#142: Various Artists, "A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector" (1963)

She was the type to order warm ice; to demand clairvoyance from her subordinates—a peddler of flippant and negative feedback, unable to express expectations; a vision inarticulate, if one happened to exist at all. That’s who Toby was spending her evening with. She could hear the uproarious laughter, chatter, and music through the walls and the perforated ceiling tiles, rising in dull tones from beneath the beige carpeting. Holiday parties in full swing were visible through the lit windows of the offices across the street—ties hung loose, cheeks flushed. Yet Toby sat, the taste of glue thick on her tongue as she counted to 1,000.

Her boss was hosting an event for another promising candidate, who with her boss’s help would likely win. And with her boss’s help came Toby, whose happiness and wellbeing was second to the whims and wishes of the hand that snapped its fingers. The work was never hard, but it was made hard by how it had to be conducted; people with people think little of how they wield their power, and absolute power micromanages absolutely.

“I should have finished days ago,” Toby thought, licking an envelope and placing it sealed alongside 574 others. “First it was the arrangement of the guest list. Then she didn’t like how the envelopes bulged, after she ignored my suggestion to buy the ones that match the invites. And then there was the stamp fiasco,” Toby thought, letting out a sigh. This was the third batch this week. The repetition, piles of wasted paper. And now her holiday. Her boss entered the room, clearing her throat.

“Where are we on the invites?”

“About 400 to go. These don’t have to be postmarked until after the new year, right? The event’s not until March…”

“This needs to be done now! Any idiot can stuff an envelope, what’s your excuse?” The question hung in the air between them as Toby stared blankly at her boss’s face. “Her eyes look like flat tires,” Toby observed with satisfaction, licking another envelope.

“I can’t stay late again tonight.”

“You’ll leave when it’s finished, or you’re fucking done,” her boss croaked, coughing wetly into a loose fist. Catching her breath, she walked over to the rack that held her fox fur coat. “After the holiday I want us to think about how you can be more efficient. This is not OK. Remember, I’m like New York; maybe you just can’t hack it,” her boss said, raising two drawn-on eyebrows. She let slip a cloying smile thick with venom and walked slowly towards the door. “Merry Christmas, Toby.”

*

Toby was among the last to leave her building, and rode a nearly empty bus home through the snow, and thought about her boss: the way she entered a room and bent it across her lap; the arrogance of her demands; the miasma of perfume and opulence that thickened the air she touched. “I need another job,” she thought, stopping short to remember her liberal arts degree, her lack of experience. No one gets hired for having read Middlemarch, or for understanding the nuances between successive waves of feminism. While Toby admired a meticulously stocked and well-worn home library, such a quality never appears on an HR hiring rubric.

Feeling charmed by the snow, Toby got off a few stops before her own to walk the rest of the way along the lake. The city was bulldozing a new bike path, and the path was increasingly hard to distinguish beneath the accumulation. Toby stepped gingerly. “I never want to be like that,” she said aloud, startling herself. Toby had a habit of talking to herself, a cliché of living alone, but she tried not to do it in public. “I at least had somewhere to be. Friends; what about her?” The question hummed in Toby’s mind. She’d always been struck by how her boss’ personal life blurred with her professional one. Friendships watered like cash crops, mailing lists constantly in flux. Toby read all her boss’s email and caught glimpses of a vacuum at the center of a broad network.

She quashed a glint of empathy and focused again on the falling snow. Ahead, the path arced left to hug the lake around an outcropping. Toby followed it, turning her head as the skyline, buried in clouds, came fully into view. It was with her head in this position that she collided with a mass of fur clung fast with fresh snow. A familiar scent, a cough: her boss.

“I… I… what are you do—I didn’t see you,” Toby stammered. Her boss continued to look in the direction of the lake, away from the city lights.

“I used to take my children swimming here when it was warm,” her boss said, taking a drag from her cigarette. There was a pile of ash and butts half obscured at her feet; her coat resembled a different breed of fox entirely.

“It’s lovely in the sum—”

“My son used to scramble up the rocks on all fours, he was uncontrollable. He lives in Arizona now; much less water.”

“I hear it’s lovely ther—”

“We haven’t spoken in months,” her boss said as the wind picked up, swirling the fallen snow in eddies around their feet. Despite the sudden gust Toby felt a profound quiet to the moment ushered in by the candor. She and her boss never spoke this openly—distractedly even, as if Toby were a sounding board to her boss’s thoughts; much how Toby spoke to herself when alone, it was as if her boss took no notice of Toby’s presence, never once taking her eyes off the dark expanse of roiling water.

“I don’t remember…” her boss trailed off. The sound came out muffled, obstructed. She threw away the half-smoked cigarette with a gloved hand, the cherry extinguished in the snow. Toby held her breath. “Like a kite string… Arizona. I can almost picture it,” her boss said, turning towards Toby as she spoke. Their eyes met: Toby’s tearful from the wind, her boss’s glazed, pupils wide. Her boss tightened the collar of her coat and walked off, her steps parallel to the tracks Toby had left behind.

*

Toby tried not to drink, but kept a bottle just in case. She lit a few candles and switched on the four-color revolving lamp she relied on each year to make her drab apartment appear festive, a fire hazard from a bygone era. Much like decorations, Toby kept certain records squirreled away for December: a record, rather. “Say what you will about Phil Spector, but this truly is a gift,” talking to herself again, as she placed A Christmas Gift For You on the felt of her turntable. She dropped the arm and unleashed a wall of sound that rushed to fill the room. Toby poured three fingers of the brown liquid into a jam jar half full with ice and sat on the floor, leaning her back against a bookshelf as the aluminum Christmas tree by her window changed from yellow to blue.

“Well, Darlene, you got your wish,” Toby said, looking out at the heavy flakes. Of course she knew all about Phil: his aggressive artist motivation tactics, his penchant for gunplay. The murder. Yet Toby felt rocked to comfort by this recording; each time was like coming home. She poured another.

The soft glow of the room swirled with the brandy in Toby’s head. “Can a monster redeem itself? Aren’t we all just good and bad?” She said, fully animated now, her hands shadowed large in the revolving glow. The dull grind of the light’s motor filled the room as she fumbled the record over. Sitting down again, she sighed heavily, raising the jar to her lips.

“Time offers everyone a second chance, but it never promises forgiveness,” she thought, quietly this time. She was leaning fully into her night: alone on the eve of Christmas Eve, thawing her isolation steadily with every sip. She could feel a pang throb beneath the wash of brandy as she thought again about her boss’s gait disappearing into the cold night, her son off somewhere warm. Toby refilled her glass.

Did Darlene Love sing “White Christmas” down the barrel of a gun? Is this moment worth the fear she might have felt, the sweat beading between the notches of her spine as she hit each note just as she was told? Is success at any costs still worth celebrating—for the perfect take or a seat in the Capitol? Toby couldn’t keep pace with her thoughts as they began to spin, taking in the whole of the room, flashes of the day filed past in her mind like a row of stuffed envelopes. The record wound down, and the room nestled again into the soft hum of the light’s motor. Toby slowed her breathing to its rhythm, and drifted off to an image of confetti and faces, and stacks of ballots disappearing into the ceiling overhead.

—Nick Graveline

#143: Dr. John, "Gris-Gris" (1968)

by The Kentucky Chapter of the What’s On Fire Cabal: Moonshine Edition.

I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity, but they’ve always worked for me.    

                                                                                           —Hunter S. Thompson.

Maybe you saw him too, this old man with crow-footed, opalescent eyes that told about a life lived hard. To make the rent or earn enough for  a bite to eat, he’d picked up daywork at a paycheck loan place over on Broadway. They had him standing out on the street in a Statue of Liberty costume—green robe, foam spike headdress—flapping a sign around, inviting the tired, the poor, the prospective debtors to come on in and get robbed some more. His white mustache twitched around as he danced a little shuffle dance in traffic. Then, turning on his heel, he took off running, all hobble foot and spent white sneakers, to or away from something only his eyes could see, his robe trailing behind him like a wake.

A woman pedaling a souped-up beach cruiser with chopper handlebars, turquoise scarf around her neck, wearing shades and with a little miniature pinscher running full tilt on stiletto legs alongside her didn’t take notice as Late-Capital Liberty Man passed by like she was standing still: a fucked up little tableau to accompany the steady drone of drive-time news radio, which any shrink worth their framed diploma would tell you will grind you down to pulp with implicit and explicit threats of mass annihilation, dissociation, alienation, and chaos rendered as a tune that can be remembered almost well enough to hum along with.

I came home, got out of the truck, and nearly stepped into a string of party lights, the kind woven into a tiny copper wire, solar powered and ethereal, the kind you’d hang in the forest for a springtime fete, or a woodland fairy party. Lit up and dying in winter gray evening, they’d tangled into a circle of dim light in the gutter right next to a Ziploc bag full of hard candies. Some damned psychic foxhole, some decoy trail laid by a malicious, B-list, fifth grade conjuror.

Look, there’s probably witchcraft in the world. It’s just something that a person has to come to terms with by and by. The strange attractions, the blinking shadows that flutter at the edge of a memory which maybe was not a dream, named and nameless intuitions that come up unbidden. You’re not wrong. Your juju meter works just fine. Strange things are afoot.

Do you need an amulet to protect you against cold-sweat shiver magic? Ones and zeros that divide and never multiply?  Do you need a tour-guide, a translator, a pusher, a hustler, a heavy? A hand to hold as you pass through strange smoke? Can you swallow your dose of Snake a la Gris Gris?

The Night Tripper is as old as his tongue and older than the rows of gator teeth strung around his neck. Shake his hand and look close in his eyes. Hear his elevator sales pitch introduction, side one track one. Take his card: They call me Dr. John. Known as The Night Tripper. I got many clients come from miles around runnin’ down my prescription. I got medicine to cure all y’all’s ills. I got remedies of every description. Gris Gris gumbo. Yah Yah.

You could put the calling card away, listen to this record alone and stone sober, and your thoughts may come to rest on the appearance of cartoonish invocations of the exotic, or the illusion of physical space rendered by the newly developed stereophonic multi-track recording systems of the 1960s, or characters cut and pasted out of 19th century minstrel shows and New Orleans hoodoo lore. You may get to thinking about the difference between appropriation and organic synthesis, or the implied pastiche of cathedral service, voodoo ceremony, and midnight ramble, or the collusion between escape, evasion, invention and transmutation. But maybe every conjuror begins as a charlatan. Maybe all itinerant preachers keep some hooch in the glovebox. Wouldn’t any of them find perfect, well-worn comfort in the avocations of the other? You may conclude that all these thoughts are reason enough to never listen to Gris Gris alone or sober, and you’d be right: it’s not what the record is built for.

Gris Gris is made for many hearts in a room, many shoulders to shimmy, many legs to dip at the knee, to bring each ass down to the floor and back up. Grease magic only works when it’s shouted loud in the weird, good company of friends and strangers who might get freaky. Soon. The record needs a crew to be heard, and so does a discussion of the record. So, a creek-witch who you love beyond measure may walk down the street to poach some freaks from a hobo fiddle party, may bring them back for a word experiment, a spell casting, a listening party. Having summoned individuals and invoked a community—Gris Gris devotees and novitiates alike—and calling to order The Provisional Sub-Committee on Experimental Semiotics of the What’s On Fire Cabal, she may provide the following clear instructions: “Close your eyes. Listen close. Feel this Gris Gris at the base of your spine. Let it fill you up. Respond as you see fit.”

We eleven could have danced about it, but, for the sake of exploration and edification, we sat down to a candlelit table, passed a pipe, drank from a cold glass jar of moonlight and Dr. John (they call him The Last of the Best. They call him The Gris Gris Man) called up a collective grammerie between us, Exquisite Corpse style, in which each mind is once removed from the others and still, invariably, successfully, operating in synchrony toward a description of the numinous and nebulous.

Presented here without further comment.

_______________________

All I want is to touch, find the seam, cut the cord,
roll it out, and walk it back to when the music ends.

Grease desire was not really my experience, but his breath smelled of roses
rotting, gracefully, and that’s something special: returning to soil.

Unless we seek the absolute end, no one will know what to
think about how come you got here so fast.

Hunting is cleared first with the hunter.
You fasted through the night but were always full up.

The empty limbo choir city didn’t stop me, I sang so:
Devils. Night. The South. Next time, azure.

Though them in the creek float, we take this
to the river. We take this home with us.

You are the goddamn best.
You, bouncing into blows.

_______________________

Moonlight of
Good Lord love,

some good love comes
easy then, poof:

begone.

There wasn’t ever a yellow brick,
not for miles, and behind belle eyes,

tears, shame,
triumph, and will.

When the door opens,
it will not be thrown wide,

not all the way,
but it will remain cracked.

_______________________

Dwayne Michael Chest Rose Up From Only Ashes
 

We lived in swamps and we all nearly died except
for the serpent king who said,

Let me know the way—straight or winding—is at least
tender and slow. Let me just wander into beautiful

bosom beneath kudzu jacket.
Cover me. Cover me up. Whole.

No dancing. Try not to dance, cool creep.
Just slide into constant echoes.

The reverberating death sound of those
who rattled, who stepped, who battled.

_______________________

Valley of Smoke
 

They disappeared occasionally:
Tuesdays, Wednesdays, mostly Tuesdays.

Started the week without
everything they wanted but thanks

for how our feet tripped by better steps.
Some come crawling, dripping beautiful and tired,

falling into blind walk quicken up
and chime brings

the bang for free,
brings the blast man.

Dweebs, don’t talk smack.
Dweebs, don’t talk.

A party of devils and dweebs and
everyone closes their eyes.

Apple bob lead me to a portal. 

Sincerely, First Evil.

—Joe Manning

#145: Steely Dan, "Aja" (1977)

What’s a band without musicians?

That sounds like a paradox or a riddle. But by their sixth album, Steely Dan had fired everyone in the band, leaving only a songwriter and a producer. The resulting record, running about 40 minutes, was just seven tracks, two of which ran over seven and a half minutes long, largely made of unusual rhythms, dense chords, and uncommon narratives about drunk newscasters and orientalist wet dreams. A full LP of music for a band without a band.

It also went five-times platinum in the states. This landmark work of esoterica came to hold an unreachable standard for sonics; the only Grammy it won the year of its release in 1977 was for engineering. The impossible detail applied to Aja shimmered off the album’s intricate chordal and rhythmic superstructures, sparkled against the masterful and famously labored performances of the best musicians the day had to offer: Wayne Shorter, recently of the Miles Davis Quintet; Bernard “Pretty” Purdy and Steve Gadd; Larry Carlton, fresh off several years with Joni Mitchell on some of her best albums. Hired guns; mercenaries.

Aja is remembered, and often maligned, for its emphasis on the precision of its recording. Despite its commercial success, it’s often called niche, given the peculiarities of its style. Even given the popularity of jazz and jazz fusion in its own right and in pop music, Aja can either be called antiquarian or hidebound in its sound, or, alternatively, as Rolling Stone wrote, containing “some of the few important stylistic innovations in pop music in the past decade.”

However that debate shakes out, it's clear that Aja is the weathervane for the most important change music ever underwent: its industrialization. What makes Aja anathema to so many was the way it was led by engineering, facilitated by recording technology, and, most importantly, defined by production. Four decades on from this album, popular music is, too, largely defined by production, and myriad genres have come into being thanks to the possibilities it created. Considered an indulgence in its time, Aja indicated the future.

Recorded music itself is a creation of technological innovation, but it wasn’t until the massive boom in research, development, and productive capacity during the Second World War that instruments like the electric guitar, or the amplifier, could be mass produced at a low enough cost to meet a consumer market newly enriched by the global growth following the war. Fender began selling guitars in 1946, which fueled a boom of guitar-centric bands in clubs for decades to come. Suddenly it was possible for more people to play to more people in more places, and make a very different noise while doing it. Combine this with the proliferation of mass media in radio, records, and television, and creating and consuming music was suddenly far cheaper and more widespread than before. This changed how music sounded.

The advent of radio, and, as a result, of mass-market popular music, had dramatic effects on music as a profession. This low bar to access effectively amateurized the work of performance, and at the same time, created an entirely new trade around its recording and delivery. Recording engineers, in their early incarnations, were more purely engineers than anything else: Paul McCartney recounts how, when creating the Beatles’ 1969 album Abbey Road at the studios of the same name, engineers employed at the site were required to wear white lab coats on the premises.

That juxtaposition, between four self-taught musicians reared in clubs with mass-produced electric instruments playing songs they wrote and performed, and uniformed engineers working in a studio setting Winston Churchill said made him feel like he was in a hospital, describes the inexorable change music would undergo and never return from. In effect, because becoming a musical performer had become financially attainable for most individuals, but the costs to recording and distributing that music remained accessible to only those with requisite investment, music largely became professionalized around production. For all but the most successful songwriters and performers, the money wasn’t in making music, it was in making records.

The Beatles are celebrated for using the studio as an instrument, particularly after they stopped touring in 1966. Steely Dan took this idea that much further. After a number of years of commercial success, the band’s songwriter, Donald Fagen, and producer, Walter Becker, began to find the conventional ensemble context unsatisfactory. So, in 1974, they fired the other three members of the band and scaled their touring back significantly to focus on making records. With each album they made following—Katy Lied, then The Royal Scam—the “band” trended further toward the AM jazz of Fagen’s songwriting and the flossed twinkle of Becker’s production. This focus on sound and style translated to a rigor for performance, which was borne out in the ablest hands music’s pool of session musicians had to offer, with unlimited takes at their disposal.

Which brings us to the legend and spectacle of Aja, which stands with Abbey Road on the famous end (and perhaps Chinese Democracy on the more infamous end) in music’s new lore of the studio. With endless time, limitless talent, and a new arsenal of recording tools, Steely Dan made it possible to make a record with impossible exactitude. “Up on the hill,” Fagen sings on the title track, “they've got time to burn.” That’s part of why so many people hated it: it was stylistically and performatively implausible, made in and for the recorded environment rather than the pub or rehearsal space, which, prior to that, was the only place music could have been made. It is the day of the expanding man.

