#261: Grateful Dead, "American Beauty" (1970)

The soccer coach runs down the sideline, the crown of his head shining in the stadium lights, his ponytail bouncing against his tie-dyed shirt. During the day, the soccer coach is a bankruptcy attorney, but he doesn’t think of himself as the bankruptcy attorney. He is the soccer coach and he runs up and down the field griping at the refs, pulling at his hair, shouting encouraging words at his girls. This is a recent development, the running and shouting, the hair pulling. Just for the last six months to a year or so. The soccer coach used to be chill. That’s not to say he didn’t care, before. He always cared, but now he cares furiously.

After the game, he will go home and burn one. He used to smoke in the bathroom, blowing out the open window, but a while back he started to worry that the neighbors were suspicious—the houses in the soccer coach’s neighborhood are closely situated and small, their yards smaller. Also, around the same time his wife started complaining about having to shower in a room that smelled like an art school dorm. Tonight, he will smoke in the garage, as he’s done for the past few months. He’ll pop a tape into his Walkman and slide the foam covered headphones over his ears. He will sit on the hood of his wife’s Mitsubishi Mirage because he can’t sit on his own car—microbuses aren’t good for sitting, exactly—and he will listen to one of Dick’s Picks, or the ‘72 Veneta set he loves so much, or that ‘82 Iowa City show that he was actually at the summer—one of the summers—that he followed the Dead on tour, that particular time to celebrate passing the Bar, or maybe even something more recent, another show he attended a year before in Cincinnati. Yes, that’s probably the tape he will listen to. And he will remember the cool April air everywhere around him, and the Ohio River creeping behind the band as they performed beneath a bloated night sky, thick with hope or nostalgia or dread.

But for now, beneath a similar night sky, the soccer coach runs up and down the sidelines of a high school stadium, jumping and yelling until the refs miss a call when one of his girls is tripped while making a run on goal. Here, the soccer coach sprints onto the field and shouts, “You blind fucking prickhole,” with the kind of passion and loathing that most people his age save only for themselves. When the ref, a college kid working for a few extra bucks, pulls out his red card and holds it over the soccer coach’s head, he pulls at his hair and walks to his van where he sits and watches the scoreboard in his rearview mirror, thinking to himself, “What the fucking fuck?”

*

The soccer coach rolls a joint on the hood of his wife’s car, then sits in the same spot. He puts on his headphones and lights up, watches the smoke swirl and grow to fill the air in front of him as he listens to a cheering Cincinnati crowd—he was one of them—and the opening piano chords of “Let the Good Times Roll.”

He remembers the concert, for the most part. He and his wife and some friend drove down in his microbus and spent the afternoon sneaking puffs and throwing back Yuenglings that one of his friends had brought back from Pittsburgh. When he started to feel too fucked up, the soccer coach sneaked off to some nearby woods and stuck his finger down his throat, returning all that Yuengling and half-digested grilled meat to the earth.

The soccer coach hadn’t intended to drop acid that night, didn’t go to the trouble to procure any, even, but once he was in his seat—an hour early—waiting for the show to begin, and after he scanned the amphitheater’s seats, full of people like him who he desperately didn’t want to be like, and turned to look at the crowded lawn, full of younger fans—he desperately wanted to trip. So, he did the only thing that made sense—after guessing, probably correctly, that none of the other concert-goers sitting around him, all in their thirties and forties, like him, wouldn’t have any acid—the soccer coach made sure he had his ticket stub, went out the side of the amphitheater, and walked the long way around to the lawn area talking to younger concert goers until he found a group of kids, seniors in high school or younger college kids, who sold him a single hit for two bucks. Since he didn’t have any singles he gave the kids a ten and told them to keep the change. Then he ate the hit and returned to his seat.

Once the band was on stage, the soccer coach was glad that he’d eaten the acid, even though it hadn’t kicked in yet. Despite having seen the Dead play a hundred and thirty-seven times, this was the first show he’d made it to in a few years and—pre-trip—the soberest he’d been for one in even longer, maybe ever. What struck the soccer coach most about the band was how much they looked like the crowd, looked like they could be teachers, doctors, advertising executives, mid-level managers, bankruptcy attorneys. The soccer coach remembered going to Dead shows in the seventies, the way the audience swayed and danced, all the flowing locks and bare breasts, hypnotic dancing and good vibes, but there he was in Cincinnati, in 1989, looking up at Jerry and Bob and Phil and Mickey and Brent, who didn’t really count because he hadn’t been around in the ‘70s, all looking like upstanding citizens, like everyday guys—and that felt wrong, felt bad. That wasn’t how the Dead were supposed to be. Not how their fans were supposed to be.

And then, about halfway through a long-but-not-too-long rendition of “China Cat Sunflower,” the acid kicked in.

But tonight, after the game, in his garage, the soccer coach sits on his wife’s car and smokes a joint and listens to a fan-traded recording of that show and thinks about when he was younger—not last year when he went to the show, but ten years ago, fifteen years ago, twenty years ago, before his idols got old. Before he got old.

*

The soccer coach’s favorite thing about the Cincinnati concert was the encore—“Box of Rain.” This is a point of contention between the soccer coach and many Deadheads who don’t like the album it’s from—American Beauty. The album is too polished, they say, too structured, too clean. They say, the Dead are about their concerts, about jamming, about the performance. American Beauty, they say, is a pop album, not a Dead album. But it’s also the album that made the soccer coach love the Grateful Dead. And “Box of Rain” is most of the reason why. When the soccer coach first heard the song, stoned at a friend’s house during his senior year of high school, he felt what Phil Lesh was saying about love and loss. “Such a long time to be gone,” Lesh sings at the song’s end, “and such a short time to be there,” on that box of rain called Earth. Box of fucking rain, the soccer coach thought to himself when he was seventeen—who calls the Earth a goddamn box of rain. His interest grew when he learned that Lesh had written the song about his father’s death to cancer, something that the soccer coach knew a great deal about at seventeen, having lost his mother two years prior after she, in an era without pink ribbons or national awareness months or even basic and pervasive public knowledge, failed to detect the lump that ended her. When he heard “Box of Rain” after that, he regretted not having the wisdom to say to his dying mother, “What do you want me to do / to do for you to see you through?”

The year after he first heard American Beauty, when he enrolled at the Ohio State University, the soccer coach started going to every Dead show he could, following them on tour, even, over summers.

Of all the Dead shows he attended, the soccer coach saw them play “Box of Rain” only a handful of times, mostly in ‘72 and ‘73 when American Beauty was still fresh. They didn’t bring it back into regular rotation until the late eighties, after the soccer coach had more-or-less stopped following the band on tour. The Cincinnati performance—that was the first live performance of the song he’d witnessed since he made it out to Watkins Glen for a late July show in ‘73.

When he heard “Box of Rain” that night, he thought something changed inside him, or for him, or something.

*

But here in his garage, the soccer coach swaps the first tape of the Cincinnati show for side two of the second and fast forwards to the encore. This isn’t his usual practice. He normally listens to the concert from the beginning, and rarely all the way to the end. He’s listened to the encore of “Box of Rain” maybe twice since one of his tape trader buddies sent him the cassettes—once when he first received the tapes, and then a few months later, after he and his wife had had a fight after he got a vasectomy without telling her, ensuring that the couple would never procreate. What was the point in having a kid at this point, the soccer coach had thought to himself when he scheduled the procedure for when his wife would be out of town, visiting her sister for a week. Most of the time when he listens to the Cincinnati set, though, he avoids “Box of Rain.” It means too much, he thinks, though he isn’t sure why, not anymore.

*

At that show the previous year, when, during “China Cat Sunflower,” the soccer coach started to feel the acid doing what acid does, he smiled. For the first hour after that, he mostly saw only trails, like every movement on stage and every movement around him was a jet cutting through the sky’s vapor. During “Space,” which he’d seen the band play at almost every show he ever attended, he walked out from under the venue’s shelter and looked up at the sky, moving his head back and forth so that the stars became lines. When his head stopped moving, the stars didn’t. His trip had picked up. He saw satellites floating through space, watched the stars move in the sky, forming shapes—an acorn being eaten by a squirrel, a 1986 Honda Civic with its bumper falling off, a bathtub full of pushpins, a soccer ball. He didn’t—still doesn’t—know why he saw any of those things except for the last, and it was after seeing the soccer ball that he walked back to his seat to enjoy the rest of the show.

By the encore, the soccer coach was tripping hard. When Phil Lesh walked back out on stage in his professional-dressed-casual-for-a-relaxing-weekend attire, the soccer coach saw globes of soft light rise up from each band member and swirl above the stage before separating and returning to their sources in a bright, blinding burst. As his eyes readjusted to the darkness that followed the flash, the soccer coach saw that the band’s appearance had changed—now they all looked exactly like him. He stared in horror, closed his eyes and reopened them, but nothing changed. He looked away from the stage and was alarmed to see that it wasn’t just the band that looked just like him—the entire audience had taken on his appearance, had become him. A woman he had earlier seen shimmying to the music in a tank top and daisy dukes was him now, his body, face, ponytail, male-pattern baldness, but still wearing her own clothes. He was his wife, the ushers, the roadies. And he was disgusted. He thought this is what it is to get old, man.

*

And tonight in the garage, when the soccer coach cues the tape to the beginning of “Box of Rain,” he remembers that moment, and then he remembers sitting on his buddy’s sofa in 1971, stoned stupid, and the immense feeling of wonder and possibility he felt in the song. A box of fucking rain—our planet Earth! And he remembers all the gigs he attended in the ‘70s, all the acid he ate, and the dope he smoked, and the women he fucked, and every note of every solo, and every warm feeling and stoned hug and heavy conversation and then he thinks of the red card hanging over his head, the long trek from the soccer field to his microbus, of the client list at his day job, and he hears Phil Lesh sing the line about how if you look into any eyes around you, you’ll see “clear through to another day.” The soccer coach thinks of his mother’s lump, and his own vasectomy, and he thinks of his wife inside, probably watching the eleven o’clock news, or sleeping on the couch after Cheers, and knows that he doesn’t have any other eyes to look into and probably shouldn’t anyway because seeing clear through to another day doesn’t mean anything, not anymore. The soccer coach closes his eyes and lets the tape play past the end of “Box of Rain,” past the closing crowd noise, and through several minutes of silence until the side ends with a click.

—James Brubaker

#262: Crosby, Stills & Nash, "Crosby, Stills & Nash" (1969)

I am sweating, even in the shade of palm fronds and hundred-year-old banyans. I’ve been in Florida less than a week, and every day I measure change in myself by freckles and the contrast between my gently tanned skin and scars. These are small changes in the context of my life lately, but I like the concrete measure—a version of proof that now I am different. In three months, I’ve been rattled with loss of love, a shared home, meaningful work, and I’ve thrown my last few dollars at my ever-tricky body, coded to stumble in one way or another. And I have also chiseled deeper into love, feeling new, happy shocks. I have access, somehow, to joy, accepting its complex harmony with pain. So now I am different; afraid, grateful, and free.

I am visiting Florida, where green attaches itself to everything, with my family. My brothers and I are living out of suitcases, tucked into free corners of a house that tries to support all of our feelings and noise. Every day we call to a machine with a name, Alexa, asking her to play the wintery albums that used to scratch across the record player of my childhood—my parents’ childhoods, too. It doesn’t feel like January here, even with Crosby, Stills & Nash. There’s so much color in this strange winter of my life, and it’s like I’m hearing these songs my parents have always hummed on snowy mornings for the first time.

I am barefoot and the tile is cool and the beautiful bird my grandmother calls a Brown Egret is cawing on the other side of the sliding glass door. “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” is on and I almost cry, because it’s one of those moments where a song feels expressly made for the moment you’re hearing it. I fixate on harmonizing under my breath, only getting it right, appropriately, on what have I got to lose?

I play it again and again until finally someone says, “Haven’t we already heard this one?”

I say, “Haven’t we heard them all?”

When the record goes on, I get dizzy retracing my so-far life. I wish, like a record, I could play it backward to hear some kind of essential, veiled message. In my mind I walk backward, encountering different truths I’ve known. I watch so many people I love disappear and others reappear. I trace my life back until I too disappear, imagining the parts of me that hid out in my parents until they made me. Dad’s teeth; the joints of Mom’s thin fingers. I follow them to their own childhood bedrooms, a few miles apart, both listening to this record. It’s so comforting to imagine a time when I wasn’t material—when I had no mass. A time before I could be measured.

I tell my mom I can’t stop hearing the word free on this record—that I feel like it’s in almost every song. She says the word she hears over and over is morning. When “You Don’t Have to Cry” starts, in the morning when you rise, I laugh to myself. I close my eyes and wait for a word to stand out and give me the jolt. Even though they sing cry what feels like a hundred times, all I really hear is telephones. I’ve always loved the word telephone in a song; something about voices jumping across long distances gets me.

It’s funny how much has changed in my lifetime. Analog, gone digital; frequencies, now zeroes and ones.

Through sunglasses, I squint at a quick wispy cloud passing over the sun. The light refracts a greenish halo. I learned a little about the science of light refraction this week, but I can’t know it as anything but voices of the angels [ringing] around the moonlight. I ask Alexa if she can please play “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” and my grandmother, shuffling cards, says: “Don’t ask her, Elise; you have to tell her to play it.”

I think about why we shriek in frustration at a disembodied, named voice; why it feels dangerous that she can’t play a song if I ask instead of demand. Because I don’t ask her to play it again, she keeps on with the rest of the album: “Wooden Ships.”

I resist the urge to ask my Dad to tell me more about the physics of ships like I normally would, because I anticipate everything that might sting these days and I am afraid to hear the word displacement.

Even though when this album echoed through my childhood home while we made pancakes on snow days, it isn’t until now, hot noon in Florida, that I realize many of these songs have warm winds, islands, seagulls, and bays. It isn’t until now that I see the palm frond in the upper left-hand corner of the album cover, sneaking in. Every day I am learning that my conceptual association, what’s etched and encoded in my brain, can be modified. Maybe these songs live in my hippocampus, sparking snow, maple syrup, pops in the vinyl. I am adding, though, this breeze, this lizard scurrying across the pavers, and the chills I get, despite the heat, despite myself, during the line: Love isn't lying, it's loose in a lady who lingers, saying she is lost, and choking on hello.

I get the jolt, big time, for hello. I get it, too, for goodbye.

I am leaving this place tomorrow and I am not sure what’s next, but I scarcely need to remind myself that I am lucky. Not because of rabbit’s feet or heads-up pennies, but because I look around at the people I love and I love them. It’s loose in me.

The pool water is January cold and even though I try to wade in slowly, my brother pulls me in. On the top of the pool, I take a few deep breaths and try to teach myself to float. It takes a couple tries to relax and lighten, but after a few moments, I do. There’s no separating displacement from buoyancy—only in their harmony do we rock on the surface of dangerous, sparkling seas.

—Elise Burke

#263: Tracy Chapman, "Tracy Chapman" (1988)

God talks to me with Tracy Chapman’s voice.

I’m sitting at the table with my fingers on the laptop and I’m thinking about who I was in 1988, and I’m trying to remember the world of 1988, which was very small, and which I struggled to understand even though it was so very incredibly simple. It could not have been simpler. I could not for the life of me figure it out.

God talks to me with Tracy Chapman’s voice. God says, I told you not to call me that. God says, I am neither God nor am I Tracy Chapman.

And I say back, God, you are so funny. And I say back, God, what should we talk about?

And God says, Let’s talk about “Fast Car.”

And I say, Good. Yes. Let’s.

You didn’t always like that song, did you?

No. It seemed phony to me at the time. It felt self-consciously arty.

How old were you in 1988?

I’d rather not say.

Okay. Fair enough. (You were thirteen.)

Hey!

No one expects you to have appreciated that song as a thirteen year old in 1988. Do you understand that?

Yes, I understand that. I just wish that I had appreciated it as a thirteen year old. I wish I had been a savvier thirteen year old. I wish I had been ahead of my time. I wish I had been older than my years.

I get that. No one likes to be late to the game.

Plus, it’s a pretty fucking great song.

What do you like about it?

It’s bleak and beautiful. It’s deep and compact. It’s authentic and true. It makes me feel some stuff.

It appeals to you as a writer.

Yes. It does things that good short stories do. It’s narrative. It has a strong voice. Every verse introduces new information. It has a beginning and a middle and an end. It’s a basic masterpiece. If I were smarter, I would have recognized that at the time.

You believe that’s true.

Sure.

It’s a matter of intelligence. It marks some kind of intellectual failure on your part.

I’ve always been slow on the uptake. I’ve always been six years behind.

That’s a specific number.

I’ve had lots of time to think about it.

Your friend liked this song at the time, didn’t he? He recognized its value right away.

Yeah…

Is that part of the reason why this bothers you?

…

Why you remember this song as one of your failures?

…

Is it because he got it and you didn’t?

Are you asking me or telling me?

Neither. We’re working through it.

I suppose that’s right, or partly right. Or maybe it isn’t right at all. It bothers me because it represents a pattern of people getting a thing and me not getting the thing until later on, until after it makes any difference. Until after the thing is established and it doesn’t matter who gets it—it only matters who got it. I didn’t get it. I wish I had. I wish I had been able to see what M— saw.

You think M— was smarter than you?

I think everyone is smarter than me. I think M— was savvier than me. He saw things for what they were. He was older than his years.

The two of you did not remain friends.

…

And that’s tied up in this somehow?

