#74: Neil Young, "After the Gold Rush" (1970)

At fourteen, I am a band-T-shirt-and-black-eyeshadow wearer, shuffling in my Vans and enormous JNCOs at my local junior high. It is spring of 1999, a strange time: only a few weeks after the Columbine shooting, which has made everyone look at me suspiciously, edging away from me in the halls. The stares that have always been there are of a different quality now, and make me self-consciously adjust the neon plastic barrettes in my magenta hair. At a routine appointment, the dentist I’ve had all my life pointedly asks me if I intend to shoot up a school.

But at fourteen, I found solace at the mall, where I met up with friends who looked like me, and felt most welcome loitering in a Hot Topic. The scent of unburned sandalwood incense and baby powder and something unidentifiably candy-sweet wafted through the store as my friends and I would window shop for merchandise we could rarely buy. Sometimes we coveted clothing, or jewelry with glittery or spooky motifs, but it was almost always music.

I noticed, too, that the store had started stocking more LPs alongside the CDs. I don’t remember exactly how it transpired, only that I ended up with a clunky stereo from the ‘80s with a turntable on top, which was purchased from an ad in the paper. I especially loved the knee-high speakers we bought with it, that could seemingly blast away even the worst day of 8th grade. But I had very few records of my own to play, at least until I could start working in the summer. Something possessed me to start pilfering my parents’ from the shelf in the basement. I noticed After the Gold Rush, with its gloomy, grainy black-and-white cover, and deemed it promising: it didn’t look too suspect on the outside, at least. If any of my friends found tame, boring music in my room, it would be the end of my social life. Deep down, I must’ve known that these unspoken rules about what made something “cool” were not all that different from what the popular kids lived by; if I was truly free to be myself, I wouldn’t care. Still, I trekked upstairs with some trepidation, feeling like I was betraying something, defecting from my side.

The opening track, “Tell Me Why,” to my 14-year-old self, made me picture people singing around a fire at a sleepaway camp in the 1960s. The acoustic guitar was so clean and cheery, one could clap or tap a foot along without much practice. The vocal harmonies channeled something almost angelic. It evoked landscapes of sunny fields, forgotten times. All of this was a far cry from the drop-D tuning and distortion, the overt aggression and bluntness I was accustomed to. I slid the record back into its sleeve, and tucked the album covertly into the rest of my collection, between Dead Kennedys and System of a Down, and hoped no one saw it when they came over.

That summer, I woke up at six o’clock each morning to work on a tobacco farm, as my parents and grandparents, and most young people in my town, had done for generations. For ten weeks—or however many we could handle—we’d work eight hours a day, Monday through Friday, picking and drying tobacco leaves that would be used for high-end cigar wraps. I was excited: it meant I could spend my own, hard-earned money on music and clothes, and cheese fries at Denny’s with my friends.

Every morning, I walked about half a mile to the nearest major intersection in the early light, where I would wait with my lunch bag to be picked up by a decommissioned school bus painted blue. Everyone wore their most beat-up old clothes, myself included, meaning I could usually pass as a “normal kid” if my hair was tied back. It was strange stripping myself of the thing that felt so central to my identity at the time. We all looked the same, groggily boarding the bus that would carry us teenagers from our suburban neighborhoods, across the Connecticut River that divided us and the next town over, a farming community known for its great school district.

The bus wound down the dirt roads between the fields and belched us out near the barns. The family who owned the property then barked orders, and assigned our work for the day in small groups. A lot of us working at the tobacco farm were around my age, or a little older: mostly high schoolers, a population I’d be joining in a few months. Already in the fields when we arrived each day were the migrant workers, all from Jamaica or elsewhere in the Caribbean, who lived on the property in tiny, run-down cottages. They would spend the summer, and return home at the end of the season, preceded by the weekly wire transfers of their checks supporting their families. There seemed to be a significant number of these workers, and yet, oddly, I felt like I hardly saw them: they always seemed to be working elsewhere, off in a different section of the field, concentrated in one corner of the barn. We never spoke to them.

The work was grueling and grotesque. It was July, and the heat was brutal; some worked out in the fields, directly under the sun—but I was lucky, and assigned to work in the sheds, which provided shade but not much else. Here, the broad, green leaves would be strung up on wooden laths with the aid of a pre-war contraption. With one leaf in each hand, we’d jam the thick stems up into a serrated blade that would thread a string through them, allowing the leaves to be hung and dried. Speed was a priority, and more than one kid was sent to the hospital because the blade went through their thumbs. The dirt floors of the barns were a fine, loose powder that would whirl up and land in our eyes, or mix with the sticky tobacco juice that dripped down our wrists, making a mascara on the hair of our arms.

The rafters of the barn were filling with leaves in varying stages of drying, acting as insulation that held in the summer heat. The air smelled like stale, unlit cigarettes. I was covered in filth and sweat, my biceps burning from the repetitive motion. I began complaining loudly about my misery. I was slowing down, clumsy with exhaustion, and not treating the leaves delicately enough; ripped tobacco leaves were useless. If anyone important came by, I surely would’ve been yelled at. I whined about just needing a break, which I knew would not be granted. One of the migrant workers walked over to my staton without a word, and began sewing my leaves for me. He was totally calm, and moved with a fluid efficiency that I could hardly fathom. With the exception of the trickle of sweat snaking down his dark neck, his work looked effortless. I watched silently, unsure of what was happening. Why was he at my machine? He finished three laths of work, just over a minute, then met my eye, nodded, and returned to his own machine across the barn. I managed a “thank you” a few seconds too late.

This moment happened almost 20 years ago, and yet it’s a memory that resurfaces often. I am left wondering now, as an adult, was this a gesture of kindness, because I was so young and a girl and the work was truly strenuous—or did he just want me to shut up and stop whining? Was his stoic silence in doing my work unprompted something symbolic that I’m still not sure I understand? I think of this moment most whenever I hear “Southern Man.” The obvious racial element, as well as the setting of a tobacco plantation perhaps makes for a facile observation. But this moment happened just shy of the 21st Century, several states north of the Mason-Dixon, and yet there was no scathing song critiquing the region I grew up in. Growing up, it was easy to criticize other places and pretend, with our cable TV and my bedroom full of cheap clothes and toys, that the truly distressed and backwards places were elsewhere, in geography and history. Meanwhile, a family in a picturesque New England town was bussing in children from the less desirable suburb across the river, and housing black international workers in “little shacks” to support their carcinogenic agribusiness.

One of the things I have grown to enjoy about After the Gold Rush is its understatedness. The almost-waltzy “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” is deceptively, well, heartbreaking. The pain is all the more evident in its subtlety. The jubilance I thought I first heard in “Tell Me Why” is tempered with lyrics about alienation and hardship. Young’s voice is often characterized as “whiny,” even by a number of his fans. But it’s not quite true: it’s more urgent, mournful, exposed; at his highest pitches (in songs such as “After the Gold Rush” and “Don’t Let It Bring You Down”), his voice reads as almost a whimper, a plaintive insistence at singing a line that seems nearly too painful to voice. “I Believe in You” is haunting in its slow-brewing gloom. Young is sometimes pegged as the “Godfather of Grunge,” and only just recently have I come to believe it: the darkness evident in these songs is palpable to the careful listener—something I was not at 14. At that age, I would sometimes find the smooth gap between the grooves on the record, gently dropping the needle down from between my black-polished nails, and listen only to “Southern Man,” the song with the plainest message, the loudest guitar.

—Lisa Mangini

#75: James Brown, "Star Time" (1991)

Let’s get something out of the way: I am in no way the right person to evaluate James Brown, his life, or his musical legacy. Such a task should be treated much more carefully and gracefully in the hands of someone who knows more and knows better. I do not know better, I do not know much at all, but I think we can collectively agree that James Brown is one of our most gargantuan cultural icons and his legacy (also definite) is founded upon some of the greatest music in all of recorded history. His music is what music aims for.

The way I originally approached Star Time—a whopping 72-track, 4-disc compilation heavy in the years between 1964-1973—for the purposes of writing on it, was all wrong. I reserved 72 days for myself, promising (nay, dramatically vowing to myself) to listen to a track a day on repeat, to really glean its essence, like some kind of sonic vampire. I tend to over-dramatize tasks to make them more appealing when it comes around to actually completing them (lazy), and it usually pans out that my idea was dumb and impractical so I’ll utterly change course (mercurial). I planned to dig deep into each track and really come up with an idea to flesh out what each song “really means,” or to see how the track could play into with whatever mundane thing happened that day, to prove its universality or whatever. Oof. All wrong, friends.

First, there is no way I can work my way through each track on an individual basis. To do so would be to dismember a man’s career—his life—into individual parts, and this compilation is doing something different; it is experiential, it progresses, but it is never sequential. It is also not at all like an album (a fairly recent invention) in terms of conceptualization; there is no solid theme to constrain it nor any kind of obvious limitations that would result in a stricter curation. Second, to try to feel something specific or to respond with prescribed emotion once a day, like brushing teeth or taking pills, would reduce Star Time, in all its glory, to tedium. This compilation is one big 72-track high note that cannot be diminished nor “reacted” to; it is much more fluid and is felt holistically.

The other tactic I considered when writing this was to be much too succinct by simply saying “He sings real good.” Because MY GOD, HE SINGS SO GOOD. It would be so simple and also correct to leave it at that. And so easy, as this is my first bit of focused writing as I inch my way out of a jaded, post-MFA depression.

What I landed on is an exploration of a feeling. Instead of these extremes (saying too much or too little), what seems most right is to just feel it, the whole damn thing, all of soul music. And, like James Brown, I need to tell you how I feel. A word about soul:

I. A WORD ABOUT SOUL

Some things are holy. My gray cat peacefully gazing out the window, drenched in warm morning light. Fresh biscuits for a hangover. The roughness of my mother’s hands and how mine look and feel more like hers every year. That first gravitation to someone new—someone right, or even better, someone wrong. To be gin-drunk and lusty in the South, sweating, hips searching out hands in a smoky room with “Prisoners of Love” purring in the background. To be gin-drunk anywhere, held close and swaying. To move at all, to be moved, that is holiness. By holiness, I mean the nearly inexplicable quality of those moments and people and objects in our existence that bury themselves deep into the soul upon sensing them—that which moves us. These things are the raw material of soul, and we take them in every single day. James Brown’s soul music, his soul-annihilating and soul-nurturing music, is for the everyday.

For the past several months, I’ve been feeling my way through a dense fog. There is something incomprehensible about the way the world is slowly turning its gears, all its cruelty and simultaneous wonder. To a degree, I can explain what’s happening, the way it is happening on an individual, moment-to-moment basis. We pay attention to those things almost manically. It’s the big picture destruction that seems harder to grasp. The deepest sort of pain that turns us cruel—I cannot explain that kind of influence.

Then comes the despair I have known to associate with that fog. When I despair, I turn to soul—the balm to big-picture pain—because what can tell us what to do with pain better than dancing it away, at least momentarily? What should redeem our souls but soul? In his autobiography, Brown states, “The one thing that can solve most of our problems is dancing.” So, I think I can confirm then that this piece is about dancing to James Brown. Sweet, holy, redemptive dancing. It’s about the truth of movement in a room.

A friend of mine, long ago during my undergraduate years, once used the phrase “Boogie Truth” during a discussion about the impetus and afterburn of dancing, specifically bar dancing on a Friday night once the school-week stress is on held on mute. Ultimately, the truth of dancing is sex—always sex, the reason and the effect. I agree, but I think sex is half the reason. The other half is pain. I dance because I’m hurting.

Star Time is the best example I can think of to demonstrate the Boogie Truth as I see it: sexy escapes rolling between waves of pain. Often the trickster, James Brown blends ballad with upbeat orchestrations, resulting in a sexy backdrop for his main lyrical truth: pain. Then, he gives us some organ-squealing, horn-stabbing interlude to ponder the next movement. How are we to solve such profound sadness? Well, let’s take it to the band. Listen to “There Was A Time”; my God, James Brown's voice is insane of course, but in this one, the tightness and energy of the band is unreal. Brown, ever the ruthless bandleader, ensures that each part of the complex unit remains effortless in its syncopated support of Brown’s squealing vocal performance. Demarcations between the two (instrumentation and vocals) often seem inextricable, as complex, feverish rhythms propel the lyrics into movement and vice versa. James Brown makes us move, and that is why he is the Godfather of Soul.

II. A WORD ABOUT THE GODFATHER

The King of Soul. The Hardest Working Man in Show Business (toured and performed hundreds of shows a year). Soul Brother No. 1. Mr. Dynamite. The Godfather of Soul.

With Star Time, we aren’t dealing with the “Best Of” or the greatest hits. This is a monster of a compilation, sure, and there is something to be said about a lack of modesty here, formally speaking. But James Brown’s lack of modesty, his braggadocio, is what makes him the Godfather: “I’m a greedy man” (“I’m a Greedy Man”); “I’ve got money and now I need love” (“I’ve Got Money”). To bear witness to the pipes of James Brown, even several decades removed from his peak, is a privilege. We do not deserve to have such a voice—a rusty belt slapping metal, sometimes syrupy sweet in its reverence for pain. At the beginning of “Devil’s Den,” Brown belts a lightning fast note that I can only compare to screeching brakes. His range is mythological. How the hell did he get all the way up there in that stratosphere?

A quick personal history of self-inflicted vocal training wounds: when I first started playing in a band, I’d scream into a pillow every night (because I heard a rumor that Tom Waits did this to get his throat all gravelly) with the very unrealistic hopes that I could train my vocal chords into hitting high-and-rough registers. What I got instead was a lot of pain and the inability to speak for two weeks. In many ways, what I’m getting at is pain. Pain is a universal, and I come to soul music bearing it openly without reservation.

I can’t talk about the musical legacy of James Brown, though, without addressing the eponymous “It’s a Man’s, Man’s, Man’s World.” This is more for me than it is for you. Brown has received much criticism over the years for being a misogynist, and this track is notorious for its quite literal proclamation of those attitudes. I feel a couple of ways about this song. (Surprise, surprise: more inner turmoil.) To try and see a thing within the context of capital-S Soul, long after Brown has departed from us, I want to draw attention to the last few sentences of this song: “He’s lost in the wilderness / He’s lost in bitterness.” The track ends with “He’s lost!”

I do believe in redemptive moments. I believe there are unique pathways into all of our beliefs and attitudes, no matter how problematic, and each one of those pathways is speckled with inalienable truths, like old gum, often grounded in pain and trauma. This trauma is felt individually, but it is shared culturally. What “He’s lost!” expresses to me (as I aim to feel this song on its own terms) is doubt. It feels like shame. In that way, I am learning something here and, because this song makes me a better thinker, I’ll never turn this track off, despite its grave offenses. What I am choosing to do with this song is to see its gum-speckled pathways, to feel what I perceive to be individual/collective pain, and in that way, James Brown becomes visionary for me. This may seem to more hard-lined individuals like a convoluted, roundabout way to permit certain art into my life, but it is not out of ignorance of the patriarchy, or toxic masculinity, or any of the other buzzwords or coined phrases that make it easier to talk about these very complicated things. For me, it’s about the Boogie Truth. The curation of my own life, my craft, and the art that influences it involves the recognition of all pathways and the openness to let it speak to me in ways that I find meaningful.

I could also talk about how many people James Brown wronged in his lifetime, about his penchant for misogyny and domestic violence (check out Cold Sweat: My Father James Brown and Me). I could explore his impoverished upbringing in the south, his six-year sentence after a high speed chase (“Public Enemy #1”), his social activism (“Get Up, Get Into It, Get Involved,” “Say It Loud - I’m Black and I’m Proud”), and his struggles with addiction (“King Heroin”).  But these truths can already be found in the music. And Star Time is ultimately about movement driven by pain, sin, pride, pleasure, rinse, repeat, repeat, repeat. Repeat it until it sinks in and drives you to move. I think soul music operates in this way: it lays itself bare for the complete, inextricable range of feeling. Pain, ever the universal. Soul, always the cure:

Get up offa that thing, 
And dance 'till you feel better, 
Get up offa that thing, 
And try to release that pressure!

—Kori Hensell

#85: Aretha Franklin, "Lady Soul" (1968)

When I was seventeen, I met a boy—let’s call him Noah—a few days into February. A mutual friend set us up, claiming she had never met two people more perfect for one another. He sent me candy and a stuffed animal on Valentine’s Day and hid in my neighborhood so he could see my reaction, which my friend told me about later. He took me to dinners and movies and visited me during lunch at school. He taught me the rules of soccer so when I went to his games we could talk about them afterward. He held my hand in the hallways.

By March, Noah and I had stopped holding hands. At lunches I talked and he stayed quiet; he just barely said hello after his soccer games. Our dates stayed in his basement where we watched TV in silence. He didn’t laugh anymore around me.

In April, I asked him if he would still date me if I were 600 pounds. “No,” he said, “I don’t want to date a fat girl.” I asked him, “What about if I gained 60 pounds?” That was the first time he looked at me with hate in his eyes. “Did you not hear what I said? If you get fat, I’m done.”

Over the new few months, the hateful look in his eyes came back more and more often.

“Let’s just stay on the couch, where would we even go together?”

“We both know we’re not going to last, don’t be so upset about things that don’t matter in the long run.”

“Stop wearing so much makeup, it just makes you look trashy.”

“You eat so much.”

“I don’t want to kiss you anymore.”