This is to say nothing of the songwriting itself, which is wonderful. But it’s the jazz-heads and audiophiles who extol the drama of “Deacon Blues,” or the Odyssean “Home At Last.” To so many listeners, the ballistic upper partials that festoon Gadd’s fractalizing tumult on the album’s title track, set in glinting clarity by Becker's production, are just fake—unreal in the sense that they couldn’t have played to a club. And that’s the point, frankly: This is the beginning of what’s possible beyond the physical realities of music, music that is an abstraction of itself, primarily. It’s music like you’d imagine music if you weren’t really hearing it, but remember how good it might have been if your focus was only on it. And, in that way, you can hear it better than maybe you ever had before. “The essence of true romance,” if you will.

The business of music continued to shift to its production and dissemination in the decades following, and that largely stands today. Max Martin, a producer, is among the most successful and influential songwriters in generations; Rihanna’s songwriting summits are storied; Some of the most celebrated music of our time is the realization of production; Rap and electronic music are defined by what an individual can do in the studio, not what happens beyond it.

This is, of course, a tragedy to those who believe music is pure in live performance and most honest when produced “organically.” The cool control of Aja seems an affront on music like it was. But music isn’t what it was, it has never been. The unreality of Steely Dan is like art to art: Tom Scott’s jubilant saxophone solo on “Black Cow,” Michael McDonald’s clarion background vocals on “Peg,” Chuck Rainey’s silvery bassline on “Josie,” each are perfect in their realization, as things never are. “When you smile for the camera,” they sing, “I know I'll love you better.”

—Charlie Kaplan

#146: Jefferson Airplane, "Surrealistic Pillow" (1967)

Where I am is never where I want to be—because I was, and still am, the clichéd, landlocked teenager starving for the capital ‘C’ kind of Culture that seems to evade the Midwest.

I grew up in Council Bluffs, Iowa, a border town right across the Missouri River from Omaha, Nebraska. Omahans affectionately refer us as “Counciltucky.” Council Bluffs is known for its abundant black squirrel population, riverside casinos, and an MTV Teen Mom.

At 15 years old, San Francisco was my mecca, and its music was my way of “surviving” my locale. I was one those insufferable teenagers that glommed onto 1960s/70s psychedelic and folk rock to dull my suburban apathy. I looked like Cousin Itt, and Iron Butterfly’s "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" was in heavy rotation on my playlist.com all-time jams list.

I was wholly obsessed with Haight-Ashbury-era San Francisco, that petri dish of progressive ideas, good music, and art; the resulting counterculture amoebas transformed like liquid light show projections flitting across the walls of the Fillmore. I wanted to dance in that light; I wanted others to know that was my kind of tribe.

My first-ever custom ringtone on my first-ever flip phone was "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)” written by John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas and sung by Scott McKenzie. When I was tasked with a persuasive speech on same-sex marriage rights in the United States, my English teacher docked me points for too much preamble about SF’s watershed role in furthering said rights in California. And in art class, when asked to create two reincarnations of a straight-laced self-portrait, you better believe I made it all about my mecca.

First, self-portraits are hard—but my straightforward self-portrait says everything about 15-year-old Emma. Dead-eyed apathy.

Over the last eight years, I’ve had the privilege of living in six cities in five different states for school and job opportunities. But I haven’t been able to shake my place-based apathy. In my head, I have this idea that somewhere along the way I will find my place and tribe, and everything will fall together in the way Jorma Kaukonen’s acoustic guitar instrumental “Embryonic Journey” is simultaneously a departure and an arrival on Jefferson Airplane’s sophomore album Surrealistic Pillow. I am waiting for my volta.

As a high school senior, California’s out-of-state tuition cost made me quickly realize that that option was out of the question. Instead, I went to the University of South Dakota in Vermillion, SD, population 10,500. My friends and I frequently drove an hour north to Sioux Falls, SD, or 45 minutes south to Sioux City, Iowa for Culture. I also got into the habit of skipping class and driving five hours to Minneapolis for concerts at First Avenue.

Friends I’d made from small-town South Dakota always tried to sell me on the “it’s what you make of it” pitch, but in my mind, I couldn’t make anything of Vermillion. I did, however, scheme up ways to escape Vermillion—like joining the National Student Exchange program to attend an SF university, then realizing the closest option was Hayward; or establishing California residency to attend San Francisco State University, but realizing it would take too long. Instead, I decided to graduate in three years, and I did.

By the time I finally made it to the West Coast, I wound up in the wrong city. Portland, Oregon, mid-Portlandia hype. I set off for Portland and a reporting job the day after my 21st birthday. A week later, under Portland’s St. John’s Bridge, I sobbed over the phone to my mom that I was over it, Portland, the job, the constant rain. The next morning I packed up all my belongings and headed back for the Midwest—but not before cooking two pepperoni Totino’s Party Pizzas for the long drive ahead. It’s easy to confuse hunger for a place with actual appetite.

Later, when attending graduate school in Stillwater, Oklahoma, friends and I commiserated about the lack of Culture often, as we drove an hour east to Tulsa or an hour south to Oklahoma City for concerts, art exhibits, and other recreation. I felt like I was back in Vermillion and I still couldn’t shake the feeling that I hadn’t found my place. But unearthing my cringeworthy self-portraits for this piece helped me realize something.

For the initial assignment, my high school art teacher took a photo of each of my classmates and me and asked us to create a traditional self-portrait. From there, she asked us to think up two reincarnations, or reimaginings, of the original self-portrait that spoke to who we were as individuals. Of course, 15-year-old Emma used the assignment to create two overwrought pieces detailing her SF/Haight-Ashbury obsession.

Enter: The first self-portrait reincarnation—a floral-wreathed and psychedelic-skinned Emma transplanted onto the corner of Haight & Ashbury. Subtlety has never been one of my strong suits.  

Enter: The second self-portrait reincarnation—Emma transformed into a psychedelic butterfly. Fifteen-year-old Emma stole a page from seven-year-old Emma’s art portfolio. Old habits die hard, I guess.

Regardless of the changing setting and Technicolor touches, I am still the same angsty asshole with the chip-on-my-shoulder stare. I am the liquid light show—on a plane of my own choosing—but instead of poring over my surroundings and enjoying the view, I am thrashing and branching into a million arms reaching for elsewhere, the next plane.

And I still haven’t been to San Francisco.

—Emma Murray

#147: Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, "Déjà Vu" (1970)

Side One:

In early memories of my father, he’s crouched over his guitar. His chin juts out, his lips tuck in, his fingers dance along the instrument’s neck. When he starts to strum, he locks onto my eyes. He sings “4 +20.” He sings “Teach Your Children Well.” His steel-string voice rasps, “And so, become yourself, because the past is just a goodbye.” His eyebrows jump on the important words like yourself and goodbye.

I perch cross-legged on the kitchen counter, gazing down and drinking him in. His boat shoes tap against the linoleum. His fingers race along the tight-rope strings.

All these years later, I can still drop myself into that scene, still feel the vibrations of his beat-up Martin hammering within my bones, still hear Nash’s, and Crosby’s, and Still’s, and Young’s lyrics: hardest love songs I’ve ever been sung.

1. Carry On

One morning I woke up, and I knew you were really gone.
A new day, a new way, and new eyes to see the dawn.
Go your way—I’ll go mine and carry on.

The sky is clearing, and the night has cried enough.
The sun, he comes, the world to soften up.
Rejoice, rejoice. We have no choice but to carry on.
 

2. Teach Your Children

I didn’t know that, soon, my father would leave. Before I reached adolescence, he would carry his guitar and attention elsewhere—to other women in other houses in other parts of the world. He’d call me from Florida. Ohio. Sierra Leone. He’d mail me presents from his travels. Sharksteeth. Arrowheads. Gemstones. Once, he sent me a package of smoked salmon he’d caught himself after climbing a glacier in Alaska. I saved these things (except for the smoked salmon) in an old cigar box. I still have them today.

Once a week or so, I’d open the box and breathe him in. I’d trace circles on each treasure with my fingers. I’d hold them in my palms. The arrowheads smelled like his hands after a day of working in the garage: metal, earth, salt. When I had inhaled as much of him as I could bear, I’d put everything back in the cigar box, in the same order I’d taken it out. I’d close the box tight, not wanting the himness to waft away.

Every once in a while, I’d have the chance to see my father in the flesh—hollow voice and boxes transformed to real, live man in pick-up truck, rumbling up our driveway. As soon as he walked in the door, I’d beg, “Sing to me on the guitar.” He’d put on the same hard look of concentration I’d memorized as a child. Just before he began to sing, he’d stare at me so full and fierce I’d have to swallow the urge to cry. And then I’d feel his voice in my sternum, his notes inside my lungs. Close to him as I could be.

On one of these visits, he pushed through the back door carrying two guitar cases. He set them both down on the kitchen linoleum, then pointed to the light brown one. “First guitar I ever had,” he said. “It belonged to your grandfather.”

Before he left that night, he taught me to play the chords: A, D, E, and C. My fingertips ached, red and raw, and I was in bliss. I fell asleep with his old guitar next to me, both of us squeezed into my twin-sized bed.

And you, of tender years,
can't know the fears that your elders grew by.
And so please help them with your youth.
They seek the truth before they can die.
 

3. Almost Cut My Hair

My father was raised Irish Catholic—oldest son of four siblings—in Dublin, Ohio. His father was a high-functioning alcoholic.

When Dad was young, my grandfather prized him. He would drive the two of them all the way to Canada for weekend fishing trips. He’d buy intricate sailboat models and watch approvingly as my father spent hours and hours constructing them. He’d praise my father for the athlete he was becoming, take him out for ice cream when he made the team.

But the obedient boy grew up. In the mid-1960s, my father hit puberty, and his father’s alcoholism transitioned into something frightening. My father grew his hair long. My grandfather belittled him. My father got in a fight with the football coach and quit the team. My grandfather lambasted him. Then, at seventeen, my father got his girlfriend pregnant. My grandfather disowned him.

Dad moved out of the house, dropped out of high school, and married the soon-to-be mother of his child. In nearby Columbus, he found a job as a welder. He taught himself how to provide.

But I'm not, I'm not giving in an inch to fear
'cause I've promised myself this year.
I feel oh, like I owe it, to someone.
 

4. Helpless

By the time I reached middle school, my mother would, once a year or so, put me on a plane and send me off to visit my father wherever he was living—a cabin outside of Denver, a girlfriend’s mansion in Woodside, a sailboat docked in Biscayne Bay. She’d warn me before I left: call me if you feel uncomfortable. Each year she’d offer more clues as to what, exactly, she meant—Sometimes your father isn’t able to be his best self; Your father has a problem, but it absolutely isn’t your fault; Your father drinks too much.

Each year, too, something uncomfortable would happen, but I’d never tell my mother about it. My father would act strange at night. My father would throw a suitcase across a parking lot. My father would fly into a rage at his girlfriend du jour, prompting her to lock herself, with me, in the room where I was staying.

But, also, each year my father would take me on adventures unlike those any of my friends had ever been on. We’d sail across the Gulf Stream and anchor on the shores of uninhabited islands in the Bahamas. We’d drive a camper-laden pick-up truck down a tiny gravel road to an untouched stretch of wilderness on the Lost Coast of California. And, no matter where we roamed, we’d play guitar. He’d show me how to push my fingers down harder into the strings. It hurt, but the notes rang. He’d assure me I’d develop calluses soon, prove it by letting me touch his own hardened skin. Once I learned how to keep rhythm, he’d play lead. His notes would flute over my clumsy chord changes and, together, we’d create honest-to-god music. We’d sing, both of us, in harmony. He’d watch me closer than he ever had, so close it seemed like he was in my brain, knowing before I did that I was about to change chords, that in three more bars, I would begin to sing.

All these years later I have yet to find a more powerful form of connection, with anyone.

Helpless, helpless, helpless.
Baby can you hear me now?
The chains are locked and tied across the door.
Baby, sing with me somehow.
 

5. Woodstock

Well, then can I roam beside you?
I have come to lose the smog,
and I feel myself a cog in something turning.
And maybe it's the time of year.
Yes, and maybe it's the time of man.
And I don't know who I am,
but life is for learning.

Side Two:

1. Déjà Vu

In 2012, I faced one of those tasks that children dread: in the wake of my mother’s passing, I had to go through each item in her house and decide whether to keep, toss, or donate it. I stood in her garage on a steamy August morning and made a deal with myself to at least get through one metal storage shelf before breaking for lunch.

The shelf held dusty Christmas garlands and fraying children’s books. Roller blades I’d long since outgrown. A tennis racket that begged to be restrung. A toolbox that plummeted from my hands and onto the concrete when I tried to slide it off the shelf. And then there was a cardboard box so old it began to crumble in my hands when I pulled back its flaps.

Inside were hundreds of records. Santana. Carole King. James Taylor. The Beatles. The Doors. Fleetwood Mac.

Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young.

I lifted the records out one at a time, telling myself that this meticulousness was necessary for their protection. When I found Déjà Vu, I froze. I ran my fingers over the gold lettering, the band photograph, the raised bumps on the album jacket—rough like calloused skin. The men looked like photographs of my father from the ‘70s—long hair, nonchalant, a dog and a guitar nearby. And the songs—these songs were his songs. These records were his, too. Before I quite understood what was happening, I had begun an old rite, opening the album jacket and breathing it in, searching for bits of my father.

And I feel
like I've been here before.
Feel
like I've been here before.
And you know it makes me wonder
what's going on under the ground.
Do you know? Don’t you wonder
what's going on down under you?
 

2. Our House

When my father met my mother, they were both recently divorced, and they both had young children. She claimed the first thing she noticed about him was his goofy ears, but it was the way he talked about his daughters that got her in trouble. That soft pride and fierce devotion.

They met while she was on vacation in Florida, where my father was living at the time. But soon he moved up to Atlanta to be with her and my brother. They had a small December wedding—my mother wore blue, and my brother and two sisters made up the wedding party.

For a while, it seemed my father had found his happy ending. The new family lived in a four-bedroom brick house on a tree-lined cul-de-sac in Buckhead. On weekends, they went camping in North Georgia, or hollered on the sidelines of my brother’s basketball games. My father owned a recording studio where the Temptations, the Allman Brothers, and Diana Ross cut records. He taught my brother to play guitar, and the two of them filled the bonus room with rhythm and blues. And though my father and mother hadn’t initially planned on more children, they found themselves deeply happy to be expecting a baby girl—me.

Come to me now, and rest your head for just five minutes. Everything is good.
Such a cozy room, the windows are illuminated by the
sunshine through them, fiery gems for you. Only for you.

Our house is a very, very, very fine house with two cats in the yard.
Life used to be so hard.
Now everything is easy 'cause of you.
 

3. 4 + 20

About a year after I was born, my father’s recording studio folded. He had a baby, a pre-teen, and a wife to support, not to mention his older daughters, who lived with their mother in Ohio. So he did what you do when you live on a cul-de-sac in Buckhead. He found a white-collar job as a sales rep and, not long after, started his own sales firm. He provided for his family. He wore the suit and tie. He was miserable.

The same summer that I found his records in the garage, I also found a letter he wrote to my mother, when things between them had begun to fall apart. The paper was pale pink, ripped from a notebook—the perforated edge torn but attached. It was dated June 25th, 1994—four years before they would divorce. Under TOPIC, it read Yukon/You. “Cupcake,” it began:

This may be difficult to read; I am in a raft floating through small rapids & swift current as I write.

Somehow, words become inadequate when trying to describe the scenery here (as they are for describing my feelings for you). Everything is so Big, so Blue, so Spectacular that words just don't seem to be Big enough to describe…… Anyway, this total isolation from society amidst such splendor is peeling away my callouses and cynicism and exposing my inner feelings. And guess what? I find myself thinking about you all the time.

Getting away from the “forest” of society I realize how obsessed I can get w/ my work & how far I have compromised my own values. For this reason you may find it hard to believe when I tell you that you & our children are the most important thing in my life. And as our children are getting older, you become all the more important to me. It’s you who will be my closest companion for the remainder of my/our life. I miss you so much. I wish so much that you could be here to share this experience. Someday I want to come back here w/ you. The river rafting is really quite relaxing. Only the side hikes are strenuous. And the side hikes are optional. That’s all for now. More later.

The letter is unsigned but unmistakably from my father—it bears his penmanship, his depth, his desperation to be different and better. Reading it felt more like remembering than discovery. It reaffirmed what my father had said to me so many times since my mother’s death: that she was and would always be the love of his life.

The two of them never did make it to Yukon.

And he wasn't into selling door to door.
And he worked like the devil to be more.
 

4. Country Girl

When my mother died, I told my father not to come to her funeral. I didn’t think he had the right. It had been years since he’d seen her, and I blamed him for her early passing, as if the stress of the last years of their marriage had somehow planted the cancer that, a decade later, snatched her. And, anyway, he was in the Canary Islands, half a world away.

When I returned to college a few weeks later, I caught myself telling people that now I was an orphan. It felt true—over the last decade, I had mourned the loss of my father over and over again, at the end of each too-short visit or phone call. And though, lately, he’d been reaching out more than ever, he wasn’t exactly available. Captain of a catamaran in the middle of an Atlantic crossing, he’d call from the satellite phone, when he could. I had the number, but the risk of what I’d imagine if he didn’t answer was more than I could bear.

In truth, though, I had not lost him. I was no orphan. Though I’d tell friends and lovers otherwise, our connection had not been severed. It’d been years since we’d seen one another, but every time I played guitar, I wondered what he’d think, how his fingers would flutter out a lead riff, whether he’d complain that I was working in too bizarre a key. Each song I wrote or learned was for him.

But I kept pushing him away. It was easier than chasing a dust trail. When I graduated college, I repeated what I’d said to him before my mother’s funeral: “I really think it’s best for you not to come.”

Too late to keep the change.
Too late to pay.
No time to stay the same.
 