It must be. I’m writing about both things. I’m tying them together.

Tell me again about that thing that happened.

We were walking back to his house. We had just bought a bunch of pop and some Cool Ranch Doritos. We were about half a block away when we heard a noise we didn’t recognize. It sounded like a thousand fingers drumming on the roof of a car. We turned in its direction and saw the regular world as we knew it, but smudged.

It was rain.

Yes. It was sunny where we stood but pouring heavy rain a hundred feet away. It took us a moment to process. It was very disorienting.

What did you think?

I thought, This is something totally new.

What did you do?

We stood and watched. We had the experience.

Then what?

Then it started coming towards us.

And what did you do?

We ran. We ran away from it as fast as we could, toward his house. We could hear it gaining on us. We could hear it pounding the pavement at our heels. We could feel the chill of it on the skin of our arms. It was a sliding wall of rain. It was coming for us.

And what happened?

I made it to his front porch without getting a drop on me. I beat it. He fell behind. He got pretty wet.

Why do you still think about this?

It wasn’t usual for me to beat him. I was the scrawny one. I was the awkward one. I needed glasses, had a bad haircut, wore dorky clothes. M— was strong. M— was capable. M— understood how the world worked. M— saw the value in “Fast Car.” M— was M—. I was me.

How do you explain it?

The only explanation is that M— wanted to fall behind. He wanted to get caught in the rain.

Do you wish now that you had gotten caught in the rain too?

That’s one that I have never been able to figure out. I don’t know if I wish that I had or not. Is that strange?

I don’t think so. What else would you like to say about “Fast Car”?

Nothing, I guess. Do you have anything to add?

Plenty.

Right. Of course. Sure you do.

How do you feel about what we’ve done here? Did it all come together the way you wanted it to?

Mm. No. It’s not quite together even in my mind. You must know that—you live in there with it.

That’s true.

You’re God.

Please don’t call me that.

—Joe P. Squance

#264: Grateful Dead, "Workingman's Dead" (1970)

“I didn’t know you were a Deadhead,” my coworker said one day after she’d heard me whistling “Sugar Magnolia.” I cringed. Her words hinted at a conspiratorial discovery—I was one of her! Of them! All along! The chasm of Grateful Dead lore with its tie-dyed everything and dancing bears began unfolding from my cubicle into oblivion, threatening to subsume me.

“Oh, God no,” I said, and explained that though I do like many—a lot, even—of their songs, I wasn’t a Deadhead, or any other sort of head, and didn’t like to identify myself through tangential affiliations. This of course was just a bullshitty sentiment of my cynicism, but when faced with a monolithic entity like the Grateful Dead it does feel dishonest of me to claim any half-hearted allegiance.

There were definitely times when I wanted to be a Deadhead. My best friend and music partner was raised up in the Dead by his father, who had toured with them in a Volkswagen pickup truck in the ‘70s and would still pick up his old Martin to play their songs with us. China cat sunflowers nurtured by boxes of rain and sunshine daydreams—the Dead’s music was a second language to them, spoken without effort or affectation. I never knew the words or melodies well enough to sing along and could barely track the chord changes as I flubbed along on my bass, but I could feel how music was an inextricable part of their family, a sensibility that was both close to me and out of each.

Later on, the Dead were the gateway wave my friends rode in to other jam bands. Suddenly they were all Deadheads, imitating their cooler, older brothers who themselves had become Deadheads as a means of communicating their counter-culture status. They had long hair. They wore tie-dye. In the thick of it, they started trading recordings of live concerts, the “tape exchange,” via an online forum. The canon of recordings dated back to nearly the beginning and had been fostered by the Dead themselves, who had encouraged their fans to record. This was still well before Napster, et al, so trading the Dead involved overstuffed binders of burned CDs and lots of parent-paid postage. I listened to some of the concerts, listened to my friends tell me about the merits of the concerts, but it never hooked me.

What was the point of listening to a hundred versions of the same songs played at concerts three decades prior? How much listening, how much sifting through and comparing would one have to do to find the rendition that most spoke to them? That singular performance that would elevate and transport the listener beyond corporeal bounds? Perhaps even to a grateful death? (Too easy, I know.) I had the Greatest Hits and it did me good. The cost-benefit ratio only confirmed the great endeavor required to become an honest-to-god Deadhead. You were either born into it or devoted your whole life to becoming it—and yet, when caught whistling a single song, some folks would lump you in all the same.

*

But of course you don’t have to be a Deadhead to enjoy the Grateful Dead, and Workingman’s Dead is a good, important album. Good because with only eight tracks at just over thirty minutes, WD accomplishes a lot. Bookended by two of the Dead’s most popular songs, “Uncle John’s Band” and “Casey Jones” (the latter kicking into gear on that infamous illicit sniff), the album delves into a nitty gritty folklore of those hardscrabble laborers that built up America only to be broken by it. Miners, road and rail workers, lonely souls getting love while they can, only to beg for death at the end, be it delivered by dire wolves or dire weather. Good because the Dead can carry songs of kumbaya, lover’s lament, and jangly foot tappers without breaking stride.

Important because WD represents an intentional transition in the Dead’s style that would dictate their future successes. With WD, the Dead had to move beyond a band that could play good music, and become a band that could craft good songs, too. Less acid rock, more Americana. They brought the lyricist Robert Hunter on board and, after hanging around Crosby, Stills and Nash, developed their own folksy song-style with a focus on acoustic instrumentation and vocal harmonies, straightforward lyrics that told their tale and maintained the Dead’s particular weirdness. Those first big open-G strums of “Uncle John’s Band” were practically a thesis.

Important also because it seems one of the primary motivations for these changes was financial. Owing money from the extensive studio time of their previous album, coming off of a heavily publicized drug bust (later documented in the song “Truckin”), and having been essentially robbed by their manager, the Dead were in dire straits. They needed to make marketable songs and make them fast. Thus, the “workingman” of the title not only describes the thematic content of the song lyrics, but also the Dead’s experience writing and recording: here they were working through the challenge of stylistic change, making song-songs; here, also, they were working for that money-money. As the speaker of “Cumberland Blues” says, “Make good money, five dollars a day / Made any more, I might move away.” The work paid off—not only was WD a great success (even topping CSNY’s Déjà Vu in a Rolling Stone poll), but the songwriting and instrumentation practiced in WD laid the groundwork for their next album, American Beauty, which came out only six months later and is generally acknowledged as their best.

*

In part because of the proliferation of Grateful Dead recordings, both studio and live, in part because of how stand-out songs get separated from their genesis over time, I’d heard all of the songs from WD—again, liked them—but would not have been to reference the track list, or identify which rendition of the song it was I was hearing. Whether it was the studio version from 1970, a short, clean live version from Red Rocks from ‘78, or the remastered reissue in 90-what-have-you. But the songs by themselves are powerful alone, even with the ability to elevate and transport.

A few New Year’s Eves ago, back in my hometown in Kentucky, I gathered with my friend, his Deadhead father, and their family to celebrate. We were high-time drunk on rakia, a clear moonshine-like liquor that I’d brought back from Bulgaria, and starting to get boisterous. Unbeknownst to me, something turned in my friend’s mood. His dog jumped up to the table and knocked over a glass, and while we all scrambled to clean the mess I could hear him cursing at his fiancé, blaming and belittling her in a low, dark tone. She excused herself. His mother, who had heard his comments, was next to leave. Shortly thereafter, another conversation, another offense, this time to his sister, her subsequent exit. I was both upset by his actions, and worried for whatever might have caused him to act that way. To this day, I don’t know, and when we’ve spoken about it, he doesn’t remember. Either way, as the night came to an end, his father pulled out that old Martin, handed it to me, and asked for a song. It had been too long since I played, too long since I had sang with any confidence. I plucked out the first few notes of “St. Stephen,” but quickly faltered. Their disappointment was palpable. I handed the guitar back and my friend’s father made a toast to the new year. My friend lifted his glass but hardly moved his mouth in response. But when his father struck those first big open Gs of “Uncle John’s Band,” I could see my friend’s shoulders go loose as he started crying. Whatever it was inside him that was tearing him up, here in this music, a language of peace and love.

—Colin Lee

#265: Ray Charles, "The Genius of Ray Charles" (1959)

It was his city rendered strange, become track, become route, the footfall-by-footfall measuring of effort. 26.2 miles of city streets were blocked off for the runners, and Joe found himself at mile 18 running in the early spring rain by the Pennsylvania Avenue entrance to his own old neighborhood, through an intersection where he had sat countless early mornings smoking cigarettes in his car and cranking the rock to get him up for the day. Now he glided past, fleet and quiet on the outside, his body aching and Ray Charles belting “Let the Good Times Roll” in his ears: “Hey everybody! Let's have some fun / You only live but once / And when you're dead you're done / So let the good times roll—.”

He opened an energy pack and tried to squeeze the gel down his throat, found both the gel and his saliva thickened by the cold air, his hands numb and hard to move. Mile 18 was always the hardest. When he had first started running, he listened to rock, the harder the better, the louder the better, operating under the assumption that the music would push him, energize him, back when running five miles seemed like an unattainable goal. But at some point he had realized that the narrative nature of songs, the egotistical first person of them all, kept him in a place in his head that disallowed the flow his mind was trying to drop into.  The flow, that slipstream of mind and body governed by breath, feet, inhalation and exhalation—the flow wanted some other kind of music. Classical worked, and he had spent countless hours over the last few years running to Beethoven’s 9th and to the Goldberg Variations, Glenn Gould’s precision speediness inspiring a physical parallel in his own clicking pace.

Still, sometimes you needed a voice, you needed the murmur of sympathy in your own throat reaching for something past personality. Who had turned him on to Ray Charles? The way this marathon made his city not his city, but a meditative, testing route with a medal at the end, a proud sticker for his car, and a bright rayon T-shirt, Ray Charles wove love and longing into the formal properties of his songs, ropes of sound Joe wore like a scarf around his neck on this chilly day. He’d been a fan since he could remember. By the time that biopic starring Jamie Foxx came out, he had felt like Ray Charles was an old ally. He remembered going into the theater with a skeptical air, feeling protective of Ray and doubtful the film could get him right.

Why did he feel that way? Was there a moment before he knew who Ray Charles was? The rain was really coming down, worsening his need to pee somehow. He rounded the corner of Northwest Expressway, the empty early morning parking lot of Penn Square Mall sprawled before him, and he remembered his great-grandmother in her 1972 Cadillac, burgundy with gold trim, driving him and his father somewhere when Joe was small. What an aggressive driver—she’d driven a cab through the mixing bowl of Houston in the ‘60s, taking scientists to and from Cape Canaveral and drunk oil workers from bar to bar along the western rim, making more of her job than should have been possible, building a regular clientele and creating, in her cab, an environment of good tunes and strong drinks that people came looking for the way you frequent certain bars for particular atmospheres. The day Joe remembered in her Cadillac, she’d been driving with big, black shades on, the kind that wrapped around from ear-to-ear in a sheath of blackness. What was it, the incongruity of her delicate feminine features against the mobsterish shades, that had made him and his dad laugh? Something like that, something so tough and ready in the way she gripped the wheel and stared through opaque glasses at the bright day outside, had made Joe’s dad say, “You look like Ray Charles.” Joe hadn’t known who that was, Ray Charles, but his grandmother had affected a broad grin and tilted her head back, swaying her head side-to-side in a gesture that Joe understood to be an imitation of a blind person. His great-grandmother played air-piano against her steering wheel and belted out:

“Don't let the sun catch you cryin'
The night's the time for all your tears—”

Joe had been confused because he had heard her sing that song countless times and had thought it was her own composition, only understanding in that moment that she was singing someone else’s song. The Genius of Ray Charles, she had offered then, was his best, her favorite, the one she played most on the 8-track in her cab. It was big band, it was ballads, it was big-souled and it was slick as glass, pure professionalism powered by an artist simply manifesting who he was. His great-grandmother said those things; she talked like that, of band and soul and slick, and Joe had noted the admiration in her voice when she spoke of people doing what they were supposed to do and doing it well. He knew she felt she hadn’t done that well, herself, felt her life was too small for her, and so her Ray Charles imitation, her too-white dentures flashing, was more than mirth, it was a small act of becoming.

He had run marathons in cities he didn’t know, and it was better that way. This route was too familiar. He knew what was coming, with painstaking detail—hospital, gym, Beverly’s Pancake House, Starbucks. The route would head back downtown, ending where it had begun, at the Murrah Bombing Memorial. He would feel a rush of pride, civic and personal, when he saw it ahead, he would feel like he had done something good for his city when he pushed through the finish line, but in the meantime—what was the phrase?—in the meantime it was a mean time. His lungs burned. Other runners thudded around him. The toes of his right foot were tingling with needle-like pain, which meant his ruptured disc was acting up, shooting nerve pain through his extremities. A neon flashing signal that he really should stop. The rain chilled the early morning air and loosened all the grease and dirt on the road, making it slick and filling the air with the unwholesome smell of petroleum products. Which seemed right. This was an oil town, after all. What else should coat the roads? He really had to pee. A bright bloom of discomfort shot through his bladder with the strobing frequency of each step.

What was all this effort for? He wanted the city to vanish in a vapor behind him as his feet cleared each spot of pavement. He wanted to look back and see open plains where his hometown had been. Why did she have to go the way she went? And his dad—him too. Everyone in that old Cadillac was gone but him. He had the Cadillac. It sat in his driveway under a tarp, his grandmother’s tape player still in it, together with stacks of cassettes, their miniaturized copies of the album covers pasted to their plastic fronts. The Genius of Ray Charles was in there somewhere. But also out here with him, in his ears, out on the road, in the rain.

“Almost there!” A passing pair of runners called out, shot him waves as they crossed the nearly-empty road ahead of him. “Come Rain or Come Shine” was playing. “I'm gonna love you, like nobody's loved you / Come rain or come shine / High as a mountain, deep as a river / Come rain or come shine—”

He peed. Felt heat in his crotch, against his legs. Why not? He was pouring sweat; it was pouring rain; who would know? Because it was that or stop and ruin his finish time and he wasn’t stopping, he was going on. Like Alexander’s ragtime saints in the song, like the road and the city and the music, he was one of the things that was still here.

—Constance Squires

#266: Blood, Sweat & Tears, "Child is Father to the Man" (1968)

As the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump approaches, many citizens are wondering how Trump’s policies will affect the lives of everyday Americans. The administration has already created a flurry of question marks surrounding issues like foreign policy, healthcare, domestic spending, the environment, etc. As Americans brace for dramatic change, one question has emerged above all others: What does the election of Donald J. Trump mean for the future of Blood, Sweat & Tears’ 1968 debut album, Child is Father to the Man?

In an attempt to offer guidance on this, the most pressing issue of our time, I offer the following 20 potential outcomes:

1. Horns will likely be reduced in mix as horn players tend to have large, dexterous hands.

2. The Harry Nilsson-penned song “Without Her” will be reimagined by Ted Nugent as a Hillary Clinton diss track. In it, Nugent will rhyme “she-male” with “e-mail.”

3. In 2018, the album will celebrate its 50th anniversary. Rhino Records will release a 10-CD deluxe Child is Father to the Man: Complete Studio Recordings box set. Critical reception will be mixed as Pitchfork names the record Best New Reissue while Rolling Stone, Paste, and All Music are destroyed by global thermonuclear war.

4. David Fricke will upload his consciousness to the internet. It will then begin bombarding millions of cellphones with 1,000-word SMS think pieces about how John Simon’s production style changed from his work on Simon and Garfunkel's Bookends to Child is Father to the Man and how this shift mirrors our own interior shifts under a newly oppressive regime.

5. Prior to the 2018 mid-term elections Russian hackers will once again breach the DNC and expose e-mails in which Bernie Sanders calls Al Kooper’s arrangements “weak af.”

6. The song “My Days Are Numbered” will become even more ominous.

7. Smooth, chill saxophone solos will sound more like nervous, sad saxophone solos.

8. Due to a reduction in federal income tax rates, Kanye West will have enough money to not simply sample this record but buy the entire thing and release it as a whole under his own name as Kanye is Father to Man. This same tax cut will destroy public education.

9. A newly resurgent Boomer generation will send Child is Father to the Man and Viagra sales skyrocketing.

10. To avoid name confusion, Blood, Sweat & Tears and Earth,Wind & Fire will be merged into one super group: Blood, Earth, Sweat, Wind & Fire & Tears. Experts agree this will save us all time.

11. White people will continue to overestimate the diversity of the group Blood, Sweat & Tears.

12. Something will be done about the name. A child cannot be father to a man. It would be like saying Eric was Donald’s father. Such frivolity will likely not be tolerated in the Trump administration.

13. In 2019, Metallica will sue Apple Music and effectively destroy the current streaming model. In the wake of CD players being all but obsolete, vinyl sales for Child is Father to the Man will eclipse their 1960’s totals. However, it will be difficult for most Americans to hear music as Amazon will be beaming advertisements directly into their cerebral cortex.

14. Digital renderings of the album will lose audio fidelity as your phone or computer will be unable to maintain audiophile sound output while simultaneously recording your thoughts and actions.

15. Teens will discover that if you play the opening track, “Overture,” backwards and light a candle, you’ll hear messages from Satan about how student loans are a good idea.

16. Donald Trump, Jr. will dismissively refer to the group as “Buttsweat and Tears” during a controversial appearance on SportsCenter.

