#414: Go-Go's, "Beauty and the Beat" (1981)

I was eleven when my parents divorced, which was just old enough to appreciate the fact that the house was quieter without their constant screaming at each other, but young enough to still feel that it was my fault. My father took me out for ice cream the day after my birthday, and as I was trying to lick the peppermint bon bon off the edge of the cone before it melted into a puddle on my hand, he told me that he’d be moving out, thereby taking a hammer to the mirror that was my world and smashing it into pieces. The peppermint bon bon dripped and dripped, and I cried, and my dad said, “Cynthia, this doesn’t mean I don’t love you,” and then he went inside to get more napkins to clean me up.

The next weekend, my dad moved out of the house he’d shared with me and my mom and into an apartment with the woman my mother referred to as “that skank” when she thought I wasn’t listening. The woman herself told me to call her Ella. I spent every other weekend with Ella and my father at his new apartment, which smelled like mold and old Chinese takeout, and which didn’t even have blinds over the front windows. My father gave me Sharpie markers and a coloring book, like he thought I was still five, and my mother was furious when I got home, because I’d managed to mark up my T-shirt.

Illustration by Annie Mountcastle

I tried to hate Ella, but I was only a kid and incapable of nursing a grudge the way I can now. She bribed me, and I fell for it. She gave me barrettes and braided my hair and told me I was going to be a rock star in middle school. She wanted to know what books I’d read, what movies were my favorites, what kind of music I liked. She took me to the library and we went to Saturday matinees at the cheap theater, where they still made their popcorn with real butter. When she found me singing along to her Go-Go’s record, she went out and bought me the CD. “Now we can sing in the car,” she said. She helped me put my hair in a side ponytail and did the same to her own, and dressed us both in baggy, bright sweatshirts and pronounced us ready for the 80s. “You’re going to grow up and make history, too,” she said. “Be a badass female. You won’t be able to help it.” I liked when she spoke to me like that, like I could do and be anything.

When I got home that Sunday evening, I played the CD in the boombox I had in my bedroom. I kept the volume low, but my mother heard it anyway and came in. She didn’t knock. She never knocked anymore.

“Where did you get this?” she said.

“Doesn’t matter what they say,” Belinda Carlisle was singing, “in the jealous games”—and then she fizzled into nothing as my mother hit the eject button.

“Where did you get this?” my mother said again. I mumbled something about borrowing it from a friend, but my mother said, “It’s from her, isn’t it? She thinks she can paint your nails and do your hair and be your best friend and I won’t notice. That skank,” she almost screamed, and I was surprised, because that was the first time she had ever called Ella that when she knew I could hear. My mother took the CD in her hands and snapped it in two, and the sound it made as it cracked seemed to echo through my bedroom.

My mother began to cry and say how sorry she was. She sat down on my bed and patted the mattress next to her. I didn’t want to be near her, but I sat down anyway. She was still holding the pieces of the CD. It had split perfectly down the middle. “I need you to do something for me,” she said. “Can you do something for me?” I nodded. “I need you to tell your father that you don’t like Ella,” she said. “I need you to tell him that you hate her, that if she’s there, you won’t go see him. I need you to make him believe you. Can you do that?” She leaned forward and her hair covered her face and she made a honking sound as she tried to blow her nose into her sleeve, something she’d always told me never to do.

I was only eleven, so I didn’t yet understand how love can make you crazier than you ever thought possible, how it can grab you with its teeth and thrash you back and forth to break your neck, how by the time it releases you, you don’t know who you are anymore. I hadn’t yet lain awake at night feeling like my stomach was twisting out of my body. I hadn’t moved out of apartments, switched grocery stores because I couldn’t stand to be in the same place where I had once been happy. I hadn’t cried so hard it sounded like screaming.

I didn’t know that my father had been sleeping with Ella for years while still married to my mother, that he’d known her longer than my mother, that he’d almost called off the wedding because he’d known he didn’t love my mother. I didn’t know that my mother had been calling him every night, alternately cursing him and begging him to come home. I didn’t know that he answered each time she called, that he called her honey and said that of course he loved her, he just couldn’t be with her, leading her to believe that she still had a chance. All I knew was my mother wouldn’t stop crying, and she had given herself the hiccups, and she had broken my CD, and I wanted her out of my room.

“No,” I said.

“What?” she said.

“That’s mean,” I said.  “You’re mean. I won’t do it. I wish I lived with Dad and Ella. I want to live with Dad and Ella!”

“You don’t mean that,” my mother said. “Cynthia? Do you mean that?”

And then I did the cruelest thing that I have ever done. “I hate you,” I said to my mother. “I hate you!”  

Illustration by Annie Mountcastle

It wasn’t the first time I had said those words. When you’re a child, you can say them for anything: no dessert, no second underdog on the swing, no sleepovers on a school night. But this was the first time that I meant it. In that moment, staring at my mother’s blotchy face, the CD pieces still in her fingers, the pale white line that marked where her wedding ring had always sat on her finger, I hated her.

My mother stood up carefully, like she was afraid she might break something if she moved too quickly. She set the pieces of the CD down on my bedspread. I didn’t touch them until she’d left the room. I tried to fit the two pieces back together, but I couldn’t. Some little tiny chip had come free when she’d broken it, had gotten lost in the weave of the carpet, and when I placed the pieces next to each other, it proclaimed itself by its absence.

I didn’t move in with my father and Ella. My mother and I never mentioned the conversation we’d had. She stopped calling Ella “that skank.” She stopped talking about Ella at all. I still spent every other weekend with them, but when Ella tried to braid my hair, I flinched away from her. When she asked me about my life, I shrugged.

As it turned out, Ella left my father just two years later. She stopped by to see me on her way out of town. She told me that she was sorry we hadn’t been able to stay close. She told me that I was still a rock star. She told me that she hoped I’d remember her when I was older. Then she reached her hand out like she was going to hug me, a squeeze across the shoulders maybe, but instead she let it drop, and she turned around and got into her blue sedan and drove away.

I went back inside, where my mother was waiting. She didn’t say anything, just watched as I went past her up the stairs and into my bedroom. My window overlooked the street in front of the house, but when I pulled back the curtain, Ella was already gone. I had thought that I would feel sad, but as I watched the front yard, where the tire swing my father put up for me when I was little was swaying back and forth in the breeze, I didn’t feel much of anything.

—Emma Riehle Bohmann

#415: Van Halen, "Van Halen" (1978)

He could imagine committing the crime, any number of them—arson, blackmail, drunk in charge of a motor vehicle—that wasn’t the problem. It was the being proud of it in the aftermath that he couldn't conceive of, those smiles, all that smug mugging for the mugshots. No, Petey thought, he'd be tear-streaked and mortified in his.

Unless it had been a delinquency of joy, like crowd-surfing (or the aiding and abetting thereof) after the behemoth with the braided beard had asked everyone not to, something victimless and reeking of youth like that. Petey used to mosh, used to elbow the pretty girls near him and mime a helping boost, a questioning shrug. He'd make a basket out of his hands for them, a ladder to rebellion. He'd never touch the butts of their jeans unless it was to bestow an absolutely innocent and necessary momentum. They'd wink their thanks as they sailed away into the sea of drunken, groping revelers.

What you lost, as you got older, were the things like that, the gumption to go against people, even in little ways that made the world better for yourself without making it all that worse for anybody else.

“Goddamnit, Petey, are you even seeing this shit?” his friend asked, sharp elbow in his ribs, breaking the spell.

The Israeli punk band was tearing up the stage at Chilgrimage, the summer festival they'd attended every year since graduating college a decade ago. The bassist wore a trashcan, the guitar player some fan's underwear on his head. There appeared to be no lead singer, though frenzied yelps still blared out of the enormous speakers. Petey was looking the wrong way, the predictable idiot, staring at the stage and hundreds of upturned faces when the real action was behind him: the rock star, middle-aged and bare-chested, nearly finished ascending the metal tower that housed the audio booth.

Petey turned around. Was the guy going to jump? The crowd wouldn't be satisfied otherwise. Was that going to make it worth it?

The singer climbed down the same way he'd gone up, a little carefully. He marched around and around the pit, stole his drummer's sticks and played his skull as the crowd pressed inward, crushing, crushing toward the center to get near the crazy guys, the guys with all the fun dumb energy left, the plenty of idiot energy.

Petey got smooshed, spilled his five-dollar Dasani on a topless woman, got his big toe stomped on hard by a child, was introduced to a fat man's armpit, pressed up against a lovely teenager's back, smelled her cliché rosewater shampoo, lost his favorite corporate-logoed sun hat into the mess of feet and mud. His friends were nowhere to be seen. He stripped off his shirt and mopped the sweat from his head and noticed that the music had stopped. It was just the ear-ringing now and the notion that he had survived. It had been thrilling in the hollow center of his terror and now he had just enough time to make his way to the main stage. When the day-glo children pushed him out of the way, he didn't even mind.

“Nice war paint,” Petey said to a shirtless, hairless teen boy as he passed him by.

“Yeah, thanks,” the kid said, kinda smiled. “Nice, um, nice hiking sandals.”

*

Petey always kept an eagle eye out for his favorite stars at these kinds of things. Because sometimes they’d stroll around among the common folk for an hour, just to get a bite-sized taste of it. They needed elephant ears and people-watching through pot clouds as much as everybody else did. He both feared and relished the fact that he might miss something, might not know who it was at the time. He thought he saw the woman from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. He thought he saw Dave Grohl. An ugly old son of a bitch walked by, looking like a motorcycle mechanic who got fired for hitting the whiskey. Pierced septum, stringy thin hair, half-assed dragon tattoo gone wrinkly. Profile like a Portrait of Someone Who Once Coulda Been Someone, With Ear Hair. Petey thought the old boy could almost pass for Eddie Van Halen. But then, practically anybody could be Eddie these days, if you squinted.

Maybe getting older was the exact opposite of becoming a celebrity, Petey thought as he walked. He'd sometimes imagined the crushing depression of making your first blockbuster, realizing some pipe dream, finding out it wasn't what you'd always needed in order to begin, to be. Maybe reaching oldness would be the process of arriving somewhere dreaded, achieving the anti-fantasy in order to find it was a place that you didn't so much mind being once you arrived accidentally.

He had wanted to be famous once, back before he met James Earl Jones. He'd tried to sell James a souvenir lollipop for his granddaughter at a crappy gift shop, and had been too scared to tell Darth Vader that the charge of $1.79 had been declined; he just surreptitiously swiped his own plastic instead. That booming voice, that face that nine out of ten American humans had seen and seen and seen. It changed people.

Obviously, James would have been good for it. Must have been some mix-up at the bank. Would have been no big deal to ask for a different card. The man must have had a bucketful, all platinum, or black gold, or plutonium, or whatever they make 'em out of for people with money.

Petey knew then that he was part of one of the big little underrated problems of the world, that he was making life worse for James.

The horror, the horror. Every single human either too nice or too terrible to you for the rest of your life. You'd have to spend your days questing for apathetic, mediocre reactions from your fellow man. Other people leaving you well alone because they couldn't care less was an honest-to-God blessing some people couldn't afford to lose. Plus, Petey liked the idea of a whole existence spent thinking about it that way—that he'd chosen not to ever achieve anything more than dulled and moderate successes. He'd weighed his options and chosen not to flip on the light switch in the dark room of his life that would have blinded everyone, left them with sunspots on the insides of their lids, blinking.

*

Petey hustled toward the spot his friends had staked out with a blanket earlier in the day. He pushed past the dance forest and the Esurance prize wheel. Little things had changed, booths had been switched out, they'd brought in better porta potties, but he felt each time as though he were striding through a mashup of all the previous summers, spun by a shoddy DJ.

Photograph by Marie Sicola

Last year, the final act had been Jane’s Addiction. Oh, the youth-reliving glory! It wasn't that they weren't still cool, it was just how much cooler they used to be. Or maybe it was that all the people who thought they were coolest were wrapped in blankets, some Babybjörned, grooving from high up on the grassy hill and watching the twin Jumbotron screens. Down in the pit you had zonked adolescent Canadians on ditch weed and ecstasy who kinda thought every third song was pretty tight and maybe a little familiar.

Petey's crew had reposed on one elbow and said they were thrilled, said it was the show of a lifetime. Doesn't it look intense down there? Hah! From the front row, how could you even hope to see? They'd played almost all of Nothing’s Shocking. How old and how happy this had made Petey!

Petey pushed on, skirting a crowd of people taking video of a young girl kissing and arguing with a tree. It's not that you ever make some big choice, he thought. It's not that you turn your back on staying up all night, on stabbing friends in the back to get lucky. You just fall asleep early and wake up early not liking what's on the radio and wishing you did. You just go dig out your old binder of Sabbath CDs and find that you're 50/50 on whether this is badass and nostalgic or just a bad sign, like how you've been drinking less beer and more wine.

And then you find yourself revolving by on another loop at the same festival, nearly midnight, and you find that you’ve eschewed the luxurious hill for the grimy pit, though you don’t even know who the main act is. Still, you’re down there in the throng and it’s headliner time, around witching hour, when your feet are sore and you have to keep bending your knees, putting weight on the left foot a while, then the right one, and the set changes are interminable, a personal affront, your bladder a beaten middleweight cruiser, and you’ve entered some dreamspace.

Petey rose up on the balls of his feet. The whole gorge went black and when the floodlights snapped Petey surged forward. It was the old boy in makeup and a crimson jumpsuit, the edge of his dragon glistening in the rain. He picked up the mic stand and flung it into the crowd, the metal just missing Petey's ear. It was like the violent-gentle, guttural whisper of a semi-trailer rocking past a sedan on the interstate. A tall dude cut in front of him and Petey gave the guy a hard shove, because screw that guy, and because he had to see, and because what's a little crime, anyway, if it's for a good cause? On stage the odd creature was stuck in the spotlight—struck head-on by the blinding blessing and menace, yet unconcerned, finger-tapping his strings, shredding and saying, It's me, it's still me you're all here to see.

—Eric Thompson

#416: Tom Waits, "Mule Variations" (1999)

I remember two stories people have told me about Tom Waits.

The first one is this: When my friend Joe was in high school he would give his younger brother, who was ten at the time, rides to school. For whatever mildly sadistic reason, Joe would proceed to lock the car windows and play select tracks from Bone Machine (the Waits album that sounds like a psychedelic nightmare-carnival) at maximum volume until his brother started crying.

