapsulated just what it is to listen to Burnin’. Everyone in that room wanted to feel like we were communing with Bob, with that message, with that prophesy, with the hope for peace, for love, for personal and political freedom. We all want some of that sun to shine on us, to feel some of that magic and mysticism, to feel free—even just for a night. We don’t always require a message from our artists, but when we receive one, the experience can be holy.

—Lee Erica Elder

#320: Radiohead, "Amnesiac" (2001)

Seven Types of Forgetting

Amnesiac: a person who suffers from amnesia: a partial or total loss of memory.

"This vacancy is filled to capacity with everything imaginable."

—D.E. Harding, "On Having No Head"

1.

I have always listened to music to forget (myself). When I listen, I'm not there. I don't know where my emotions go: My emotions are replaced by the music's emotions. It's kind of like writing. Like daydreaming. I don't know where the "I" goes. AKA: simply: to be not there.

AKA: "I forgot who and what I was, my name, manhood, animalhood, and all that could be called mine. It was if I had been born that instant, brand new, mindless, innocent of all memories” (Harding).

There is music for going and music for coming. There is music for transcending. Music for unknowing. There is music that opens and music that stays shut. Sometimes music is a door. There are doors that open forward and doors that open backward. There are two doors in the center of the Labyrinth: one that lies and one that tells the truth: only one door that leads to the helping hands (release me); there's a door to Ligeti's “Disordre.” To “Arc-en-ciel.” A red door. A door to Cage: “In a Landscape.” There are doors that are trap doors. Xenakis, “Concret PH.” There is only one door to “October 24, 1992: Graz, Austria”; doors to “Terminal EMA”; doors to wells with no bottom; doors to be not there. Doors to nothing, doors to nothing to fear. 

AKA: Amnesiac was/is my gateway (drug). I would not have heard “Disordre” without it. Amnesiac is a door. There's a door at the end of this rabbit hole. Do you know how hard it is? To say "no" to a door?

2.

I can't stop forgetting. I used to call my family my external memory. Do you remember? I don't remember myself. But my sister remembers. Names of family members and how we're related. Things that happened to me. How old I was. How much time has passed. Was it a dream or did that really happen? I forget so easily. This isn't the kind of forgetting that I mean, though. 

I don't mean trauma-induced forgetting either. Forgetting due to brain atrophy or vertigo. Psychologically convenient forgetting, escapism; not amnesia unless it is temporary. I don’t mean psychedelic forgetting, the kind you introduced me to. I mean none of these. What I mean is a forgetting that is transcendent; this forgetting is decadent. I mean a seventh kind of forgetting. An impoverishment of self. To be not there.

I will be not there just about any day a seductive, sedative voice calls: There are secret doors//There are doors that lock/And doors that don’t/There are doors that let you in/And out/But never open/But they are trapdoors/That you can’t come back from.

Perhaps you will protest: Is there not an observer who sees these doors in her "Mind's I"? But one cannot say "I" in the sense of "used by a speaker to refer to himself or herself," for inside of this music there is none to speak. One cannot say "I" in the sense of "the subject or object of self-consciousness; the ego;” it is precisely this self-consciousness and ego which have disappeared. It is true that an experience is received. But one does not need an "I" to receive. Let's ask it a question: What is your name? Your gender? The year of your birth and the name of the one you love? In the moment of receiving, no answer can be given.

3.

"…before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on” (Samuel Beckett, Unnamable).

I don’t remember the first day I met you. But I remember your piercings and tattoos, your deep voice. The way you would lift me into the air when we were apart too long and spin me around. You let me sleep in your family’s spare room one summer when I had nowhere else to go. I was too afraid to be an inconvenience to spend much time in the house, except for in my room, the room which was probably designed to be a library, because it had no door. Your bedroom was across the same hall. And I remember your Bowflex, and the muscles you built on it. You’re the only woman I ever fell for.

And when we went to Thailand on a college trip, you got another tattoo, went bungee jumping, attended an underground boxing match. You returned to me at our bungalow on the beach and we got four-hour massages from small Thai women who spoke to one another in the most melodious voices I have ever heard, pure sound poetry.