17. The United States Senate will label the post-Sgt. Pepper 1960s an unfortunately decadent era of sonic expression. The eclectic Child is Father to the Man will gain increased underground popularity as Mike Pence publicly laments Al Kooper and Steve Katz’s stylistic shift away from their formerly conventional “The Blues Project.” Steely Dan will be named the national band of the United States of America.

18. The song “I Love You More Than You’ll Ever Know” will be renamed “I Love You. It’s Tremendous. You Can’t Even Imagine. So Much.”

19. High-level Democrats will call an emergency session of Congress and attempt to pass a joint resolution condemning President Trump for using his entire first State of the Union speech to practice the Blood, Sweat & Tears track “Just One Smile” on guitar live from the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. The resolution will fail as House Republicans jockey to back up Trump on bass.

20. Blood, Sweat & Tears will be all you have left.

—Steven Casimer Kowalski

#267: The Who, "Quadrophenia" (1973)

Maybe it was something like this:

A lie started it all.

It just slipped out, as he, Scott, sat there on the couch with his new friend—his only friend, at least in town—playing air drums to the new one.

Because how could he not?

Because Keith Fucking Moon.

The parts that weren’t weird, anyway. The parts that sounded like a band playing, instead of—well, whatever was happening.

Wow, man, Mike said. You’re good.

Thanks.

You play?

Yeah.

I mean, yeah, you play, Mike said. Obvious from watching you. Like, you still play? You playing?

Totally. I mean, not with people. Not yet. I just got here. Haven’t found anyone. But yeah. I do.

And this was the lie: before moving from Iowa, Scott’s drums had been gathering dust in the basement. They probably still were, unless his parents moved them. Mom always talked about wanting space for a sewing machine.

And he hadn’t found anyone yet because he hadn’t looked. Not with any focus. He wanted to play music, sure, but he wanted to keep doing his artwork.

And he wanted to take it all in.

He could walk to the ocean. The ocean! Water was water, as far as he was concerned—at least before he’d seen it, so different from the Mississippi, huge and powerful and unspeakable.

He tried to articulate the ocean to his parents and felt stupid as soon as the words fell from his mouth into the phone receiver. Because of course it was big, and of course it was beautiful. But there was more, and he couldn’t wrap words around the way wave after wave crashed into the bridge stanchions, tireless and unrelenting. How the air felt in his lungs.

The hills—he’d heard. And he was excited for them, even as they kicked his ass and he whooped for breath, that amazing ocean air he couldn’t appreciate because he insisted on keeping a normal pace—he was a fast walker—and even after he’d been there a while he still found himself having a hard time, but he loved it. Muscataine was built on bluffs, but nothing like even the routine hills.

And Muscataine was part of the Quad Cities, had its neighborhoods, but it didn’t sustain itself the way San Francisco did, reaching out seemingly endlessly, always with something new, some restaurant or record store, some shift in tone, in feel. So many beautiful people in one place, more than he’d ever seen. So many homeless. So many students. So many businessmen. So many cars. Trains. He still didn’t understand the trains.

And as much as he wanted to think tapping out paradiddles on his knees counted as playing, it didn’t. He knew it didn’t.

But it had come out. The lie was out there.

*

Mike knew a guy who got the British music newspapers, the ones that always arrived a month late and cost way more than Rolling Stone or Creem. They pored over these, weaving their news into the conversational fabric passed as currency.

The news of the Who’s return to the U.S. was in the British mags, of course—but no specifics. And it wasn’t until a few days after the sale that Mike heard about the lines stretching from the box office in Daly City. This, too, became part of the fabric, how the queue had been a huge party, a real cool time. They’d missed it, heard about it, tried to own it through inflation. When he told his new friends—Mike’s friends—about the line, how they hadn’t heard, he tried to possess it by exaggerating. By making up details, turning what had probably been a few joints and a pizza into something like Woodstock. He hadn’t been—he was too little, it was too far—but he understood that the experience had grown since it happened, and would continue to, as long as the bands were popular. And they would be forever, thanks to Janis and Jimi, who had themselves been inflated.

None of it was a lie, exactly. But it was out there.

*

A knock on his door.

It was Mike—who else could it be?—but frantic. Excited.

How much money you got?

Huh? I don’t know. Why?

You know that guy Jesse talked about?

Scott heard the blood pounding in his temples. You mean the guy who waits out for tickets?

You know where this is going, right?

Are you serious?

He’s got two, and he said he’d hold them for me for an hour.

When is it again?

Friday.

Work.

But he hadn’t called in sick yet.

He would if he couldn’t find someone to cover his shift.

Scott disappeared into his room, returning with a tin can full of change. He dumped it out on the coffee table.

Help me count it out, he said. We have to get into that show.

*

The Cow Palace was part of the fabric—one of the places Bill Graham booked. Had it been him that put on the first Beatles show in the States, in the Cow Palace? Scott didn’t think so, but he wouldn’t’ve been surprised if it was—Bill Graham did everything.

Including hiring a ton of security guards.

They’d counted the money, bought the tickets, decided to go as early as possible so they could get right up front. He imagined trying to articulate the feeling of Daltrey’s mic whizzing overhead, how that air was somehow being shared by him and his favorite band. Trying to articulate the feeling of Townshend’s sweat hitting him, how he knew he should be grossed out but wouldn’t be.

How Moon’s drums were going to hit him right in the chest, over and over again.

Right in the heart.

And all this would turn out to be great, of course, and then some.

Instead, he tried to imagine some way to describe the utter boredom of waiting in line.

Scott felt stupid about the falsehoods he and Mike had woven about the ticket line, the one where Jesse’s sketchy friend had presumably waited to get tickets. About how he’d turned what he thought had been a few joints and a pizza into Woodstock.

He didn’t know if the guards were actual cops or not. He wasn’t sure it mattered. Bill Graham didn’t take any shit, not since (he’d heard) the thing happened with the MC5, when biker bouncers broke Graham’s nose. He’d heard the shows were strict, but he didn’t know he’d be, like, surveilled for thirteen hours.

Thirteen.

Hours.

This will all be worth it, Mike kept saying.

He wished he’d brought a deck of cards, or a book. The kid behind him had Vonnegut, a girl a little ways behind was reading Fear of Flying. Everyone was too scared to blaze up, too scared to crack flasks under the gaze of the positively terrifying security.

*

And then they were in, running.

(A few years later Scott got word of Cincinnati and thought it could have been any of us. It could have been me.)

Pretty much front and center, against the barricade.

The security between them and the stage weren’t the black-clad guards who’d been watching the line outside. They were just normal guys. A little older, maybe, but cool. They talked with Scott and Mike and everyone else up front during the wait.

Yeah, one said, Moon’s crazy.

You met him?

I met them all.

Whoa.

Like, he hasn’t stopped since he got here. I used to hear all the stories about him and thought they couldn’t be true because the dude would just be dead. But they’re true. I saw with my own two eyes.

I hope it’s not all new stuff, Mike said, after Skynyrd.

From behind, someone yelled holy shit, it’s them!

They all walked onstage and Scott couldn’t believe it, how close they were. How real they were, after so many years of British music magazines one month late and photos and stories passed like currency.

They ripped into “Can’t Explain” and Scott grabbed Mike’s shoulder and jumped up and down, up and down, singing along through “Summertime Blues” and “My Generation.”

It cannot get any better than this, he thought as Daltrey swung the mic and just as he’d hoped, the air, Daltrey’s mic air, pushed his hair back, the drums thumped heartbeat time against his chest. He thought that he’d never be able to explain it, no words.

He even lost himself in the new stuff. It would have been better if they hadn’t been playing along to a tape or whatever was happening, but still—the air, the thump, Entwistle holding it down, Townsend’s leaps. Thinking back, he was transfixed, utterly hypnotized.

It went so fast.

And then Mike broke the spell during “Won’t Get Fooled Again.”

Something’s wrong, he said, pointing to Moon.

Scott was glad for this. He thought he’d noticed, too. But come on. Keith Moon. Keith fucking Moon wouldn’t drop time and lose beats. He was too good.

Then he slumped against the kit.

The crowd cheered, unabated, lights still down. Maybe people in the back thought things were normal at first. But word must’ve spread, right? Like it always did.

The security guy up front shrugged. The amount he’s been drinking, not surprised. And people gave him gifts beforehand.

What kind of gifts?

The guard laughed. Fucked if I know. Probably some kind of fish paralyzer.

They all came back on, waving, and went into “Magic Bus.”

And again, he hit the kit.

Daltrey and Townsend and Entwistle played it off like it wasn’t a big deal, like food poisoning or something. But Scott thought about the bouncer, the gifts—who knows what Moon had taken. Were fish paralyzers even a thing?

After  a drumless “See Me, Feel Me,”  Graham got up there. Scott knew it was him from the magazines.

CAN ANYONE HERE PLAY DRUMS?

Mike elbowed him.

That’s you, man!

CAN ANYONE HERE PLAY DRUMS?

Scott thought oh, shit. I haven’t played for a year! More!

Townsend: Someone good!

Mike gestured to the guard. Hey, man! This guy! This guy right here! You know us! This guy can play! He can play!

The guard looked at Scott.

He thought of his hometown, the city.

The lie that started everything.

Trying to find words, failing.

The exaggerations.

If I don’t do this, he thought, what will I say?

What can I say?

He nodded. The whole thing was built on bluffs.

The guard extended a burly hand.

No way, Scott thought. This cannot be happening.

He grabbed the guard’s arm and hopped the barricade, Mike too. He was walked up the side stairs, lights rendering everything silhouette and haloes.

Everything except for Bill Graham, who stood between him and the stage.

What’s your name, kid?

Uh, Scott. Scott Halpin.

If you’re pulling my leg, I’m—

I’m not pulling your leg, Mr. Graham. I’m a drummer. They’re my favorite band. I know all the parts.

Silence.

I can do this.

All right, Graham said, leading him by the elbow onto the stage, the stage at the Who concert, his favorite band.

Leading him to Townsend.

Here’s your drummer.

Scott felt himself shaking like a leaf as Townsend stared into his eyes.

Want some brandy?

Scott nodded.

What’s your name?

Scott repeated his name.

All right, Scott. You’re going to be great. Right? I’m going to lead you. Watch me. I’ll cue you.

Someone produced the brandy, which he slugged. It helped a little.

He sat behind the kit and took Moon’s sticks, fully intending to his each drum a few times. He tried to imagine how much work it would be to set up so many toms before every show, break them all down. There were roadies for that, or course, guys paid specifically to perform such tasks. A regular guy like himself wouldn’t have room in his station wagon for so many toms, in bags or more likely hardshell road cases, but what did a station wagon matter to fucking Keith Moon? He didn’t care.

Yeah, he fully intended to try them all, but before he realized what was happening he started “Smokestack Lightning,” which he knew.

What he didn’t know, not until later, was that he didn’t have to exaggerate, didn’t even have to try and articulate what was happening, the wave after wave of noise he was creating behind Keith Moon’s kit, crashing against the back of the Cow Palace. There weren’t words for it, anyway, this chance to sit with his favorite band, the best in the world, behind that kit for three songs. There was no need to articulate what was instantly and irrevocably woven into the fabric.

—Michael T. Fournier

#268: Paul Simon, "Paul Simon" (1972)

In the summer of 1996 four of us pooled some money and bought a beat-up, hard-rode 1985 Dodge Prospector conversion van for $750 from the Mid-American Auto Auction in Louisville, Kentucky. The thing was amazing—it had wooden venetian blinds that mostly worked and one of those little ladders anchored to a rear door. That the van shook like it was entering the atmosphere when rolling faster than 44 mph meant nothing to us. We fixed it up, which really consisted of three things, in increasing order of importance: 1. Found a way to stash some weed behind the CB. 2. Replaced the missing rear captain’s chairs with some replacements we found at a junkyard. 3. Took a copy of Neil Young’s Zuma to a local mall and had the cover airbrushed onto a license plate that we proudly affixed to the front of the van. Thus was the van christened Zuma. As my father said, we were about to meander into parts of the country deeply unknown to us in a vehicle he wouldn’t trust to circle the block. But we set forth on our adventure. About 18,000 miles of driving over nine weeks, with most of our stops being the grand National Parks of the west, where we’d hike, backcountry camp, and try to stay awake following each ten-mile trek long enough to drink whiskey.

We had the things you’d expect. Sleeping bags and backpacks. There were a couple of acoustic guitars and a somewhat ingenious storage system created by lashing together milk crates with bungee cords. We wore out two copies of Rand McNally’s United States road atlas, an indispensable tool in those pre-GPS days, particularly for people hoping to avoid interstates and keep to William Least Heat-Moon’s blue highways. And we brought some road culture, of course: in addition to a journal I never cracked other than to note the locations of our daily campsites, I brought with me a copy of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. I’m also the one who placed the obligatory, totemic copy of On the Road in one of Zuma’s door pockets.

A Discman connected to the speakers through a tape adapter stayed on the console next to the beer cans and food crumbs. In between the two first seats were rows of CDs. Although we may have each had Discmans, music was a communal, though not necessarily equitable, affair during the trip. Three days in, one of the guys requested Dylan’s “Stuck Inside of Mobile,” and I think I managed to filibuster that selection for, quite literally, weeks. We were not the easiest folks to get along with.

Certain records served as the background to that trip, soundtracking midnight drives through the Tetons, or the marathon, single-shot drive we took from Arches in Utah to Glacier in Montana, or the 23 hours spent shuddering from Albuquerque to New Orleans, which is still the only time I’ve ever spent in Texas. The first Son Volt record. Bowie’s Hunky Dory. American Beauty. The first two (remarkable and criminally neglected) Dire Straits records. Any Neil Young, with extreme prejudice in favor of Tonight’s the Night, Zuma, and Comes a Time. These were all in heavy rotation.

We also listened to quite a lot of Paul Simon’s eponymous 1972 solo record. Like all music that ever means anything to you, to this day, insofar as I ever listen to that album, it has the ability to tractor me back to that time, those places, and those friendships which have frayed, been redeemed, or ended silently over the past 20 years.

Since finishing that last sentence, I’ve been staring at the screen. It’s been quite some time, and I’m surprised at what I’m about to attempt. When I first set out to write this piece—or rather when I accepted the assignment—I intended to spend some time exploring how Paul Simon fit into the, for lack of better concepts, teleology and history of American musical populism. The thing about the Zuma trip was supposed to be scaffolding to delete once I started talking about my ideas. But that’s proven impossible. Not because that task is objectively impossible, but because I can’t clear my mind of one of my fellow travelers and how every time I think of the Paul Simon record I think of him and what our friendship was and what it has become. But I also don’t quite know how to talk about that, either.

*

You know “Mother and Child Reunion.” If you’re taking the time to read this, you surely know that song. But do you know how the song got its title? According to a 1972 Rolling Stone interview, Simon was eating at a restaurant in New York City’s Chinatown. The menu included a dish featuring chicken and eggs called, of course, Mother and Child Reunion. According to that RS interview, Simon’s response was, "Oh, I love that title. I gotta use that one."

That’s about as sentimental as Paul Simon gets.

Simon’s a great songwriter—and songs like “Bridge Over Troubled Water” invested him with the aura of an emotionally raw troubadour. I’d argue that reputation was always-already incorrect, but in his first solo record he revealed himself as an emotionally distant poet of the everyday. Not that he only wrote about the banality of everyday life. More to the point, he wrote about even the most transformative moments—social protest in “Peace Like A River” or losing one’s virginity in “Duncan”—but delivered everything with a Vulcan’s detachment. It’s beautiful. It’s also cold.

For the record, I find this a startling observation. Paul Simon has long been a contender for honorable mention in any top-five list I’ve created while boozing away the night. And I’m a sloppy emoter. But when my impressions of that record were made, I think my ears were as novice as Simon’s heart was when he wrote those songs.

Simon was 30 years old and desperately trying to escape the long shadow of his co-fame with Art Garfunkel when he released this record, but it is a young man’s record. Paul Simon doesn’t reckon with its past. The record doesn’t indulge in nostalgia and is a bit frozen in the extremities. There may be heat in the heart but the way the record touches the world is with icy fingers that can’t quite feel what they’re grasping. It feels strange, in hindsight, that this album played such a role in that long-ago trip. It’s not a road record. It’s a roadside motel record.

In the ’72 interview, Simon goes on to discuss “Mother and Child Reunion” further. Critic, producer, and, in this instance, interviewer, Jon Landau says that he read a lot into that track’s title, to which Simon says:

“Well, that's alright. What you read in was damn accurate, because what happened was this: last summer we had a dog that was run over and killed, and we loved this dog. It was the first death I had ever experienced personally. Nobody in my family died that I felt that. But I felt this loss—one minute there, next minute gone, and then my first thought was, ‘Oh, man, what if that was [Simon’s wife] Peggy? What if somebody like that died? Death, what is it, I can't get it.’"

Paul Simon is less clumsily expository than this interview response, of course, but the album feels marbled by similar emotional near-connections. Feelings exist in the record’s atmosphere, if you will, but if we keep with that metaphor, they are exhaled as easily as they’re inhaled. They don’t seem too deeply enmeshed in the songs. Sometimes this is in the service of irony, as in “It’s carbon and monoxide / that ol’ Detroit perfume,” the first lines of “Papa Hobo,” a playful invocation of the Motor City’s realities—realities which lead the narrator to hit the road and leave town. Some of the songs don’t feel complete so much as suspended with narrators that are enchanted by getting through the day in a life that is both easy and rewarding. “Everything Put Together Falls Apart” is an unfinished idea. And “Run That Body Down” offers the record’s best example of its alluring, easy banality. The record play-acts at emotion.