Next is something from my friend Jon. I don't remember the song, but he would play the same one, all the time. I think it was from Rain Dogs, but it doesn't really matter. What matters is how afterward, he would tell me about how his dad disliked music, almost all music, but whenever he heard that one specific Tom Waits song, he would stop whatever he was doing and ask Jon to play it again.

Here's my point: people like Tom Waits for a lot of reasons. It might be safe to say they hate him for just as many. I think my response to his music is probably just as minuscule and idiosyncratic as everyone else's. From Mule Variations (the album The RS 500 has paid me handsomely to write about), I'm thinking mostly of the song “House Where Nobody Lives.” In other albums there are many of his songs like this: “Kentucky Avenue,” “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis.” They’re songs that seem to be longing for a place that meant something to Waits, but a place that's now long gone.

And for a lot of my life I've been overwhelmed by places. Maybe more than most people, I don't actually know. What I do know is that trying to convey what's meaningful to me about them is overwhelmingly difficult. I've been writing for a lot of my life too, and I'm finally at peace with the fact that I won't ever be able to communicate, or communicate fully, what a place means to me. Before you stop reading because you've already read Derrida or Jacques Lacan, hear me out. What I want to tell you is why I think we can't write about places, and what any of this matters for. If at all.

*

I think a lot about buildings, and how beautiful and weird and sad they can be.

I think a lot about Pizza Huts, and how they amaze me. I'm not talking about the food (except for the lunch buffet: always relevant), but about the actual structures they're in. As a kid growing up in the 90s, I loved the restaurant, and would get excited by that bizarre trapezoidal edifice whenever I saw it.

But something weird happens to me now. I'll often drive by someplace that was built to be a Pizza Hut, but then re-purposed for another storefront. Even then, even though a pizza may not have been cooked inside that structure for a full decade, I recognize it. I love this, how the shape of a building alone can recall something meaningful, how arbitrary designs are coded into our psyches, and become activated by the strangest things, in the strangest ways.

And what else I love is that it's these shitty, overlooked buildings that actually become the stuff of our lives. We often want to define places by landmarks: the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building, something Frank Lloyd Wright built, etc. Famous buildings or architectural anomalies are cool, sure, but they're novelties. I grew up just outside of Chicago, and what makes me think of the city isn't the Sears Tower, but the piss-smelling L train and an under-lit, smokey basement off 26th Street. We live and create through vernacular architecture:

Suburban ranch homes lined up quietly in the summer dark.

Driving through Indiana, you can see for miles. When it's warm out, everything on blacktop shimmers and it makes me sad for some reason I cannot explain.

Once I walked alone to a gas station at 4 o'clock in the morning to buy candy. I was 16. It was winter, and it was so bright from the snow reflecting moonlight I could see like it was day.

Illustration by Lena Moses-Schmitt

And if our lives are determined by the finite, imperfect spaces we live in, then, too, are our memories. Geography informs memory more than anything else, I believe. And for Waits and myself, place is enormously important in a specific type of remembering: nostalgia. So many of his songs, the ones I like most, are about this (especially “House Where Nobody Lives”): the desire to communicate a place long gone to him, and because of this, someplace longed for.

There's something about nostalgia that makes places and things more wonderful and more painful. It's a lens we see through, but any light from the past that's visible has already been refracted. Nostalgia is, if nothing else, a distortion. It makes us yearn to communicate things even more, yet it makes it harder to communicate anything accurately.

*

I might be crazy, or stuck in my own head (or both!), but I think Tom Waits understands all of  the consuming, unnameable drive to communicate something about the places and landscapes that define our lives.

What he also understands is something I do too, finally: the futility of all this. For me, all of his twisting and turning through personas, atmospheres, and different interpretations of familiar landscapes, is the attempt to convey at least something about the places that matter to him, while recognizing the impossibility of doing so completely. Maybe only from a hundred separate perspectives can we begin to convey a place essentially. But maybe, probably, we can't, yet will still try just as hard. Just as hopelessly. And there's something great about that too.

I'm not saying this is what Tom Waits is all about. I'm just saying I think it's present: present in Mule Variations, in Bone Machine, in Rain Dogs, in whatever. It matters to him. And it matters to me. And it might matter to you, too, if you care about places, if you care about, say, the Monongahela National Forest, or your Uncle's cabin in South Dakota, or the shitty ranch house you grew up in. Even if it looks exactly like all the other shitty ranch houses around it. Even if you don't live there anymore; even if it's a place where nobody lives.

—Jack McLaughlin

#417: U2, "Boy" (1980)

The Blues, as Ellison put it, might be summed up as “personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.”

By definition, no one is good at navigating catastrophe. But as teenagers, we’re extra-bad at navigating catastrophe—assuming whatever we’re up in arms about can, even by extraordinarily loose standards, qualify as catastrophe. As a teenager, in deliberate preparation for all the catastrophe I was worried was coming my way, I listened to U2. I listened to a lot of U2. The thing that distinguished them from any respectable band to claim (then and now) undoubtedly had something to do with earnesty, and that's probably what's separated them from the scenes they've inhabited throughout their long history of making music.

I discovered U2 way too late, once everyone else was already done and over with them. It didn’t help that my discovery of U2 converged with my most intensely churchy years—not really religious, just churchy. While spending years’ worth of weekends and summers repairing dilapidated houses and delivering Meals on Wheels with youth groups, I obsessed over each of U2’s eras—from Boy to their much-hated film Rattle and Hum, which was made the year I was born but which I did not discover myself until I was sixteen or so. I watched Bono, The Edge, Larry, and Adam sliding down Memphis’s bluffs on flattened cardboard boxes and touring Graceland looking teary-eyed and star struck, and I loved it.

The worlds between the singles first released before Boy and the final cut of the album are spectacular. Something crystallized in the studio—and from then to now, there’s a more singular arc, it’s always a stretch, but you can follow the path pretty clear. And the arc mattered: it took them up above the insular music scene of the late 70s in Ireland—which rightly or wrongly would’ve been called provincial Britain by some. Certainly, the Dublin of then wasn’t the Dublin of the 2001 recording of U2 Go Home, recorded live at Slane Castle some twenty years since they opened for Thin Lizzy, riding the waves created by the debut of Boy. And at the height of this wave, there's a particular recording of "Out of Control" that's still in heavy rotation for me.

I loved the outlandish Zoo TV and Achtung Baby tours, when U2 attempted to counteract those words that hounded them in each and every review: earnest and overly serious. But even their attempts at irony still managed to be too earnest, too serious: with multi-colored Trabants hanging from the ceiling, Bono and his various alter egos preached about Sarajevo, access to contraception, dumping radioactive materials with Greenpeace. Their activism was loud, showy, and I ate it up, thinking it somehow sanctioned my own smaller attempts to do good and make change in my quiet, churchy ways.

Listening to Boy was, for me, always a kind of homecoming. U2 recorded Boy when they were all under twenty-one years old, and when I listen to that album now, I can see myself as a teenager, falling in love with a band for the first time. I listened to U2 everywhere, all the time. On a church trip to Mississippi, stripping highway paint from the side of an old woman’s house, I’d have headphones jammed deep into my ears, listening to U2 and believing there was a way to be a person of faith, an artist, an activist—to do all of these things well—and still be sort of cool (right?).

Now look here: no one in the history of music, not since wandering troubadours had to sing for their nightly meal, was as hardworking as B.B. King, and he said those Irish boys can play. He meant it enough to sing with ‘em. He told Bono it was a deep song for such a young fella, and there’s damn sure no higher honor in the land. But maybe it was Joey Ramone called ‘em by the right name in the end (called ‘em gospel singers, I heard to tell). Say it's the truth or not, but don’t forget for a minute the other important part: B.B. King said they could play.

Chiming with glockenspiel and The Edge’s signature pulsating guitar, “I Will Follow” was written in tribute to Bono’s mother who’d died not long before, when Bono was fourteen. Bono claims to have sung the song from his mother’s perspective: If you walk away, walk away / I walk away, walk away, I will follow / If you walk away, walk away / I walk away, walk away, I will follow / I will follow. This song was kind of confusing to me: wasn’t she the one who’d left? Was she following him, or was he following her? How, I wondered, can someone follow someone after their own death? Was she a ghost? Whatever. What I hear expressed in this song is an ardent, hopeful faith, in spite of loss and pain.

My wife has never loved a band—as in, never loved a single band. She likes music, but she lives for paint—for colors I will never be able to see. She points out that I’m perfectly polite in galleries, but that my questions betray a gruesome lack of the real shit required to know and love a painting. Every time she brings me, there’s no way I belong—that’s the sort of ground you can tread when you’re married. But in formative media, we’re from different worlds, and I am the utter, sloppy opposite of her vivid world of brushstroke and dynamic art: I am a born sap—there’s no two ways about it—and I love U2.

Like “I Will Follow,” most of the lyrics on Boy aren’t ready for the voice—big, at times operatic—Bono is trying to give them. Amazingly, Bono wrote a review of Boy in the comments section of Rolling Stone’s website in 2008. After listening to Boy for the first time “in over twenty years,” Bono made jabs at his own girlish voice, his pretentiousness, the album’s “nonlyrics,” and his own “face like a baked bean and in search of a nonregional identity...” Bono also wrote some surprisingly insightful observations about Boy that helped me clarify my own confused, lingering attachment to U2.

For those years when I loved U2 whole-heartedly and unselfconsciously, it didn’t really occur to me that U2 might be deeply, fundamentally uncool. Even now, when I find someone willing to hear my case for U2, I have to remind myself that U2 might be a lot of things but they are definitely not cool. “[O]f course,” Bono wrote, “the pursuit of coolness is rarely the same thing as the pursuit of art…” No matter what Bono or U2 did to try and counteract their sincerity, their earnestness—their pursuit of art over coolness might have been the most sincere thing about them, something they couldn’t renounce without becoming a completely different band.

There’s a lot of murk and shimmer surrounding U2—by design, maybe, but surely it couldn’t have ever been any other way. What’s sure is that there is a constant play between sincerity and teasing, and there’s those who say that when it comes from Bono, it’s the same thing. But Bono has outed me and the hundred (thousand?) others cut from the same cloth, time and again. He’s never shy to leave us high and dry as his followers, those of us not quick enough to realize we shouldn’t take him seriously—or at the very least, that we should never, ever call U2 cool out loud. All of us sincere, weepy saps, desperately trying with a well-timed sarcastic quip, or oafish, appropriately juvenile stunt here and there—we all live in constant fear that the moment comes when we have to reveal all the bleeding-heart thoughts we live with constantly, or else betray them forever.

Let me put it this way: among those who would strongly identify as religious, my thoughts and words have never once carried water. People in my high school girlfriend’s church admonished me—“Every tongue got to confess”—when I was too quiet.

In high school, I didn’t tell many people that I was a preacher’s kid. I don’t know what, exactly, compelled me to keep this information private. I was five-foot-eight and weighed barely ninety pounds soaking wet the year I fell in love with U2, and, at fifteen-years-old, I had almost no conception of irony. I look at myself through memory as a case study in over-earnestness, carrying still-wet four-foot paintings through my high school’s crowded hallways, brooding from behind my curtains of hair, watching videos of frightened rhesus monkeys in AP Psych, spreading paint over thickly-layered canvases during all my classes. I lugged around a camouflage bag bought at an army surplus store, all grimy and covered with U2 and Harold and Maude buttons, amulets to protect me from the forces that would peer back, from a few years’ distance, and see in me an earnest grappling, a sincerity, that is as painful to remember as it was to try and get rid of.

And among those who love words and say there’s no God, I wouldn’t by any means reckon I’ve fared better, but they’ve at least proved slower to chastise me believing. So it was always in the folds of those crows I hid—people who didn’t ever think twice about God or faith of any kind, or even how the big story worked in real life. When an interviewer might bring up “Where the Streets Have No Name,” and Bono says, “We can be in the middle of the worst gig in our lives, but when we go into that song, everything changes. The audience is on its feet, singing along with every word. It's like God suddenly walks through the room. It's the point where craft ends and spirit begins. How else do you explain it?” you still flinch, because the man is in the process of trying to out how much you feel this shit.

As I retreated deeper into myself, my mother dug her heels in and wouldn’t let me disappear entirely. She tried to reach me through my obsessions (though she could never figure out the Jeff Buckley thing. “He doesn’t know how to just let a note end,” she said once). She drove for two days so I could see a Basquiat exhibit in Houston, and later that year she took me to Atlanta where we saw U2 in concert. It was jarring, to see the band members that had lived for me, only within my own private mind and heart, come out onto the stage. During that show, I felt an intense love for this band, and also felt it start to slip away. Not because they weren’t cool, which I’d kind of started to figure out, but because my love for them had been nurtured in isolation. Surrounded by thousands of dancing, screaming fans, I felt I had to cede some part of my personal attachment to the crowd.

When a section of the audience started chanting, “U-S-A, U-S-A, U-S-A,” a shrill voice cried out, “They’re not even from here!” As if anyone could forget this band was from somewhere. This was, perhaps, what resonated with me most deeply about U2: everywhere they went, they were connected with their place, almost representatives of it. They were able, it seemed, to claim their home and its history without brushing over the ugly parts. And while there are no verdant moors or crumbling castles in Memphis, I was, and am, similarly obsessed with the story of my place. I have never been able to loose myself from the place I came from, and, lately, I’ve come to understand that I don’t want to.

As Bono puts it, Boy was an album about virginity and not wanting to lose it.

The day I lost mine was a miserably anticlimactic day, that, looking back at my young self (who maybe wrongly appears to me, chubby cheeked and in the grainy light of Super 8 film) and all the expectations I’d laid out on the bedsheets before—well, Jesus, it’s just heartbreaking, even still. In the afternoon, I went to see a girl who wasn’t very kind, but was very beautiful to me then. It was a sunny winter day, and bitterly cold in the wind. My strongest memory was how in the shower after, I waited under the pattering of warm water for something to feel different about the course of my life. All I could feel was a slow, small disappointment that’s stayed slow and small in all the days since then. How marvelously coincidental it appears then, that this album fills me with a certain kind of excitement, an abiding shame, and a deeper sense of hope than I’m entitled to, on the sum of events between then and now.

