#179: ABBA, "The Definitive Collection" (2001)

To tell you I listened to ABBA on my own would be a total lie. In reality, I listened to ABBA because of my mom. Before that, though, there were the A*Teens.

Sometime between 1999 and 2001, a group of polished-but-punky tweens would dance around between commercial breaks on the Disney Channel. The lyrics were super easy to remember—“you can dance / you can ji-hive”—and I would remember them in a heartbeat. I was in third grade and felt as if I’d been let in on the secret. I finally knew what song everyone was going to be singing along to during lunch time, and how nobody knew who these people were. The band had two boys and two girls, and we all longed to be like them because of the green streaks in their blonde hair. I remember a classmate named Victoria got pink streaks sometime that year. I asked my mom if I could and she laughed, asking why. “Because the A*Teens have them.”

Today, I know that the A*Teens were a Swedish ABBA cover band full of—you guessed it—teens. Initially, target consumers like my nine-year-old-self at the time were drawn to the combination of crop tops and highlighter streaks. The smoggy music videos, bubbly tone and easy-to-remember lyrics, though, should have made me suspicious; or maybe it was my mom singing along. The first nine years of my life were committed to Bollywood music because American music in many ways did not occur to me, much less interest me (with the exception of the occasional “Say My Name” video on Disney Channel). When my mom sang along to “Dancing Queen” by the A*Teens, I didn’t think much of it at the time. I figured my mom knew the words because the video would play on television so many times, and she had just learned it.

Looking back, I remember that it made me happy. My mom and I rarely sang songs in English growing up, with the exception of songs from Barney or nursery rhymes. I grew up on Punjabi music and Bollywood because of my parents; American music never sounded rhythmic or like something you could dance to, much less interesting, while I was growing up. A*Teens was a good balance between the two mediums I felt like I struggled to identify with at school: white faces, but actually good (to me) music. My sister and I would just bop around during the music videos, oftentimes singing it before staying up past 9 P.M. to watch Indian tele-serials with our parents. When I look back at this time, it felt as if we were starting to figure it all out. I felt more “normal” than before.

*

I’m not embarrassed to admit that I didn’t realize the A*Teens were an ABBA cover band until a family road trip. Specifically, a family road trip in India. My mom rarely sees her sisters, which consequently means that my siblings and I rarely see our aunts and cousins in India unless we go to India. When we are in India, it usually means that we are going on a road trip with my mom and our aunts because we won’t be together for another few years.

When I was eleven, my sister and I went to India again with our mom. Our mom, aunts, and cousins all rented a van and went to a remote mountain village in India called Nainital. Before this time, we did not have portable DVD players or Walkmen that we could use to drown out noise. We were all together, usually our moms all gabbing with one another while the rest of us would play card games. Eventually, we would all decide that it would be time for singing games. Singing games? Essentially sing-a-longs.

And that’s when I heard my mom and aunts sing “Dancing Queen” together. At eleven, I was still young enough to appreciate and be unembarrassed by this moment and I joined in unapologetically, proudly shouting along out of tune with my aunts. We all laughed—heartily, no giggles—and I asked my aunts how they knew who the A*Teens were, told them how I only thought they were popular in America.

That’s when my mom and aunts laughed even harder, “This is ABBA. This is from our school days!” I still wasn’t embarrassed and, looking back, was surprised my mom and I had the same songs from our school days.

The last time I was in India was in 2014. All of us (aunts, cousins, uncles) went to Amritsar together. We rented a large van, and in the age of YouTube, my aunts were able to look up songs besides “Dancing Queen.” One aunt kept crooning, “Remember ‘Fernando?!’” while my cousin Purti said, “No no, sing ‘Mamma Mia!’” We were all taking turns recording videos of us singing and dancing to the songs, clapping on beat. A*Teens hadn’t mattered to begin with; this all started with the glory of ABBA. ABBA was what sisters sang with each other, to each other.

*

When writing this piece, I asked my mom if she remembers these moments of singing along to ABBA with her sisters. Did she even know what the band looked like when she was growing up? “I don’t care about those things!”

I asked if she had ever heard of The Definitive Collection, or cared to. In retrospect, she was sewing and did not want to be disturbed, but I was short on time (and ideas). “Stop bothering me!” So I kept it simple.

“What did you like about ABBA’s music?”

She didn’t even think about it. “The same way you and Ekta listen to and like music. I loved music too when I was younger. We loved listening to ABBA.”

—Upma Kapoor

#180: The Rolling Stones, "The Rolling Stones, Now!" (1965)

What a drag it is getting old. It’s not just that I date from 1965, like The Rolling Stones, Now! It’s also that my opinions, beliefs and knee-jerk reactions, which once were passably progressive, have become antiquated, even reactionary. I feel my age in the classroom when my students condemn the blinkered views of 17th- and 18th-century authors whom I revere, or when they make it clear that my own thinking about gender, race and sexuality belongs to another century. Kids are different today.

I also feel my age on Facebook, which is where I go to interact with folks to the left of me. Last summer, for instance, I got into a Facebook spat about the Rolling Stones. I was eavesdropping on a conversation between two strangers. One of them, a woke-seeming young man named Jason, declared the Rolling Stones “stone cold racists” and “classic racist cultural colonizers.”

The Stones, Clapton, etc. are not important artists. They are products for white people. As an artist I just had to get real about it. These types of bands started and are popular because they give racists a place to safely enjoy black art without having to appear subservient or even respectful of a black person. […] Richards and Clapton (Jimmy Page, etc.) pay lip service to black artists. But they strip mined what they created without a second thought. They probably don’t even acknowledge to themselves what they represent. They are classic racists.

His interlocutor surrendered at that point (“Thank you for that info. Now I’m glad i never paid a dime for their music. Lol”), but I took up the cause. I argued that the Stones had always acknowledged and honored their African American idols—most famously, getting Howlin’ Wolf on the TV show Shindig with them and sitting at his feet as he performed. Jason soon set me straight:

I don’t buy the photo ops and PR as genuine. It was all marketing slight [sic] of hand specifically designed to steal black music and re-market it being played by young white bands so the racist American audience would buy it. Elvis, Buddy Holly, Stones, right up to Beastie Boys (first number one hip hop album). It’s a standard marketing formula. I don’t consider the Stones artists on the same level as Wolf. They are not real.

I made one more effort to engage my adversary, proposing that there were many lazier, blander, and more cynical ways of stealing black music. “The Stones,” I proposed, “at least treated it as something to live up to rather than as something to water down.” I ended by asking, “Are there white singers/bands whose relation to black musical culture you can approve?” I got no reply. Jason was finished with me.

The Rolling Stones, Now! might seem to prove Jason’s point. It stems from the (brief) period in which the Stones were primarily re-marketing black music—strip-mining it, if you will. The album has twelve songs, and only four are Jagger-Richards originals (“Heart of Stone” being the best-known). The rest are renditions of songs written and first recorded by African American musicians. There are two versions of Chuck Berry recordings, two songs belonging to other Chess Studios recording artists (Howlin’ Wolf, Bo Diddley), two songs by fairly well-known soul singers (Otis Redding, Solomon Burke), and two songs from comparatively obscure R&B singers (Alvin Robinson, Barbara Lynn). In 1965, this selection would have struck few people as racist, of course. More likely it would have seemed the opposite: an eager embrace of African American culture, and a scrupulous desire to emulate it. The Stones were working hard to produce credible versions of these songs, and (pace Jason) their covers are if anything too respectful and subservient. They follow the originals closely, the changes mostly coming from the guitars of Brian Jones and Keith Richards having to compensate for a missing horn section. (Jones does this brilliantly with the fey slide lick that substitutes for the horn riff in “Down Home Girl.”) They show themselves to be sonic chameleons, mimicking the loose jalopy rattle of “You Can’t Catch Me,” the pulsating, reverberant throb of “Mona,” the jaunty groove of “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love,” the languid, swampy feel of “Down Home Girl.” One can detect amphetamines goosing the tempos a bit, but otherwise meticulous imitation is the order of the day.

That doesn’t free them from the charge of exploitation, however. A lovingly crafted forgery is still a crime when passed off as an original, right? The Stones were presumably paying songwriting royalties to the original artists, all of whom are properly credited here, but they were also profiting from these pale imitations. Moreover, they have been pretty dismissive of this apprentice work; Jagger, at least, seems to have agreed with Jason that they were not “real” in the way Howlin’ Wolf was. He famously asked in a 1968 interview, “What’s the point in listening to us doing ‘I’m a King Bee’ when you can hear Slim Harpo do it?” That question admits some plausible answers, however. Maybe you can’t hear Slim Harpo do it. It’s easy enough today to summon up the originals via the internet, but in 1965? And how would you, a teenager in Manchester or London, even know you wanted to hear this music without the intervention of local musicians? The radio, maybe, and those famous American sailors in Liverpool (“Cunard Yanks”) bringing vinyl treasures from the new world. But many of us, even in more enlightened times, have needed the Rolling Stones to get us interested in the blues. Jagger mused, in that same interview, “We did blues to turn people on, but why they should be turned on by us is unbelievably stupid.” Stupid, perhaps—but doesn’t the opposite situation, in which I never learn there is a Slim Harpo, reflect a more unfortunate stupidity?

So at least we can defend the album in 1965. But do we need The Rolling Stones, Now! now? Does it belong in our top 500? Is it really better than Natty Dread (#181) and almost as good as Abba’s Definitive Collection (#179)? Is it even a real album, this U.S.-only release cobbled together from stray singles, cuts left off the first two U.S releases, and a bit of new material? Do we need it for the moody David Bailey photographs, or for the faux-Clockwork Orange liner notes (“Cast deep in your pockets for loot to buy this disc of groovies and fancy words. If you don’t have bread, see that blind man knock him on the head, steal his wallet and low [sic] and behold you have the loot”)? Other than nostalgia and antiquarianism and vinyl fetishism, is there any justification for The Rolling Stones, Now!, when you can compile in minutes (I just did) a Spotify playlist of the originals and “enjoy black art” in its unadulterated and undiluted form?

The answer to all these questions should be “yes,” but I guess I’m not really sure. Maybe this album is just a relic. What I am certain of, is that you need to know “Mona,” and “You Can’t Catch Me” and “Down Home Girl” and “The Little Red Rooster” and “Pain in My Heart” and the rest. They will enrich your life; they will explain your existence to you. Whether you get familiar with the originals or with the Stones’ mostly plausible covers (only “Pain in My Heart” eludes them entirely) doesn’t really matter to me. If authenticity is your bag, go for the originals. If you are interested in the early works of the world’s greatest rock and roll band, get The Rolling Stones, Now! But if you plan to dismiss the Rolling Stones out of hand, well then you’d better pay your own damn homage to Howlin’ Wolf, Bo Diddley, and the rest.

—Will Pritchard

#182: Fleetwood Mac, "Fleetwood Mac" (1975)

For years, I believed that Fleetwood Mac (1975) was Fleetwood Mac’s first album; in a sense, it was. It was the first to feature the band’s most successful lineup, as rounded out by Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, the first to break the band into American rock consciousness, and the first built upon the swaying, lilting California ambiance that would become the band’s musical trademark and bedrock throughout the height of their popularity. It was the album that first led to public speculation that Stevie Nicks was a literal witch, the first that saw Christine McVie and Stevie alternating vocals to best salute their talents and songwriting ranges. It was the first on which the percussion section got due creative license. In many ways, while listening without any knowledge of the band or their history, the album feels like a birth, forward momentum accelerating beyond itself, a door opening, a fresh breeze coming off the mountain. Rumours is the album that cemented Fleetwood Mac in rock history, but the self-titled is the truck that poured the concrete.

If Fleetwood Mac is to be called a birth, let us specify that it is a reincarnation. It is not, in fact, the band’s first album—it’s not even the band’s first eponymous album. A previous iteration of the band, one that was bluesy and frenetic and entirely male-anchored, released another album, Fleetwood Mac, as their full length debut in 1968. That album, heavily influenced by the British blues scene as it was, feels miles and light years away from its 1975 counterpart—the vibe is less “fog rolling off the sea in gauzy sunlight” and more “smoke filtering through the window of a creaky door in a basement pub.”

Though nine albums and almost as many member lineups separate the two, the 1975 album feels like a direct, if unintentional, repudiation of Peter Green’s original efforts, a near total musical rebuilding of the band despite the presence of two founding members. Recorded mere weeks after Buckingham and Nicks joined the group, Fleetwood Mac is an album built primarily on material that is old in one way or another. Most obvious is the band’s live setlist mainstay “World Turning,” a rearrangement of the earlier album’s track “The World Keeps on Turning,” but nearly every other track had been written for some project, including nearly all of its hits, including, perhaps most serendipitously, Stevie Nicks’s pre-Fleetwood emotional masterpiece “Landslide.”

A live version of the song, recorded decades after the self-titled album, would go on to be one of the band’s bestselling tracks of all time, spawning several successful covers by the likes of the Smashing Pumpkins and the Dixie Chicks and being featured in innumerable books and movies and television shows. To some, it is the definitive slow Fleetwood Mac song. Ironic, then, that the song is the direct result of Stevie Nicks grappling with whether or not to continue pursuing a career in music at all. As she would go on to say in interviews, Stevie wrote the song while supporting Lindsey’s spotty bookings after their first duo release flopped and she was considering returning to school in lieu of chasing her recording dream. She looked at the Rockies surrounding her, the only time she lived near snow, and penned the groundbreaking song (which she often refers to as a poem) in a matter of days.

I cannot discuss Fleetwood Mac without talking about “Landslide,” and I can’t talk about “Landslide” without discussing how it first came into my life.

One of my top five least favorite books is Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower. I’ve ranted through my litany of grievances innumerable times in the decade since I read it, but I’ll give the summary: the book reads like a post-season-three episode of Glee mixed, tonally, with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind fanfiction. The plot is overwhelmed with varying types of trauma handled with varying (and often inappropriate) degrees of care or attention, and filled with characters who could be interesting, whole people if Chbosky had allowed them to bloom beyond the stereotypes and after-school special issues they were written to illustrate. In place of meaningful looks at the lives of the teens populating its universe, Perks offers pithy, “relatable” lines of dialogue, platitudes on angst, quick resolutions to complicated and socially ingrained problems. Ultimately, though the book wants to be an emotional guidebook, a bible of feeling, it seems more concerned with performing the character’s pain as opposed to letting the reader truly experience it.

One of the few standout scenes in Perks features, of all songs, “Landslide.” In it, the three main characters are driving through a tunnel after a dramatic homecoming dance, awash with possibility and anguish and feeling of all stripes. The track begins to play off a mixtape and Sam, the requisite manic pixie dream girl, stands up in the bed of the truck, stretching her arms and declaring that she feels infinite. The line has since become a meme, and the scene can seem a bit overwrought with cliche youthful hopefulness, but there’s something about the earnest mix of desperation and almost impossible belief in possibility in “Landslide” which finally humanizes a story so previously detached from nuance.

I was a know-it-all, angsty teen when I read the book, bored by its performative anguish as I was dealing with my own personal emotional tumult and was fresh off of my first time reading The Bell Jar. I knew Fleetwood Mac, but only a few megahits in passing, like “Don’t Stop” and “The Chain.” I’m very attuned to music as a complement to writing, so despite my general annoyance with the book, I felt obligated to experience the written moments as closely as possible to how the characters would, songs played and all. When I first listened to the song as a necessary accompaniment to reading that passage, I felt the story transform. I didn’t see a cardboard prop of a character grappling with issues ultimately meant to be a plot device for the protagonist; instead, I saw a young girl on the precipice of herself and her life, the possibility and terror and splendor of it all, trying to contain and be contained by it all at once. In the song’s raw emotion, I saw and felt infinity.

Stevie Nicks was twenty five when she wrote “Landslide,” and twenty seven when the eponymous album was released. Retrospectively, her existential anxiety seems laughable for someone so young (and her talent for expressing it mammoth), and yet that disconnect is precisely what gives the song and its containing album its weight as well as its beauty. To feel that deeply, to express it that eloquently and achingly, is nothing short of purely distilled human experience.

“Landslide” seems to follow me wherever I and my emotional uncertainty go. It was there on the countless, endless night drives through my undergraduate ennui leading up to the void of graduation. It was there when I avoided seeing my high school mentor during a terminal illness, and there, too, when I had to face her funeral. It was there when I moved out on my own, it was there after every fight with my parents, it was there in a conversation with my boss about the fleeting nature of aging. It has, in fact, been the soundtrack to the seasons of my life. After every listen, I feel more whole, more in tune with anxiety and all its facets. It is both a balm and a sting, a feeling like I cannot breathe, am being crushed, can feel all of eternity closing in above and within me, a pressure and release all at once.

—Moira McAvoy

#183: Willie Nelson, "Red Headed Stranger" (1975)

While in India a few years back, I traveled with a friend to the Taj Mahal on a day thick with fog. Down the road along the River Yamuna, past the camel carts and kids selling Taj snow globes, we could barely see ten feet in front of us. Our rickshaw driver was concerned we might not be able to see the mausoleum through the haze at all.

Inside the grounds, the pools designed to reflect the Taj reflected nothing, but we kept walking until the pure white marble of the Taj appeared a little at a time, like a ghost rising from the mist.

*

In Red Headed Stranger, we meet a man who has been betrayed by his lover. He seeks revenge by murdering her and her new lover, and then he finds new love and his pain is vindicated.

The story is simple, in a 1901 Wild West kind of way. The music is simple (Nelson used his own band to back him and many of the songs were recorded in a single take, relying on the three-chord structure of old country-western music and Nelson’s raw vocals). But the emotions are complex. Red Headed Stranger is about the kind of love that makes you do things outside of the norm. It’s a love that’s ever-changing and easily lost in the way that makes you strive to remember, to be remembered, or both.