*

This guy that I keep thinking about—let’s call him Neil—was one of my best friends. Starting early in high school we spent years together, inseparable, playing music, drinking Keystone Dry, doing other white dude things. And then life intervened. By life, at least in this instance, I mean desire. It’s a trope, of course, but at some point Neil started sleeping with a women who had recently dumped me, and when he did that, something broke, and drift started.

The rupture was abrupt.  Over years, we tried to heal. The break occurred before we bought the van and headed out west. That journey wasn’t an attempt to salvage the friendship. But it did cast the friendship’s frailty in an entirely different light. There were things we couldn’t or wouldn’t talk about. Music remained a safe common ground, where the biggest battles would be fought over which Bowie era was superior. We listened to Son Volt and Dire Straits. We keyed in to Paul Simon.

The ability to be romantic and adopt a philosophical posture toward the dissipation of our youth is a stupendously privileged thing in which to engage. We often—and here “we” means a lot of middle class, literary kids like me—ache in some stupid, forlorn, bad-poetry way, contriving a sense of sentimentality in the moment. This clouds reality, though. The knock-off Keatsian appreciation of the passing moment obscures what is passing. Time, life, sure, but in this context friendship. For years that’s how I approached my history with this dear old friend. The point became the poetic echo of a lost friendship. The loss of the friendship became the point of the friendship.

But why does Paul Simon connect so intimately with a two-decade-old experience? I think it’s because the record tends to shrug off its hollow emotional core with a similar kind of poetic shrug. Neil and I have been trying for several years to re-establish something. We’ve never been fully out of each other’s lives, but nothing has ever really felt natural. Maybe we’re coming close to that now. I don’t know. But what I do know, and what thinking about Paul Simon confirms for me, is that expression of an emotion is not the same as feeling that emotion. That even though we always know that the cherished things in our lives are passing away, what we should never honor is the process of loss over the things you lose.

—Michael Washburn

#269: The Jesus and Mary Chain, "Psychocandy" (1985)

“Pure? What does it mean?”

    - Sylvia Plath, “Fever 103°”

I’d love to be able to tell Sylvia Plath that I know what “pure” means. Pure is a sound. Pure is a place where noise becomes poetry. Pure is Psychocandy, a fusion of sex and despair and offerings-up. Psychocandy is bedroom music; starting with the Reid brothers brooding and dreaming in a too-small space in East Kilbride, Scotland, to me, over thirty years later, looking at a picture of my childhood bedroom in suburban Connecticut, circa 1982, and remembering that five or six years later, I started writing song lyrics on the wall, and ripping up the carpet, not caring that the house was a rental and that I had no permission to do those things. The exposed carpet tacks that bordered the floor-edge near the door were for other people to step on; I either invited you in, or you didn’t come in.

Step back and watch the sweet thing
Breaking everything she sees

    - The Jesus and Mary Chain, “Happy When it Rains”

I close my eyes for a minute while I’m listening to “Taste the Floor” and the feedback and noise carve out places in my body. This noise doesn’t mean to do me harm. I take it into me, like a tuning fork or a divining rod. I can hold on to it. It runs through me the way those first moments of “Everything in its Right Place” ran through me the first time I heard that in 2000: I was afraid, because a noise knew what lived in my head. How did it know? How does a sound so devastating know, now, what an almost-43-year-old holds in her head (She’s singing to herself / as she’s singing in herself)? Noise and pain sing in me, and the music guesses this. It doesn’t tell me I should have worked through this by now. Instead it tells me don’t turn off.

And I watch, And I watch, And I watch

    - The Jesus and Mary Chain, “In a Hole”

I want to tell you that in 1985, when Psychocandy dropped, I was the cool kid, playing it incessantly, alternating between it and New Order’s Low Life, which also came out that year. I could tell you that, but I’d be lying to you. I was eleven years old in 1985, by most accounts weird, and by my own, desperate. I looked the part, dressing in the approved uniforms of affluent pre-teen 80s suburbia, but I was tall for my age, with puberty encroaching. I slouched. I turned my shoulders in, hoping no one would notice my body. It was all right to show enthusiasm, but not too much, for books or art, and I was too enthusiastic. I danced to Madonna in the living room of that rented house, and I said I wanted to be a writer. It was the only thing I knew from a small lifetime of watching: the arbitrary cruelties of school, the way my mother almost succumbed to a near-lethal episode of depression. The way words moved on a page, and held people like me long after the authors had gone. I watched and I watched and I watched.

Paula Mejia, in her 33 1/3 volume on Psychocandy, writes that it’s “an album that viscerally clangs with the sound of struggle and outcasts making sense of their bitterness, using music as survival and, ultimately, a form of escape” (24). Would I have known what to do with Psychocandy’s poetry-noise if someone had handed it to me in 1985? Probably not. I knew about escape; I made up other worlds in my bedroom all the time. I borrowed other people’s pop fantasies, not understanding that I needed one of my own. If you had asked me about bitterness, I probably could have owned up to unhappiness, but bitter has an edge on it. It would take a few more years, and hours of bedroom listening, before bitterness seeped in.

Listening to the album now, I bite down on the noise. It’s that solid. It tastes like copper; heavy, with the sharpness of blood. It’s singing like myself, a poem of feedback. Hold on to the knife in the socket, it says. Hold on to the purest burn.

—Sarah Nichols

#270: The Rolling Stones, "Some Girls" (1978)

Several years ago, HBO released a documentary about the Rolling Stones that I watched more than once. During that time of my life, I was stuck halfway between heartbreak and new love, and there was this part of me that wanted to fall in love with a non-presence, with something that could not hurt me. The documentary was a bunch of primary-source clips spliced together—no voiceover, just footage of the Stones at their concerts, in their dressing room, in news stories from the time. It felt a little like watching someone else’s home videos. It made me feel nostalgic for a time I had not come even close to experiencing.

This was a welcome reprieve from my everyday nostalgia and regret, that powerlessness you feel when a thing you tried like hell to keep going ends anyway—that space where it still seems like that ending could possibly be the worst thing, when you are still struggling and cannot yet see the steps you’ve taken toward something you cannot even comprehend at the time: a life without that struggle.

I guess I felt a ghost echo of that life when I watched the documentary, picking up on a possibility I wasn’t even aware of. Or maybe I just found it a more comforting kind of longing. At any rate, I wanted to write about it. I started listening to the Rolling Stones a lot, and Some Girls was the album I ended up listening to most.

Here is what I remember: putting on the album and pulling out the typewriter I liked to write on back then. I picked Some Girls because I had an idea about listening to the album as its own thing—that an album would have a kind of cohesion, be a made thing, in the way that a greatest hits album wouldn’t be. I picked that particular album somewhat at random, mostly because it had “Beast of Burden” on it, which is my favorite of all their songs (I’ve never shared this without people reacting with surprise—I guess that song isn’t usually a favorite, and I never really know what to say to that except: Oh, well, it’s mine).

I was listening to the music in an attempt to channel their spirit, or to work through what appealed to me about their spirit, or to tap into the recklessness and nostalgia I felt, the longing I felt for some other past layered on top of the longing I had for my own past layered on top of the thrill of having kissed a quiet and unassuming-seeming man and being so unexpectedly, completely upended. I wanted to care about it and I wanted not to care about it—which is how the Stones seem, to me. They have feelings, but they also have bravado, they have energy that comes from more than just those feelings, energy that is all their own.

Of course, this wasn’t the first time I’d ever listened to the Rolling Stones. In my first year of college, they played a concert in the stadium across the street from my dorm, and I bought their greatest hits compilation (a multiple-CD set) in preparation for tagging along with my parents and aunts and uncles to the show. I knew many of the songs already, but in a peripheral way—I had heard them I guess, but I don’t know that I’d ever made a point of listening. Leaving home was both tough and easy; I missed my parents and my old home but I also didn’t. I wanted to adjust, to feel settled where I was, more than I wanted to return home, but I was in flux regardless. I wanted to like something my parents liked, a safely-delayed sort of connection.

They smuggled airplane bottles of booze into the stadium and I felt inducted into some illicit club of adulthood, even though there was no way any of that liquor was going to make it into my soda. Halfway through the show, someone called in a bomb threat and the Stones left the stage while officials investigated. My uncle got pretty upset while waiting, wondering why they weren’t evacuating us, afraid the whole place was going to go up in flames. He and his wife went back to their hotel while the rest of us waited it out, and the Stones eventually got back onstage to play some more songs, and so he missed the end of the show.

It’s funny, because I hadn’t thought of this in ages, and now, in remembering, I wonder if they’d shared a joint on the walk over to the stadium, something that would enhance paranoia—what’s interesting to me about this idea isn’t the possibility of the thing itself, but the fact that such a thought would have been completely alien to me when I was eighteen. The airplane bottles were the limit of my imagination, the biggest rule I could picture them breaking. It makes me want to reach through time and pet my hair, oh you sweet, naïve, serious thing.

It was a lot of excitement, that evening, but the biggest excitement was seeing Mick Jagger onstage. We did not have good seats; he was a small figure in the distance. He was an old and wrinkly man. But he moved purposefully and easily, with an energy that astounded me. Mick Jagger was 43 years older than me, old enough to be my grandfather, and it seemed impossible to me at the time but there I was, thinking it: he was unmistakably and undeniably hot. I’m struggling as I write this to come up with a way to describe it that doesn’t sound laughable, and it occurs to me that I don’t have to describe it, not really: you know Mick Jagger. You’ve seen his energy. It’s part of why he’s famous. But the strength of that energy, how apparent it was even when he was inches high on a stage so far away, how it traversed an age difference of nearly a half-century, that surprised me. But I guess that’s part of what sexiness is.

Years later, in the face of meeting a new man I was excited about, I wanted to understand that swagger, to disassemble it into all its parts (impossible, but that’s what I wanted to know)—maybe more to understand this man I met, who was one person when he talked to you and another person entirely when he kissed you, than to understand it inherently on its own or somehow embody it myself (for a woman it’s different anyway, more passive, such a pretty pretty girl). So I watched a documentary over and over, I listened to the songs, I tried not to be too sad about what had passed or too scared about what was to come. I had met a lovely, lovely man, something promising—but it would take us years to figure out how to engage with that something in a productive way. I didn’t know it, but the giant unknown thing was just tumult giving way to more tumult. Oddly, I’m nostalgic for it now.

—Katelyn Kiley

#271: The Beach Boys, "The Beach Boys Today!" (1965)

Sam and I were camp friends, which meant that from the ages of six to fourteen we spent a month of every summer together at Camp du Nord in northern Minnesota, swimming, horseback riding, going on nature hikes, singing around the campfire, and every other camp activity you can name. She was from Oxnard, California, though the way she talked about it, you’d have thought she lived in Hollywood itself; I was a farm kid from Wisconsin. She taught me how to French braid my hair, how to craft friendship bracelets, how to do the Macarena. I taught her how to pee outside, how to identify poison ivy, how to whistle using a blade of grass. Looking back, I can no longer remember if we really were such stereotypes of our upbringings, or if it was just camp that turned everyone into a caricature of themselves.

I can state with confidence now that camp was a different world, that we each reinvented ourselves for four weeks every summer. I embraced my outdoorsy, tomboy side, in part because my doing so made Sam declare that she was going to help me “be a girl,” like that was the end goal for all girls, everywhere. I can laugh at that now, but as a child, all I wanted was to be a girl. A normal girl, who didn’t show up in overalls on her first day of sixth grade at the new middle school, who had a curling iron to form her bangs into perfect poofs above her forehead, who had dresses hanging in her closet that she could slip into and no one would mention how odd it was that she wasn’t in jeans.

Sam and I didn’t talk during the rest of the year. We exchanged a handful of letters—postcards, mostly, mine always with cows or the cheese castle in Kenosha or the state capitol building, hers of the Hollywood sign, the ocean, the Los Angeles skyline. “Can’t wait to see you this summer,” we’d write, and we meant it.

Our last year at camp was the summer we were 14. We’d be in high school in the fall, and if we returned to camp, it would be as junior counselors. I think both of us knew that we wouldn’t be coming back, but neither of us had said it. The last few summers had been more strained than in the past. It took us a couple days to slip back into our friendship, and we each had more references to events from our regular lives. I had brought my school yearbook for the first time and spent much of the first day showing her pictures of all my friends, most of whom were mere acquaintances, if that. But we were still close, still inseparable, and if you had asked me, I’d have said that we’d remain that way for the rest of our lives, with or without camp. I’d have known that it wasn’t true, but still, I wanted to believe it.

At the end of each camp session, there was a dance for the older campers, those entering middle school and above. The girls wore dresses that they’d kept in their lockers in their cabin the entire session, and the boys wore slacks and button-down shirts. Some of them gelled their hair into spikes, a practice that for the most part fell by the wayside during normal camp life. Sam, like many of the other girls, had a camp boyfriend from the time of our first dance. His name was also, coincidentally, Sam, and when I’d asked her if that wasn’t confusing, she’d laughed and said she liked it.

Sam and I had looked forward to the camp dance all month. Sam had brought makeup, and she helped me get ready. She said that her Sam had a friend who liked me, who had told her Sam that he wanted to kiss me. I had never been kissed before, though I’d told Sam that I had. I was nervous and excited.

We took over an hour to get ready. It was the age of glitter, and we applied glitter eyeshadow, glitter stars next to our eyelids, glitter lip gloss. Sam had a tub of silver glitter dust that we threw in the air and spun under as it fell, so we sparkled and shone with each movement. When I look back at photos from that night, I can see how obvious our efforts were: the eyeshadow weighing down our lids, the mascara clumpy on our lashes, our lips sticky with lip gloss that came off in thick strands against the plastic cups we drank from. We were beautiful.

The music at these dances was always terrible. The camp director would play entire albums at a time, sometimes multiple times in a row. They were never the pop and R&B artists that we listened to in our own time, but rather music from the sixties and seventies, the sort of music he’d cut his teeth on at his own middle school dances. The dance was held in the mess hall, cleared of its tables, with a disco ball suspended from the ceiling and crepe paper along the walls. Cameras flashed in the semi-dark, capturing campers gyrating against one another as counselors attempted to break them up and ensure six inches remained between their bodies.

“There’s Sam and Tyler,” Sam said when we entered. Tyler was the boy who liked me. I blushed as they approached, but knew they couldn’t tell in the dim light. Sam kissed her Sam, their lips smashed against one another for an interminably long second while Tyler and I scuffed our feet against the floor that still bore signs of its everyday use in the form of food stains that would never come out.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi,” I said.

The Beach Boys were playing, and Sam—my Sam—said, “Should we dance?” even though none of us knew how to dance to these songs. We hadn’t yet gained the control of our bodies needed to pick out a beat on our own, hadn’t yet gained the confidence to make fools of ourselves.

“Okay,” I said. I had never danced with a boy before, but I mimicked Sam’s stance, her cocked hip, her head toss, her smile like it was nothing. “Do you want to?” I asked Tyler.

“Sure,” he said, and we followed the Sams onto the dance floor. They were instantly pressed against each other, hip to hip, cheek to cheek, his arms wrapped around her back, her hands straying down to his butt. Tyler and I maintained the requisite six inches between us, our feet shuffling against the floor, our toes kicking each other. His hands were on my shoulders, covering the spaghetti straps of my dress. His palms were clammy with sweat.

“Sorry,” I said as our feet bumped.

“Sorry,” he said.

I knew, without being told, that when the song ended, he would kiss me. That was how it worked at camp dances. Songs ended. Dancers kissed. Sometimes it was just a peck on the cheek, other times a full-blown make out session with tongues, but regardless, if you danced with someone, you kissed them.

The song ended. Tyler dropped his hands. He took a step back. “Well. Thanks,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. I leaned forward. I didn’t purse my lips, but when I replay the scene in my mind, I do, and the image makes me cringe.

“Well. I guess I’ll see ya,” he said. He backed away from me and then walked quickly toward the snack table.

I remained on the dance floor as the next song started, another one by the Beach Boys. I could feel the tears filling my eyes, but I didn’t move. If I moved, I would start crying. If I moved, everyone would see me.

The Sams swayed together in front of me. There weren’t six inches between their bodies. There wasn’t even an inch. One of the counselors came up to them and said something, held her hands up to demonstrate the distance. My Sam laughed and they scooted apart, but as soon as the counselor left, they pressed their bodies together again. My Sam laid her head on her Sam’s shoulder so she was looking at me. She smiled, but I could tell she didn’t really see me. If she’d seen me, she’d have left her Sam, come to my side, taken my hand, and walked me off the dance floor. If she’d seen me, she’d have let me cry and known that it wasn’t just about the kiss or the rejection, even though I didn’t know that myself.

But she kept dancing with her Sam and I stood by myself as campers swayed around me and the Beach Boys asked did I want to dance and I answered silently, yes. Yes.

—Emma Riehle Bohmann

#272: Sleater-Kinney, "Dig Me Out" (1997)

I first saw Sleater-Kinney on the Dig Me Out tour. I was 15 in 1997, so my friend Marie drove us from Greensboro to Chapel Hill on a school night, blasting the album the whole way. Inside the Cat’s Cradle we connected with some girls Marie knew from online riot grrl message boards—girls who’d driven from as far off as Georgia or Florida just to hear Corin Tucker’s live vibrato or see Carrie Brownstein smile. Girls who radiated with the palpable belief that their lives would be forever altered by one concert.