“I don’t think I’ll ever love you. You’re just not a lovable person to me.”

With each thing he said, I got quieter. I was scared to say anything to him, to touch him, to see him. I thought if I stayed with him long enough he could like me again, maybe. But he broke up with me in August, and then we hugged for the first time in months.

*

That same month, I met another boy—let’s call him Brandon—a few days before leaving for my freshman year at college. He liked it when I called him Brandy, he said he loved listening to me, and he hated Noah. “You deserve so much better than him,” he always said.

Brandy went to school across the country but we didn’t stop talking. We sent good morning and goodnight texts and talked on the phone on the way to class. I joined an a cappella group and a sorority and made some of my best friends, while every night we FaceTimed and, very quickly, we fell in love from across the country. But at the end of the semester, he left his school unexpectedly.

We spent December wrapped up in one another, smiling.

Brandy started working in the spring, digging trenches in Colorado for six hours a day, while I sat in classes and got lunch with friends and laughed. By the end of February, though, he said, “I just don’t like talking to you when you drink, can you stop?” I didn’t know what he meant—stop drinking or stop talking to him. “I guess both, whatever you choose. I just don’t like you when you drink.” So I stopped drinking, hoping he’d still love me.

As the spring continued, Brandy began to call me every few hours. He cried more often than not, it seemed, and he said he couldn’t live without me. “You’re the reason I get up in the morning,” he said. “I need you to need me like I need you. Don’t you love me? Don’t you need me too?”

And because I loved him, I decided then that I needed him. I talked to him for hours and hours everyday, telling my friends at school that I didn’t feel like going out anymore, that I didn’t want to, that I needed to talk to Brandon. I got quieter.

In May, Brandon and I were reunited again, after four straight months of being apart. He stopped smiling by the second week of the month.

“You want to hang out too much.”

“You’re suffocating me.”

“I love you less.”

I stayed quiet.

By the end of the month, we both agreed we weren’t good together anymore. I lay in bed and cried for a month; I wrote about how lost I felt. I didn’t know who I was without him. I needed him.

*

Listening to Lady Soul for the first time now, I keep thinking about these two relationships. Aretha sings of getting cheated by the men she loved, and I have always felt cheated too. “You tell me to leave you alone,” she says, in “Chain of Fools,” and I can almost hear both Noah and Brandon saying those things to me. I wish I had listened to Aretha back then, instead of crying for days, even weeks, after those breakups. I wish I had listened to “Good to Me As I Am to You” and really thought about how I let myself be treated. How I gave myself up so I could be loved, and unloved, badly.

But listening to it now, I feel Aretha’s words coursing through my veins. I feel them pump through my heart, straighten my spine, clear my head. They envelop me.

And “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” makes me feel whole, especially knowing the man I’ve been seeing for a year now.

I’m not ashamed of him, so we can use his real name: Ian. A little over a year ago, a mutual friend set us up for a date at Chili’s, which neither of us thought would amount to anything. We lived in different states, I was going abroad in a couple days, and we didn’t go to the same school. It would be too hard to stay in contact after just one date.

But we smiled the entire night. We ate fajitas and talked about how much we love Arizona and started inside jokes we still laugh about now. He asked to see me again, and again, and again, and then we had spent three days straight together with neither of us realizing how much time had gone by. It felt like three years and three minutes all at once.

Then I went abroad for two months, but we talked every day and he said how much he couldn’t wait to see me when I got back. He listened to me when I told him about my adventures abroad, and he really listened. Every night that I got to talk to him made the night feel as bright as daylight. When I came back, he visited me in Williamsburg; it felt like I had never left. He met my friends and I met his; he taught (and is still teaching) me the rules of football and about how he films the games; he held me tight when I told him about my past relationships. I told him I’d have a lot of anxieties in our relationship because of my past ones, and he said he’d do anything to help me. “Anything to make you happy,” he said, and still says.

Early on in our relationship, I asked him if he would still date me if I were 600 pounds. “Of course,” he said, laughing a little, “how you look doesn’t change how I feel about you. But I’d try to help you lose weight because that’s just not healthy.”

I also asked him if he minded that I drank. “Not at all,” he said, “what you do is up to you.”

We said we love each other a few months into the relationship, but we also say we started falling in love at Chili’s. “It was a little love,” we say.

*

I have never felt love the way I love him, and I have never felt love the way he loves me. And I have never felt love the way I love myself, now.

Ian has driven almost four hours just to hold my hand after a terrible week, and I have done the same for him. He has encouraged me to speak when I get scared and quiet, especially when it’s with something about our relationship. He encourages me to write, to sing, to spend time with friends, to eat whatever my heart desires. He says I’m the most lovable person he’s ever met. And after a year of dating, he still says he can’t wait to see me again, even when we’re falling asleep next to one another.

But I think Aretha Franklin would like, even more, that I have learned to treat myself better. I’ve learned to respect myself. I told Ian explicitly that if he wasn’t okay with the things I’ve been through and how I make my decisions, he could leave. He stayed, and I have stayed, too. I sing love songs to myself when I drive, I wear as much makeup as I want, I tell Ian I can’t talk sometimes because I’m with family or friends, I make time to remind myself of the good things about me.

I know I’m lovable, because I love myself.

I wish I had known about Aretha Franklin and Lady Soul when I was younger, but I am just grateful to know it now. Aretha, if you’re hearing any of my words, know that I have heard yours. Know that we, both, are here to stay ourselves, with the love that we have always deserved.

—Nicole Efford

#77: AC/DC, "Back in Black" (1980)

Like rock ‘n’ roll itself, AC/DC’s Back In Black can feel like a gallery of clichés.

The album after the lead singer drinks himself to death; the rich kid savant producer who gives rock this loud a polar sharpness; lyrics with the wattage of an older sibling’s encouragement; lyrics with the loving stupidity of an older sibling’s advice; drums so warm they almost breathe; the GOAT all-black album cover; 1980 Leo season made real (US release date: July 25), a Mobius strip of White Anglophone nonsense and bravado that helped forge the commercial culture of the decade as much as Reagan’s creaky old smile did; loud, clear, fun, inescapable, shallow, pure.

Funny thing is, clichés happen. The child of a prosperous South African engineer and a German heiress, producer Robert “Mutt” Lange really does have a remarkable gift for clarifying rock: smaller studio amps to control Malcolm & Angus Young’s guitars; a prodigious number of takes; wiping the background clear of clutter so that the sounds people are paying money for, power chords and more power chords, soar.

The replacement for the deceased Bon Scott, Brian Johnson, really did go from journeyman to lead singer on the most popular rock album of all time. Johnson’s voice, once thought too high, even harsh, compared to Scott’s, now sounds predestined for these songs. Johnson’s voice scratches at lines, wails and snaps. The levity is there too. Listen to how he changes the refrain slightly at the end of “Hell’s Bells,” from “Oh” to “Aw, hell’s bells!” like he’s just dropped something.

But you get it. You don’t need a hagiography. Even if you can’t stand a single second of the music, if you’re reading this, you’re involved. Back in Black is like caffeine, capitalism, love, and the devil: even if you don’t believe in it, it believes in you.

Maybe a snippet of “You Shook Me All Night Long” (the shouted “YOU” that starts the chorus?) pings around in your own brain’s compartments, you having been in concrete stadiums, having sat through movie trailers and a battalion of sports promo packages in this life, having been subjected to AC/DC’s ersatz followers, laughable hair metal runoff.

Maybe it’s closer to you. Maybe you lifted weights to Back in Black or routinely closed up a short-order kitchen with it. Maybe you had a pedantic older sibling who put “Rock And Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution” on a mixtape a few months ago, couldn’t change it now, and would be goddamned if he’ll listen to Ace of Base while he drives you home.

*

Like a cursed or enchanted object, I don’t know how or when AC/DC’s Back In Black arrived in my life exactly.

I know I have had my own copy since college, having bought the CD at Encore on South State in Ann Arbor. I ripped it onto my desktop and have been ferrying those files from desktop to laptop to iPhone in the decade since. I know that much.

Listening to music and writing about it was close to a daily activity for me then. I worked on the college newspaper. It was my extremely intense and very important job to provide 500 words on Interpol or Ludacris or to cover a show at the Blind Pig. My friend, two years older, the music editor, would feed me albums I had missed or had never even heard: Autechre’s Amber, Television’s Marquee Moon, Spoon’s Girls Can Tell.

For a happy while, and with a pronounced peak at the time when I bought my own copy of Back in Black, I wager I was spending nearly every waking hour either listening to music to write about it or reading a book to write about it.

I didn’t need to work an actual, full-time campus job. I fell in with no student organization outside of the paper. I was out of state, with more than a minor tendency toward happy isolation, and I was churning through more media (though I certainly would have said “art” then and yes I was the worst) at a more ruthless, hungry pace than I have since.

AC/DC cut through the churn. Without the self importance of Led Zeppelin, without the sleeve-tat-bro-pout of Metallica, with the fun of ABBA, with the right kind of a Little Richard obsession, AC/DC and Back in Black kept making itself necessary to my life.

Before I realized it, the album had the same effect on me as coffee in the morning and cold beer in the afternoon. Get up, tidy the apartment, walk to class, deadlift this, errand running, read that, a quick repast with a friend to down a whiskey before moving on to the second half of the night, a chapter for which you want to be properly energized, a little loose but keyed in (“I’m tryin’ to walk a straight line / on sour mash and cheap wine”), all of it enhanced by “Hell’s Bells” or “Back in Black,” or—saints preserve me—“Let Me Put My Love Into You.”

The album’s pulse hit me at just the right time. As an English major interested in—shocker—intense early 20th century poets, ashy, sealed-off indie rock made in a cabin sounded like music made for a cabin. I was 22. I had enough frustration with Byzantium and Ariel. AC/DC fit.

I loved a drink, enjoyed loud-ass conversations and parlous decisions. They were all verve and performance, the minute of warm, anticipatory drums at 3:20 on “Shoot To Thrill” sounding like the heartbeat of a gigantic, friendly animal, the drums building to Johnson’s sizzling vocal fit, a pure version of the thing done to death, the rock star who just can’t even handle the words right now, howling and breathing with want.

Outside of rap, the music that surrounded me in early, middle-school adolescence was reflective of the private day school in which I spent my days: white, wan, and believing itself to be both more engaging and progressive than, you know, those other schools. Lots of discussions in which sixth graders were trusted with ‘big ideas.’ A few older draconian lacrosse players. Clinton-era achievements.

Dave Matthews and Phish, those were the two that I remember most. I remember what felt like their hegemonic control over my classmates, especially the cool ones. To me, that music sounded like artisanal paste or a FREE TIBET sticker on a zebra-striped Range Rover, or “the only people for me are the mad ones” printed on anything.  These bands had electrified instruments and beating hearts and this was what they made?

Maybe I let it get to me too much, but that complacent odor, that blasé, baked-on vibe, that all seemed to come from the music my peers loved. I think that aura helped drive me from home, out of that school, made me wary of the idea of “chill.” I could have used Back in Black then.

So, for me, that’s the most clichéd thing about Back in Black. The energy I wanted my life to have—bullshit as a desire like that is—runs through the best parts of an album so accomplished, so inescapable, that my desires aren’t even my desires anymore. My own petty passing facts aren’t so different from a million other coming-of-age narratives soundtracked by this exact album. And isn’t that just the biggest rock cliché you’ve ever heard.

—Evan McGarvey

#78: Otis Redding, "Otis Blue" (1965)

Poor Otis, dead and gone
Left me here to sing his song
Pretty little girl with the red dress on
Poor Otis, dead and gone

- The Doors, “Runnin’ Blue” (1969)

That was Jim Morrison’s crass eulogy for Otis Redding, recorded about a year after Redding died in 1967. It introduced one of the weakest songs on one of the Doors’ weakest albums—not much of a legacy for “Poor Otis.” Thankfully, the Doors were not the only ones to memorialize Redding in song. His protégé Arthur Conley recorded “Otis, Sleep On,” which rhymes “heaven” and “Redding” in its opening couplet. Wilson Pickett re-wrote Dion’s “Abraham, Martin and John” as “Cole, Cooke and Redding,” casting Otis in the JFK role. But the Doors’ homage stands out for its sheer presumption, as though Redding had named them his musical executors. I recognize this same presumption in myself at this moment, as I appoint myself the one left here to sing the song of Otis Blue. John Milton, writing of Shakespeare in 1630, asked why there should be any stone or marble monument for him: “What need’st thou such weak witness of thy name?” Otis Redding, too, needs not the Doors’ weak witness or my own. Still, Milton wrote his poem, and I will have my unnecessary say as well.

There are more than ten Otis Redding LPs in my collection, but Otis Blue is not one of them. That’s not for lack of trying on my part. When I was discovering soul music in 1979, all of Redding’s original releases had been deleted from the catalog. Only two compilations were in print, but hearing those convinced me I needed to own the rest. I managed to secure used copies of many of his albums, but Otis Blue never turned up. This platter’s elusiveness was particularly frustrating since Paul Gambaccini’s Rock Critics’ Choice: The Top 200 Albums (1978) identified it as Redding’s best: #23 out of 200. The Immortal Otis Redding was at #33, and had the two Redding factions formed a single voting bloc, he might have risen even higher on the list. (That book’s canonization of Otis Blue, I suspect, is responsible for its exalted position on the Rolling Stone 500.) Fortunately, nine of the eleven songs on Otis Blue were also on the two-LP Best of Otis Redding (1972), so I got most of its contents indirectly. Now, of course, Otis Blue can be had instantly via Spotify, or in a deluxe CD reissue, or even, for about $250 on eBay, in its original format as Volt Records S-412 (condition: Excellent).

Otis Blue would be lovely to own, but it is not Redding’s best album. That honor, surely, goes to The History of Otis Redding, a flawless compilation of singles released just prior to his death (and thus prior to “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay”). Otis Blue, Redding’s third LP, was his finest to date, however, and it does include two of his greatest songs: his original, pulsating version of “Respect” and the searing ballad “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long.” Aretha Franklin, incidentally, tried her hand at the second of these songs as well, but that cover would not have led Redding to say (as he reportedly did of her “Respect”), “that girl done stole my song.” The Rolling Stones also covered “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long,” but no one—not even Jerry Butler, who co-wrote it—could take this song from Redding. Redding’s fifth album was called The Dictionary of Soul, and the liner notes to Otis Blue also venture a definition of that term (“an intensely dramatic performance by a singer, projected with such feeling that it reaches out and visibly moves the listener”), but one could simply offer “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” as Exhibit A and leave it at that. It is the archetypal soul ballad, and its alternation between power and vulnerability is endlessly fascinating and moving, most notably on the way Redding slowly glides up to a high A on “You are tiiiiiiired,” lingering on a dissonant G# against the tonic while he decrescendos at the same time. Jagger’s falsetto version sounds embarrassingly feeble in comparison. Aretha wisely does something different entirely at that point in the song, knowing she could not improve upon perfection.

Mention of the Rolling Stones here may seem impertinent, but their rise and Redding’s were intertwined. They were very early adopters of his music, recording “Pain in My Heart” and “That’s How Strong My Love Is” in addition to “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long,” all in 1965. Redding returned the favor on Otis Blue with a rollicking version of “Satisfaction.” Redding recorded the song only a couple of months after the Stones did, and his version is a blistering rave-up that runs roughshod over the original lyrics. He would take a similar approach to “Day Tripper” the following year.

In fact, it turns out that most of Otis Blue is covers. Along with “Satisfaction,” Redding offers his versions of songs by Solomon Burke (“Down in the Valley”), William Bell (“You Don’t Miss Your Water”), B. B. King (“Rock Me Baby”), and the Temptations (“My Girl”). In addition, he included no fewer than three songs by Sam Cooke: “Shake,” “Wonderful World,” and “A Change is Gonna Come.” Cooke had been shot to death six months earlier, and Redding was perhaps feeling that Cooke had left him here to sing his songs. This was not mere opportunism, however; he had already included songs by Cooke on each of his first two albums. The homage was heartfelt, and Redding’s gruffness adds a distinctive edge to Cooke’s smooth facility. Still, “Otis Sings Sam” is not a foolproof formula. “Shake” works well, perhaps because its lyrics are fairly trivial (e.g., “Ding-a-ling-a-ling / Honey, shaking is the latest thing”). On “Wonderful World,” however, Redding’s frequent interpolations add little (“I don’t know much about my history” spoils the original’s spare opening), and on “A Change is Gonna Come,” Redding robs the song of some its bite. Not only does he omit the anti-segregation verse (“I go to the movie, and I go downtown / But somebody keep tellin’ me, don’t hang around”), he also rewrites Cooke’s bitter bridge:

Then I go to my brother
And I say, “Brother, help me please”
But he winds up knockin’ me
Back down on my knees

becomes the less confrontational, more sentimental

There’s a time, I would go to my brother
I’ve asked my brother, “will you help me please?”
He turned me down, and then I asked my little mother
I said, “Mother…,” I said, “Mother, I’m down on my knees!”

As a teenager I preferred the unvarnished, impassioned singing of Otis and Aretha to the more restrained, string-laden style of Sam Cooke, but now I think I was partly deceived by surfaces.

