#397: Massive Attack, "Blue Lines" (1991)

continued from #438: Boy’s Don’t Cry

I must’ve gone snooze again ‘cause I wake up in the kitchen sink now, water dripping down the crack of my ass and a gat jammed in my temple, some Tricky Kid with a rainbow grill slobbering in my face.

“Whar da soz’s at?”

Through slumbering head clouds I don’t rec the speak but don’t see him a tealeaf anyhow. “Hey pal, wallet’s yours. On the table,” I say, bargaining seconds like a turbaned bazaar vet, reaching back quiet for the wire scrub brush—for that caked on grease, so the dame in the pitch viz says anyway.

“Oi, ain’t inerest’d inat. Gettin’ a Visa card nowadays isn’t hard.”

I acknowledge his point with a shrug before bringing my arm around hard and jamming the brush in his eye; my other fist swinging pendulum-like wrapped ‘round a sudsy mug I picked up München way back. My souvenir stein crashing into his mouth and twisting his face up into a bloody tunnel of budding orthodonture; 52 pick-up with many-hued teeth.

“Feckin’ murderin’ bastard,” he screams through eyeless/toothless agony and I push myself out of the sink onto the floor where I land a kung fu chop to his solar plexus, followed by a knee to his now bent-over noggin, messing my slacks with some ocular leavings. With the pain and the blow to the head, he’s out. I tie him to the kitchen chair with some cord from the cupboard, wipe the sweat off my brow and walk over to the window, lean out into the drizzle, hands on the sill. A Blue Razr parked across the way speeds off. I nod to myself, tuck back out of the rain, spark a Morley’s and puff, collecting on my next move.

*

“Hey Momma,” I say into the vizcon. Trendy Wendy stares back though a brick wall of mascara: ‘coons must be the new thing in Dogtown. “I got a package for ya,” nodding my head at the drifting bloody dingbat leaking on the formica.

“Creepz Bobby, what’d he do?”

“Boy interrupted me from my Palmolive usings whilst waiting on a client. Damned hard to reach spots and streaky drying. Chapped my hands.”

“You sure enough did a number on ‘em.”

“Yeah, well, dukkha. I was hoping you could send one of your boys down for cog and disposal. Remove some toenails, Guantanomize, the like. Get to the prize of this particular Cracked Jack.”

“Sure thing Bobby, Judo Jonny be over in twenty, no problemo. Let you know what we find. Who’s the client anyways?”

“Some rich dame, who knows. Eyah Brusha here coulda been looking for her or come in her place; I’d reckon the former, making it more complicated than the easy few Cs I was counting on this gig.”

“Ain’t that always the case.” Trendy Wendy blows a kiss and signs off and I sit down to wait for Judo Jonny, smoke a fag or two, and meditate on the grievous prospects ahead.

By the time Judo gets the boy cleared out and bleaches the floor, I’ve gone through a pack of Morley’s and a bottle to boot. I lay my buzzing head down and finally drift off as the sun peeks out between the curtains, dreams of falling into a huge sandstorm, a bloodied Arab, an endless caravan, sand spinning ever ever ever.

*

The buzzing vizcon shatters steamy harem visions, perking me out the cot. Have to bend over sideways to take a leak.

“What is it,” I scream from the loo. Trendy’s on the screen again. I catch her grin tweaked and me covering my privates as I race by, her face made up in some newday perversion.

“Why good morning sailor,” she says, laughing. “Just wanted to let you know what we found out about One-eyed Willy here… Not much.”

I grumble from the commode.

“But, and fair warning on this one, he appears to be one of Ter Mojave’s goons.”

I raise my head and peak out the loo. “Ter Mojave?”

“Yup.”

“Damn, that do plant a tick in my tenders don’t it?”

“You could say.”

I zip up and walk over to the screen. I can see now Wendy’s latest trip: a diorama of raised scars and implanted hillocks make a map of her face.

“Cute look.”

“You like it? It’s the newest thing from Ney Tokyo.”

“Sure thing babe, cheers for the data.”