If we’re being honest, I was meh about it all. Sleater-Kinney was a little too cerebral and polished for my taste; I preferred the sloppy, confrontational thrash of Bikini Kill. But that year I’d made it my mission to own everything in the Kill Rock Stars catalog and after weeks of waiting, Dig Me Out had finally arrived by mail. I’d ripped open the package and raced upstairs to my bedroom, where I queued the album on my stereo.

The truth was that I didn’t love it then and I still don’t love it now—but seeing Sleater-Kinney live was different.

For one, I hadn’t yet attended a lot of shows, so there was an inherent electricity in standing inside a smoke-filled club on a Wednesday. The other girls and I had made a play to be right there, up front, and we’d squeezed ourselves through the crowd to press ourselves against the stage under the glaring lights. The rest of the audience buzzed behind me.

Looking around, I realized I was in a crowd of almost entirely women, and that I felt safe. Dancing often made me feel self-conscious or uncomfortable, but maybe everyone felt safe that night because once Sleater-Kinney took the stage we collectively surrendered our bodies to dance like our lives depended on it.

And some audience members’ lives probably did depend on it, a fact I was keenly aware of even then. Sleater-Kinney maintains a large queer following, and North Carolina was and remains notoriously LBGTQ-unfriendly. Still, that night we danced and screamed and when Marie’s online friends made a sudden play to rush the stage, we followed.

Propelled by adrenaline, we hoisted ourselves up. Now, I was an unruly teenager who’d suffered the parental—and sometimes legal—consequences of my impulsivities and immediately feared being dragged off stage like some hysterical groupie in a Bon Jovi video. Thankfully, that never happened. We were safe.

And we’d sparked a chain reaction. Girls and more girls hiked the stage, too, all of us dancing and screaming and shaking and going crazy alongside Corin and Carrie and drummer Janet Weiss. It was our Ed Sullivan Beatles moment, only the moment was about us—straight or gay, female or genderqueer. It was about being comfortable. It was about art. And it was about community.

These pure moments of surprise and joy happen less and less as you get older, but that night remains a touchstone, one of my earliest moments of feeling empowered, validated. Nearly 20 years since that Sleater-Kinney concert, the word empowerment can seem both twee and artificial, more a corporate mechanism than anything as spontaneous as dancing on stage or as grassroots as the riot grrl movement. When deodorant commercials tell women that their product is empowering, the meaning of the word is muddled, its agency sapped. Today, empowerment is so entangled with a beauty and fashion industry hellbent on undermining a woman’s power for corporate profit.

It should go without saying, but the world isn’t safe. I would learn that again and again as I grew up. When I wasn’t getting promoted or receiving the same opportunities as my male colleagues or when a man on the subway put his hand between my legs, I could never forget it. The lesson again reverberated through my body after learning that Hillary Rodham Clinton had won the popular vote, but not the presidency.

The world wants its women pretty and cowering. The world wants its women focused on deodorant-sanctioned empowerment rather than the attainment of actual power. Seeing Sleater-Kinney was so revelatory, in part, because Corin’s voice wasn’t “angelic.” Carrie and Janet’s rhythms weren’t “smooth.” Here was a group of people who defied convention, who refuted the factory farm of glossy and neutered anthems, and for a 15-year-old girl in North Carolina, I didn’t need to be the band’s biggest fan to recognize the value and courage in that.

It’s easy to feel cynical, especially right now. But we’ve got to keep fighting in whatever capacity we can. We’ve got to keep making art and music. We’ve got to climb the stage. We’ve still got to dance.

—Sarah Sweeney

#273: Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, "Going to a Go-Go" (1965)

    for Ben

Last night I was listening to Going to a Go-Go with my friend Ben, who has a story about a Canadian soldier who was lying in state, a soldier named Smokey. In this story, Ben's friend works as a tour guide in Canada's Parliament building, and in the course of giving this standard tour the friend informs the tourists, or rather misinforms them, that the Smokey-in-state is none other than Smokey Robinson. This is not my story, so I can't really be more specific than that, and in telling it in this way I've ruined the punchline, which would have been the point in the first place if I was going to construct this analogy between a pop album primarily focused on heartbreak and yet which—like so many great pop albums—takes it as an occasion for sounding a little sunny. And anyway, the story is Ben's and not mine. Can I write about a pop album using someone else's anecdote?

I want to be clear that this is a formal and compositional problem more than an ethical one. Or, if it's ethical, then unfortunately I intend to be callous about it. I don't think that rarefying personal experience is the best window into thinking about all the complexities of our relationships to objects. In this sense we relate to objects pretty much the same way we relate to pop music: what is "personal" about it is ultimately something fairly un-individual and generic; it's built into the songs themselves. For example, I was going to write about the guitar in "My Girl Has Gone," a delicately strummed introduction that soon vanishes beneath the exuberance of the orchestration that accompanies the song's ironic hook about heartbreak. But when I looked up the album on Wikipedia—is it OK to admit I did this? how does this differ from using Ben's story about someone else's story as a springboard for this piece?—some anonymous editor had already praised Marv Tarplin's "startling guitar riffs."

And yet—this is a misreading. The word in the Wikipedia is "starting" and not "startling." Either way it's fairly inadmissible, for, as we all know, citing Wikipedia is unacceptable in essays. Is this the kind of essay in which citing Wikipedia is unacceptable? Am I "citing" it in the uncitable, unacceptable way? All these questions I've accumulated since the beginning of this piece are questions about textuality, that variegated constellation of representational strategies we deploy (sometimes without even thinking about it) constantly to organize our perceptions of the world. Textuality is the "l" I added into the word "starting" on Wikipedia: it's the small mediation that gives the lie to the "immediacy" of whatever we experience as immediate, the minimal distance between us and the sheer empirical data that constitute "existence" that we sometimes notice and which sometimes startles us because it feels almost like a mistake that we realize: "there wasn't an 'l' in the word after all, it was just 'starting'" or "this story is Ben's story about someone else's story: can I tell it?"

It's no accident that this roundabout writing about pop music has landed on the theme of textuality. Most writing about pop music is writing about textuality. It's hard to argue otherwise: the sorts of tonal asymmetries that I mentioned above—upbeat songs about downbeat themes—are almost instantly recognizable, to the point where when I write them down it feels like I'm telling you something you already knew. Part of the reason I'm having so much trouble writing about Smokey Robinson is that you've heard Smokey Robinson before: either the artist himself, or the music for which "Smokey Robinson" is the name for a complex set of devices, an arsenal of techniques to achieve specific sonic effects. So what do I have that is not a value-superlative, to tell you about this album that you probably know, whether you know you know it or not?

Nothing, except maybe this anecdote about a dead Canadian soldier, and it's not even my story, it's Ben's story—or, it's Ben's friend's story he's kindly shared with me. So I have my friendship with Ben, the textuality of this friendship. But how can a friendship commend to you an album, let alone give an account of it? Fond as I am of giving accounts of things, I'm trying something else out. Let me close with my own anecdote:

Last night Ben and I listened to Going to a Go-Go all the way through together. Most of the way through the album we sat quietly and listened to a kind of music we both knew well already and were already fond of. Call it "Motown," call it "Smokey Robinson," it doesn't matter. The point is it was very familiar, though no less pleasurable for the feeling of immediate recognition, of non-strangeness. Then came the album's last song, "A Fork in the Road," which begins with Robinson and the Miracles blithely harmonizing on the word "beware" over a delicate, mid-tempo arrangement of strings and xylophone. The song's title derives from the lyric, "although I may be just a stranger / lovers, let me warn you: there's a danger / of a fork in love's road." And as Robinson sang this over the same almost dreamy instrumentation Ben looked at me and said "this is nice; the whole album is nice, but this ends really nicely." I agreed, which I guess you knew already, because if I hadn't I wouldn't have written it into this piece, used it as a mediation of how I think pop music is a strange cipher for textuality, whose lessons I feel like I need constantly to remind myself of so that I can do things like write. But let us not forget the other text sitting alongside Ben's text, the text of Robinson's lyric, the danger of a fork in love's road. Is this not also start(l)ing to hear or to think about, pop music as the reminder that everything has the capacity to appear to be the same as everything else, but that doesn't mean that the fork in the road goes away? In fact it maybe intensifies that fork. And that was when Ben said, "let me tell you about Smokey Robinson [NB: who is not dead] lying in state." And that was when the album ended.

—David W. Pritchard

#274: Labelle, "Nightbirds" (1974)

     Are you lonely
     are you lonely
     living in a city without a heart?

A lot of Labelle's Nightbirds as I understand it is disco music, and I’m a stranger to that. I don't get on the dance floor—that floor is lava unless I’m five drinks in. Last time I indulged was at a white-tent wedding in Vermont, with a set of brightly-colored, loose LED balloons being lifted, punted, and swatted above the dance floor.

Of course I'm lonely, I think. If this city had a heart, I’d hear it pumping by now. I’d stop downloading all these smartphone apps. I’d stop swiping through Tinder, Bumble, OkCupid, take my dancing shoes and go home.

I had guinea pigs as pets when I was a kid. They're extremely social creatures. Apparently, it's illegal in Switzerland to possess only one of them. When one of yours dies, rental services can provide your surviving pet a friend to hold them over. It seems on point.

Here’s what I found. Loneliness calcifies. Sure, it starts out aching, like a muscle you’ve torn, warm and sensitive to the touch. Time, however, camouflages it. Loneliness, extended from a state into a practice, is a farmer tan that gets evened out, or an errant plank of wood you stomp down until it’s flush with the floor.

This is typically the part where one of my friends saves the afternoon by telling you to calm down. You’re hanging around too many married people with kids. You just need to get laid. Maybe they’re right.

* * *
====

Earlier this year I got to a point where I felt ready to get back into the dating scene I’d mostly abandoned for years. For me, that meant online dating. I refurnished my OkCupid profile, downloaded 4 or 5 other apps. Excessive? Maybe. But for all the work I put into my profiles, 90% of this game is profile pics. I’m not ‘80s Rob Lowe. I’m Toby Ziegler from that scene in The West Wing where he says to Josh Lyman, “How you do get women? Smart and funny, right?”

So it made sense for me to diversify. I sent dozens of messages out. I tried smart and funny and sometimes it worked, other times it fizzled. Still, the swiping mechanic of these apps is simple, comfortable, and fun. Soon you start singling people out for pettier and pettier reasons. For instance, one otherwise lovely girl uses the phrase “Partner in Crime.” Nope. Another one watches NCIS and doesn’t mention Game of Thrones. Next. You don’t feel bad. She’ll never know.

Eventually I hit a match on a girl with a cute picture of her wearing a long-sleeve tee with “STAR WARS” written on it. This is on Bumble, an app where after you match, the woman must make the first move to initiate the conversation within twenty-four hours, or it fades forever. She doesn't initiate, but it turns out we have a mutual friend—the wife of my coworker and friend, Josh. I ask him about her. “Oh, yeah,” he says, “that’s my wife’s boss at the animal shelter.” Josh helps me make a meet-up happen. He says she's excited, but nervous.

I get invited to his wife’s birthday dinner the next week. First I drive down and spend an hour at their house while everyone gets ready. Josh and his wife, Jessie, have three children. The oldest daughter is six years old, smart and talkative. The boy, a two-year-old, sees me standing next to his similarly bearded father and exclaims, “Two daddies!” I introduce myself, trying to correct the error. I pull out my smartphone and play Pokemon Go with them. The wide map and endless cast of characters don’t seem to paralyze them. They just want to hear Pikachu go PIKA! on my phone.

At the restaurant, my match shows up and is incredibly quiet. First I think it's shyness, and I try to engage her in common interests—Star Wars, pets. She won't look me in the eye. When I step away for a moment, she tells someone at the table that I'm cute, and word gets back to me. On my return, I mention Harry Potter, and how I just figured out my patronus was an otter or something on the Pottermore website. Nothing.

Come on girl, I think, everyone loves a patronus.

This dynamic lasts until the end. On the way home Josh, Jessie, and I do an autopsy. Maybe she's just cold like that. Maybe she didn't like that I mentioned an allergy to cats. I'm incensed, as that seems unfair, but I remember that Josh's cat made me sneeze uncontrollably before I left his house.

Pika, as it turns out, is Japanese for the sound a spark makes. There was none.

* * *
====

It’s Tuesday, November 8th, 2016. I’ve taken the week off work to write and visit old friends who still live in the area after I’ve moved away. Once I take the exit heading into D.C., the Labelle track “Somebody Somewhere” begins on my car stereo. The song seems an appropriate anthem for the empowered men and women I know who are ready to see Hillary Clinton take the best house in town. It helps that the guy she’s running against would see the White House as a step down from his other holdings. From this hopeful song:

     Somebody somewhere has all the answers to the questions in our minds
     somebody somewhere has grown impatient with your reasons and your crimes
     and no more lies shall be told, no more lies shall be sold

First, however, I have to wait for my hosts to get off work, and write awhile at a restaurant called The Coupe on 11th Street in Northwest. On the street corner sits a stand for copies of the Washington Hispanic, the candidates' faces on the cover, with the headline “El futuro en tus manos” (The Future in your Hands).

     Somebody somewhere has all the answers to the questions in our minds
     somebody somewhere has grown impatient with your reasons and your crimes
     and no more lies shall be told, no more lies shall be sold

Much like dating, this song seems unfamiliar and awkward to me until, despite yourself, you’re caught up in it.

* * *
====

It’s a strange, offhand kind of cruelty we deal to one another in these apps. We put out what amounts to a baseball card’s worth of information. Almost instantly, we choose to keep someone in our deck or discard them forever. We answer batteries of questions about our preferences, sexual proclivities, even trivia:

Which is bigger, the sun or the earth?
In the phrase, “wherefore art thou Romeo,” what does “wherefore” mean?
In a certain light, wouldn’t nuclear war be exciting?

What do people want from this? Labelle sings in the energetic “What Can I Do For You?”

     People want true things, or nothing at all
     People want sincerity and nothing more

Take that as you will. I got to D.C. a few days after a second date with someone I’d met on OkCupid. Well, first date. The first time we met was in a Barnes & Noble for tea, and you could argue that's just a standard catfish/creeper check. This particular night was Halloween. A Roman centurion served us our food and a unicorn stood over the grill. I liked her—smart, pretty, committed to a nursing career and watched Parks & Rec—but she presumably didn't feel the same. Dinner ended early, she won the check dance, and was noncommittal about meeting up again. I texted her a few days later. Her schedule was bluntly full. I wondered if I'd have handled it the same way.

It's hard to be honest. Sometimes it's even harder to listen.

* * *
====

Polls start to close, and I get to the house rented by the newlywed couple from Vermont—the last time I danced to anything. As we watch CNN, the tension rises against odds that tamped it down earlier in the day. We're all anxious, but sure enough that this is a party.

     Who holds the key
     who will it be
     you or me

The mood is, on balance, hopeful. We've seen the likelihood for Hillary Clinton’s win drift down over the last few weeks from around 90% down to about 67%. It’s not ironclad, but it’s enough for us to feel secure in concocting a drinking game on our whiteboard. Selections include:

A state's called Blue – Drink. Yell, “Nasty!”
A state's called Red – Drink. Shout, “Wrong!”
Your home state goes Trump – chug a Yuengling.
CNN promotes a new toy (touchscreen, holograms, mystic seer) – Drink.  
CNN fucks up while using their toy - Drink.
The House flips  – Drink until you pass out.

But you were probably watching with me that night. You know how this ends.

* * *
====

Some of us call it a night early, disgusted. Others stay up until five a.m., waiting for all the networks to call it and the speech we thought would never come. Some of us cry, others comfort each other. Someone else punches a wall. One friend calls her Canadian parents warning them to expect her back home. Many condemn a deeply racist, sexist country. We feel alone.

     Somebody somewhere must lead us onward to the truth in our hearts
     somebody somewhere will hear our cries for freedom if we never, never stop

I want to change my answer on OkCupid—maybe a nuclear war would be exciting, in a certain light.

I can't stop thinking of how confident we were—how blithely we made wagers, the game we made of it. I think of my uncles—white, working class men in middle America, whom I was furious with for voting for the winner—and their Facebook posts. We had failed to connect with these voters and failed to respond to something that festered this year—a sense of being left behind that, despite its attendant horrors, was still real. We'd swiped left too quickly, dismissed too smugly, and paid the price.

I spend some days in DC watching protests, hitting old haunts like my alma mater and the Red Derby, a favorite local dive. Wednesday afternoon, I go to the local taqueria solo, tipping unreasonably and abnormally well.

* * *
====

One blessing of this kind of loss—you get to know yourself again. The songs that put you on the streets start ringing in your head. The people you knew would be out there with you all start to coalesce, to re-form.

     Nothing good comes easy
     nothing makes it fast
     no one ever made love
     overnight to last

You are no longer pretending to be something you're not. There is no time left to pretend.

If this is going to work, I have to know myself and be willing to know others. I have my profile ready, but here's a preamble that's too much for OkCupid:

I am a public servant, a poet and a friend. I believe chorizo tacos are the perfect food. I believe dogs are truly loyal to us while most cats merely tolerate us. I believe the darkness around us is deep, but that a kelson of creation is love, and that will keep our ship afloat. I have three computers with three keyboards and they all kill fascists. Courage is no longer optional.