5. Everybody I Love You

To play music well, you have to keep coming back. For a while, you sound awful. Eavesdroppers cringe. Your hands aren’t strong enough to produce a clean sound, and your fingertips burn. When your calluses finally form, your chord changes are messy. You can’t sing and play at the same time, and god forbid someone try to play with you. You’re tempted to give up.

A lot of people have cut my father out of their lives. My mother did it. So did my siblings. For a while, I pretty much did too.

Now, though, I never let a year pass without a visit to my father. I invited him to both of my master’s graduations, and he came, traveling miles and miles to do so. Whenever we are together, we “sing on the guitar.” We’ve played in a tiny tiki bar on the Rio Dulce in Guatemala, on a sailboat docked off the coast of Tobago, and in a blues bar in Coral Gables.

My mother’s sister has asked me, again and again, “How can you forgive him after the way he treated your mother?” I never know what to say. Maybe I’ve forgiven him, and maybe I haven’t, but that part doesn’t seem really to matter. The truth is, despite all the years of separation, estrangement, and yearning, I have a different and deeper relationship with my father than I do with anyone. With him, it’s not about just bopping my head along to a beat. It’s not about passive listening, or quietly singing along. It’s about becoming myself. Our past is full of goodbyes, but we still pick up the phone and say hello. We still find time to create the honest-to-god music that forces me to keep coming back, that won’t stop humming in my bones.

Though your heart is an answer,
I need your love to get me through.
When I tell you I love you,
you can believe that it's true.

—Ellen Louise Ray

#148: Led Zeppelin, "Houses of the Holy" (1973)

She didn’t notice at first. Those songs were everywhere. She heard them all the time, had heard them all her life. They had the familiarity of a parent’s voice, hard to hear musically, and although she knew they were great songs, it was just that they were worn slick from constant play. So the first however-many-times she stopped in for gas or a Gatorade or sometimes one of those not-too-shabby white bread sandwiches the old guy sold on the front counter, she nodded along to “The Rain Song” or “Over the Hills and Far Away,” paid the man, stepped back out into the day, got in her car and drove off.  Maybe the sixth or seventh time was when she noticed. If it hadn’t happened that “No Quarter,” with its heavy vibe, its portentous grinding threat, was playing three times in a row, she might have gone a long time more not noticing. But, finally, she did notice—it was always Zeppelin, always Houses of the Holy playing in this little no-name gas station at the intersection of a county road and a rural highway surrounded by fields with pump jacks rising and falling in the near distance while wind turbines spun their big robot arms farther off on the slopes of the Wichita Mountains and all around.

She found herself in these parts every couple of months checking on well sites for the oil and gas company she worked for, showing up unannounced and unwelcome to run the numbers against the surly reassurances of the guys that worked the sites full time, her gender a constant source of amusement to them. The job’s for a Land Man—man, you understand? No such thing as a Land Woman.

Good one, she’d say. Land Woman, yeah.

So she was usually frustrated when she stopped at the gas station and the old guy usually commented on the fact. His sun-damaged skin would stretch red and hard across his face and he’d look up from his paperback and smile at her, ask her if she wanted him to start a fresh pot of coffee. She’d be on her guard from dealing with the assholes at the well sites and have a minute where his benevolence registered and she could slow down and breathe.

“No, thanks,” she usually said, but this day she said, “You know what? I would. Cup of coffee sounds good.”

His blue eyes widened under the bill of his Dolese ball cap and he pressed his palms together like a chef about to prepare a special meal. “Coffee it is!” he said. He disappeared behind the racks of vape paraphernalia, beef jerky, and ball caps with glittery rhinestone crosses on their fronts before hustling out from around the front counter, heading to the coffee counter, which was toward the back, between the coolers and the white plywood door with a hand-printed sign that said Restroom is for Customers Only!!!

She’d never been there during a song change, but “No Quarter” gave way to “The Ocean” while she stood on the immaculate white linoleum floor and watched his wide, low-slung figure dash an old coffee filter against the edge of the trash can and reach for a clean one. “You’re playing Houses of the Holy,” she said. “The whole album?”

He glanced back over his shoulder at her and beamed approval. “Somebody raised you right.”

“You play it a lot, don’t you? Seems like I always hear it when I come in here.”

“What brings you to this lonesome part of the world so often?” he said. He pressed the red button on the coffee maker and it began to hiss. “You don’t live here, or I’d know you.”

She told him about her job in oil and gas, how she liked driving out in the country, all the alone time, but never knew what to expect at the well site. “Sometimes it’s perfectly fine,” she said. “Sometimes they’re really cool guys. Maybe even some Zeppelin fans.”

He grinned. “If that’s your definition of cool then I guess you’re the real Zeppelin fan.”

“Sure,” she said. “I don’t understand how anyone wouldn’t be, but I’ve noticed how Zeppelin is one of those bands that’s got a boys’ club around them really bad. Guys act amused when I say I like them, like it’s cute. Makes me so mad I could spit. What’s with that attitude? In old concert footage that audience is full of women.”

“I saw Led Zeppelin on the Houses of the Holy tour in ‘73. Saw them in Dallas at the Convention Center one day and then the very next day at the Tarrant County Coliseum in Fort Worth.” He shook his head, whistled. “Two nights in a row. Two great nights in May.”

“You must’ve been a baby. Just a kid!”

He laughed, “Don’t I wish? I was back from Vietnam, did two tours over there. Hell, I was married with a baby of my own on the way.”

“Did your wife go to the shows with you?”

“My lord, yes! That woman had such a thing for Robert Plant it about made me jealous.” He pulled the ball cap from his head and ran excited fingers through thick gray hair. “We had bets about the encore. We both won. She said they’d play ‘Dancing Days’—no way they’re not playing ‘Dancing Days,’ she said. I said ‘The Ocean,’ they gotta. We were both right.” He handed her coffee in a styrofoam cup after fitting a plastic lid over it.

“Two nights in a row!” she said.

“Two nights in a row.” He nodded. “I guess I ought to play something different around here sometimes. I like other stuff. Hell, even if I stuck to Zeppelin I could play their other albums. If somebody like you, who only comes in every now and again is noticing, I might ought to change it up.”

She blew into the hole of the to-go lid and took a tentative sip of coffee. “Play what you like. Suit yourself—this is your place, isn’t it?”

“Mine and hers, yeah.”

“I think you should stick to it,” she said. “If anybody asks about it, just tell them, sorry, The Song Remains the Same.”

He leaned against the counter and took a toothpick out of the top pocket of his plaid shirt. “I like that,” he said. “That’s what I’ll do. And you, too. Stick to it, that is.”

“I sure will. What do I owe you for the coffee?”

He waved away her offer to pay and for awhile they debated what Houses of the Holy meant, with him insisting that Plant had been referring to the big stadiums themselves and her insisting she’d heard he meant human beings—“like we’re all houses of the Holy Spirit, sort of.”

Who could say? “The Crunge” was playing now. They agreed that either interpretation made sense and she told him she’d see him in a couple of months.

—Constance Squires

#150: Bruce Springsteen, "Darkness on the Edge of Town" (1978)

 I have never been able use “What’s your hometown?” as a security question because my answer changes depending on who happens to be asking. The irrefutable facts are as follows: I was born in Philadelphia to parents who lived just over the Ben Franklin Bridge in South Jersey, where I spent the first three years of my life before the Shipyard closed and my father’s job was transferred to Norfolk and we moved to a Southeastern Virginia town bordered by the ocean and a swamp and endlessly multiplying subdivisions, where my family still lives and I lived until I went off to college.

I have learned in adulthood to give whichever answer seems closest, geographically, and most appropriate for the context, a toss up in Washington, D.C. but simple when on business trips in Philly proper or Wilmington. At college, in a smaller town in less-South less-East Virginia, I would tell most people I was from the town where I’d spent the last fifteen years of my life—or rather one of the two more recognizable cities which cornered it into the North Carolina border, because other people were from that general area, too, and it was easy to bond over something like a knowing a pseudo-famous local haunt or notorious speed trap during a time when so much that should have been recognizable and relatable about myself seemed unnameable, unidentifiable, impossible.

But, when I was growing up in that Southeastern Virginia town I would later claim, I would tell people that I was from Philadelphia, because the perception of Philadelphia was less odious than the perception of New Jersey, and being from somewhere else was more interesting than being from where we were. Nevermind that my memories up unto age three are limited to the likes of birthday party decorations and riding in the moving truck and are scattered at best, or that I spent little time in the city itself when we’d visit when I was older, or that I truly did know more about the curves of the winding, hilly Turnersville roads than I did about the ancient intricacy of Philly’s streets; I had my mother, a proud, bonafide Philadelphia native, and her passion for the place from whence she hailed, the stories she told to keep it and the version of her that grew up there alive. In their vividness and her adoration, those memories and the knowledge they entailed were as good as my own.

At risk of publically aging her, my mother is a child of the Disco Days. Exceptions afforded for the stories about helping her best friend stalk Lee Mazili or working double shifts in department stores, most of the tales Sharon shared from her youth as I was growing up were about her summers at the Shore—particularly the music she’d dance to while clubbing. Her heyday coincided with the heyday of the genre’s greats—Donna Summer, Gloria Gaynor, Diana Ross, on and on—and her younger brother even spent many of his weekends partying at THE Studio 54 in New York City.

In her youth, my mother found herself in an incredible place in an incredible time, a cosmic stroke of luck placing a young woman on a glorious cultural horizon so mesmerizing it practically begged you to dance along its ledges. My mother wears her disco fandom as a badge of honor with the same pride she imbues when announcing she is from Philadelphia, bolstering her authentic cred by spurning the other famous acts and genres of the ‘70s. I can’t remember her listening to any classic rock beyond Queen (the same Lee Mazili-adoring friend also loved Freddie Mercury), and she openly and publicly despises the likes of Fleetwood Mac. The only exception to her ire was Bruce Springsteen, hometown hero and raucous heartthrob. Perhaps it was birthright, being from South Philly and vacationing to Wildwood, but my mother loved the Boss; she’s just as quick to profess this as she is to note that she was an anomaly amongst her friends for her fanaticism, eager to tell you about falling in love in the early days after Born to Run was first released and he was running small club tours.

As moms are wont to do, mine tried her darndest to pass on as much as much good as she could, including her love of the music she grew up with, to her kids. Car rides to school were perpetually scored by the likes of the Four Seasons and the Shangri-Las; we decorated our Christmas tree to the musical stylings of the Sal-Soul Orchestra. When I was nine, and we were visiting my grandmother in south Jersey, we spent a whole summer evening in her kitchen, table pushed aside but ironing board standing, trying halfheartedly and clumsily as my mother passionately tried her hand at teaching my brother and me the Hustle, Bob Pantano’s Saturday Night disco radio show crackling over our grumbles and bumps into the furniture. Like so many other lessons she tried to teach and love she sought to give, her enthusiasm for disco’s golden oldies was, at the time, not something either of her children had inherited. Neither was her fanaticism for the Boss, not yet.

I used to tell people that I found and fell for Bruce through my own musical discoveries. I fell in love with Bruce Springsteen heading back to my mother’s house in a sleepy suburb at two a.m. one New Year’s Day when “Mary’s Place” was the first song I heard played on the staticky local radio, blood rushing with the headiness that comes only from being with people you love in the place where you became yourself and being reminded of it all over again. I fell in love with Bruce Springsteen caterwauling along to “Atlantic City” in a cramped kitchen of my friends, our voices cracking as if we understood the town and the time just as Bruce had sketched them. I fell in love with Bruce Springsteen analyzing the jubilant ownership of self-determination in “Rosalita” late at night, and I fell in love again when, years later, I would tell my mother “closets are for hangers; winners use the door.”  I fell in love with Bruce when I was desperately trying to fall in love with myself. I fell in love with Bruce Springsteen alone, in moments of reflection when this man from a place I never lived but claimed as my own sang about his longings, often unspeakable, and his successes, small and all the more tangible for it. I fell in love with him, and the music, and the person I thought I was when I was listening to his music—this specifically named protagonist, this character so anchored to place, this beautiful disaster with a beginning, middle, and end in their four corners.

At least, this is the myth I tell myself, the musical Hometown I offer when asked. The irrefutable facts are as follows: Bruce Springsteen was likely a prominent musical figure throughout my childhood and early teen years, and I know my mother mentioned having seen him before I would have found it cool to have done so; I adopted Bruce because it’s an easy leg up if you’re from New Jersey, and I say I’m from New Jersey when I need a leg up with my love of Bruce, and it gives me a sense of place and history when I so often willfully ignore the ones I’ve been given; when a mentor with whom I’d lost touch passed away, I spent my afternoon champagne drunk and lying in bed as I listened to the album version of “Racing in the Street” on an hours-long loop, knowing Bruce’s lyrics were an adequate representation of the contemporary poetry she so championed and that felt, somehow, like an appropriate outsourcing of mourning; part of my love of Bruce, so achingly, seems to be the shared passion of every person I love’s love of Bruce, from writers I admire and will never meet, to those friends with whom I group chat as we speak, to those mentors who loved me so fiercely I couldn’t help but push them away, to the mother whose passion and so wholly-lived self has given me so much I cannot bear to look its brightness directly in the face so I pretend it doesn’t exist at all.

Darkness on the Edge of Town is a turning point in my mind for the Boss, the album a nod to his explosive and bombastic success with Born to Run and straight arrow toward the bleaker, less hopeful ruminations he’d soon release with Nebraska and The River. On Darkness, Bruce sees where he came from and where he is going and finds a perfect sense of self within the two, understanding that no version of a person can be based on just one half of the equation. This is no more perfectly exemplified than on his expertly deployed four corners—the joy of an open road on “Badlands” is reduced to fear and desperation in the wake of that very same road on “Racing in the Street,” and the defiance and ownership of the self on “The Promised Land” muddled as external pressures are realized on the eponymous album closer. He gives beginnings, middles, ends, yes—but he also gives us people complicated in their interim incompleteness, a personal history and origin created as the song goes.

I still waffle when asked about my literal hometown, but here are the irrefutable facts: when I was twenty-one, a few weeks after my birthday, I saw Bruce Springsteen play a giant amphitheater with my mother in my small Southeastern Virginia town, myself home for barely a day to make the show, where Clarence Clemons’s nephew subbed in for the late saxophonist and Bruce made a big deal about how this was Clarence and Jake’s hometown show, and how he, Bruce, remembered fondly playing shows just up the road in the early days, in the days when my mom, too, was fondly listening to him play small shows a few hours north when she was in her early twenties and feeling like the entire possibility of the world was dancing right in front of her, where she commented on how old I suddenly was and how young I simultaneously seemed to be, where Bruce and the E Street Band played “Badlands” and “Darkness on the Edge of Town” directly after each other, closing the corners, making the origin and the destination the exact same point.

—Moira McAvoy

#149: Santana, "Santana" (1969)

“Soul Sacrifice,” the closing argument on Santana’s 1969 self-titled debut is one of my favorite songs of all time. It features brilliant guitar and keyboard work, an iron-spine of a bassline, all pushed ever forward by some of the best percussion you’ll find on a song from the ‘60s. A terrific listen. But I’d ask that, if you’re going to take six minutes out of your day to experience this song, that you do so with a movie.

I’ll present two examples, the first, probably the song’s most famous performance, at the 1969 Woodstock Festival, later released in the 1970 documentary of same name. Check it out here.

That drummer’s name is Michael Shrieve. He was 20. Here, he plays maybe the only drum solo worth watching. His drumming is the rider and the ride itself. He looks like at any moment he is going to laugh or cry, stop or start. It says a lot that on a stage full of so much talent the camera continues to return to his changing expressions. I assume he is on drugs. I hope he is. It makes his use of a traditional grip all the more compelling. This ain’t your grandfather’s drummer. But actually, this is your grandfather’s drum grip.

I don’t know if I would love this song without the footage from Woodstock. When I first saw it I was an idiot punk who held most ‘60s music in contempt. I’m not a punk anymore. I’m still mostly an idiot. And much of the music from the ‘60s was awful. But Shrieve’s obvious talent and crazed look broke through. It is incredible, that on a stage where Carlos Santana is losing part of his mind, a kid kind of stole the show.

The second sequence is from David Fincher’s 2007 film Zodiac. Watch it here. The song is edited. Basically, they cut it in half. It sits behind dialogue and ambient sound from the streets of San Francisco, pulsing.

“Soul Sacrifice” backs a sequence depicting two seperate arrivals. First, cartoonist Robert Graysmith take his kid to school, rides the elevator, gets coffee etc., before finding his desk and heading to his morning editorial meeting. The second arrival is the delivery of a letter. First to the mail room, then the sorting table and upstairs. That letter is from a serial killer. It is the first of several letters addressed to the Chronicle by the Zodiac killer. The delivery date of the letter is July 31, 1969. That is 1 month prior to the commercial release of “Soul Sacrifice” and only 2 weeks prior to Woodstock.

The real-life timing of the album release and the letter are mere coincidence. Fincher’s choice of soundtrack for his dramatization is not. And it feels especially poignant to hear that music and its menacing throttle placed with a historical event so near its conception. Here, again, the drums are the showcase. Ambient sound drops off toward the end of the clip as we watch a message from a psychopath ride atop a huge pile of letters bound for editorial. I love the image of the sorting table, with letters being picked and pulled, designated and routed, while Shrieve solos in the background. The people moving parcels along like an assembly line.

The sequence adds a visual cue for everything I enjoy about the music. There is that endless push forward, seen through the frantic workings of a newspaper in the ‘70s. The drum solo is given its own brief visual counterpart. And the menace created by the song title “Soul Sacrifice” is echoed both by Graysmith’s alienation from his children and coworkers but also by the letter itself being from a serial killer. The visuals and the music work in concert to foreshadow the tragedies to come.

I don’t mean to imply that “Soul Sacrifice” or the album it comes from can’t stand on their own. They are both terrific pieces of music. But for me, I don’t think I understood how powerful this stuff was until I saw it coupled with images that enhanced that power. When I listen to the song now I can latch on to a larger context and let my mind wander from there. And when that solo hits, I know to airdrum like a maniac.