Speaking of surfaces, Otis Blue is a great title. One wonders why the label felt the need to add the bet-hedging subtitle, Otis Redding Sings Soul. Evidently “soul” was a selling point they wanted to emphasize. His previous LP had been Otis Redding Sings Soul Ballads, and his next one would be The Soul Album. “Otis Blue,” in contrast, hearkens back to Ray Charles’s brilliant The Genius Sings the Blues (1961) and perhaps even to Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue (1959). Blues, however, even kind-of blues, was not what young, African American record-buyers were purchasing in the mid-sixties, and with the exception of “Rock Me Baby” Otis Blue does explicitly not lay claim to the blues tradition. Then again, neither does Joni Mitchell’s Blue (1971). There’s not a 12-bar blues or AAB verse to be found there, but that album, like its cover art, is saturated in blue. And if you are fortunate enough to own both Blue and Otis Blue, you might notice that the heavy-lidded blonde women on their covers look remarkably similar.

—Will Pritchard

#79: Led Zeppelin, "II" (1969)

Recently, at the age of forty, I had a ruptured aneurysm, which resulted in a subarachnoid hemorrhage. Most people die. I survived. You might be asking yourself what this has to do with Led Zeppelin’s second album, and the answer is nothing.

Perhaps I brought up my affliction after thinking about John Bonham dying young. John Bonham, the drummer for Led Zeppelin, was thirty-two when he died. He was found unresponsive after a night of heavy drinking. He had a family at the time and an incredibly successful rock band. Many think of him as the greatest rock drummer of all time. The similarities between us end before they begin.

I first remember listening to Led Zeppelin II and becoming enamored with both the band and the album during the Summer of 1991. I was thirteen, at camp that summer, and songs like “Whole Lotta Love” and “What Is and What Should Never Be” spoke to me. I recall going to a natural waterslide park (basically people go down rapids that have eroded some of the hillsides, so the rock path slides are smooth). The music was incredibly powerful. This was before I started listening to heavy metal, and Led Zeppelin was the perfect precursor. They straddled the line between metal and hard rock.

At the time, I think I would just listen to those first two songs off the album. I recall lying on the ground, bathing in the sun, eating Twizzlers, and listening to the compact disc for the first side of Led Zeppelin II. It was a highlight of that Summer. Come to think of it, it may have been a cassette tape.

Listening to the riff from “Whole Lotta Love” was revelatory.

In the film Almost Famous, members of a feuding rock band all start to sing “Tiny Dancer” together and it re-affirms their affinity/connection/what have you for each other. This, apparently, was influenced by an event where Cameron Crowe, the writer/director of Almost Famous, who had once been a rock critic for Rolling Stone, was on a tour bus in which a band started singing along with “Whole Lotta Love.”

I wasn’t the only one who felt inclusion with that song.

In 2008, Jimmy Page would perform the riff for Jack White and the Edge when they convened in the documentary It Might Get Loud. Jack White and the Edge, looked like two little boys who’d just witnessed something beyond the realm of their comprehension. The same exulted joy on their faces reminded me of my time at the natural water slides listening to overdriven blues riffs played with a ton of feedback.

Of course, there are those who would denigrate Led Zeppelin for their lyrics or originality with their songwriting. Zeppelin was sued by Willie Dixon for plagiarism.

He claimed the lyrics for “Whole Lotta Love” were taken from his song “You Need Love.” They settled out of court and Dixon is now a credited writer on “Whole Lotta Love.”

Similarly, Chester Burnett aka Howlin’ Wolf is a credited writer of “The Lemon Song,” since the song itself is basically a reworking of Burnett’s “Killing Floor,” a song which Zeppelin used to play.

You can make of that what you will.

Rounding out the rest of Led Zeppelin II are some other phenomenal songs: “Heartbreaker,”  “Ramble On,” and “Moby Dick.” “Living Loving Maid (She’s Just a Woman),” “Thank You,” and “Bring it On Home” are also on the album.

“Heartbreaker” was a chance for Jimmy Page to demonstrate his chops on the guitar, as there are numerous solos and transitions.

“Ramble On” makes a lot of references to Tolkien and his Lord of the Rings mythology. In fact, I recall at one point in the song, the woman who the narrator is attempting to woo is kidnapped by Gollum. They probably should have included this in the film.

“Moby Dick” was an opportunity for Bonham to showcase his drumming skills. Mostly instrumental, the song lasted for more than fifteen minutes when played live.

While I never got to see the band play live, I did get to see all the living members of Led Zeppelin play. I saw Page and Plant touring together while I was in college, and John Paul Jones play as a solo artist opening for King Crimson after I had graduated. They all played some Zeppelin songs, but it wasn’t the same. That magic from when I was twelve on the natural waterslide was missing.

The innocence was gone.

I admire Led Zeppelin for their music, and I respect their decision to end the band in 1980 with the death of Bonham, rather than seek a replacement. They quit at the top of their game, and their legacy has remained intact.

Perhaps that is why the music has a special place for me; it doesn’t remind me of specific events per se, but rather an era, a time before things became complicated. When one could live off Twizzlers and go down rapids with reckless abandon.

I still can’t see very well, due to double vision, and at times I feel like a human bobblehead, but I am reminded of those carefree days eating Twizzlers, listening to Led Zeppelin II, and going down the rapids (not at the same time). Trying to hold on to the past, though, would be futile. Like when Heraclitus said, “You can’t step in the same water twice.” I wonder if he was at a natural water slide when he had that epiphany.

—Andrew Davie

#80: John Lennon, "Imagine" (1971)

Imagine all the people
Living life in peace
You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one

The vision of John Lennon’s song and eponymous album Imagine feels very far away right now. During this especially-contentious month of this divisive phase in U.S. history, it’s difficult to picture this divided country living as one, much less the world.

I cannot help but interpret John Lennon’s 1971 album Imagine through the particular lens of what it is to be an American woman in this moment in time: October 2018. Perhaps the reading that follows is a poor one because it is so personally informed. This political moment is all-consuming for many women, and some men, especially those who, like me, are survivors of sexual assault. Lately, almost everything has filtered through that lens. It’s a lens through which the personal and political are blurred together, just as they are in Imagine, which is both a deeply inward-looking and an expansively outward-gazing album. Though its tracks were recorded nearly forty years ago, the sentiments the album conveys feel relevant today. The American people were angry in 1971 and we are angry now.

Lennon’s vision feels almost impossible to realize in the aftermath of the contested confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who has been accused of sexual assault by multiple women. Of course, Kavanaugh has denied everything. Of course, most Republican leaders back him, making him out to be the victim of slander against his good name. This time is particularly difficult for women who have experienced sexual assault because we are seeing the naked truth: the assaults we experienced mean nothing to many lawmakers; a man’s name means more. Those in power do not care about what happens to women. That realization feels like yet another assault.

In the midst of a national debate about the value of women’s stories—in a moment in which people flooded the Supreme Court’s steps to protest a Justice’s confirmation for the first time ever—some of Imagine’s songs are especially resonant. In particular, “I Don’t Want To Be A Soldier” comes to mind. Notably, these lyrics: Well, I don’t wanna be a lawyer mama, I don’t wanna lie. / Well, I don’t wanna be a soldier mama, I don’t wanna die. I didn’t ask to be assaulted when I was nine and again as an adult, just as other women didn’t ask for their own assaults.

But it happened, and now we survivors have the opportunity to fight for those selves that didn’t have a say. We don’t want to have to take part in this battle—the fight to be heard and believed—but here we are, drafted now. We wanted the truth from a thorough FBI investigation into the accusations and didn’t get it. Our request to gimme some truth was denied, and a man who likely has a history of sexual assault at worst, and belligerent drunkenness and perjury at best, is now a Supreme Court Justice, now able to steer this nation’s legislation for decades to come. As in 1971, but for different reasons, Americans are sick and tired of hearing dismissals, broken promises, and lies from politicians.

(Let’s take a moment to enjoy the way Lennon characterizes politicians in “Gimme Some Truth”: uptight, short-sighted, narrow-minded hypocritics… neurotic, psychotic, pig-headed politicians… tight-lipped, condescending, Mama’s little chauvinists.)

I have never felt myself less valued by the government that is supposed to represent me. And that makes me mad. (As a relatively privileged, straight, able-bodied white person, I recognize that many people have felt this way for decades or generations.) I’m mad, too, because I didn’t report my assaults at the time and because my story doesn’t matter to the politicians who have the ability to make it matter now. I didn’t report it when I was nine because the man who assaulted me was an authority figure (and because I knew I wouldn’t be believed). I didn’t say anything as an adult because I thought it was my fault—that I deserved what happened to me. I’m mad as hell now to learn that so many women and men have felt the same way. I’m angrier still to see that the experiences of millions of women effectively mean nothing. No wonder we didn’t disclose. No wonder we’re still haunted.

The bitterness filling “How Do You Sleep?” was directed at Paul McCartney—the song contains numerous references to and digs at Lennon’s former Beatles bandmate—but it’s a question many of us are asking now because we, too, feel betrayed. To the men (mostly men) who assaulted us: how do you sleep? And how do you sleep? to the people who think nothing of what we have endured: the assaults that give us flashbacks, and/or nightmares, and/or a fear of certain places, and/or an inability to trust, and/or depression, and/or anxiety, and/or an impulse to constantly look over our shoulders. Think of Utah senator Orrin Hatch recently telling sexual assault survivors to “grow up,” as if they were harping on a petty old injustice. As if they should just get over it.

You must have learned something all those years, Lennon writes to his former friend. Clearly Kavanaugh, Trump, Hatch, et. al. have learned nothing about compassion in their lifetimes. The one mistake you made was in your head, Lennon sings, and I would add that many Republicans (and Democrat Joe Manchin) also made mistakes with their hearts. Actually, their votes to confirm Kavanaugh are more than a mistake; they are a failure of empathy.

These people in power, and others like them, have learned little about the sorts of trauma that haunt many Americans, the things that leave us feeling crippled inside, sometimes for a lifetime. Imagine’s second track, “Crippled Inside,” illustrates how some traumas feel impossible to shake—as if they’re always clinging onto us, no matter what behaviors we undertake to suppress them.

Lennon faced traumas as a child, including the death of his mother, that scientists now call Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACEs. Research shows that children who experience multiple ACEs are more likely to develop certain diseases and causes of death in adulthood. Early trauma changes the way our DNA is expressed. No wonder those of us who’ve experienced trauma, especially in childhood, feel crippled inside at times. What happened has literally changed the fabric of who we are.

Even if you try to deny or hide your traumas from yourself—you can hide your face behind a smile, Lennon sings—the body and the soul remember. After what that man did to me when I was nine, I began to hate my body. I forgot about the assault itself for a while, but it contributed to a feeling that there was something intrinsically wrong with me. It has only recently occurred to me to be mad at the man who assaulted me as a child and at the man who assaulted me as an adult.

Now that the #MeToo movement has gained steam, more survivors of sexual assault are speaking out. We won’t hide the fact that we were assaulted because it’s important to tell our stories. We will use the telling to heal and our newfound power to put an end to the fucked-up way generations of men have gotten away with treating women.

But the way to a more equitable society will not be easy. How can I go forward when I don’t know which way I’m facing? Lennon sings in “How?” Perhaps this song speaks more directly to our current state of affairs than any other on Imagine. It’s a series of questions: How can I go forward?, how can I have feeling?, how can I give love? Most strikingly: how can I have feelings when my feelings have always been denied? This is a question with which many women are currently grappling.

“How?” stares uncertainty in the face. Though its verses consist of questions, the act of asking them approaches a solution. From the first stanza to the last, the questions shift from How can I to how can we?—and therein lies the power. How can we go forward when we don’t know which way to turn? / How can we go forward into something we’re not sure of? One question at a time. Together. The song ends with oh no, oh no, but I like to think that the nos speak to uncertainty, not to an inability to go forward.

The album’s subsequent and last track also provides a glance at a possible solution. Delightful in its simplicity, “Oh Yoko” reminds us that love is not just found in the sweeping, dramatic moments, but in the minute and the routine parts of daily life. In the middle of the bath…in the middle of a shave…in the middle of a dream. Lennon sings that my love will turn you on, which has obvious sexual connotations, but I think he’s also singing about how Yoko Ono’s love sustained him through moments big and small.

Imagine alternates between deeply personal and unabashedly political songs, but ends in a place of peaceful, joyful love. The album begins with “Imagine” because ending with it would force listeners to be left with, and thus sit with, the title song’s revolutionary notions. I think John Lennon knew we weren’t ready for that. So instead, he leaves us with love.

Yet “Imagine” will always be the song for which this album, and possibly Lennon himself, will be most remembered. Imagine no possessions / I wonder if you can / No need for greed or hunger / A brotherhood of man / Imagine all the people / Sharing all the world. The world “Imagine” offers is the antithesis of what American and global society has become fixated on in the decades since Lennon’s assassination in 1980. The song pictures an end to our nationalistic, divided, materialistic way of living. It proposes an erasure of borders of all sorts (national boundaries, religions, capitalism), which would signal an end to a society that pits people against each other so that a handful of individuals can profit. Eliminating the structures that shape most of the world would leave us open to a way of living that maybe can’t be clearly envisioned until we see what life on the other side is like.

Instead of taking the easy route of asking listeners to examine our limitations, “Imagine” challenges and compels us to lift our gaze upward and outward. To close our eyes and feel other possible ways of being. That’s what makes it such a radical song—the fact that it asks us to consider a way of life from which the confines of this one have been removed. Instead of believing in the social forces that currently shape our lives, we’d have to believe in each other and in ourselves. Right now, that may feel impossible.

But then I watch the footage of women filling the Hart Senate Building, demanding to be heard. I see women running for all levels of political office in the upcoming midterm elections. I call congressmen and find that the Capitol’s phones are ringing off the hook. I hear story after story like mine and watch those tellers find their power through their voices.

We are not only imaging something better than this, but millions of us are letting our outrage—and, more importantly, our hope—drive us to actively work for a better world. Imagine that.

—Marissa Mazek

#81: The Clash, "The Clash" (1977)

I.

I started listening to the Clash in 8th grade, the same year our class bussed north from North Carolina on an annual pilgrimage to our nation’s capital. My brother and I were running multiple BMG and Columbia House schemes, pulling in dozens of “free” CDs for the bargain price of a penny before our parents received the bills for our crimes and shut the whole thing down. I was newly into punk rock and ravenous—the Buzzcocks, Blondie, Siouxsie and the Banshees, X-Ray Spex—and packed my Sony Discman with a copy of Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, a dreamy EP by the band Luna, and the Clash’s first album.

Our class stayed at a rinky-dink Days Inn somewhere on the Virginia border and I roomed with three other girlfriends, two on each double bed, sequestered away for the night by a piece of tape on the outside door, ensuring no sneak-outs, no boys, and no fun.

Only I’d picked up some fake blood pills at a gaudy prank store on an excursion to one of the area’s myriad malls—where a $5 psychic reading left me thinking I had a bright future in dentistry—and slipped into the bathroom, sometime around 10 o’clock, just as me and the girls were growing delirious with cabin fever. The pills frothed into realistic blood streams as I gnashed into them before lurching from the bathroom, groaning, to the utter horror of my friends before we all tore into laughter. The commotion signaled the red-faced teacher-chaperones who threatened us in their casual wear, always on high alert to squash whatever hijinks we might be up to. But the beauty of youth is feeling emboldened even when you know you shouldn’t, and so after they returned to bed, we cracked the hotel windows to smoke a surreptitious cigarette, passed between us and exhaled into the crisp night air of the biggest city we’d yet traveled to.

The next day, we wandered the Smithsonian and explored the National Mall in fragments I can just barely recall, but what I do remember happened on the bus ride home. The underwire from my bra had snapped on a tour of the aquarium and was jabbing the underside of my breast; so, in the aquarium restroom, I disposed of it entirely. My burgeoning knockers could still go without any real support and so I thought nothing of it—until we returned to the bus and settled in for the long ride back to Greensboro. I’d bent over to retrieve my Discman, totally oblivious that Mark, my ultimate skater boy crush, was watching, peering down my v-neck shirt as I rooted around my bag, emerging with my Sex Pistols CD in hand.

What happened to your bra? he demanded loudly, both indignant and satisfied, as though he’d caught me mid-crime and savored my humiliation.

I flushed and felt my whole body go hot. People were looking at me, and I knew I had to say something.

It broke so I got rid of it, I stammered.

Mark howled with laughter and glanced at the Sex Pistols CD I was still holding. God save the Sween! he crooned—standing up on his seat for the whole bus to see—She doesn’t wear a bra!

II.

I preferred the Clash, anyway, I remember telling Jeff almost a year later. Anytime I heard the Sex Pistols, I heard Mark’s song echoing and I winced—at the time, his cleverness bugged me more than his cruelty.

Up until this point, Jeff and I had led our parents to believe we were the best of friends, strictly platonic, but of course we were dryhumping like chipmunks in the hammock of his parents’ backyard and dryhumping in the car while we waited for his younger brother to finish class at Tumblebees.

I was just a freshman, but Jeff was a junior and drove a white Buick, and thus became my default chauffeur. After school, we landed at his house and I’d harass him while he attempted homework, distracting him into picking up his guitar and he’d break into Sonic Youth, Pavement, and the Clash, which I’d just turned him onto.

He preferred London Calling, but I still carried a torch for the Clash’s first album, and remember making my father drive me to the record store to buy it. Even if I now prefer London Calling—the band’s more literate older brother, back from study abroad—I seized upon the first album’s anger then because I was angry too. Angry that my mother had chosen her loathsome and jobless boyfriend over me, prompting me to run away from home and get picked up by my drunk father, who I loved dearly but who I’d never imagined as a qualified caretaker. Angry because those circumstances coupled with my age ostensibly rendered me powerless.