This may not be a game I'll win. No, it's not really a game at all. But I'm still in it.

I got me. What can I do for you?

—Benjamin Walker

#275: Eminem, "The Slim Shady LP" (1999)

I bought my own engagement ring in college. I got it at the hippie mall, downtown, at the classy junk shop, Chi-Chi’s, the one that sold wooden African earrings and tiny plastic timers set to go off the day George Bush would finally be out of office.

I did it because things had changed. The night before, he’d tucked my hair behind my ear, the same old trick, but this time, he kept talking.

    You knew the commitment, he said.
    I thought you could get out of it, I sobbed.
    I don’t want to get out of it.
    I’m going to be a terrible war widow.
    It’s ok, he tucked. I’ll only be a B+ corpse.

Now, today, we’re on the phone. We are always on the phone. My job and my friends, my shampoo and my shoelaces, my half-decafs and my houseplants, they are only real when recreated. Reality is in the connection between his ear and mine. As soon as I hang up, items that are actually tangible become less so.

This cottony mist feeling comes with a noise. When you talk to someone who is standing on the other side of the world, you hear a faint buzzing on the line. Sometimes I wonder where it got picked up. What part of space it comes from. Is the sound some kind of large reverberation from those marbled, looming planets? Or just the dry static in between stars.

I like to paint my nails while we talk. I change the colors every day and go through so much acetate that the tips of my fingers grow weak and thin. I have to double-bag my trash because the chemical eats holes in the plastic. I have begun to use nail strengthener to prevent fractures. This too, I remove and replace. 

   What’s going on? I say, as music begins to blast through the phone.
    Insurgents.
    Ha ha, I say. Ha ha, my heart says. Haha. Haha. Haha.
    Chris and Taylor are got back from the weight room.
    Tell me they’re not playing Eminem.
    I’m eating M&Ms.
    Slim Shady? Really? That album is ancient.
    We prefer the term “pre-war.”
    Remember how often we listened to that freshman year?
    Too much.

I don’t ask if he means that we listened to it too much or that he remembers it too much. Early on, I asked those things. Now I stroke my peeling nailbeds and try to forge emotional connections with my furniture so that neither party becomes a ghost.

We are silent. I want to hear him breathing, but I can’t. I want to hear him focus, but I don’t. What I want is to hear him want to come home. Instead I get Eminem’s world—his innocence, his tenderness, his angry white trash.

    These are the results of a thousand electric volts, he raps softly.
   A neck with bolts.
    Nurse we’re losing him, check the pulse!

Nausea rolls in my stomach like a gentle, private earthquake. The strain of maintaining his safety with my mind is exhausting. I have been keeping him alive with my thoughts, just as you can keep an airplane aloft by willing it not to crash. I quickly erase the phrase “we’re losing him, check the pulse” from the universe’s memory.

   Are you opening something? I ask.
    Easy Mac.
    You really are in throwback mode today.
    I’m tempted to make you feel bad and say something like, “I’m here fighting in this terrible war and have nothing else to make me happy.”
    Don’t burn yourself on the hot water, baby.

I hum with Eminem and start my second coat. I’m remembering us in his dorm room at 6 a.m. He is going to ROTC rehearsal. I can never come up with the actual word for it. Training. Practice. Drills. Something.

We’d gone to a foam party the night before. He talked to his friends while I rearranged the magnetic words on the fridge. Head full of mountains / go under for the best tomorrow / suck my dictionary, you.

He walked into the kitchen and lifted me on the counter, rattling dirty dishes in the sink. I remember feeling how solid he was, how muscled his arms. So strong, so down, so rooted. Next to us, food continued congealing.

At 6, he didn’t want to go to ROTC rehearsal. He used me as a blanket. I felt very patriotic when I cast myself off.

   You have to eat something.
    I’m gonna puke it up.
    Y’all are so tough.
    Fine. Are we out of bananas?
    You say “out of” like your dorm is a grocery store. There’s only ever been Easy Mac and beer.

I made it—two packs of mix to one pack of noodles, just how he liked, and I was proud to know this tiny, intimate fact about another person. He dressed. He ate. I gave a fake salute and watched him watch my breasts jiggle when I threw my arm forward. As I stood in the doorway and he jogged down the hall, I noticed a line on the back of his neck, grime leftover from the foam party the night before.

    Wait, I said, snatching a washcloth and waving it like a hanky from the bow of a massive ship.
    Come back, I called. Wait!

He’s never alone there, so we often lapse into silence. Sometimes we’re so comfortable being silent that I grow worried. I wonder whether he calls because he doesn’t want to be a person without someone to call. In that case, it doesn’t matter whether he talks. In that case, all that matters is that our phone tendrils meet each other in space.

I wonder if he just doesn’t want to be the guy alone on his bunk, listening to another man’s music.

   You know the problem with Eminem, I say.
    Aside from the violence, misogyny, and obsession with drugs?
    He doesn’t say the word “cock” enough.
    Sweetheart, you’re so right.
    Actually, not enough rappers say the word cock. They all just use dick.
    It’s a travesty.
    Can’t we write a letter to someone?
    We need to take drastic action!
    Yes! Call in the Arm- oh.
    You made that joke on purpose, he says.
    I made that joke on purpose, I say.

I have Eminem stuck in my head now, but it’s there in a weird way. I can’t get to any content except the refrain – HI! My name is, HI! My name is, HI! My name is

Later, I fake a dial tone in my head, because cell phones don’t do them for you. They should bring that back, the empty, metallic bawwwwww. I look at my hands on the table. Nails done. I can feel the burn on my skin beneath, so I know they’re drying.

I look at the ring on the table; it’s the one I bought, but he imbued it with joint power the first time he left. I don’t want to slip it on again. The cotton mist creeps around corners when I wear it, the buzzing becomes addictive. I have faith and a sinking feeling that someday, I will speak loud enough to take it off for good.

We sit and stare at each other, the ring and I. It’s not clear who’s going to blink first. For the life of me, I cannot remember why I bought it in the first place.

—Molly Seltzer

#276: Parliament, "Mothership Connection" (1975)

1. P-Funk (Wants to Get Funked Up)

Often before we’d start dancing, during the prelaunch of Mothership Connection, the boys would roam Main Street to the huge electrical hub that lit the neighborhood—they called it the Pillbox. It hummed, pulsing with energy, like a baby rocket. I’d often stay behind, listening to the album’s first track from the kitchen counter, waiting.

Now this is what I want you all to do: If you got faults, defects or shortcomings, you know, like arthritis, rheumatism or migraines, whatever part of your body it is, I want you to lay it on your radio, let the vibes flow through. Funk not only moves, it can re-move, dig?

It was a really good sound, the rev-up of Mothership and hearing them climb the stairs with the different pitches of their laughter. I imagine that anticipation sounds different for everyone—the moment before something you want to happen happens. “P-Funk” and hearing them near was that for me. The color of the apartment in deep night buzzed for us: a purple glow I imagine is the color of electricity’s blood.

During this summer, seven years ago, Andrew and I lived atop the bridal salon my mother owned. I’d stay up all night dancing with the boys and once they fell asleep, I’d whisper softly to the one who became my best friend. Dane would stay up with me, and in the morning I’d sneak back into my bedroom where Andrew slept alone, peel off nightgown and robe, and drag myself into work clothes. All day I’d sell and steam wedding gowns, forcing myself awake, wondering about what it took to make lifelong commitments in all those yards of Alencon lace. All I concretely knew that I’d want in the future: the feeling I had this summer. But all along I knew that I wouldn’t. Even when we danced, I was aware that summer was rolling too quickly into another season.

Once upon a time called Right Now.

          2.   Mothership Connection (Star Child)

This is how I remember it: every night we shuffled wildly on the carpet. As instructed, we laid our faults, defects, and shortcomings on the radio, though I’m not sure we knew that we were. A few of us literally were pre-diagnosis, unsure about the strange things our bodies did and wanted to do.

We turned the music up. We shouted over it, but didn’t say anything.

If you hear any noise, it’s just me and the boys.

We were a ragtag crew. Here are our names: Elise, Andrew, Dane, Alex, David—sometimes Bobby, Aria, and Scott.

This is how I remember them: Alex smiled and laughed more than anyone else I’ve ever seen. He was always ready to participate in whatever fun anyone else wanted to have; he was generous that way—a way I am not. David was solid, pillar-like—even inebriated he was stoic and I always trusted him. Bobby danced like he didn’t have bones; he was uncomplicatedly fun. Aria and I rode the bus together in middle school and she was willing to tolerate me, all those years later—to validate my desires, to dance when called to—she was a friend. Scott felt like my brother, in that I always wanted him there but I had to suffer watching him live parallel to me, sometimes dipping in. Dane was like my phantom limb, my touchstone person, my telepath. Andrew—my boyfriend—was the reason we were all together. He was a mad flame everyone wanted to watch jump. He was constant and we all wanted, constantly, to please him. Fierce, fiercely devoted, and loud, he captivated and eluded us all.

After we’d dance, we’d fall into different pockets of the apartment or the neighborhood. I’d read upside down, put Band-Aids on skinned elbows, argue about the intention of ‘it is what it is’ (a phrase I’m still wary of), make six boxes of mac ‘n’ cheese, lower the lights, and tell the boys to listen to the lyrics of harp songs. On many of these nights I’d faint and then wake up beside my blurry boyfriend asking, instead, for Dane.

Ain't nothing but a party, y'all.

I feel like we were always falling. Like gravity had gotten aggressive that summer—throwing us down, or forcefully towards each other. We were tripping down the stairs, passing out on the asphalt beside cars—we were all hitting the ground in one way or another. I’d drop often from these fainting spells, the root of which I didn’t yet understand. Dane, with his cataplexy, would go into a sort of seizure-like state from hard laughter, crumpling and twitching. I’d always race to his side and shove my finger in his mouth. Though he always bit down hard on my knuckle, I sometimes wonder if it was just so I felt needed.

One night while everyone was dancing, I snuck into the bridal salon and tried on a wedding gown. I felt Mothership rattling the ceiling—all the feet of my friends shook the chandelier. I sat on the floor in a heap of silk and listened for the proof of them, staring at the mirror. I looked so off in that shade of white. I remember wondering if one day we would all be dancing to these songs, with me in this kind of dress. I put a veil on and pulled the netting over my face.

Face it, even your memory banks have forgotten this funk.

If every other memory is seen through the veil, I remember this in total clarity: Sneaking back in and hovering at the back of the apartment, I watched Dane see me, open my cabinet, pour me a glass of water and glide through everyone else, still dancing, unaware of me. He handed me the cup and asked: “Where did you go?”

          3.  Unfunky UFO

I don’t want to speak for everyone, but I think we were all sleep-deprived—at least we were all something-deprived. I didn’t feel belonging, in the traditional sense, but I think we were triumphantly comfortable being together. We united in music, loud enough to cover up our own quiet, independent grief. Mine was less private and less quiet, maybe. I regularly concerned them all by slipping into the scorching hot, overflowing bathtub in my clothes. I did strange things sober.

Sometimes they’d enter day-long fevered hangovers that no amount of Tums or Tylenol or big breakfasts could cure. None of us were aware of our limits yet, or maybe were not interested in obeying them. This isn’t meant a criticism— even without liquor, without smoke, I imbibed the most.

All this to say that we all hurt and some of us were hurting each other. But it didn’t stop us from dancing, from sharing, from going to sleep in sick piles, from needing each other in this strange moment, before takeoff.

Early in the summer, Dane went to Honduras to work in a clinic where he gave eye exams; I remember glasses spilling out of his trunk before he left.

You've got all that is really needed to save a dying world from its funkless hell.

Not long after he got there, there was a military coup—the president was ousted and exiled. Dane sent emails about gunfire and burning tires—being less than a mile from the presidential house—but mostly that he hoped that everyone in the states was aware of the political implications. He wanted us to know what was happening and why it mattered. I sent back self-involved emails about the nightmares I was having about him, buffered by stories of what we did on the nights he wasn’t there. How much we missed him—loved him.

Soon after the coup, Dane got sent back to the states. I was overjoyed—we all were—but knew he wouldn’t be. He had this project in mind, to collect poems from children at the clinic. I put a Welcome Home party together where we filled a piñata with candy and poems that I made everyone write that we then translated, poorly, into Spanish. I scoured the party store for other relevant objects and found a bin of eye patches, surely for pirate costumes, but I bought those, too, so we’d appear eye-troubled and in need of him.

I sometimes think of this party as among the most loving gestures of my life. But when framed differently, it was maybe among the most careless. We were twenty-year-olds, so clumsy already with love—how on Earth could I convince anyone, including myself, that it could be divided?

We’re unfunky and we’re obsolete and out of time.

We’re out of time.

4.  Supergroovalisticprosifunkstication (The Bumps Bump)

My crew made music. They all made music. Everything we did orbited their creation or appreciation of sound. I didn’t make music, though I was encouraged by Dane to sing, which I did only because he made me feel like I made beautiful noise. Though truly I didn’t, I still felt a certain kind of ecstatic frenzy singing along.

I was called to write—I knew even then that words were my lifeblood. Their sharp, musical quality when arranged right on the page and in mouths, caused me to salivate and sweat.

Everyone knew that this work was the work of my life, but that I’d hardly begun. I’d hide in the dressing rooms at work and scribble narrative poems, stupid, ephemeral blocks of text. I had this enormous catalogue of literary journals, agents, publishers that one afternoon, as the boys peeled themselves out of sleep and got ready to teach their music lessons, I opened. Out of it fell all these sheets of paper—words.

I knelt on the floor and tried to piece together their intended order, glancing between them to try and figure out who’d done it. I asked Andrew. I asked Dane. Alex and David, too. No one fessed up, even when I puzzled them together: DON’T GIVE UP. ONE DAY YOUR TRUEST DREAMS WILL REALIZE.

Eventually Dane admitted he’d been the one who snuck the pages in my book; in case I hadn’t known, he believed in me.

But it was hard to know what to do with love that activates like this. That rumbles, wanting to rocket. It’s hard not to want to let it take off.

Give people what they want when they want and they wants it all the time.

5.  Handcuffs

If I ever slowed down, took a breath or break, I’d pick back up for “Handcuffs.” I never thought of it as my favorite, but it was the one I wanted to dance to—this was the song I was always waiting for.

Every one of these tracks is meant to get wild to, but this one had a sharp gravity. It pulled me up and jerked me back to reality, too. No matter how loud we’d turn it up, it never let me disengage.

Oh, do I have to put my handcuffs on you, mama? Do I have to keep under lock and key?

Every day at work, the brides would cry so joyfully—so eager and in love and sure. I always eyed them in the mirror as I zipped up the gowns, searching their faces for the uncertainty I imagined unavoidable, despite any amount of love. I’d look hard, suspiciously, never finding any glint of doubt.

When I danced to “Handcuffs,” I wondered if anyone else noticed the parallel. I felt akin to the subject of the song. I felt my creature-like lovin’ was to blame—susceptible, too, to flattery and game. But, would I really submit to other humans that called my name? The thing was that the person who you’d expect to call my name didn’t. As much as I felt like her, needing to be handcuffed to stay put, to stay chaste, I often didn’t feel a hand even grab, or even graze, my wrist.

Now we both know that's not how it should be.

At a certain point, it was clear to our whole small tribe—I mean, nothing was clear, even to me. But everyone knew that there was something between Dane and I that was palpable and significant and happening. But don’t misunderstand what I mean by happening.

We’d sneak out of the apartment and go to the park down the road. We’d talk about our histories and futures, wedged in the plastic tunnels of the jungle gym. I hardly remember what we’d say, but I think we both felt maybe we were just hopeful, fleshy tragedies. Once he tried to open a glass bottle on the cement curb and it shattered. I sobbed, all our friends circling us there in the street, glass everywhere, my hand trying to hold his blood in. I can only imagine what they thought.

So little really happened between in action or even in words, but I loved him powerfully and reached into the inaccessible place and I wanted to be allowed to be his champion. And he did that for me, too. The loving, the reaching, the wanting.

Don’t you know that would be uncouth?

We had this glass marble that we found wedged in the pull-out sofa’s mattress that summer. We’d pass it back and forth. He’d press it secretly against my palm and I’d stare at the little licks of green and orange glass cast in the sphere like maybe that’s where his voice was hidden, telling me what was true. We’d never say anything about what it meant, but I think it was something like:

I that hope you will understand.

6.  Give Up The Funk (Tear The Roof Off The Sucker)

When summer came close to ending, we were all readying for different changes. We went to bed earlier—we saw less of each other. We didn’t listen to Mothership as much. We saw each other in shifts.

Andrew was getting ready to leave to start school in Baltimore. I was getting ready to say goodbye to him, to all of them as they scattered into different pockets of the northeast. I stayed in the little apartment for months, listening to their echoes dim. Every day I’d wake up in my bed, knowing they were all elsewhere, making music, hearing music. I’d stay up late on the sofa under a pile of beat-up veils, sewing the barely-fabric back to the combs.

One of the last times I saw Dane, we played Monopoly with our others. I just remember thinking he was so frustrating as he passed out all his colorful dollars to everyone else who was struggling to pay up. I couldn’t stand watching him give so much away.

I guess every season has an arc, like every album. There’s always something innately sad to me about the second-to-last anything—more so even than the last track, last moment, last line. That awareness of the almost-over is even more painful.

Give up the funk.