Winsome Wendy, lips bearing curious around new bolts and designs into concern, “Hey Bobby, just get away with dem gangsters, we don't want it.”

The screen goes black.

*

Ter Mojave has a Cadillac the size of an aircraft carrier, TV antennas in the back, sunroof top, and a collection of 30 Eurasian twinks whose only job is to spit shine the windows. Restricted to a diet of aloe and lilacs, their sputum makes clean and fragrant. This Sally who paid me a visit the prior eve not one of that lot, obv. Ter’s business spiderweb in need of as many toughs as poofs.

Dig this scene: rumor is Ter’s a mutant. Nobody seen his face since the aughts when Mommy or Daddy covered his egg with a burlap sack and shoved a sawed-off in his tiny mitts. Wound up the toy soldier and pushed him into a Circle-P whereby he enacted his first, of many to come, criminal enterprise. Such compassionate education led predictably into pimping and usury, drugs, arms, a whole sandbox of toys for the bobbing babe. He’d ditched the burlap some years back for a more fetching skintight balaclava, but lingering rumors of mutation persisted, facial deformities, wolf eyes, cleft palate. Still he stands tall.

If my visitor was one of Ter’s cast of characters, and he was after my client, a dame I’d seen but the one time she come strutting and waving her sallow Benhameens, I had more trouble than I thought. I guess I could forget the whole shebang, take a trip down Barbados for a few weeks, live life as a fever dream of shuffleboard and piña coladas, but she’s already left a deposit after all. A man’s gotta do.

The place to start if Ter was involved was the Sheik Mansour Supper Club, a posh joint in Lil’ Da Nang for the hoi polloi and layabouts of the sweeter set. After a pot of coffee and a round of cigs, I put on a dinner jacket over my gat and stride out to catch a Johnny Cab. It’s early yet, but the lunch crowd at the Sheikh Mansour would be a little easier to handle; no need to go in all musket balls and ramrods.

*

Elvis Phơưng’s doing a soundcheck up on stage, while lunch patrons slurp phơ and smoke black Gitanes. Bạn không là gì, nhưng một con chó con chó săn, đung đưa tất cả các thời gian. His voice more gravel than his namesake, guitars jangly and loose. The maître d’ in his monkey suit looks down on me like King Kong perusing an abused gaggle of Skull islanders on a lunch buffet.

“Could I see your identification sir?” he says over the backbeat and slurps. I feign chagrin at his thinking me heat all duded up and all. His face shines no sympathetic crag.

“Hey hey,” I shuck, “don’t call me an officer. This ain’t official business or nothing.”

The beefcake is unimpressed and I flip a card on the podium like some Lost Vegas card sharp. He continues unimpressed and disdainfully tweezes it between two grinding meatsticks, peering quizzical at the raised Lucinda Grande on Bone Alabaster. Tiki Taka falling deaf on the ogre, I go Route One.

“I’m looking for Ter Mojave.”

“And your relationship with Mister Mojave.” Not a moment’s breath and all focus on the Mister.

I harrumph and jaw, “We’d a been book club pals, Edith Wharton and whatnot, come what may. Err… boy’s school locker room hi-jinx, some youthful experimentation if you get my drift. Snapping towels, rape-lite. We go way back, the Mister and me.”

His meaty nostrils flare a meat minute, clenching up fists the size of my sorrowful bean. Eyes protuberances of ripe fruit peeling away layers of sweat and melancholy. I momentarily reckon perhaps my tactics were in error.

“Yers a greeby fuckstain ain’t ya?” his door manners dropping like trousers in a Re-Orleans nutlounge. “May I oughta learn yous a thing or two bout…”

I don’t wait to suss his teachings and instead plump my Taze-o 5000 up under his equally greeby armpit and let go a mean buzz. All hmmsss and hoiiisss, he burbles to the floor spurting pee and snot; Elvis and his cohorts carry on uninterrupted. I straighten my dinner jacket and step over the hulking island at the foot of the podium—the harder they fall—scanning the room for Ter Mojave.

Horus Birdface joins Elvis on the stage and they duet something nice.  