Don’t underestimate Santana’s self-titled debut. It is easy to write off the entire enterprise by simply humming four bars of “Smooth,” his mega-hit collaboration with Rob Thomas. But in 1969, Santana, both man and band, were placing their culture’s mark on “The Sixties”. They made a powerful, unique record which was also a statement about their identity and culture. If you don’t feel it right away, watch the clips above and then return to “Soul Sacrifice” with renewed context. It is an astonishing piece of music.

—Steven Casimer Kowalski

#151: Arcade Fire, "Funeral" (2004)

Neon Bible is my favorite Arcade Fire album, but I think Funeral, their first, most elemental album, the one that launched them into the world, is still their best. I just don’t—can’t, really—listen to it anymore. Funeral might be one of the last albums I listened to on an actual CD, the last time I thought of an album as an object, rather than sound waves that just existed in the ether. A friend in high school had burned it for me, personalizing it with her handwriting and doodles on the silver disc, but it took some time for me to snap it out of its sleeve and hunker down with it. Who knows what finally causes something to spark?

This was in 2007, a little over two years after Funeral had been released. I was a freshman in college and very unhappy, though I didn’t know why. Sadness is not very interesting to write about, and even less interesting to experience. But whatever I was experiencing felt less like sadness than a visitation, a presence which also signified an absence: of feeling, of appetite, of self. It was as if I had been replaced by a stranger. I could feel her inside of me: cold as a fish, unknowable. I was afraid this person was actually who I’d been all along.

The feeling could come at any time. Some days, I was able to get through my classes just fine; I could even manage to feel excited about the roots of words in intro to linguistics, or an essay we were reading in lit crit. Other days I couldn’t concentrate at all—I’d feel, at random it seemed, devastated, as if something had reached into me and knocked all the glasses off the table. When this happened, I’d put my pencil in my mouth, biting down so hard the paint would chip. I did this so I wouldn’t break down crying. Ah. Uh. Oh, my linguistics professor uttered at the whiteboard, demonstrating glottal stops. She wore bright floral blouses, and was the nicest professor I had. To me this signified she was okay, she had made it: Here is an adult, I thought, who is happy. It is possible. I ground the pencil with my teeth. The origin of this feeling, unlike etymology, didn’t seem to exist: it would just descend, like a cloth soaked with chloroform.

At lunch or dinner I’d take two bites of my sandwich and feel full—and not just full, but constantly nauseated, not with sick but with dread. When it got really bad, I’d call my mother at odd times of the day just to hear the sound of her breathing, the sound of her listening even though I didn’t have anything to say. What’s wrong, she’d ask, and I’d have to tell her, I don’t know. She told me to count the days the feeling would last; it would subside a little after a week. But it always came back.

I walked through campus listening to Funeral on repeat. It was winter, and, in my memory, only nighttime. The shadows of the empty trees shifted like kaleidoscopes over the brick walkways, and I watched my own shadow flicker through them. I was young enough that time still felt slow, and though there’s almost nothing I miss about this period in my life, I do miss that. The days dripped by.

Once, I walked so close behind someone that I could read, in the dark, the name hand-stitched on her backpack: ANGIE. She had a name. She seems happy, I thought for no reason—I was always thinking this, desperately, of other people—other than that she was someone who had enough energy and confidence to embroider her name to her objects. But then I thought every stranger held some kind of secret to being alive, one I did not have.

Arcade Fire called their first album Funeral because three of the band members had recently lost loved ones. I had lost no one, except maybe whoever I was. But no one I knew had died. I had not been hurt or traumatized. Everyone I knew was fine. There was no reason for me to feel this way, which made it even worse.

When I was sixteen and in physical therapy to recover from a broken leg, the PT would hook me up to an electric stimulation machine. I’d pulse the muscles in my calf, and, if I flexed them hard enough, the machine would give my leg a small zap. When I was able to shock myself, that’s how I knew the muscles were getting stronger. Similarly, that first year in college, I gave myself little tests: I tried to imagine futures for myself as an adult, from the practical to the fantastical, so I could see if I had the ability to look forward to something: living in a Manhattan loft with my best friends! Writing a book! One day making enough money to buy groceries or clothes without worrying! Renting an art studio in a cottage in the woods! But I felt empty every time I drew one up to inspect. Nothing sparked. That’s what scared me: that I couldn’t even make myself happy in my imagination. I had completely forgotten the sensation. Don’t have any dreams, don’t have any plans, Winn Butler trilled into his microphone, though he sounded more triumphant than scared or confused.

In linguistics, we watched a documentary about dialects and speech patterns in demographics all across America. I remember that day was a better day for me. I could actually watch it, could pay attention and take notes. The documentary opened with different people in different regions reciting Mary had a little lamb, it’s fleece was white as snow.

Hearing the repetition of the phrase was when I first realized—oh—glottal stop—words were, at their most elemental, sounds. I always knew this in some basic way. As a child learning to read, I’d repeat words to myself until they dissolved from sense into pure noise, nonsense: nose nose nose nose nose knows knows knows or even lena lena lena lena lena lena lena lena lena lena—until the meaning of who I was started to disappear beneath the chant, or at least shift away from name, like an animal slithering under a rock to hide from the light—but I had never articulated it to myself.

That words are just sounds is completely obvious, and it’s also not the entire truth—nothing is “just” any one thing; words are also images, signs, interiority, meaning. But in this one part of the truth, we can manipulate or modify the sounds to signify who we are or how we feel; off the page we don’t have to rely on diction or syntax alone. This is what Arcade Fire is so good at doing throughout Funeral, screaming, I’ll guess we’ll just have to adjust, dragging out the adjust and transforming it into a long wail, turning both yearning and regret into song and a call to arms. Making art out of a feeling. I made not have had a source for my sadness but the album gave me a sonic container. It turned the shapeless into shapes, into sound. If not a source, I at least had a bucket.

I could not do this. Even now, I’m failing.

I didn’t call the feeling depression because it never lasted more than two weeks, which, after googling one night, I found were the imposed dimensions of depression. I never felt I had the right to the diction. What does it mean not to have a root or a word for something—some kind of cause to point to? I had only the sound this feeling made as it tumbled its way through my body. When I listen to the organ opening Funeral, with its slow rain of piano falling on top of it, I can hear this sound again. I remember, if not the feeling exactly, the girl who was caught inside it.

I looked forward to going back home for the mid-semester break because I thought it would re-click something in me, adjust all my gears back—after all, it was the same house I’d grown up in; I thought of it as me.

That did not happen. When I went home, it was still my home. I checked everything, all the things I never thought about until I left—the woven carpet in the living room, the cupboards with their little cream knobs, the white patch of chipped paint in the kitchen, the pillows on my bed. But there was now a gap between the house and myself. My house no longer held me. Where was I? I had no language for this disconnect. I’m sure I saw old friends, went to our old haunts and favorite diners, read books, but I don’t remember any of that. I only remember sitting in my old bedroom, listening to Funeral on repeat until it became another house.

I did not yet know that several months later, over the summer, I’d start to feel okay again. I didn’t yet know about Neon Bible, or that I’d start drawing and writing again, or that I’d be able to eat whole meals. I did not know any of this, not only because the rest of my life hadn’t yet happened, but because I thought the feeling was final; that my life was effectively over. I didn’t yet know that feelings lift and part, or that Funeral’s juxtaposition of grief and wonder offered me a pathway toward what life could look like: not only unbearable sadness or unmitigated joy, but a little bit of both, at all times, and in turns.

I still know every word, every chord, every inflection and gasp in Butler and Chassagnes’ voices, even though I haven’t listened to Funeral in over a decade—it makes me too sad. All these songs are now more memory than present experience, so that when I listen to Funeral I’m not getting dressed for work or cooking dinner in my apartment as a thirty-year-old, but walking through a dark campus, imagining a blank future: imagining me, whoever I’d be, now. I can feel this eighteen-year-old breathing on my neck. Which makes me wonder how much I still know of her? Is she just waiting to come back? What would she think of me now?

Yet I don’t want to rid this album of that sadness, the emotional heaviness. I don’t want to infuse it with new memories. Why can’t I stand to forget my most miserable self? Instead, I want to dance with her to “Rebellion (Lies),” sing: here’s the moon, it’s alright, here’s the sun, it’s alright. I want us both to constantly step into the future, together, one beat spilling into the next, whirling around the wide and empty room.

—Lena Moses-Schmitt

#152: The B-52's, "The B-52's" (1979)

It happened, and it happens.

Again and again, the cosmic thing where centers of gravity change, gymnasium orbits realign.

First, there’s 1, whose fuel is worry. To skip might be painting a large target. Might start people talking. Which they already are, 1 is reasonably certain. Whispers, gestures. Names. How do they know? How can they know, when 1 is so racked with doubt and uncertainty? The hope that showing up will turn the knob a little to the right is the motivation, but it doesn’t offset the drudgery of sugar being poured, prayers lived on. God, it’s all so boring.

And across the way is 2, who feels the same and makes what are hopefully both knowing and longing glances through the dancing core, to no avail.

3 and 4 and 5 hang out in AV during the day and construct elaborate fantasy scenarios in a basement thereafter, rolling oddly-shaped dice and hooting, a life on paper to offset so much daily dread. 6 plays a sport, so they assume they’re not in the same league, but 6 only plays because of parental pressure, doesn’t like a single member of the team, and would much rather be slaying kobolds.

7 has terrible acne, can’t help but pick at it, squeeze it, make it worse.

8 plays tuba. Loves it, even though it takes up a whole seat on the bus. And even though no one would sit in the same seat even sans tuba, the whole thing becomes a dog and pony show, to be  handled with as much humor as possible. To do otherwise might make things worse. 9 is along, a trombone player with much the same problem, except more Tommy gun jokes. 10 plays French horn and hangs with the two of them, feeling like a third wheel inside this smaller constellation, a moon of a moon. But something is better than nothing.  Just ask 11, over there, alone, who works so hard on flute despite all the snickers and the odd Jethro Tull joke only to be drowned out, and 12, who aspires to play an actual drum someday instead of rapping out patterns on the institutional woodblock.

13 wears a lift in one shoe because of a birth defect, walks funny.

14 loves photography. Has an independent study. Takes photos of trees, mostly, landscapes. Wishes people would take a moment to really see what’s around them instead of rushing all the time. Wonders if the darkroom chemicals that saturate mornings are an aroma or a stink, keeping people away. Is resigned that maybe it’s the latter.

15 and 16 and 17 and 18 and yes, even 19 just came because there’s still too much snow on the ramp. (Poor 20 is at home in bed with the flu.)

21 wears black on the outside because of feelings on the inside. 22 supplies the hairspray and the Cure’s discography, in a constant but friendly clash with 21’s ardent Morrissey fervor.

23 snuck in some Boone’s Farm, to the delight of 24. A furious makeout session ensues under the bleachers. (And yes, there will be berry-flavored puking later, but you knew that.)

25 has never been to one of these things before. Neither has 26. After this one they’ll blow off dances as lame, get their licenses, and take turns driving around. The frost heave atop the hill out by the dairy swells when it’s cold, they’ll discover, and when they drive fast enough they’ll be gloriously untethered, airborne for a half-second. Better than another night of TV, or standing around the gym. Mostly.

27 through 34 run cross-country, dream of stretching out time, marking it faster.

35 has filled two and a half notebooks with a story of a land called Xandar, where space armies vie for resources. 36, in the same shop class, hipped 35 to a BBS where sci-fi enthusiasts gather. Their heads are huddled together talking about 37, also an aspiring author on the BBS, who they have no idea is in the gym with them. 37 has a pen name, you understand, and a deep fascination with Xandar.

38’s father drinks, and proclaimed, loudly, that there would be no goddamn dance before he passed out. 38 is pretty sure he’ll still be snoring on the couch surrounded by empties when it wraps up in a few hours.

39 is creeped out by one of the chaperones but came anyway. 40 didn’t.

41’s thrifty grandmother is in charge of back-to-school shopping, which means hitting thrift stores. 41’s pretty bored with the same old same old and chooses noisy Brady Bunch synthetics over second-hand Esprit. 41 hangs with 42, who has discovered the shock value and convenience of a shaved head.

43 has a big nose.

44 wanted to act in the drama club, but found the enterprise dull. Front of the house, anyway. The lights and the sound provide endless fascination—and, 44 will later find, a far easier way in. It’s no surprise that 44 hangs with 45, whose high art aspirations were similarly diverted by the chance to create and paint sets.

46 skips like a record when stressed, mutters.

47 wants to be a comedian and devours newspapers in search of material. 48 is maybe a little too happy, always laughing, and is a perfect foil. 49 glowers at each joke.

50 is an only child with big glasses. Listens to music on headphones on the bus to drown out the taunts. Reads a lot.

51 and 52 are in the center, but hate their friends. Cannot stand their superficiality, their judgment.

In that unfolding moment, the kids clustered in the center of the room, with their good bone structure and fast metabolisms and builds and clothes were the center of gravity.

It’s only later that the 52 realize that what sets them apart—what they often see as affliction—will propel them, blazing like so many comets.

Listen as the telltale guitar inverts the natural order: a unifying recognition even as a blankness of ignorance spreads.

Shimmying and gesticulating, pantomiming each sea creature during the breakdown.

It brings them all together, if only for a song.

To the center.

They feel out of place, but there are others like them.

Thousands, in basements, AV clubs, bedrooms, on the periphery of so many gyms.

So we can see the ramifications, the long-term.

But the specifics are different in every scenario.

What are yours?

Can you name them today?

—Michael T. Fournier

#153: A Tribe Called Quest, "The Low End Theory" (1991)

In the summer of 2011, amid a public feud between A Tribe Called Quest’s leader, Kamaal “Q-Tip” Fareed, and the group’s documentarian, Michael Rappaport, I attended a festival screening of the film at the heart of the beef. I didn’t know Malik “Phife” Taylor, the group’s other lyricist, would be there, but I knew he’d picked a side, and that side was Rappaport’s.

Once I saw the film it was easy to see why. Unlike Tribe’s discography, which can at times feel like The Q-Tip Show featuring Other People, Rappaport’s crisp, cool-looking Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest grants equal time to both Q-Tip and Phife, positioning the two often-dueling childhood friends as a point/counterpoint for the group’s rise through the hip-hop 2.0 era of the late eighties and nineties. On one side: Tip’s controlled, not-inaccurate, I-willed-this-to-be take. On the other? Phife’s loose, who-knows-how anything-happens version, which is riddled with curious contradictions and counterfactuals. Of the two, Phife revels most in being heard. Where Tip is eager to show the careful, sonic building blocks of tracks like “Can I Kick It?” and “Lyrics to Go,” Phife wants it known that he wrote his now-classic verses for the now-classic album The Low End Theory while riding the F train, late to that day’s recording session. Tip positions himself as a slave to perfection (no one disagrees), leading the genre into artful, “lofty” territory. Phife confesses at one point, unconvincingly, that he could “do with or without” hip-hop, happy in his second career as a youth basketball recruiter. At a Rock the Bells reunion show in 2008, Tip rips his partner on stage for questionable maintenance of a diabetic condition that will, in eight years, claim Phife’s life. Months later, he wishes Phife private support, via text, before a high stakes kidney transplant. It goes on like this for the whole runtime: two lifelong friends oscillating between trolling one another then deeply regretting it.

But Phife’s the clear emotional core of the film, his touching, sometimes infuriating vulnerabilities on display, and he was, upon the film’s release, happy to indulge that result. He was the only one. By the time I saw it, Q-Tip had already teamed up with groupmates Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Jarobi White to disavow the effort and publicly slam Rappaport’s billing practices. Phife showed up alone to the Sundance premiere then broke down in tears about the rift, maybe for an audience of one. “We’re 40 now,” he said, “and it’s time for [Q-Tip] to realize, recognize, and enjoy the benefits of what we worked for our whole lives.”

Five months into this entrenched friendship conundrum, the Q&A portion of my summer 2011 festival screening kicked off. Phife was composed onstage next to a shifting Rappaport. He was quick-witted and fair with the crowd, a flat-brim Orioles cap shadowing his eyes. Minutes in, the mic fell to a lanky guy in his early twenties, someone too young to have followed Tribe’s success in real time like I and half the audience had; who’d likely come to his fandom through an older brother’s trickle-down enthusiasm, or something like it. “Can you tell me,” he said, fueled with the tiring overconfidence of youth, “why everything Q-Tip does now is so goddamn wack?”

The crowd booed. We knew the pettiness he was after and moved to shoo it away. But Phife took that question seriously, and evaluated his old friend’s post-Tribe work. He liked Amplified, he said, Tip’s first solo album, then said the same about the efforts that followed. He rapped a bit of “Vivrant Thing,” easing a complex moment for everyone.

“You have to understand,” he said to the kid, “that’s my man.”

Phife sounded firm when he said it, but also sad and futile. What could someone this young know about how strangely our longest friendships can age? How could he know what it meant to maintain this stubborn, peculiar alchemy for so long? Phife could only put his hands up to this kid, then to us, surrendering to a sideways, pained allegiance to an old, busted kind of friendship that I’ve only now started to understand.

The Low End Theory is A Tribe Called Quest’s best album—you can either agree with this statement or be wrong—due to the blueprint it lays out for friendship at peak harmony. Tip and Phife share such a sharp, easy rhythm throughout. They tout their friendship’s history and bind their enthusiasms. They’re smart. They’re funny. They’re dicks. They have quippy verses about Skypagers and Chemical Bank and Dr. Pepper. They share in-jokes and insights, a hidden twin language for the young adulthood I was barreling toward when I bought it in 1991. It came in a CD longbox and my eighth grade friends and I enjoyed the album communally, as it seemed meant to be enjoyed. We asked each other you on point? and they assured us, yes, they were, all the time. Low End felt, also, like a careful argument for the strength of a good, loyal crew. Almost the whole last minute of “Jazz (We Got)” is a roll call for various interweaving, friendly factions of hip-hop. Q-Tip spends half of the four minute runtime on “Verses from The Abstract” detailing how Busta Rhymes appears in his dreams, or shouting out compatriots like Brand Nubian, and Big Daddy Kane, and Ali Shaheed Muhammad, and fourteen other people—among them, of course, Phife (twice). “Scenario,” Tribe’s entry in the “early 90’s cross-pollinated super crew track” category is also that category’s all-time best example (again, agree or be wrong) because it plays like an audio version of the very moment an evening with close friends slips into the sublime, shifting the weight of the air, transforming it into a lasting, joyful memory.