*

It is said that the great Mughal emperor Shah Jahan confined himself in a dark room for two years after the death of his wife, Mumtaz Mahal. To prove his love and immortalize her memory, Shah Jahan recruited the world’s best architects and craftsmen to construct the Taj Mahal, the Crown Palace, a world wonder. The construction took 20 years to complete; the materials were carted in from faraway lands on the backs of a thousand elephants.

When the mausoleum was completed, Shah Jahan cut off the hands of the chief architect so nothing like the Taj could ever be built again.

*

In Red Headed Stranger, after heartache, love is described as a burning ember, where only memories remain. The Stranger says of his ex-lover: Through the ages, I’ll remember blue eyes crying in the rain. This refrain, low and slow and beautiful, comes right before he rides into town to kill her.

*

The Taj Mahal tour guide told our group that we were not allowed to go up in one of the minarets, the tall tower at each corner of the mausoleum originally used for call to prayer, since a man had flung himself from the top of it. Here the question is not why, which cannot be answered, but how. I imagine a man stepping barefoot onto the windowsill, his toes curling against the white marble, his eyes open as his body drops. I stared up at the minaret, the top barely visible in the fog, and considered how it must feel to fall.

I can consider this to the extent that I can consider how it must feel to ride into town on a horse and shoot the person I love with a smile still on her face. It’s something past imagination, and past empathy, except to say that there are human emotions too large to explain or contain.

At key points during the narrative, Willie sidesteps explanation altogether. After we learn of the murder the Stranger commits, we hear: Don’t cross him, don’t boss him, he’s wild in his sorrow / He’s riding and hiding his pain. The pain is acknowledged, but it’s a fruitless warning, looking back on what can’t be changed.

Later, during the second-to-last song on the record, Willie sings: Well, it’s the same old song / It’s right and it’s wrong, and living is just something I do. The line is couched in one of the happiest songs on the record, which paints the full picture of redemption with the Stranger finding new love. That the line comes here bothers me, because I can’t make sense of it against the rest of the story. It feels like a cop out.

*

Red Headed Stranger ends with an instrumental song called “Bandera.” You can hear echoes of the melodies that have recurred throughout, but the song is entirely its own, with a piano coming in about halfway through playing a tune that suggests resolution.

In Spanish, “Bandera” means flag. It’s not clear what that title means. It doesn’t evoke a literal flag flying in the wind or feel thematic at all. But the music does leave you with a feeling—one that encourages you to start again and to remember somehow that, Just when we think it’s all over / It’s only begun.

—Lacy Barker

#184: Madonna, "The Immaculate Collection" (1990)

The following is a work of fiction. Any similarity to real names, settings, or situations is purely coincidental.
 

The day after the election, when the school gathered for its daily assembly, the English teacher, Sadie Jaffe, refused to stand for the pledge of allegiance. That day, her thirty-ninth birthday, began like a nightmare. She woke, retrieved her iPhone from her bedside table and read the New York Times alert telling her he had won the election. When she saw the tide turning the night before, she’d taken a Xanax and crept into an uneasy sleep. After waking, she stood in the shower before work sobbing and too indifferent, too instantly drained of hope and of energy, to wipe away the snot and shampoo running down her face, over her body, and eventually finding its way to the drain.

She arrived at work puffy-eyed but ready to lecture on Langston Hughes’s “Evil,” something she had planned in the case of this worst-case scenario, now a reality, and yet a misty iridescent denial stayed with her through the day and whispered that someone would announce that this was a mistake, for it was. It was. The conservative all-girls private school catered to the privileged, but paid well. Sadie blamed herself for taking this job, for not seeing what type of place it was to begin with. She felt like wearing a hair sweater or flogging herself as she listened to the glee of the students talk about their pussy-grabbing president-elect. She saw her students, really saw them, and loved them and all the wonderful things they could do for the world, but could not save them from themselves or what they had been taught. She couldn’t save herself either, and this year, which had been infused heavily with the election, she relied upon Xanax to make it through her day and took extra before chapel, where it seemed that a line-up of manic clergy took to the altar to speak about random and offensive subjects in the name of Jesus Christ. These people were not sympathetic like mentality ill people, but simply hypocritical men breathing the death rattle of the changing of the world making their professions and importance obsolete. She simply could bear no more and ceased to attend chapel, but could not escape attendance of the daily assembly.

When she did not stand for the pledge of allegiance the day after the election, it did not go unnoticed; however, Sadie did not care, for her thoughts were focused on the semantics of the pledge: words written not by the founding fathers but pounded out due to McCarthyism. As the students and faculty said in unison “and liberty and justice for all,” she began to laugh and cry simultaneously and felt the faculty turn to look, shaking their expensively highlighted heads and whispering to one another. One other teacher had not stood; she was young, had blonde surfer hair, and this was her first year teaching here after attending a west coast school. When she had told Sadie that she was a libertarian, Sadie had just thought “bless her heart,” and realized that the young teacher either contained an innocent kindness and happy countenance that indicated resilience, or perhaps life had yet to fuck her over in a real adult fashion. With only a small bit of guilt, Sadie held only indifference as to which it was.

Sadie went home that night and drank the split of champagne that was meant for celebrating the first female president and listened to Patti Smith. She felt insulated by the books that lined the walls of the living room of her condo, for it was the books that kept her company and substituted for adult interaction. She checked her phone for missed calls or messages. It was her birthday and her son, Knox, who started college just a couple of months ago, had not called her. She thought back to college. Had she remembered her parents’ birthdays? Probably not. She could not remember going to the student union for a greeting card and stamps or using the precious minutes on a calling card to phone them. However, living on campus was short-lived, and at twenty-one she had become a parent herself. After that there was only one birthday that mattered, and that was Knox’s. The years flew by raising a child on her own, though not easily, and yet she looked younger than her age. This year as she had met the other parents at college orientation, on more than one occasion they had exclaimed, “But you are so young!” before realizing almost instantaneously their blunder by calculating in their heads that she must have had him too young.

More worried than hurt by Knox’s forgetfulness, she reluctantly checked social media to see if he had posted anything. Sadie abhorred social media, and the last time she had posted to her page was in summer: the photographs of herself and Knox in Greece weeks before he left for college. He had chosen to go to an SEC school in Mississippi to major in studio art, and to her surprise he joined a fraternity. She refused to pay his dues, but his all but absent father living on the west coast was more than happy to pay them. She found Knox’s page and was relieved to see his last post was less than an hour ago. It was a photograph, in front of the fraternity house, of a bunch of college guys dressed in khakis, ties, and blazers. She spotted Knox in the first row smiling. Dressed like the others, he had one of the disgusting red hats on his head that said, “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” Then she noticed the banner they held, a bed sheet with spray paint that said, “LOCK HER UP!”

“Jesus Fucking Christ,” she whispered. Her hands shook as she automatically began to phone him, but stopped herself. Soon he would make his monthly plea for money via phone or even drive the hour and a half back to Memphis to do laundry and eat something decent. She needed to calm down before she spoke to him; she needed a plan, an intervention, a shaman to sprinkle waters and anoint him with oil. She put her phone down, took a valium, and went to sleep, not noticing that she had been crying ever since seeing the picture.

*

Walking into assembly the next day, the sweet girl with blonde surfer hair told her that an administrator warned her to stand for the pledge or there would be trouble. While telling Sadie this, the sweet girl with blonde surfer hair seemed distracted by Sadie’s clothes and hair. Though it was November, Sadie had worn a turtleneck under a brightly embroidered sundress from Mexico with red woolen tights underneath and Clark’s Wallabees on her feet. Her hair had been braided and pinned up like Frida Kahlo’s. Sadie applied bright red lipstick effortlessly without aid of a mirror as the sweet girl with blonde surfer hair spoke; this also seemed to mesmerize the young woman and made Sadie want to interrupt her to tell her that the lipstick without a mirror thing came with time, but instead Sadie said nothing. When the girl with blonde surfer hair finished talking, Sadie paused and smiled a soft, warm smile without showing her teeth and placed her palm over the sweet girl with blonde surfer hair's cheek. Sadie wanted to tell her to join a commune in the Catskills, or go live on the beach in Hawaii and learn to surf and find a beautiful young surfer to fuck (maybe even fall in love with him or her), or, at the very least, get a Fulbright and get the out of the country for a while. Yet she didn’t say a word. Sadie withdrew her hand from the young woman’s cheek then turned and went into the assembly where she did not stand for the pledge. Again, everyone took note.

Thursday, on her ride home from school, she gave up on listening to Patti Smith, Bob Dylan, or any of the other musicians she usually listened to. A musician friend of hers once told her that her taste in music was of the genre of “Tenure Rock.” She dug in the glovebox and found the CD that she wanted: The Immaculate Collection by Madonna. She had bought it at a garage sale recently. She liked physical copies of music even as she conceded to subscriptions to music services, and she made sure that when she bought a new car that it had both bluetooth and a CD player. The CD slid into the slot with a swish, and she began listening to “Holiday.” Madonna, she thought, never got credit for being the first third-wave feminist. People called her an entertainer and not a singer, which might be fair enough, but no one said such things about Bob Dylan, who hardly had a great singing voice and just won a fucking Nobel for literature: poet, yes; singer, no. Reminiscent of the election, people criticized Madonna’s lyrics, her clothes (or lack thereof), her attitude, her constant reinventions of herself, and yet this seemed to encourage her to be more of a provocateur, more of a boss, and more powerful. She did what she had come to do, and she did it with a precise, almost surgical, precision. She did not need the word “feminist” lit up behind her at a concert; she lived the word and blazed the trail for others in her wake, leaving them to realize that they had more than two binary options to choose from: virgin or whore. Her final move of late, her newest reinvention and arguably the one causing more critique than any other in her past, was her refusal to “act and dress her age.” Madonna refused to don the veil of invisibility as women in their fifties were implicitly told to do. Sadie thought of Drake wincing at her kiss during a performance at an awards show. She wondered if Madonna went home that night and felt embarrassed, slighted, or ashamed, but preferred to think that she relished the attention, albeit bad attention. “Drake…what a little shit…what does he know?” Sadie said aloud to no one.

Most of the songs on the CD were from her childhood up until high school. Reagan. Bush. Clinton. What she would do to have any of them back. She had owned the CD before. Knox’s father had bought it for her at a used CD store during their short romance. It was the only gift he had ever bought her, and she had lost it in one of her many moves as she worked to earn more income to move Knox and herself into increasingly nicer apartments and eventually into a condo.

She had named him Knox after her hometown in Tennessee; it seemed fitting to install some piece of her southern roots, seeing as she gave birth to him at Columbia Presbyterian in New York City. Her parents had not been present, and showed no interest in supporting her choice to keep the child. Years later, they changed their mind and wanted to see Sadie and Knox. Sadie had lost all interest in seeing them and had refused. Connor’s parents had paid the medical bills, and that meant that her checkups had been at a fancy OB/GYN on the Upper West Side. They had the best magazines; W was her favorite with its oversized pages, endless pictures of celebrities and socialites, and fashion advertisements; however, she only remembered one photo from the plethora she viewed over the course of her pregnancy. The photographer had been a guest at the party and had quickly pulled out his camera to catch the shot, or so the caption read. It was a picture of Madonna seated at the party: her body faced what seemed to be the center of a group of people, yet her head was turned in response to a hand placed on her shoulder to gain her attention. The hand belonged to her ex-husband from long ago, Sean Penn. The photographer caught her look of recognition after she had turned. Her face gazed upwards meeting the eyes of her ex, and the expression on her face said so many things at once: surprise, happiness, grief, but above all else it showed vulnerability. It showed that she still loved him, just as she had declared in her documentary, filmed while she was dating Warren Beatty, that the love of her life was Sean. Madonna had requested that the scene be cut, and the director refused, for it was the only part of the film that showed her as a real person. At the time, she wondered if she would ever get over the heartache of Connor not wanting anything else to do with her or their future child. She did (and quickly), navigating her last year at Barnard with an infant. The name “Connor” became associated with strings of profanity when Knox was sick and a paper was due or traffic was bad and she didn’t reach the daycare on time.

The road, ironically named “Park Avenue,” ran parallel to the railroad tracks and offered views of dated ranchers eventually emptying itself into a less than desirable part of town before bringing Sadie to her condo in an artsy historic neighborhood. Within blocks of her home, her phone rang, and Sophie accepted the call, expecting Knox.

“Hey there,” the voice on the other end greeted her. She recognized the voice: Sam of years’ past. Sadie thought briefly of hitting “end” or saying “hello” over and over, acting as if she could not hear him, but with the thought she exhaled audibly. Sam took the sigh as an acknowledgement and continued, “I tried calling you last night for your birthday, but it was probably too late.”

Yes, it was too late, she thought. Everything about Sam was late or a miss. Five years ago, he had worked with her for a year; he was an art teacher. They had formed a fast friendship that slowly developed into something more. What it had developed into had never been defined, and soon he left and moved to somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. Portland? No, Seattle? It was somewhere that vaguely reminded her of flannel and grunge music, so it must be Seattle. After telling him that she fully supported his move, she distanced herself from him and Sam was filed in the “def con five scrapbook” in her head, though after she had wept over him in private. He called her on holidays and her birthday. Sometimes she answered.

“Thank you for thinking of me, Sam. It was very thoughtful,” Sadie answered slowly and with coolness, and a silence followed.

“Okay, if we are doing things this way…you sound like shit,” Sam said.

Sadie suppressed a laugh at his statement, yet this angered her at the same time. Sam read the subtext of Sadie like a dime store novel, and constantly reminded her of how uncomplicated she was (despite her best efforts to seem opaque).

“The world is shit, Sam,” Sadie said and parked her car in her designated spot at the condo, “and Knox has turned into some horrible plantation owner caricature.” She put her palm to her forehead.

“I think he might be rebelling. You know, making up for his years of being perfect as a teenager,” Sam said, and she could hear him lighting a cigarette.

“I wouldn’t mind if he were smoking pot, but becoming a member of the alt-right is a bit much. It is unacceptable. I didn’t raise him to be this way. A few months ago he was a cello player who walked around with a sketch book.”

Sam sighed, “Well, it is rebelling. That means you don’t get to choose his path of rebellion, and it probably means he will choose something that actually goes against your values.”

“Don’t use the word ‘values.’ It sounds so damn Dan Quayle, Sam.” Sadie began to cry.

“Look, I will talk to him,” Sam said. That was one thing that he got right: he kept his relationship with Knox intact. She knew that they spoke regularly. Knox had fallen for Sam just as much as Sadie had.

“I would appreciate that. Look, I am at home now, and I really need to just get myself inside and…”

“Sadie, I hope you have a great year ahead of you. I miss you—”

“Bye, Sam,” Sadie interrupted and hit end. She couldn’t stand it when he said that he missed her.

*

Inside her condo, Sadie pondered her life while she stretched out on her couch. It was a life so small it was peacefully contained in this small space that she had worked so doggedly to purchase. Her home had become her refuge; it had the strength of a fort and shielded her from the other disappointments in her life, but its four walls also kept her hidden, unseen. Her job had kept her busy all these years, but what had it kept her from? She had a son, but he was an adult now. She had provided him with so much, but that time had passed. The world had changed since she became a mother in college; the rage of the ignorant and the privileged had been awakened, and there was nothing she could do to change it, except her own small share of course, and she would do that, but she could not take responsibility for everyone else. The couch cushions became softer, the night became darker as Sadie meditated upon the thought of her own part…and began to think of the plans she had for herself so long ago before falling asleep.

Sadie woke the next morning fully rested. She had not taken any of her anxiety medicine and her sleep had been deep and peacefully opposed to the muggy, drugged sleep that the Xanax provided her. She cried only for a few minutes in the shower, applied mascara and lipstick, and reverted to her normal head-to-toe black wardrobe choices. She felt lighter somehow, resigned, and wrote this off as it being Friday, but something had changed. The air outside was crisp against her face and the sun shone as brightly as it possibly could in November.

She let Madonna serenade her down Park Avenue and into the gates of the school, and did not notice the stares of the other faculty as she poured her coffee into her thermal mug in the teacher’s lounge. When the secretary came to retrieve her and tell her to go to the headmistress’s office, she was only mildly surprised, but still, her stomach dropped.

As she entered the office, she saw that all her superiors were present, along with a few board members who were but well-groomed, well-married jobless mothers of students. Sadie marveled briefly, as she always did, at the headmistress’s once-a-week set hair. How neat it was. How solid and unchangeable it was! Hair like an institution, an entity in its own right. Sadie giggled as she sat down.

“Sadie, we have a problem,” the headmistress said, scowling at Sadie’s giggle.

“A serious problem,” another administrator said.

“Yes, I see,” Sadie said, leaning forward and interlacing her fingers over her knee. The headmistress opened her mouth to speak again, but Sadie was quicker, “I am resigning effective immediately. I have plans…huge plans!”

For the next fifteen minutes, Sadie told the administrators and the board members about her plans in great detail. She had, after all, listened to them, ad nauseum, for years. They stared at her with great confusion. When she was finished, she grabbed the legal pad that the headmistress held, scribbled the date, wrote, “I quit!,” and signed her name. She replaced the pad on the table and left the office.

Before leaving the campus with a box and accompanied by a security officer, she stopped the sweet girl with blonde surfer hair in the hall, handed her a folded note, and said, “I would love to have coffee with you sometime. I regret not getting to know you better.”

*

“But what are you going to do with our home?” Knox asked Sadie as she taped up another box of books.

“I am renting it out for a year while I am gone. I’m coming back.  Everything will be put back in it’s place. Our little fortress of books. A nice professor who is visiting Rhodes is staying here,” Sadie said as she hoisted the box on top of the others to be placed in the storage unit.

“Is this because of me?”

“No. It’s because of me. It’s what I need,” Sadie replied and started loading another box with books. “You are an adult now, but that comes with responsibilities. While I am gone, you’ll have to find a way to deal with those…like paying your car insurance and health insurance on your own…maybe getting a part-time job…earning for those expenses and spending money.”