Light at day, the lady’s lay,
Broken, cray, this baby’s pay to play,
Marzipan love and sugar pop dove,
She stove my heart with a hearty shove.
The big wheel do keep its turn
Unfinished and unsouled.
Will be for all time,
The end of time,
All time.
End time.

Up on the stage, one man struggles, another relaxes.

—Erik Wennermark

#398: ZZ Top, "Eliminator" (1983)

“Them weeds growin out them cracks must live off coolant or some shit.”

“You reckon? Oil just as good a juice as any.”

“Ain’t no way, thicker than sorghum and slick as a good time, ain’t no way nothin’ll catch hold in that.”

“Well either that or we got ourselves a new breed done come loose.”

“Coolant at least got some water innit.”

“That’s true now Marty, that’s true. But I still got my doubts.”

“Like hell you do. Pass me another one a them suds hey Cole?”

“Mmhmm.”

Normally there wouldn’t be no drinking this early in the day or ever for that matter but today there was no bosses to swing nothing so there stood Marty and Cole having a couple in the late morning sun. It was that pale kind of light that starts to fall when September moves into its later parts and leaves are all in a rush to lose their luster, just the right amount of breeze and the early-to-deathers falling in slants across the sky and spinning as if whisked wherever the wind catch. It was the type of day where folks feel genuinely thrilled to be alive and waking. But leaves, trash, and the occasional scavenger aside, Muscle Mike’s Used Cars and Garage was without patronage.

Marty coughed and swirled the last contents of his Schlitz before knocking it back. Clearing his throat he pressed a loose fist to his mouth and turned to Cole.

“You bring that radio again?”

“Mmhmm”

“How’s bout fixin it so we can hear some music?”

“I reckon that can be arranged. But don’t go funny on me.”

Cole rose from a squat and sauntered to his truck, knees popping and cracking with each step. Marty doubled back into the open hatch of the garage towards the fridge and swung back the door, removing two more bottles from the breath cloud of cold air.

“Hey we may need to make a run here in a minute if this here don’t pick up,” Marty shouted from the back of the garage as Cole fitted the radio’s plug into the orange extension cord usually reserved for the shopvac.

“Well I brought the last sixer so you gon have to do somethin bout them next few,” Cole said, as he adjusted the frequency knob with hands coated in yesterday’s grease. Marty came up beside and leaned over Cole’s shoulder to read the numbers on the dial, then shifted his weight and motioned towards the cigarette pack in his front left shirt pocket. Extracting one and placing the filter to his lips, he lit the tip against the wind as Cole centered in on a station. Drums and guitar cut the silence.

“You ain’t still smokin, are ya?”

“Only when I’m drinkin.”

“But you always drinkin.”

“You sure got a keen set on you. How ya say bout once this place tucks in we head on up 18 to…”

Just then tires rolled in onto the gravel, cutting Marty short and shaking dust over the lot, then lulled to a stop. Marty took a long drag and exhaled into the coming cloud and placed the butt filter and half the white on the edge of Cole’s radio. The opening riff of ZZ Top’s “I Need You Tonight” came through as the engine noises faded and Marty winced and Cole stood up and removed his cap to rub the sweat away from his receding hairline with a worn blue hankie. A V of geese passed over heading southeast as a man walked out from the dust haze and caught sunlight.

“Mornin fellas. Hope I’m not interrupting nothin here but there’s an awful funny sound I’d sure appreciate for one of y’all to take a look at, if it’s not putting you out none,” the man said, removing his sunglasses and tucking them into the front of his denim shirt, pulling his beard aside to do so.

“Not at all mister, Cole here wouldn’t be put out none to see what’s the matter with your vehicle, ain’t nothin getting past him today.”

“Pull ‘er on in and let’s get ‘er up,” Cole said, casting a sideways glance as he placed his cap back on to hide his eyes.

Marty crouched and fit the filter tip back into his mouth as the bearded man got back into his truck. Engine noise filled the air again and the tires moved into the empty bay and came to a halt. Marty exhaled a plume and moved a coarse hand through his thinning hair. The radio played on in the background. The bearded man slammed the door shut and exited the garage towards Marty. The radio played as they stood.