In 2001, U2 played two outdoor concerts at Slane Castle in Ireland, in front of more than 150,000 people. When they performed their first-ever single, “Out of Control,” Bono introduced each of his bandmates. (In this video, as with every other performance of U2, I find myself wondering where the hell they found Adam Clayton. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard him speak. I have a theory that Larry is feeding off Adam’s life force—how else would Larry keep from aging a day while Adam looks thirty years older than the rest of them? Mostly, The Edge seems like a preternaturally nice dude, who has worn the same outfit every day for ten or fifteen years.) Anyway, performing in front of the lighted castle, it is clear that U2 are giddy to be back home, in front of a huge crowd. They are reveling in the Irishness of it all. Bono pulls an Irish flag from the crowd, saying “maybe just once…?” as he wraps his country’s flag tight around his body.

Always, it's the tension with U2. Shame and guilt everywhere and no way out of the dopey hope. It’s a good bet, though, that whether we're teenagers or not, if we’re real close-in on that tension, it’ll cause us to speak. What comes out, though, and how good it might be, we’re not to say. But there’s no mistaking the feeling we’re after. Primo Levi said that it is not important to be strong, but to feel strong; if we accept this as resonant in any fashion, we are certainly trading in the selfsame bits and pieces that the young boys of U2 were furiously fidgeting with as they assembled the extraordinary and crystalline studio cuts of their songs in 1980. Out of control.

No doubt about it, the songs are all in their way challenges, and likely juvenile ones. But the challenges grow bigger throughout the years that U2 are out on tour through the world. And in Boy the seeds were always there, and are still evident. Is there another big artist you could hand a buck to who might promise more?

Even now, my wife asks skeptically, as we watch all the old songs re-sung at a live show from the Elevation-era, “Is that a heart-shaped track he’s running on?” and I want to tell her so much more.

Bono ends his own comment section review of Boy by saying, “...i'm proud of this little Polaroid of a life I cant fully recall. As well as the ability to make embarrassing mistakes, the demands of a great debut might be fresh ideas, fresh paint and sometimes for its canvas, a fresh face…I miss my boyhood.” [sic] When I think back on my own less-than-great debut, all those embarrassing mistakes, those ideas that might have been fresh, a murky image of myself starts to emerge from the darkness, but never completely develops. Maybe my own earnestness, my sincere faith, is too painful to witness. Perhaps this is what I feel when I listen to U2, even now: It’s like I’m missing something I can’t fully recall. And I do—I miss it.

—Aaron Fallon & Martha Park
Illustrations by Martha Park (AF) & S.H. Lohmann (MP)

#418: Paul McCartney and Wings, "Band on the Run" (1973)

The first musical argument I can remember having must have taken place in 1971. I was in first grade, and I was disputing with my best friend the relative merits of the Beatles and the Banana Splits. Not the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, or the Monkees, or even the Archies: the Banana Splits, a bubblegum band without a top-forty hit from an animated TV show I had never even seen. I was indignant, even then, that anyone would question the Beatles’ supremacy, and that the rivals would be a band so synthetic and ephemeral. I understood that the seventies were a fallen decade, and I mourned my belated condition. I had missed the Beatle moment.

Missed it just barely. We lived in London in 1968-69, where my brothers acquired 45s of “Get Back” and “The Ballad of John and Yoko.” I was less than three miles away when the Beatles gave their final performance on the rooftop of the Apple building on January 29, 1969. Back home in Massachusetts, my dad owned all the Beatles’ albums, and I remember being allowed to use his stereo to play (carefully) side two of Rubber Soul or side one of Abbey Road, my early favorites. But I knew the Beatles had broken up, and I understood that I was enjoying something that was over. Or was it just a temporary split? I remember reading hopeful reports in music magazines about prospects for a Beatle reunion. As a child whose parents never divorced, I focused my yearning on getting John and Paul back together.

That’s why I cherished Ringo, the 1973 album that seemed the prelude to a  reconciliation. Ringo’s song “Early 1970” had professed his desire to remain on good terms with “all three,” and Ringo, with John and George playing on one song and Paul and Linda on another, showed him doing just that. He even invoked Billy Shears in one song! It was hardly a Beatles album, but it seemed about as close as we could get.

Until one month later, when Band on the Run came out. Band on the Run had only one Beatle playing on it, but it was hailed by many as a work that could stand alongside the Beatles’ best, and in certain ways it courted that comparison. The title track’s celebration of a mythical band, for instance, brings to mind Sgt. Pepper and his crew. The way in which musical and lyrical snippets of “Band on the Run,” “Jet,” and “Mrs. Vandebilt” [sic] are reprised on side two is also reminiscent of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, suggesting that this, too, was a coherent “concept” album of some sort. “Let Me Roll It” had a snarling guitar and a reverberant vocal that imitated or parodied John Lennon, perhaps answering his scathing 1971 attack on McCartney, “How Do You Sleep?” (The lyrics were mostly just another love song to Linda, however.) In any case, Paul seemed to have the Beatles on his mind, and rather than shirking his legacy, as he had in four underwhelming post-Beatles LPs, he seemed with Band on the Run finally to live up to his Beatleness.

At moments, however, the album feels less like a return to form and more like self-imitation. When “the undertaker [draws] a heavy sigh / Seeing no one else had come,” we are a bit too close to Father McKenzie. The third song on side one, “Bluebird,” is a lush and pleasant song, but it pales (or azures?) in comparison to the graceful ache of “Blackbird.” Like Robert Frost’s oven bird, “Bluebird” and Band on the Run and McCartney’s entire solo career ask us “what to make of a diminished thing.” How do we properly value McCartney’s lesser seventies work in relation to his sixties masterpieces? Robert Christgau, for one, viewed Band on the Run quite sternly. Denying that it was “McCartney’s definitive post-Beatles statement,” he gave it a C+. More conventionally, the Rolling Stone 500 calls it “McCartney’s finest post-Beatles hour.”

Perhaps the best thing would be to forget the Beatles altogether, thereby eliminating any sense of diminishment. What if this were not the album of an ex-Beatle? What if it came from the Raspberries or America or Klaatu or some other Beatlesque combo? How does it sound compared to Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, or There Goes Rhymin’ Simon, or Countdown to Ecstasy (all 1973 also)? In writing this essay, I’ve become aware of how my reverence for the Beatles has caused me to overlook solo Paul. Over the years I have indiscriminately collected albums by ’70s pop artists. I have the entire ’70s works of Elton John and Rod Stewart and E.L.O., but I’ve never owned—never even listened to—much of Paul’s music from that decade. I know only the hits and Band on the Run, and even that LP, which I have owned for decades, includes a couple of deep cuts that I swear I never heard before last weekend. If some non-Beatle had produced these hits and these albums, we would esteem them a good deal more than we generally do.

The fantasy of a Paul who was never a Beatle was made use of in one of my favorite jokes from The Simpsons. Homer and Marge are trying to rescue Bart from the clutches of Mr. Burns, so they hire a professional deprogrammer:

Deprogrammer: Mr. and Mrs. Simpson, your son has clearly been brainwashed by the evil and charismatic Mr. Burns.

Marge: Are you sure you can get him back for us?

Deprogrammer: Absolutely. I’m the one who successfully deprogrammed Jane Fonda, you know.

Marge: What about Peter Fonda?

Deprogrammer: Oh, that was a heartbreaker. But I did get Paul McCartney out of Wings.

Homer: You idiot! He was the most talented one!

If (as Homer sees it) Paul was first and foremost the lead singer of Wings, if there’d never been a Beatles, or had Paul not been one of them, then Wings might be a group we now treasure as much as we do Big Star or Steely Dan, and Paul’s disbanding them in 1981 might be lamented as much as Robbie Robertson’s breaking up the Band or Rod Stewart’s leaving Faces. Instead, Wings (or Paul McCartney and Wings, as they are called on the label of Band on the Run) is band we must place well below the Beatles, but well above the Banana Splits.

—Will Pritchard

#419: Portishead, "Dummy" (1994)

Watching the red second hand glide, Beth thought about her posture. She’d hold her arms like she’d practiced—head cocked, eyes thrown at the dark shapes beneath the window of the projection booth, arms bent at her sides. In front of the mirror she’d been a Rodin, and even at her worst she allowed a comparison to a broken masterpiece. Even the Venus de Milo had her flaws.

A classmate coughed. In front and behind, the scuffling of graphite on paper mixed with whispers. A gust of wind outside tugged at the dying leaves off the oak trees that dotted the student parking lot, their delicate impacts adding silent stresses to the lecture Ms. Kovak somnolently decanted. Beth let the gentle cadence of her teacher’s words wash over her; how easy they flowed one into the other. Next to the photo of Earth taken from far away, the red line continued its progression.

Where was she? The words. It certainly wasn’t the words. Those she could write backwards in her best cursive, each one having spent time on her tongue, bringing forth moisture like a stone. She knew their contours, had felt them pull and twist at her dark places as she pressed both cushions of her headphones until they laid flush against her temples; the honesty, the longing, the pain. The way they dripped from the singer’s mouth, pooling in her eardrums.

What kept Beth’s eyes cutting at the red line beside Earth’s reflective light was her noises, culled from the desire to illicit the same response, to give them shape from her own longing. It was the noises she feared she’d make that kept Beth rapt in attention towards the clock’s shifting face. The hushed whisper she reserved for the echo of her parents’ footsteps on their house’s hardwood was the only space she’d allotted those words to roam. If the singer’s voice was water, Beth thought, then hers was a cobblestone street.

In front of the mirror, she’d watched her lips move, the sounds barely audible over the creak of wood, the soft domestic breaths of her parents’ motions. They rose jagged and misshapen from her throat, each word encased in a thick layer of earth and slag. In her room she’d kept those words close, quietly fussing over their appearance, smoothing out the rough edges, her head cocked and her eyes cast long into the distance. Today she’d show her sounds to the dark shapes, the ones beneath the projection booth, their forms one with the darkness around them. Her arms bent at her sides. Today she’d let them run wild and free, she thought, as the red line allowed a right angle to form between 12 and 3 and a sound cut short the lecture.

Beth blinked. Building-wide conversations erupted as tennis balls swept soundlessly on chair feet across tiled floors and the din of pent-up noise swallowed the bell. Students rose, unfurled bunched clothing and shuffled papers back into the various folds of their solid color Five Stars. Chatter followed each movement, as straps were slung over shoulders and the great exodus towards buses and cars and home began. Beth, however, was silent. Placing her hands palm down on the hard plastic of her desk, she raised her body reluctantly. Sucking air deep into her lungs, she exhaled. Canvas bag slung over her left shoulder, Beth was the last to leave Ms. Kovak’s room as the sweat from her palms evaporated off the desk’s surface and the red line continued its progression.

Out in the hall, the applause of footsteps grew as Beth joined the confluence of the student body as it sloshed along the scuffed faux-marble floor. Struggling to match the pace of the current, she made her way along the cramped tributaries from the math hallway into the foreign language hallway, coming to a pause where her locker was three in on the left in a bank of tarnished red metal. As she fumbled with the rotary’s combination, she felt in the rhythm of the metal the words that scrolled by on the ticker tape behind her eyes:

Did you realize, no one can see inside your view?
Did you realize, for why this sight belongs to you?

The door opened with a bang and Beth reached a hand in, procuring her headphones amidst the clutter. Wiggling the iPod from her front left pocket, Portishead’s “Strangers” was cued up and waiting to be received. The cushions enveloped her head as she pressed play and the horns spiraled and she slammed the locker shut. The clock in the hall read 3:07. She had 23 minutes before her audition.

*

No one had told her about the heat. Standing with her feet shoulder-width apart on the worn wood of the stage, she felt the light press like hands on her exposed skin. Becoming accustomed to the autumn weather, the mock summer pressed heavy on her frame. She was relieved to have removed her cardigan. In the darkness a throat cleared. The follicles on her arms basked in the warm glow, as Beth stood alone in the spotlit cloud, thinking about her posture. A bead of sweat came into being on the small of her back and began its slow descent.

A door opened opposite the stage, spilling light from the hallway down the aisle. The outline advanced through the sparse auditorium and paused to enter the row where several figures sat beneath the outline of the projection booth.  Beth felt her palms fill with a familiar slickness, and the cry of metal announced that her final audience member had arrived. 

“My apologies, detentions went longer than expected. You may begin whenever you are ready.”

Beth hung onto the vowel sound as it faded into the soundproofing. Where does sound go when it’s done being heard? The voices, the drums, the horns, the crackle and pops of vinyl, all absorbed into bodies, bricks, wood, fabric. Does it die? Can it feel pain? It hits yet causes none, but what about the equal and opposite reaction that Beth was taught exists by law. Perhaps that’s one law, like jaywalking, that’s meant to be broken, for convenience sake. Maybe the sound of sound dying is a frequency we’re not meant to hear, or can’t handle, like the voice of God. Beth blinks hard. It’s not God. But maybe not too far off.

When Beth was small she’d shuffle around the house testing the noises that came from the things she touched—the sigh of the mail slot, the dark echo of the laundry shoot, the way the steps yawned against her slight weight. She’d rattle doorknobs, swing cabinets on their hinges, and push furniture across the hardwood and linoleum. Her parents would laugh and share glances, catering to Beth’s need to make sense of her world, to make sound of her world. Every kitchen utensil was tested against the metal of the stove and the washing machine, as Beth categorized their timbres like each were a steel drum.

She remembers the noises her parents would make, the laughter spurred by a hushed remark, light kisses and whispers that in Beth’s primitive language stood for love. Even the sounds she didn’t understand, the ones that came at night, gave her comfort. In time those sounds were defined, spelled out, and as Beth’s frame grew, her body filling in the contours of her clothing, the sounds she made stopped sounding like her own. Her voice, like that first round of teeth, had another pushing beneath it.

“Beth?”

Beneath the heat of the lights, Beth felt stirring in the morass of her silence the words forming, clotting, taking shape. She tasted metal in her mouth as the room outside her lit radius sparked a soft luminescence. In the curtains and paint layers, between the fibers of the rugs and the interwoven fabric of the seats, the silhouettes of dead sounds were strewn and hung. For a moment Beth could see them all—a mosaic, a tapestry, and the darkness glowed brighter and hotter than her center of gravity and the lights were consumed briefly by the outpouring that Beth alone was poised to catch.

Can anybody see the light?

“We’re ready when you are.”

Cocking her head and with arms bent, Beth threw her eyes at the figures reclining in the darkness. The words, extracted from the rough ore of her chest, glowed hot in her throat: a magazine of sound. As the horns in her head spiraled, her voice rang out and the sounds in the darkness hushed their glow and met hers with a roaring silence.