“How do you expect me to get health insurance?”

“Well, it’s called Obamacare, or the ACA. I would register now if I were you. I don’t know if it will be around much longer though,” Sadie said and Knox frowned.

“You are doing this to punish me,” he said looking around the room.

“No, I am doing this for the benefit of us both. You’ll see. I feel like I have been asleep for years. Don’t do that, Knox. Listen to yourself,” Sadie said as she brushed a stray twig of hair from Knox’s brow. “Look, let’s get these boxes loaded and I want you to help me do something very important. I want to go and adopt a dog from the shelter to take with me to Marfa. I can bring a dog with me to my shifts at the bookstore.”

“A dog? After all the years that I begged for a dog and now you get one,” Knox said with a serious pout that made him look twelve again.

“The dog will be our dog, and you’ll have plenty of time with him when you come out this summer,” she replied and put another box on the stack.

“Why would you want to open a bookstore here?  Why not stay in Marfa? They are becoming obsolete. It’s not profitable anymore; they’re all shutting down.”

“Because they are needed, and it has always been what I have wanted to do. I have a home here, but I just need to get away for a minute. When I get back and open it up, I would love for you to curate the art and music books. You know much more of what to get than I would.” Sadie turned and saw Knox smile before quickly concealing it.

“Why go to Marfa to work in a bookstore?”

“I told you, I have to learn the business.”

“I know, but why Marfa?”

“I’ve always wanted to go there.  It’s a place that an artist built.”

“It’s that simple, Mom?”

“Yes, it’s that simple,” Sadie replied and watched her son. His dark brow furrowed as he stared out the window. He looked so much like her, especially his expression of concern, yet the lines disappeared when his face relaxed. How lucky he was to be his age, a magic age, with everything in front of him and nothing to lose. Functioning with a naivety of how the world works and having to be an adult at the same time. She didn’t blame him for joining a club for males; he’d been stuck with a doting mother for too long. However, she thought that the simple task of obtaining and paying for health insurance and other expenses would straighten his politics out; perhaps it wouldn’t though, and Sadie was okay with that…almost okay with that.

Knox turned toward Sadie with his arms open. Without waiting, he fell into her arms, and, though he was taller than she was by a head, he stooped over, resting his cheek on her collarbone, and tucked his head under her chin just as he had a million times before over the course of his life.

—Edie Pounders

#192: The Flying Burrito Brothers, "The Gilded Palace of Sin" (1969)

Let’s start with the Nudie suits. When the band sported them in 1969 for the album cover of Gilded Palace of Sin, the Ukrainian-born, Hollywood-based tailor Nudie Cohn had by then outfitted at least half of the country stars who had graced the stage of the Grand Ole Opry with his elaborate embroidered and rhinestone-studded suits. By 1969, rhinestones, spotlights, and country music were indelibly linked. Like the rap industry of today, the country-music industry was, then and always, about glitz and fame. It was about making it past your poor roots and becoming a star. As the rap industry is about escaping the projects, the country-music industry was about escaping rural America. Country was about gold records, large shiny belt buckles, seeing your name in the marquee lights.

In regards to rap culture: Cornell West has written that Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Let Freedom Ring!” became “‘Bling! Bling!’—as if freedom were reducible to simply having material toys.” In wealth-obsessed America, the freedom we seek is less about the opportunity to pursue a spiritually fulfilled or a richly meaningful life and more about cash money.

The country music that also glosses the meaning of freedom commodified the rural American experience and turned it into profit; it was about capitalizing on one’s humble upbringing by conjuring all of its sellable images—dirt roads and hayfields and rivers and creeks and oak trees—while at the same time turning them into nostalgias, leaving the rural life behind. To make it —to become a star—meant to make it out of rural America. Living in the country was the past, and that’s what made country songs pure and sad and very big money among a rapidly urbanizing and increasingly wealthier and more depressed American population.

It was the “outlaw” country singer Waylon Jennings who in 1977, eight years after the influence of Gilded Palace had seeped in, insisted, “I don’t need my name in the marquee lights,” who suggested going back to Luckenbach, Texas (pop. 3) to live simply, with music, friends, and love, and renounce success. It’s funny that the term “outlaw” used to describe Jennings and other musicians who shunned the industry’s “slick” production, its rhinestones and marquee lights and gilded palaces of sin, means to have broken the law and to be a fugitive, which implies a restriction of freedom. It’s as if to seek fortune was to follow the law, while to shun material wealth was to break the law and thus to have one’s freedoms restricted.

“Baby, let’s sell your diamond ring / Buy some boots and faded jeans and go away.” To be a fugitive was to return to the country. But the fugitives who fled Nashville and Hollywood came later, in the late ’70s. The pianist David Barry, who played in L.A.’s music scene, has said that in the Flying Burrito Bros.’ time, “Real country stars didn’t want to wear [jeans and boots], because it suggested they came from country’s poor white roots.”

Real country stars lived in Hollywood. They wore Nudie suits.

That the suit that’s said to have launched Nudie Cohn into fame, one worn by a trying-to-make-it country singer named Tex Williams in 1948, featured a covered wagon and wagon wheels is not uninteresting. The covered wagon as American symbol stands first for manifest destiny, that notion that swept the new inhabitants of the continent ever westward, into already-inhabited territories that they believed, or made themselves believe, God had intended for them to have—what is now Mexico and Texas and New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado, Utah, Oregon, and Washington. And California, the farthest West of the continent that embodied and made complete this notion of expansion.

The term manifest destiny was first used by a journalist named John L. O’Sullivan in an editorial in favor of the annexation of Texas, in 1845. He asserted the American Anglo-Saxons’ “manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”

Three years after O’Sullivan’s editorial, when gold was found at Sutter’s Mill in Coloma, California, the Rush began, and covered wagons rolled in steady streams, and pack horses plodded in droves, making their way to the land that symbolized then and now both freedom and bling bling, or the material—if not spiritual, mental, psychological, or otherwise—freedom that bling bling affords. (“In your high society you cry all day,” Jennings would later sing.)

One hundred thousand Native Californians were killed or died of disease in those first twenty gold-rushed years, and by 1900 the Native population in California had dropped from perhaps a million to 16,000 people, while Los Angeles hit a population of over 100,000. It was exactly 100 years after the Gold Rush began that Nudie Cohn, newly relocated to Hollywood, convinced the struggling Tex Williams to buy him a sewing machine with the money he’d made from an auctioned horse.

With the sewing machine, Nudie made Tex’s covered-wagon-covered suit that began his career of selling high-Western-style wear to stars at exorbitant prices. As Nudie rose to fame, he became known for promoting himself shamelessly, paying cash for purchases with dollar bills on which a sticker of his own face covered George Washington’s.

Nudie designed the famous gold lamé suit that Elvis wore in 1959 on the cover of his album of hit singles called 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t be Wrong. Released by Hollywood’s RCA Victor, it turned into a bona fide Gold Record. Its cover featured no less than 16 identical Elvises in gold lamé suits, a fact that, coupled with its title and Gold status, puts the Elvis phenomenon in direct conversation with the German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay called “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” which argued that the aura of a work of art is devalued the more it is reproduced. (Hence the dollar bill is not-regrettably defaced, and, though it would take some time to explain the leap, hence also inflation, wherein the more money that is produced the less value it has, meaning that the $10,000 Elvis paid for his gold-lamé Nudie suit would have cost him $85,000 or so today.)

This idea resonates with the oft-told (and most often laughed at as outlandish) Native American belief that having one’s photograph taken robs a person of their soul. The duplicated Elvis photographs on the record cover look like figurines, toys ready for sale. Elvis would spend the next decade in Hollywood making films that preceded his long psychological crash and drug addiction that ended in 1977 with a pharmie-induced heart attack.

But when kid Gram Parsons—lead and harmony vocals, guitar, piano, and organ for the Flying Burrito Bros.—saw Elvis in Waycross, Georgia, Elvis was still 21, and his aura captivated the nine-year-old Gram. Elvis was a strange and different bird. He had grown up in Tupelo, Mississippi and in Memphis, Tennessee, sometimes in public housing projects in predominantly African-American neighborhoods, hearing blues musicians on Beale Street, and singing hymns in a Pentecostal church in which the Lord was made of blood, sweat, tears, and spirit, was a Lord who traveled through music, worked through song. When Gram saw Elvis, he was channeling something real and raw and profound on stage. It was the beating heart of America, particularly of the capital-S South. Seeing Elvis is often cited as the formative event of Gram Parson’s young life as an artist, and when Gram—also a Southerner with a background in church hymns, spirituals, and country—ended up in Los Angeles some ten years later, Elvis was living there too.

Gram was the grandson of a wealthy Florida citrus-fruit magnate. His parents had both died of over-consumption of drugs and alcohol. As a member of the Byrds, he transformed the group, as Country Music Hall of Fame writer Peter Cooper put it, “from America’s most popular rock band to one of America’s least popular country bands.” He can be seen as the force behind the Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo album, which Gram didn’t call rock or country either but Cosmic American Music, and he and fellow Byrd Chris Hillman split off to continue the sound as the Flying Burrito Bros., along with “Sneaky Pete” Kleinow and Chris Ethridge, on the Gilded Palace album.

A Rolling Stone article written at that time called Los Angeles a place to “get heard, get signed, get rich,” where “there are 318 record wholesalers and manufacturers listed in the yellow pages,” “a city crammed with writers, photographers, artists, critics, producers, marketing consultants, promoters, managers, publicists, messenger services, and at least a hundred other occupational categories—all of them devoted in part or wholly to the music business.” Not to music but the business.

No artist’s aura was safe there. The language of the music business echoed the language of Western imperialism and expansion—as in, for example, Columbus’s “discovery” of an entire continent already inhabited by intricate and complex civilizations, or Cabrillo’s “discovery” of San Diego Bay, or all the lands and places that explorers “found”—in that agents “discovered” new talent, original people and material they hoped to plunder for riches.

Thus was written the searing gospel anthem of Cosmic American musicians— “Sin City,” of Gilded Palace of Sin, the Burritos’ debut, recorded in Hollywood’s A&M studio. “This old town’s filled with sin, it’ll swallow you in,” were the first lines. It’s a visionary song. It’s slow and sorrowful and on fire. It’s everlasting. It seems to grow richer the more you hear it, not less.

The song’s central and invisible character was the former Byrds’ manager Larry Spector, with whom Hillman and Parsons had had bad dealings, and who Hillman said was “a thief.” The unnamed Spector stays hidden behind a gold door in the song. “On the 31st floor, a gold-plated door won’t keep out the Lord’s burning rain,” Hillman and Parsons sang together, like choirboys.

Hollywood didn’t know what to make of choirboys, be they cosmic or not. The album was a commercial failure, while a few critics at the time insisted it had artistic value.

*

Rhinestones are imitations of actual stones. They’re sparkly, cheap, made to catch the spotlights. They are mass-produced, while real stones and gems are more rare, each one a wholly unique piece of rock from the earth.

The Flying Burrito Bros. did a photo shoot for the album cover in the Mojave desert outside of Los Angeles. Dressed in the rhinestone suits, they stood in the ruins of a wooden shack that looked like a hovel abandoned after the Gold Rush and left to dissolve again into the dust. Gram’s suit famously featured marijuana leaves, poppy flowers, and pharmaceutical pills, along with fire leaping up the sides and a cross on the back with shafts of light radiating from it. Was he country? Was he rock ‘n’ roll? He was a Cosmic American.

The Burrito Bros. wore the rhinestone suits for the cover, while on the “Sin City” recording, their voices shone like emeralds, the pedal steel a gleaming ruby. Real gems.

Gram died of an overdose in that same Mojave Desert, at the age of 26, four years after the photo shoot, after Gilded Palace of Sin, after a lot of commercial flopping, and with him died whatever his vision of Cosmic American Music was, except that it didn’t. It’s an aura that continues to penetrate in its mysterious way.

Elvis outlived him by four years. He lived to be the subject of the first global concert satellite broadcast; his image reached more viewers in the world at once than any human’s ever had. He staged more and more live shows than ever before while his addiction grew. Those closest to him say that he was not himself, that it was as if he’d disappeared, as if his soul, that raw spark that he was known for in the beginning, had vanished. He died, from a drug-induced heart attack, on the toilet in his gold-embellished bathroom, an American king.

—Holly Haworth

#185: The Stooges, "The Stooges" (1969)

Two men from the local utility company visited our classroom in 4th grade to teach us about electricity. They looked like a comedy duo: one the lanky, clean-shaven, slick-haired straight man who did all the talking and the other one the funny man, shorter with a big gut that untucked his shirt from his low-riding jeans every time he bent or turned. The funny man seemed to stifle giggles every time he set up a demonstration to show us electricity’s dangerous side.

“1969”

The straight man started with a brief history of electricity and overview of how it’s produced. His history lesson focused on usefulness, mostly on the convenience of home appliances, then his partner jumped in with speculation about the potential of electricity. He must have been a Star Trek fan because his vision of the future included androids and interactive entertainment that reminded me of the Holodeck.

“I Wanna Be Your Dog”

“POP!” The funny man’s word jumped into the air like we were in an old episode of Batman. “That’s what you get if you catch an underground power line with a shovel.”

“You gotta be careful about letting your dogs dig too much, too,” the straight man added.

“Yeah,” funny man continued. “You have to stop them because they won’t stop themselves, and you don’t wanna hear the sound they make.”

“We Will Fall”

There’s no way for a person who comes across a downed power line to know if it’s live. It might jump around like you expect it to, or it can appear calm. In the video they showed us, a man lost control of his car and ran into a power pole. You get the idea from these types of safety videos that running your car into some kind of utility equipment is inevitable, something every driver does at least once. I hope I’m not due. Of course, after the man’s car hit the pole, a power line dropped onto his hood where it hummed while he made several attempts to escape his car. We saw him “die” repeatedly until he finally jumped out of the car without turning his body into a ground for the wire.

We kept watching him die; the humming continued like meditation.

“No Fun”

The straight man only needed to point north out of our classroom window to show us what a substation was. University Boulevard separated the school from the substation. Beyond that, the new hospital.

“See that big fence around the substation? That’s there for your safety,” he said.

Questions went to the funny man, who knew exact figures for voltages and amps. He also had a story ready. A friend of a friend of his who worked for a utility in California told him about a man who broke into a substation to steal copper.

“Imagine. Close your eyes and imagine with me. Imagine an arc of electricity like I showed you earlier from a battery magnified and shooting from one corner of the substation all the way around, back and forth, zigzagging all over the place. Exploding transformers exploding with that big shotgun KERBOOM!”

The straight man jumped back in. “And the man is now in prison. Maybe an example where someone miraculously didn’t get shocked ain’t the best one.”

“Oh, right. Well, you might get zapped. You might get locked up.”

“Real Cool Time”

“You really don’t want to get zapped by lightning,” he added, then popped the VHS tape back in for the next segment, a general piece about thunderstorms that wasn’t necessary for all us kids who grew up in tornado alley. Everyone in Oklahoma has an honorary meteorology degree.

If you learn to smell the storm that’s brewing, you won’t end up being the tallest object in the prairie or underneath branches of the tallest tree. Nothing short of storm chasers reporting in on the TV or radio that a tornado was on the ground nearby sent my family to the storm cellar. Every March, my dad and I pumped the water out of the bottom of the cellar that it collected throughout the rest of the year. Usually we had four to eight feet of water to pump out. I don’t think an electric water pump ever survived more than two years.

“Ann”

She sat one row up and two seats to the left of me. By the beginning of 9th grade I found the courage to ask her out. She and her family had moved away during the summer.

“Not Right”

I hate when butter doesn’t melt properly on a piece of toast, and I like a lot of butter on my toast. That’s how I started an electrical fire. After a run of warmed and crisp bread with cold blobs of Parkay on top, I needed better toast in my life.

Instead of toasting the bread then buttering it, I slathered two slices before dropping them in the toaster and walking back to my room at the other end of the house.

I guess the comedy act couldn’t warn us about all the possibilities of indulgence. Too bad I had no way to contact the funny man to add the tale of butter dripping onto heating elements and bursting into flames to his repertoire. I can see them clearly, the straight man holding a fire extinguisher while his partner goes WOOSH.

“Little Doll”

“What you really want to know is what would happen if you were electrocuted,” the funny man said as he set a car battery on the teacher’s desk.

“We’re going to show you using a little doll made out of toothpicks and canned sausages, but being electrocuted is serious business.”

The funny man couldn’t hold back anymore when the doll split open and shot pieces of itself off the desk onto the floor. He snorted.

—Randall Weiss

#186: Sly and the Family Stone, "Fresh" (1973)

“In Time,” the opening track of Sly and the Family Stone’s Fresh, is truly fresh. “I felt so good I told the leader how to follow,” Sly croons toward the end of the song, which, in all its 3/5 funky verve, makes you tap your foot in a way you never have. But rewind. Listen to those first thirty or so seconds. That’s Andy Newmark snapping snare shots atop the percussive syncopated undertones of a drum machine bopping along a groove. You don’t really know where it’s going at first listen. It sounds, in all honesty, like someone feeling something out. Like Sly told Andy to check out this groove and see what he could do on top of it. Like Sly told Andy this and then pressed record. And this would make sense if it wasn’t for the way, about 30 seconds in, after the guitar’s repetitively sneaky and snaky riff, Sly’s voice brings it both all together and to a head at once. The legend goes that Miles Davis played “In Time” for his band on repeat for half an hour. I’ve been listening to just the first 30 seconds on repeat for days.