“The darndest thing, I was out at Mel’s yesterday, having a few and visiting my girl Evelyn and this same song came on all ghostly like out of that jukebox. Can’t say I’d heard it before since who knows when.”

“What you mean ghostly?”

“Like I says. Like it don’t need money to play no music. It just plays what it will.”

Marty shifted his weight, holding the smoke in the right corner of his mouth, palms suddenly wet.

“You never been out by Mel’s off highway 18 near the Citgo? With the haunted jukebox?” the bearded man asked Marty as he moved his hands to his back pockets.

“Well sure. Cole and I have been known to take up residence there from time to time.” He didn’t recall no haunted jukebox.

“Mostly a haunt for drifters and such, but helluva fine establishment.”

“Well I’ll be. But now you says you know Evelyn?”

“I should say I know her, she’s fixin to be my wife here before winter. She said she’d always fancied herself an autumn bride.”

“You don’t say,” Marty stooped low and stubbed his cigarette out amongst the loose bits of gravel. He rose slowly, placing a hand on the weatherproof siding of the garage in an effort to keep his balance. He felt faint suddenly.

*

Truthfully it had been a long while since Marty and Cole had been out to Mel’s on account of the last time they’d all been in. On account of how Marty’d composed himself. He had had more than a few, this is without debate, and it had been that type of day where neither Marty’s mood nor drinks was sitting well with him. It had also been after Evelyn had said she’d rather not go round with Marty no more.

They’d come through Mel’s on Marty’s insistence. Approaching the empty bar, Marty craned his neck back to where a 40-watt bulb hung illuminating the storeroom and right then Cole knew he should’ve steered Marty elsewhere. A caged ceiling fan spun overhead filtering the traces of cigarette smoke curing in the air above them. Marty lit up and put his wallet on the bar. From the back came some rustling and soon enough Evelyn strode elegantly into the afternoon light. Her steps tapered as she recognized the patrons. Cole braced himself. A few loners drank in silence.

“Hi Cole. Marty. What can I do for you boys?”

“Ma’am.”

“Evelyn! After looking at this asshole all day you my dear are a welcomed sight!”

“Easy, Marty.”

“Easy yourself! How ya been sweetheart? You always look better than I picture you. That dress holds you like I used to.”

“Marty, look, maybe we should…”

“A beer for my friend here and a taste of something special for us. What’s your poison, Evelyn?”

“Marty easy, stop yelling.”

“I’m not Cole I’m not! Can’t a guy buy a pretty lady a drink? What’ll it be? Huh, Evelyn? Huh?” Marty stood abruptly and caught his foot funny on the barstool to his left and went down hard. The few day drinkers paused and looked towards the noise. Sprawled and screaming, Marty cursed high and low. Across the way a light flicked on in the old Jukebox and CD’s shifted and “I Need You Tonight” came blasting through at full volume.

“Get him outta here Cole!”

“Marty, come, let’s get.”

“Fuck off me, Cole! Our song, Evelyn! It’s our song!”

*

ZZ Top finished up and gave way to a commercial about fabric softener. A car sped past on the interstate blasting the same advertisement, yellowed leaves trailing in its wake. Back in the garage the hydraulic lift kicked on, lowering the car back to ground level and Cole stepped into the now high sun.

“Just some loose bolts. Nothin a couple turns couldn’t fix.”

“You’re shittin me? Well if I’d a known I wouldn’t a troubled ya. What’s the damage?” the beard said, sliding his fingers along his wallet chain until they found purchase. Marty took out and lit another cigarette, turning away from Cole and the beard towards the road.

“Well with time and labor should be bout…”

“Don’t worry about the bolts mister,” Marty interrupted, staring into the distance where the long-passed car glimmered faintly beyond the county line.  “It’s on Mike.”

—Nick Graveline

#399: Tom Waits, "Rain Dogs" (1985)

LETTER TO CASEY WAITS

This is the month we turn thirty. We’ve never met but our parents were pregnant at the same time so maybe the first sounds we ever heard were the same. Maybe our mothers weighed the same with us inside them.