7.  Night of the Thumpasorus Peoples

Most of us became anecdotes to each other. I cringe to write that because my blood pumps with every person I’ve ever loved, every one of these people, but we became dormant and inactive in other’s lives.

Eventually I got to Baltimore to study writing. Andrew and I stayed together, but were always haunted by what we hardly acknowledged out loud but both knew about that summer. It’s strange how we provide feelings their own bodies, their own way of taking up space, wedging themselves between things.

Though that summer became a part of our pasts, it was always very much alive in our bond to each other. To be fair, how couldn’t it be? Framed on every desk I’ve written at since that time, Dane’s voice has screamed “DON’T GIVE UP”—something I have to believe Andrew felt, too, but wasn’t saying.

Somehow I am back in the business of weddings—now I fluff their trains and send them down the grand staircase of an art museum to make their vows. All these years later, I am still searching couples’ faces for a flicker of uncertainty without ever finding any. I trust that this means that one day, a whole lifetime is something I too will be able to happily, undoubtedly, give.

When we danced all those years ago, I don’t think I was engaged with the story of Mothership Connection—just the sounds. It seemed like it was about trying to access something—the funk—which was, if not the cure, a certain kind of medicine.

I thought we were space-travelers in the purple glow of the apartment, unable to speak through our spacesuits, searching for that interplanetary dose of funk. Though I am not sure what the rest of them would say, I think I failed to really get it.

But I’ve been listening close lately, and I realize that Mothership Connection isn’t just about a season, it’s about a lifetime—it’s an epic—it’s a series of journeys, not just the one. The funk has to be obtained, experienced, but also lost. But then, of course, it is to be pursued and taken back.

It used to frustrate me that the album ended with so few words. The gaa-gaa-goo-gah, gaa-gaa-goo-gah, gaa-gaa-goo-gah-gah at the end of “Night of the Thumpasorus Peoples” though, I think, is supposed to be baby sounds—newborn language—preverbal effort to externalize a feeling. It’s so clumsy and indiscernible, these first attempts.

But what better way to leave anything—with the first of many worthwhile tries we make in a lifetime.

—Elise Burke

#277: Janet Jackson, "Rhythm Nation 1814" (1989)

America turned loose on America -
All living is listening for a throat to open -
The length of its silence shaping lives.

                        -       Claudia Rankine, Citizen

THE MANIFESTO OF THE RHYTHM NATION 1814

A generation full of courage, come forth with me! We are drawing battle lines, with music by our side, to fight the color lines.

Let’s work together to improve our way of life. Join voices in protest to social injustice. Let it be known:

WE ARE A PART OF A RHYTHM NATION

People of the World! Unite! We hereby form THE RHYTHM NATION.

What We Want
What We Believe

We draw together to fight homelessness, drugs and crime spreadin’ on the streets, we fight for the people who can't find enough to eat, for the kids who can't go out and play: that's the state of the world today, that is why we have come together, this is our struggle.

This is the test: No struggle, no progress.

Say it people: NO STRUGGLE, NO PROGRESS.

Lend a hand to help your brother do his best. Things are getting worse! We have to make them better! It's time to give a damn. Let's work together, come on.

MIZ JACKSON
Ministress of Information
The Rhythm Nation 1814

In 1989, when Janet Jackson released Rhythm Nation 1814, I was thirteen years old, growing up in a white middle class household in southern Ohio. And therefore I probably have no right to say anything about Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814.

I’d like to talk for a moment about what just happened in this country. When I started out writing this piece, it was a piece of fiction: the story of Miz Jackson and Black Cat, the runaway white rebel who joined the cause to help her black brothers and sisters fight for the Manifesto of the Rhythm Nation. The manifesto is just as you see it above: mostly from Janet’s own lyrics. Then, in the wee hours of the morning of November 9, as the returns for the American election came in and elected Donald J. Trump, who had run a campaign—let’s be frank now—on a platform of racism and xenophobia, as the next president of the United States of America, I realized how tone deaf this piece would turn out to be. How much it felt like appropriation. How much it relied on my being white, privileged enough to have fantasies about white liberals joining the cause, how much it relied on my readers being so, too. So I scrapped it. (The “Miz” in “Miz Jackson” was borrowed from “Nasty Boys,” intended to be an echo of Trump’s own words in the final debate. It was also a nod to an idealistic liberal white revolutionary, Mizmoon Soltysik of the Symbionese Liberation Army, famous for kidnapping Patricia Hearst.)

But I want to let the manifesto stand. Because, initially, the title song on Janet Jackson’s album was a manifesto, and that has to be recognized. When Janet Jackson made this album after 8 years of Reaganomics and the War on Drugs, she was writing lyrics with sincerity about the struggles of black people in America. I’m sure I understood some of the social issues Janet Jackson was singing about in a distant sense as a thirteen year old, but it’s incredibly likely that I was under the impression that I was changing the world just by listening to a Janet Jackson album. But listening to Rhythm Nation 1814 did nothing to change anything. In the 27 years since her album was released, black men and women are still being imprisoned for Reagan’s war on drugs; and if there is no cause to imprison them, they are simply being shot in the street by police officers.

In my original story, I explained the fourth verse of our very own national anthem, in which Francis Scott Key wrote, in 1814:

No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave,
O'er the land of the free, and the home of the brave.

The year of Francis Scott Key’s writing of these words is the reason for the 1814 in Janet’s album title. This was written before the Civil War, before the practice of slavery had been outlawed in the United States. According to some historians, Francis Scott Key was writing in this verse specifically about the Corps of Colonial Marines, escaped American slaves hired by the British to fight against the Americans in the War of 1812 and the Battle of Fort McHenry, about which these verses were written. In this verse, he is actively rooting for the demise of these former slaves. The refrain became our national anthem, sung before ballgames; our national anthem, during which some recently have felt compelled to kneel rather than salute. It’s worth understanding to its complete depths, drilled down to the fourth verse. It’s part of us; just as the slavery described therein is part of us, an undeniable part of the fabric of this country. We as white people need to confront this and own it.

This too: silence is consent.

I’m writing to break my silence.

I read an assortment of Black Panther texts and speeches in preparation for writing the fiction of Miz Jackson’s manifesto. I borrowed—or, rather, appropriated—tone and even a few words directly from their platform. Maybe it was Janet’s reference to the “Black Cat” that pointed me in this direction, but it seemed obvious to me that my fictionalization of Janet Jackson’s call to arms—and especially a white liberal’s interpretation of it—would have parallels to that of the Black Panther Party. They were both equally tired of the murder and the destruction of their communities. The Black Panthers rejected capitalism and promoted a socialist agenda for educating and feeding their children: We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. Janet Jackson wrote pop music that was commercialized and sold but espoused the same message: We fight for the people who can't find enough to eat. Her message was heard in bedrooms across America, but was it heard? How much of a manifesto was it, packaged and sold to little white girls in the Midwest? Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, spoke on April 27, 1969 (seven months before he, too, was killed in a police raid), of the socialist intent behind starting the Black Panthers’ Breakfast for Children program: “We sayin’ something like this—we saying that theory’s cool, but theory with no practice ain’t shit.”

Manifestos, like Janet’s about breaking the color lines, with no practice ain’t shit.

Wouldn’t it have been easy to write something light about a Janet Jackson album, take you on an escapade? In my story there were soft moments when Miz Jackson read a letter from her revolutionary lover who wrote “I miss you much.” That was predominantly what I took away from Janet Jackson’s album back when I first heard it. Shot like an arrow going through my heart / That's the pain I feel / I feel whenever we're apart. Making up dance routines and squealing when her slick-looking music videos came on MTV. The privilege of dance routines. But I’m 40 now. I’m a white woman living in America where Donald J. Trump was just elected president by 53% of white women, and if I don’t confront the fact that the ease with which I greeted Rhythm Nation 1814 back in the day is an important indicator of the level to which I need to help change things, then I’m doing nothing to break the color lines Janet sang about. Ain’t shit.

I suppose in the end this is, like Claudia Rankine’s “America turned loose on America,” an essay turned loose on a piece of fiction, or: myself turned loose on myself. We write in order to sort through our thoughts, give them shape. I wrote this in order to confront what is happening in this country as well as what is happening inside me, the white privilege I have grown up with and how to handle and utilize that privilege going forward.

There are things we can do with our energies, and things we cannot help but do, and I cannot help but do this: activate my awareness. Join voices in protest to social injustice. For real this time: more than just listening to Janet Jackson’s album in my bedroom.

Huey P. Newton, speaking to The Movement (a leftist newspaper associated with SNCC and SDS) in August of 1968: “I personally think that there are many young white revolutionaries who are sincere in attempting to realign themselves with mankind, and to make a reality out of the high moral standards that their fathers and forefathers only expressed.” Most liberal whites are predominantly unactivated allies. Some of us think we are being allies, but what have we given so far but words? Am I giving more than words here, more than a shallow assessment of Janet Jackson’s own protest? And by giving words, aren’t we just talking over those we need to be listening to?

Here I am, Janet: I’m listening to your manifesto. I’m ready to struggle and cast aside the ease of fantasy I grew up with. I should have arrived here before, fought harder, truly struggled, not just shouted encouragement on the sidelines of the struggle. I’m reaching out to lend a hand like you asked back when I was thirteen, before I knew how to give it. I was listening, but I wasn’t listening.

That ain’t shit.

—Zan McQuade

#278: Harry Smith (Ed.), "Anthology of American Folk Music" (1952)

Harry Everett Smith did not die on November 27, 1991. No, Harry Everett Smith disappeared—vanished, seemingly, without a trace in Room 328 at the Hotel Chelsea in New York City. The date of November 27 was provided by the missing man’s legal representatives to authorities and creditors as the official date of death after an exhaustive five-month search for the 68-year-old visual artist, self-educated student of anthropology and ethnography, and self-proclaimed mystic ended with far more questions than answers.

In the years leading up to his vanishing, the staff working at the Hotel Chelsea reported seeing Harry Everett Smith carrying boxes to Room 328, his permanent residence at the time, daily, sometimes two or three times a day. The boxes, often overflowing, consisted entirely of his eccentric collection of string figures, paper airplanes, Ukrainian Easter eggs, and out-of-print records—artifacts, according to Harry Everett Smith, that represented man’s complexities and idiosyncrasies. Varying cultures’ manipulations of string for games, stories, and divinations fascinated the ethnographer; the age-long yearning for flight and transcendence found in paper airplanes astounded the anthropologist; the craft, geometry, and superstitions intertwined with Ukrainian Easter eggs bemused the artist and mystic; and the recordings of America’s past haunted the old man.

Management at the Hotel Chelsea feared, though, Harry Everett Smith’s room was becoming a site of hoarding brought about by his compulsive, decades-long ethnographic predilections. However, upon inspection, under the pretense of a supposed water leak in the room directly above 328, a maintenance worker reported that none of the boxes, nor any string figure, paper airplane, egg, or record, were found in the room, just the usual furnishings. Disbelieving this, hotel manager David Reed, pretending to give in-person courtesy calls to all 250 residents of the hotel, visited Harry Everett Smith’s room and discovered the maintenance worker was telling the truth: the room was, in fact, absent any boxes and collectibles. Curious about the final location of Smith’s collection, as he and the staff were sure they had only seen boxes going into the boarder’s room and never any coming out, Reed stopped Harry Everett Smith in the lobby one morning and asked the old man where he stored his collection. Harry Everett Smith simply replied, “Oh, I put them in storage.”

On June 11, 1991, poet Allen Ginsberg visited his close friend Harry Everett Smith at his hotel residence. There, the two men spent the evening listening to records and smoking marijuana while discussing America’s rapid approach towards the new millennium, a conversation that hampered the otherwise optimistic mood of the room. Ginsberg expressed concern about the direction of American poetry, while Harry Everett Smith conveyed unease with the current course of conservation for the world’s greatest treasures. Easter eggs, paper airplanes, and string figures—physical objects—could stand a chance against the specter of time through the adequate methods of preservation, but it was the ephemerality of music and its media that concerned him. Music lasts in fleeting moments. Those moments are often transcribed to physical objects for preservation, yes, but the physical objects of transcription were now becoming as ephemeral as the fleeting moments of music themselves. The relatively young CD technology, for example, with its supposed lossless sound and promised physical longevity, did not convince the collector. Not long after compact discs became available on the consumer market, Harry Everett Smith purchased Swordfishtrombones by Tom Waits and was disheartened with the “disc rot” that began to appear over time—the  discoloration, or bronzing, of the disc caused by abrasions or oxidation of the reflective layer that rendered it unreadable, therefore unplayable. And magnetic tape recordings, with their susceptibility to sticky-shed syndrome, did not provide a stable alternative to the crisis of media preservation. Of course, Harry Everett Smith recognized that vinyl records were not without their faults, but the longevity of their form with the proper care, as far as he was concerned, was the proper path forward. He couldn’t help but smile at the idea of Voyagers 1 and 2, launched fourteen years prior, traveling across the cosmos with phonograph records, each containing greetings and salutations in 55 languages in addition to the sounds and music of Earth, and those records reaching the inhabitants of Gliese 445 in 40,000 years. “Who would listen and what would they think of us? Would we be worth their time? Would they want to know us?” were questions that Harry Everett Smith often pondered when he considered the two ambassadors. But with each iteration of media development, Harry Everett Smith feared that music, testimony to the human condition writ large, was on the verge of oblivion. In 40,000 years, the extraterrestrials of Gliese 445 could possibly hold in their prehensile organs the only available recordings of human existence, and upon visiting our blue world, discover us as frauds without evidence or proof of our humanity. Ginsberg, of course, giggling from the pot, tried to comfort his friend with the same kind of humanism that usually consoled Harry Everett Smith: man would find a way, as they always had, to preserve and curate, to carry on. To this reassurance, Harry Everett Smith responded, “I don’t want to think or know about what comes after this, but I have a plan.”

As the evening came to a close, Harry Everett Smith pulled out his six-LP compilation of American folk music, a compilation he curated from his personal collection of 78s and released in 1952 with the help of Folkways Records, and began to play Blind Willie Johnson’s “John the Revelator.” Ginsberg complemented his friend on the selection of songs on the compilation, a range of songs, he noticed, that highlighted the American folk tradition exquisitely. The collector thanked the poet for his praise and confided that there was, in fact, to be a seventh vinyl disc in the box set, but it was cut at the last minute during production due to cost. Ginsberg, enthusiastic and wanting to hear the songs that were excised, was told by Harry Everett Smith to return the following evening for another listening party as he needed to consult his archives for the seventh disc to do so. But when Ginsberg returned the next day, Harry Everett Smith was not in his room nor would he ever be in the room again. June 11 was the last time Harry Everett Smith was ever seen.

*

Two weeks after his disappearance, the Hotel Chelsea management closed Harry Everett Smith’s account and was in the process of removing his belongings from the premises, what little effects he had, when hotel maid Esmeralda Díaz discovered the steel 6-foot x 3-foot door in the back of the hotel closet. Upon opening the steel door, Esmeralda Díaz entered a temperature-controlled corridor of approximately 50 feet in length with four doors, two on each wall. Díaz, curious, opened one of the doors to discover a large room with hundreds of rows of shelves. On the nearest shelf, the maid could make out string figures pinned to black felt boards. The maid immediately closed the door and reported the discovery to hotel manager David Reed, prompting an investigation by both hotel officials and members of the Smith estate. By all intents and purposes, the door should not have existed. The head maintenance official could not find evidence of the door, nor the corridor and rooms, in the hotel plans. Dimensionally, and logically, the door should have led to the brick wall facing the back alley of the Hotel Chelsea and the four rooms to the parallel streets north and south of the block. But the door, and its corridor and rooms, were inexplicably there, and apparently, so was Harry Everett Smith’s collection. These rooms were Harry Everett Smith’s archives.

A week after the door was discovered, Henry Wallace, Smith’s lawyer and estate executor, appointed the task of cataloging Harry Everett Smith’s collection to four paralegals. This is what the paralegals discovered when they began the process of cataloging: Each room was devoted to one of Harry Everett Smith’s ethnographic predilections, and in that given room, every iteration of that artifact could be found shelved. For example, in Room A, the string figure gallery, one would discover every variation and permutation of the Apache rug: Apache rugs starting from one inch and intermittently moving up in size by the half-inch, as well as constructed from every material known to man, organic and inorganic. Apache rugs made of cotton twine, sisa, jute, hemp, henequen, coir and other natural fibers before moving to twine of every metallic base. In Room B, one would find a paper airplane in every variant: different sizes and weighted sheets in every imaginable color in the spectrum, from A to Z: Absolute Zero, Acid Green, Aero, Aero Blue, African Violet, Air Force Blue, Air Superiority Blue, Alabaster, Alice Blue and so on and so forth. The same could be found in the vinyl record gallery, Room C: every pressing, national and international, of every given release starting at “Aa” was there, and each album had hundreds upon hundreds of copies to account for the variations in sound inherent in each one—each record’s sound conditioned by the production and handling of the individual record. The categorization of every permutation from A to Z was a mere hypothesis, though. After spending two months in Room C, their days inside increasing each week, the four paralegals had not left the first entry of the library—the first record archived—and there seemed to be no end in sight to that particular record. The same was for the cases of Rooms A, B, and D: the rooms and shelves were seemingly infinite in length with infinite entries. Given Harry Everett Smith’s rigid and precise archival tendencies, the Smith estate could only come to the natural conclusion that the four rooms were infinite archives, his own Library of Babel.