I loved the Clash’s first album for its visceral, political anger—which had always felt so romantic to me, a rebel child born from such Southern, genteel sensibilities—but also for the way Joe Strummer fused that anger with something that felt like joy. Janie Jones was a love song if ever there was one; Garageland an homage to a DIY musical ethos; and Mick Jones’s soaring, ribbon-light vocals gave me something to shout from the Buick’s open window—Let them know, let them knowwww-ooh-oh-ohhh.

One fall school night we were riding around, making out at each red light, which prompted Jeff to pull into the parking lot of a Baptist church off Friendly Avenue. Under a lone streetlight we kissed, we dryhumped, and then there was Jeff’s penis, the first real-life penis I’d ever seen, and at 14 and still clueless about sex I certainly didn’t know what to do with it.

But I’d wanted to see it because I was advancing—as a teenager, as a person in the world, and as a sexual being who’d someday soon know what to do. But that night, I looked at Jeff’s penis and nodded. Then I said, You can put it away now.

And that's when he got on top of me and pinned me to the car seat with the full weight of all his taut teenage body, still new and golden and filled with all the opportunities the world affords to bright young white men, while I writhed and struggled beneath him before starting to scream. 

As he simultaneously thrust his penis at my face while trying to wrangle my arms into submission, I remember screaming and staring at a blue dumpster up ahead, as if that dumpster might somehow come to life and rescue me.

And maybe my screams worked, because Jeff eventually stopped. But back then—North Carolina in 1997—no language for sexual assault was taught to young girls. There was only language for being molested by a family member or a friend of the family or rape, none of which happened to me.

I didn’t know what happened to me. But I know that Jeff drove me home and on the way, I remember thinking, Do not look unruffled in front of your father.

I remember thinking, What just happened, anyway?

I remember thinking, Do I tell my father? Do I tell anyone? Is there even anything to tell?

I remember thinking, It wasn't rape, though.

I remember thinking, If it wasn't rape, then I guess it was nothing.

Besides, I told myself, I started it.

III.

Why suffer through the annihilation if it’s not going to matter?

Lately I’ve been thinking about what Dr. Christine Blasey Ford said of her decision to appear—though I want to say testify, even though we’re all supposed to believe she was not on trial—before the Senate Judiciary Committee and tell the world how the newly-appointed Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her in a Maryland bedroom sometime during the summer of 1982.

On the day of the hearing, my coworker—a man I like very much, a man I consider a friend—asked to speak to me privately. I just want to understand, and I think you might be a good person to ask, he started. It’s just—what do you think of all this? Do you think she’s legit?

I closed his office door, and that’s when I told him about Jeff’s Buick, about the dumpster.

I feel lucky, I told him, because this is it. But isn’t that enough?

Isn’t telling my classmate that my bra broke enough? Isn’t telling Jeff no enough? Isn’t telling my coworker enough? Why must humiliation—annihilation?—be the cornerstone of womanhood, of our believability?

I still can’t listen to the Sex Pistols without wincing, without thinking about how I thought I loved Mark and how he was an asshole to me, and how I thought I loved Jeff and how he was an asshole to me, and how I’d come to internalize humiliation by men as a part of life—even as a token of love. Once I believed that pain was part of being a woman, that suffering for a man was the most valiant love in the world.

Years later, in college, I saw Jeff and asked him about that night in the Baptist church parking lot and he said he didn't remember. I'm really sorry if I did that, he said, but I just don't remember.

But women and girls—we remember.

When I listened to the Clash as a young girl, I felt powerful. I felt angry. I didn’t quite understand the political and social context of the lyrics, but intuitively I recognized that the songs were about injustice.

That night with Jeff may not have ruined my life, and he may not be on the Supreme Court, but if he were, I would’ve come forward too. I am now.

Appearing on Joe Rogan’s podcast in 2017, the singer Henry Rollins said of Trump’s regime: This is punk rock time, this is what Joe Strummer trained you for.

Now I know exactly what he means.

—Sarah Sweeney

#82: Neil Young, "Harvest" (1972)

I knew Nash was coming over so I asked Elliot, who was working with me as producer at that time, to rig up the house and barn like we’d talked about. We’d been working on Harvest for months and I was ready for someone other than the two of us dimwits to have a listen. Nash was a good dummy run, always had been. He didn’t say too much and that was the good part.

It was a warm afternoon in late summer and the trees were just starting to turn on the ranch. Nash and I got to shooting the shit, I fed him a couple of beers on the porch while he talked about the Israeli athletes just killed in Olympic Village, and then I asked him if he wanted to hear some of the new stuff. He agreed, and suggested we go to the studio. Instead I got up, gathered our beer cans into a pile, and motioned for him to follow me down the hill to the lake.

I bent down to untie the boat from the dock. “Get in the rowboat,” I said.

“Get in the rowboat?”

“Yeah, we’re going into the middle of the lake.”

Now Nash had known me quite a long time by then and he was used to my peculiar requests. My ex-wife used to say the only people who could stand me were people fascinated by bullshit instead of put off by it. Nash never was presented with a question he didn’t want to tinker with, and when the answer seemed unknowable, he loved that the most.

My hair was long in those days and I was working on a scraggy little mustache streaky as a skunk. It was a windy day, and that shit was bothering my face so much I slid my sunglasses onto my head to push my hair back and sacrificed my eyes to the blinding sun. Nash had a similar haircut at the time, or lack of haircut I guess, but his hair was so heavy with grease it didn’t move an inch in that wind. The effect, coupled with his squinty eyes, made him look inhuman.

He got in the boat while I held it to the dock, and then I stepped in myself, one foot at a time, the boat rocking in the shallow water. The algae stank in the heat and a swarm of flies buzzed close to Nash’s head. You could see a couple of red-wing blackbirds floating in the distance.

I don’t know what he thought. Maybe he thought I had a cassette player ready to play him a tune, one of those early models that had just come out. Maybe he thought I was about to open up my mouth and serenade him and the birds and the fishes right there in the rowboat.

When we got to the middle of the lake, I called to Elliot and gave him the signal.

Then: the opening bars of “Heart of Gold,” that familiar thud of bass and guitar I’d heard dozens of times in recent weeks. This time it was louder than hell and I could feel it in my chest, rising and warm as bathwater. I saw the blackbirds whiz away over the hill, their red wings like some kind of flare.

Nash looked behind him, ahead of him, and side to side more than once before looking back at me. True to form, he didn’t say anything at all, and it took him until about the start of the chorus to realize what the hell kind of contraption we’d rigged up. Even once he realized it he clearly couldn’t believe it. From our spot in the middle of the lake, the whole house was playing the left-hand channel and the whole barn the right. In the house, Elliot had set up big speakers by every window, and in the barn, he’d cranked the recording PA system all the way up. It was the loudest surround sound we’d ever heard, out there under the open sky, the music drowning everything out.

Keep me searching for a heart of gold / and I’m getting old.

When “Heart of Gold” faded out, Elliot came running down the hill from the barn smiling huge. “How was that, Neil?” he hollered.

“Could use a little more barn,” I said.

Nash started laughing so hard the boat shook. “You crazy son of a bitch,” he said.

That much was true, to be sure. I stood right up and dove into the lake. Nash yelled after me, his voice garbled in that underwater way. The music started up again—this time it was “Harvest.” I could barely make out the piano chords or the tenor of my own voice, but I could hear the subtle high frequency notes of the slide guitar, more uptempo than it should have been because sound waves travel faster underwater, vibrating that heavy bone right behind your earlobe. I stayed under as long as I could, letting my ears quiver. After the first verse, I opened my eyes and took in the filth of the lake. The moss coated everything, from the scummy bottom of the boat to the frothy rocks and the fish fins. It was growing on me, too. I could see it griming up my forearms. But that music, though distorted, was more clean and pure and loud than it’d ever been, and I had to have it. I opened my mouth and swallowed up every last wave.

—Lacy Barker

#83: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, "Axis: Bold as Love" (1967)

It was early spring. My husband was away for the evening, and I had the apartment to myself. I was restless and stir crazy and riddled with a sort of itch that indicated a quiet Friday on the couch with my laptop wouldn’t quite cut it—and the only hope I had to outpace this feeling was by getting in my car. It was light when I left the house, but already deep dusk by the time I reached the edge of town. Despite the early evening dark, it was warm enough for the tang of  the neighboring cow pasture to have started to thaw into the air: the first and truest sign of Spring, even with the blackened crust of ice still hemming the roadway. I followed a one-lane state route under a glowing moon, squirming in the driver’s seat. I should be working: it was like an accidental motto I’d adopted. There were always papers to grade, manuscripts to edit, rooms to tidy, muscles to tone—if it couldn’t be lauded as productive, it shouldn’t deserve my time.

I winced with every pair of headlights from oncoming cars. They were painfully bright, but also irritated me, the presence of others as I was trying to drive my way to isolation, someplace where it was just my thoughts and a simmering inexplicable urgency I assumed hurling myself into would help quell.

Capturing what this drive feels like and the need for it is hard. And for two reasons:

1. The older I become, the more difficult it is to acknowledge and process my emotions. I feel an uneasiness around even the most benign of them. This is bad news for a writer.

2. Some feelings do not lend themselves well to being portrayed in language altogether. At the end of the day, feelings are abstract, no matter how many sensory details we try to staple to them. This, unfortunately, is also bad news for a writer—along with probably everyone else who wants to meaningfully express themselves.

The pastures adjacent to both sides of the road are serene and mostly empty; they host a few trees, green-black in the darkness, that cast diagonal shadows across the dash. The radio station that I’ve been ignoring begins to play something that catches my attention: an electric guitar that is golden and melodic, a glockenspiel sounding like a celestial bell, a shimmering warmth that is the audio equivalent of the wavy distortions of air above summer pavement. “Little Wing” is unmistakable, and slows my spinning brain to match its meditative quality. It is languid like watching honey poured into a spoon, and sounds almost like the sunlight color of it, too. There is a reason Hendrix’s music is often labeled psychedelic. How else do I talk about what it makes me feel: soothed by melody, energized by the drum fills, sad and wistful and relaxed all at once? Look at those empty adjectives: what a cop-out.

The only other way I know how to talk about what this album can make me feel is the time when I was 8 and also heard Hendrix on the radio: legs plastered to the scalding vinyl back seat of my mother’s ‘73 Plymouth Duster. The music made me feel like the emblem on the car’s quarter panel: a spinning cyclone with big wide open eyes, a still image conveyed in a blur of movement, a cloud of electrons that could peer out at the world with an eagerness to take it in. On the spot, I asked for a Jimi Hendrix album for Christmas, still almost half a year away.

I delighted in discovering that Hendrix and I were both left-handed. I watched a rented VHS of him at Monterey Pop—which, in June of 1967, was when Axis: Bold as Love was in the early stages of recording. I leaned in close to the TV screen, watching his guitar in flames, Hendrix kneeling as if at an altar, lifting his fingers into the air like he was trying to coax the fire up as tall as possible, exorcizing something unsayable from it. It mesmerized me. This may seem like a stretch, but I suddenly felt understood all the times I cropped my doll’s hair, or drew on Barbie’s face and rubbery limbs with pink pen, or even the pleasure I felt at tearing snack wrappers into strips before tossing them into the trash: a feeling that could only be expressed through action, impulse.

Hendrix in interview footage (at least the clips I’ve seen) is taciturn, evasive, offering a shy smile or a shrug after a sentence into the microphone. But I hear so much else when I listen to the muddy, almost aggressive guitar of “Spanish Castle Magic,” the near-flippancy at how cruel life can be in “Castles Made of Sand,” and can understand how he could have recorded three studio albums between 1967 and 1968: this is someone who has a lot to say, who is trying over and over to present it to us just right, even it it might remain obscured.

I wonder if he, too, felt a churn in his stomach to be productive, to do everything possible, to maximize a checklist. Probably not in the same way, but given his brief but prolific life, it seems Hendrix may have also felt an encroaching ennui he tried to outpace with the aid of his guitar. I think of him singing, “I wanna hear and see everything” over and over on “Up from the Skies,” and it serves as an important reminder to recalibrate to a more meaningful definition of “productive,” one that values my time—my life—beyond how many tasks I can finish by the end of the week.

Maybe I can start by rolling down these windows, the meadow-scented air tousling my hair into knots, turn the volume up until I feel the bass beating through the seatbelt across my chest, until my shoulders unclench and it’s only high beams and stars and shadows of telephone wires cast by the moon, propelling into darkness. I am feeling something real and sincere, and I want to share it with you, for you to believe me, but I don’t know for sure if I can tell you in a way that’s easy to understand.

—Lisa Mangini

#84: Aretha Franklin, "I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You" (1967)

I’ll designate the following sentence a command: Do not let yourself read what I wrote about this album before you have heard it. This is crude; it is words, a mere facsimile, a type of repurposing. Even if it works, this will be a loving tribute, which is just a shadow of art. I’m giving you permission—actually a kick in the pants—if you haven’t listened to the album yet: stop reading this, close the browser, and let it carry you away.

Aretha Franklin was called home on August 16, 2018. What she did for music, for soul, for Detroit, for America, is still being eulogized, felt, and processed. It is likely that no single memorial, no 1,000-page biography, no slide show at the Grammy’s, will ever capture what she meant to the world. The remembrances will ease the mourning, but it seems to me that the best way to honor her memory is to keep the words brief and let the music be eternal.

*

I finished the first two decades of my life before I heard I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You. I never felt Aretha’s voice in my house as a child like many of her fans whose parents played it on vinyl while the kids splayed out and drew in coloring books on carpeted parlor floors. But I didn’t get too far into adulthood, where hardened tastes might have stopped me from letting myself fall in love with something new. The first time I heard Aretha Franklin’s 1967 masterpiece, I was smack dab in the middle of my 21st year.

I was en route to Europe, technically already in Europe, in Iceland, for the up-to-then longest stint of my life away from home. Markers of growing older and the thrill of a taste of independence had me thinking deeply. I remember feeling, prior to listening, that more of my life lay ahead of me than behind, and also that that fact scared, soothed, and amused me at the same time. Late-adolescent anxieties, private ambitions, public presentations of irony, graphic tees and one-off haircuts, ruminations about financial realities and political bullshit and feeling boxed in – that was the version of me that walked into the record store in Reykjavik, determined to find a soundtrack for my trip.

Three hours before, I had rented the only available Automatic for an absurd price, hoping to assert some American freewill one last time before giving myself over to European train timetables. Most of the albums in the first section of the store bore titles in a language I could only identify as something Vikings probably spoke. In the back, I found a section labeled “Classic American.” I’m realizing now that to see a sign like that in a record store in a foreign country is to benefit from a unique kind of cultural legacy. There is an American flag on the moon and a shelf of American music in Reykjavik. Of course, the gravity of home drew me in. Overwhelmed and caught somewhere between adrenaline-fueled and jetlagged, I didn’t give much thought to the album selection. I sifted through for a minute or two, then came to the checkout with I Never Loved a Man the Way I Loved You.

After the rush of buying something with unfamiliar bills, I read the tracklist on the walk back to my rental. I sat inside and fiddled with the plastic wrap around the CD case for at least three minutes, at some point regretting that I’d bought anything at all, until finally I had the disc on my finger. The CD player ate the disc, and I backed out onto the street. From the silence came “Respect,” a song most people know even if they can’t name the singer.

The voice—Her Voice—slinked, and popped, and soared, and rolled, and fell out in a big heap from the factory-standard speakers of the Volkswagen Jetta, and it seemed to be living with me, speaking straight through fifty years of temporal haze. I felt warmth—as in, perceived actual warming, to the point of taking off a light jacket—and the power, the pain, and the emotional exposure lifted me up with the sensation of cosmic fellowship and raw humanness that sometimes accompanies the art of the most divine performers. It’s hard to find the metaphors, but people who have heard the album (all who are reading this far, I hope) have already felt them, so I don’t have to keep searching.

I drove around for an hour through clouds of gray mist and diffuse sunshine. More than once, passing pastel-colored houses and New Urbanist civic buildings, I smiled at the thought that a woman so black and an African American so female was getting playtime in a country of fair-skinned and mild-mannered Northern Europeans. Barack Obama summed it up: Aretha Franklin is American history. She is the confluence of every kind of music we can claim as ours. She channels the totality of the black experience in the United States better than any single musical artist before or since. But I’ll leave the reflections on the historical significance of Aretha Franklin to New Yorker think pieces and Kennedy Center Honors ceremonies. The first experience of listening to her cannot be so analytical simply because it is so overwhelming. I let the whole album play through twice.

I pulled into the hostel parking lot and turned the car off. I’d made up my mind: I Never Loved a Man the Way I Loved You was my favorite album.

Inside, I met Vassili, Andrea, and Mauro (Ukrainian, Italian, and Italian, respectively). Including me, that’s four men, aged 20 to 53, sharing a small space with four twin beds, each with a different reason for our trips to Iceland. Vassili had just signed the papers for divorce number three, and this was his gift to himself. Andrea had begged his dad for a week off, and although the family livelihood depended on his ability to take over the management of a hotel from his aging father, the wish was granted. Mauro had escaped from a vengeful ex-girlfriend (also his former muse in his professional pursuit of fashion photography) and needed some time to lie low in a far off place.