The year we were born your dad was making a record in a vault in Lower Manhattan. How the city has stretched and grown inside itself in the thirty years since has been well documented by all kinds of great minds. I’m on the train uptown to see my father for the first time in nine years, which nobody else’s research has prepared me for but your dad is growling at me through the headphones. His yell is almost protective. The decade of our birth lays itself over this one like a long grey transparency.

Going up to Harlem with a pistol in his jeans.

Going up to 86th & Lex with an iPhone in my purse.

At least September feels right for a birthday, the trees in their back-to-school clothes. My nine-year estrangement is a fourth grader. Something about this being the truth makes it seem less like my own life, like a poster on the side of a bus. Is that what it’s like to have a famous father? I tell you all my secrets but I lie about my past. People like to bring that up to him, don’t they, that he sang that once.

When I bob my neck and slap my thighs along to “Big Black Mariah” on the train the lady next to me moves away. Thunder that the rain makes when the shadow tops the hill. I hear a hurricane hit the coast in 1985 and three days later I came.

Thirty—how’s it sitting with you?

You and I both know what 1985 was really like: impossible to remember. It disappeared behind big grownup hands. The leaves fell when we were born. Ships skated out of their moorings and a bass drum tumble stowed away on the back end of the beat. Tumble-stow, tumble-stow. The two people who experienced my birth most closely never worked with their hands. When the rain came they got indoors to wait it out. Your mom co-wrote one of the songs on the record, “Anywhere I Lay My Head,” and my mom had a tape of your dad’s in her car. One time she said it wasn’t appropriate for kids my age, which is our age. Maybe the rain came down hard that year too, like a tarp thrown over all this.

Our parents’ activities in January of 1985 made me this kind of a person and you that kind of a person and Lower Manhattan the home of a vault where your dad made a record. I grew in a regular way tucked behind the reference desk at a medical library in Connecticut into a person who imagines you grew underground at the rate of nineteen tracks per album per year. What about being young led you to hit stuff with other stuff for a living? How blue is music as a job? My parents were musicians once, they met that way, over music, which is exactly also how we met only we never have. I think the lady who wants not to be sitting next to me on the train must not know anything about music or being almost thirty or fearing recognizing yourself in a much older man on the steps of an austere museum or listening to your favorite record by someone’s dad who could have been yours. I like stomping my feet in public. Could I have been a drummer? Do you have any idea what your parents were thinking? It hums in the front inside compartment of a life like an engine.

And you spill out over the side to anyone who will listen.

What weird alchemy it must be to expand like that in an instant, making a kid, making a record. To go underground and emerge with something somebody else will eventually hopefully fall in love with, with something that will sneak into other people’s homes, ride the train without you, meet you for a drink 29 years later. These are things we need to consider at our age, Casey. Will the kids we might in time make ourselves be loveable? And yet the older I get the better I understand that it’s ridiculous to claim my age as a justification for anything I think I know.

None of us want to be remembered for our fathers no matter how great and some of us don’t remember much about them anyway but what I like most about this record is that it’s easier than the uptown errand I’m on. It’s like a laughing anger lumbering. I can take anything laughing but my father doesn’t laugh. He doesn’t get the joke which is that we’re related but you get it don’t you Casey? We were made at the same time as each other and as this record so we must be connected. It makes about as much sense as that we should be connected to the people who made us, their studios, the myth of their having existed in any other form before the leaves fell and we came into being. Anyway to be connected to anyone ever is to brave the assumption that you can understand them enough to say how you’re connected and you and I understand this much: that drummers and poets are magnificent failures at keeping it all together.

There’s a joke about this. It goes

Q: What’s the difference between a pizza and a drummer/poet?
A: A pizza can feed a family of four.

You and I are connected because about you I can say whatever I want. About my parents I can say almost nothing.