“In Time” seems to build off of “Family Affair,” a track from Sly’s previous album, the seminal There’s a Riot Goin’ On. In “Family Affair”—Sly’s last number one hit—the dark and funky drum machine syncopation is there, but the real drums are way back in the mix. I don’t know what made him bring those drums further up into the mix a few years later, but I think of those lines—“I felt so good I told the leader how to follow”—a lot when I think of Sly, who, at the release of Fresh in 1973, had just turned 30 and had seemingly lived a lifetime. I think of Sly wearing long fur coats and outlandish outfits, doing choreographed dances with his band at live shows. I think of him, in the years before There’s a Riot Goin’ On, missing so many of those same shows. I think of him using. I think of him figuring out his politics. I think of him making music for the Black Panthers. I think of him not making music for the Black Panthers. I think of him recording There’s a Riot Goin’ On, in all its confusing, gritty, funky, dark, hopeless, blunt, introspective glory. And then I think of him on the cover of Fresh—karate-kicking his blackness against an all-white background, teeth gleaming, and then, in my thinking of that, I think of Zora Neale Hurston’s assertion, “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background,” and here I am holding the record and feeling its edges and corners, and I am thinking still of Morgan Parker’s poem after both Zora and Glenn Ligon, and how she writes, “I feel most colored when my weapon / is I feel most colored.” In that same poem, she writes, “Stone is the name of a fruit.” Heh, consider that. What kind of fruit is Sly? And how fresh? Sometimes I think an orange. Sometimes I think a ripe banana. Sometimes I think the beam of light yellowing the skin of an apple in a bowl, and how it shines the fruit to a polish so beautiful, you think the apple will pick itself out of its place and find its way between your teeth.

What I want to say about Fresh is that, like all great art, you should listen to it now and feel how it echoes against both its own music and the world that has given birth, died, grown back, waged war, made peace, and fucked and schemed and lived around that same music. On July 1st, 1973, the day after Fresh was released, the United States founded the Drug Enforcement Agency—DEA for short—a federal institution used indiscriminately in the War on Drugs to discriminate against people of color. It’s hard to think of this and listen to Sly croon on “The Skin I’m In,” where he sings, simply and full of verve:

    If I could do it all again
    I’d be in the same skin I’m in
    The clothes I wear and the things they dare me to do
    The places I go
    And the people I know
    The things I gain
    Sometimes they rain on me
    The skin I’m in
    And the things I never, never win

Combine Sly’s honest, tender hopelessness in this poem-of-sorts with the fact that, in 1973, despite massive civil rights gains in the years prior to Fresh’s release, there is still a not-so-secret war against people of color. Combine Sly’s painful awareness of his own future losses with the fact that, in 1973, the President of the United States pulled the country out of one of the most obscene wars in modern history. Combine Sly’s nostalgic sadness with the fact that, in the months that followed Fresh, that same President of the United States was under continued and worsening investigation for the Watergate scandal. Combine Sly’s understanding of his and his people’s own continued politics of interrogation, discrimination, and death with the fact that all of this—this song, these verses, this album—was composed while a nation made by and for white people was falling desperately out of control because of the failings and over-extensions and egotistical, racist motivations of those same white people. Combine all of this and more, and see how Sly and his family rile up their notoriously funky hope to sing, just a few tracks later, above a bouncy, pulsating rhythm: “If it were left up to me, I would try.” What can we make of this?

This is why art is both hopeful and hopeless, why we turn to it for comfort and why we turn from such comfort and face the world and all its burning, only to say, now what? Sly understood this. He always did. Which is why he can sing, on the same album, about everything he will “never, never win,” while at the same time begging to “let me have it all.” Great art exposes the contradictions that exist both in this world and society. It lives between the folds of our eyelids, between what we see and what we want to see, between what is and what could be, or what is and what was. Art, in many ways, is its own tense. To art is a verb of neither present nor past nor future. It is, perhaps, all three, all at once. What is the word for that? Eternity? God?

In Hilton Als’s beautiful, introspective piece on Diane Arbus in the June 8, 2017 issue of The New York Review of Books, he writes, of Arbus, “She wanted to see the world whole, which meant seeing and accepting the fractures in those connections, too, along with all that could not be fixed.” I think, with Fresh, one can say the same about Sly. But it’s worth noting that seeing the world whole carries with it its own set of possible consequences. Sly leaned hard and heavy on drugs. Sly and the band were pulled apart. Friends left, became friends no longer. There’s an idea about the way art takes its toll on the artist, about how it suffers the artist toward a too-short, often painful existence. I don’t want to believe in this. I don’t believe in it. But when I consider Sly, I dwell on this word fracture. What does it mean to be breakage? To inhabit it? To be, like a lullaby, in a world that is already and perhaps forever broken, that trying song before sleep?

On the subway, as I write this, “Que Sera Sera” comes on in my headphones. I’m on the elevated train in Queens, heading home from work. There is something about the light in Queens. I say this to everyone. I think it’s a little more orange, a little more golden. I think this has something to do with the fact that Queens lies a little lower than the rest of the city, its buildings not-so-much scraping the sky. I think there’s more room for light to do light’s work. It’s evening and all of this color comes in at a slant and the train car is not really full and we are all, each of us here, sitting in our own softened pools of color. We won’t have rainbows day after day, I know this. But we will have light. And soul. We will have ourselves living in such light, like cats sprawled out on the floor in the sharp rectangles of a shadow’s opposite. There is joy here, is what I’m trying to say. It is simple enough to point out and hard enough to find. The future’s not ours to see, I know, but I believe that it can be ours to determine. Even this light, this beam touching my boots, is a kind of future, how it has traveled such a great distance to arrive, and how traveling in and of itself, is a reference to a future. This is what I mean when I say we can be tenseless, when we can be both action and its result, the force to break the thing and the broken thing itself and the way a thing broken can always be referred to as a thing having been broke. Have you ever taken a mirror to a beam of light, and changed its course?

In 1975, a couple years after Fresh, Sly and the Family Stone—a band of such great heart and funk and love and soul—didn’t even come close to filling up Radio City Music Hall in New York City. Fresh, in many ways, was somewhere beyond the beginning of the end, closer to the end than any rumbling beginning of it. But, like hurt, like joy, like sorrow, like light, like every synonym for every word and every synonym’s opposite—I still can’t get enough of it. I’m still here, when the train pulls underground, listening to “In Time,” my foot bumbling along the floor, trying to follow Sly’s lead.

—Devin Kelly

#187: Peter Gabriel, "So" (1986)

London never looks more beautiful than the day that Mara tells you she’d rather be with you than with him.

It has been a year since you moved in with her and her husband. You were a college dropout twice over by then and more than slightly adrift. Come and stay with us, she’d said; you and I can work on poems.

In the period that followed, she slowly remade you in her image, until you were twin shadows in ostrich-feathered hats like musketeers, walking hand in hand down the street in the late-afternoon light. But she modeled herself in your image, too. She was fascinated by your dreams. She asked you to write them down for her and used the images in her poems: a dream where instead of humans she was mother to a bevy of tiger whelps. You looked older with your hair pinned up dressed in her draped blacks, like a crow’s coat of feathers, but she looked younger with color in her cheeks, a red pen clipped like a corsage to her shirt collar.

I get the sense that you’d like us to do—more things together, she had opened the conversation. You immediately burst out Of course! and then blushed when she said, I’m fifty years older than you! After a pause, she added: It’s unusual, is all I’m saying.

The thing is, Martyn is going through some personal stuff right now, she says; we have to give him a wide berth. He’s jealous of our connection, she explains, and so it’s best if we have our relationship away from him. He has PTSD from his time in the army, he’s experienced such terrible violation in his life; he has to be handled with kid gloves. You nod, flattered that she is confiding in you. As she speaks, their relationship is somehow transformed into a testament to your empathy and magnanimity; it’s something you’re letting her have, because you understand it’s best for everyone involved.

If it came down to it, if I had to choose between you and him, it would be you. You know that, don’t you? He knows it.

On the steps outside the Cadogan, she kisses the corner of your mouth on a July day pregnant with rain. Afterward, you walk through all of Mayfair in the downpour to clear your head, Peter Gabriel’s breathless murmur in your ears: Oh, I wanna be with you, I wanna be clear. You feel like you’re hearing her voice—or your own.

*

That summer, London is yours. You meet at the hotel where Oscar Wilde was arrested; then you meet at the hotel where Kate Middleton stayed the night before her wedding, where for ten years Mara and her Great Love came every afternoon for a glass of champagne and a salmon platter. You wait for her in a little garden somewhere behind Piccadilly, reading a library book about primitive jewelry. After half an hour, she texts Sorry, can’t get away. Mx. You reply, Shame, I had Egyptian amulets to show you, trying to sound breezy, but feeling you’re coming off over-eager all the same (see? remember how smart and weird I am, how much fun?). Yes shame! comes her artlessly breezy reply.

She’s from a different era. When she left her husband in 1950s Missouri, the sheriff turned up at her door. She thinks that ‘marriage’ should be printed in a different color in the paper when it refers to two people of the same sex. I feel something for you, she keeps saying, but I don’t know what it is, and so you meet at Café Richoux for Black Forest gateau to try and figure it out.

I feel something for you that I’ve only ever felt for my father, she says. When she was five, she got a splinter and had to be taken to the New York Memorial Hospital. He picked her up and said, I’ll give you a piece of gum if you don’t cry.

Her favorite movie scene is Ed Norton’s character in Fight Club punching himself in the face. That’s the epitome of strength, she says. The great power women have, she says, is subterfuge. She has some sense that ‘feminine power’ is something that appeals to you, and so she alludes to that line of reasoning to justify a swath of different decisions: it’s why you should help her run an illegal B&B out of her apartment; it’s why you should sneak around meeting in the city; it’s why the two of you should never speak openly and non-circuitously about what you’re doing.

For a while, you think this is power. You feel plump with secrets, smug and exalted, striding down the long dark hallway in a seashell-shimmer cream silk slip, the apartment seeming to undulate toward you like a coral reef. You are the mistress. You decide to play the role to a T, coming up with the most extravagant outfits in which to meet her: a yellow asymmetrical Aquascutum raincape with a ruffled black dress and lace-up witch-heels. A man on the bus tells you you remind him of “a character in an Agatha Christie story.” When, after your meeting, you go for a walk on the South Bank, kicking off your heels on the beach down by Gabriel’s Wharf, a kid nudges his friend in the ribs, points at you and exclaims “Look! A lady!”

You stopped writing poetry after you moved in with her because her voice eclipses everything: her poems stenciled on the walls, silkscreened on the bedding.

You hide: in other languages (you discover that you can’t talk about your life in English anymore, and so you rekindle friendships with people from your time abroad); in magic. The more you feel at the mercy of the situation, the more you feel a need to appeal to primal, deeper things. You check out books about Druidry, runes, Egyptian magic. You feel that she has robbed you of speech—turned you into a Sphinx, beautiful and mysterious. You visit the sphinxes in Crystal Palace Park and allow yourself to be cradled in their laps, telling them what you can’t tell anyone else.

You go to the Greenwich foreshore one night, intending to do a ritual to banish him from your lives, but you chicken out at the last minute. It shouldn’t be up to magic to break them up. It should happen of her volition.

Martyn once said to you, My father always told me: if you have a secret, you can tell two people, but they have to both be dead. You note down the plot number of her Great Love’s grave in your journal when the annual renewal notice arrives in the mail. You consider visiting the headstone and asking him for guidance, but you never go.

*

At the end of the summer, you travel to Europe together. You leave two days later than her so as not to arouse suspicion; you tell him you are going to see your parents. You take a night train across Germany. Curled protectively around your luggage, you let the rumbling wheels rock you to sleep as Peter Gabriel sings in your eyes I see the doorway of a thousand churches. This is how you know yourself, this is how you know love: a pained straining, a religious fervor.

You meet her at midnight under a Medieval city gate—her sequinned top like chain-mail, she looks like a battle goddess from Celtic mythology. Over the winter, you will revisit the image of her waiting there for you as a way to reassure yourself of her love. You travel to Switzerland to do her banking business and then spend several days in her cousin’s holiday house on Lake Maggiore. When the cleaner asks if you are related she tells her, “We are sisters at heart,” thumping her fist on her chest for emphasis. You laugh because it’s such a lesbian cliché, or it would be if your situation weren’t so absurd.

You go into tiny churches; you watch her cross herself and you think on top of everything else, a Catholic—although she cares more about the pomp and circumstance of it than about genuine faith, genuine piety. Every day you go into the village to buy red wine, cheeses, meats, and have hot chocolate by the lake. She calls him and you’re afraid to even clink your spoon. Walking down the cobblestoned street, she can tell you’re downcast and puts an arm around you, asking, Does this help? You leave early because you have work, and you cry all the way to the airport.

Of course, these stories never end well. Love whispered becomes love hissed in anger, becomes hands flung up in desperation: what do you expect me to do? That winter, you argue on street corners in the biting cold and you can’t even stalk off, because you’re afraid she’ll fall on the ice and break a hip. You sit at night and his voice from the other room is like barbed wire digging into your skin; an assault on your existence.

By January, you decide something must be done. You book a cottage on one of the Dutch islands for a few days to think. You bring a stack of CDs, including So, and her poems, but instead you spend all your time on the freezing beach, walking with the wind.

You’re lonelier than you’ve ever been. You can’t stop singing.

—Emma Rault

#188: Buffalo Springfield, "Buffalo Springfield Again" (1967)

Something terrible and irreversible happened when I listened to Buffalo Springfield Again.

I became old. Fully old. No more pretending otherwise.

Accepting it has taken a lot of processing and time set aside to listen to myself and to Buffalo Springfield Again again.

Where to begin? Not, actually, with my parents; they were a little too young for Buffalo Springfield proper, but they did have an LP of the first Crosby, Stills and Nash album packed away in the storage room of our old house. The one with the cover where the three of them are sitting on a couch and Graham Nash has his boots on the cushion—which, even though it’s a raggedy old couch on someone’s porch, would not have been acceptable in my house growing up. This guy may as well have been Marilyn Manson.

My parents also had LPs of Neil Young’s Harvest and After the Gold Rush, but by my time, any mention of Neil Young would trigger an eruption of spirited mockery, with either or both of them launching into a nasally, geriatric rendition of “Heart of Gold” (“I wanna heeeeeal”). In my father’s view, ahistorical but experiential, Young was the paterfamilias of what he called “whiner rock,” an umbrella term for all that ailed music during the Clinton administration. Bald guy from R.E.M.? Whiner. Dirty guy from Pearl Jam? Whiner. Bono? Still whining. Bald guy from the Smashing Pumpkins? Wouldn’t know one of their songs if I heard it, but…. On MTV and VH1, FM radio and cassette, whiners were legion.

My folks never played the records they owned. Their LPs belonged to another time, archaeological remnants of a past discernible only through Polaroids pasted in albums, a hazy world of wood-panelled basements, very blue denim, moustaches, plaid furniture, Playmate Igloo coolers, white T-shirts with red rings at the collars and sleeves, large glasses, Virginia Slims, and cans of Schlitz. I never heard those records, so for the longest time I couldn’t give a damn about Crosby, Stills, Nash, or Young. But one by one I came to know each of them, each like a horseman of the apocalypse come to visit my own transience upon me, tolling adulthood with each song shuffled up by my iPod, each play another revolution of time’s dread wheel.

Crosby happened first, at age 16, thanks to a public library copy of the Byrds’ Mr. Tambourine Man. The Byrds I came to from my old soul’s love of R.E.M. (whiners!). R.E.M. I came to from a copy of Automatic for the People bequeathed to my older brother following a divorce in my extended family that broke in our favor.

Next came Nash solely because of the Hollies’ “Carrie Anne,” one of a few songs written about Marianne Faithfull before she started writing better songs by and about herself. I hope like hell it’s not true, but I have a chilling suspicion I first heard “Carrie Anne” on an episode of Lost in 2007. It adds up, but I’m not prepared to confront that possibility right now.

Then Stills entered my life from the unlikeliest of directions. It was April 2010, the month of the BP oil spill and the Icelandic volcano that blocked air travel over Europe with a giant cloud of ash. Cypress Hill dropped the video for their single “Armada Latina,” featuring Pitbull and Marc Anthony. Outrageously, brilliantly, the song samples the doodoo do do do DOO do do doodoo-doo part at the end of “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” from the first Crosby, Stills and Nash album, with Marc Anthony lending some genuine robustez to the near-inscrutable Spanish cawed by Stills on the original.

In the video for “Armada Latina,” B-Real, Sen Dog, and Pitbull are partying at L.A.’s Mariachi Plaza, their three bald heads reflecting the tawny waning sun. The camera cuts to a silhouetted figure during the parts by Marc Anthony, who for reasons of scheduling (or conscience) declined to appear in the video. Pitbull, however, revels with the vigor of two men, gamely dancing with mamis and abuelitas alike, telling Castro to eat shit. And then—under the gazebo!—is a treat for the geezers: the actual Stephen Stills, nondescript as an IT specialist in his Hawaiian shirt, miming away at the guitar part he recorded 40 years earlier. I didn’t know at the time what Stills looked like, but I knew enough to know it must be him. The shame of recognition could have been no less crushing in that moment than if Stills had looked into the camera to watch me watching him, and said, Stop, children, what’s that sound? You’re becoming unrelatable to your peers.

And finally I made it to Young from Buffalo Springfield Again. Its cover drew me in. The band is floating over a row of mountains and a shimmering lake, holding hands with each other and what could be an angel or just a woman in a bathrobe. A Mothra-sized butterfly and a colossal bluebird are in flight too, the whole odd scene framed by a border of flowers. It has a certain slapped-together elegance, inviting and trippy but not alarmingly psychedelic (like the cover of Cream’s Disraeli Gears from that year). Eve Babitz asked to design it in exchange for giving Stephen Stills a ride home from the bar one night.

The album itself is a collage too; each song sounds like it comes from a different band, which isn’t so off the mark since the studio door seems to never have shut with the traffic of personnel and ideas across of most of 1967. It’s like Young, Stills, and Richie Furay decided to make a joint solo album featuring Dewey Martin and Bruce Palmer. The effect is jarring.