—Nick Graveline

#420: Buddy Holly and the Crickets, "The 'Chirping' Crickets" (1957)

I like Buddy Holly and the Crickets, but I am constantly worried I'm not having the right response when I listen. This is in part because my response is, almost every time I hear The "Chirping" Crickets, that all of the songs sound very much the same. It's a comment I mean descriptively, not evaluatively, but which I associate with my pre-teen years, when my dad would make fun of the music I was getting into by saying that all the songs sounded the same. I didn't have the wherewithal or the cultural capital to respond with "So what? Isn't that why we like them?" back then, and even now that I know I can say that it still makes me feel a little silly. But there you have it: I like Buddy Holly and the Crickets because their music is incredibly formulaic and "samey" at the end of the day.

There is, in addition to my own reticence, a more general resistance to describing things in terms of the formulae they operate with, or the continuities between them. To celebrate a cultural production, we highlight its daring newness, the ways it breaks the mold—one need only read any given think piece on any given movie to see what I mean. But I find that sort of analysis exhausting, in part because it makes me feel cheated of some marvelous experience, and, more seriously, because it makes "novelty" feel like a genre or a trope all its own, thus depriving the word of any substance (if, of course, it has any substance in the first place). Instead of this approach, I would offer one that looks to the continuities that attend The "Chirping" Crickets, the ways in which Buddy Holly and his band link up with, rather than deviate from, other kinds of cultural productions.

This is to say that a song like "Not Fade Away" is great, not so much because it does something new, but because it brings together a lot of old things. It delights in the music that came before it; it excitedly asks that things influence it. Thus we hear Elvis Presley and Hank Williams in Holly's hiccupping vocals, the shifting between falsetto and regular singing voice; we hear the greats of the Delta blues (John Lee Hooker, Robert Johnson, and on and on) in the guitar; we hear, in the drums and bass, rhythms right out of Bo Diddley; and we hear harmonies in the backing that would fit in the music of any act invited to the Grand Ole Opry. So when I say that Holly and the Crickets made "formulaic" music, I mean that they took a bunch of existing musical tropes and smashed them together. And that—more than some isolated encounter with the sublime—is what's so great about their music. We can, perhaps remarkably, see the active attempt to synthesize a bunch of disparate elements into the coherent unity of a single song.

In all this I don't want to reduce Buddy Holly and the Crickets to aesthetics alone; in their short existence the band lived in the same peculiar interstices their music formalizes and indexes. They were, after all, a white band who performed at the Apollo, and whose songs made significant headway on R&B charts. It's not that they were crusaders against racism or anything, but they reflected how complex the cultural interactions were along the lines of race. By sitting on the very vexed and contentious fault line between white cultural production and black cultural production, they laid bare the degree to which the former owed—and still owes—an unspeakable formal (and monetary, given the predatory practices of record labels!) debt to the latter.

These observations are easy to make from the present, and risk occluding the experience of listening to "That'll be the Day" or "Tell Me How" that is not simply meditating on our own guilt and complicity in ongoing racial exploitation and violence. The really difficult thing that Buddy Holly and the Crickets point up on The "Chirping" Crickets is precisely that our pleasures have been organized around this fundamental appropriation. It makes the quotations marks around the "chirping" take on a sinister valence. These aren't crickets, sprung fully formed out of nature; they are artificial crickets, and they are stealing everything they can get their hands on to hide the care with which their image and sound is manufactured.

My aim is neither to condemn nor redeem Buddy Holly. That seems pointless. What I do want to suggest is that we can't just ignore the peculiar position he occupies—the complexity of his own music's impulse toward cross-pollination and the ways in which he has been received by his audiences—to make ourselves feel morally pure in some way. We can listen and enjoy, and we do, or I do, and hope you will too; and we can recognize the contingency of our pleasure, the degree to which we have the privilege of taking pleasure in this, or anything at all. And that's not to say that some pop is less degraded than other pop. All pop is pop, it is all a cultural production. But the history of such a pronouncement brings to light the uneven contours of how it took shape as an apparatus that extends our exploitation into every facet of our lives. If this is the necessary consequence of a line of thought that begins with continuity and similitude, so be it. I like to think the other side of all of this "chirping" is the acknowledgment of its contingency—crickets don't sing all year round—and thus the very real recognition that, whatever degradations we face and deal with and live through now, they are ultimately historical, which means, if nothing else, that they will not last forever. Things can change! And Buddy Holly's music in some way reminds us of this. It's a small comfort, but if it jangles like "I'm Looking for Someone to Love," I'll happily take it.

—David W. Pritchard

#421: The Best of the Girl Groups, Volumes 1 & 2

The Phil Spector Guide to Girl Groups
Part 2: “Do You Remember Rock ‘N’ Roll Radio? (Or, How To Get Enough Women Of Color On Your 500-Best Album List)”
 

“It was 1963 and everyone called me Baby, before I knew to mind.”
—the opening line of Dirty Dancing
 

Nevermind the 300 pages of bland, chronological prose—you can read Ronnie Spector’s whole life story in just the index of her autobiography, which lists more entries under Phil Spector’s name than her own.
 

Spector, Phillip, wall of sound created by

Ronnie published Be My Baby: How I Survived... in 1990, the same year Rhino Records released The Best of the Girl Groups: Vols. 1 and 2. More than 750 distinct girl groups sang songs that made the pop charts from 1960 to 1966. A proven formula: three to five black girls named for winsome objects with a definite article: the Crystals, the Exciters, the Chiffons, the Toys. Some produced by Phil, some not. Each group had their own plight, their own I love you, I need yous and hairdos stacked high. But if I told you that it’s Ronnie Spector crooning on “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” would you know to correct me?

Spector, Phillip, number one songs predicted by

Are anthologies and “best of” records worthy to be called albums? Retrospectives are certainly enjoyable, convenient, and cost-efficient. But an album is more than the sum of its tracks—it's an emblem of an era, a right of passage forever etched in the grooves. A compilation is short stories, an album is a novel. Is it the Girl Groups of the early ‘60s we’re honoring with the inclusion of this Best of…? Or is it the executive at Rhino Records who calculated that by 1990, baby boomers were making enough money to buy their teenage soundtrack instead of fishing for it on the radio?

Spector, Phillip, Ronnie’s comeback attempts sabotaged by

The titular character in Citizen Kane built his singer an opera house, and Phil Spector built his a Wall of Sound, what he called a “Wagnerian approach to rock & roll.” While Charlie Kane filled his mansion with rare marble statues into his old age, Phil hoarded royalties and obscure B-sides, releasing tracks in England without any of his girl groups’ knowledge. In 2002, after an 11-year lawsuit, Phil paid the original members of the Ronettes $1.5 million in uncollected royalties.

Spector, Phillip, black culture loved by

The editors of Rolling Stone must have had some quotas to fill in their list of 500 greatest albums, as 423-421 is a block of tokens. First the Supremes, then the Ronettes and then those others, right in a row so as not to be missed. Their silky voices still carry, but Diana Ross and Ronnie Spector didn’t break the glass ceiling—they stood on top of it, in heels, avoiding cracks, staring down at nameless back-up singers oohing and ahhing from below.

Spector, Phillip, romanticization of

In 1991, a year after The Best of the Girl Groups charted, another record label released Back to Mono (1958-1969), a four-disc compilation of Phil Spector’s hit singles: the best of the best of the Ronettes and the Crystals and those others. Most of the tracks on Back to Mono already appear earlier in Rolling Stone’s 500 greatest albums,  but we still find this record presiding in the top 100. Phil has been in prison since 2008, serving a sentence of nineteen years to life. In 2012, Rolling Stone editors revised and updated their 2003 list, perhaps reaching out to the baby boomer’s children, a younger, more politically correct generation. Let It Be, the Beatles album Spector injected with orchestral syrup, fell from number 86 to 392. Back to Mono slipped just one slot, from 64 to 65.

Spector, Phillip, Ronnie’s shoes hid by

On the June morning when Ronnie finally escaped the Spector mansion in 1972, she ran out of the house barefoot, shredding the bottoms of her feet on asphalt and broken glass. She and her mother hailed a cab and went straight to a law office. She never returned to the property.

“Everything was his idea, except my leaving him,” said Susan Alexander, the failed opera singer ruminating on her late husband at the end of Citizen Kane.

Spector, Phillip, fame and legacy of

The full title of the Ronettes’ first record is Presenting the Fabulous Ronettes, featuring Veronica, though the entry on Rolling Stone’s 500 just reads Presenting the Fabulous Ronettes. While researching for this essay I stopped into my local record store to see if I could find a copy on vinyl.

“We don’t have that particular title,” the clerk told me. “But we do have the Dirty Dancing soundtrack, and a couple ‘Greatest Hits.’”

—Susannah Clark

#422: The Ronettes, "Presenting the Fabulous Ronettes" (1964)

The Phil Spector Guide to Girl Groups
Part 1: "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)"

Boom. Boom Boom. Pow. Four precise beats and the narrative begins. Twenty-four years before igniting the opening credits of Dirty Dancing, the drum fill in “Be My Baby” redistributed the chemicals in Brian Wilson’s brain. In his own words, his mind was not just blown the first time he heard the song, it was “revamped.” It was 1963, the year of the Beach Boys’ first number one single, the year he first took LSD, and the year the chords constantly ringing in his head turned into voices. For the next decade Wilson played the record on repeat, reportedly one hundred times in one day, dissecting every “be” and “my” and “little” and “baby.”  His children recall a period of waking up to Boom. Boom Boom. Pow. every single morning.

So goes Pet Sounds lore. Ronettes producer Phil Spector spoke of Wilson’s obsession with the song in a 2008 interview with BBC: “I mean he's a little gaga over it... I'd like to have a nickel for every joint he smoked trying to figure out how I got the ‘Be My Baby’ sound, you know he is demented about it.”

“Demented,” “gaga,” as deemed by a man currently serving life in prison for murder. In a court documented narrative, Spector pulled a gun on Lana Clarkson in 2003, to stop her from leaving his house. In 1968, he didn’t need a gun; he had electrified gates and a herd of wild German Shepherds to keep his wife from leaving the premises. Ronnie Spector, the original bad girl of rock ‘n roll, the very voice that hypnotizes us in “Be My Baby,” spent more than a year locked inside of a California mansion. Phil hid her shoes. And he forced her to watch Citizen Kane over and over again.

Released in 1941, Citizen Kane depicts the life of a monolithic newspaper mogul named Charles Foster Kane. The film is framed by one journalist’s investigation to uncover the meaning of Kane’s mysterious last word: “Rosebud.” Presumably, Phil re-played the film as a reminder to Ronnie that like the opera singer Kane marries in the film, she would be nothing without him.

“Charles Kane turned his Xanadu into a walled fortress, and that’s just what Phil did to our house,” Ronnie writes in her autobiography, Be My Baby: How I Survived Mascara, Miniskirts, and Madness, or My Life as a Fabulous Ronette.

A superlative among superlatives, “Be My Baby” might be the Citizen Kane of pop songs. Citizen Kane being an idiom for legacy, a benchmark familiar even to the generation who can’t find it streaming on Netflix. If Citizen Kane redefined how we tell stories, “Be My Baby” redefined how we sing them.

And yet, those lush layers of woodwinds and strings, protective background vocals and sweet cream lyrics were composed by a murderer, an abusive madman. Each time we press play, we forgive him all over again. Who cares who wrote it, who collects the royalties? The song just sounds too damn good. That’s the manipulative tragedy of popular music.

Illustration by Annie Mountcastle

A recent poll determined that Dirty Dancing is the most re-watched film amongst women. For almost three decades, first wives and 12-year-old girls have rewound the night when spandexed lovers discovered they needed each other so. Psychologists often point to the “exposure effect,” how familiarity adds a layer to a narrative that transcends cheap suspense. When you turn on Citizen Kane for the first time, you keep watching to find out what “Rosebud” means to Kane. When you turn it on again, and again and again, you keep watching to find out what “Rosebud” means to you. We start to tell the story ourselves. Because who is a creator other than the person who knows what comes next?

In the final three minutes of Citizen Kane, our journalist surrenders his quest to find the meaning of Rosebud, positing, “I don’t think a word can explain a man’s life.” And maybe a song can’t either.

But nostalgia prevails, dropping quarters into a refurbished jukebox; the snow globe shatters, Johnny lifts Baby into the air, and we hear it once again: Boom. Boom Boom. Pow.

—Susannah Clark

#423: Diana Ross and the Supremes, "Anthology" (1974)

My mother carries me in body-warm blankets to Vivian Volvo to doze in the backseat, blood hourglassing to my skull as the car careens in the ridgecut’s curve illuminated in the streetlights’ arched, interval orange as the unbalanced tires warp out the black sea on which my breathing rowboats. Burning, burning yearning… Whatever voice from the waking world penetrates a dream is a kind of a god. I have learned to pray, Deus ex cassette tape. Sugar’s Ribs neons on the dark ridge like the expectation of tomorrow’s heat as the brakes scuff and ache time to a slower pace. At the exit ramp’s red light, no traffic passes and yet we wait. He has called her, his wants stamped by Percocet, and asked her to come, and so she goes.

Middle of the night, middle of the summer, I always wait in the car, asleep, not asleep, on these errands, something easy, Motown, in the deck, the whir of the tape as it spools and unspools, not unlike memory, and not like it.

A-side. B-side. A dark figure approached the car. I tensed.

Once she flicked her cigarette out the open window. Outside it parabolaed and whipped into the back, cherry-end sweetening my thigh to a sear. I screamed, she swerved, the road kept going. The road led there night after night. Set me free, why don’t you, babe? I’d mouth into my half-reflection in the window, but I’d never sing. I’d never sing. I’d click my teeth every tree, mailbox, streetlight, driveway, billboard we’d pass. Are we a dream’s dream? She’d get me a warm Coke at the Exxon. My teeth grew soft. I wanted to bite right through them, and spit them out. I wanted to bite right through my lip and draw blood.

Sometimes we’d ride to the pharmacy, where the lights poured out of the drive-thru like whatever imagination I had of heaven was, like chiffon if it weren’t finite, the way a body is finite to the voice that replicates, replicates, replicates from room to cut to track to remaster. Sometimes I wondered dreamily where I began and ended, if I lived beyond the hot car and its sputtering air conditioning, the windshield that said to the night take me, take me. She let me fall asleep before we’d go, so I wouldn’t, wouldn’t I, know what was going on. You can’t hurry love, you’ll just have to wait. How far could I go to become someone else? A lip sync, a practiced dance, a closed-eyes scene. I pretended to sleep. I knew the words but had to pretend to know the lyrics, the fade-out, the call-and-response, the Supremes as conscience.