Allen Ginsberg, learning of the seemingly boundless library, and remembering Harry Everett Smith’s request of the poet, posited that, perhaps, his friend was lost in his own library. Against the wishes of his partner, Peter Orlovsky, Ginsberg decided to mount an expedition into the library to find Harry Everett Smith. Ginsberg recruited the help of Smith’s lawyer, Wallace, a competent mountain climber and backpacker, and college-student videographer Richard Clark as the third party. The three men entered Room C on August 31 and returned to the Hotel Chelsea nearly three months later, on November 20. All three men were malnourished and unkempt when re-entering the hotel room and in varying states of distress. Ginsberg and Wallace screamed and raved unintelligibly about what they had experienced in the library, while Clark, on the other hand, returned in an almost catatonic state. Clark simply handed over a tape recording of the expedition and retreated into seclusion.

The day before Harry Everett Smith was officially declared dead, members of the Smith family and the Wallace firm convened and listened to the Smith Rescue Expedition tape to hopefully explain the disappearance of Harry Everett Smith and to determine the cause of Ginsberg, Wallace, and Clark’s mental declines. This is what they heard: In week five of their expedition, the three men—Ginsberg, Wallace, and Clark—could hear the faint sound of folk music playing in the distance, which, to the three men, could only be coming from Harry Everett Wallace. However, after three weeks of trying to find the source, the three rescuers never seemed to get closer: the immeasurable library appeared to be echoing the music off its never-ending walls and shelves, making the music travel farther than the three men were capable of trekking. Taunted by the reverberations of the fathomless archive, in addition to its immense size, the three explorers reached almost complete mental breakdowns. The fact that the three returned to the Hotel Chelsea alive was considered a near miracle.

Immediately after listening to the tape, and under the recommendation of the Smith family and Wallace firm, Hotel Chelsea management closed the door to the infinite library, permanently sealing shut an extensive collection of string figures, paper airplanes, Ukrainian Easter eggs, out-of-print records, and presumably, Harry Everett Smith.

—Dillon Hawkins

#279: David Bowie, "Aladdin Sane" (1973)

The storm’s slowing inland, like a semi truck hitting the steep, hard-packed slope of a down-grade’s emergency pull-off. In the delirium of dark and rain made mirror by the rental car’s windshield wipers and oncoming headlights, I blindly thumb through my Amazon Cloud player for anything that will keep me awake, that can provide a backbeat to the rock-a-bye of the wind gusts rising out of the Shenandoah. I type bo by muscle memory so I can toggle between Bob and Bowie. No sleep with a voice nasal-y and fast talking, I think I’ll call it America, I said as we hit land; no sleep in the heaviest of Bowie’s albums, oh honey, watch that man.

I’m driving back to New Jersey from Lena and Brad’s wedding in Harrisonburg, Virginia, to which I’d driven that morning—five hours down, five hours up. I wanted to stay, wanted to have another whiskey ginger and join the dance floor, but I have a reading tomorrow in Newark I can’t miss, and much grading to do besides. My thoughts seem like the flat line of a heart monitor, a beaded break sliding across the screen. I’m worn out from weeks of travel and work. A few weeks ago, at my gate in Minneapolis, I told a guy that I liked his hat, a black baseball cap with the cross-stitched image of Ziggy Stardust from the cover of Aladdin Sane, red and blue lightning homespun in heavy thread, orange-red mullet, the sharp cheeks, eyes downcast.

“Thanks,” the guy said, smiling as he turned to see who’d spoken. I caught his eyes’ movements, their gaze mirrored in shape by the scar on my cheek, right eye to jawline.

I moved forward, as if my zone had been called.

I’ve been traveling alone a lot lately, on trains and planes and rental cars. I like the me that travels alone, the one that leaves behind my husband at home, my dog, the dirty dishes, the laundry, a couple changes of clothes stuffed in a duffel bag, earbuds in, an order of two coffees from the flight attendant’s cart. In-laws have often made comments about the fact that I travel on my own, that I’m the wife that leaves her husband alone. “Where’s J. at?” my mother-in-law says of a picture of me and a friend in a new city.

Recently, while hiking with my husband along a steep trail beside the Musconetcong River, we passed a young woman, out for a hike alone. It was deep on the trail, way back from the road. We told her hello, and she said hello back, her eyes scanning everyone and everything. After she was out of range, I told J. that I would never do that, never go out into the woods alone.

“I would be worried if you did,” he says, tugging our dog away from some deer scat.

My father, a forensic scientist and former cop, lectured me throughout my childhood about the dangers of girls and women going out on their own. He told me which way to twist an attacker’s wrist, to kick the backs of their knees, use fingernails on their eyes, “and don’t be afraid to give them a hard kick to their privates.” Not until recently did I ever realize what an impact these early lectures had on me and the way I move in the world, the way I avoid being truly alone away from help or streetlights or a phone.

J. once gave me pepper spray to keep on my keychain—I think it was a stocking stuffer. After a while, even though I lived in a city and rode my bicycle to and from the campus where I worked, I stopped carrying it, as if it was an invitation to try me, and I started meeting every man’s eyes as I passed him. I started telling them “hello.”

I’m not sure what changed in me, why I felt this would keep me safe, why I took the risk of not having a defensive weapon. I remembered then something else my father said, that I should never show fear—that is, weakness—in public. Stay alert. Show that you will remember a face, that you will remember who they are, if something ever happens. Traveling alone, although not a hike in the woods, allows me to be in public, in the world as myself, not a woman, a vulnerable target, a person with somewhere to go.

I buzzed my hair off after I was clear of cancer, in part because I was still so afraid it would return and, also, because I’d been so afraid that I would lose my hair in chemo, back when the doctors thought I’d have to go through a few rounds. Thankfully, the biopsy from the third excisive surgery of my cheek let me off the hook of chemo. By buzzing it later, when I was “okay,” or as well as the aftershocks of the anxiety and trauma would allow me to be, I was able to take ownership over my body, a body that had felt de-sexualized, some days even gender-less, when I was sick.

When I went out with my husband to supper, servers often called me “sir” when they walked up behind me. I wasn’t offended. It was like having someone hurl a pebble at me when I was standing behind tempered glass. In some ways, it was the most respect I’ve ever received from strangers in public.

“Aren’t you afraid people will think you’re a lesbian?” a hairdresser asked me candidly.

“So what if they do—there’s nothing wrong with that. Plus, it’s none of their business,” I said, and she didn’t reply, but I could tell in the mirror by the way she studied the hair clumping up like bales of hay before falling to the floor that she was worried for me.

On Twitter, I say something about how triggering the news is about Donald Tr*mp’s sexual misconduct, and a rando responds that I’m just jealous that he didn’t rape me and that no one would ever “consider me” because I look like a “little feminazi.”

A female friend types to me, “feminazis unite!” but even that hits me the wrong way. The word further problematizes feminism, connecting it to Nazism. I block the rando, close my computer, and go to bed.

Near Grimes, Pennsylvania, a marquee reads:

GOD UNIQUELY & LOVINGLY

CREATED YOU

TRANSGENDER IS      HUMANISM

There’s a telephone number beneath the message, and I wonder who would answer if I called. I’m surprised to see the sign, even though I don’t quite follow its meaning and fear that it has been defaced from “TRANSGENDER IS DEHUMANISM,” since I’m in a part of the country littered with “BLUE LIVES MATTER” and “TR*MP PENCE 2016” signs. If it is as I fear, I wonder if the argument is that God created each person as a specific gender and, therefore, one shouldn’t try to change it. If it isn’t, if it is in support of trans individuals, it’s suggesting that it’s God’s intention to create each individual’s unique gender identity. I hope it’s the latter.

Every time I travel, I lose myself in my head and almost forget that I have a body, except when my hips begin to ache from sitting at the wheel all day or my feet start to swell from a cross-country flight. Tonight, my body reveals itself only in its sleepiness. I’m uncertain if the bodily disconnect is a good or a bad thing, something I should want, something I should even need. Do we need the mercy of being relieved from our bodies sometimes? Does you mean the you I understand myself to be, or the you that others see me as, a body?

When I was a kid, I used to play in drag all the time. I wanted to have all the boys’ roles in playtime: father, sheriff, cavalry general. I wore baseball caps so often that my softball coach called me “The Hat,” and my mother once had to make me a giant fake beard out of felt and brown-dyed cotton balls and elastic so I could wear it for a book report at school. I wouldn’t let my mother refer to my underwear as “panties,” and I loathed the thought of ever having a period or wearing a bra or buying makeup. I hated the color pink and I detested princesses, because I saw them as weak. In truth, I saw all things “feminine” as inferior to explorers and scientists and doctors and cowboys (all of which I envisioned as male) because women didn’t seem to have any agency in their lives, in the world. It wasn’t until I hit puberty that I began to pay attention to, even see value in things I thought were “for girls.” (Estrogen, man.) My feminism seems to have an antecedent in my tomboyishness, in that play-drag. Although I identify as a woman, I want to complicate what that means, how being a woman sometimes means embracing feelings and expressions of masculinity, or what some often think of as “masculine.”

When I became sick, I retreated into those early feelings of gender-inbetweenness, in part, I believe, because I wanted to recover my agency, or at the very least to signal to the world that I didn’t have any agency as a woman over my sickness. My melanoma was sexless, genderless, and it had control over me, my body and possibly my death, as well as my thoughts. It said, hide in yourself, girl. Change who you are and maybe it won’t recognize you.

But accompanying these feelings were the comments—from friends and strangers alike—about the scar that shifted and changed and redrew itself across my face with every surgery. “What’s the other guy look like?” our house mover joked, as if I was one “guy” and I’d been in a roadhouse knife fight with some biker.

A nurse once said, “Once it heals, it will become less noticeable, more feminine looking.”

“Think of it as a beauty mark,” someone else said, without my query.

Although I temporarily felt less feminine, I didn’t feel as if I had gained any agency; I just felt dehumanized. I was the somebody that something had happened to.

It took months, even a few years, before I began to regain a sense of myself as something beyond the cancer, something not defined by it. In doing so, and through therapy, I learned to honor all of me, the androgyny of my mind and my trauma, the way some days I still need to find myself not woman, just me.

—Emilia Phillips

#280: U2, "All That You Can't Leave Behind" (2000)

We could have been friends, but there wasn’t much to me in those days. Bits and pieces, strings of unconnected thoughts, underneath a chaos of fragmented notions. As bad as I seem, I promise I was worse than I am. In all my crustached, lip-smacking glory, refraction of heaven-bent light through my constant excitable spittle, wearing my Dragon Ball Z T-shirt, with notions of the future we were all training our hearts for—in the midst of knowing I was a fallow field of human evolution—I had a locker next to hers, and I wanted so badly to talk to her about this album: All That You Can’t Leave Behind.

When I asked if she’d heard it, though, she held with me the kind of hyper-focused eye contact people make when they realize the person they’re talking to has come a little unhinged. She’s unlucky enough to be closing the adjacent locker—positioned to make a quick escape—and inside a moment’s passing, the thought occurs to her. That’s when she starts to think U2 doesn’t just annoy her. She starts to think of that shit-stain megalomaniacal prick of a singer, running around in his translucent sunglasses, or wearing a gold suit and pretending to be the devil.

She was right to think, hopeless, when she looked at me and saw I was careening into an adulthood where I will still (often and secretly) think of that maniac in the colored glasses whenever I can’t get my locker open. An adulthood in which I will still think, When exactly did U2 stop being cool, and how did I miss it so thoroughly? Why was U2 still cool to me? I’m not the only one still wondering: “When did U2 become uncool” is still a frequently-searched question on Google, which makes me feel oddly comforted.

*

If I had the courage and the time machine to go back to that moment, in our old school, right before she slammed the door shut and turned the combination lock with a quick twist of her thumb and index finger, I’d ask if she remembered the millennium. It feels so thoroughly quaint to talk about now. Back then, though, it was a big deal. The run-up to 2000 seemed to start somewhere in 1997, and it lasted forever. All anyone could talk about was the future. We all felt the stillness of time, looming up suddenly the way an onrushing train seems to slow across the leaden folds of a panicked brain.

If I could go back in time, I’d ask if she remembered the moment of relief she felt at midnight when it all switched over. The devil, of course, wasn’t in anyone’s computers. It wasn’t in the clocks, or the machines stashed down in the bowels of the world’s banking houses. But we weren’t to know for sure, then, were we? The devil is in the details, and such details are always with us.

For U2, the nineties were bookended by Achtung Baby in 1991 and All That You Can’t Leave Behind in 2000. The creation of Achtung Baby—which was essentially a re-creation of U2 itself, following accusations of self-righteousness, bombast, and tiresome sincerity—took three years and nearly destroyed the band. In writing Achtung Baby, U2 was determined to avoid making the “Big Statements” critics had grown tired of, without doing away big material: the band explored spiritual doubt, personal failings, and tensions of religious and sexual devotion. In the Rolling Stone review of Achtung Baby, Elysa Gardner writes, “Squarely acknowledging his own potential for hypocrisy and inadequacy, and addressing basic human weaknesses rather than the failings of society at large, Bono sounds humbler and more vulnerable than in the past.”

Between Achtung Baby and All That You Can’t Leave Behind, there was Zooropa and Pop, two albums in which the band experimented with their sound as well as with irony, parody, and megalomania. Held up with the rest of their albums, I think these two are a little boring and overdone. But their stylized performances during the resulting world tours were fascinating. Before there was Trump—back in the gaudy nineties, when we didn’t think it was necessary to abandon all decorum to pursue spectacle—there was the Pop Tour, with Bono prancing around on stage, his powdered face all full of makeup, playing the devil.

What should the devil look like, anyhow: agitating, playful, and grim? Smug, calamitous, and shy? Unsteady in his gaze and in his walk, or stony-eyed—moss-bitten, even? Manic Bono found him in MacPhisto—furious, giddy and delighted. In performances in Italy, Bono-as-MacPhisto talked about how he missed Mussolini, and would leave messages for il Duce’s granddaughter, telling her what a great job the old man had done—and that he would have been very proud of her.

Thousands in the audience laughed, unsure whether from anxiety or the release of feelings unspoken. These moments became a hallmark of the church U2 never meant to form. To beat the devil, mock him, and he runs away. To mock the devil, all you’ve got to do is become a pop star. When this was a kernel of an idea, it was charming. Promising. But it always had to come to an end.

*

All That You Can’t Leave Behind was released on a precipice: in 2000, the year the world was supposed to end but didn’t, and one year before the September 11th terrorist attacks that made us feel that if the world hadn’t altogether ended, it had certainly changed forever. Imagine, injected between these two moments in time, an album with lyrics like:

And if the night runs over
And if the day won't last
And if our way should falter
Along the stony pass
It's just a moment, this time will pass

As Joshua Rothman writes in his 2014 New Yorker article “The Church of U2,” classic U2 “expresses a particular combination of faith and disquiet, exaltation and desperation that is too spiritual for rock but too strange for church.” For U2, Achtung Baby might be Ecclesiastes (“What are we going to do? / Now it’s all been said / No new ideas in the house / And every book has been read”), and All That You Can’t Leave Behind is straight-up Gospel (“Because Grace makes beauty / Out of ugly things / Grace finds beauty in everything / Grace finds goodness in everything”).

Post-Pop U2 emerged reborn and fully formed in those reeling first years of the millennium. With All That You Can’t Leave Behind, the band arrived at a place just beyond the yearning and doubt expressed in previous albums. In this way, All That You Can’t Leave Behind was a kind of culmination of the decades-long spiritual exploration of a rock band that took the devil seriously enough to bring him out on stage. These days, Bono needed to get in and out of Satan’s shoes quicker than before—his lips curling up into that evil grin, and then relaxing into grace.

At the time, All That You Can’t Leave Behind launched U2 back in the spotlight. U2 was back, and they were boss, and more than anything they were ready for the moment they found themselves in: what better band to play the first show in Madison Square Garden following 9/11, than a band that had been formed in the crucible of the Troubles of Northern Ireland, a band that could, in songs like “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” sing about terrorism and, somehow, make people want to dance.

*

Since then, of course, U2’s story has changed again. They came back, but then they were all too present: dancing silhouettes in Apple commercials, on their own black and red iPods, and then on everyone’s Music Libraries, whether you wanted them or not. By the time U2 made How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, Bono was everywhere, singing “Your love is teaching me how to kneel.” In Songs of Innocence, he sang, “You no longer got a hold on me / I’m out of Lucifer’s hands.”

Maybe the band’s embrace of commercialism lined up too nicely with their increasingly solidified Christian identity. In retrospect, certainty might be a harder sell than all that questioning. Maybe faith isn’t as cool as doubt, after all. But for me and all us weirdos standing dumbfounded in the lonely gust of wind that rushes through a high school hallway, U2’s crystallized faith wasn’t enough to shake our own.

High school—Bono would have shrugged it off. In a little while you’ll be blown by every breeze. Weightless as a notion. Flighty as a turkey vulture, drifting off across the ridge on the updraft, hungry for the smells of all the rotting shit the high schoolers tossed out of their backpacks as they walked to class. When the bell rang we could all walk out of the lunchroom together—me and Bono and the Edge, with Bono dancing up the amphitheater steps and gleefully pointing at the other weirdos. Edge’s steady gaze gives nothing away, or only a mild curiosity.  The moment aches on, and Edge just shakes his head. In a little while, you’ll be fine.

—Aaron Fallon & Martha Park