Young’s brooding and almost sinister “Mr. Soul,” the opener, drives us through a dark tunnel to the wholesome country morning of “A Child’s Claim to Fame,” Furay’s toe-tapping out-Byrding of the Byrds’ “Time Between” from that year’s Younger Than Yesterday album. The volatility just keeps up from there, each song not sustaining but undoing the vibe of the last. Stills is feelin’ languidly groovy on “Everydays,” but then Jack Nitzsche’s Wall of Sound production on “Expecting to Fly” blasts Neil into orbit over that radioactive lake on the cover. Elsewhere is the incorrigibly patchoulied “Bluebird”; the derivative white soul of “Good Time Boy” (where, by the grace of God, Dewey Martin narrowly restrains himself from letting out a “sock-it-to-me”); and “Rock and Roll Woman,” written by Stills either directly or indirectly with David Crosby, a song whose harmonies break in the couch of the first CSN album.

The tenderest moment on Buffalo Springfield Again is also the least exciting: Furay’s near-solo performance of “Sad Memory,” a song he recorded for the album on a whim. It sounds like an early 60s song, not a late 60s song—from a time before “For What It’s Worth” and all the generational chaos that song has come to signify in documentary montage after documentary montage. (You can see it now, can’t you: yellow flowers sliding into gunbarrels, purple smoke rising in plumes from the paddies.) According to John Einarson’s book about Buffalo Springfield, “Sad Memory” is one of the first songs Furay ever wrote, “when I was still a folkie in New York,” he said, “about a girl back in Ohio.” It’s a still point in the storm of Buffalo Springfield Again, an old-fashioned lament so generic it feels out of place.

For just that reason, though, “Sad Memory” represents better than any other song the album’s liminal quality: the band’s caught looking backwards and forwards at the same time, untethered from any one sound, any one songwriter, any one reality (as they drift hand-in-hand over the mountains). Hear the lyrics of “Mr. Soul” and “Rock and Roll Woman”: they don’t even sound in accord about what it’s like to be rock stars. They’re moving in five directions at once and somehow getting somewhere, though it would take until after one last album for what’s happening on Buffalo Springfield Again to resolve itself into the more comprehensible forms of Poco, of Crosby, Stills and Nash, and of the man who would be “Don Grungio,” Neil Young (whiner!). It’s like a transitional fossil.

“Sad Memory” is what made me old, not the fact that my taste ran to Buffalo Springfield Again or the Byrds or Cypress Hill (who formed before I was born). The song drifted by me dozens of times before I read about how Furay started recording it alone one day while waiting for the rest of the band to arrive at the studio. Years after writing it, he was still only in his mid 20s. It’s like he put his hands up six songs in and said,

I want off this ride for a minute. I want down from the mountains and the giant bluebird. I need to sing this very normal song about a person in Ohio I don’t even talk to anymore, who probably never thinks about me now. But I’m not ready to give this one up while I still feel it just a little bit.

I hear you, Richie, I replied to my own imagination. That’s our age for you. Revising the memory of every old thing in turn. Deciding what the past ever did for you. Returning sometimes or often to the most sentimental, irrelevant things if for no other reason than because you realize you’ll never have them at closer reach than they sit today. Call it the spirit of the empty high school parking lot at night.

So I listened again to Buffalo Springfield Again in that frame of mind. From beginning to end, I felt right there with them on the messy cusp of everything. And then I listened to it all again, and felt none of it.

—Andrew Holter

#189: Quicksilver Messenger Service, "Happy Trails" (1969)

Here’s a weird thing to think about, the next time you’re paralyzed by the sheer amount of music available on your phone: recorded sound has only existed for about 140 years. If we’re talking about popular music and the culture that’s sprung up around it—the kind of recorded sound this website is concerned with—then the timeline is even shorter, about a century. The oldest recording on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums list is Uncle Dave Macon’s “Way Down the Old Plank Road,” which was first recorded in April of 1926 (and later collected on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music). The most contemporary inclusion, Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, was released in November 2010. Somewhere between those two recorded monuments lies the wild and weird history of American music: the story of how, within the span of one human lifetime, we went from singing about whiskey over a banjo to rapping about Pharaoh-sex over Auto-tune.

Before Edison invented his mechanical version of the eardrum in 1870, music was constrained by time and space and wealth. If you wanted to hear Beethoven’s 5th, that meant you had to pay to get your actual ear drum within audible distance of an orchestra playing Beethoven’s 5th. Unlike literature, which became mass-produced in the 15th century, and visual art, which followed suit in the 16th century, music before 1870 was an elusive art form, unique to each performance. Sure, there were systems of musical notation, but there was no way to bottle the music itself.

Think about that for a moment. Mozart never heard an Indian raga. Chopin never heard the blues. Robert Johnson, king of the blues, never heard a West African drumming ritual, nor the polyphonic chants of central African pygmies—the roots of his own music. The idea that, with only a few smudges of our thumb, we might hear music outside our own desolate crossroads of geography and time, is, in the context of human history, a deliriously strange novelty, a gift.

So why then, in an era of unprecedented access to recorded sound, do we still go to such great expense to see live music? In 2015, Nielsen reported that half of every dollar spent on music in the U.S. went to a live event. In 2016, we spent twice as much on concert tickets than on total music sales. Just last month I doled out 3% of my monthly income for tickets to see U2 perform The Joshua Tree, an album recorded to the highest degree of sonic fidelity in a studio. The concert ended up getting canceled and the tickets refunded, but still: why put so much emphasis on “seeing” a music performance?

I blame my Mom. Before I was old enough to read, she was dragging my two siblings and me to Mass every Sunday, where the only thing that kept me from falling asleep in the pew was the church’s drummer. I imagine that, at some point in his life, this middle-age man with a rat tail had had musical ambitions other than keeping time for a Catholic church choir. The 16 pieces of his drum-set practically said as much. As a rule, I hated the placid, Christian pap the choir sang at Mass, but when his drums came thundering in on “On Eagles Wings” or “Jerusalem My Destiny,” I was transported. This guy was a one-man drum line, a 12-armed monster of rhythm, the John Bonham of church choirs. Sitting there in the pew, listening to him incorporate every single one of those floor toms, I found the seeds of a religious fervor blooming, just not the kind I think my mother anticipated.

Not long after my parents split, Mom started taking us out to a local concert series that featured mainly washed-up talent from the ‘70s and ‘80s—groups like Three Dog Night and 38 Special. We must have seen tons of these concerts over the years, but I retain a distinct impression of only two: Pat Benatar and the Village People. As a ten-year-old, I was at a disadvantage, lacking the equipment necessary to fully appreciate the social contexts of these performances. I had no idea, for instance, why the audience for the Village People was mostly men, dressed in extravagantly revealing costumes, nor why Mom, in the midst of a custody battle, sang along so loudly to “Hit Me With Your Best Shot.” What warped me about these concerts was all music and spectacle. The moment when Pat Benatar’s guitarist climbed off the stage during “Love is a Battlefield” and ripped a solo a couple of yards from my face. The moment during the Village People’s encore when, after several choruses of watching Mom configure her arms into the shape of various letters over her head, I finally, hesitantly, attempted to join in.

There are certain monumental occasions that define a young life. Your First Kiss. Your First Drink. The First Time You Hear “Dancing Queen.” I submit that learning the YMCA deserves a place on that list. With all due respect to the Macerena and the Electric Slide, and with absolutely no respect whatsoever to the Cha-Cha slide, the YMCA is the closest thing my family has to a communal dance, the kind of thing that brought our pagan ancestors together. Learning to do it has served as an initiation ritual into a lifetime of dancing with people I barely know who hardly dance. Two decades of school formals and wedding receptions may have taken their sad toll on our relationship, the YMCA and I, but I swear, the first time we met, in the company of the three people I loved most, at a Village People concert, it was pure, unadulterated joy.

When I was 15, my brother took me and a friend to see a now-defunct punk band called the Blood Brothers play a now-defunct venue in Richmond, Virginia called the Nancy Raygun. There was a now-defunct quality in the air that evening: the teenage excitement of being downtown and not in a suburb; of being driven by my brother and not my mom; of being in a bar before I was old enough to drink.

The opening act was a band called the Plot to Blow Up the Eiffel Tower—who, it turned out, were more of an anarchist performance art project than a band. The lead singer opened their set by miming fellatio with the microphone. About a song or two in, the singer spat on an audience member, and the crowd imploded. Someone behind me got punched. At some point, the crowd surged toward the stage, knocking me to the ground, where I lay for a few suffocating seconds, until a stranger extended their arm into the fray and pulled me up. I managed to squirm my way to the wall, where I watched my brother throw his elbows around in the pit, flailing like some kind of mystic lost in an ecstatic trance. Even there I could feel the noise from the stage humming through my body like a tuning fork. Nothing in my young life had prepared me for this, the wild communion of a mosh pit. It was a revelation, an awakening, a public exorcism of private angst. I don’t think I’ve experienced anything quite like it since.

Which isn’t to say I’ve stopped looking. But as I’ve gotten older, these moments have gotten rarer. Certainly my aging music taste hasn’t helped, steering me, as it often does, toward a predictable kind of live show. A band singing and strumming the same things they sing and strum on the recordings that garnered them an audience in the first place. In a weird twist from the freewheeling era of Uncle Dave Macon and his bottle of whiskey, recordings—whether made by the band in the studio or taken by the crowd on their phones—now seem to take precedence over the performance itself.

Of course, there are exceptions. About a year ago, I was lucky enough to catch pianist Hailu Mergia on his first tour in at least a decade. Hailu had been something of a household name in Ethiopia in the late ‘70s, but after his band toured the U.S. in the early ‘80s, during Ethiopia’s Civil War, Mergia chose to stay in the U.S., to settle in Washington D.C.. He gave up the life of a professional musician to became a taxi driver. Fast forward a few decades, and a small label was reissuing his records to wide acclaim, and he was touring again. The point of all this being that here was a musician who had good reason to sound rusty.

Quite the contrary, it turned out. Not only did Hailu sound as good as those early recordings, he improvised the whole set, his nimble fingers running up and down the keys, layering melodies over top each other with a casual grace my fingers maybe only achieve in the act of tying my shoe-laces. It was a stunning performance, one that left me marveling not just at the power of improvisation, but the vulnerability required to pull it off. Jazz fans will maybe scoff, but as someone raised on Pat Benatar and the Village People, this was new to me, how gripping improvisation could be in the ear of the beholder. There was a pre-1870 urgency to the act of listening to Hailu play, the realization that whatever sequence of notes was passing through my ear drums would not pass that way again.

*

I’ll confess that I have very little idea about the kind of person who reads these things. Who reads anything on the internet, really. In this time we live in, the golden era for having the attention span of a goldfish, I sometimes wonder if these readers exist at all. I imagine that if you’ve made it this far, there’s a good chance you’re a writer yourself, have written things on this site, or sites like it. And as someone who spends an increasing amount of their time writing, I wonder about the performative aspect of what we do, of how difficult is it to channel that vulnerable voltage when you’re sitting alone in front of a computer screen. Unlike the musician improvising on a stage, we have the liberty to write and rewrite our vulnerabilities, to consider and reconsider—a process that I can’t help but suspect is not super conducive to actually being vulnerable. If the best writers alive could somehow condense and transform their talents into a band, one that revised with the same frequency as a writer, I suspect the results would sound pretty abysmal. That this literary super-group would make Steely Dan sound like The String Cheese Incident.

No, writing is an extremely weird kind of performance, one in which the performer is physically estranged from the audience. The writer doesn’t get the laughter or the applause, the bored yawns in the front row or the distracted texting. And the audience doesn’t get to subject the writer to their gaze; at best, they get a well-lit head shot inside a book flap.

No, the audience has to make do with reading the words on the page, a process so basic to literate society that we often forget just how strange it is, the ease with which we translate written symbols into thought. Writing, when it works, allows us to perform across time and distance, not with our actual voices, but with the much weirder, disembodied one in our heads—the one that, during the writing of this paragraph, informed me that I suck and should stop writing and go make a quesadilla. The one that decided I should take a nap afterward, and when I woke up, that it was a good idea to call my Adderall-enhanced grandfather, who spent the better part of an hour explaining the fine print of his current cell phone plan. The same voice convinced me to quit this sentence mid-thought so I could Google the girl who got me in trouble in second grade for putting boogers on her arm. (She’s a project manager now, it turns out, for a charity in Ohio.) Writing, on those rare occasions when it’s going well, feels like a way of going to war with this voice, of wrestling it to the ground and pinning it into the shape of something intelligible. Writing, on those even rarer occasions when I manage to get something satisfying on the page, reads like a carefully rehearsed performance of how I wish my mind worked.

*

I wanted to write this because I wanted to learn about Quicksilver Messenger Service, a band that, three months ago, I knew next to nothing about. Over the summer, I picked up three of their records for cheap. I figured that writing an essay would be a good way to learn more not just about Quicksilver, but the Grateful Dead, too, and the San Francisco acid rock scene in the late ‘60s that gave birth to them both. As it turns out though, I really just don’t care about Quicksilver Messenger Service. I listened to the records I picked up—Just for Love, What About Me? and the self-titled one—five or six times apiece, in various states of listening engagement: while cleaning, while reading, while writing, while doing that thing where I pretend like I’m writing but I’m really just staring at my computer screen, waiting for my brain to tell me I’m hungry enough to make a quesadilla.

I listened to Quicksilver while I cooked quesadillas, and I listened to Quicksilver while I ate. It didn’t matter what I did. Every time I put their records on, I’d zone out, mentally preoccupied with the some other more urgent concern—the cheesy goodness of a quesadilla—only snapping to the fact I’d hadn’t been listening when the record ended. At one point I actually forced myself to sit down in front of my stereo and devote the full force of my attention to Just For Love and still, I wasn’t up to the task. The record is plodding and aimless where I want melody and momentum. I got up halfway through and made another quesadilla. I wasn’t even hungry.

Happy Trails though, is a different thing entirely. Happy Trails is a live record, culled from recordings at the Fillmore in San Francisco, in 1968. The entirety of Side One is an extended riff on the Bo Diddley song “Who Do You Love?” It begins with a recognizable take on the original, and then digresses into several different sub-versions of the song, all titled with different interrogative pronouns. On “Where Do You Love?” they break the riff down into an eerie drum and violin dirge that’s so quiet you can hear the crowd clapping and yelping along. In fact, for a minute or two, as the music drops off, the crowd, which is beginning to sound un-ignorably drug-addled, is the loudest part of the song. Just when it seems like the musicians have abandoned the stage entirely, and the concert is about to devolve into total anarchy, the original Bo Diddley riff storms back in, crackling and humming with voltage, drowning out the crowd. You don’t have to have been at the concert, or on drugs, to get a thrill from it. They caught it right there on the recording.

Rather than sludge through Quicksilver’s studio records, I found myself going through my favorite live recordings instead, wondering what made them all so memorable. I’ve found that a lot of them, like Blink 182’s The Mark, Tom, and Travis Show, Neil Young’s Live at the Riverboat, and Judy Garland’s Live at Carnegie Hall share a certain magnetism of personality. Some, like Van Morrison’s It’s Too Late to Stop Now, are documents of a performer transforming their recorded body of work into something else entirely onstage. Then there are those performances that feel very much of the moment, where ego breaks down and the music becomes a weird synthesizing force between the audience and the performer. “Having a Party,” the last song on Sam Cooke’s Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963, when Sam’s about to take his leave, and the crowd’s singing overtakes his own, is a famous and justly-praised example of this kind of moment. Donny Hathaway’s live take on Carole King’s “You’ve Got a Friend” is another one. I wouldn’t put even the most exciting moments of Happy Trails up with either of those, but you can tell the band is gunning for the same idea. On the back sleeve of the record, the song “Where Do You Love?” is credited to Quicksilver & the Fillmore Audience.

*

Last spring, my sister and I went to see Kevin Morby play a packed room at the Rock & Roll Hotel in Washington D.C. It was the day after terrorists exploded a bomb at an Ariana Grande concert, a fact that I don’t think either of us acknowledged out loud but was undoubtedly on both our minds, being in a crowded public place in our nation’s capital in 2017. A relationship I’d been in for a long time had ended recently, too, and I felt anxious and sad, stuck in a weird loop of public and private loss. I was hoping the concert would be an antidote to this feeling.

To some degree, it was. Morby has an incredible band, one with an intuitive grasp on when to bust a song open and jam for five minutes, and when to get quiet and let his voice linger. His guitarist, a woman named Meg Duffy, is a marvelous talent in her own right. More than once that night, I experienced that weird involuntary grin that happens when you’re hearing songs you’ve learned to love privately be performed well publicly. It was a good show is all I’m saying, but it still wasn’t enough to erase my crumby mood. Then Morby sent the band offstage, and came back up alone for an encore performance of a song called “Beautiful Strangers.”

I spend a lot of time thinking about the lifespan of a song: the length of time between first listen and when I start to lose interest. Depending on the song and the frequency I hear it, this period can range anywhere from a week to several months. “Thrift Shop” by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis lasted a couple of days. “Get Lucky” by Daft Punk lasted about a month. Some songs, like Third Eye Blind’s “Never Let You Go” and Sheryl Crow’s “Everyday is a Winding Road,” have been bringing me joy for over two decades. Rarely lately though, has a song’s life span exceeded a year.