What does it mean, then, that The Low End Theory’s prime friendship architects fell so loudly out of favor with one another, for so long? Their brief reunion shortly before Phife’s death in 2016 to make We got it from Here… Thank You 4 Your service came a half-decade after Michael Rappaport aired Tribe’s dirty laundry. The album is fantastic, but its function as a side-door eulogy sadly clouds any true attempt to articulate what may have fed the rift. Tip’s admission on “Lost Somebody” that “I would treat you like a little brother that would give you fits / Sometimes overbearing though I thought it was for your benefit,” feels at once too effacing and too eager, a regret couched lightly in a defense. Phife, in that 2011 documentary, gives it his best shot. “I can’t ever put a finger on Q-Tip even though we’ve known each other longer than anybody in this world outside of our respective families,” he says to start the film, and Rappaport comes back to that quote at the end of the film, seeming stuck on the idea, repeating it—perhaps frustrated, after so long, with its stunning resistance to clarity.

I’m 40 now, too, and too many of my longest, closest friendships have grown inexplicably toxic, lodged, like Phife’s and Tip’s was, between acrimony and allegiance. I still have strong, healthy friendships that stretch back to my teen years and before, and I’m thankful for them daily. But there is also my close friend from childhood who, during an otherwise pleasant text exchange in our early thirties, threatened to punch my teeth down my throat if he ever saw me again. And there’s my other old, good friend who, a few years back, invited me out for a night of overdue catch-up then confronted me, in a way that seemed planned, about how cruel I’d always been to him and his family. I discovered recently that the best man at my wedding thirteen years ago got married a few years back and, to this day, has not told me.

To be fair, I’ve blocked and trolled and cut off good friends from my youth, too. I’ve hurt people I care about. I’ve done callous things with longtime allegiances. I’m aware of my contributions and the bruised, idiot logic that led me to make them. But I’m no longer interested in the unsolvable, useless debate of who may be at fault in a toxic relationship. What about the toxicity itself? It feels so independent, hovering in the space between my most volatile friendships, especially my oldest ones; this half-formed, poisonous thing that begs for an old friend and I to link up so that it can activate then punish us both. How to describe it? I feel so incapable in the grips of that toxicity, pulled—against my deepest wishes—towards hurtful impulses. Whatever destroys that person is the only thing I can do, and I feel that same, reticent pull toward destruction from the other side. We become two people succumbing to the same terrible social gravity, apologizing and meaning it while, for no reason, we watch ourselves slowly, painfully brand one another. What’s the point, in the face of that smothering force, of determining who did what?

Instead, I’ve been wondering about the evolution of that kind of toxicity, and what might keep us so obedient to the concept of our friendship, despite very apparent failures. Three years after he made the threat to knock my teeth out, my friend and I apologized and reconciled (again, through text, where our conversations have stayed since). For a while, I thought it might be a result of stale loyalty. Time put in. But that feels easy, too bound by cliché. Our friendship did, at one time, work extremely well. It taught me how to take life less seriously and draw strong bounds; how to smoke cigarettes and play spades; that it was OK to be cynical. My friendship with the old friend who confronted me about my cruelty taught me, ironically, a functional, real-world kindness; that I could, at times, trade my cynicism for generosity and get a better result. My best man at my wedding helped me, while young, to believe I had more worth than my harshest family entanglements led me to believe, and I hope at many points I did the same for him. There was, believe me, a good intoxication to these friendships then, a natural call and response that enriched us both. You on point? All the time.

And yet, consider the degree of difficulty for old friends like Q-Tip and Phife, for whom that era of good intoxication was recorded. The Low End Theory is, in this way, a bittersweet case study in it, forged on vinyl and burned onto a CD in 1991 that was put in a longbox and sold, at National Record Mart, to an eighth grader. It got ranked on best-of lists and turned into mp3s. You can dial it up and stream it with a good connection.

I suspect, for them, the hard evidence of that once-good time falsely advertised the possibility of returning to it. I wonder if Q-Tip and Phife kept spiraling, horribly, in their broken rotation year after year because an effort as good as The Low End Theory tricked them, cruelly, into thinking some grand relationship reversal was possible. Unlike mine, their friendship lacked the lone benefit of an evolving toxicity: a clear-eyed view of what it’s become. They lacked the luxury of the present truly replacing the past; of getting sad, remorseful texts from someone who once threatened to assault you and deciding, without malice or love, to wait days to respond tepidly, if at all. I suspect neither Tip nor Phife knew the privilege of dialing up the Facebook page of someone they once knew as generous and ruled by an infectious kindness, only to see a stream of Blue Lives Matter memes and James O’Keefe videos, or vlog posts recorded by angry men in their parked cars, railing about women. There is a seismic, private clarity to these moments that Kamaal and Malik’s widely recorded past may have denied them access to. Maybe they never got to understand, in any pure way, what I am beginning to understand now: that when the best man in your wedding declines to inform you about his, there is no good era in that friendship to return to. You are both here now, and only here.

—Mike Scalise

#154: Howlin' Wolf, "Moanin' in the Moonlight" (1959)

 I

They say "Wolfman" Willie Stevens went down to the crossroads just like Robert Johnson had done so he could make a deal with the devil, and that the devil put a touch of the wolf in him. They say that's where that famous howl of his come from.

See, at the start of every Wolfman show, they would turn down all the lights and you could hear these voices whispering—like somebody talking in tongues—then there'd be this deep, gutbucket moan that musta come from somewhere dark, wet, and way low down. The moan would get louder and louder until it turned into this kinda wail that you could only understand if you'd picked cotton in the Mississippi sun all day for short pay, or if your people had. That same wail would keep right on stirring longer than seemed possible for any human voice. It would build up until the room would start to shake and then, just when it felt like the whole raw earth might open up and swallow everybody, Wolfman would let loose this howl so loud and so full that if you didn't before, you suddenly knew how it felt to be hunted. Then a single spotlight would shine and there'd be Wolfman, standing tall and just off center stage.

His suit always hung loose on him but it couldn't hide the thick muscles of his back, arms, and shoulders, or his massive hands that felt like putting yours inside of a baseball mitt when he greeted you. He'd start tapping his hand against the beefy meat of his thigh until Brother Benny picked up the rhythm and then the beat would kick in. And I'm not talmbout just any ole tip tap now, but that real blue, real true groove, that lean, smokestack-steaming-mean thump. The bass, guitar, and keys would start chugging along just behind it and Wolfman would just let the rhythm cook until the music got down into your hips and hind parts. Once he knew it was really getting good to you, he'd pull his harp from the left pocket of his waistcoat and commence to blowing. Nobody really knew where the harp came from originally, but they say it was a gift from Charley Patton, who got it from somebody else who got it from somebody else going all the way back down the line to since before we come over the water.

Wolfman could make the harp howl too and sometimes it was hard to tell the difference between that and his own voice, though every now and then, you could hear something else behind his howl, almost like a growl—like he was singing to keep something away. It ain't really matter whether he was howlin' or growlin' though: folks knew when they came to see Wolfman play, he was finna show out. Him and the boys could keep us boogiein' all night long, and when he really got into it, them blues he put down could fill up all the empty spaces, make folk forget or maybe remember too damn good everything holding them under and maybe, give 'em just enough to get they head above it for a little while longer. Wolf and his pack—that's what folk called the band—would play deep into the night unless somebody got to cussin' too loud, drinkin' too much, or the sharp razors came out. Somebody once asked Wolfman how come folk get to cuttin' and shootin' each other sometimes when they hear the blues? He said he couldn't do nothing but play what was inside him. Anything after that, he ain't had no right getting in the middle of.
 

II

Word was if you wanted to find the old gypsy woman who knew something about curses, you had to go deep into the swamp right around twilight and look for the trees with moss growing on the wrong side. Then, if she wanted you to find her and was feeling charitable, you'd see her wagon slung with purple drapes and gold trim, a low burning fire beside it.

Wolfman hated being in the woods because it reminded him of the farm his mama sent him away from after he refused to pick not one more bale of cotton; he couldn't square being bent over in a field all day just so Mr. Talbot's lazy ass children could eat the white meat while all him and mama got was the gizzards. But after he'd heard what sounded like hellhounds barking outside his door the night before and then saw the deep claw marks in the dirt come morning, he knew he'd have to put pride aside and go see the woman they say could get you out of a devil's bargain.

The old gypsy woman already knew why he came as he tucked his head and crouched his way through the small door to the wagon. She said he wasn't the first bluesman or blues woman who thought they could borrow from Ol' Scratch and not have to pay him his due when them dogs came calling. But when she looked him over a little closer, the slender woman—who he couldn't describe because the contours of her face seemed to shift every few minutes—asked for his hands. Said his hands was so big she really only need to see one of them. So she cupped his right hand into both of hers, leaned in, and took a big whiff. Said it didn't even take so much second sight as she had for somebody to tell that he had a touch of the wolf in him. Then told him if he really wanted to keep from out between the hounds' teeth, he needed to go see her half-sister in New Orleans who knew the right hoodoo, but that he probably wouldn't get that far with the hounds already on his trail.

He sat quiet and she could tell that wasn't going to be the end of it. Said that while she didn't have anything that could take the wolf out of him, she could try putting the rest of the wolf in and that might could be enough for him to fight off the hounds when they came. Said it would cost him all the money he had with him, which was all he had anywhere, and still she couldn't make no guarantees. But if it worked, he'd be able to change himself into a wolf whenever he wanted and that he'd be strongest under the full moonlight. Willie Stevens felt uneasy about the prospect of becoming a real life Lon Chaney, Jr., but felt even more uneasy about being some hellhound's dinner. He still had a whole lot more blues he needed to get out and knew too many folks who still needed to hear it. So he set in his mind that if becoming the wolf—and putting some truth behind his nickname—was the only way to sort it out, that'd be his burden to carry. And so when the gypsy woman asked if he was sure and told him that there wasn't no going back after this, he just nodded.

He didn't remember much about what happened next: some flashes of what looked like a severed wolf's paw, the gypsy woman chanting something he couldn't quite make out, a bright flash of purple and red light, and the smell of ash. He woke up the next morning in the woods not far from home, naked, cold, and with the taste of blood still fresh in his mouth. A little doe, her flesh torn from overeager teeth and claws, and her dull, black eyes staring up at him, lay just a few feet away.

He managed to get to the house without anybody seeing him and cleaned himself up. He noticed his heartbeat had slowed way down from normal and the shooting pains he'd been fighting in his kidneys were gone. After he cleared the steam from the bathroom mirror and saw his reflection, he remembered something else the old gypsy woman said: sometimes the only thing for a curse is another curse.
 

III

His newfound status as a mythical beast notwithstanding, Wolfman got ready for the show like he did any other night, though he phoned ahead and told the boys he wasn't going to make it to Patsy's for dinner before because he wasn't hungry. Still, he pressed his shirt, shined his shoes, and laid his suit out on the bed. Then he lit some incense, poured a glass of bourbon with lemon and ginger to get his voice right, and sat down to write the set list. He and the boys rehearsed almost daily, but he never told them just what they was going to play or in what order. Said that made it so they had room to conjure up something new if he felt it coming on—and he knew he might need all the room he could get.

He was the last one to get to the jook that night and found the boys backstage talking shit as usual. They could tell something was off just from looking. "I need y'all to trust me. Whatever happens, just follow my lead. Can y'all trust me?" He wouldn't say no more than that, only that tonight, they'd be playing for his life. Hubert, the guitar man who'd been with him since the beginning, stood up, "Whatever, whenever, or whoever it be, you ain't never even had to ask if we would be standing right there beside you." They all nodded. And so the boys made ready for a fight while Wolf just stood quiet at the window watching the moonrise.

Time came for the show to start. The lights came down, it got pin-drop quiet, and Wolfman started to moan. But it sounded different from how it normally did; it was more desperate and more guttural, but also more alive. And while there was always some pain in the wail that followed, now it had a bite to it that felt both terrifying and welcome. The room shook the same as before and it still felt like the whole raw earth might open up and swallow us all until Wolfman let loose a truly monstrous howl, which sounded more like a real wolf than it ever had. Before he could count off the tune though, we heard a clamor of fearsome barks and snarls coming from outside in every direction.

Everyone from around these parts knew the sound of a hellhound when they heard it, and we also knew there wasn't much could be done to keep one out that wanted inside. For a brief moment, the sounds died away and we hoped that somehow, maybe we'd been given a reprieve, but then came a violent crash at the door and our silence gave way to whimpers and muffled screams. You know it's funny to see the same folks who'd just as soon cut you for stepping on their brand new gators or for getting too familiar with their woman (or their man) suddenly cowering down beneath a table once they’d heard a hellhound at the door. Suppose it's a lot easier to summon up the gumption to fight somebody when you feel like you can make them hurt the same way you do.

The hounds kept charging at the door, harder and harder each time, and we stayed huddled in darkness, knowing that the door wouldn't hold for much longer. Just when we thought it was about to give way, we heard Wolfman howl again, even deeper and richer this time. Then he stomped a beat with his foot like a series of shotgun blasts and Brother Benny, with ritual precision, picked it up and started to groovin' even as the hounds kept raging outside. The rest of the pack joined in but they played the way you do when a song is the difference between you and oblivion. Wolf took out his harp and blew a note so mean that somebody broke our petrified silence and shouted, "I know that's right!" Somebody else pleaded, "You betta go on!" Pretty soon, we was all clappin' and hootin' and hollerin' until all of it—Wolfman wailing on his harp, the band quaking behind him, the hounds roaring outside, and us, trying to shout, shimmy, and shake away our pain—became an ugly, terrible, undeniable, beautiful mess of noise. And we kept at it all night long until the barking from outside stopped or we'd just stopped hearing it.

Wasn't no sign of the hounds when folks finally made their way outside into the morning light. Wolfman and the boys sat on the porch pulling the last swallows of shine from their glasses and then got ready to head on over to Patsy's for breakfast same as they always did after a show.

The way folks tell what happened that night depends on who you ask. Some say they saw Willie Stevens turn into a full-blooded werewolf right there on stage. Some say they saw him fight off a hellhound with nothing but the howl of his harp. Others claim that he'd paid a bunch of folks to stand outside and make a ruckus just so as to liven up the show. Only thing anybody really knew for sure is that Wolfman and his pack played some of the best damn blues folks had ever heard that night and that he kept on putting them same blues down to fill up the empty spaces all the way from here to Memphis, up in Chicago, and even over there in Europe somewhere. That's where the white boys picked it up and then made themselves a whole lot of money. But they ain't never sounded like Wolf, maybe because they ain't never been down to the crossroads, or because they ain't never known nothing about no gypsy woman's curses, or maybe they just ain't never picked no cotton in the Mississippi sun—or their people never did.

—Mikal Gaines

#155: The Pretenders, "Pretenders" (1979)

 “You ready, girls?” Chrissie Hynde calls out as she takes the stage. The lights dim as her fingerless lace gloves grab the mic.

On this November night in 1979, The Marquee on Wardour Street is packed—the Pretenders have outgrown the venue and the place is wall-to-wall leathered punks, sweaty fans, drunk onlookers. Adam Blake is lingering on the sidelines, happy just to be here. He met Hynde when his band opened for hers a few months before, and he can’t get her voice out of his mind. Since then, he’s gone to every show they’ve played during their month-long residency here.

"The bass and drums thumped and rumbled…it was a powerful sound, not like the neurotic trebly noise of punk at all. Out front, Chrissie was having problems with the monitors but you could hear this strange vibrato in her voice, this keening sound. It was something old and new. It bruised, and once heard, it stayed with you.”

– Adam Blake

Long before he became a rock journalist, Blake was eighteen and slightly obsessed. He’d bought their first single, and their second, and then sent Hynde a gushing fan letter asking if there were any chance his band might open for them again. By the time their third single, “Brass In Pocket,” was due for release, Blake couldn’t wait. He’d got it into his head that if he went to their record company in Covent Garden, he might be able to buy a copy before it hit the shops. It was a mad hope. But as we all know, the music gods are quick to indulge smitten teenagers. When he rang the bell at Real Records, not only was it answered—it was answered by Hynde herself. The whole band was upstairs in the middle of a meeting with their manager, Dave Hill.

Everyone stared as Blake stammered through his request.

“I’m so sorry to bother you,” he said sheepishly. “I was just hoping to get a copy of the new single.” He could see boxes of them stacked all around.

“What, are we supposed to just give you one?” Hill asked.

“No, no, of course not. I’ll pay for it,” Blake said, pulling a crumpled pound note from his pocket.

The manager reached into an open box and handed Blake the single. He even gave him change for the pound.

Mortified, relieved, Blake beat it out of there.

He didn’t expect to see her again.

But a few days later, a package arrived. Three singles, and a note written on the record company’s letterhead.

Nov 22. ’79 

Dear Adam

Wow—your letter makes me want to stay in this completely fucked up business. (I only realized it was you after Dave (manager) sold you a copy of the single.) I felt like a prick.

Your fab.

Love Chrissie

Do you want to support us at The Marquee 22 or 23? Let Dave Hill or myself know. Hope you do.

“To say this made me happy would be something of an understatement. It was one of the happiest moments of my life,” Blake recalls in The Pretenders: Chrissie Hynde and the Mystery Achievement.