My car cost $400 a day (Iceland prices things this way).

“Hey guys. Nice to meet all of you. Wanna go to a waterfall tomorrow? We can split gas.”

The next morning, our motley crew packed into the Jetta with a day full of plans. I put the keys in the ignition and suddenly there was Aretha, too. Volume way up in the stratosphere, exactly where I had left it the day before. I quickly turned it down. Up to this point, my three new friends knew me as pretty unassuming and maybe bland. Now we were listening to my favorite album, and no one knew the words except for kind of me, and it was not what you might picture a young WASP from Texas listening to if your image of a Texan came from Dallas and the Dallas Cowboys.

The volume stayed low at first. Ten minutes into our four-hour drive, we had already exhausted several small talk topics, and we all felt the need to pace ourselves so that we never stumbled into awkward silence. I reached for the volume knob and brought the speakers up to their loudest level without distortion, just in time for “Soul Serenade.”

Only you can hear my soul serenade.

Then the swanky brass. Then the electric piano. It feels so sexy without any of the embarrassment that usually accompanies sexy things for pasty American people like me. (I doubt the Italians needed this kind of comforting distance from all things corporeal.) What Aretha does so perfectly and seemingly effortlessly is meld the body and soul in a way that enhances both and elevates them to another plane.

Only sheep and very hairy cows shared the countryside with us, and I think the others in the car could confirm: I swear the car came a little bit off the ground.

I sang along, because how can you not? My European road trip comrades laughed, but the kind of laugh that offers support, like, “You do you, man.” And I just felt so intensely grateful in that moment, through the two and a half minutes of that song, for what Aretha Franklin did in 1967 and for what it was helping me do in 2015. She put goodwill, heartbreak, and the charming kind of confidence on a record. She sang with the jaw-dropping, thermonuclear power of the essence of thoughts and feelings. I had spent two years at liberal arts school looking for categorical imperatives, assuming the posture of the radical skeptic, learning the sociological theories of injustice, tracking the processes that formed my young mind and its prejudices and weaknesses, all of which produced a pea soup fog of fear and self-doubt bordering on self-loathing. And here, on this album, was someone so wholly transcending those thought experiments. With her voice, Aretha Franklin embodied being alive and at the same time projected a higher quality, one not bound by the limits of the body. No wonder the church was the starting point and finish line of her journey; the music she lived is the music of revival and salvation.

The waterfall was cool. No, really, it was sublime. I don’t mean to downplay it. Iceland’s natural beauty leapt out every bit as much in real life as it did in the online travel ads. I said goodbye to my new friends and headed further East, to my longer-term destination of Spain. And all the clichés about a semester in Europe came true: the best food of my life, the strange fellowship with other nomadic university students, a host mom with a larger than life personality and some skeletons in the closet from the Francoist era.

In time, I came upon new questions about myself and the world, some of which brought me down from the enlightenment high I had experienced in Iceland. I wish I could say this album holds the secrets to unending euphoria, but no single thing can carry us like that. Mundanities re-enter, doubts come creeping back, as they always have and always will, because the majority of our lives are simply spent living. Ups have downs and also very boring middles, like waves in the ocean have whatever happens between waves.

Still, I’m hopeful. And she is one of the reasons. What feelings her voice brings: goosebumps and unconscious dancing and strength in trying times.

I might be the only person that hears “Iceland” and thinks of America’s greatest soul singer, or hears “Aretha Franklin” and thinks of empty roads on a cold island. Whenever I want to get transported back there again, I can save the money I would have to spend on a transatlantic flight. I Never Loved a Man the Way I Loved You is still with me, sitting on a shelf in my living room. And Aretha Franklin’s voice isn’t going quiet anytime soon.

—Logan Crossley

#88: Johnny Cash, "At Folsom Prison" (1968)

Johnny Cash died fifteen years ago last month. Fifteen years ago I was in high school and music videos were my window into the world outside Lunenburg County, Va. Some days, getting to the top 40 countdown on CMT got me through school, my hour-long bus ride home, and the dusty walk from the stop home. And when the Toby Keith worship in the aughts was too much on CMT, there was always GAC to switch to.

Something funny happened on both channels in 2003. Johnny Cash released his version of “Hurt” and it rose through the charts and was in heavy rotation on the video channels up to his death. The song wasn’t his own but like his many covers, he made it his. In the video, he sits alone, surrounded by relics of his life, and videos clips from his youth cut in. He’s still the man in black in the video, but he’s Johnny without a June by that point, and his piano resembles a coffin’s ledge.

Cash was able to channel someone’s hurt and feel it as his own. But, he always could.

“Hurt” became so much his own that my friend and coworker Shannon thought he wrote it. While stacking books at the shop we both work for, she told me how in the early ‘00s she got into an AOL chat room argument with a whole group of Nine Inch Nails fans.

But long before that—50 years ago—Johnny Cash really lived. He played two shows at Folsom State Prison on January 13, 1968. The first recording makes up the bulk of At Folsom Prison.

There’s a certain magic in that first show. He riles up the crowd of prisoners with “Folsom Prison Blues” and settles them back down with “Dark as a Dungeon.” “Hell, don’t you know it’s being recorded,” he asks them in the middle of the latter song.

His perfection is a little desperate, maybe because he was. Cash was at a turning point in his career in 1968. He needed a hit and in the lead up to these two performances, he rehearsed the set list for days.

There’s an anxious energy to the album that could have only been captured at that point in America. 1968 was a restless year. Protesters were vocal. The album release preceded the killing of Robert F. Kennedy by just a month, which resulted in a cleaner cut of “Folsom Prison Blues” being released. In a time of stark divisions, Johnny Cash was the kind of man who could cross them.

It’s a lesson I’ve had a hard time internalizing, even though At Folsom Prison is on heavy rotation in my house. I have a problem with empathy. My mother calls it a problem with patience: the fact that I can’t sit still or care about the problems of people who I feel have had every advantage, and squandered it.

When my family runs into trouble (gets arrested, flunks out of school, gets locked up, ends up squatting with me) I have a hard time feeling much for them. If I could climb my way out of a situation through hard work, then surely so could they.

Maybe it’s misplaced pride. Perhaps I’m just a cold fish. But it’s hard to tell people close to me I understand, even though I’m a writer who pulls unlikable narrators out of thin air and cherishes them.

It’s easy to feel for the downtrodden, for the victims of weather, for those whose only crime was seeking a better life in a new country. But it’s hard to care for the discouraged, the ones who could turn a new leaf but are stuck on which direction to go.

It’s a heavy lesson and one that is reflected in the music. The opening riff of “Folsom Prison Blues” features eight laden chords. Merle Haggard did the same thing when he wanted his crowd to empathise with his narrator on “Mama Tried,” opening with a low, distinctive set of chords. Songs about jail start heavy, but they get lighter. They’re catchy. Cash so wants to reach out and reel us in.

But if every virtue is a vice, then the opposite is also true. Johnny Cash, a man of many vices, could empathize with the prisoners at Folsom like few others. He never did hard time, contrary to his lyrics, but he did spend a night or two drying out in local cells.

His career was in a downward spiral when he hit that stage. He had already reached fame years ago with “I Walk the Line” and “Ring of Fire”—both, notably, covers. He was climbing out of addiction and Columbia Records was wary of him. Columbia didn’t expect it to, but the album caught on. He won a Grammy. He sold a lot of records. Johnny Cash got the hit he needed all because he reached out to a group of people who were not used being cared about, because he could employ basic empathy.

Johnny Cash knew how to churn out albums; Folsom was his 27th. And he hatched the idea of playing in a prison years before. He wrote “Folsom Prison Blues” in 1955 after watching a documentary about the penitentiary.

He wrote the famous line “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die,” because it was the worst thing he could imagine someone doing. It’s devoid of compassion, but crafted in the spirit of it. And when he begins the song on At Folsom Prison, the crowd goes crazy for it, because it was written just for them, in anticipation of that moment.

Though it was his first live recorded prison performance, Cash played prisons before Folsom and he recorded more albums in them later. He went on to record At San Quentin in 1969, Pa Osteraker in 1973 and A Concert Behind Prison Walls in 1976. But none of those packs the same fire.

He ends the album with “Greystone Chapel,” another cover, which was written by Folsom inmate Glen Sherley. In an interview, Cash said he heard the song the night before the show and he stayed up all night to learn it. He needed to give Sherley justice. Cash’s own “Joe Bean” may be the better song about a convict on the record, but his insistence on hearing out the downtrodden makes his performance of “Greystone Chapel” so affecting.

Prison reform was Johnny Cash’s great cause, but Sherley was the face he gave the movement. Sherley’s story after prison doesn’t end well. It ends like a song Johnny Cash might have written himself.

But the contradictions in Cash’s own life make the record so beyond compare. The ultimate patriot, he could criticize his country. He was a backslider among backsliders who sang gospel that was deep and moving. He was a smooth operator whose pure love for June Carter made their story so sweet. At Folsom Prison is emotional in a way few albums are. Sincerity is something we take for granted, emerging in 2018 from the age of stubborn irony. It urges whoever’s listening to believe the addict as a gospel singer and the prison reform advocate as a patriot—and to understand that these identities are not mutually exclusive.

Johnny Cash would hit more hard times. His “Cocaine Blues” weren’t over. He’d be “Busted” again. And he’d climb out of it.

Here’s what Johnny Cash knew: We all build prisons for ourselves. I tend to imprison myself in work, in a shell of busy fervor. But I could take a page out of the book of the original non-role model and step out in all black, not just because it makes me look skinny but also because I should care about the dozens and hundreds and thousands of individual lives lived alongside mine, and say “Hello, I’m...”

—Lindley Estes

#91: Elton John, "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" (1973)

You might not think of Summersville, West Virginia as a prime location for an award-winning show choir (who would?), but Daniel Seacrest, Josh Simpson, Brandon Hutchinson, and I won the Show Choir Invitational two years in a row, and Elton John was a part of that legend. Senior year, we had three Elton songs in the line-up: “Philadelphia Freedom,” a piano cover of “Your Sister Can’t Twist (But She Can Rock ’N Roll),” and “Harmony” from Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. We’d take our places onstage, blue sequin vests glittering in the spotlight, and wait for our director, Jason Hypes, to start playing. And then, before God and our parents, we’d sing, “Oh, Philadelphia freedom, shine on me and I love you / Shine the light through the eyes of the ones left behind!” Were we goofy? Yes, sure. Four white trash teenagers singing Elton John. We could have sung anything we liked, but Elton—at least our idea of him—was what we liked, and even if we didn’t know what he was singing about, it was different.

The evening after, our homecoming concert took a turn for the worse that I haven’t really told anyone about because I still don’t know what to make of it. Josh had just gotten a new pick-up, a graduation present from his dad, and said he wanted to take it muddin’ down at a vile place people called “N-word Hole.” He did this in the dressing room at the high school theater, shirtless, as if to show off his physique. He was tall, with a square jaw, and these arrogant blue eyes. His favorite hobby—his only hobby, as far as I knew—was lifting weights.

I changed out of the electric blue sequin vest, stripped to the waist, wearing only a pair of boot-cut jeans. I had long thin limbs, huge hands and feet, but thin and wiry legs as if I’d descended from some type of gibbon. Stupidly, I asked, “What’s N-word Hole?”

“A grave where they threw lynched slaves during the Civil War,” Josh said.

“You’re joking, right?” was the best I could come up with.

“They say it’s haunted,” Daniel said, changing into a faded T-shirt and jeans. Daniel came across as a conservative, corn-fed country boy, but he was good and decent. His fingernails and knuckles were blackened from his part-time job at the gravel plant. His posture—I could reconstruct it just from memory alone—was perfect, proud, and even after his accident he was impeccably built, with strong musculature. “It’s behind the Go Mart in Sugar Grove.”

“I-It sounds like someplace we’re not supposed to be,” I said.

“It’s not just someplace you’re not supposed to be,” Daniel said. “It’s trespassing.”

I wasn’t a troublemaker, as far as the others could see. I imagined being arrested for trespassing. Cops would be dispatched to the place to round us up and take us to juvie.

“It’s not trespassing, so let’s go,” Josh said. “Brandon, you coming with?”

Brandon was watching Josh as if he’d been placed there by some cosmic force to enjoy it all. Josh, you see, was bringing something out in Brandon. “Sure,” he said. “Why not?”

Josh gave him the kind of look you wouldn’t expect from a friend, his eyes fixed on Brandon’s face, his lips curled into a sneer. “Brandon, you’re gay, Brandon.”

There stood Daniel, looking at Josh with uneasy disapproval.

I didn’t know Brandon as well as I knew the others. His features were more feminine, and he had a lisp, so he didn’t even have the advantage of fitting in with Josh and the good old boys. He’d spend his lunch not on the basketball court or the parking lot, but sitting with a few of the outcasts, mostly girls, in the lunchroom. And, while it’s harsh to say it, this is what I’m getting at: some people, born into their circumstances, are doomed from the start. Brandon, gay, growing up in the red center of Appalachia, the heckling and hazing, had a tough row to hoe. I can’t imagine trying to be oneself in Nicholas County. The courage it must take to do so.

Soon we were driving out to N-word Hole. Daniel brought his Goodbye Yellow Brick Road CD and we were singing along to his favorite track, “Roy Rogers,” still buzzing from the concert. The clouds were peeling back from the moon when we passed the old Go Mart at Sugar Grove, and then we hit a gravel road that ran perpendicular to the mountain, which had probably, at one point, acted as a logging road. Eventually, we turned off the music to concentrate on the road. Josh drove deeper and deeper into the mountain, across a creek and through a gate, until there was no road left. Nevertheless, the truck continued, and Josh winced every time a branch grazed the fresh paint. At its lowest point, the creek bulged into big, muddy pools, forming a swamp. Josh floored it and the truck rattled into the pools, splashing mud up onto the windows of the truck. The pools were waist-deep, but the monster truck had no trouble navigating them. Josh would rev and Daniel, Brandon, and I would holler, grunt, and whoop.

The truck jumped the creek and grumbled up the opposite bank and then down another hill. At the bottom, Josh stopped and put the truck in park. “There it is.”

At first I saw nothing out of the ordinary but a dark scatter of mountain laurel, but then I noticed the truck’s high-beam headlights illuminating a giant black sinkhole in the center of the woods. Josh got out to get a better look, and Daniel, Brandon, and I followed. I inhaled a stink of rotten roots and mud, but there was something else. There was something in the air that wasn’t natural, a thick, fecal odor mixed with an almost chemical petrichor. Even though it was just an urban legend, I thought this was an awful place. Images accumulated in my mind: a mass of faceless human suffering, rigid and naked, no trace of human decency, the worst of what we have been and still are. It felt like there was something dark settling over me.

“Come on,” Josh said, “get back in the truck.”

Josh was itching at the chance to go muddin’ in this sinkhole, so we all got back in the truck and we peeled out and then went round and round, hollering, grunting, and whooping, for what seemed like a long while. Josh turned to look over his shoulder, grinning at Daniel, moving the gearshift up a notch with a flourish. The truck pitched unsteadily and slid tail-pipe first into the sinkhole. Josh hit the gas and we smelled burnt rubber. We went nowhere. There was no yelling, but a chill spread through the cab of the truck, a silence.

Josh looked up, blankly, holding the steering wheel as if it were his junkie brother that he had just strangled in order to get some point across. “I think we’re stuck.”

As I sat there in the backseat, I heard something. Tump? And then, after a long silence, another one—“tump?”—and I felt the back of the truck sink further into the mud.

“I think we’re sinking,” Brandon said. “What do we do?”

“I don’t know,” Josh said. He was flabbergasted, and he tried to speak lightly, a cautious approach, in case the truck sank further. “My dad is going to kill me.”

I started laughing in the face of the gentle hysteria. “This is bad, just bad.”

“It’s not funny, Joey. This truck. Is completely. Ruined. Shit! Do you get that?”

“Does it matter if we can’t get out?” I said.

“Of course it matters, dumb shit,” Josh said. He laughed, and Daniel laughed a little, too, though I wasn’t exactly sure what was funny to him. Josh was trying to concentrate.

Daniel gave Josh a long slow look. “Let’s try to pull it out.”

In the next moment, we were trying to get the truck out. Josh had taken off his shirt (because it was April and still chilly at night, and “It would be better to put on a dry t-shirt instead of a wet one”) and was down in the sinkhole, trying to clear enough mud for the tires to grab. We were stuck in that godforsaken hole, bickering and getting depressed. The four of us were lined up along the front of the grill, trying to pull the truck out of the sinkhole, when Brandon’s hand accidentally grazed Josh’s.

“Get your hands off me, Brandon—god,” Josh said. “Fucking faggot!”

Brandon stood and backed away, apologizing, saying, Oh, it was an accident. He was nonplussed, perhaps a bit hurt by it. Then there was a silence. A long silence.

“Brandon, you can be gay if you want to, buddy,” Daniel said, clapping him on the back.

“No, he can’t. I don’t want a queer hanging around me!” Josh said.

“What’s your problem? You’ve been singing Elton John the whole semester.”

Josh wiped the back of his hand across his eyes, and dried the mud on the front of his jeans. He looked at Daniel. He was confused, which I guess I understand.

“Elton John is gay, dude,” Daniel said, as if it went without saying.