“Beautiful Strangers” is one of those songs. Why, is hard to say. I suspect it has something to do with how big a song it is, how much it manages to contain. On some level, it’s a topical protest song—it directly mentions the Bataclan attack in Paris and Freddy Gray—but what it’s protesting is never clear. It’s more of an elegy, really—for victims of gun violence, for victims of police brutality, for any young person whose life we lost too soon. Ultimately though, it’s just a really catchy, haunting pop song. It has that timeless quality that the best pop songs have, in that it sounds both primordially old and refreshingly new all at once. It’s only been a year since it came out, and I can already imagine referencing it, some 20 years from now, as a musical shorthand for it felt like to be at a concert in 2017, the first year of my life where it wasn’t hard to imagine dying at one. “If you ever hear that sound now,” goes a line in the song, referring to gunshots. “If the door gets kicked in, here they come now. Think of others, be their cover.” The song makes explicit certain questions my sister and I were trying to avoid, big questions about the value of human life and music performance: If gunshots ring out at a concert, what would you do? Are you willing to risk your life to drag a stranger to safety? Are you willing to risk your life to see a band?

Sometimes audiences at a concert help shape a moment through their audible enthusiasm—clapping, whistling, shouting. And sometimes they communicate their engagement by going silent. At a venue like the Rock & Roll Hotel, where the bar is loud and not far from the stage, the silence that descended when Morby strummed the first few chords of “Beautiful Strangers” was absolute, even before he dedicated the song to the victims of the Manchester bombing. It gave me that goosebump-y feeling I associate with being young, at concerts. The feeling that whatever we were all doing there that night was more urgent and important than anyone’s individual life, anyone’s private feelings of loss. It was the same feeling, I imagine, that caused my mother to drag my siblings and me to Mass every Sunday. The same feeling that gripped me when I was 10, doing the YMCA with my family, at 15 in a mosh pit with my brother, and again at 27, at a Kevin Morby show with my sister.

It was that same feeling, I imagine, that inspired Andrea Castilla, on the occasion of her 28th birthday, to drive from Huntington Beach, in California, to Las Vegas to attend the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival with her sister. The same feeling that convinced 39-year-old Brian Fraser, who was also in attendance, to move closer to the front, in hopes of hearing Jason Aldean play “Dirt Road Anthem,” his favorite song, moments before a terrorist shot open a hotel window high above the crowd and opened fire.

I’ll never know Andrea or Brian, but I feel a weird connection to them anyway. It could have been one of their arms that picked me up off that mosh pit floor at the Blood Brothers show. It could have been their faces in the crowd, at any of the concerts I’ve been to, when I turned around to see if the place had filled up, or if my sister was going to be able to find her way back to our spot from the bathroom, and was struck suddenly by how many strangers had gathered behind me to be a part of whatever was about to happen. Make no mistake, there’s a reason the terrorists keep coming for our concerts; in the world I live in, where almost no one I know goes to Church, these are the last sacred communal spaces we’ve got left.

With the rise of the internet and the digitization—you could call it the disembodiment—of music culture, we have websites like this one, too. A space where, if our bodies can’t bounce off each other, at the very least our minds still can. It might not evoke that goosebump-y concert feeling, but that’s a cross that all music writers bear. You spend a month or so writing an essay you hope will help make someone feel something, and then some teenager with a decent voice comes on the radio and does it in three chords.

I know that 2017 has been a hard year for mental exercises like this, but still, think: what a time to be alive. What a gift, to hear all this music.

—Ryan Marr

#190: Elvis Presley, "From Elvis in Memphis" (1969)

On an album with 11 ballads about sex and love and one about race and class, the latter was released as the lone single. It became a hit for Elvis and helped him pivot away from the singing-soundtracks-for-his-movies era. Thankfully. Soundtrack Elvis is my least favorite Elvis (Ballads Elvis > Hymns Elvis > King of Rock n Roll Elvis > Good Vegas Years Elvis > Bad Vegas Years Elvis > Soundtrack Elvis). Other than the single, “In the Ghetto,” I can’t point you to a specific standout song, and that’s what works for From Elvis in Memphis.

Sometimes we talk about great albums as collections of hit singles and/or thematically connected songs, but this album doesn’t work that way. A collection of mostly love songs doesn’t make for a “project album” in the same way as something like the Who’s Tommy, for instance. The songs are connected by their soundscape more so than their content—what some critics call “country soul” or “white soul.” Whatever you want to call it, it’s a style that works for Elvis’s voice. The performer grows up into the singer. Then it’s the mature singer who transitions, albeit abruptly, from love songs to “In the Ghetto.” That’s what we need to talk about.

When Elvis sings “As the snow flies / On a cold and gray Chicago mornin’ / A poor little baby child is born / In the ghetto / (In the ghetto)” we don’t need to ask any questions. We already know. We know the child is black. We know what the narrative of his life will be by the fourth line, and that line, “in the ghetto,” is repeated throughout the song in lieu of a traditional chorus. We know what to expect from the ghetto: a violent end. The trope of the inevitable black criminal isn’t new.

I’m not saying Elvis, or songwriter Mac Davis, had nefarious intent, just that the song falls short as an attempt to humanize black people for a white audience. Its reliance on stereotype becomes a kind of voyeurism of black suffering, which creates an emotional response but doesn’t require discomfort with the existence of the ghetto. It asks for pity. Almost 50 years later, pity remains the official response of “high-minded” white people to redlining, education disparity, chronic underemployment, lack of government representation, police mistreatment, etc. The song encourages the listener to feel sorry for black folks without acknowledging that the ghetto didn’t spring up spontaneously. Black ghettos in the United States aren’t any more of an accident than Jewish ghettos were in Europe.

Also, the (slight and fragile) progress we’ve made that allows some people to escape the physical ghetto doesn’t mean it no longer exists. It is both more mobile and adaptable (racism adapts faster than most organisms) and still a real place. What are we calling it now? Bad neighborhood? Wrong side of the tracks? [cardinal direction]-side? Here in T-Town, it’s a variation of the cardinal direction moniker. When the local news reports a crime in North Tulsa, you get the subtext.

Here’s the origin story for North Tulsa. (Aside: Please become familiar with your city’s (or town’s) settlement patterns and how racial disparities work there. How the ideology of ghetto works varies somewhat and must be fought locally as much as nationally.) We had segregation from the beginning in Tulsa, ya know, after forcing Native Americans off the land we forced them to, but by 1921 black Tulsans were doing too well for the taste of city leaders like Tate Brady. A false accusation against a black man led to the Tulsa Race Riot, during which a white mob murdered hundreds of Black Tulsans, destroyed Black Wall Street (the wealthiest black district in the country), and drove thousands further north to keep Black Tulsa and White Tulsa separate.

Despite its blind spots, “In the Ghetto” does ask a few pointed questions: “Take a look at you and me / Are we too blind to see? / Do we simply turn our heads / And look the other way?” These are the best lines on the entire album and, for me, a challenge. Too many times I’ve turned away into my own secure life. The song’s proposed solution is charity, “The child needs a helping hand,” but charity wasn’t enough when this album came out and isn’t enough now (not that charitable actions toward anyone less fortunate than yourself shouldn’t be pursued). What we need is to bear witness with honesty that may be uncomfortable for those of us who don’t face the machine of government policy and apathy working against us. What we need is to strive toward justice, liberation from the political and economic factors that white supremacy uses to enforce its goal of imprisoning people in the ghetto.

If you’ll indulge me, I’ll end with one such attempt to speak truth. The following is a poem I wrote a few years ago about the pogrom that created a ghetto where I live:

Tulsa, 1921
for the victims of the Tulsa Race Riot
 

Tate said he saw a n-----
noosed and dragged behind

a car. Crude thick blood
cries out from the ground

in the Oil Capital, congealing
along Greenwood Avenue

and flowing north. Black
Wall Street has crashed,

its wealth looted, redistributed.
The race riot suite sweeps

to Mount Zion Baptist Church
after rumors of guns there, where

they don’t belong. Klansmen run
a beat like deputies. They light homes

on that side of Admiral with
the white violence of Molotov cocktails.

The governor deploys the Guard
to protect white-owned property.

—Randall Weiss

#191: The Stooges, "Fun House" (1970)

I came to the Stooges late—it must’ve been like 2003 when I started listening to Fun House (and after that, what else was there to do but seek out the other records?). But by the time I started, I already knew them:

*

As a teenager, I bought every Sex Pistols bootleg I could find. This was not an inconsiderable number, mind you, such was the interest (dare I say market?) for their stuff.

The cassettes’ qualities were no indication of vault-digging. Some of the shittiest releases, rehashing the same practice tapes for the umpteenth time, came packaged with J-cards boasting six or seven double-sided full color panels; some of the good ones, with unheard demos, offered only a single black-and-white photo on one printed side.

I remember being thrilled to find a VHS tape of the Sex Pistols playing Scandanavia, the first time I’d seen the band play at length; its rudimentary packaging listed only live dates and song titles.

A live cassette of American tour dates was much the same: song titles, a single black-and-white photo. An absolutely terrifying version of “Belsen Was A Gas,” which I didn’t know how to feel about, and a long new song called “No Fun.”

“You’ll get one number and one number only,” Johnny Rotten said, “because I’m a lazy bastard. This is no fun.”

Years later, first Julian Temple’s fantastic doc The Filth and the Fury, then YouTube, confirmed the performance was the last of the band’s career, in San Francisco (unless you count the reunion tour, which is a tangent we can agree I don’t need to get into here).

If you’re a Simpsons fan, you know the episode where Lisa gives Ralph Wiggum a pity valentine and subsequently breaks his heart on live TV. Afterward, Bart slo-mos the tape and shows Lisa the exact moment Ralph’s heart tears in two. If you haven’t seen the Sex Pistols’ last performance, check it out: like Ralph Wiggum, you can see the moment—the second—Johnny Rotten realizes the band is over.

*

Later, a buddy made me a mixtape with a bunch of songs from Dischord’s Flex Your Head comp, which I subsequently sought out. The full LP includes a version of “No Fun,” this time played at a million miles an hour by Ian MacKaye’s pre-Minor Threat group the Teen Idles.

*

One’s Sex Pistols obsession cannot omit repeated viewings of Sid and Nancy.

It’s a hard film to watch.

My friend (and RS 500 contributor) Connie Squires recently wrote a book in which a documentary filmmaker vowing not to interfere with his subjects does just that. He hooks up with the film’s subject, a musician, and tries to discover the identity of the musician’s son’s father, a shrouded secret.

In discussing her book Live From Medicine Park, Connie told me that everyone has a blind spot, some issue or idea they can’t see in the mirror. It’s that lack of vision that makes everyone a gently unreliable narrator about some subject(s).

Chloe Webb’s depiction of Nancy Spungen is nuanced: is she helplessly self-deluded when she continues to insist post-Sex Pistols Sid is a “big star,” or does she know the ship is sinking and she has no lifeboat?

Either way, in the film Sid sings “I Wanna Be Your Dog” to an empty club.

*

There wasn’t much of a scene in Concord, New Hampshire circa 1992. I knew some guys who recorded a basement demo, walking closer to or further from the boombox depending on how loud they wanted to be. And a bunch of skaters started a band and played covers of Minor Threat, stuff like that.

One weekend, a girl my girlfriend knew had a party at her parents’ place. Everyone under the wide umbrella of punk rock/crunchy/alternative/goth/skater showed up.

The boombox band played one of their two shows, with a cardboard cutout of Bartles and Jaymes next to them onstage. The skater band had already played a single show and broken up.

But a few other groups played. They were older than us—in their twenties, easy—and didn’t take breaks between songs, maintaining eye contact with the audience instead of glancing nervously at one another. They had long hair and grimaced musically and played gear that looked battleworn.

The girl hosting the party was in such an act, even though she was a year younger than me. Her band played a droning, repetitive song I recognized from repeated viewings of Sid and Nancy.

*

I’m big on repetition, on overlap. Doing the same thing on the same day the same way.

I moved to Boston around the same time as a bunch of other people, this huge batch of UNH friends and their friends and their friends’ friends who went to parties, attended shows, held vegetarian potlucks, fought, dated, broke up, formed and reformed in differing configurations of factions, cousins, bands, and splinter groups.

Early on, we met weekly at this one dive bar in Allston. You know the one. Dark, almost completely empty until ten at night, octogenarian cocktail waitresses tottering through the teeming crowd without spilling a drop.

The dive had a great CD jukebox. My roommate Brendan and I would play deliberately vulgar Ween songs and giggle in anticipation as the crowd swelled and the wait between cocktail waitress visits grew. But even when our songs came on, they were barely audible over the din of so many drunk conversations.

The only stuff that punched through the density of the room was primal and simple. Pounding and repetitive music sounded the best in the jammed bar.

The same pulses, rhythms, every time I went in, once a week at least for years.

*

One night the bar was empty when everyone arrived, meaning we could hear the music, not just feel it.

A familiar scream ripped through the speakers.

Cool, I thought, they got a Minor Threat CD. Someone is playing “Guilty of Being White.”

But instead of machine gun chatter, a slow riff unfurled instead, a TV Eye.

*

The house where I lived in grad school had a garage and a basement, both luxuries absent in city living.

My buddy Damian gifted me a drumset and I learned to play, dutifully bashing along with records in headphones for an hour a day.

I’d always wanted to be in a band. I figured drummers were more difficult to find than guitarists or bass players.

After my first year, a new cohort started the program.

At the inaugural party that August, I met a guy named Tyler who had moved to Maine from Virginia. He wanted to start a band that played banjo covers of Velvet Underground songs.

Well, I said, you should come over. I play drums.

We added Paige on guitar, Steve on bass, Bec on saxophone. Katie on vocals. And we learned “No Fun.”

I can’t think of a song more incorrectly named. Sometimes we’d stretch it out to fifteen minutes, twenty, laughing and mugging and having a great time.

Threads connected.

Certainly the Stooges’ influence extended because of bands that had covered them. But those bands had covered them because the music was fun. And easy! The fact that anyone could play Stooges songs meant that everyone played Stooges songs. Including us, in the garage, like thousands before and after.

*

The Stooges announced their Boston show, and I bought advance fan club tickets for me and Bec. Rich got one, so did Frank.

The band played the Orpheum, an old theater where I’d seen Johnny Rotten play with Public Image Ltd. when I was fifteen. At that show, I’d been way in the back of the balcony, nowhere near as close as Bec and I were this time, like five rows away, stage right.

When Iggy started yelling at the security guards during “I Wanna Be Your Dog”—LET THEM UP! EVERYONE COME UP!—it was easy for the front rows to swarm.

I stood, mouth open, thinking, This is amazing. Look at everyone get up there! There’s not going to be any space for the band with so many people jumping around. I wonder if—

Bec grabbed me and pushed me towards the stage.

If she hadn’t, I might have stood there the whole time, mouth agape, watching in amazement.

Instead, I ran the few feet up the aisle and clambered onto the stage, where the band played “I Wanna Be Your Dog.”

Anyone could get onstage.

Anyone who wanted to could join them, no matter their entry point.

Maybe they’d been there back in the day.

Maybe they played covers in their bands.

Maybe they were new to the music.

It didn’t matter.

I didn’t know what to do with myself—I was onstage with Iggy Pop and the Stooges!—so I pogoed, merrily crashing into other showgoers.

No, that’s not the right word.

Revelers.

I found Rich in the pogoing mass, Frank, and we grabbed arms and bounced up and down together, grinning like idiots.

—Michael T. Fournier

#194: Lou Reed, "Transformer" (1972)

1. Vicious

Against the advice of my high school guidance counselor, who wants me to study something “worthwhile,” I move to Boston in September of 1996 to attend art school.
 

3. Perfect Day

I elect to live on a substance-free floor. It’s filled with kids like myself, who don’t do drugs, and with addicts trying to stay clean. In my room, I add a photo of my girlfriend, Jen, to the desktop. I splash one cinderblock wall with magazine cutouts of female musicians I crush over—Shirley Manson, Juliana Hatfield, Justine Frischmann—and a second with a poster for the film Trainspotting.

With every move, I hum Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day,” from his 1972 album, Transformer. The song, featured in Trainspotting, is one of my new favorites, and I keep on purring its tune as I settle into my new home.
 

8. Wagon Wheel

My roommate Andrew gets to know our neighbors. I tag along to become their friend by proxy. To say I’m typically shy is an understatement.

Most of the action takes place at the ping pong table in the dorm’s rec room. I’m horrible; so is everyone else. Enrique, the guard who sits at the front desk, shakes his head at our lack of finesse and fitness. Our group consists of:

1. awkward nerds like myself,  and

2. stoners who fell off the wagon immediately after their parents waved goodbye.

Volleys are hard to come by; our effort is spent chasing balls as they bounce down hallways. We don’t care. The game is fun enough, and we’re all at the same skill level, regardless of artistic ability.
 

4. Hangin’ ‘Round

Some nights, I act as designated scribe, writing out every stupid idea a couple of my recent acquaintances fire off after they smoke massive amounts of marijuana. Other nights, I can’t process their altered states correctly and wander on my own. It’s around this time that I befriend X and her roommate, Y, and we hang out in the lounge and watch television. They’re both drug free; sometimes that’s enough to make a friend.
 

5. Walk on the Wild Side

Not only do I taste freedom in Boston, but I imbibe it in an environment that encourages radical experimentation: intro classes screen films by Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren, Shirley Clarke, and Phil Solomon; early design drops Joseph Cornell into my life; I walk to the Nickelodeon movie theater and buy a ticket to David Cronenberg’s Crash, rated NC-17, without the box office clerk giving a second look.

Lou Reed once said, “I know my obituary has already been written. And it starts out, ‘Doot, di-doot, di-doot…’” My hometown inspires no art, no sophistication. It is a dead end. Its obituary has already been written, I decide. The city is my home. Then, at a party where I am sober and just about everyone else is high, someone offers the following advice: “Whatever you do, don’t ever try heroin.” I nod and say OK, yet my head spins at the thought. What have I gotten myself into? Who are these people? My conclusion: I am a square peg, a sheltered kid who needs to start living.
 

10. I’m So Free

Eventually, I force myself to call the dorm home and it doesn’t sound strange. I look forward to ping pong matches, midnight movies, and gallery openings. I talk with Jen every other day (killer long distance fees) and visit her at Mount Holyoke once a month. Still, I’m not sure if this is where I’m meant to exist.
 