A week before, in Endau-Rompin National Park, Malaysia, we hiked a few hours into the woods with our group. I came out the other end of the knee-deep river with two black, pinky-sized leeches on my leg; I shrieked, you rubbed your hand in the dirt and pulled them clean off. We played on the low waterfall, on the wide rocks that had big body-sized holes we settled inside of like bathtubs. We used rope to climb when the path went vertical; we crossed a log over a small, shallow stream. When we arrived at our campground, the tour guides handed out tents and blow-up mattresses. Inside of the night-noises we erected our tents. And when everyone else was long done and tucked into their temporary sleep spaces, we still blew air into that mattress over the space of a half hour before we discovered the hole and collapsed in sheer delight as the remainder of our breath deflated around us. We were happy on the hard ground. Warm from laughter and the forest heat, we fell asleep, only our hair and our dreams tangled between us.

4.

I only need the first notes of “Pyramid” to get punch-drunk. I have found myself defending this music-induced non-being like a (gateway) drug.  It's ok to disappear completely every once in awhile; it makes me feel better; by which I mean: There are certain things that, without the music, I struggle to allow myself to feel.

I feel the need to defend this dreaming-forgetting because I am aware fully of what else has disappeared in this privileged bubble of non-I which I don't want to leave. If I don't emerge from this cloud cuckoo land, then this is abnegation of responsibility. To whom? To you. You, who are gone in this forgetting. You, who are being cut to shreds.

5.

Yet I can't stop forgetting. Forgetting is a trap door, a perfect interruption of a linear trajectory, opening onto helping hands that don't give me the option I'm looking for; they give me something better. Why did I walk into this cave? Turn on the single bulb which hangs from the ceiling. Was it to open these velvet curtains? Let's open them and gaze upon the whole earth, sloshing in a pool of water balanced in one crevice of a grooved stone which rests on the back of a black-horned bull kicking up sand in a vast, arid desert that's encrusted in a gill of a gently swaying anglerfish that roams the known universe without ceasing.

“It took me no time at all to notice this nothing, this hole where a head should have been, was no ordinary vacancy, no mere nothing. On the contrary, it was a nothing that found room for everything—room for grass, trees, shadowy distant hills, and far beyond them snow-peaks like a row of angular clouds riding the blue sky. I had lost a head and gained [all possible] world[s]” (Harding, slightly modified).

Yet I know that “to be not there” is easy. Being there is hard.

"Individual truth is valid only as it strives to be more than individual; a deliberate solitude, whatever its aim, leads to an impoverishment of self” (Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson, The Modern Tradition: Backgrounds of Modern Literature).

6.

“All of you who have been through high dose psychedelic experiences know that it’s very hard to carry stupid baggage through that keyhole. In fact you’re lucky if you just get your soul and yourselves through and intact” (Terence McKenna).

The summer we returned from Southeast Asia we went to that hostel in the forest in Georgia and you spiked our oatmeal with magic mushrooms. It was my first and only psychedelic experience—I know too well how dangerous drugs can be, but with you I felt safe. You gave me a smaller dose than you gave the others. I wasn’t sure if I was going to get any more out of that oatmeal than a stomach ache. But then it happened, as swiftly as driving into an oncoming shower of steady rain.

The facts of my identity became abstracted from me—they were accessible as objects, I only forgot that they belonged to me; I forgot to guard them in the fear of border-intrusion with which I have long lived my everyday life. We went skinny dipping in the natural pool (another first and only) and then I showered in the open air of the evening light, unashamed of my nudity. We found our way to the glass house (don’t talk politics and don’t throw stones). I played the djembe too loud, I found a primal beat like a spirit-gift that I wouldn't remember the next day because some things belong only to the moment in which they are born. When we walked back to the two-story bunkhouse, secret pathways were snaking off in every imaginable direction and a five-minute walk felt ten times that length yet I was not afraid of the irrationality of time; nor was I afraid, as usually I am, of the darkness and the woods—your muscular calf was always in front of me, leading the way.

We settled in for the night in the hammocks on the first floor. My hammock was a netted rainbow I ran my fingers against. While you softly chattered with the others, I remained silent, so I could receive. Yes: All was love. I loved you all and the universe was full around me, full of joy. Joy: an opening in the heart cavity bearing a bud grown too close to its cage, so that the only way to let the flower fully bloom is to let your chest crack open.