I thought, Wait a minute—Elton John is gay? I was young, you see. Seventeen was young, especially in West Virginia. Suddenly I gained something we call clarity. I had thought that gay people were just something on TV—that there was Jack from Will & Grace and people on a show that I was forbidden to watch, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, on Bravo. That there were people like my uncle Darrell. I gained a new awareness, a heavy one, through which I understood all at once what my mom had meant when she said there was something “wrong” with my drama teacher, Mr. Reeves. Now it seems incredible to me that a satori like this can occur today in the 21st century. But consider the place, consider how seldom outsiders turn off onto the gravel roads that emerge without warning from the woods. And when those backwoods roads turn into dirt roads still deeper in woods; and when those in turn give way to roads that aren’t really roads at all, deserted for weeks at a time. It’s not hard to see how a kid growing up in the dark hollers can be virtually unaware of another human being’s existence.

“Yeah, Josh,” I said, shucking off my surprise. “Elton John is gay. C’mon, dude.”

“No,” Josh said. “Elton John is not gay. Now get behind the truck and push—”

“Yeah-huh,” Daniel said. “Philadelphia Freedom? The City of Brotherly Love?”

“Prove it then!” Josh shouted. “Prove to me that Elton John’s a fag.”

It was the way he said the word that made me understand who he was. His face was terrible in its anger, his cheeks gone oxblood red, spittle shooting from his mouth.

Daniel looked at Brandon reassuringly. “Brandon, God loves and welcomes you, man. If it’s okay for Elton John to be gay, then it’s okay for you, too.”

Josh looked at Daniel in disbelief and let out an operatic scream of anguish and then he went back to trying to rock the truck out of the sinkhole.

After a beat, I looked at Brandon. A curtain had fallen across his face, and he was shaking. With a voice gone rusty, he said, “Whatever.” He looked vulnerable standing there against the night. I looked at this tableau for a long time even though he wouldn’t look at me. I thought that I understood his grief a little more, but I could never, given a million lifetimes, understand what he must have gone through. You see, this was just one night.

At some point, Brandon wandered away. I tried to convince him to stay, until we got the truck out, but he went on. We eventually got the truck out of the sinkhole, mud-caked from head to toe. On the drive back, we drove in silence, looking for Brandon. I thought I saw him once, walking along the side of the road, but it was an old woman with pale yellow hair who looked uncannily like Brandon. Josh pulled up next to her and rolled down the window.

Have you seen our friend, we said. Blonde hair. About this tall. You seen him?

She started laughing. Who is it? she said. Who’d’ja say you were lookin’ for?

We whispered the name. We said the name again. Said out loud the name this time.

We saw Brandon at school a couple days later. He hadn’t moved away, or disappeared, but he had changed somehow. He was no longer Brandon. We rarely saw him. He rarely spoke to anyone, no more than was absolutely necessary. The show choir was effectively disbanded. Josh became interested in other things, as well, and pretended that Brandon didn’t exist.

Daniel felt sure that Brandon had made a kind of magical escape into some “yellow brick road,” as he called it, a fantasy world that Brandon had made up and now lived inside. The real Brandon would be a mystery to everyone, wherever he might be.

—Joe Halstead

#86: Bruce Springsteen, "Born in the U.S.A." (1984)

Bruce Springsteen on the choice of cover art for Born in the USA: “We took a lot of different types of pictures, and in the end, the picture of my ass looked better than the picture of my face, that's what went on the cover. I didn't have any secret message. I don't do that very much."

Born in the USA

Dad never fought in a war. No one sent him to kill anybody. They sent his father, and his father’s father, but he wasn’t offered a war. He never had a woman in Saigon hold him in her arms—so how could I expect him to tell me what it felt like? He couldn’t reminisce about her stroking his hair while he thought about fighting off the Viet Cong. He didn’t know the skin on the inside of her arm as it rubbed against his cheek, his head lazy in her lap.

Cover Me

Mom is so scared of me becoming a man in America. She doesn’t want me to grow a beard and keeps shaving it in my sleep. She doesn’t want me to marry a woman or make a woman pregnant with baby boys. When my hands get bigger and my knuckles grow hair like Bruce Springsteen’s knuckles, she would like me to shave the hair off and pretend my hands are still small and incapable of violence.

Men came to our house and they wanted to take me. They wanted me to join them, to run around the streets like wild dogs. They wanted to cover me in blood and honey and roll me around in gravel so that small pebbles stuck to my skin. My mom locked the door and kept the lights off. She told me that it would all be okay.

Darlington County

My sisters run fast enough on their own. But there are two of them, so they’d be able to move much faster if one tosses the other forward. How often has someone sha la la, sha la la la la’d them since they left our father’s home?

They need to open their eyes and run faster. God is coming. God is coming to scoop them up. His hands are splitting the sky. The angels are in his palms, running down his fingers. They’re gaining on my sisters; their angel breath is making goose bumps all along the back of my sisters’ necks.

There is too much glory. God is in America. God has come to carry my sisters away. I don’t know what he wants with them, or where he’ll leave you when he’s done, or if he’ll sha la la, sha la la la la.

Working on the Highway

I don’t know if Bruce Springsteen ever worked on a highway. He became so famous so young. Sometimes I think he’s the closest thing to a moral conscience America has.

Downbound Train

Your lungs exploded. They ripped through your chest. Why did you hold your breath so long? Remember, like I taught you: in-out-in-out-in-out. I blame myself. It’s my job to remind you, no one else will. There is no one else.

I crafted new lungs for you out of balloons. I borrowed the balloons from your room. They were in the shapes of animals: giraffes, elephants, monkeys. I un-animaled them and turned them into lungs. Lay still, I’ll stuff them where the old ones used to be. And I’ll tie this ribbon around your chest so they’ll stay in place.

I’m on Fire

Honey, baby, is loving me like a knife? Is it like a knife cutting you up inside? Am I like a knife, loving you, cutting your outsides and your insides and scrambling them? Is being loved like a knife? Are the two of us both knives, sharpening each other until the tips get too sharp and cut us through?

Maybe you’ll be comforted knowing that I dream about being around more often than I am. In my dreams I run laps around our house trying to find a door. I’m a sweaty mess, and I’m panting. Eventually—I love you so much—eventually, I cut a new door in the side of the house and crawl through it.

I crawl like those raccoons that lived under our deck. We could hear them in the wall when we lay in bed together. And we heard their nest of babies when the babies were born. And we heard the angry mother when she ran into the trap and it cut her like a knife. All she wanted was a place to keep her babies safe.

No Surrender

Close your eyes and go to sleep. I’ll make sure that no cars come this way. I’m sorry it’s not more comfortable. You don’t need to worry. I’m your best friend.

We’re not that different. You and I are a lot alike. Keep your eyes closed. We’re the wildest boys, you and I. When we look at the world we see all the same things. When you see a tree, I see the tree. What you call green, I call green. This town is the same to you as it is to me. This America is your America and mine.

It is rare to find someone who sees things with the same eyes. Keep yours closed, I’ll look at everything for the both of us. I’ll tell you what I see, and you can trust it.

I’m Goin Down

I asked if we’d met before and you said, “No, keep your voice down.”

But it felt like we had.

Now, when I pull you down and we kiss, your lips don’t trust mine. They’re full of doubt and unbelief. They don’t trust that my lips will be there. It’s as if your lips are falling down a very deep well.

We smoked cigarettes in the car with the windows down. It was too cold to smoke cigarettes with the windows down. We drove eighteen hours down to Texas. Six hours into the trip our car broke down. Smoke was billowing from the hood. We stayed in a hotel that night, pulled down the window in our room, and stepped out onto the rooftop. There was one chair and we took turns sitting down, smoking our cigarettes, and letting the ashes scatter around our feet.

Glory Days

I swear I left. You say it was only a few days, but it was longer. And now I’m back, and nothing has changed. I’m back with my daughter and she keeps winking at me. We share a secret, she and I, and it’s this town. This town is a secret imparted to children.

I really did leave, it was almost two years. It was long enough to learn that every town has a secret. I can only contain so many secrets, there is a limit. And I feel time ripping away the few secrets I have stored away. Thankfully my daughter’s mind is young, its capacity for secrets is expansive, and when I forget she can remind me.

Dancing in the Dark

Sometimes when I look at the people I love they are a mirror. And in the mirror I am building a fire. The fire won’t start, so I dance around it in a circle, begging some god, some spirit, some spark to descend and light it for me. I dance until I am sweating and unable to breath and the fire is roaring. There is enough light, then, to look into the faces of the people I love and see myself clearly. Seeing my face lit by the fire I could not start I realize how tired and bored with myself I am. I realize that I need to change my clothes, my hair, my face.

My Hometown

If we pack our bags we can take County Road 950 E out of town. Or, if we prefer, County Road 500 S. We could get out of bed right now—we don’t need the sleep—wake our daughter and hit the road. Why pack? We can buy new things. She’s not even old enough to remember the place.

We’ll leave. She’ll grow older. We’ll be somewhere new and full of life. I’ll sit her on my lap, let her hold the wheel of the car, and I’ll lie to her. I’ll say, “Honey, take a good look around, this is your hometown.”

—Stephen Mortland

#87: Pink Floyd, "The Wall" (1979)

Pink Floyd’s “tour” for The Wall wasn’t really a tour. Not in the traditional sense—a week in L.A., then five months off, followed by six nights in London, then six more months off, then a week in West Germany, then three months off, followed by five more nights in London. Of course, “touring” in the traditional sense wasn’t particularly practical for the show, which wasn’t so much a concert as an intricately staged theatrical production. Every night, the crew build a wall across the front of the stage, obscuring the band from the audience. Every night, giant inflatable puppets dangled and danced across the stage, berating the show’s main character, subtly named Pink. Every night, animation flickered, first, on good old Mr. Screen in the center of the stage, and then, eventually, across the massive, blank face of the wall itself, looming over the audience, taunting them.

*

At the end of the show’s first “act,” which, of course, coincided with the end of the double LP’s first disc, Roger Waters would sing the brief “Goodbye Cruel World” from behind the wall, visible through only the last remaining hole in the monstrous, white façade. At the end of the song each night, he’d slide the last brick into place with his own two hands, completing his isolation, finalizing his and the audience’s alienation from each other, a process that maybe Waters felt more profoundly than those watching, but which, nonetheless, was one of the driving forces for the album/show/movie’s creation. Though it all reads a bit forced, a bit on the nose, I’ve always imagined this final moment of the first act to be haunting to witness—to hear the understated, short song performed by Waters as the last hints of light shining out through the wall are snuffed out. Watch—this…

…become this

*

The Wall grew out of an incident at a show in Canada at the end of the Animals tour. Floyd fans know what I’m talking about—when Roger Waters, disgusted at what he had become, disgusted by the nature of stadium tours, and disgusted at the alienation he felt from fellow humans in the crowd and the sense that those fellow humans felt alienated from him (as if he imagined a wall between band and crowd) spit in a front-row fan’s face. In retrospect, Waters reflected that what alarmed him most about the act wasn’t the disgust he felt at the fan or the circumstances, but the thing that allowed him to do it—the fact that he had been unwittingly buying into the idea that he actually was better than the blank faces in the audience. That Rogers recognized this ugly thing inside himself and wrote an album partially about it was maybe his one good impulse leading into The Wall.

*

This is an essay or story about Pink Floyd’s The Wall. But it’s also going to be a story about losing you unexpectedly. I don’t know why I keep dragging you into these essays/stories/whatever they are about Pink Floyd albums. You deserve better. Was Tangerine Dream somewhere on this Rolling Stone list? You loved them. But maybe loving them isn’t enough. The reason I keep dragging you into these albums is because they’re all about loss, about absence. Because Syd Barrett was in Pink Floyd, and then he lost his mind and wasn’t in Pink Floyd, and then he was barely “there” at all, whatever or wherever “there” is or was. And also, and perhaps more pertinent to The Wall, because Roger Waters’ father died in World War II and Waters never got over the loss. From the moment the Barrett-less Floyd figured out what it was and who they were until the moment Waters and the rest of the Floyd split ways, these were two of the key obsessions that drove the band. Or rather, drove Waters, who was the key architect, as far as words and themes went, through the band’s beloved run of ‘70s albums. So blame Roger Waters for why I keep dragging you into these albums about loss and absence. Blame him for why I can’t listen to Pink Floyd without missing you.

*

But blame me, too. Because I’m the one who keeps reaching into memory and dragging your rotting skin and dead bones into this band’s nonsense. If Waters couldn’t let go of his father and Barrett, then I’m equally responsible for not being able to let go of you.

*

By the time Waters was working on The Wall, though, I can’t help but think that he had let Barrett go, at least partially. He hadn’t been able to move beyond the loss of his father, but he had come to terms with losing Syd. But still, Syd was part of The Wall’s DNA. On the album, particularly at the start of the second LP, Barrett is evoked on “Hey You,” with the line, “And the worms ate into his brain,” and more concretely in moments from “Nobody Home,” when Waters sings, as the song’s speaker, “I have the obligatory Hendrix perm,” a reference to Syd when he was still a member of the band, and “I’ve got elastic bands keeping my shoes on,” which references Barrett’s post-Floyd life when he had lost the mental acuity to lace up his boots. In the film, we see Syd references primarily when the Pink Floyd character shaves his eyebrows, head, and chest—as Barrett did in the mid-seventies. Upon finishing the gruesome task—bleeding nipples and all—the Pink Floyd character, played by Bob Geldoff, presses his body against a frosted pane of glass, becomes, for a moment, the bleeding ghost of Syd Barrett. So sure, Barrett was still a concern by The Wall, and sure, part of that concern was missing him, was the sorrow that came from his fall and from his absence. But, too, more in line with how Syd’s specter was used on Dark Side of the Moon, here, the real importance of Syd is cautionary, is emblematic of Waters’s—whose own life accounts for most of the material making up the The Wall’s first half, and most of the film—fears of becoming so engrossed in his obsessions with loss, with grief, with self, that he loses his shit completely, winds up, himself, caught behind a wall of his own making or on the dark side of the moon.

*

*

Because I can’t let go. Not that my “not letting go” means anything because nothing can ever change the fact that you’re gone. And even if I someday learn how or why you died, that won’t change anything. And so I write these pieces about Pink Floyd albums and I send them to Brad for editing, and he sends them back for me to make the changes and then he puts them up on the site. Meanwhile, I continue writing a new novel that’s all about how it feels to have lost you and not know or understand how or why. That new book, it’s not too far along, only about thirty-some pages and 7,000 words. I’ve got pages of notes and sketched out scenes in a notebook, I just need to find the time to sit down with it, find the courage to confront the unsettled feelings I still have about your passing. Normally, around this point in the essay, or whatever it is we’re going to call this, I’d start thinking about bringing in some specific detail about you, but I don’t think I’m going to do that this time, because this piece isn’t about your unexpected death, it’s about me and my stupid inability to deal with it, even three years later.

*

(But, and this needs to be said, who even cares about me or my grief or what I have to say. One of the most consistently applied and apt criticisms of The Wall is that it was self-indulgent, self-important, egotistic, solipsistic—the album was a ninety minute sad-sack, wealthy-white-guy pity party. Oh, your mom and wife were mean to you Roger? Fuck off. Your dad died in the war fighting against one of the greatest evils humanity has ever known and so you’re going to cry about war? Fuck off, Roger. Likewise, who gives a shit about my grief? So one of my closest friends died and I don’t know how or why? Fuck off, Brubaker. The president of our country is stoking the flames of xenophobia, promising to build his own wall to enforce the isolation that The Wall, in one of its few powerful thematic elements railed against, is separating children from parents, is indulging the whims of sexists, homophobes, white supremacists, and every other deplorable with a nostalgic lust to MAGA in a way that it A was never really G to begin with. In the film version of The Wall, during the fascist rally that plays out during “In the Flesh,” the Pink Floyd character—jack-booted, head-shaved, surrounded by fellow skinheads, his isolation behind the wall and his fragile white male ego having eroded to the point that he becomes the fascist, nationalistic ideal, even if it’s only a hallucination—singles out different marginalized groups to have them beaten and removed. “Are there any queers in the theater tonight? / Get them up against the wall” Waters sings on the album, and Geldoff screeches on film. “There’s one in the spotlight, he don’t look right to me / Get him up against the wall.” And the crowd obliges. The song goes on to call out an audience member who “looks Jewish” (which is particularly unsettling considering Waters’ own issues with anti-Semitism in recent years), another identified as a “coon” and then two more, one “smoking a joint” and “another with spots”—all of whom are promptly accosted and removed from the rally by a combination of Pink’s “Hammer Guard” and audience members. The film is designed to show the horror of such fascism. The idea grew out of Waters’s feelings about the unhealthy, fascist relationship between rock star and audience at concerts, but I suspect, too, Waters’s own male fragility, his deep-seated anger makes the song “In the Flesh” read as a sort of threat—a sort of proto-gamergate juvenile lashing out, a way of saying, “If we emasculate our men, of course they’re going to become Nazi trash.” (Oddly, throughout the entirety of the film, Alan Parker’s direction makes the Pink Floyd character far less sympathetic, and reveals the raw ugliness and immaturity at the core of the character’s being—perhaps that’s why Waters was no big fan of the film in the end). But I digress—“In the Flesh,” in any of its iterations, was never intended to be Waters’s way of saying “we should all be fascist Nazi pricks.” The intent was always to say this is bad/wrong/ugly/deplorable/horrific/hellish—and somehow, now, here in the United States, we’ve arrived at a point where Trump rallies, minus the “Hammer Squad” uniforms and arm bands, aren’t all that different from what we hear/see during “In the Flesh.” So who fucking cares what I have to say about grief? About loss?  Who cares what I have to say at all? I don’t want to be like Roger Waters, railing at my own personal demons at the expense of anyone and everything else. I don’t want to be another white male writer, absorbed in his own privilege, navel-gazing, grappling with personal things in his art in the hopes that other people grappling with similar things may connect on some primal, emotional level, and thinking that maybe that’s enough?)