9. New York Telephone Conversation

Hello?
Hi, Ben, it’s X.
Hey.
(Long Pause) I was wondering if I could sleep over your place tonight?
Why?
Y’s boyfriend is visiting, and I want to give them our room. It’s awkward for me to stay, you know?
Oh.
Andrew’s away for the weekend, right?
Yeah.
It’s just you over there?
Yeah.
You must be bored.
I’ve got work to keep me busy.
You probably want someone to talk to, right?
What?
You can’t work all night.
No, I can’t.
We can keep each other company.
 

7. Satellite of Love

X arrives after eleven, carrying her pillow and a blanket. She’s in pajamas, but her face is radiant. We sit on my bed and talk for a while. Her voice is raspy. It gets late. The city outside is so very quiet.

When the time comes, though, I don’t make room for X. I don’t give X my bed, or Andrew’s bed. I ask her to sleep alone on the floor. I am incredibly naïve. This is the last night X stops by my room.
 

6. Make Up

In his review of Transformer for Rolling Stone in early 1973, journalist Nick Tosches filleted the song “Make Up,” writing, “It isn't decadent, it isn't perverse, it isn't rock & roll.” The critiques I receive in class sometimes rival Tosches’s assessment. Their words are harsher than I expect. My ideas seem so simple. Nothing breaks through, regardless of my persistence. Who defines rock & roll, I wonder?

I spend so much time carefully navigating the line of acceptability at art school, both in my work and my developing persona. Because of this, the desire to be surrounded by other artists in the big city, which sounded so lovely back in high school, weighs on my shoulders.
 

2. Andy’s Chest

Andrew resolves to shoot a short film near the end of the semester. I help out and set up lights. In one scene, he convinces the guy across the hall, a total live wire, to stick his dick in a jar of peanut butter. The whole ordeal is unnecessarily complicated. The “actor” makes us look away while he strips naked and prepares for his big break; I try my best to keep a straight face. I adjust lights without seeing what I’m doing, and by the end of the day, the room is hot and smells of sweat and warm sandwich spread.

It doesn’t take long before everyone on the substance-free floor is talking about the penis movie. The guy across the hall is famous for about five minutes. Andrew refuses to show the footage to anyone outside his film class, but the notoriety is enough to make him feel proud.

For the first time, I feel pretty good about being part of something, too.
 

0.

“The glitter people know where I'm at. The gay people know where I'm at. Straight people may not know where I'm at, but they find it kind of interesting when they show up and see what is sitting around them. It's interesting to have a conglomeration of people that covers the strata from A to Z….There's a certain element of the audience that's intellectually oriented, into the lyrics….then there's another element of the audience that's into a sex trip. I'm into both of them.”

– Lou Reed, Interview Magazine, 1973.

Though he’s talking about his audience here, Lou Reed also does a bang-up job in summing up art school. So much of the experience, I begin to understand, is showing up and seeing what is happening around you. There are occasions when you “know where it’s at,” and there are moments you’re last week’s big deal. The highs and lows are powerful and devastating, and they never stop. Art is fickle. Art cares little about the artist.

However, since you’re part of the audience either way, you might as well enjoy the performance.
 

11. Goodnight Ladies

December: I strip my bed. My clothes fit in one big bag. Final grades weren’t so bad, after all. That the school works on a pass/fail system probably benefits me.

Friends drop by on their way out. There are some sad goodbyes as parents linger in the shadows, like the band is breaking up, if only for a few weeks. It’s time to say goodbye, bye-bye.

I head home to spend most of my time with Jen. Nothing is perfect. One semester will not transform a person. If anything, I’m more confused than ever. But I hope that when I return to school at the end of January, everything is the same.

And, generally, everything will be the same. I will still wonder if I belong. I will still be impossibly unhip and naïve. Yet within this, I will also find solid footing in filmmaking. I will accept who I am and put in the work. I will remind myself, again and again, “I am different. I am becoming an artist.” I will hum Lou Reed and inch toward adulthood. I will be worthwhile.

—Benjamin Woodard

#195: John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, "Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton" (1966)

The smooth guitar sound threw Jim right back to university, nineteen in a questionable shirt, sweating near the stage. As the distinctive vocals kicked in—

"Why's he reading a Beano?" Sally asked, studying the picture on the album sleeve yet again.

"You always ask that," Neil said.

"Dad never answers."

"I swear that's the only reason you ask for this one. I'm sick of hearing it."

"That's enough now," Jim said. "Neil, you can have your choice when Sally's gone to bed."

Jim couldn't imagine asking to listen to his parents' records, clamouring for the Andrews Sisters or Mrs. Mills. Was it simply, as he might argue, that he had such great taste in music that his daughter couldn't fail to respond to it, or had a point been reached where music crossed generations? The new Fun Boy Three single had been on the radio over breakfast and it was another good one. He might even treat himself to the LP, though he guessed he was twice the age of their average fan.

"This is boring old men's music," Neil said. "It doesn't mean anything."

"And punk's so profound, is it?"

"Eh?"

For a moment Neil looked like the confused child he was, and Jim had to remind himself he wasn't talking to his students.

"Punk lyrics, they speak to you do they? All that business about smashing things and Oi! Oi! Oi!"

"The Clash aren't like that."

"No, perhaps they're not."

Neil had saved up from his paper round to buy their new LP but he still didn't have his own turntable and Jim was wondering if he shouldn't step in and buy one for him. Evenings like this, with Neil rolling his eyes at every harmonica break while he waited for the chance to listen to his own music, were getting uncomfortable. Jim thought about pointing out to his sighing son that the Clash had harmonica parts on some of their songs too, but he didn't think it would go down well.

It was a good job Neil hadn't been around in the sixties; what with Bob Dylan and the British blues explosion, it was a boom time for harmonica makers. Even Jim had bought himself a cheap one, warbling away on it while his housemate tried picking out the chords to blues standards on his sister's Spanish guitar. It didn't matter that they weren't much good, it was all about self-expression and authenticity. Less than twenty years later a new generation was going through the same thing, only louder, and with brightly-coloured hair. Jim and his friends thought they were in at the dawn of a new age, the start of something better, but what good had any of their protesting done? Instead of a brighter tomorrow his kids had ended up with Thatcher and another war.

He closed his eyes and drifted away on Have You Heard, head swaying against the antimacassar. He was faintly aware of fidgeting on the rug at his feet, and Sally's muffled giggles.

"Ask him," Neil whispered.

He knew his kids were laughing at him, he might be aloof but he wasn't unobservant. He wouldn't have dared laugh at his father. So maybe this was what all the protests had been about, the right of children to prick their parents' bubble.

"Dad," she began, "tell us about when you met Derek Clapton." She turned to her brother, cupped her hand round her mouth and whispered, "Did I get it right?"

Neil covered his face with his hands and shook his head in despair. Thirteen and twenty-three at the same time, that lad. They grew up so fast.

"Eric, love," said Jim. "Eric Clapton."

"Go on then," said Neil.

"We were in the union bar," Jim began, knowing they both knew this story as well as he did. "I went to get a round in—I was with Dick and Jerry, who I shared a house with." He'd assumed back then that the three of them would be friends for life, that someday he'd have kids who'd know them as Uncle Dick and Uncle Jerry, just as he'd be Uncle Jim to their kids. He hadn't seen either of them since his wedding.

"While I was waiting at the bar a man came and stood next to me."

"And?" Sally was jiggling cross-legged as only an excited seven-year-old can.

"And it was Eric Clapton. I recognised him from Jerry's poster."

"Then what?"

"Then I carried three pints back to the table and Dick suggested a game of darts."

"You didn't get his autograph."

"I thought he played boring old men's music?"

Neil shrugged but before they could get into the usual argument about autograph-hunting, Jim's wife leaned round the door.

"Sally, bed," she said, and then to Jim, "I've told you before about keeping her up. It'll be you that's annoyed in the morning when she's half-asleep and you think she's going to make you late for work."

"You heard your mum," Jim said, getting up to take the needle off the record so Sally had no excuse to linger.

"Night, Dad."

He bent so she could reach his cheek, and ruffled her hair as she turned away. He ached to follow her upstairs and read to her as she drifted into sleep but he didn't know how to say so, it wasn't something he ever did. It wasn't something his dad had ever done for him. For years Jim had thought he might read Neil a bedtime story tomorrow or next week, or on his birthday. He'd kept thinking that until he realised Neil was old enough for a part-time job, and he knew he'd missed his chance. He was going to miss his chance with Sally as well, another link in the chain of disconnected fathers.

"Right," said Neil, "my turn at last."

He slid his new LP from its sleeve and placed it reverentially on Jim's turntable. Jim put the Blues Breakers album away and settled back into his armchair. His son wasn't keen on most of his music but if he made an effort Jim might grow to like some of Neil's. He had an idea that if they had music in common, Neil could grow up to be different from him in everything else.

—JY Saville

#196: Various Artists, "Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968" (1972)

“The first mistake of Art is to assume it’s serious.”

- Lester Bangs

The first time I read that line was in a high school yearbook, a manic pixie’s senior quote. I thought it was brilliant; Lester Bangs, what a cool name, and get this, the girl who had chosen it cut her hair into really cute bangs. It’s probably Lester’s second most cited quote, after “The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we're uncool,” which made its way into Cameron Crowe’s film Almost Famous. Between those two nuggets, I had heard enough—this man must be a genius.

In college, I finally read an anthology of his music writing, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung. Reading a string of Lester Bangs’s sentences for the first time was like hearing a new genre of music: psychedelic prose without pretense or proper punctuation, swinging syntax, alliteration abound. It’s an uneven collection; a number of his columns riddled with homophobia and the occasional racial slur have aged poorly. But everyone in the universe should read his reviews of Astral Weeks and Metal Music Machine, his interviews with Dick Clark and Richard Hell, and his obituaries for Elvis Presley and John Lennon. Editor Greil Marcus writes in the book’s introduction: “Perhaps what this book demands from a reader is a willingness to accept that the best writer in America could write almost nothing but record reviews.”

Lester made a name for himself in the early ‘70s writing about music from the mid ‘60s. In the collection’s eponymous essay, named for a Count Five song, he describes 1970 as the year “when everything began to curdle into a bunch of wandering minstrels and balladic bards and other such shit which was obsolete even then.” The era he yearned for was only five years earlier:

...and then punk bands started cropping up who were writing their own songs but taking the Yardbirds’ sound and reducing it to this kind of goony fuzztone clatter… oh, it was beautiful, it was pure folklore. Old America, and sometimes I think those were the best days ever.

Age 23, and already a curmodgeon.

Lester was writing about “punk bands” from 1965, a decade before the Sex Pistols and Ramones. In fact, that 1971 Creem magazine column contains of the one earliest written references to “punk” as a music genre. A year later, the same usage would appear in the linear notes of a compilation album including the Count Five’s “Psychotic Reactions”: Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968.

In his 1973 review of Nuggets, Rolling Stone’s Greg Shaw wrote, "Punk rock at its best is the closest we came in the 1960s to the original rockabilly spirit of rock & roll.” Today, these songs would be classified more accurately as “garage rock.” The double album features 27 tracks from bands with names like the 13th Floor Elevators, the Electric Prunes, and the Chocolate Watchband. The songs are grittier than what you think of as ‘60s pop, but not enough to give you whiplash. No one was screaming yet.

“It wasn’t until much later,” Lester wrote, “drowning in the kitschvats of Elton John and James Taylor that I finally came to realize that grossness was the truest criterion for rock ‘n’ roll, the cruder the clang and the grind the more fun and longer listened-to the album’d be.”

The Nuggets compilation retrospectively defined a genre. Its influence might be less of a testament to the bands who wrote the featured tracks, and more to when and how they were re-released. Producer Lenny Kaye, who would later become the guitarist for the Patti Smith Group, curated the anthology with the idea that these forgotten gems were the only antidote to the lavishness of prog rock. And lo, bands paired back down to three chords. Soon enough, teens were sticking safety pins in their ears, and Lester could live in the now.

If the Nuggets tracks were lost scripture, then Greil Marcus resurrected a prophet when he complied Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung in 1987, five years after Lester overdosed on NyQuil and died.

“Lester gave a shit about music, and that’s partly what killed him, because music in the eighties was total shit,” musician Bob Quines told a man called Legs McNeil in Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk. But wasn’t it the shitty music in the early 70s that inspired Lester and Lenny Kaye to resurface music from the past? If he had only held out a little longer, think of what Lester Bangs would have written about the Pixies, Sonic Youth, Bikini Kill, Nirvana. Punk seems to have a decade-long orbit, and the man just didn’t have another cycle in him.

*

Why do we so often leave our legacies in someone else’s words? Not only in yearbook quotes, but tombstones, email signatures, epigraphs. The line I opened this essay with is actually buried within a rambling paragraph in a rambling column called “James Taylor Marked for Death,” which is nearly 30 pages long:

Number one, everybody should realize that all this “art” and “bop” and “rock-’n’-roll” and whatever is all just a joke and a mistake, just a hunka foolishness so stop treating it with any seriousness or respect at all and just recognize the fact that it’s nothing but a Wham-O toy to bash around as you please in the nursery, it’s nothing but a goddam Bonusburger so just gobble the stupid thing and burp and go for the next one tomorrow; and don’t worry about the fact that it’s a joke and a mistake and a bunch of foolishness as if that’s gonna cause people to disregard it and do it in or let it dry up and die, because it’s the strongest, most resilient, most invincible Superjoke in history, nothing could possibly destroy it ever, and the reason for that is precisely that it is a joke, mistake, foolishness. The first mistake of Art is to assume that it’s serious. I could even be an asshole here and say that “Nothing is true; everything is permitted,” which is true as a matter of fact, but people might get the wrong idea. What’s truest is that you cannot enslave a fool.

Quite a block of text there, huh? Did you make it through? Or skip to this paragraph once your eyes started glazing over? Try reading it out loud, it’s a trip. At 17, I read the standalone quote at face value, taking comfort in the prospect that anything could be laughed off. Rereading it in context, I realize it's a blanket statement that doesn’t quite cover your feet. It also directly contradicts almost everything else written by Lester Bangs, who claimed a Van Morrison record saved his life, who wrote that “the best music is strong and guides and cleanses and is life itself.” The artsy girl from high school probably found the line on WikiQuotes and assumed it was serious. So did I.

Maybe the first mistake of art is to is to assume any interpretation is a mistake. Of course Lester Bangs contradicted himself. Contradiction is rock ‘n’ roll, and rock ‘n’ roll is contradiction. I’d like to leave you with a quote from Bruce Springsteen’s keynote address at the 2014 South by Southwest Festival, a speech which, by the way, is framed with a quote from Lester Bangs’s “Where Were You When Elvis Died”:

Be able to keep two completely contradictory ideas alive and well inside of your heart and head at all times. If it doesn't drive you crazy, it will make you strong. Stay hard, stay hungry and stay alive. When you walk onstage tonight to bring the noise, treat it like it's all we have. And then remember, it's only rock and roll.

Did you glaze over that one too? It’s still a little too wordy, wouldn’t fit in a tweet. How about this one, by Woody Guthrie:

Take it easy. But take it.

I know it’s more complicated than that, the seriousness of life. It’s just a nugget, something imprecise and punchy to tide me over until I can put it in my own words. Or until I give up trying to.

—Susannah Clark

#197: R.E.M., "Murmur" (1983)

Kudzu. That was one of the first things I noticed about Georgia. The view from the car window on our drive down from Ohio revealed a glossy green vine that seemed to be everywhere.

“What is that growing over everything?” was one of my first questions about this strange place my parents had brought us to live in the summer of 1988. The second one being “why is the dirt orange?”

Kudzu as it turned out was an invasive species, brought to the U.S. from Japan in 1876 and introduced to the Southeast in 1883, where it was originally marketed as a decorative plant for shading porches, and where it now covers nearly seven and a half million acres. What started as an ornamental vine quickly revealed itself to be toxic, strangling native foliage and covering entire fields under a hardy blanket of leaves.

I was eleven when my family invaded the south, still barely young enough to be exploring our new physical environs in a way I’m not sure I would have had I been even a year older. On bike rides with my brothers, I discovered the red clay that gave the soil its unusual color, along with fire ants, ferocious mosquitoes, and relentless humidity that, like kudzu, had a way of devouring everything in sight. Between the two, it seemed to me that my new world was muffled.

“Muffled” is also one of the words I’d use to describe R.E.M.’s debut album, Murmur. The cover art depicts a field overgrown with kudzu that has engulfed an abandoned train station before dying off itself. Looking at it you can practically smell the earth, the rot, hear the moldy crackle the leaves would make as you made your way through the field.

I discovered R.E.M. the year after my family’s move to southern climes—the video for “Orange Crush” was on heavy rotation on MTV, and Green made its way to my tape deck not long afterwards. Once I’d worn that out, I worked my way backwards through the band’s canon via dubs of whatever albums I could get my hands on. I started with Eponymous, R.E.M.’s first compilation, and then went back through the overt politicism of Document, back through the dreamy folklore of Life’s Rich Pageant, back through the nerviness of Fables of the Reconstruction, passing over Reckoning because I never got a copy, and then settling on Murmur and Chronic Town, the EP that preceded it, where I landed and stuck around for a while.

There was something about the band’s sound at that period that captivated the me of 13, and it continues to captivate me now—although R.E.M. remains one of my favorite bands 25+ years later, these are the only records I regularly return to. Much of Murmur sounds like it was recorded underwater—a clangy, murky sound, like something submerged. And yet there is urgency in it, too. The taut production and jangly guitars overlaid with inscrutable lyrics that later became R.E.M.’s trademark sound is here in its infancy, years before the songs became more coherent and the band became iconic. In Murmur it’s just mysterious as hell, and, for my money, therein lies the album’s enduring appeal.