At dawn, I went to the top floor of the bunkhouse, a series of wooden bunk beds with stiff white sheets. Retrospectively, I'm sure you were still there, in your hammock. But maybe you weren’t. Either way, I forgot you. I did the thing I've always felt best doing. I lay belly against the bed and I wrote. And, of course, I listened to Amnesiac through my headphones. Think about the good times / And never look back. I tried to hold onto the feeling before it wore away.

On the return to Jacksonville, I listened to Amnesiac's twin album, Kid A, the bigger kid, the one that swayed easy in the amnion; Amnesiac, its ectopic sibling, a strangely-formed thing that I love more anyway because it was the first in my arms. But now I listened to “In Limbo”: I'm lost at sea / Don't bother me / I've lost my way / I've lost my way / /You're living in a fantasy world / You're living in a fantasy world / You're living in a fantasy world / The most beautiful woman in the world.

Your hair is up in twin buns, one behind each ear. You’re sitting either in the driver’s seat or riding shotgun, I can't remember which because I can't stop forgetting. This is my last memory of you. Not long after that, you vanished. There was no explanation, no final message. I went to bed one night in a world in which you were in my life, and I woke up in a world in which you were gone.

What were you going through when you disappeared completely? Did something bad happen to you? Was there anyone around you who you felt you could trust? I learned nothing, until two years later when a mutual friend heard from you. There were still no details. But you were alive, and that was a deep relief. What she could say: You severed contact with all of your friends. You didn’t know who really loved you, and who was only taking advantage. And I knew it immediately to be true, without question: In my absent-presence, I failed you. I’ll never forget that.

7.

Radiohead released “Daydreaming” yesterday. Do you know how hard it is? To say “no” to a door? Dreamers / They never learn / They never learn / Beyond the point / Of no return / Of no return // And it’s too late / The damage is done / The damage is done.

Thom Yorke, who is being followed, walks in a tunneled roadway, through an open doorway into a kind of warehouse hallway, opens a door to an apartment hallway. He looks behind himself, right at me, because I am one of the followers. Now we know this is a labyrinth: He opens an apartment door into a house where a mother, presumably, and her children are living their day. He walks through an open door into a hospital, back into a different house vacated of people because the last door was a trap door for forgetting. A door to a door, a kitchen, a laundromat, a novelty shop, a grocer, a dark hallway, the woods, a staircase, a beach. There are too many doors, I can’t keep track. There is always another door and a staircase leading to another door and then the whole snowy mountain in the light of a clear blue day—

Wander through the snow. Wander until it is night. Wander into the cavern like it was there you always intended to go. There is a fire waiting for you. Here, it is safe. You can fall asleep. We’ll all keep watch while you dream…

…of metaphors that build bridges to the moon and analogies that yield a chrysalis on your extended tongue. Reason away the existence of the outer world whole and all the people around you, because reason is only another kind of shared dreaming anyway. Sure, you can build roadways with collective dreams if you know the right symbols. Breathe the sweet faeries into the dew on the grass, sink yourself into the soil and come up daisies, spend eternity waiting for the all the wrong gods. I wouldn't blame you. I would blame you for Nothing at all / Nothing at all; Let’s go down the waterfall while these greater and lesser demons all around us make pretty little speeches and crack our little souls, moan the banshee through your throat and she’ll grant you three wishes, any wish at all except for more wishes, because that renders the offer null and void and vis-a-vis Harding, I have never been anything but this ageless, adamantine, measureless, lucid, and altogether immaculate Void:

8.

I awake from a fever dream. No one I know is around me, all of these people are strangers. Sound is unkind. Light, sharp.

A decade has passed since I last saw you. After years of waiting, nothing came. I doubt you think of me as I think of you. Still, it takes me fifteen minutes to remember your last name so I can look you up online. I’ve never found you that way before. Yet there you are, now, and not a moment sooner. You look peaceful and awake. There is only one post on your wall. Just a little over a month ago, you wrote a lament about the loss of love, and a promise to conquer the world, all contained in one exuberant sentence. Then your friends rallied their voices to be there for you. Involuntarily, I smile. My chest hurts. It’s joy.

—April Gray Wilder