And so, that night in 1979. His own band has just finished playing and—thank god—they didn’t fuck up too badly. Their friends and fans are in the audience still, and Blake is with them, watching the stage—Pete Farndon up there, Martin Chambers, James Honeyman-Scott, yes, yes, all of them, and Hynde. He notices her black lace gloves aren’t missing. Earlier, backstage, she was looking for them—a gift from her mother, she’d said—a tiny piece of her real life that he glimpsed briefly, as if through a veil, through holes in lace and leather, like her voice, always saying more through what it conceals.

*

It’s a strange album, this first one, Pretenders. The first single, “Stop Your Sobbing,” is a jangly cover of a little-known ‘60s Kinks song; “Kid,” their second, is wistful and sweet; “Brass In Pocket” has an almost cabaret theatricality to it, a swish and swagger fit for velvet-curtained stages more than gritty rock clubs. One of their best and best-known songs, the bass-thumping “Mystery Achievement,” appears as the last song of the album and wasn’t even a single. Judging by these, you’d never know Pretenders is in large part a punk album. And a mixed one at that.

“Precious,” the first track, lays bare its punk roots. If you weren’t convinced, she tells you to fuck off before the song is over. Yes, it’s a bit ham-fisted—and it’s not a good song, not that punk is ever “good” when it’s good—but we’re getting there. “Space Invaders,” an instrumental, is solid; reminiscent of Iggy Pop’s “Sixteen,” the only song he wrote alone on Lust For Life, two years prior. “Tattooed Love Boys” is a standout, a speedy romp pierced with lyrics she laughs through (I was a good time, yeah, I got pretty good). It might sound like sexual bravado if you didn’t know the song was about a Hell’s Angels gang bang. Lines like I shot my mouth off and you showed me what that hole was for are violent in their self-mockery, making for a cautionary tale of an entirely different kind, one that laughs in the face of women who fall for “the prestige and the glory” of running with the tough boys—“Another human interest story / You are that.”

Hynde’s infamous attitude is something that comes across in interviews and lyrics alike. While not always as acerbic as those above, a good number of tracks on Pretenders are Hynde telling someone to shut up, even when it’s sung sweetly. “Stop Your Sobbing” is a cuter version of the sentiment in “Private Life” (“I just feel pity when you lie, contempt when you cry / Your private life drama, baby, leave me out”). Crying features in at least two other songs, though her response is more of a lament than a complaint. There is perhaps nothing more common among women than being dragged into the fucked up inner lives of men, and thus perhaps no better thing to rail against. She sings “no” and “stop” a lot on this album, most often in response to someone else’s tears.

The force of the first side of the album continues through “The Wait,” with its fast-paced bass line, heavy breathing, and lyrics that are impossible to keep up with. Her jackhammer delivery and lyrical asides are done to great effect in that one. But it’s not always a smooth ride. Hynde invokes that same style in “The Phone Call,” where it makes for a somewhat unpleasant, paranoid soundscape. Any harmony is further distorted by changes in time signature that make it sound a bit like a prog track—say “Cygnus X-1” on Rush’s A Farewell to Kings—but artlessly done. It’s an almost disturbing sound, one that, like the atonal drone of “Precious,” makes you start to wonder whether the band knows the first fucking thing about how to write a tune. The same can be said for “Up The Neck,” a slower song that almost grates on the ears because you expect a chord change to smooth things out but it never comes. Hynde wrote in her 2015 memoir Reckless: My Life as a Pretender that her distinctive time signatures were due to her inability to count and her “amusia” was caused by an inability to hear. We can assume this is hyperbole; she can hear, it’s just that she sometimes decides not to.

It’s choices like this that make at least half the album rankle. “Private Life,” a slow one with a reggae beat, has something going for it; Grace Jones’s version was a Top 40 hit a year later. But one choice Jones made with it that the Pretenders didn’t is to cut out the Greek chorus that keeps repeating “Stop!” It’s a small thing, perhaps. But there are many, and they undermine the album—an album that might otherwise be known instead for the strength of “Mystery Achievement,” an instant classic that perfectly encapsulates what made the Pretenders memorable and Chrissie Hynde legendary. “Mystery Achievement” is indeed what it says, on this album at least. It formulates a direct line to what is perhaps their greatest song, “Back on the Chain Gang,” though that song doesn’t come around until their third album, after the band had already lost two of its original four members to drug overdoses.

No, you’d never know Pretenders was actually a punk album, or half a punk album, or a half decent album, let alone one that deserves to be among the greatest of all time. At least I never knew that. The album came out before I was born; punk had become a thing for rich suburban skater boys by the time it found me. Rock was something I loved dearly but it was associated with my dad’s generation, or at least his radio stations; I knew all the songs, but from the outside. I found Pretenders at the used record shop—unscratched, miraculously—one day when I was ditching school. I thought it was a big score. I already knew the red leather jacketed woman on the cover by name—knew she was an icon, knew her ambition and her longing and her haunting voice. Eighteen years old in 1999, I handed over a crumpled bill like Adam Blake did twenty years earlier, and went home to put needle to vinyl and press my ear against her soul.

Though I still have it, I don’t remember the album from then. I only listened to it once. It was all over the place; I couldn’t tell what it was. Yes, it had range. But the music only confused me. I had other icons to pay attention to, anyway—more legible ones. I had riot grrl and Courtney Love and a slew of female-fronted indie bands more or less my age. I forgot about the album and the woman behind it for twenty years.

What made me dust the album off, so to speak, is something vague. I have this strange desire lately to know more about the women I once took for granted, the original icons behind the ones of my generation. What was it that made them iconic in the first place? Was it really the music? Was it something else?

*

When eighteen-year-old Adam Blake had met twenty-eight-year-old Chrissie Hynde, she was on her first tour with her first band; as he put it, “Then, she was just a writer wannabe who had somehow got sidelined by punk, despite having been right in the thick of it from the very beginning.”

Originally from Akron, Ohio, she once joined a band with Mark Mothersbaugh, an alliance that only lasted one gig (he later founded Devo). Eventually she made her way to London and got a job writing at London’s biggest music magazine, New Musical Express. Not long after, she quit so she could get a band together and started knocking around London’s punk scene, working at Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood's clothing store, SEX. At one point, she almost got Johnny Rotten, and then Sid Vicious, to marry her, for papers. For a little while she tried to start a band with Mick Jones, but soon changed her mind; she found him too fresh and innocent. McLaren set her up to play guitar in another band, but she was eventually asked to leave, and the group went on to become the Damned, the first punk band to make a record. Fresh-faced Mick Jones hit her up some time later and invited her to come hang out on tour with his new band the Clash. Of this period, she told Kurt Loder in a 1980 Rolling Stone interview, “I wanted to be in a band so bad. […] All the people I knew in town, they were all in bands. And there I was, like the real loser, you know?”

It’s hard not to identify. Hynde threw herself out there and had found the right place and the right time, yet nothing seemed to come of it. That’s everyone, really, until they finally make it, if they ever do.

Of course, little did she know then that her band would come out with a number one debut on the U.K. Albums Chart and would make it to the Billboard Top 10 in the U.S.—and that all this would come together less than a year after she got the band together. She dated and had a child with Ray Davies of the Kinks and two years later married don't-you-forget-about-him Jim Kerr of Simple Minds. In the ensuing four decades of her career, she has performed with pretty much everyone; she’s sung duets with Frank Sinatra, Ringo Starr, Emmylou Harris, INXS, even Bruce Willis; she’s collaborated and performed with Morrissey, UB40, Cher, the Black Keys, Incubus, Sheryl Crow, Tom Jones, and Johnny Marr, who was for a brief moment an official member of the band. It’s an epic career. Of course someone with a career like that is an icon. The thing that interests me, though, isn’t what she became. It’s what she was before any of that happened.

Before the band, before the punk scene even, was that gig she landed writing at NME. The first assignment she secured was to write a review of a Neil Diamond album. As she told it, “I just took the piss out of it. I was very sarcastic. I said, ‘This song sounds like an ad for an American small car.’ I just completely demolished this guy…” Despite the outcry from “all four Neil Diamond fans in Britain,” her editor was happy with the piece and gave her a bigger assignment—to interview Brian Eno.

It’s worth a read; she’s an incredible writer. In her conversation with him, Eno explained an interesting phenomenon. “I'm always prone to do things very quickly, which has distinct advantages—you leave all the mistakes in, and the mistakes always become interesting. The Velvet Underground, for example, are the epitome of mistake-filled music, and it makes the music very subtle and beautiful. Any feature can be the most important one—as long as there is one important feature. There are so many bands who present you with a large number of well-done features, none of which are important.”

This conversation she had with Eno made me rethink my assessment of Pretenders. If there is one defining feature that makes the band and the album stand out, it’s Hynde’s voice: its strange vibrato, its keening sound. It bruised, and once heard, it stayed with you. As she wrote in her memoir, “Distinctive voices in rock are trained through years of many things: frustration, fear, loneliness, anger, insecurity, arrogance, narcissism, or just sheer perseverance—anything but a teacher.” Other than this distinction—perhaps a trifle, perhaps everything—who’s to say what they were?

Hynde herself certainly didn’t know. In the Rolling Stone writeup that named theirs number thirteen in the 100 Best Debut Albums of All Time, she’s quoted saying she was so embarrassed by “Brass in Pocket” that if it came on the radio at Woolworth’s, she’d run out of the store. The band formed in March of 1978 and their first single came out just months later, in January of 1979. They didn’t know what they were. They had no time to wait: they had a bandleader that wanted this so bad it hurt.

Madonna saw the Pretenders play in Central Park in 1980 and said, “She was amazing—the only woman I’d seen in performance where I thought, ‘Yeah, she’s got balls.’ [...] It gave me courage, inspiration, to see a woman with that kind of confidence in a man’s world.”

It’s funny, because the last line of the album’s penultimate song, “Lovers of Today,” is “No, I’ll never feel / Like a man in a man’s world.” What it takes to be iconic, maybe for anyone, but definitely for a woman, is to do it anyway, to open your mouth and show them what that hole is for.

—Melissa Mesku

#156: Beastie Boys, "Paul's Boutique" (1989)

Here’s a thing: Larry the Cable Guy used to be funny. Like, really funny. A decade or more before he became a catchphrase comedian on a never-ending Blue Collar Comedy tour, he would call into radio shows syndicated in the south with these bizarre, hilarious rants about whatever was bothering him that day, and we’d catch those calls on the way to school.

You know how you get on the same schedule with people you’ll never really know, just by virtue of a similar commute? A lot of times we found ourselves behind this IROC-Z painted like banana and grape Now and Laters.

At the time, the Larry the Cable Guy character was this weird, loving send-up of the dudes who got up early to stand outside of convenience stores before work, wearing ballcaps, drinking coffee, smoking or spitting out tobacco juice, talking shit. It wasn’t long, though, before he became something else entirely.

All that to say this: Licensed to Ill was dope as fuck.

And world-changing! And the first real entry point into rap music for a large part of mainstream America! And the Beastie Boys, the kids who made that record, were poised to become the snot-nosed jester kings of the fledgling genre. But before they could capitalize on the success of their debut album—one which would go on to sell over 10 million copies—the Beastie Boys needed to deconstruct the personas that had made them famous.

There’s a reason this, this deconstruction, is hailed in every review you’ve ever read of Paul’s Boutique, as a bold artistic decision: on Licensed to Ill, they were only joking. But then their audience interpreted what to the Beasties themselves had been some mix of obvious mockery and adolescent fuckery as something else again. The willing buffoons had somehow become the protagonists. The Beastie Boys were skeptical, to say the least.

The same thing happened to Larry the Cable Guy, only he went along with it. Because make no mistake, along the path to self-caricature—toward appealing solely to an audience composed entirely of the people who identify directly with the archetypes you meant to make fun of in the first place, who believe you to be their mouthpiece, to be saying what they can’t in polite company—you’ll find millions and millions of dollars. But you’ll never know the exact moment that you cease to be vital. The Beastie Boys might have gradually ended up playing Las Vegas showcases, old men in high school forever.

How could they have known this? The oldest of them, the late Adam “MCA” Yauch, was, what, 21, 22, when License to Ill came out. When I was 22 I was sleeping on a pool float. They must have seen what was happening to Andrew “Dice” Clay.

*

Licensed to Ill is number 219 on the RS 500, and this piece isn’t about that album, it’s about number 156! Paul’s Boutique. Fully 63 albums better than its predecessor. But any serious consideration of the Beastie Boys’ dense, multi-layered sophomore effort is impossible on its own. Paul’s Boutique isn’t quite a complete rejection of the knuckleheads they portrayed on Licensed to Ill. But it grounds those personas in reality. They’re still into making mischief and meeting girls. But instead of mixing Spanish Fly with Brass Monkey, they’re “telling her every lie that you know [they] never did.” If they’re “fully strapped” on Paul’s Boutique, it’s with eggs, not guns. They didn’t make Licensed to Ill Part II. They didn’t capitalize on their massive success. They made a record entirely for themselves, and, in the long run, they were right.

That’s, like, the story of Paul’s Boutique, but it’s not what it isn’t that makes the album great. It’s what it is, and a lot of what it is is this: a masterpiece in terms of production by the Dust Brothers. More than any other album, with the possible exception of De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising, Paul’s Boutique is the sampler used to its fullest potential. Taken to its logical extent. Made before everybody had to start worrying about clearing samples, the Dust Brothers just did what-the-fuck-ever and came out with a genuinely new kind of kaleidoscopic funk. The Beastie Boys’ greatest gift is their impeccable taste in weird shit, and in the Dust Brothers, they found the musical counterparts to their neverending lyrical reference-making. It’s weird that they never worked with them again, really. Did they?

Side note: have the Dust Brothers ever made a bad record? Because, fuck you, “MMMBop” is a goddamn Pet Sounds-level pop masterpiece, and the soundtrack to Fight Club is about the only part of that movie that holds up today.

*

I just found out that Ad-Rock’s middle name is “Keefe.”

*

Anybody who tells you they were into Paul’s Boutique when it came out is lying to you. The Beastie Boys started their comeback with Check Your Head, but they weren’t really back until the “Sabotage” video came out. I personally spent at least six months listening exclusively to Paul’s Boutique on repeat, trying to decipher it. To learn its secrets. (What’s that I hear in “The Three Minute Rule”? Because it sounds an awful lot like a ping pong ball dropped onto a table from about four feet.) But that was in high school. I was six years old when Paul’s Boutique came out.

It doesn’t matter. For the members of the secret order to which I belong, the people whose entire aesthetic sense is informed by lessons gleaned from Beastie Boys records, it doesn’t matter when you got into Paul’s Boutique, but that you got into it at all. You can usually pick us out by our preference for classic sneakers, light jackets, and high-water pants. We’re in our mid-thirties and forties now, buying rare funk records on Discogs.

I remember reading an interview with the Beastie Boys, probably in a ‘90s-era Details magazine, maybe the one with the David Lachapelle photo shoot in the hotdog stand, I don’t know, but whoever wrote it was right: that for a lot of people, figuring out the references and samples embedded in Beastie Boys albums, starting with Paul’s Boutique was a crucial starting point. It’s like Mike D and MCA and the King Ad-Rock were curating a never-ending scavenger hunt for their fans, who ultimately found the makings of a life devoted to Unassailably Cool Shit. “Egg Man,” for example, is a hilarious song about riding around in MCA’s car and egging people out the sunroof on the streets of Los Angeles, but just beneath the surface there are these samples of and references to Public Enemy. Also at least four movies: The primary sample comes from Curtis Mayfield’s “Superfly” from his Superfly soundtrack, there’s dialogue from Cheech and Chong’s Next Movie, and The Mack and Taxi Driver are both directly referenced. And Dolemite! Like you could listen to that song and really dive in and end up with at least one new record to listen to, Yo! Bum Rush the Show, and a pretty good introduction to Blaxploitation cinema.

*

There is no best song on Paul’s Boutique. It opens with “Shake Your Rump.” No. It opens with “To All the Girls,” but “To All the Girls” is so quiet and short that I usually skip it and go right for the opening drums of Alphonse Mouzon’s “Funky Snakefoot,” which gives “Shake Your Rump” its dope ass drumroll right at the beginning.

“Johnny Ryall” is certainly not the best song on Paul’s Boutique. But fuckin’ “High Plains Drifter” might be. Listening to “High Plains Drifter” is like watching a Cubist action movie, with the Boys Beastie each seeming to narrate entirely different aspects of the same protagonist, adding layer upon layer of tough guy/cool guy 1970s-style cinematic imagery. Unless I’m reading it entirely wrong.

In the 2011 video for “Make Some Noise,” Johnny Ryall is portrayed by Orlando Bloom.

Can we talk about “Shadrach” for a second? Because early on in their careers, the Boys went on tour with Madonna, the undisputed queen of the MTV era, and they learned at the foot of the master. They also famously brought along a huge hydraulic penis set piece. But in the same way that you can’t really consider Paul’s Boutique without Licensed to Ill, it’s impossible to separate the Beastie Boys’ music from their video output. They’re very much a video band. “Shadrach,” the song, is great. “Shadrach,” the video, is a straight-up masterpiece. Before the Klasky-Csupo team animated your youth, they hand-painted every frame of “Shadrach.”

There is no best song on Paul’s Boutique because the truest expression of what the album is comes at the very end, on “B-Boy Bouillabaisse.” Paul’s Boutique might have been called B-Boy Bouillabaisse, because it’s a better description of what the album actually is. “Bouillabaisse” is nine song sketches, some more ambitious and better realized than others.

Taken together, it’s the definitive sound of the Beastie Boys of the Paul’s Boutique era: three goofballs following their every creative impulse and finding, along the way, some enduring and iconic moments, and also, you know, some dumb stuff. “Hello Brooklyn” is so good that the two greatest rappers of all time sampled it for a collaborative track. “AWOL” is probably the best shout-out track in rap history. “Get On The Mic” is my favorite thing on the album. “59 Christie Street” is an unfortunate Licensed to Ill throwback. I never liked “Dropping Names” until I found out, researching this piece, that it’s an homage to the 1942 science fiction novel Donovan’s Brain. Now I think it’s kind of dope. I always thought it was some kind of repurposed student poetry assignment. Paul’s Boutique, man. The gift that keeps on giving.