I wanted to throw that cigarette back at my mother, send it smoke-knotting the air where it might find the floor and set fire, set fire like his apartment that blazed after the fish tank burbled water onto the electrical outlet and sparked like the brilliant seawater scales of the thousand-dollar fish he watched swim like a television, stoned. His two plastered legs clunking on the stairs as he scooted down the stairs. The tank must have boiled, the fish leaping like later mercies from a tower or cooked in their own skins as the plastic sea-plants melted like candlesticks, before the glass ruptured, the fire receding oceanic as the fifty gallons spilled before evaporating and ceding the carpet back to the flame and char, the not-long-after-the-fever of my mother’s, the race of her heart that I would not feel without my ear against her breast, that would only reveal itself in her cheeks that silvered in the rearview mirror as she checked to see if I was awake or asleep, awake or asleep. Baby, baby.

I began to pray, wanted things I didn’t want. I wanted to pop the door lock and walk across the lot, to the dark road that believed in danger more than it believed in going somewhere, the way our car believed in motion more than arrival. I was bored. I was tired. At some point as the road arched up around the ridgecut, I was no longer in the backseat of the car in 1996. I was here, in my bed, in the dark. I gave it my voice. It gave it back. Once I saw a second-story window filled with light. I called it my mother, and I loved it.

—Emilia Phillips

#424: Bruce Springsteen, "The Rising" (2002)

1.

Critics often describe Springsteen’s model for arranging albums as a “four corners approach” in which each side of the record begins jubilantly, only to end somewhat emotionally unraveled.

I know that most listeners don’t still play an album through start to finish. Forms change. Songs get shuffled, emotions muddled. The good and bad intermingle, as they always have.

I don’t want to wax too nostalgic for the old days: the needle skipping across the grooves or how dubbing album cuts for mix tapes inevitably meant imprinting the recording with a vestige of its creation. I know that in those moments, I didn’t want the scratches, the background noise of everyday life. I wanted a seamless progression from track to track, no sound or blip, no marker of transition.

But I know this, too: in one of his last voice mails to me, my brother ends his message, then fails to hang up immediately, because he has to sneeze. Now, nearly five years after his death, his recorded voice rarely makes me cry anymore. But that sneeze—the most quotidian and messy part—evokes tears every time.

2.

Upon its release, The Rising was hailed as a 9/11 album. Writing in Rolling Stone, Kurt Loder described it as “a requiem for those who perished in that sudden inferno, and those who died trying to save them.”

Some of the songs on the album were written before 9/11.

Before my brother’s death, I didn’t hear the sneeze in his voice mail. I’d listened only to the words, then disconnected. Only afterward, scouring each possible source for him, did I notice the rest.

3.

Before boarding the BWI—BHM flight I booked last-minute after learning of my brother’s addiction, I sent my mother a text. We hadn’t spoken in months, for reasons she’d surely describe differently than I would.

We obviously still have things to sort out, I wrote. But we can set those aside for now to focus on helping Austin. I’ll be there tonight.

I spent the next four days at my brother’s. We shivered together, him from withdrawal, me from the temperatures to which he’d dropped his air conditioning as he detoxed.

My mother and I have never spoken of that message or the issues preceding it again.

4.

Airplanes stay aloft from the precisely calibrated intersection of what NASA calls “the four forces.”

5.

The elderly woman on BOS—RIC has been talking for hours, though not to me. She’s loud, though, and I’ve heard plenty, first in the terminal and now as the flight taxis out to the runway.

She’s cycling through what I now understand to be her accustomed terrain life in Manhattan, relocation to Richmond, children on Cape Cod. I know her politics, birth year, and medical history. I know that she is widowed, and I learn that she selected two readings for her husband’s funeral: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “How Do I Love Thee” and the lines Horatio speaks upon Hamlet’s death.

I listen over the plane’s engine as she recites them: Goodnight, sweet prince, and legions of angels fly you to your rest.

Because I have turned to those words, too, I know that she has misquoted them, that legions is really flights; fly, really sing. The man next to her tells her how beautiful the funeral must have been, how perfect the words, and I think how she’s disrupted the meter, amended the string of gs that curl through Shakespeare’s original line.

I know that you cannot tell an elderly woman that she’s misquoted a text at her husband’s funeral, that the phrasing isn’t the point.

6.

Years ago my parents’ house caught fire. Not all of it was destroyed, though they had to move out for rebuilding. On the first night in the rental house, my mother grew agitated over the fact that she couldn’t find a remote control for her television.

She had not been harmed in the fire; she was perfectly capable of walking to the television and changing the channel. But she harped on that remote for days, as if it were the most crucial aspect of her existence.

We knew it was a talisman, a clear metaphor for her lack of control over her life and circumstances. So we bought a universal remote, then, when she disliked it, we bought every brand available. None worked—not the same features, not the same arrangement of buttons. Finally, we slipped back into the scorched house, entered the rooms the fire marshal hadn’t yet deemed safe enough for passage, hunted until we found it, returned it to her waiting hand.

7.

In my brother’s final days, which we knew were his final days (he overdosed; doctors declared him brain dead; we took him off life support two days later), I worried about how I would announce his death. I knew that was not the point, not the real problem before me. But I knew, too, that I couldn’t control the fact that his life was ending, could only control what I said about it.

He was the youngest, the baby, the unambiguous favorite. We believed him the most talented, the most charming, the most likely to become widely known. I, the most academic child, knew he was actually the most innately intelligent child. I knew, too, that his death was tragic, not the inevitable and natural end to a full and long-lived life but an all-too abrupt and dissonant rending of our family.

Afterwards, from the hospital waiting room, I typed the words on which I’d settled, the words I’d claimed from another who’d witnessed the death of a young man destined for more than he’d actually become: Goodnight sweet prince, and flights of angels sing you to your rest.

8.

Two months after my brother died, I published an essay about the experience. Titled “Watching Your Brother Die,” it described just that.

On the morning it went live, I didn’t know what to do, so I drove thirty minutes to the nearest real shopping center to buy cowboy boots. It marked a new approach to grief for me; after two months of seclusion, I decided to run after things I wanted.

I hadn’t listened to Springsteen since my brother died. I picked The Rising, which I’d only encountered briefly before, because I thought it was about 9/11.

It is, of course. And of course it’s not.

9.

They don’t make Mother’s Day cards that say I’m sorry this isn’t from him. Each year, I think they should.

At first, this was from resentment. Over time it shifted, a genuine desire to acknowledge my mother’s sadness, a wish to restore to her what she most loved.

10.

Released less than a year post-9/11, The Rising marked a dramatic return for Springsteen, his first number-one album in over fifteen years.

Some critics bemoan what they perceive as his exploitation of tragedy. Others, such as one presenter at the 2005 “Glory Days: A Bruce Springsteen Symposium,” see the inverse, claiming, “Healing also came in the form of Bruce Springsteen’s album The Rising.”

Despite grief, my life after my brother’s death is really quite lovely. Upon realizing that few things can be harder than witnessing and surviving my brother’s death, I grew less timid. I’ve pursued work I believe in, visited places I’ve always wanted to see, eaten lavishly. I believe that nothing can stop me from seeing, doing, experiencing, tasting.

I often feel guilty for this.

11.

My mother softens.

We still avoid phone calls, text infrequently. But we see each other two or three times a year, and sometimes she asks me questions about my life, listens to some of my replies. She hugs me goodbye when I leave town; every now and then she says she loves me.

As if in a bad sitcom, I stutter out a response. Okay, I say, or Thank you.

12.

With The Rising, for the first time in nearly two decades, Springsteen recorded an album with the E-Street Band.

The album’s title song begins with a focus on self—the speaker references his blindness (“can’t see nothing in front of me, can’t see nothing coming up behind”), his own journey (“make my way through this darkness”; “lost track of how far I’ve gone and how high I’ve climbed”) and the burden (“stone”) he carries on it.

In time, though, other lyrics surface, gain prominence in my listening. Perhaps this is linked to the different contexts in which the song appears, moving from elegy to exhortation, 9/11 to inaugural celebration.

At some point I’m struck by a shift in perspective; near the end of the song, I hear something I’ve never noticed before. The focus changes from the speaker to the recipient: May you feel your arms around me. I spend a lot of time thinking about this shift, the idea that instead of looking inward the whole time, the song eventually moves to a broader view—a lament becomes a benediction.

13.

Years pass. I stiffen less at Mother’s hugs. I visit for her birthday, trying to act on a belief that perhaps my presence can be a balm.

During the visit, Mother offers a gift of her own—my brother’s professional-grade camera and accessories. He’d love for you to use it, she tells me, referencing my upcoming trip to Borneo. I should have given it to someone a long time ago, but I just couldn’t get rid of his things.

I do not know how to transport this home, as I’m nervous about checking it, and it’s too large to fit in the overhead of the small commuter plane.

She keeps talking, telling me about the trips she and my brother planned to take together.

My mother has flown only three times in the last three decades. My brother was scared of cities and foreign places, refused even to join me in Europe.

But I don’t argue anymore. I simply nod, say Thank you.

14.

One night I hear a live version of the song “The Rising” and notice a different lyric than I’ve heard before. Convinced that it’s a variation only for concert, I return to the album, only to realize I’ve been hearing it wrong for months: May I feel your arms around me, the song proceeds. I listen repeatedly, then confirm it on Springsteen’s official website. There was never a grand wish, no benediction, no shift in the speaker’s perspective.

15.

Grief isn’t linear. Like flight, it’s the product of a number of competing forces. I becomes you, then reverts. Legions and flights intermingle. Yet still we make our way through the darkness; we find a way to move through it.

—Elizabeth Wade

#425: Gram Parsons, "Grievous Angel" (1974)

I.

That I loved him there is no question, I can say that now that he is gone. But to love a lost man who is living is too much to really know about oneself although I always knew from the beginning the way it would go and I won’t say I chose it, or ever accepted it, though I saw it for what it was, saw it with prism-like eyes that reflected the world to me in perfect sorrowful clarity, separating one truth from another though I often didn’t know what to do with the many and separate truths and I would wipe my mind with the blue of sky, wipe it clean of words or knowing (though the heart is always knowing and holding so much more than the mind) and how can we see and all and still choose the way we do, what is the knowing for?—I am not sure I can tell you that part or that we can choose who to love, or choose not to love a person because of any knowings or diamond sight, and though it hurt I loved him from the first moment my prism eyes held his light—I saw and knew and the light shattered inside me, knowing.

Knowing that it was a slanted light and some men cannot be saved from their private sadnesses and women who think otherwise are fools and will spend their lives chasing phantoms. Oh, I was a fool.

Illustration by Lena Moses-Schmitt

II.

What I saw and see with my prism eyes is the grievousness of angels and that the weight is too much for some and that angels do not really have wings. What I saw with my eyes were his eyes and some people are left too alone and that is why they sing so beautifully. And some angels follow the way of their fathers and there was his daddy Coondog who shot himself when Gram was twelve, and there was his mother Avis who drank herself to death and some angels have mothers who are sad and some never get past all the grief. What I heard was his voice, and it was beautiful and it was saying why are we all so alone here.

III.

He was singing from a great sad tender country heart and he had seen the sadness of great lonesome-road America, seen it in the truck stops under fluorescent lights and the gas pumps with the vast rumbling highway-night stretching out beyond and in the diners with lonely spoons clanking stirring packs of white sugar into lonely-clanking cups of black coffee, steaming, and in the sweet desperate faces of waitresses and the eggs cracked onto skillets, the tossed shells, and in the grease traps out back, in the brick-walled train stations in the creases of slacks and the shine on the toes of shoes, in the ticking-second clocks on the walls and in the starched collars and pursed lips of men like his father.

He saw it in the barrooms, sticky residues of stale beer on countertops and in the lines around the eyes of men drinking whiskies, in the long columns of ash on the ends of cigarettes and in the Saturday night Main Street neons, in the pool halls and the shoulders hunching over card tables in casinos, in the Indians slouched on the sides of roads.

He saw it in the shiny Buicks and on the palm-tree boulevards of sunny Florida and in the chrome streets of Manhattan in the sparkle and sharp sunlight of high-rise windows and in vast shining Los Angeles and he wasn’t sure where to go, only that the roads of America tell a man to go, go anywhere so long as you’re going, you can’t stay here you have to move and fast and where is there to go anymore for a sad tender country-heart man without a father but on and on under the bright lights until gone until down and out in some far-off place at the end of some road, like Joshua Tree, the place he would go, where at night the air got clear and one could hear one’s own breathing in the cold and the stars burning above and see motionless black silhouettes of ancient spiny trees and in the rocks one could touch the dust of aeons and all was hushed there—there, there—that is where he is now, his heart still burning with lost cosmic end-of-the-road America.

Illustration by Lena Moses-Schmitt

IV.

He saw it all with his own tear-bucket coal-black eyes turned upside-down, in fact he saw too much and took anything to blur his vision and in the bright lights he couldn’t see a thing and he sang with eyes closed and poured it out and I saw him there in the lights and I loved him but it wasn’t enough it isn’t enough to open his eyes and I swear I tried to love him.

He saw mirages like oases from which he couldn’t drink and the golden fields that lay between those bright-light places went by too fast, like dreams out of the plate glass train windows just golden dreams and everyone passing through and what rest and where to lay oneself down in what fields on a golden afternoon in sad America and what salvation and his eyes blurred with tears and his eyes closed endlessly.

V.

I watched the moon come up tonight and thought of how lonely his body burning in the desert out there like he asked for, casket filled with gasoline, how lonely the flames that licked at the desert sky, and how final, and at death it is just me and you, moon, just the cold fire of the moon. I thought that and I am not sure if I said it too, as I have been in the habit of saying my private thoughts aloud, like scripture, repeating them as if in prayer, so I said it is just me and you now, moon, and I am not sure if there is anything beyond this small comfort for me now and clouds moved across the moon.

