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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I love it.

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

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

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

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

—S.H. Lohmann

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

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

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

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

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

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

—David W. Pritchard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She shrugs. “Okay.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Thanks for the smoke,” she says.

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

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

“Poetry,” he says. “Songs.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Emma Riehle Bohmann

#311: The Sun Records Collection (1994)

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

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

*

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

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

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

*

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

James: Number 4!

Subject #4: Hey there.

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

Subject #4: No problem.

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

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

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

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

James: Oh, James Cotton.

Subject #4: You know him, huh?

James: Yeah. He played with Muddy Waters.

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

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

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

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

Subject #4: And then I did it.

James: I’m sorry?

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

James: What?

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

James: …

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

James: Shit, man.

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

…

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

Subject #13: Carl Lee Perkins.

James: Thanks, Carl. Now—

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

James: Wait, what?

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

James: No, I thought—

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

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

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

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

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

James: I didn’t know that.

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

James: I’m sorry.

Subject #13: See that guy over there?

James: Who is that?

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

James: …

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

James: Sure?

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

James: Oh.

…

James: And you two are?

Subject #23: Elsie Jo Miller.

Subject #24: Mildred Miller.

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

James: You two were on Sun Records?

Subject #23: Yes, shortly.

James: Shortly? What happened?

Subject #23: Elvis.

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

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

James: So what did you do?

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

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

*

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

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

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

—Dillon Hawkins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pig eats shit, but only when he hungers.

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

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

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

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

—Erik Wennermark

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

Armchair Friendly Page Turner

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

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

“Are you OK?” I meekly asked.

“Kurt Cobain died,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Directions for listening to Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged:

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

*A beginner’s playlist of great Nirvana covers:

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

—April Gray Wilder

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sure. What CD is it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The doorbell rings.

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Marie Sicola

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Katelyn Kiley

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

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

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

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

        1. “Candy Says”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

        2. “What Goes On”

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

“This soap smells good.”

“Good start to the positive thinking!”

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

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

        3. “Some Kinda Love”

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

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

        4. “Pale Blue Eyes”

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

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

“Deep breath.”

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

        5. “Jesus”

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

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

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

Her shadow’s head nods.

        6. “Beginning to See the Light”

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

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

             Fran: Hi everybody!

              [The Crowd goes wild]

Fran: Oh, stop it!

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

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

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

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

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

involuntarily liked.

        7. “I’m Set Free”

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

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

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

I get up and switch over to One Direction.

        Interlude: “Story of my Life”

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

        9. “Murder Mystery”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

        10. “After Hours”

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

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

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

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

—Nicole Efford

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Colin Rafferty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Lee Erica Elder

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Lee Erica Elder

#320: Radiohead, "Amnesiac" (2001)

Seven Types of Forgetting

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

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

—D.E. Harding, "On Having No Head"

1.

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

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

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

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

2.

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

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

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

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

3.

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

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

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

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

4.

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

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

5.

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

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

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

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

6.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7.

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

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

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

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

8.

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

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

—April Gray Wilder

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

      Black bile // earth — autumn — gallbladder

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

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

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

      Phlegm // water — winter — brain & lungs

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

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

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

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

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

      Blood // air — spring — liver

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

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

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

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

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

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

      Yellow bile // fire — summer — spleen

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

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

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

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

—Brad Efford

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

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

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

*

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

*

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

*

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

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

*

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

—Eric Thompson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Emma Riehle Bohmann

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

Dear Reader,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bowie is anything but chameleon.

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

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

—Emma Murray

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Nicole Efford

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

The entire way, you told yourself jump.

Because how could you not?

What would they say about you?

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

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

But they didn’t.

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

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

But your rural home had no pavement.

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

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

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

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

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

The skater was there.

What are you doing after this?

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

I don’t know, you said.

Because some people are going up to the quarries.

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

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

Hey, she said. Mind if I come?

This cannot be happening, you thought.

The quarry, the company.

Something would go wrong.

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

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

Here, she said. Let me try.

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

Telltale windchimes, regular speed.

Wait, you said. How did you do that?

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s go, they said.

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

The sky crackled as you three walked.

What is that?

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

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

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

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

Who was that?

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

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

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

The sky crackled like the end of the world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Michael T. Fournier

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

Guyvilles

—Laura Eve Engel