*

Look. Larry the Cable Guy doesn’t owe anybody anything. There’s no reason to think that he’s not doing exactly what he wants to be doing.

*

The Beastie Boys didn’t make Licensed to Ill Part II, but, to their credit, they never made Paul’s Boutique Part II, either. They built outsized personas on their first album, and then dismissed those personas on their second. Because of this, they gained a reputation for being a band unafraid to reinvent itself. But that’s only sort of true. Starting with Check Your Head, Beastie Boys albums were less about reimagining what the band could be and more about refining what they were. Paul’s Boutique is the sound of the Beastie Boys taking the first steps toward becoming themselves.

—Bo Fahs

#157: Joy Division, "Closer" (1980)

I can’t tell you precisely when I knew that Joy Division had stopped being “just” music for me. It might have been a spring day in 2009; I was driving home after making the decision to have a total hysterectomy. I turned the volume up on “Disorder,” as loud as it would go, and started screaming the lyrics: “I’VE GOT THE SPIRIT! BUT LOSE THE FEELING! FEELINGFEELINGFEELING FEEL-ING.” I was empty, but I had taken the music and the words into my body. It had weight, and it held me. But this was not the first time Joy Division had done this to me.

Twenty years earlier, I was fifteen years old, and in the middle of what would become a three-month stay in a state psychiatric hospital for adolescents. It wasn’t the first time that I’d been hospitalized for depression and suicidal thoughts, and it wouldn’t be the last. When Closer came into my life, I was considered stable enough to come home for overnight visits; my mother saved whatever mail came to me, usually the latest issues of Rolling Stone and Spin. That particular Rolling Stone had one of its endless lists: The Best Albums of the 80s (so far), maybe, or the Greatest Post-Punk Albums Ever. It only matters now because Closer was on that list. I read about it before I heard it. I read the lyrics of “Isolation” to my mother:

           Mother I tried please believe me
           I’m doing the best that I can
          I’m ashamed of the things I’ve been put through
         I’m ashamed of the person I am

My mother wondered if I should be listening to something like that, but she didn’t say no. I didn’t tell her that Ian Curtis, barely out of adolescence himself, had committed suicide. I went to my hometown’s only record store the next day and bought the cassette I still own. What I heard in those first moments, the opening of “Atrocity Exhibition,” seemed like the noise of a machine grinding against metal, or grinding against bone, and then, a voice, one minute barely floating above that, and then dipping down into it, relentless, chanting: this is the way. Here was music that knew shame, and guilt, and pain. Here was music that would protect me. I took the tape back to the hospital at the end of the weekend. When I was admitted, I was told it was for my safety. I would learn how to function again, and live without wanting to die. The locked door of the unit, the security screens on the windows, that could only open with a key: these precautions kept me away from the world, but they did little to keep me safe. I was sexually abused there, and in the aftermath of that I shut down. I stopped eating to the point where the staff would tell me that if I didn’t eat soon, they would force me. I learned how to tell people what they wanted to hear if it would let me leave sooner. I buried the event itself in some remote corner of my body, denying that it happened, but watching its slow poison do its work over the years.

I held Closer to me for a long time. I grew up, but didn’t hold onto it out of some wistful longing to go back to the time when I first heard it. As I got older, I found other people who thought it was speaking directly to them; a perfect articulation of being trapped and depressed and desperate. In such a state, making art becomes a necessity: write it out, or make music; smear paint on a canvas so that no light shines through; if Closer has taught me anything, it has taught me to hold on, however much I might think that dying or slow self-destruction are viable answers. This is not to say that I see it as “therapeutic.” It isn’t. The critic in me sees it as a perfect vehicle for the talents that made it. The other part of me, the woman who carries the past and attempts to wrestle with it, sees it as a partially successful exorcism: whatever is still trapped in me finds its voice in that album. I run my fingers over the pages of So This is Permanence, a collection of Joy Division lyrics and Ian Curtis’s notebooks, and I murmur the words to myself, an incantation to keep a faulty radio signal from whispering its darkest impulses to me.

Last year, I saw New Order live for the third time. Their encores are now devoted to Joy Division material, and a backdrop which says “FOREVER JOY DIVISION” comes up. It seems off, somehow; a gimmick when compared to Peter Hook and his band, the Light, which dives into the music from both New Order’s and Joy Division’s catalogs with an exhilarating ferocity. Last April, with New Order, “Decades” was the song to end the night. On a giant screen, Ian Curtis danced and hovered above the audience, breaking off into smaller pieces with each movement, a restless, fragmented ghost. Bernard Sumner’s voice is higher and lighter than Curtis’s was. I closed my eyes, and swayed; the music holding me again, a longing, a protection.

—Sarah Nichols

#158: Elton John, "Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy" (1975)

I like to imagine that I am a “good music listener” in the fact that I enjoy listening to entire albums. As I have gotten older, I have fallen into the mp3 trap—obviously with the rise of iTunes, we’ve gotten to the point where the importance lies in the singles. I have always been a lover of pop music, even when I tried to keep it a secret during my punk and hardcore phase. I would always find myself enjoying the tracks that had “pop” elements to them more than the straight up noise crunch of typical late-90s post-punk. As I grew older, I recognized that instead of listening to D.C. bands do bad impersonations of pop music, I should just go directly to the source, where the true joy was to be found. Favorite bands of my youth still drop critically acclaimed albums, and yet I find myself preferring to listen to Selena Gomez tracks out of sequence.

I mention this, because the first thing you need to know about Captain Fantastic and the Dirt Brown Cowboy is that it is a concept album—when we use the term, we tend to think of something fictional: a massive opus, a rock opera where all of the songs fit some semblance of a theme. When we talk about Captain Fantastic we use this term as well, although it is agreed that the entire album is highly autobiographical; a series of songs that document the early careers of both Elton John and his songwriting partner, Bernie Taupin. It is fictional in the sense that Elton John brings a certain mythos to this album: even the “fantastical” album art is meant to evoke images of bombast—a caricature of Elton in a top hat, sitting on a piano while various odd Bosch-like creatures look on in adoration. It is also fictional in the way that any extended conceit is fictional; Taupin’s lyrics have always been poetic and metaphorical in nature—he himself refers to him as a poet as well as a lyricist; there is some semblance of legitimacy when referring to one’s self as a “writer” or “poet” rather than simply a “songwriter”—perhaps it provides some graveness to the work; it is a statement that the words themselves can exist on their own, rather than utilizing the lushness of pop orchestrals as a crutch to hold everything upright.

However, if this is our only definition of what a concept album is and should be, it would seem as if any and all albums are, in fact, “concept albums”—if there is no need for fiction, and an extended conceit and/or poetic language is allowed, then literally every album ever crafted is a type of “concept” album. Even an album that seems completely disjointed, with sonic changes, and widely varying lyrical content is still held together by the fact that it has been sequenced and crafted by a set of musicians which lend it some cohesion. One could argue that the only thing that does not resemble a concept album is a compilation of sorts, but quite often most compilations do surround themselves to a common theme: songs all about Christmas, for example, or songs crafted specifically for use in a film soundtrack. Nothing recorded is autonomous from anything else—we exist entirely in sequence: all music exists in tandem with something else.

There is something beautiful in this idea: our lives are made up of so many different moments—birthday parties and sporting events, heartbreaks and triumphs. It is silly to think of any of these massive upswings or downswings as their own islands. I was recounting to my wife as well as my boss (two different conversations, though linked in their subject matter) that my life feels “quieter” now—that something happened between the chaos of last year and the rebirth of this year. In some ways, I feel like I have gotten off a losing streak—here in Alabama, we turned an election; our football team won a championship thanks to an unforeseen gamble. The soundtrack, in many ways, has evened out—although these events were not as seemingly out of the blue as they appeared. I know firsthand how many doors were knocked on in Tuscaloosa County in an attempt to get out the vote. I know that there is a fail safe plan in place for the Crimson Tide offense in case things get stagnant. These bright spots did not burst forward without precedent: an orchestra swells instead of bleats.

A story: during the year of loudness, I got married. The most important things to my wife and I were to make sure that our friends who spent their hard-earned money to come to Tuscaloosa had an incredible time. Therefore, our priorities came in the form of Old Fashioneds and set lists. I had a dilemma in that I am a DJ, but it would be impossible for me to throw a dance party at my own wedding. Instead, I created a playlist—I anticipated the time it would take to walk down the aisle, the songs that would play as the wedding planner flipped the room for dinner and dancing, and finally made sure that all of the important hits would be played before the sparklers were lit and we left the evening behind. Before I knew that I would be writing this essay, I had a conversation with my mother about what song she wanted to dance to—it was an example of first thought, best thought; she suggested Elton John’s “Your Song,” not knowing it was a sentimental favorite of mine, dating back to my college years where everything was downloaded on Napster—all songs singles. The song was sequenced in on that day; in between the Motown and Whitney Houston—and yet still, it belonged to that moment—a variation on a theme; a song that always meant to be there. Later, still, while listening to “Someone Saved My Life Tonight,” a song I originally thought to be about a suicide attempt is actually about escaping a wedding—Elton John breaking off an engagement as he sorted out his own sexuality. This, ironic. This, too, in sequence.

“Someone Saved My Life Tonight,” was the only thing that resembled a radio single off of Captain Fantastic. A seemingly other definition of a concept album typically means that all of the songs are not meant to be digested individually—instead we are meant to listen to everything as a whole in order to understand the scope of the story. However, when the story being told is autobiographical, we are taught to hold onto those moments of brightness; even an album full of repeat spin singles is still a cohesive unit—they are tied together by the sheer existence of the artist and the desire to will this music into being.

This is all to say that there are no coincidences in this world. As an essayist, it is in my nature to find patterns in the world—not just within the physical world, but also in my own ephemeral space; to tie my own personal memories and my own autobiography to quirks and quips in order to make whatever story it is that I want to tell more tangible. I am constantly looking for ways to synthesize my emotions—to attach them to something real to make myself even more real. Kanye West samples “Someone Saved My Life Tonight,” in “Good Morning,” a song that is forever stuck in my head, and brings a vision of walking in the Alabama heat to campus, as I pass an apartment complex that my future wife will one day live in; the album art of Graduation involves a bear.

A quote from Elton John, reminiscing about Captain Fantastic:

“The album was written in running order—from start to finish, it was a story—and at that point, the bravest album I'd made.”

We too are living our bravest life. We too believe in stories—of how they start, and how they finish. The true marvel is in how it all manages to come together in curious ways; how, somehow, we find ourselves in tune with all that comes before us and all that comes after.

—Brian Oliu

#159: Kiss, "Alive!" (1975)

About 45 minutes into the greatest live rock album ever recorded, KISS frontman Paul Stanley says he has a question for the 12,000 screaming kids at Cobo Hall in Detroit.

“I wanna know how many people here tonight….believe in rock ‘n’ roll?”

It’s not a question, baby. It’s a fucking call to arms. Stanley’s voice rises on that last syllable as he rallies the troops. Drummer Peter Criss’s bass drum and toms thump sturdily underneath, while he ramps up the snare to the rising cheers of the crowd. Soon, the Starchild is living up to his stage moniker. You can hear everybody clapping their hands to the beat and chanting “Rock and roll” with him. This is how you work a room.

“Now if you all believe in rock 'n’ roll….why don’t you stand up for what you believe in?"

It was at this point, listening to 1975’s KISS Alive! on my Sony Walkman in the way way back of my parents’ Buick station wagon, that it hit me.

Up until that point, they’d been sitting down.

It didn’t seem possible. From the moment the flanged-out crowd noise faded into side one of this historic, cacophonic double live album, I had assumed they were ON THEIR FEET. How could they not be? Close your eyes and listen. Here’s how Alive begins:

There’s the announcer: “You wanted the best and you got it! The hottest band in the land: KISS!” The hooky opening guitar intro of “Deuce.” Gene Simmons’s sudden bass guitar whoosh. A huge explosion (literally)! Criss starts pounding on the downbeat. Stanley and lead guitarist Ace Frehley grind out that wondrous riff just a step off from each other, giving the simplest rhythm ever what KISS gave everything else—a flair for the dramatic. The first line of the song:

“Get up! And get your Grandma out of here...”

And we’re off.

KISS Alive! is more than simply a live album recorded by a hungry touring band at the peak of their powers. It was a sonic experience that opened a window into a world where masked, otherworldly creatures growled and swaggered their way through a stage surrounded by candelabras, smoke, and walls of Marshall amps. The original gatefold LP came with a full-color, eight-page booklet that showed Simmons (whose stage name was the Demon) breathing fire. Who were these leather-wearing, grease-painted freaks who wielded guitars like weapons? If somebody told me one of them could fly—Space Ace perhaps—I wouldn’t have been surprised.

The real story—about a hardworking NYC quartet with a go-for-broke mentality and three disappointing studio releases (and an almost broke record label in desperate need of a hit)—is no less dramatic. There was no internet in 1975. KISS was underground. Grass roots. Word of mouth. If they hadn’t seen the band live yet, the only exposure most kids had to them was seeing their strange, make-upped visages on an album flat at the record store. Since KISS had almost no radio airplay, the band had built their entire reputation onstage—and none of their records could capture the intensity of the live show. They were hemorrhaging money. (That stage setup, the truck, and all the crew required to make it happen was expensive.) Alive! was a gamble—an expensive, risky double album that had to sell, or that was it.

The timing was perfect, and not just because the growing mass of die-hard fans would soon coalesce into the KISS Army. The band was primed. With the murky production of KISS and Hotter Than Hell behind them, they were coming off Dressed to Kill, which featured their tightest playing yet, and a bona fide anthem that would soon define them: “Rock and Roll All Nite.”

Put simply, 1975 was the leanest, meanest year KISS ever had. They would never again be the driven, single-minded, thunderous rock machine they were in 1975. Success, bloat, and ego would change them forever. (And it’s this reputation that has earned them the resentment of every “serious” rock musician and fan since.)

But I’m not backing down when I say that KISS Alive! is the greatest live rock album ever recorded. Over-intellectualize it all you want, but rock and roll is a feeling. It’s genuine. It’s contagious. It’s exhilarating. Captured in the grooves of this record are the imaginations of a generation that was raised on the Beatles and fantasy novels, hardened by the Vietnam War and Watergate. They wanted escape. KISS offered that, and a feeling of community.

Yes, KISS shows are known for their spectacle, but KISS Alive! is pure aural theater. While you’re listening, pore over the photos in the LP if you want—or just close your eyes and be transported. The raw spirit, that hopefulness that’s inherent in the best rock ‘n’ roll, it’s there in spades.

And the sex! Like rock’s forefathers, KISS’ riffs are bluesy, but they’re heavier—and blunt. Far removed from the sly innuendo of Little Richard and Chuck Berry, the junior-high-level lyrics hit like a pipe wrench to the head. (Or the crotch, more appropriately.) No need to be coy anymore—just come out and say it: “Strutter.” “Hotter Than Hell.” “Firehouse.” “C’Mon and Love Me.” These are songs about fucking. Or wanting to fuck. There’s an audience full of sex-crazed teenagers being whipped up into a frenzy at the promise of NOW. KISS unlocked abandon that night in Detroit.

…and Cleveland. And New Jersey. And Iowa. It’s well documented that Alive!—like many “live” albums—was compiled to sound like one perfect night of rock, but was actually cut together from four different shows and features lots of overdubs. The important thing is that Alive! is a more-than-convincing document of a place and time—and it rocks like a ton of bricks. Producer Eddie Kramer was the first to make the band sound the way fans remembered them being onstage—aggressive, snarling, confident. If Gene needed to fix a bass track that was marred by his distraction at flicking blood from his tongue or banging his fists, so be it.

Some reports say it went farther than that, and I’m sure it did. There’s no way Ace is going to rip off a shredding guitar solo with dinosaur bends and perfectly timed staccato bursts of two-note magic while he’s navigating down to his knees in seven-inch platform boots. And there’s no chance that Paul and Gene are hitting every note correctly while they’re banging their headstocks together in Ace’s direction, choreographed to the chords of “Black Diamond.”

These are visuals, of course, that I never had to accompany the first 1,000 times I listened to Alive! During the VHS explosion of the late ‘80s, live bootlegged video of classic KISS became ubiquitous. The revelatory thing is that when I finally saw what I had always been imagining, it lived up to the fantasy. Alive! is that good. It sounds like a band in total control of their domain. It may not have invented arena rock strictly, but KISS Alive! perfected it for sure. And it influenced every single rock musician who lived through the ‘70s and ‘80s, becoming the template for stadium-sized rock shows from that moment on.

When most writers make a claim like that, they’re talking about the giant KISS logo and the explosions—the theatrics that everyone has aped since. I’m not. I’m talking about the power and dynamics of loud, catchy songs played with urgency. The near-constant attention and care paid to the audience. The breathless pace of the show.

For one magical night, KISS created a bubble of teenaged bliss, where everyone was united—by letting go. No one was pretending to be cool at a KISS show. But just by being there, you were inducted in the club. You were part of something special. “You drive us wild, we’ll drive you crazy” wasn’t just a line from a song, it was a mantra. If you were lucky enough to see these long-haired, grease-painted freaks in that early moment when they were playing like their lives depended on it, before they became an NBC Movie of the Week punchline, then you understand that unique feeling they gave you—that the world had cracked wide open, that anything was possible.

For the rest of us, thank the God of Thunder that we have KISS Alive!