I’m not sure Murmur is what you’d call an accessible record. With a few memorable exceptions—“not everyone can carry the weight of the world” from “Talk About the Passion” comes to mind—the lyrics defy interpretation. They’re a disjointed mess of imagery (“scratch those candles in the twilight”) juxtaposed with nonsensical declarations (“you’re so much more attractive / inside your moral kiosk”) that don’t describe so much as evoke.

But somehow it works—the record overflows with emotion. “Radio Free Europe,” the album’s opener and the band’s first single, conveys both longing and a call to action—to what is up to the listener. “Catapult,” with its references to childhood, “ooh, we were little boys / ooh, we were little girls,” and its bouncy refrain, is a heady cocktail of exuberance and nostalgia. And cueing up “Perfect Circle” with the lights off and the ambient noise of nighttime around you is a sure way to get right into your feelings.

Murmur was recorded in the thick of the band’s formative years, a time when they would have been discovering things about themselves, each other, and making music; exploring their own environs, mental, physical, and otherwise. And as such, the lyrics don't seem written so much as retrieved from somewhere deep in Michael Stipe's subconscious. He didn’t quite know what he was on about yet, a fact he’s readily admitted in dozens of interviews over the years. But as with any creative endeavor, he and the rest of the band were making it up as they went along, feeling their way in the dark.

I was surprised to discover when I was researching this essay that, like me, no one in the band was strictly a Southerner. Michael Stipe was an army brat born in Decatur, Georgia who moved around when he was a kid and attended high school in Illinois before returning to attend the University of Georgia in Athens, where the band met. Peter Buck was born in California and moved to Roswell, Georgia when he was 14. Bill Berry was born in Minnesota and landed in Macon, Georgia as a teen, and Mike Mills was also born in California before moving to Georgia at the age of 10.

This is notable because R.E.M. is considered a quintessentially Southern band—when people hear of the town of Athens, the band is often the first they think of. Granted, that their sound was forged on the fertile soil of the storied south and the region’s influence is apparent throughout most of their work, but there’s something revelatory about the knowledge that the boys themselves were largely forged elsewhere. It leads me to a question I find myself asking more and more the older I get: how much of our lives are determined by what we’re exposed to versus what’s inside of us?

If the band had met anywhere else, would they still have turned out music that has influenced and continues to influence me and *millions* of other musicians and music lovers? If my family had moved to, say, Missouri instead of Georgia, would R.E.M. have struck the chord in my heart that’s still reverberating all these years later? Or would I have stumbled onto another band from, I don’t know, St. Louis, whose oeuvre would have had the same impact? Was it just a function of finding the music that matched the landscape that matched the era that grabbed me? Or something deeper? I’m honestly not sure—but then I also can’t imagine a world where I haven’t sung “Gardening at Night” at the top of my lungs with the windows down dozens of times on Route 316 between Athens and Atlanta, so maybe that’s the answer.

There’s a famous quote attributed to Michelangelo that says, “Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.” There’s a not-so-famous quote I came across recently in a novel by Anthony Marra called A Constellation of Vital Phenomena that says, “Perhaps our deepest love is already inscribed within us, so its object doesn’t create a new word but instead allows us to read the one written.” These ring true to me. Lately it seems that in the business of creating art—and in the business of creating ourselves—our influences matter, but it’s the process of uncovering what’s inside that matters most. If you’ll allow me to use kudzu as a metaphor—surely you must have known it would come back at some point—you can choose where you pare the weed back and where you allow it to grow, but there’s not much you can do about what’s underneath it.

—Sara Campbell

#198: Little Walter, "The Best of Little Walter" (1958)

I was classically trained on the piano, taught to sit up straight with my wrists suspended in the air. Poor posture could cost you points in a recital, or at least that’s what my piano teacher would tell me. She was so set on perfection. To her it didn’t even matter if I was playing the right key if it was with the wrong finger, and she would immediately smack my hands if she caught me doing it. I wouldn’t get very far into Mendelssohn’s Hochzeitsmarsch before you’d hear the cacophony of my mistakes, the sound of my hands pressed forcefully against the keys. She was the devil.

My Senior year of high school, when our jazz ensemble pianist had graduated, I was asked to fill in, since our band director knew I played piano. Fuck, I didn’t know the first thing about jazz. Still, I went along with it because, well, they were so cool...like a bunch of band kids who went rogue. Every class, before we officially started rehearsal, our director opened the floor up for any improv. The drummer picked a beat on his hi-hat and the bass played a chord progression, and then people were given about 16 bars to play whatever they felt. That’s what jazz is all about, the metamorphosis of a feeling into music.

With no notes on a page to tell me what to do, I became acutely aware of my own rigidness. I would freeze, afraid of making a mistake. For hours after school, in the practice rooms where most band kids would go to make out, I would sit there and plan all my “improv” pieces, 16 bars’ worth. It wasn’t until the end of that year that it clicked: if jazz and blues is all about feeling, then it doesn’t need to make sense. In “Sad Hours,” there’s a part where Little Walter leans on the same note, he just wails it out over and over again, he didn’t give a fuck. He was musically unpredictable.

Little Walter reinvented the harp. When I first listened to “Juke,” one of the songs he’s most well known for, I kept waiting to hear a harmonica. Instead, from the sound of it, I pictured something like a trumpet with a mute? I’m not really sure, but definitely not a harmonica. Little Walter didn’t just make music, he brought new sounds to life. He pressed his harp right up to the mic and turned the amp all the way up, setting it free. While he stayed in the band with Muddy Waters for some time, he was too volatile to stay in one place. That kind of genius couldn’t possibly be contained. It would be like trying to pull a comb through Einstein’s hair.

I interject here, because recently, while writing this, there was a protest in Charlottesville, Virginia over the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. White supremacists united under the stated goal, “to take America back.” I watched the news coverage of the rallies, and was confused. The party chanted things like, “You will not replace us.” A part of me wishes I could pull one of them aside and honestly ask, What do you mean “replace you”?

At the turn of the 19th century, racism and prejudice were rampant, but I didn’t have to tell you that. Police brutality didn’t just suddenly become a thing because someone decided to tweet about it. Needless to say, there were A LOT of feelings, and out from the mud of the fields and the streets, the blues were born. But few people give credit to artists like Little Walter, Muddy Waters, or Bo Diddley, let alone even know their names. Ask anyone who Elvis Presley is, and they’ll tell you, “The King.” Some might recognize Willie Dixon’s song, “My Babe,” because Elvis recorded a live cover of it. However, this song was originally recorded by Little Walter and was a number one hit on the Billboard R&B charts. It’s funny how Little Walter’s own wandering and seemingly aimless spirit would become the roots or part of the foundation to legends like the Rolling Stones. He taught people after him how to feel with music, and they inherited the keys to the kingdom without the scars of oppression. So, I ask again: What do you mean “replace you”?

—Yuna Lee

#199: The Strokes, "Is This It" (2001)

I have absolutely no idea when I first heard Is This It.

To clarify, that’s kinda strange for me. With almost every other song, album, movie, book, or TV show I love, I can vividly picture my first time with it and the person who introduced me to it. I know I was 8 years old when the album was first released, but my earliest memories of the album involve me (twice my life later, as a fresh-faced 16-year-old) boldly insisting it’s the “best album ever made.” I remember getting my inexplicably-sweaty Phrazes for the Young tee signed by long-time Strokes mentor JP Bowersock, explaining to my friend that “he’s the fuckin’ guru, man!” (and credited on Is This It as such). I remember starting a vinyl collection with the records I deemed “all-time greats”: Abbey Road, Is This It, and, somehow, Viva La Vida. I remember waiting all day to see “the boys” play a free concert, only to get myself crowd-surfed out of the audience three songs into their set. I remember proselytizing to anyone who’d listen about how Julian’s AM radio voice filter was the band’s greatest asset, as if it was an original thought and not the standout quote from an NME article I skimmed. I even remember Is This It being the album that fostered a close college friendship with the people who would teach me to play guitar and introduce me to Radiohead, and how I became the one defending the Strokes’ later output as “better than people say”—but I have no clue when or how I was introduced to the record. The damn thing just fell into my life at some point, as if I sent it back in time from the future to follow me around like a specter. And I do mean follow: “Hard to Explain” regularly shuffles up on my walk to work, “Last Nite” is a staple of every friend’s karaoke outings—even “Someday” is almost guaranteed to play twice a day at any given store in Los Angeles. And as the album has soundtracked a good third of my life, I’ve found myself falling into auto-pilot and singing along with every track. (Except for “When It Started.” That song blows. It’s boring as hell and was written very quickly to replace “New York City Cops”— possibly 9/11’s greatest casualty.)

All of this makes it very embarrassing for me to admit that until recently, I never once sat down and thought about the album’s meaning. In the many years I’ve spent with it, lyrics just sank into my mind through repeated listens and I went on to sing them, the way your dad might sing “Fortunate Son” or “Born in the USA” without realizing the parts that aren’t the chorus really fuck up the mood at the Fourth of July barbeque. Maybe I was just too arrogant to ever care if I knew what the record was about. That said, wanting to say something about the album was an easy decision; both the naked glove album cover and its psychedelic spiral alternate are seared in my brain as “important” symbols of teendom. It’s a beautiful case of dramatic irony that I only now understand why—because Is This It is an album about youthful arrogance.

I don’t necessarily mean “youthful” as in teen—a lot of the ideas expressed in the album stick with people well into their adulthoods. I also don’t mean “arrogance” as in your abilities (although, wouldn’t you give anything to live in the universe where the Strokes wrote “I Think I Can Beat Mike Tyson?”). It’s an album about growing up and going through experiences believing that your love is the first of its kind, that your vices are unconquerable, that your problems and emotions are some unique cosmic experience that people truly “ain’t ever gonna understand,” whether they be girlfriends, grandsons, or galaxy travelers. The same song giving us those words hides them under an upbeat, swingy pop-rock sound, the same way you’d hide those “unique” parts of your life. After all, no one worries about the life of the party!

That’s not to suggest this album is the band’s massive cry for help (maybe a lil whimper at most) because it’s more of an offering to any young people that might soon cry for help, only written by five men that couldn’t even legally purchase alcohol yet. It’s the confident transmissions of a group that thinks they’ve been through the wringer and come out clean on the other side, ready to share what they’ve learned. It’s a 40-minute Sermon on the Mount from a pack of teenage Jesuses (Jesi?) come to spread their gospel to the unwashed masses. (First 9/11, now a little light sacrilege. Fuck it, mask off.)

My favorite feature of Is This It is how versatile it is in the meaning of each song. Obviously, the Strokes didn’t invent that—it’s the whole reason artists rarely step out to explain the meanings behind their songs—but they do it in such a fun way that it’s easy to be their intended audience and still come away from the album with the arrogance to think the songs couldn’t possibly reflect your experiences. From the first sentence, “Soma” is pretty explicitly a song about drugs, but on a deeper level it’s about the vices you use to cope before you’ve learned to do it responsibly. Yes, sometimes that’s drugs. Sometimes it’s alcohol, or sex, or companionship, or video games, or television….or drugs (I mean, a lot of the time, it’s drugs). “The Modern Age” is about the depressive feelings you push down, pretending the vices aren’t taking a toll on you. “New York City Cops” is about the idea that they’ll never catch up to you. Addiction isn’t within your sights, you lost the cops around the corner, you can quit anytime you want to. But you don’t want to. So the one night turns to two, and two turns to five, then to nine, then to fourteen. But it’s fine, because you’re a genius, and the forces running against you—they ain’t too smart.

When Julian Casablancas isn’t crooning about outrunning your demons, he’s probably singing about fucking them; “Barely Legal” is a song about lust and how unbelievably draining it is to be on any side of it, “Hard to Explain” is about how a relationship can be brought down by complicated differences, and “Trying Your Luck” is about the heartbreak of committing to a relationship, even when you see the iceberg coming in the distance. Even “Take It Or Leave It,” the final song on the album, caps the record with a “he ain’t shit” coda that’s also a searing break-up banger for the ages (which could have easily veered into a screed about girls only wanting assholes, but that’s besides the point—the album is good!!)

I think most people make the case that “Hard To Explain” is the best song on the album, but for my money there isn’t a better song on this album than “Someday.” It’s the one song that breaks away from hammering you down with the frustrations of youth. The frustrations are still there—but they’re stated so plainly and honestly, with the understanding that this will all be a fond memory one day. It’s a beautiful song whose lyrics don’t try to tell you it’s not a beautiful song. It’s instantly nostalgic, and sweet, and positive and real, and it’s all the feelings you may recognize in a brief period of lucidity, if you can place yourself far enough outside of your own head to recognize that things are truly gonna be better, someday.

You know what’s particularly embarrassing to me as I write more and more about this album is that every message on this album that I internalized and ignored is right there, so plain and clear, in the title track—the track I often skipped because it wasn’t as ritzy as the rest. It’s a perfect thesis statement. It’s about working so hard to get so little, and reckoning that exchange with what older people told you to expect. “Is This It” can be pronounced with a scoff or a sigh of disappointment. You can read it as a braggadocios middle finger to everyone who said it would be hard, or as a disbelieving question levied at everyone who said it’d be the best years of your life. Often, those are the same people. And often, they’re right. Maybe you’re just too young and too arrogant to know it yet.

—Demi Adejuyigbe

#200: AC/DC, "Highway to Hell" (1979)

When I was in junior high my best friend had an older brother who was a few years ahead of us. He was a record collector constantly seeking new sounds. One glorious hot Texas summer, we raided and digested every record he had. This turned me onto a lot of great rock music I never knew existed. It also cemented for me the concept of the “Older Brother Band,” bands that are distinctly separate from the music of your parents’ generation but not quite a part of yours. For me, Older Brother Bands included groups like Deep Purple, Pat Travers, and Montrose. My parents’ record collection was amazing. It was filled with Beatles, Stones, Dylan, etc. In other words, it was filled with the music of their youth. This collection was filled with bands I had never heard of, or at best only a slight inkling of. These records were the door I passed through on my way from the musical identity of my parents to a musical identity of my very own. An identity that was informed by many sources but distinctly and rebelliously apart from the tastes of my parents. It did not hurt that these were records that often horrified my folks.

I’m pretty sure the first band I found on the other side of the Older Brother Band bridge was AC/DC. My 8-track tape copy of “If You Want Blood” got worn away by nearly non-stop play. AC/DC is music without subtlety. It is sledgehammer music built entirely on the dark impulses of id and existing entirely below the belt buckle. Their sound is a three-headed beast delivering a rock and roll throat punch that remains mostly unrivaled even today. First there is the nearly cruelly unyielding riff-and-rhythm machine that is anchored in Malcolm Young’s deceptively simple rhythm guitar marching lockstep with the bass of Cliff Williams and the drums of Phil Rudd. Second is the genius-level blues-suffused lead work of Angus Young’s Gibson SG. It is so ferocious it fooled an entire generation into believing that an Australian blues rock band was heavy metal. The third head of the beast is frontman Bon Scott, who takes the naughty bad boy pose of Jagger, mangling it and fusing it to the raw aggression and sexuality of a Neanderthal. AC/DC does not make smart records. They don’t make nice records. The records they make are records that terrify parents and drop panties in back seats. Part of their genius is they never aspire to be more than that. They never vary from this framework. You might find them offensive and dumb but their impact cannot be denied. They do one thing, and they do it better than anyone else.

Though they had several great records under their belt already, Highway to Hell is where the AC/DC sound formula finds mastery. It is, for my money, the greatest rock record of the 70s, a decade of many amazing rock records. From dropping the needle into the groove of the title cut and picking it up at the end of “Night Prowler,” you’ve got a record that perfectly reflects the vision and intensity of its creators, an unabashed mix of violence, brute sexuality, relentless crushing riffage, and hooks that are the envy and nightmare of every Tin Pan Alley and Brill Building huckster ever to put pen to paper.

The summer Highway to Hell was released, I spent a lot of time with my best friend Jason. Highway to Hell was our record. The older brothers of our crowd also knew and loved it, but this platter of wax was ours. We found it without them. Loved it without their input or influence. Everywhere we went that summer, we dropped quarters in jukeboxes filling burger joints and arcades with the sounds of Angus, Malcolm, and Bon. At home, our turntables spun this as much as anything else. Jason passed this summer very suddenly. I feel his loss every day. No matter where I go or what I do, he’s there at some point during the day. We weaved in and out of each others' lives for somewhere near 45 years. Every great turning point in my life, my losses and my victories, were shared with him, and his with me. We were as much brothers as friends and our families were intertwined as much as we were individually.

Great records are often about many things: the art, the sound, the lyrics, the moment they are born and the climate they are created in. They are also always about who you share them with. Jason and I howled and wailed with Highway to Hell in adolescent abandon, furious, hilarious. I have revisited this record over and over since it was released in 1979. I knew when he passed that telling my story of Highway to Hell would be mixed with him. I shared so much life with this man. We often moved in and out of each others' lives for a year or two at a time. There were marriages, moves, travel and careers, all the things life brings to the table. We never lost touch. Absence was almost irrelevant. We always picked back up as if nothing had changed. Most often it was like one of us had just left the room to refill a glass and was just now back to pick up the conversation where we had left it just a minute or two earlier. So, my story of this record, like many others, is woven through with Jason, the Biscuit Boy. We shared a lot of records. This one was a departure point for finding individual style and taste independent of your influences. It is also a touchstone for a time and place that’s both long gone but never far away. I am connected to it through an unfaltering friendship that endured everything life threw at it. The raw seething power of Highway to Hell is a glorious 100 MPH thrill ride through all the things you aren’t supposed to like about the world, all the things you aren’t supposed to want to be. We got to be all of them and tell the tale unashamed.

Hey Jason, look at us, we’re on our way to the promised land!

—Bosco Farr