—Holly Haworth

#426: Cheap Trick, "At Budokan" (1978)

Cheap Trick’s At Budokan confirms that the shrieking sibilant hysteria of teens sounds the same in every language. Recorded in Tokyo on two nights in late April 1978, it endures as one of the quintessential live albums of the seventies, an honor it shares with The Who’s Live at Leeds, Peter Frampton’s Frampton Comes Alive, and Kiss’s Alive! Cheap Trick was, and remains, a pure product of the seventies, as they married macho riffs with a Beatles-esque sensibility that favored whimsy and artful arrangements over grandeur. Tracks like “Hello There,” “Goodnight Now,” and “Clock Strikes Ten” echo the buoyancy and meta-narrative of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, while “Come On Come On” and the Fats Domino cover “Ain’t That a Shame” sound like outtakes from The White Album. Less ambitious than Led Zeppelin, less ostentatious than Rush, Cheap Trick wanted the best of pop and rock, and in their definitive work, they unified the frivolity of a summer road trip with the snarl of a band still working out their angst.

At Budokan spawned two massive hits that are still classic rock standards nearly forty years later—“I Want You to Want Me” and “Surrender”—and these remain the band’s signature tunes. It’s strange to realize both had already been recorded in the studio for 1977’s In Color and 1978’s Heaven Tonight, respectively, yet the realm of radio would have us believe they only exist amid the crowd roar. What does that iconic chorus mean when it entreats us to surrender, surrender, but don’t give yourself away? I think it means the idealism of the sixties is over. Gone are the days when we threw ourselves into causes or new loves with swooning abandon. America is no longer a dirty beach we can pick clean in an hour with our first grade class on a service learning field trip before we sit, kicking our heels on the dock, with cheese sandwich crumbs tumbling out of our mouths. “Surrender” reminds us that our parents rummage through our records. Our parents smoke dope and lie about how they met. Our parents are the remnants of a war that almost blew the world to smithereens. No wonder they just seem a little weird. Under the bleachers, in the back seat, as the stars shine, when no one can see, our hearts exploding in our chests, you never know what you’ll catch.

There’s a case to be made, and I’ll make it, that neither of these famous ditties are the album’s best. “Need Your Love,” the closing cut on side A, clocks in at nine minutes, and its infectious, chugging syncopation, liturgical falsetto hook, and crunchy, punchy riff make it unforgettable. Like other extended space-outs of the decade, its lyrics are a thin excuse to jam, but “Need Your Love” dodges the spiritual bombast of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” the tedious clichés of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird,” and the neanderthal misogyny of Ted Nugent’s “Stranglehold.” Like The James Gang’s magnum opus “The Bomber,” “Need Your Love” has more in common with Ravel’s “Bolero” than it does with rote rock gestures, as its central melody meanders through subtle permutations until the whole shebang builds into an orgasmic crescendo of awesome. Seriously: someone should sample those last eight bars and drop a beat. “Need Your Love” is a haunted farmhouse of a song, full of nooks and crannies to explore. It’s the kind of song record executives and ex-girlfriends hate. It’s the kind of song no one ever hums for the music store clerk with their wide, embarrassed eyes imploring, do you know the one I mean?

For two years in high school—as well as my first winter break from college—I was one such clerk at the Annapolis mall. Though our retail outfit didn’t sell vinyl—it was the heyday of compact discs—the ambiance was similar to the shop spoofed and celebrated in High Fidelity. We did our best to assist our yuppie customers while simultaneously despising their wealth and lack of taste, cursing them as they left with Yanni or Blink 182 or TLC albums they could have easily bought for $5 less at the Best Buy down the road. For several months, whenever business slowed to a crawl, we lethargically packed away the wall of cassettes, letter by alphabetized letter, and sealed them shut with squeaking tape guns that wafted everywhere the pungency of industrial adhesive. We shipped each box off to some distant warehouse none of us had seen but which, in my imagination at least, became the long eerie corridor in the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Maybe palettes of Bel Biv Devoe and Teena Marie rot in a secret government bunker after all, right next to God’s gilded radio to humanity. During the holiday season, we defaulted to that robotic lethargy all too familiar to retail employees, as the lines snaked past the registers’ last-ditch displays of empty jewel cases into the stacks. It verged on a religious experience whenever someone returned from their food court pilgrimage to Sbarro, at the far distant end of the mall, with a round of cheese slices and Cokes. On warm summer days, when inventory was done and customers were few, I read Rolling Stone and Spin, filling my mental gaps in the rock canon, gleaning the latest industry gossip, and embellishing my deluded adolescent fantasies of stardom.

It was on one such day that I read an interview with Billy Corgan espousing his Cheap Trick fanaticism. Though I loved The Smashing Pumpkins’ early work, they had already begun their precipitous decline, and the unexpectedness of Corgan’s comment—coupled with the colossal aesthetic gap between the two groups—sent my head spinning for the rest of the afternoon. The Pumpkins’ implosion followed a stereotypical trajectory: their collective energy was smothered by a megalomaniacal front man, their success made them cripplingly cynical and self-reflective, their sound and subject matter grew monotonous, and ultimately, their insecure bid to remain relevant saw them churn out mediocre material rather than wait for inspiration to find them again. Whatever happened to all this season’s losers of the year? Homer said it best when the band made a cameo on The Simpsons in ’96: “Making teenagers depressed is like shooting fish in a barrel.”

Whatever failings Cheap Trick had, they didn’t take themselves that seriously. Rick Nielsen’s quintuple-neck Hamer and trademark flipped-brim cap made a mockery of rock’s pretensions. “Look Out” and “Big Eyes” reflect a songbook from a band that wants to be blasted with the windows rolled down as you drive through the ruin and glory of teenage Friday nights, cruising the strip for someone, anyone, to catch your gawking stare and smile. Even in their darker songs, such as “Dream Police,” the sickly-sweet melodies and jangly arrangements resisted the ethos of the lyrics themselves. I pondered all of this as I found Cheap Trick’s Greatest Hits in the discount bin, sold it to myself with my employee discount, and fed the disc to the house system that had, moments earlier, been blasting Ricky Martin’s warbling dross. There wasn’t a single customer in the joint. Every time I got to thinking, where’d they disappear? I checked the track listing for the Budokan numbers. I skipped ahead until I heard the screams.

—Adam Tavel

#427: Peter Wolf, "Sleepless" (2002)

Lately, everything around here has been a growing pain. I’m just completing my MFA in Creative Writing at Hollins University—just finishing two transformative years, two years in which I’ve written and read and cried and grown far more than I ever anticipated. Two years of constant change, of change being the only constant, and now that’s about to change, too. For months, I deny it, but then the acknowledgment begins.

It starts one rainy March morning, as I drive to the annual spring literary festival—my last before graduation. I’m thinking about previous Lit Fests: in 2013, when I was just visiting, admitted but uncertain; in 2014, as a first-year, with my thesis due date still a year away; now, in 2015, about to take my comprehensive exams, turn that thesis in, and graduate; the next times I attend will be as an alum. I’m passing a slowpoke sedan when it hits, that thunderbolt moment, though the clouds bear down only rain: graduate school is over for me, and my eleven classmates. Soon, we’ll have our degrees. Soon, many of my friends will be leaving town.

I speed up, the rain blurring my windshield, and put the wipers on high. The mountains look like they begin just at the end of the highway, though I know they’re really miles and miles away. Fog curls around them, obscuring the peaks and nuzzling up against their bases. By the time I leave 581, a few miles down, the Blue Ridges are almost totally gone, hidden under a blanket of fog.

I’ve been listening to Peter Wolf’s Sleepless. On the exit ramp, I turn the sound up and go back to the first track. Shaky nerves, baby, got the best of me / I need a shot of somethin’ much stronger than tea. I drum my fingers against the steering wheel. Last literary festival as a student. Last couple of months to work exclusively on my writing for who knows how long. Everything around here is a growin’ pain.

I mope through the morning’s reading, a moving excerpt from a visiting professor’s memoir. During a break, my roommate says she thinks she has forgotten the flash drive with her thesis on it at home, but isn’t positive; I drive her back, speeding along the highway I’ve just left. Sleepless plays through while my roommate thinks out loud about where her flash drive could be. I strain my ears for the music:

I've been swept and kept up all night
Sometimes I didn't rest at all
I've been shifted, lifted up sky, waited on a waterfall
I know sometimes it's easy, and sometimes it's rough
I just can't seem, girl, to get enough
I said never (never) oh, never (never) never like this before        

Wolf’s blues album is about love, yes, but it could also be about transition, for what is love if not a sea change? What is spending years dedicated to art if not love? Never like this before could apply to the last two years of my life: to moving six states south, to dedicating years to that risky thing called writing, to a big breakup, to friendships made and friendships somehow twisted into something unrecognizable, to small successes and bigger doubts. I’m just one of the twelve writers leaving the Hollins MFA program this year; the other eleven have stories greater and more complex than mine. All of us have had experiences over the last two years that have made us shake our heads and think, never like this before.

Flash drive found, my roommate and I head back to campus. I put “Run Silent, Run Deep” on as I drive my Subaru past Carvin’s Creek. A family of ducks swims in the water. All the rain has heightened the creek, made it spread out around the bases of trees that are normally dry. I pout around my office for a while, then meet a professor for lunch.

We sit in a corner of the dining room while my friends and other faculty fill long tables, chatting with the visiting writers. I’ve been drowning in doubt lately; my novel’s too long, it’s never going to get published, my classmates are better writers than I am. All writers know these thoughts—managing them is part of our job. But when they hit me, they hit, surging and rushing until I can’t hear myself think.

My brilliant and gracious professor pulls me out of the slump. Sometimes, I think I just need validation, and the professor says what I need to hear. She tells me to let my novel be long. She tells me that what I’m doing is good, that it’s important. Over at the next table, my friends laugh with Charles Baxter. I wish I was there, learning from him, but what I’m hearing now is what I need. I go into the afternoon’s readings heartened, my fog starting to lift.

Illustration by Annie Mountcastle

A few hours later, I leave campus. The rain has stopped, and the afternoon has misted over, damp but no longer chilly. “Oh Marianne” comes on: The world is a sad place / so put on a brave face / and dance. I feel braver, ready to finish this draft and to go out into the world beyond school.

As I get on 581 for the fourth time, I fill my car with the sounds of “Nothing But the Wheel”: I’m holdin’ on, holdin’ on, holdin’ on, holdin’ on. The next two months will pass too quickly, I know. And, after that, I don’t know what I’ll be doing, or what my writing life will look like, or where my friends will be.

The mountains, now in my rearview mirror, open back up. The day unfolds like an album, nervous first, then despairing, then, finally, lifted up. The final eponymous song of Peter Wolf’s album ends with the first line, a circle completing, but also different this time around: I’m still sleepless. Still sleepless, yes. I’m still doubting, still scared, but the afternoon is bright.

I play Sleepless after every transitional moment for the rest of the semester. After my last tutorial; after turning my thesis in; after sitting in a professor’s home for the last time before she moves and most of my classmates do, too; after my last Friday afternoon office hours and my first big this-is-ending-and-I’m-going-to-miss-it-desperately cry. Mostly, I replay “Growin’ Pains” and “Nothing But the Wheel,” but I sometimes flip through the tracks, waiting to see what speaks to me. Often, Peter Wolf’s lyrics bring an unexpected wisdom—guidance I didn’t know I needed until I hear it.

I’ve spent the last two years in the company of the eleven brilliant writers in my cohort. I’ve also been lucky to know the eleven who graduated the year before us, and the twelve who will graduate in 2016. Thirty-four talented, wise, generous, brave people. What I’ve learned from them is countless.

Two years writing is two years of risk, of failure and trying again. It changes you—how can it not? Two years focused inward, but also looking always outward, learning about the world and about myself. I’m a better writer and person because of this experience, because of my classmates and faculty. They’ve given me the wisdom I didn’t know I was seeking, told me it’s okay to sit in uncertainty. Maybe we’re all only holding on to nothing but the wheel, but what a good wheel it is: steady, bringing us back, always back—if we want—to each other, and to language.

—Marissa Mazek

#428: The Police, "Outlandos d'Amour" (1978)

Listening to Outlandos d'Amour at the Office, 2015

8:59 am, “Next to You”
A strong, upbeat start. Pleasingly repetitive, driving guitar. To my left, a group of twenty-something women are talking about baby rabies—not, like, babies getting rabies but women getting rabies for babies. Meaning they’re insatiable, and they want them. What can I do? All I want is to be next to you. The Police make me think of my mother, and I wonder if she ever felt the way we feel in our twenties, but then I remember she’d already had two babies.

9:35 am, “So Lonely”
After a team meeting, we retreat to our desks and stuff in our earbuds. Sting sings falsetto over a reggae beat. No one’s knocked upon my door for a thousand years or more. We reply. We forward. We reply-all with emoji sign-off, and, for a minute, we feel good.

10:17 am, “Roxanne”
A client call went bad. Or it went good. Sometimes the hallway laughter sounds the same. The laughter at the beginning of “Roxanne” was supposedly caused by one of the Police accidentally falling butt-first onto the piano. I picture Stewart Copeland, cigarette in his mouth, bleached locks flying.

11:28 am, “Hole in My Life”
My inbox is full again. The chorus of this song is catchier than I want it to be: hole in my life, there’s a hole in my life, there’s a hole in my life, yeah, yeah, yeah. In an old Rolling Stone review of Outlandos d’Amour, the critic writes: “Sting can't make us see that there's anything special about this generation, because he knows there really isn't.”

Graphic by Marie Sicola

11:34 am, “Peanuts”
Before I found out my mother couldn’t name a single Police song, I thought she’d love “Peanuts.” Certainly she’d resonate with the Police: don’t wanna hear about the drugs you’re taking, the love you’re making, the muck they’re raking. Years ago, we’d seen Sting on TV, in a sleeveless, rhinestoned shirt, and she’d said what a “very nice looking young man” he was. She said that about others, too: Byron Sully, the tomahawk-throwing, also-sleeveless boy toy of Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman; Jim Brickman, the clean-cut pianist; John Wayne in chaps. But this time she’d said it with feeling, like he was someone she used to know, in the intimate way all girls know their crushes.

12:30 pm, “Can’t Stand Losing You”
I think a bird has gotten inside until I see a guy doing bird calls in front of the window. I mute the music and someone’s talking about Appalachian mamas putting Mountain Dew in their babies’ bottles and rotting their teeth away. Someone else mentions something about justice in America: I can’t stand, I can’t stand losing you.

2:01 pm, “Truth Hits Everybody”
One thing my mother always has loved is the truth—all kinds of little everyday truths, old wives’ tales, Women’s Day articles, and biblical, capital-T Truth. Recently, she moved back to the mountain country she was born in after thirty years in sheet-flat Iowa. For weeks she felt altitude sick. I got that way, too, when I visited, as if being too close to the sky makes your lungs give out. When I first hear Sting say, “Truth hits everybody,” I think he’s saying, “Truth hates everybody.” I can’t get that out of my head.