*

(It’s probably not enough.)

*

(But I don’t know how to be or do anything else.)

*

*

I still don’t know why you died. I still don’t know how you died. I mentioned in another piece that one person told me you died of an accidental drug overdose, and another person told me it was suicide. I don’t think I believed either of those for a long time, because I couldn’t imagine you hurting yourself, and I’d never known you to use drugs. But now, I wonder how well I knew you at all. You lived in London for the last decade of our friendship. You could have easily started doing drugs, though I still don’t think I buy that. Which means, by default, if one of the two causes of death I was given must be the actual cause, then…

*

When I first bought The Wall on CD (I used money from umpiring, bought it from the CD Connection near the Dayton Mall), “Goodbye Cruel World” made me uncomfortable. Even at the tender age of thirteen, I knew the phrase “Goodbye Cruel World” to be one tied to the idea of suicide, the kind of thing one might hear flippantly spouted on a TV sitcom when a character is joking about committing suicide. Sure, in The Wall, the phrase is used more as a way of saying goodbye before closing one’s self off to the world, but it still feels heavier than that, more permanent.

*

In Alan Parker’s film version of The Wall, for most of the time that “Goodbye Cruel World” plays, the Pink Floyd character is sitting in a chair, not-quite-smoking a cigarette, the cylinder of ash dangling off the end almost as long as the cigarette before it was lit. He is already behind the wall, hiding. I get that. I get that—the hiding. But we can’t hide forever, and maybe that’s the one other idea in The Wall that doesn’t come across as utterly acidic and juvenile—we need each other.

*

*

*

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┳┻| _
┻┳| •.•) I’m here for you,  I said. Fat fucking
┳┻|⊂ﾉ lot of good that did anyone.
┻┳|

*

But there’s that Waters-esque self-indulgence, again. You deserve better than to be a brick in my wall. I deserve better than to be a brick in my own wall. Fuck bricks and fuck walls. In the final shot of the film adaptation of The Wall, a small boy, wandering in the remnants of Pink Floyd’s exploded wall, picks up a bottle full of what appears to be gasoline, a rag sticking out of the top—a Molotov cocktail. Meanwhile, Waters can be heard singing the final verse of “Outside the Wall”—“…after all it's not easy / Banging your heart against some mad bugger's wall.” The kid discards the rag and sniffs at the bottle’s contents before pouring those contents out. The frame freezes on the kid and the credits roll.  It’s a weird, beautiful moment at the end of a weird, ugly movie. That end is maybe the most right Waters or Parker or anyone involved with the project got anything. The crowd chants, “Tear down the wall,” and the wall comes down, and then maybe something can be redeemed, then maybe there can be some kind of peace.

—James Brubaker

#89: Dusty Springfield, "Dusty in Memphis" (1969)

“Small towns are not an aesthetic.”

— SZA, in a December 2017 tweet

Dusty Springfield arrived in Memphis skeptical.

“Like most people, perhaps, I associated Memphis with one kind of sound, a hard R&B sound,” she said. “That’s not the thing I can do, and I’d rather leave it those who can.”

What was it she could do? “Big ballady things,” is how she put it. At one point the top-selling female vocalist in the world, Dusty’s saccharine pop was starting to lose its charm in the swirl of the late ‘60s. The beehived songstress, born Mary Isobel Catherine Bernadette O'Brien in Middlesex, England, went to Tennessee looking for an edge. Her first album with Atlantic Records, Dusty in Memphis, was to be her entrance music at the soul debutante ball.

Certainly of its time, the copy on the back of the Dusty in Memphis LP, written by legendary music journalist and Memphis native Stanley Booth, reads as condescending today: “The Memphis Cats have a great reputation, but they are also associated with such artists as Aretha Franklin and Wilson Pickett—not singers of ‘big ballady things.’’’

He then quotes Dusty: “I had no idea how far out of the R&B bag the Memphis musicians could go. I discovered that their versatility is amazing, and their musical knowledge is extremely wide.”

A commercial flop when it was released, Dusty in Memphis was re-evaluated in the 1990s as an all-time best precisely because of of its production—its gliding horns and and silky basslines cut right through any sentimentality. It would be easy to write off Dusty Springfield’s pivot to soul as contrived, a product of racist record executives hawking a White Aretha. Blue-eyed soul, no matter how groovy, must be listened to in context. Musical gentrification is certainly at play here, but note the marketing: it’s Dusty in Memphis, not Dusty Goes Soul. This album is attempting to capture the aesthetic of a place, as much as a people.

With her singular vocal prowess, Dusty Springfield would have become famous singing in any genre. The best singers are actors, on a stage with seamless set changes.The album’s lead single, “Son of a Preacher Man,” was originally written for Aretha Franklin, whose father and grandfather were preachers (she would record her own version years later). There’s no location mentioned, but it’s undeniably a song of the American South. The first words are “Billie Ray,” for god’s sake. Dusty was wearing Memphis like it was a new mini dress.

A song either needs a strong sense of place or have no setting at all—for this reason, “Small Town” by John “Cougar” Mellencamp is one of the worst songs ever written. But by distilling a physical space into sound, what do we lose? What do we risk?

*

I spent the second half of my twenties a rolling stone, trying on different lives in Boston, then India, then Oklahoma, then D.C. I moved to each place for a new job and a new folksy quality to add to my repertoire. I hoped to leave Boston plucky, lndia enlightened, Oklahoma humble, D.C. wonky. These attributes would be my rewards for undergoing yet another jarring transition; I’m a writer, I would remind myself, this will all come in handy one day. But instead of the artistic authority I felt entitled to, I left each of these places feeling like I only scraped their surfaces, painfully aware of the limits of an individual’s experience. I could only consume; even my floweriest prose would never capture the complexity of each terrain.

Now I’m turning 30 in New York City, one of the most written-and-sung-about places in the universe. I arrived here the age that Dusty arrived in Memphis, ready for reinvention. From day one, I’ve been wary of contracting the insufferable If-I-can-make-it-here attitude. Having embraced the beauty of so many other places, I’ve long resented the New Yorker superiority complex.

But I started to get it this summer, during a free concert in Prospect Park. There I was, listening to Anoushka Shankar play the sitar, having the musical experience I expected to have in India (but never did) just a mile from my apartment in Brooklyn. I realized that what makes New York the greatest city in the world is that it’s made up of little bits and pieces of all the other greatest cities in the world. New York wouldn’t be New York without Mumbai or Memphis or even a small town in Oklahoma.

I’ve been to Memphis once, a stop on a roadtrip with girlfriends to reacquaint myself with “Real America” before I left for a year in India. We listened to Dusty in Memphis on the way, along with a Stax compilation, Paul Simon’s Graceland, and even that goddamn “Walkin’ in Memphis” schlock. But we didn’t make it to Beale Street. After a tip from the front desk worker at our hostel, we ended up at a punk show at an indie video rental store. Surrounded by leaning stacks of VHS tapes (this was in 2014), we handbanged in the back, our itinerary long forgotten. Memphis rocked.

Perhaps Dusty in Memphis didn’t land in its own time because it doesn’t capture Memphis in 1968—it captures how people who weren’t there imagine how Memphis in 1968 was. What Dusty sought in Memphis—the same thing that Bowie sought in Berlin, McCartney in Nigeria, and Kanye West in Hawaii—can be found anywhere. You just have to take off your headphones for a little while and listen for it.

—Susannah Clark

#90: Stevie Wonder, "Talking Book" (1972)

For the longest time, I thought one of my most treasured Stevie Wonder tracks, “Superstition,” was off 1982’s Original Musiquarium, and not 1972’s Talking Book.

That’s my fault.

When I picked up Musiquarium in college, I considered myself a “serious” Stevie Wonder fan. I’ve put that in air quotes because clearly, I was neither astute nor serious enough to realize Musiquarium was a greatest hits/unreleased-tracks compilation album. Being able to say I listened to the Beatles since I was nine, for example, doesn’t give me a pass for not reading the liner notes.

“Superstition,” a groove-heavy juggernaut tinged with evil and laced with apprehension, remains undefeated in funk music for Wonder’s still unsurpassed mastery of the Hohner clavinet.

And for years, I barely gave Talking Book a glance.

Other Wonder fans over the years told me I would like it, but I put it off. Ignorant and stubborn as I was (I’d like to say “headstrong,” but come on), I’m embarrassed to say its cover stopped me from picking it up sooner. He’s shown sitting on the ground, wearing an earth-tone caftan and jewelry and lazily touching the dune sand with his hands.

It all seemed too weepy, too sappy, and too touchy-feely. It appeared to me that Innervisions and Songs in the Key of Life, with covers that illustrate Wonder as being the center of a psychedelically woke universe, would be deeper, more spiritual and groovier than Talking Book.

When I finally did buy it, I didn’t appreciate most of it at first, simply because “Superstition” absolutely, every single time, blows me away, especially the way the swoosh-swoosh drum line plays cat and mouse with intertwined layers of buzzy notes from the clavinet. When it hits that sliver of a bridge, the horn section unravels and goes haywire, jeering and wailing and taunting Wonder as he cries out as if struck by lightning. The other tracks didn’t stand a chance. Forty-six years of “Superstition” have reigned on earth, unvarnished and raw.

Learning about the grace, inimitable heart, and genius talent of Stevie Wonder began in the mid-‘80s, when I found my mom’s CD (or tape, I can’t remember which), of 1985’s In Square Circle. Already his 20th album, he could easily make pop gems like “Love You Too Much” and “Go Home” instantly catchy, despite the synthy glaze that was so popular then.

But I especially loved the gentle vibrato and captivating lyrics of “Overjoyed,” which I played over and over. It brought me near tears every time I heard it, and I couldn’t place why for a long time. I can’t explain it, but I can only come to this conclusion: he could make his voice “smile” through the speakers. It’s one of his most endearing vocal qualities. It makes my eyes sting whenever I hear it on classics like “Joy Inside My Tears,” or “As,” or “Ribbon In the Sky,” or even “My Cherie Amour,” from his previous identity as a fresh-faced Motown wunderkind.

That exuberance shines on Talking Book, but it’s more than that. The album’s inner core comes down to love.

Love, in its many forms and interpretations, is always woven throughout Wonder’s vast catalog—love as lust, love as romantic, love as spiritual, love as universal, love that’s never returned, love as an arm of humanity. And spinning out from that bright sphere are warm rays of hope, faith, kindness, tenderness, celebration, and most of all, thankfulness for just being alive. That’s Talking Book.

Much of the album reflects Wonder’s wildly changing emotions and all the thorny complications caused by imperfect relationships. Its moods are punctuated by the familiar pangs and rushes of adrenaline rendered by pure joy and happiness, suspicion and desperation, cynicism and peace. As the album ends, he finally reaches acceptance and the hope that maybe next time won’t hurt so bad.

His love of love eventually extended, as he left his Motown roots further behind, toward socio-economic issues and championing political activism in his lyrics. That’s briefly touched on in one of my favorite songs off Talking Book: “Big Brother,” where he lambasts the white politician on his TV screen who spouts injustices as Wonder sings, “My name is Secluded / We live in a house the size of a matchbox.” And he throws in the imagery of roaches in that home, just for good measure.

While “Big Brother” previewed what would come in future albums, Talking Book as a whole is a revelation of these emotions. Its start, “You Are the Sunshine of My Life,” is undeniably shiny and mellow. But doubt and paranoia creep in on “Maybe Your Baby,” when suspicion, and then full-blown obsession, take hold as his inner monologue about his girl’s whereabouts runs amok. But love lurks, and his doubts never veer into maliciousness toward her; it instead wades toward emotions like sadness, frustration, and vulnerability.

When his love is unreturned, he grabs onto the silver lining of “You and I (We Can Conquer the World).” Though their future together is over, in his mind it’s eternal, and that’s enough. Again, Wonder never devolves into sappiness. “You and I” validates the construct that, even if it’s just for a split second or a sharply drawn breath, maybe he really could conquer the world. He lets in the notion that it’s okay to dream that big. The fuzzy, woozy splendor and jazzy keyboard of “You’ve Got It Bad Girl,” closes Side A and fades into memory.

“Superstition,” on the other hand, is the monster that kicks open the second half of the record. It’s the beat-stomping, ass-shaking outlier here, a standalone piece of earth shattering art. When I first heard it as a kid, I was afraid that singing “13-month-old baby /  broke the looking glass / seven years of bad luck / good things in your past…” would actually reach out and shake me. Stevie Wonder represented something forbidden, something that was just down and out bad, and I loved it.

If that could be considered the album’s apex, “Blame It On The Sun” is its polar opposite. It’s about coming to a stark realization: he alone has sabotaged yet another failed relationship. At first he places the catalyst for its demise on not enough time, on the birds, on the always-changing tide—everything except himself, until he finally gives in. It’s the lowest and most revealing point of the album.

The optimism in “Lookin’ For Another Pure Love” turns his head toward the future. He thinks: Maybe this one is the right one. Wonder accepts his mistakes as an imperfect mortal, and again, reawakens that hopefulness. The song’s companion piece and the album’s coda, “I Believe When I Fall In Love,” tells us that all the pain, all the struggles we go through in life…it’s all worth it. This is Stevie saying, “Try again, even if the last one hurt you beyond recognition.”

So I want to thank you, Stevie, for reminding us to try love again. And if we fail, at least we can still smile inside our tears.

—Emily Reily

#92: Buddy Holly & the Crickets, "20 Golden Greats" (1978)

“You know I’m from near there, right?” Adam says, tuning his rickety drum set.

I brush greasy hair from my eyes.

“No way!” I say, struggling to tune my top string.

“Clear Lake is spitting distance from my hometown. I used to drive out there and read the plaque they put up. It’s in the middle of a giant field. There’s nothing there.”

“Let’s do this fucking thing,” Pete says. “We starting with Buddy Holly or the Damned?” He looks over at me.

“Um, hey four-eyes,” he says. “Where are your glasses?”

I motion to the mixing desk.

“I hate those god damn things. Ugliest blue ever and those frames make me want to wretch. I got them when I was twelve.”

Pete laughs. “Yeah, well, you better pinch your pennies if you want to get those Buddy Holly birth-control shades.”

“So, Adam,” I ask, plucking out a blues bass-line. “Did you set the memorial on fire?”

He shoots me a look of death.

“I heard that about you, man. Isn’t that why you moved up here? To get away from the long arm of the law?”

No response. He practices the ferocious pounding of “Peggy Sue” while Chris practices his rockabilly hiccups.

Out of habit, we gather in a circle, our amps ringing us, but this time we have actual reel-to-reel tape recorders and a mixing desk—not my rinky-dink Panasonic tape recorder arranged in the center.

Normally we’d be practicing in Chris’s living room, but Adam got us some time at the radio station where he works. We’ve rolled in on a Saturday morning, posters of Seals and Crofts, James Taylor, and America greeting us as we humped our gear into the basement, kicking lumps of hard-packed snow off our Doc Martens.

“Hey Beethoven, you ready?” Pete says, strumming out that classic fury of chords. This is one of our nicknames for Chris, for his unusual retro 1700s hairstyle. He nods affirmative.

We sweat our way through “Peggy Sue”— and I just pound that low E. Frankly, I don’t know if anyone hears me over Chris’s histrionics.

“That fucking stomped!” Chris yells, grabbing me by the jacket lapels.

Pete smirks. “Indeed,” he says. “Now hopefully you’ll stop asking us to cover the Beatles. Now that you know where they got their best ideas from.”

Chris’s ears turn red and he tries to speak. Pete tut-tuts him with a finger.

“Let’s not talk about the horrifying Sgt. Pepper,” he says. Chris fumes in a corner, dancing around like a boxer. If Elvis were a boxer.

Pete turns up the reverb on his foot pedal until the whole session is underwater. 1! 2! 3! 4! And we’re off into “That’ll Be the Day,” but my fingers disobey me halfway through.

“Hey butterfingers,” someone says to me. “We are playing this fucking thing slower than dirt. You got this?”

I nod. I want to get it. I don’t look at any of them for fear of losing the beat again. Pete plays that ringing descending intro again. I stare at my giant fingers.

I walk up the bass-line, tentatively smiling. I walk down, really grinning. I tap my foot and look over at Pete and his delicate, bright lead. Adam’s blue mop sways left and right in time, Ringo-style, and as much as it pains me to say it, it’s perfect.

All the while, Chris/Buddy falsettos, growls, and hiccups from somewhere beyond, brushing his chin-length locks away from the mic. As I tremble on the last note, a wave of elation hits me. We all look at each other. They feel it too.

*

Adam was so mortified by his drumming that he never let us hear the tapes. Whenever I asked him about it, he’d always mutter that he wanted to re-record his part or something like that, swearing he’d give them over eventually. A month or two after that Saturday recording, he fled back to Iowa and took the tapes with him. I’ve still never heard them. Perhaps we didn’t sound as good as we did in my mind…but on that morning, we were rock ‘n’ roll gods.