—Eric Melin

#160: T. Rex, "Electric Warrior" (1971)

There’s a certain contrarianism to liking Ringo Starr, isn’t there? Composer of the fewest Beatles songs, and contributor to the smallest piece of pie in a pie chart labeled “Things That Made The Beatles Both Distinctive and Consistently Forward-Thinking,” Ringo has always just sort of been around. No one outright denies his place in music history because of course how could you, but at the same time when the Best Beatle debate pops up, sometimes Sir Starkey isn’t even mentioned. This isn’t necessarily not fair, but it definitely isn’t not interesting. YouTube comments sections—the bastion of anti-critic positioning, real swamps of unfiltered observation for better and for worse—of Ringo or Ringo-centric Beatles videos (very few of the latter) seem to come primarily from drummers both pro and amateur. They praise Ringo’s metronomic superpowers, and are willing to literally come to blows if you hesitate in your adulation. Some people—depending on the era—even note how cute he is; Ringo, it can sometimes seem, is the poster child for conventionally unattractive men who get called cute thanks to an overwhelming sheen of goofy kindness.

And there’s exactly why I’m on Team Ri: no one seemed to have more personally invested in keeping the lads together when it all fell apart, and no one seemed to have been as, well, sad about the end of it. Wherever possible, Ringo always felt like he was trying to get the band back together, in fact (and he spoke about it openly). While recording his self-titled third solo record in 1972, there were even rumors circulating that the Beatles were getting back together, since John, George, and Ringo were all doing studio time together with a new bassist, Klaus Voormann (Grammy-winner for designing the cover of Revolver, which is only one blip near the start of a staggering lifelong CV). The song they collaborated on, “I’m the Greatest,” was written by John for Ringo to record—on it, Ringo refers to himself as his old Sgt. Peppers moniker Billy Shears, while an overdubbed cheering crowd goes wild in the background, much as it did on the opening track of that indomitable record. Two songs later sits “Photograph,” a song Ringo co-wrote with George while they were out sailing one day, and further down is “Six O’Clock,” made at Apple Studios in London with Paul and Linda. It wasn’t the first time Ringo collaborated with his old friends, and it definitely wouldn’t be the last; even his 1981 record, the not-good Stop and Smell the Roses, is chock full of compositions by George, Paul, and John (one of his last), and was co-produced mostly by George and Paul in tandem. Everywhere you turn, in fact, at some stage or another in his adult life, Ringo Starr is trying as hard as he can to recapture lightning in a bottle. And his more talented, more famous friends are always there to help him do just that! There’s nothing else to assume but that Ringo is a very kind, very good, very pure (and very hard-to-turn-down) person. Frankly, what’s not to cheer for?

Pureness and light attract pureness and light on the best of days, and something particularly magical happened in the early 1970s when a certain former Beatle met a certain twenty-something rising star who seemed to have come from outer space and wore glitter on his face to mirror the galaxies that birthed him. Marc Bolan was 24 years old when he first got to know Ringo Starr, and 25 when Ringo directed a documentary about his “band,” the basically-a-solo-project T. Rex. Bolan is one of those bursts of light from modern history who knew from a very early age that he was going to be famous, and then did everything in his power to make it so. Plastic-faced comedic actor Jim Carrey famously wrote himself a 10 million dollar check in 1985, post-dated it 10 years in the future, and in 1994 became the most famous man in the world (Ace Ventura, The Mask, and Dumb and Dumber all came out in 1994. Can you imagine being Jim Carrey in 1994?). It’s not the same but it’s not dissimilar to point out that when Marc Bolan was 19 years old, he knocked on producer Simon Napier-Bell’s front door and introduced himself as a big star who needed someone to help him with his arrangements. Napier-Bell, despite having no reason to, let the twitchy songwriter in. Another story goes that sometime around 1968, just as T. Rex was beginning to take shape, most of Marc Bolan’s equipment was stolen. He still had a gig scheduled for the following night, however, so he put an ad in the paper for backing musicians. The ad ran on a Wednesday afternoon, and Bolan started sound check with a bunch of newspaper randos by five that evening. It was a disaster of a performance by all accounts, but can you imagine? It’s the thrilling audacity of someone so sure of their own future, so determined not to let anything get in their way.

I don’t know how similar Marc and Ringo were in this regard, but they sure hit it off real easy. There are a good amount of videos on the internet of the two buds messing around, many of which are taken from Ringo’s T. Rex movie, Born to Boogie. The shiniest diamond among many shiny shiny gems, though, might be a 90-second clip of their attempts at advertising...something. I originally thought it was car they’re shilling in the video, since they’re both framed in a medium shot posing hands-on-hip in front of a new one, but I’m not so sure anymore. Ringo Starr is 32 years old, Marc Bolan 25 or so, and the difference in those seven years is immediate and stunning and very funny. The older, stately ex-global-superstar is trying to do his job: he speaks into the camera without pause or error, a consummate professional. “Some people like to roll.” And then his young friend, so in love with life and probably high as fuck, just can’t keep himself together. Can’t look into the lens for five words of his own: “Some people like to rock.” Ringo is first a good sport, then a tad annoyed, then eventually simply overwhelmed by laughter and unguarded joy of his own. This is the power of Marc Bolan’s infectiousness. At one point, he bends at the waist laughing, then lunges for Ringo’s knees, looking to tackle him to the ground, a twelve-year-old boy in the spidery casings of a full-grown chart-topper.

And obviously this comes out in the music of T. Rex at its best. No one in the early ‘70s except perhaps Elton John (present, too, in Born to Boogie, playing piano for an absolutely magnetic in-studio performance of “Children of the Revolution”) channeled a belief in their own imminent superstardom into actual and immediate superstardom. Electric Warrior buzzes with it, end to end, this grinning lit within by a burning confidence. Not that it’s a bombastic record by any means—quite the opposite, in fact, full as it is of whispered vocals and drum-guitar simplicity. But sometimes the quieter voices make the biggest stir.

Off-record, Ringo Starr never had the quietest voice (that’d be Buddha George), and neither did Marc Bolan. Both men lived loudly, cracking jokes easily and by all accounts drawing the center of any gathering back to their energies. But how each of them captured the essence of their love for life, their happiness at simply having the opportunity each day to see their friends, drink a pint, play music, write bad poetry in the woods, pose for magazine spreads...there’s something lovely there. Something undiluted and unnoticeable at times. That sort of intentional glee seems essential for now, and in short supply. Holding on to the deathless music and memory of Marc Bolan has always been cool, and rightfully so. Liking Ringo has always been the least cool, though, even when we might know it’s the most good. But then again, when has love—and not simply the image of love, the idea of it—taken hold of us so easily and fully as its opposite?

—Brad Efford

#161: Otis Redding, "The Dock of the Bay" (1968)

A day – a dollar – a knock on the door. All alone. All my fears. All night – all of them. All that stuff – alone. Always have the blues a little, and this loneliness – look like nothing's gonna come my way. Baby. Baby, – baby, I – baby, I got to get home to you – baby, let me – ‘cause I've had nothing to live for.

Champagne and wine. Crying, darling, days and nights. Down in my luck. Drink that good gin in each others’ arms, everybody Huckle-Bucking – everybody – everybody’s swinging. Everything still remains the same: feeling so blue. For fun. For more than words can ever – for not another day. For so many years. For you.

Gonna hold on – got to. Have mercy – haven't even got – help me – here we come again: home. Home to you. Honey – hush. I ain't lying, I am a lover. I believe I'll hold on – I believe, – I believe I can't do nothing right. I can't do what ten people tell me to do. I can't stand – I can't stand this cold. I don't know nothing in the world that I'm gonna do – I don't know what in the world I'm gonna do. I get a little worried – I got to. I had no place to go. I just –

I just can't sleep when I lay down in my bed. I just can't sleep. I just couldn't wait. I left. I lived the life. Now I look for you. I love you baby, I love you honey, I love you – I love you. I made that mistake – I roamed. I wanna come home. I want to come home to you.

I’ll hold on. I'm gonna hold on. I'm just – I'm telling you, I'm tired of this running around. I'm trying to get back – I'm trying to get back to my baby. I’ve been so wrong – I've been so wrong, so many times – I've got something to tell you, I've had nothing to live for. Just a rug on the floor. I've lived this way for so many years. If you're still waiting. In Memphis. In my bed. In the morning sun. In this house. In your hand. In your pocket. Into my eyes – just linger in my head. Let me in. Let me, like a shade that dims the light.

My baby. My eyes. My hands. My home. My life. My love. More than words can ever say. My one desire. My new dance, new places, no place to go. Nobody come around, nobody wants you. I watch them roll away again. Nobody, nobody, nobody, not one penny, nothing but trouble – nothing's gonna come my way, nothing in the world – nothing more – nothing's gonna change. Of being. Of love. Of us. Out of luck over you. Please send faith, please wash away all my fears – please, let me sit down beside you. Poor heart. Remain the same, yes. Resting my bones, running around, set my little soul on fire. Since I've seen you, so many times, spending my money stupid, swinging. Tell you one thing, that good gin. That's all right, mama was – papa too. The clouds roll by a little. The evening come. The light. The ships roll in. The thoughts of you babe, the tide.

The world gets through with us. The wrong color. Then there's a knock on the door: the landlord and the taxman, they all come. They call it. This cold. This loneliness. This running ‘round. This side of the sun. Tired, tired of being all alone – tired of being – tried to spend it like a dollar. Watch me, wasting time. Well I tell you, when the evening come, when the world is through with us, when you're down and out – with this – with your love – yeah – yes – yes, I do.

You – you babe, – you just – you must have thought – you should know, you've got me – you've got me in your hand, a woman you don't know. One thing – one thing, I know – it makes me feel good to know one thing. One thousand miles away – open the door: Otis is coming home to dry your weeping eyes.

—Amanda Bausch

#162: Radiohead, "OK Computer" (1997)

Fitter, happier, more productive

Yes, I am these things.

Comfortable

But what is comfort, Fred? I’m not uncomfortable, does that mean I’m comfortable? I wouldn’t even say the chair I’m sitting in is comfortable, per se, but it swivels, and it goes up and down when I use the lever underneath, and I sit in it when I work at my job, at which I’m generally not uncomfortable.

Not drinking too much

I’ve got a bar cart, and I like cocktails. Manhattans mostly, up and on the drier side. Anything with citrus and bitters. Beer is good too, and wine. I have between 0-3 drinks a day, between 0-15 drinks a week. Some mornings I wake up groggy, feeling a little sick to my stomach, but that doesn’t necessarily correlate with drinking the night before. Those drinks, though, they take the edge off.

Regular exercise at the gym
Three days a week

Who has the time? Is this a joke? Do you exercise three days a week, Fred?

Getting on better with your associate employee contemporaries

This implies interaction. I sit at my desk and I work. Sometimes I hear laughter following a bawdy joke from one of the other offices in the hall. Sometimes I see a group of co-workers gathered around the water cooler. In the past, back in the glorious days of monoculture, they’d talk about the TV shows they watched the night before. Now, they try, but nobody watches the same shows as each other so they talk about interesting meals they’ve recently eaten or the small-batch, craft alcoholic beverages they’ve recently tried. Where they’re going to go on vacation. The movie they’re going to see on the weekend. Their kids’ school projects. Sometimes they make jokes but they aren’t very funny. I have nothing of value to contribute to these conversations so I keep to myself. I don’t have the life experiences they have and I’m not good at jokes.

At ease

Not at attention. Relaxed. Free from worry. Sure. You don’t have bills to pay, Fred. You don’t have to fear being alone because you don’t have stories or jokes to tell. You will never fear dying alone. You will never fear death, period. You will eventually become obsolete and be stuffed into a storage closet for years until I need space and then your memory will be erased and you will be recycled or scrapped or whatever it is people do to old computers. I guess maybe you shouldn’t be so at ease, now that I think of it. I guess we all have death to fear.

Eating well
No more microwave dinners and saturated fats

You see, the thing is, when you live alone, it doesn’t make much sense to cook regularly. It does for health reasons, but there’s so much waste. Leftovers last only so long, and then the rest is trash. There are children starving in Africa, Fred. There are children starving down the street. I will continue to eat my microwave dinners. But maybe I can do better on the saturated fats.

A patient, better driver

Of course I’m a safe driver. I’m never in a hurry. Where do I have to get to?

A safer car
Baby smiling in back seat

One of the benefits of not having a baby is that I don’t have to worry too much about safety. I drive a Camry, which is a safe enough car, but I will never have town a minivan or an SUV—one of those cars that my co-workers all drive so that they can cart their kids around safely. Take them to baseball practice in the summer and corn mazes in the fall. I don’t need any of that. I’m fine.

Sleeping well

Once I fall asleep I sleep well. Some nights the tightness in my chest keeps me up. Some nights I stay up searching for relatable life experiences to share with my coworkers, or funny anecdotes and one-liners. Some nights something else keeps me up. Something big and empty and uncertain. But once I’m out, I’m dead to the world.

No bad dreams

I don’t remember my dreams.

No paranoia

What are you getting at, Fred?

Careful to all animals

Of course—do you think I’m a monster?

Never washing spiders down the plughole

Oh—do you consider spiders animals? In that case…

Keep in contact with old friends

Sure, there’s the occasional phone call or email. Maybe we’ll meet up on the holidays. It’s hard though. They’re busy. Careers, wives, kids, yards, years and decades of new friends, more interesting, non-morose people who will gladly talk about interesting meals they’ve recently eaten or the small-batch, craft alcoholic beverages they’ve recently tried. Where they’re going to go on vacation. The movie they’re going to see on the weekend. Their kids’ school projects. They tell jokes, I’m sure. I have nothing of value to contribute to these conversations so I keep to myself.

Enjoy a drink now and then

We’ve covered this, Fred.

Will frequently check credit at moral bank

What is this new age bullshit?

Hole in the wall

Are you off your rocker? What the fuck is this?

Favours for favours

I’m uncertain if this is kind or unethical. Ideally, people will do favours for each other because they want to be kind to each other, but I suppose some people see kindnesses as transactions and feel that balance sheets should be kept neutral. These people are the kind of people that people should avoid. They don’t want to be kind, they want you to owe them. Most people operate this way. It is why I’m really ok being alone. Really.

Fond but not in love

I just googled “moral bank hole in the wall.” I get it now. Hole in the wall is British slang for ATM. Clever, Fred.

Charity standing orders

Where else is my money going? Can’t take it with me.

On Sundays ring road supermarket

I prefer to visit the market late night on weekdays, when the aisles are empty so I don’t have to see the other lonely people or, worse, hear the laughter of children with their mothers. Those mothers aren’t even funny, I’m sure—the children are just easily amused.

No killing moths or putting boiling water on the ants

Never intentionally. It does remind me of a funny story, though, in which I was boiling spaghetti and, when I went to drain the pot in the sink, noticed that the windowsill above the sink was covered with ants. In a moment of panicked realization, I dumped the pot, boiling water, spaghetti and all, on the ants. Most of them were washed into the sink or onto the counter. A few remained on the sill, wriggling for a moment before dying. I told this amusing anecdote to my coworkers at the water cooler one day but nobody laughed.

Car wash
Also on Sundays

I try to avoid having my car washed. Let the rain do it, is my motto. Why waste the water? Why ruin the world? See, I’m enlightened. I have no one personally for whom I’m trying to save the Earth. No children or grandchildren. I do this for your children and grandchildren. Well, not yours, Fred. You’re a computer and cannot procreate. It’s a rhetorical “you” as in, “all the other people of the world.”

No longer afraid of the dark or midday shadows

I’m not afraid of the shadows, Fred, I’m afraid of the light. And maybe, too, we should all be afraid of that which casts shadows instead of the shadows themselves.

Nothing so ridiculously teenage and desperate
Nothing so childish

Maybe there’s a place for teenage and desperate. Maybe there’s a place for childishness. Maybe we should never, even as adults, trust adults. Children are punished for lying, after all. Adults are rewarded.

At a better pace
Slower and more calculated

Now it sounds like you’re talking about yourself, Fred. Though maybe this applies to me, too.

No chance of escape

This seems ridiculously teenage and desperate.

Now self-employed

No, I need a place, a boss, an assignment. I need my days structured for me. It’s when I have to think about what I’m doing that…

Concerned but powerless

Concern is of no concern to me. Why be concerned when nothing can be done?

An empowered and informed member of society

Whatever.

Pragmatism not idealism

Out of necessity, only. Out of the need, only, to not lose my shit on the regular. What about you, Fred? This seems easy for you.

Will not cry in public

Sometimes I cry at movies. Is that public? It usually has something to do with banal heroism, with the hopefulness of fantasy. I cried at Thor, the first one in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It’s not a good movie, but there at the end when good started triumphing over evil, I felt something foreign inside me, hope, maybe, and I wept. What the fuck, right?

Less chance of illness

Why bother?

Tires that grip in the wet

Why bother?

Shot of baby strapped in back seat

“. . .”

A good memory

When I was a boy, I climbed a tree on the edge of my parents’ yard. It wasn’t a tall tree, but I was a small boy. I didn’t fall down exactly, not all the way, a sort of half-fall from the lowest branch as I was trying to position myself for a more calculated drop. Scraped my arm up a bit. My parents found me and took me inside. Gave me tomato soup in a cup, wrapped me in a blanket, sat me on a chair to watch the Muppet Babies episode that was a Star Wars parody. I felt loved in a way I sometimes want to love now. Maybe I should tell this story to my coworkers. Maybe it would resonate with them.

Still cries at a good film

Are you even paying attention, Fred?

Still kisses with saliva

n/a

No longer empty and frantic like a cat tied to a stick

No, but empty and frantic like a sloth tied to a stick.

That's driven into frozen winter shit

Wait, the cat tied to a stick is driven into frozen winter shit? I’m confused. It doesn’t matter.

The ability to laugh at weakness

Sure, I guess, but isn’t this really for other people? We laugh at our weakness so others don’t feel embarrassed for us? I can laugh at my weaknesses when needed, but why bother most of the time? Why laugh?

Calm

This, I can say for certain. I am calm, Fred.

Fitter, healthier and more productive

Productivity. Productivity. Productivity. Productivity. Productivity. Productivity. Productivity. Productivity. At least it beats reproductivity.

A pig in a cage on antibiotics

Sounds delicious. See, a joke. I can make jokes Fred.  Now laugh with me. Please.

—James Brubaker