2:05 pm, “Born in the ‘50s”
At a tech company, none of us were born in the 1950’s, not even our bosses. Maybe our grandmothers were getting baby rabies about then, clutching our mothers to their chests when President Kennedy died and blaming it all on the Communists, just the way Sting says.

3:40 pm, “Be My Girl—Sally”
The first half of the song is just monotonous background noise as I watch a pair of co-workers over in Quality Assurance dancing under a parrot piñata. But then, out of nowhere, the Police break into a 2-minute, sporadically iambic spoken-word poem about a blow-up doll named Sally, who’s like a rubber ball, served up in the morning deflated on a plate, and it becomes clear my mother would hate everything about this.

4:53 pm, “Masoka Tanga”
People are zipping up, but the Police are in the Caribbean, ad libbing and jamming away. Ma wa ba wa ta la throw awa, to ma ba sue le dah, oh! Clearly they’ve got something to prove. I just want an ending that feels more final than dissipating drumbeats, but, this time, that’s all there is—the fadeout, and that nagging, unexplainable feeling of wanting to go back to the beginning and start all over again.

—Lacy Barker

#429: Brian Eno, "Another Green World" (1975)

—but what point is there, I often wonder, in even trying to assign meanings, in bothering to try to understand mysteries: things happen, things don’t happen, and who (not me, usually) can say why, and who knows the sum of everything I don’t know (have never known; will never know) that informs those happenings and non-happenings, and how would knowing alter what’s already transpired: “Honour thy error as a hidden intention,” reads the first of the Oblique Strategies, a deck of cards Brian Eno designed with his friend, the late painter Peter Schmidt, and which Eno used extensively in the composition and recording of Another Green World: generous advice for any artist contemplating one’s next move, because whose life can proceed without full respect given to one’s countless errors, without at least pretending (or accepting) that one meant some of them: but is meaning even anticipatory, or only retrospective? That evening—all those evenings—I wandered Hooker Avenue looking at footprints in concrete sidewalk squares and the etched plexiglass of bus shelters and crows inscribing dusk and chain-link fences orange with rust: everything seemed marked—there seemed a necessary link between my next move as an artist and my next move as a person: the poems I’d begun writing in response to the maddening, endless, meaningless rattle of an idling Ford F-250 diesel engine on an otherwise beautiful sunny September morning because I felt if I didn’t write them I might never write anything else, and in one of which I encoded my debt to the moods Eno’s music offered me as I wrote—“the extant daydreams of the man ironing / a pair of trousers and wandering some greener world…”

Still, if I ever thought that Eno’s music might offer me meanings, a record such as Another Green World, with its sideways pop songs accompanied by small instrumentals, confounded that belief: making meaning and evading meaning is one of the primary tensions of this LP, famously composed (or improvised and then edited) in the studio rather than being planned, and anyway, as with most pop music, meaning resides less in these songs than in whatever experiences we connect to them—as Eno said, “meanings can be generated”: or, as in “Sky Saw,” the first track on Another Green World: “All the clouds turn to words / all the words float in sequence / no one knows what they mean / everyone just ignores them…”

The fretless bass and “Anchor Bass” and Jaki Leibezeit-style drumming (by Phil Collins!) that begin “Sky Saw” would have, had I heard them in my teens, meant nothing I wanted to be involved with—too proggy and noodly, too excessive—but the “Digital Guitar” and “Snake Guitar” (such fanciful instruments fill the LP’s liner notes) and John Cale’s seesaw viola line that ends the song, well, sure, those would’ve always sounded great to my ears. But by the time I bought this record, in grad school, I could appreciate this song—even if I still preferred the short instrumentals on the LP, musical fragments that rarely resolved and onto which I could project whatever feeling I liked: sometimes, I’m pretty sure, I could listen to an hours-long loop of “In Dark Trees” or (other times) “The Big Ship” (“My intention,” Eno wrote three years later, in the liner notes to his record Ambient 1: Music for Airports, “is to produce original pieces ostensibly (but not exclusively) for particular times and situations with a view to building up a small but versatile catalogue of environmental music suited to a wide variety of moods and atmospheres”)—

—but I never finished my idea that Eno’s seventies solo LPs seem to concern middle age to me, or mean more to me in my own middle age than a lot of other records, or than they did when I was younger, even though Eno was himself a young man when he recorded them—“On Some Faraway Beach,” yes, but, on this LP, “St. Elmo’s Fire” (“Brown Eyes and I were tired / we had walked and we had scrambled / through the moors and through the briars / through the endless blue meanders…”) or “I’ll Come Running” (“I’ll find a place somewhere in the corner / I’m going to waste the rest of my days / just watching patiently from the window / just waiting, seasons change, some day, oh ho / my dreams will point you through that garden gate…”) or “Everything Merges with the Night” (“Rosalie, I’ve been waiting all evening / possibly years, I don’t know / counting the passing hours / everything merges with the night”) or especially “Golden Hours,” which begins with Farfisa chords (“Choppy Organs”: the song also credits “Spasmodic Percussion” and “Uncertain Piano”) so lush and familiar that—because I heard this synthesizer sound throughout the pop music of my childhood and absorbed it environmentally—it triggers a near-unconscious nostalgia in me, even before Eno starts to sing lyrics that explicitly reference perceptions of time and age and discordant piano notes ring low in the mix:

“The passage of time / is flicking dimly upon the screen / I can’t see the lines / I used to think I could read between / perhaps my brains have turned to sand / oh me, oh my / I think it’s been an eternity / you’d be surprised / at my degree of uncertainty / how can moments go so slow? / several times / I’ve seen the evening slide away / watching the signs / taking over from the fading day / perhaps my brains are old and scrambled…”

At that point, Robert Fripp’s sparkling guitar and a background voice sighing like John Lennon’s in the middle of “A Day in the Life” animate the song’s dreamy order before contrapuntal overdubbed vocals (“who would believe what a poor set of ears can tell you?”) and John Cale’s rich, romantic viola slide the song toward its fadeout.

And if I sit here on a mid-May morning in 2015 listening one more time to Another Green World—the album both background and foreground—while outside my window winds swirl hurricanes of hundreds of maple keys, and feeling still almost certain that events I experienced in 1995 happened, say, just a few years ago and that 1975—well, those things happened a long time ago, of course, I was a tiny kid then, but it wasn’t forever ago, it’s not history, I’m not that old—and maybe now this all sounds as noodly and self-indulgent and excessive to you as “Sky Saw” once sounded to me, one more dude’s self-pitying moan about how mystifying life feels from his own compromised and minor point of view: but maybe I’m not totally wrong, since, as theoretical physicist Paul Davies has written in Scientific American, “We do not really observe the passage of time. What we actually observe is that later states of the world differ from earlier states that we still remember. The fact that we remember the past, rather than the future, is an observation not of the passage of time but of the asymmetry of time.…the flow of time is subjective, not objective”—and there’s always another world and it’s always a greener world, and maybe middle age means admitting that that world’s (or this world’s) as much a daydream as the buzzing, humming, twinkling textures in “The Big Ship,” building and shimmering and cresting and fading, so many hidden intentions disguised as errors—

—Joshua Harmon

#430: Vampire Weekend, "Vampire Weekend" (2008)

Dear Fifteen-Year-Old Me,

It’s two in the morning right now and I’m worrying about what I should invest in for college (Mace? A lifetime supply of laundry detergent?), and how I’m going to leave everybody and everything I’m comfortable with behind in a few months, and if I’m going to find a roommate who I can actually get along with for a whole year, and why I can’t just go back to being a fifteen-year-old. I didn’t have many problems when I was you—your problems extended as far as worrying about how much junk food you could hide in your room without Mom finding out or how long you could get away with avoiding your chores. Fifteen is naïvety and ignorance and, just like Taylor Swift said, there's nothing to figure out.

Do you remember that time you sat in your room at some after-midnight time—the house quiet save for your iPod blasting Vampire Weekend’s brilliantly-named first album, Vampire Weekend, at full-volume like any ‘normal’ teenager would. That night was the first time you said “fuck,” which, of course, was the best part of “Oxford Comma” to any fifteen-year-old goody-goody. It was the first ‘fuck the system’ song you’d ever heard. But when the word slipped out you smacked your hand over your mouth as if you’d just said the most horrifying word known to man. You were so afraid somebody was going to hear you. But what if someone had? What if you had been out with your family? What would have happened then?

Do you remember the only answer you could come up with?

Nothing.

And you started listening to more Vampire Weekend, and you started to feel powerful. And at fifteen, power is hard to feel. While your friends were dealing with eating disorders and school stress, you were listening to “One (Blake’s Got A New Face)” feeling that you were Blake—you were the one with the new face. And I’m going to let you in on a little, awful-but-true fact: When everybody else is going through rough patches and you’re sitting there with a genuine smile on your face, the power escalates. Your power radiated across the school and people came to you for advice, and because you were basically a teenage life-coach (Exaggeration? Please define the word. No, you were definitely a life-coach. You should have been paid for your killer services), the power you felt boarded a rocket and landed on the moon. In simpler terms: You were invincible; nothing could touch you. Just like Blake, the moon had a new face and that face was yours.

You became Johanna in “A-Punk,” stealing power as she stole the ring from His Honor’s lilywhite hand. But a reformation is coming just for you, by the name of “M79.” It's going to take a little time / While you're waiting like a factory line—those first two lines will hit you like a baseball going at ninety-three miles per hour. Because you pretty much believe in geocentric theory, except more to the point that you specifically are the center of the universe, you will believe that you, too, are waiting in a factory line. You are following the path of your fellow sophomores: going through the motions of high school, being conditioned for college, comparing friendships and pasts, etcetera. But as long as you’re in that factory line, what power do you really have?

So you’ll become less of a teeny-bopper drama queen—all thanks to Vampire Weekend and their cleverly-named first album. No longer will you dwell on the past or present, but you will begin to look toward the future and milk it for all it’s worth. And no more gossiping, either. When you desperately want to shit-talk, you’ll ask yourself WWEKD (What Would Ezra Koenig Do)? Because, after all, nastiness will cause your doom.

But that’s something to talk about in another letter, to Sixteen-Year-Old Me.

Do you remember going to the Bahamas for winter break sophomore year? “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” was how you spent your time there. At the gym, at the beach, in the hotel room, wherever you could bring your iPod—the music was rushing into your head, flooding your senses with its frenzy.  You didn’t understand the song’s meaning, and I’m pretty sure I don’t either, but it was catchy and that’s all that mattered to you.

You know, when I think about it, fifteen was like a giant shrug of a year. You’d listen to “The Kids Don’t Stand a Chance” and just shrug along to it because you didn’t have to stand a chance against anything. You were under the radar; you were a speck on a windshield. You were small and unimportant and, no matter how much you denied it, I know you loved it. There were no big decisions, and you didn’t have to worry about the pin-striped men of morning or denying romance. It was just a happy tune that you were happy to listen to.

I remember how “Campus” and “Mansard Roof” were your favorites, though. You made a separate playlist just for those two songs and you’d sit there, listening to them go back and forth for hours. At fifteen, you sought freedom, and that’s what those two songs gave off. Sleeping on a balcony? Count you in. Walking on the tops of buildings? Perfect. You pictured yourself in those songs. You were on a campus; you were seeing Argentines collapse in defeat. But the song would change and you’d be back on the couch ignoring the dirty dishes. Far less exciting stuff.

But now? Now I’d choose dirty dishes over this album. I don’t need exciting stuff anymore. The only song I still listen to is “I Stand Corrected,” since I stand corrected: I do not have any power, and more things matter than catchiness, and I have to face-off with so many big decisions, and complete freedom is not what I want. Koenig puts it best when he says No one cares when you are wrong / But I’ve been at this for far too long. I’ve been wrong for about half of my life, and nobody has really cared. I was young and naïve, what could anybody say? But it’s time I make some right moves now. I can’t afford to not give a fuck about an Oxford comma when it may affect my grades and I can’t afford to fuck the bears out in Princetown when it may affect my safety (and health and relationships, if you’re really thinking about it). I’m not you anymore, no matter how much I wish I was.

I know that seventeen is very close to fifteen and I am still a little baby of a human, but adult problems have started popping up and I’m just a little baby of a human. How am I supposed to deal with emotions and boys and college and…I don’t know…taxes? Adulthood is ominous and looming ever closer, ever taller. And I’m sorry to break it to you, Fifteen-Year-Old Me, but you haven’t grown at all. We’re still 5’3”, so most things seem giant and scary, but adulthood takes the cake—no doubt about it. Remember how Six-Year-Old Me had to have the closet doors closed for fear of monsters? Well now it’s kind of like that except the doors are creaking open and there actually is an undefeatable monster in there: adulthood.

Do you want to switch places? I long to be you again; when I was you, I had nothing to figure out and life was dumb and fun. But now, life is stressful and I have too much to figure out. I don’t feel ready.

I’m not sure why I started writing this letter. You can’t write back, but I figure that since we’re the same person, you could help me in some way.

So. Do you have any advice, Fifteen-Year-Old Me?

Please tell me something other than that I should start adulthood by asking myself only one question: WWEKD?

Love and miss you,

Seventeen-Year-Old Me

—Nicole Efford

#431: PJ Harvey, "Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea" (2000)

As a young girl, my life was full of firecrackers, flickering television screens, stolen lipstick, and whiskey. It was full of boiling Irish blood, broken bones, and grudges, full of smoke and poker and cutting dresses out of magazines, slick shaven legs and dirty feet. My sense of self rested somewhere between flowery chalk drawings in the driveway and late-night basketball games, between period blood and motorcycle grease. My family was full of vocal men and silenced women and I never wanted either for myself and I never understood why it had to be that way…How could that happen? How could that happen again?

*

I am fifteen years old, in the car on a road trip to my grandparents’ house in Illinois. I have been listening to Pixies, Nick Cave, the Cramps, and know all the words, but I’m sick of women blurred in the background. At this point in my life, I don’t know how to articulate any of this, but I do know I want to see myself more in the things I love, want to see a young woman with her head up, smiling, but don’t know where to look.

I put my older sister’s burned copy of PJ Harvey’s Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea in my portable CD player. I don’t know what to expect because I only know the name. I press play. The disc spins under the plastic. I hear the frantic power of a woman’s guitar, a woman’s song.