—Josh Medsker

#95: Miles Davis, "Bitches Brew" (1970)

That was all I was going to write. Actually, that was all I should have had to write, because I’m just going to sound like an entitled prick from here on out. I cut my teeth working in a pretentious record store in my formative years. My bias was unfiltered and undefined and I kept trying to convince the world that my taste in music was clearly the best and fuck you I was always right.

A pretty accurate description of my youth: Most of my time spent earnestly wanting people to hear something the way I heard it, in the way that I knew and learned it was perfect, and burning the woods down when the girl I was dating bought a Rusted Root album.

I acknowledge that music is subjective in the same way I accept that we just don’t have a better explanation for most human follies except we’re all stupid and doomed. This disposition, which was like if Cobra had made Serpentor out of the difficulty of Henry Rollins, the genius of Richard D. James, the shrewdness of Donald Fagan, the daring of Charles Mingus, and the ruthlessness of Ayn Rand*; was steadfast, unwavering, and entirely based on my own personal experiences and objectivity. It was my truth, but what is true?

I fucking hate that saying, misattributed to Einstein, about the definition of insanity. Trying something over and over again and expecting a different outcome. I hate it, but is it true?

I wanted to talk about this very clinically at first, this kind of verbose description of a perfect infographic tracking each of the players’ rise to perfection, or, in the case of Herbie Hancock, starting out flawless. The fact there was once an artist who, by ignoring that dumb old adage, meticulously and miraculously defied all odds, perfected his craft, compositions, and crew along the way. But I’m not sure that’s true either. There’s a truth to this story that isn’t told by facts. It’s not a history lesson but it’s the tendency for great things to take off and soar, but only before they come crashing back down to earth. That’s the problem with perfection.

This is where I’d tell the complete backstory of the B-52s, another perfect quintet. But the truth of their story isn’t important either. It suffices to say that the B-52s appear out of the blue, they release s/t and then Wild Planet, then what the fuck do you do? The part that matters is done. So you spend the next decade as a ‘90s cartoon parody of your former selves (not that I’m mad about that) because you’ll never make another “Give Me Back My Man.”

So, is it really that hard to believe that after literally creating the quintessential jazz quintet, a perfect bebop Voltron held together and powered by their sheer determination to not only be the fucking smoothest and greatest musicians who ever walked the earth, but also to not be outdone by anyone else, that the only reasonable outcome of being a megabeing greater than the sum of your parts is that you then have to self destruct into a droned-out drug-induced Apocalypse Now version of the worst aspects of your character? What’s going to happen if you try to be something other than perfect? Is the other a lie if the perfection is the truth?

Davis spent almost 15 years prior to Bitches Brew making legendary records.

And I get it, when you feel invisible you never want it to stop, nor can you believe, especially in that moment, it will ever end. Thus, if you make something precious and perfect, naturally you can do it again. I had a handful of ideas that haunted me for years, always sure they were the next big thing. I would add them to every project and to-do list until finally, like the good friend he is, Bo Fahs was like “Dude, you have to let that shit die, otherwise it’s going to be your Eyes Wide Shut.” And Bo, the same Bo who wrote the review for Paul’s Boutique on this very website, best friend Bo, call-me-out-on-my-stupid-shit Bo, was right. What Bo was talking about was an idea cemetery, a necessary feature in any creative city, in which you bury all your half baked ideas in order to really get to the good ones and get on with your life. The idea cemetery is right next door to the Derivative Dump.

The problem with that is no one ever told Davis about this till it was far too late. But to his credit, impossibly, Davis defied all the sound logic of putting things into the idea cemetery. If making revolutionary jazz recordings were a 3-point contest, Miles Davis would clearly win, but instead of simply winning, he tried to make as many consecutive 3-pointers as he could, moving farther and farther away from the goal just to prove what an unstoppable madman he is, impossibly getting slicker and better as he does so. Until he misses.

Bitches Brew isn’t a bad album, but is it great? How did we get here, to a place where the white people’s guide to free jazz is considered the masterwork of possibly the greatest human to ever put a trumpet to their lips? The best I can figure is that that accolade was given by the same person who feels like the sound of Ornette Coleman or Cecil Taylor, in all its wild possibilities and academic precision and sentiment is just not “crunchy” enough for their Fleetwood Mac-informed palettes.

What, by the way, is with the least qualified people talking about music using food terms? Nothing about the garbage you listen to is “yummy.” When you go to music school everyone wants their jazz band to sound like Miles Smiles. When you give up on your dreams because they seem too hard, decide to be worthless and waste your parents’ money on a kayak you never use, you talk about how “earthy” Bitches Brew sounds. But how did Davis go from rescoring Porgy & Bess to scoring Trevor’s Almost Formative First Year in College**?

The story that Ken Burns*** tells in his 8-part “here’s what jaded asses the Marsalis Brothers can be when reflecting on a time in jazz where they probably would have been Davis famous but were born too late and too Berkley****” documentary, is that Miles Davis saw Sly Stone get all the kind of attention and fame he once garnished at the Newport or the Montreal or the Paris Jazz Festivals. From this gnashing of teeth and ego, Davis created Bitches Brew. I feel like this might be true.

Davis probably did this to reclaim some former glory he thought he was owed. And I get it, the addiction to fame is tough. On one hand, being Beatles/Michael Jackson famous makes you a crazy person, but the only thing worse than being mega famous is almost or kind of being famous, especially if you’re an auteur. Since history is written by the victors and the Rolling Stone 500, not the people who think the soundtrack to Elevator to the Gallows is his best work, Davis had to chase fame, lose his mind, and wear tie dye. Also if there's no Elevator to the Gallows then there's no Twin Peaks, so you decide what's more important, the String Cheese Incident playing like a vacuum cleaner or the masterwork of David Lynch.

I wanted to close with something about that analogy where the only way to experience imperfection if you’re perfect is to make yourself forget. The only way to know what everything in existence is like if you made everything is to forget that you’re a god; living an infinite number of lives as a human with all our flaws and imperfections. It’s why we have to deal with life in the present tense and can’t deal with time being an illusion, histories and personal experiences that are all too big for one person to deal with. It’s what we need to get out of bed in the morning, the reason we fight, the struggle for what we think is real and what we already know. The truth about perfection and even just truth is that it’s all just noise, another illusion, which we try to make binary by comparing the present to the past, good versus bad, there and now. All we can really ever hope for is to be remembered for that one fleeting shining moment where we remembered we’re that god, and that others will remember us for it too. What the fuck else do you want out of this world?

Here’s the truth about Bitches Brew:

At the end of the day, Bitches Brew is more than a jam session. It is a jam session done by a practiced and genius musician who spent his previous, legendary career in a pressure cooker full of film scores and breathtaking compositions. Bitches Brew works because Davis did all the work, he surrounded himself by the best musicians and if he wasn’t playing with them they were challenging his throne, which he tirelessly defended until the jazz he knew was nothing more than a memory. Bitches Brew isn’t a bad album. It’s pretty good. But as the sneering teen clerk who’s disgusted that the money you paid for that Dave Matthews sticker pays his minimum wage needs to remind you, if it hadn’t been crafted by a trumpet player who once conjured perfect cinematic and scenic environments with sound, then it would just be the name of another IPA.

*Not that I’ve ever read Ayn Rand nor would I, but I did play BioShock about 5000 times so I am something of an Andrew Ryan expert.

**Sorry, for you film buffs out there I wanted to note that I used the shortened title and not it’s original Trevor’s Almost Formative First Year in College Where Instead of Doing Age Appropriate Nonsense like Drinking and Trying Boring Drugs When You Were a Teen, You Went Way Off the Deep End with Your New Found Freedom; Which Isn’t Really that Surprising I Guess in Retrospect Since You Tried to Portray Yourself as Kind of Like a Preppy Hippie Soccer Player who Wasn’t Good Enough at Sports to be a Bully Jock but was Still Kind of an Asshole Lacking any Kind of Real Personality or Uniqueness, Not That We All Should Be Artists or Whatever else that is Just Another Nice Way of Saying “Asshole” but Some People are Just Born to be Middle Management I Guess.

*** Incidentally, Bo and I used to work at this video store where besides making minimum wage when you were in your late 20s and rampant alcoholism, one of the perks was getting to rent all the movies your heart desired for free. In a lot of ways it was just like the previously mentioned record store I worked at as a brash teen. Anyhow, what this has to do with Ken Burns is that since Bo and I clearly didn’t have health insurance from said video store, as way to treat/deal with the rampant anxiety and insomnia that smoking 5,897 cigarettes a day and only consuming coffee and gas station food coupled with the shame spiral our lives were leading us down thanks to, you know being in your late 20s with a college degree making minimum wage at a video store in 2008 which inevitably creeps in the edges of your mind constantly but especially when you try to sleep at night, instead of being able to go to a doctor and get a prescription for Ambien, Bo beat the system by checking out every Ken Burns series that you’ve never heard of to get to sleep. My best guess is that Bo figured out this perfect alchemy regarding something just interesting enough to hold your attention while distracting you from everything in that previous run on sentence, scenic and calming, but also not interesting enough to keep you from falling asleep, ie the National Parks, Jefferson, etc. So, while I make it sound all romantic and fun, using record, video, and “cool” things to justify my position, know that it’s not and I can only do that because we literally had to force ourselves to sleep with constant voiceover narration and slow fades for like 15 years.

**** Wynton, Bradford, I love you guys. You’re true patrons and ambassadors of jazz, you’ll have more talent than I’ll ever understand, you’re understandably a little jaded about the state of jazz when you came along... but you kind of sound like this review reads my dudes. Plus, somebody has to stick up for all the Cecil Taylors of the world. I’m just saying. If it wasn’t me talking shit about you guys I’d be defending you too except it’s all inception now. Also, what are you reading this? If I googled myself and I showed up in the writing of Will Sellari, I probably wouldn’t read it. But again, I love you guys that’s what’s important here.

—Will Sellari

#93: Prince, "Sign 'O' the Times" (1987)

Perms were ascendant—weren’t they? Wasn’t that right? Even for guys? He had just gotten it figured out, the long bangs with the perm, super short on the sides, the shoulder pads, the boots. Prince—you couldn’t go wrong. He had studied his own round, pasty visage in the mirror, imagining his limp, grout-colored hair in tight, commanding ringlets, considered that, as a homeschooled, classical-music-playing geek, he knew less than nothing about what was cool, and he had asked his mom. She assured him, yes, of course perms are in, I’m so glad you’re finally taking an interest in your appearance, Gerald. You know that song, “Let’s Go Crazy”? That little fellow has a perm. He’s everywhere.

So Gerald asked for a cassette of Purple Rain and a perm for his sixteenth birthday, and now here he was, in a salon that his mother assured him did men’s perms all the time. The damage was done—Gerald was sitting in a red vinyl chair under a heat lamp, his eyes smarting from the pungent chemicals soaking his scalp.  He was in a row of chairs full of women under heat lamps, with another row facing him across a coffee table strewn with shiny magazines.

The women ignored him. All women—his mother had been wrong, no guys were in there getting perms. Even one would have been a relief. One guy, any kind of guy, a pudgy middle-aged dad kind of guy or a public school ruffian kind of guy, the sort he usually crossed the mall to avoid, any kind of male would’ve been a relief. He imagined the wry conspiratorial smile he’d give to this other guy, who would be sitting across from him under a heat lamp, too. His eyes would be red-rimmed and watering from the chemicals like Gerald’s and he’d look at Gerald man-to-man and they’d feel insulated from the world of women around them. But there was no other guy.

Then he looked down at the magazine-laden coffee table in front of him and saw a magazine with Prince on the cover. Prince, with glasses that made him look smart in a way that Gerald’s glasses didn’t, and—oh, God—a new hairstyle. The headline said he had a new album. Sign O the Times. Was that a typo? Didn’t they mean “of”—Sign of the Times?  But anyway, the point was, oh God, Purple Rain was like three years old, you dork, and Prince had already moved on. Sign O The Times—the new album, with the silly “O” all by itself, a kitschy abbreviation like what you’d see in an ad for cough syrup or an Irish pub. But that was Prince—even the silly o would get respect, unlike him, unlike Gerald. And Prince had a new hairstyle, which meant that everyone would have a new hairstyle, and, he had figured this much out about the world, anyone with the old hairstyle would be laughed at.

Prince’s curls were looser, the sides longer, the overall look closer to pre-Raphaelite than New Wave. God, now that was a look—it was like Beethoven’s glorious hair! Gerald had secretly studied the stiff plaster-of-paris hair on his musical hero’s bust that sat atop his Steinway in the living room at home. Beethoven looked like he’d sat for his bust after fighting a lion in a high wind! That was some hair! No one else would put two and two together, but he, Gerald knew things about Prince that other people didn’t. Being a classical pianist, Gerald understood that Prince was a real musician, a musician’s musician, not just some fashion icon who could kind of carry a tune that somebody else taught him while drum machines kept a beat. Prince knew his Beethoven, Gerald could just tell, so Prince had probably noticed Beethoven’s splendid tonsorial instincts as Gerald had, and was probably paying homage with his latest look, which was so viscous, so motile, almost like his hair was an organism dancing to the music he made. Gerald realized this—this Prince/Beethoven/cool hair connection with fifteen minutes to go in the setting period of his perm.

He picked up the magazine, and as he flipped through the glossy pages, sticky with hair product, to the article about Prince and found the picture he would point to when his hairdresser asked how he wanted his perm styled, a song started that made him lean out from under the heat lamp to hear it. It was the catchiest, sweetest, bounciest music he had ever heard, a pop song like no other, a pop song that made every other pop song sound like a dirge or a nursery rhyme. Never take the place of ol’ Han? Was it about Star Wars? He listened for the chorus to come around, imagining the keyboard before him and beaming in his red vinyl seat as he heard what Prince had done. Oh, it was fantastic! Never take the place of your man, that was it. This had to be a new release from Sign O the Times.

He had heard another one, “If I Was Your Girlfriend,” inside the music store where the guy who tuned his piano worked. He had gone in with his mom to ask Todd, the piano tuner, who was also a fine piano player, if he could come over and see what was going on with his A-Flat. The store, a sunny, white-carpeted shop with plate glass windows across the front, usually had nothing newer than Mahler playing when Gerald went in, but he had found on this particular day, Prince, and not just any Prince, but a raunchy and confusing Prince song with lyrics that Gerald chose to ignore.

“He’s like Bowie, you know?” Todd had grinned at Gerald from across the counter top and pointed up, at the air, as he tapped out the rhythm of the song with his free hand.  Gerald didn’t know. “It’s like Ziggy Stardust or something. Another personality.”

“Prince has another personality?” Gerald tried earnestly to follow what Todd was saying. His mother was standing reverently by a white and gold baby grand by the front window, communing with the instrument like her focused devotion would make the instrument materialize in her dingy living room.

“Her name’s Camille.”

“That’s a girl’s name.”

Todd smiled at him. “He was going to do an entire album in his Camille persona, but it didn’t work out. Too bad, if you ask me. This song, though, it’s got to be one of the Camille songs.”

Gerald looked down at the bowl of twenty-five-cent picks on the counter. He felt like he was in a new place with a person he’d never met before instead of in old, familiar McMurtry’s Music with Todd, who had even been his music teacher for awhile in 6th grade before Gerald’s abilities surpassed him. But Todd was being different today.

“I didn’t know you listened to popular music,” he said.

“Prince isn’t like most of that stuff,” Todd said.

Gerald had told him then about his newfound love of Purple Rain, and had even made a shy inquiry about Todd’s opinions of perms. Was Todd’s hair naturally curly?

Todd had thrown his square head back and laughed. He patted his blond curls and pulled one down over his left eye, grinning impishly at Gerald.  “What do you think?” he asked.

“Prince isn’t embarrassed about his perm,” Gerald said.

“Prince isn’t embarrassed about anything, little dude, and neither should you be.”

“My A-Flat is wonky.”

“I can come by tomorrow.”

“My mom really wants that piano.”

“You don’t have the house for it.”

“I know. I think it’s that way with me and Prince hair. I don’t have the face for it.”

“Get the damned perm, Gerald. It’s not permanent.”

“It’s called a permanent. Perm means permanent.”

“I just mean, live a little, Gerald."

“I will.”

And he was. And he would. When his hairdresser finally came over and lifted the dome of the heat lamp from off his head, peering at him like he was a kitten hiding under a couch, he had pointed to the picture of Prince. “I want this,” he said. “Not what I said before,” he said.  “Can you do it?”

She patted her lips with two fingers, studying the picture.  “I’m glad you’re going for this,” she said. “It’s really new.”  She tilted his chin from side to side, narrowing her eyes meditatively.  “As long as you know you’re not going to look just like Prince.”

“I know,” he said. And truly, his expectations were modest, but after she rinsed and set, dried and styled his hair and spun him around to look at himself in the mirror, the effect was better than he could have ever hoped. He looked like a guy who could go to public school, who could go to the mall and walk right into the record store, and when Prince came on, he could make a sage remark about Ziggy Stardust, and to the kids who looked uncomfortable, he would smile and his curls would move like beings affirming his every word. As he left the beauty shop, he passed a boy about his age walking in with his mom. The boy’s expression, both mortified and hopeful, lit up when he saw Gerald. Gerald nodded, and his perm nodded right along with him.

—Constance Squires