*

When I started playing guitar, I was eleven. I played and sang the songs I knew best from childhood and any songs I was taught. Country songs about men in love. Folk songs about women dying beautifully. I’m watching from the wall. I sang the male experience, soaked it all up as the only kind of experience worth putting into words. One day there’ll be a place for us.

*

I hear a woman’s song and it is as if the words were meant for me. It is the year after my father left home. Things I once thought unbelievable in my life have all taken place. I saw it coming, but I am still heartbroken. All around me people bleed. We are no longer speaking. This world all gone to war. I lean my head against the car window’s cold glass, and listen with all my heart.

Illustration by Annie Mountcastle

*

This is the year I write my first song. Keep the walls from falling on me. And learn every PJ Harvey song I can. Just give me something I can believe. The year I learn to growl like a woman. I was in need of help. I am in need of articulation. It will take years and the help of many more women for me to be able to say I only need myself, and mean it.  

*

This is the year I meet my first love. We act like lovers. Speak to me about your inner charm, and how you’ll keep me safe from harm—I don’t think so. We hold hands and kiss—speak to me—he tells me he loves me—the language of love—so I write him into my songs—the language of violence—where I know my voice can dominate. I tell him they are all fiction.

*

When I write my first song, I feel connected to her and every other girl picking her guitar up to play, every other girl learning, for the first time, to use her voice—to speak for herself.

I start wearing leather with my lace, playing power chords. I show my first boyfriend the music video for “This is Love” on a school computer. He says she has a mouth like a ripped pocket. Sometimes I can see for miles. I start exploring the dark places of a woman in love with a man.

*

When I was fifteen, I heard a woman singing like I have never heard a woman sing before. Her voice, strained but powerful. Her P’s popped. Her H’s hissed. I learned her melodies and words by heart, and kept them close. Set myself free again.

When I think of her now, what she meant to my girlhood, I think of a stomping heeled shoe, the honesty of her womanliness in flux, her rough edges—feminine grit. It was for me. My small life, growing. Guitar strings and calloused fingers, and PJ Harvey in my headphones.

​—Amanda Bausch

#432: Brian Eno, "Here Come the Warm Jets" (1974)

One weekend afternoon c. 1984, when I was in eighth grade and pop music had supplanted almost every other source of potential meaning in my life, some DJ at WBCN 104.1 FM Boston—which I received in my bedroom forty miles west via a five-foot T-shaped gray plastic antenna I’d thumbtacked to my bedroom wall, only partly disguised by the early U2 posters I’d also hung there to cover the dark wallpaper and faux wood paneling—played the title track from Brian Eno’s second LP, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy). My stereo then served as the primary conduit through which the external world reached me, but that external world—as represented by music, anyway—had yet to confound me so deeply. I can recall few first-time-I-heard moments as well as this one: my spruce-shaded bedroom in the upstairs corner of our house, the door shut against anything that might disturb the haphazardly rigorous self-education underway; my walnut desk with built-in bookcase and fluorescent light that my father had brought home from a yard sale; my mattress and boxspring on the floor beneath the window because I thought it looked cooler than having a bedframe; and these familiar quarters dismantled by what I understood as the willful strangeness of Eno’s song. At that point, I’d heard some of the odd, sometimes artsy whimsy of the Sixties—which I despised with a zeal appropriate to my age—and the artsy gestures of the new wave and post-punk I was discovering with an equal intensity—but I had no template whatsoever for this ballad’s plaintive lead guitar, mellow piano, and chorus singing about oh, how they’d climbed. I laughed at how absurd the song sounded, as the facts that much of Eno’s music deliberately entertains absurdity and irrationality, and that the bands I was learning to love owed overt and covert debts to his records, whooshed right over my unschooled head like the wind noises punctuating the song.

As much as I wanted to dismiss the song—it was old; it was weird, but not in a cool way; it was quiet and slow; it was unsettling and unfamiliar in ways I wasn’t ready for—I couldn’t. “Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)” bothered and beguiled me for years, even as my tastes got weirder and older and quieter and slower and more unsettling, and though I didn’t buy that LP, or any other Eno LP, for even more years, I never forgot that song, either.

*

“I was talking to David Bowie about…the records that first affected us and I said that the first one that I can really remember being awestruck by was Get A Job, by the Silhouettes, because I’d never heard doo-wop or anything like it, so it was a mystery, and really thrilling as well. He said it was either Eight Miles High or Mr. Tambourine Man for him, that sound just made him shiver.

“As you get older, you get fewer and fewer of those kind of thrills because you learn what the context of things is, so I can listen to the Silhouettes now and say ‘Oh yes that’s New York doo-wop,’ or whatever… and just being able to place it like that immediately reduces it, knowing that it’s one of many similar things, rather than being this strange singularity. I said to avoid that I suppose one of the reasons one becomes a composer is that you want to recreate that thrill for yourself. You want to do something that makes you say ‘God, where did that come from?’”

—Brian Eno, Melody Maker, “Energy Fails the Magician,” January 12, 1980, interviewed by Richard Williams

*

I heard Eno’s name invoked with respect (and occasional disdain) in the context of U2’s The Unforgettable Fire, which he produced the same year I first heard his own music. I learned he’d been involved with some of the early Roxy Music tracks on the cassette my mother kept in the car (though I hadn’t yet seen his fantastic feathers-and-bell-bottoms glam shot inside the gatefold of For Your Pleasure)—and that he’d produced a bunch of the Talking Heads records I knew well. Eno reappeared when a friend dubbed Bauhaus’ cover version of “Third Uncle” on a mixtape. And when I discovered that there was much more to David Bowie than “Space Oddity” and “Suffragette City.” And when Eno said that My Bloody Valentine’s song “Soon” was the “vaguest piece of music ever to get into the charts.” By college in the early ’90s, I’d heard most of his solo recordings, and by the end of the decade I’d finally accumulated all the LPs, but still, it took middle age for me to appreciate Eno’s work as fully as I might, and once again it was a slow burner of a piano-led ballad that arrested me—“On Some Faraway Beach,” from his first LP, Here Come the Warm Jets:

Given the chance / I’ll die like a baby / On some faraway beach / When the season’s over / Unlikely I’ll be remembered / As the tide brushes sand in my eyes / I’ll drift away / Cast up on a plateau / With only one memory: / A single syllable / Oh, lie low, lie low…

Though Eno never wanted his lyrics to mean much—“Essentially all these songs have no meaning that I invested in them. Meanings can be generated within their own framework,” he once said, or “the words on the first album are just there to give the voice something to do. Just arbitrary sets of words which didn't add a dimension to the music”—sometimes even in middle age a pop song feels mere mirror to the same way it did at fourteen, and I see myself more in them than elsewhere (Borges: “I recognize myself less in [Borges’s] books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar”), and I don’t want to write about the title of Eno’s first solo LP or his famed sexual exploits or his tiff with Bryan Ferry: I want to talk about myself and that mirror, and two days: one circa 1984 in my boyhood bedroom, and one I can pin to June 17, 2009, thanks to a date written in a notebook, an evening I walked along Poughkeepsie’s Hooker Avenue just past South Grand Street, watching boys standing outside a 7-Eleven and composing in my head some lines in a poem while I listened to Here Come the Warm Jets on my iPod and thought about how even my plans to leave the town I hated depressed me, and maybe tried to make that feeling substantial by giving it the language of a poem and the soundtrack of a song that suddenly collapsed that fourteen-year-old self letting music make meaning for me and the middle-aged self who felt a growing awareness of just how precisely any of the meanings I try to make for myself are unlikely to be remembered amid a life that so often, even when I’ve learned the contexts for things, feels mysterious in my efforts to understand it—

*

Or, as Lester Bangs wrote about Here Come the Warm Jets in his review for Creem, “Don’t miss it; it’ll drive you crazy.”

—Joshua Harmon

#433: George Harrison, "All Things Must Pass" (1970)

In college, a friend told me I was a “dark horse,” a phrase I thought made me sound very compelling. This label transcended the perception I had of myself: fairly shy, quiet, boring. Or rather, I was interesting to myself—in the way, I suppose, that everyone is—but assumed my reserve came off as dull to others, which in turn made me worry that perhaps I really was dull. I rarely spoke up in public settings and classes, and I didn’t really open up to someone until I felt I could trust them, which usually took a long while. I was unsure sometimes whether my timidity was a hesitancy to speak my mind or if it was a symptom of having nothing to say.I was the sort of person who longed to be spontaneous because I recognized it as a desirable character trait, but struggled going along with last-minute changes in plans. It seemed all my friends were extroverts, and though they often pulled me out of myself, I also occasionally felt lost in the sea of their personalities. All of this to say, it was hard for me to reconcile my shyness with my self: who I knew I was, versus how I felt I must appear.

But maybe what I liked best about being thought of as a “dark horse” was the implication that I could exceed people’s expectations of me—that someday, terrifyingly, I could even blow my own expectations for myself out of the water. And there was something exotic about being the dark horse, so for awhile I used this term as an explanation, as a crutch. Instead of pushing myself to be more open and outspoken, I imagined myself sloshing with rivers of ancient wisdom. I dispensed advice to close friends with worldly sage, trying to lend the impression I had already lived a hundred lives before this one.

The moniker also put me in mind of my favorite Beatle, George Harrison, who was often called the same (and even had an album and a song called Dark Horse, which later led to his eponymous record label). Growing up, I had always identified with George because he was marked the “quiet one,” but maybe this comparison was wishful thinking on my part. I wanted my still waters to run deep without being sure they actually did. Regardless, it was comforting for me to have a shy person to look up to, especially one that was successful. I absorbed the fact that perhaps I could succeed at something I loved, even if I found it unbearable to be in the spotlight.

In popular imagination (or maybe just in my imagination), George was also the wise Beatle, the one who cared more about chasing inner peace than drugs and women.  In an interview with Guitar World, George’s son, Dhani Harrison, talks about a letter George wrote to his mother when he was young:

He was on tour or someplace when he wrote it. It basically says, 'I want to be self-realized. I want to find God. I'm not interested in material things, this world, fame—I'm going for the real goal. And I hope you don't worry about me, mum.' He wrote that when he was twenty-four! 

I remember stumbling across that quote when I went through my own teenage Beatles frenzy, four decades after actual Beatlemania, and thinking how wise George was, and consequently, how real. But as I get older, I’m not exactly sure what being wise means. I haven’t really thought about the Beatles in a long time. I still listen to them occasionally, sure, but I haven’t considered them outside of the context of their music the way I did when I was a teenager and obsessively read up on them, so the rather simplistic image I had of George when I was fourteen has been preserved for over a decade: reserved, self-effacing but brilliant, striving toward enlightenment. And then I started doing research for this essay.

A few years ago, Martin Scorsese produced a documentary about George Harrison, and Harrison’s ex-wife Pattie Boyd published a memoir. Between the documentary and the memoir, I find myself, via multiple tabs of Google search, wading through the more unsavory details of George Harrison’s private life. How in his inner circle of friends George wasn’t thought of as shy so much as bitter and cocky; how he cheated on Pattie with Ringo’s wife, Maureen, and how Pattie once returned home to find them locked in the bedroom together. Did I know these sorts of details when I idolized him? I don’t remember. And if I did, why did I overlook them, instead favoring a more flowery and innocent version of Harrison?

It startles me, how upsetting it is to read those details about George’s private life, even when I haven’t actively looked up to him in years. Of course, it’s always discomfiting to find that someone you once idolized is not only imperfect but somewhat abominable. But if I had admired George for his guitar playing or his singing, it would be different. Instead, I admired him for his alleged wisdom, his success despite his shyness, traits which turned out to be much more complicated than they appeared.

During the time of my life that I most identified with George, I also took the most comfort in his lyrics, which told me that everything was impermanent, constantly changing. Listening to “Within You Without You,” for example, temporarily reminded me not to take myself so seriously (“and to realize you’re only very small / and life flows on within you and without you”), though it didn’t do much to make me consider why it was that I took myself so seriously. I actively sought out adages, going to bookstores and flipping through banal quotable cards (“Life is a journey, not a destination”; “Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass, it’s about learning how to dance in the rain”) to hang on my wall. In the same way I craved a label such as “dark horse,” I loved platitudes because they made more comprehensible a life I still found overwhelming and roaring in its uncertainty.

The most popular song off Harrison’s solo album All Things Must Pass, a title that is itself a platitude, is “My Sweet Lord,” a song about longing for communion with a higher power. The beauty in this song doesn’t belong to the lyrics (all of which express exactly one sentiment: the desire to be one with God, and the fact that it takes a long time to do so) but in the sound. Or maybe the beauty is in the fact that the melody makes its incredibly mundane lyrics beautiful, which distracts us from the fact that it isn’t saying much at all.

Platitudes—and song lyrics—that act as placeholders for deep thinking, designed to placate pain or discomfort, are not bad exactly. But I’d argue they aren’t good either--sometimes discomfort shouldn’t be placated. So: what does it mean to be wise, and does real wisdom actually exist?

I don’t know. The version of me who liked being called a “dark horse” would say yes, because I felt then that wisdom was attainable; it was the only currency I felt I ever had a chance of owning. I thought wisdom could make me interesting to other people, and so I believed in it. But I hadn’t lived long enough and didn’t know anything. (A fact which is still true.)

Is this what George thought, too? That creating around himself a constructed aura of sagacity would help him stand out in the wake of the more colorful, witty duo of John and Paul? Do we always have to bend to other’s perceptions of us? Are we just making shit up as we go?

William James said that “the art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook,” which I like. It implies a certain meditative quality I think George would embrace: a calm mind in the face of too much information and too many details. But it’s also yet another platitude—in my mind, this quote marches in rainbow-colored text across a white-square card. There is no escape from boiled-down bits of knowledge, advice, guidance. This is because, to communicate knowledge, it must first be put into words, an action which inherently simplifies thought. There can’t be wisdom without simplification.

But of course we can’t have wisdom without recognizing contradictions, either, acknowledging that too often opposing characteristics coexist. Such as the ones in George, the ones in all of us: the public and the private. And sometimes there is no answer for the questions these inconsistencies raise. This is something I couldn’t see when I was younger: that I could be both quiet and loud, introvert and extrovert, successful and a failure, an interesting person yet, like everyone else, alarmingly mediocre. That I could be both a dark horse and one waiting for the light, impatient for the paddock door to open and let me be seen.

—Lena Moses-Schmitt