Where is the straightforward exposition of this errand I’m on? What’s a deft description of the circumstances? My father left me is a sentence I have no practice writing because I’m pinned like an insect to accuracy. That I left my father is no more direct a hole through the center of the apple, the brain’s guts get everywhere.

This is a joke too. It goes

Q: What do you call it when two people leave and stay exactly where they are?
A: All the doughnuts have names that sound like prostitutes.

But if you have the temperament and the means you’re soon up and over the border of your little life with great relish. The countries that took me in after were full of stories and I could pick whichever ones I wanted off the shelf. In this one we’re partners, Casey, we grew up together like cousins in different cities, we had the best jokes and the same dark curls and long summer visits that came around just often enough to learn what it feels like to have to miss a piece of your own family, which is how you learn there are some things inside of you that are also outside of you, which is how you learn you are a you and not something entirely different. Those were good summers, just before the leaves began to fall. I’d watch your parents back out of the driveway with you in the backseat banging with chopsticks on your father’s headrest like a drumset and try to remember what missing you felt like so it wouldn’t take me by surprise this time, so this time I wouldn’t cry.

—Laura Eve Engel

#400: The Temptations, "Anthology" (1995)

In graduate school, a common seminar move was to say, “I think we need to talk not about [singular noun] but about [plural noun]”—not sexuality, but sexualities; not the public, but publics, etc. In that spirit, I think we ought to speak not of the Temptations’ Anthology, but of Anthologies. The Temptations’ Anthology exists in three different iterations: a triple LP from 1973, a double CD from 1986, and a revised two-CD package from 1995. The three versions have different artwork, different formats, different contents. Five post-1973 songs were added in 1986, and the 1995 set switched out about 25% of its content. My hunch is that the listmakers at Rolling Stone did not carefully collate the various editions but simply chose the one that was currently available.

Their inclusion of Anthology (an Anthology) acknowledges the greatness of the Temptations and lets them bow in the direction of Motown, a label that produced scores of immortal songs but no memorable albums before What’s Going On. (I see that Smokey Robinson & the Miracles’ Going to a Go Go is ranked #273 on the big list, but I disagree.) We used to fret a lot in high school about whether Best-Ofs counted as “real” albums, but without such compilations a lot of hugely important and justly beloved music falls out of the canon. Even with compilations, the Rolling Stone 500 is missing much Motown: no “Money,” “Please Mr. Postman,” “Shop Around,” “My Guy,” “Dancing in the Streets,” “Shotgun,” “Reach Out, I’ll Be There,” “I Heard it Through the Grapevine,” “I Want You Back,” etc.

We need to speak of Anthologies, too, because the original Temptations Anthology in 1973 was part of a series of triple-album anthologies released by Motown after its sale and removal to Los Angeles. These were lavish affairs: double gatefolds with glossy booklets and generous song selection. (Sometimes too generous. Six sides are a lot to fill, and “lesser” artists who got only four sides sometimes benefitted.) The look was somewhat standardized. The covers all had the word Anthology at the top, with the group or singer’s name below it, encased in a lurid, oblong rainbow of green, yellow, red and purple. The covers were color coded: yellow for the Marvelettes, blue for the Four Tops, orange for Jr. Walker and the All Stars, etc.. I bought a few of the Anthologies, although it was usually easier to find cheap, used copies of the older Motown “Greatest Hits” LPs from the mid-sixties, which had less filler. The Temptations had two of these Greatest Hits: Vol. I (1966) and Vol. II (1970).

Thus we ought to speak not of Temptations but of Temptationses. The Temptations, too, existed in different versions, marked not (as Joni sings) by lovers and styles of clothes, but by producers and lead singers. There were the early, jaunty, lovelorn Temptations, with David Ruffin and Eddie Kendricks singing lead and Smokey Robinson writing and producing (e.g., “The Way You Do the Things You Do”). And there are the later, angry, socially conscious Temptations, with Dennis Edwards singing lead and Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong writing and producing (e.g., “Ball of Confusion”). There’s plenty of overlap, however, since Eddie Kendricks and his crazy falsetto straddle both periods, and Ruffin and Whitfield collaborated in the middle (e.g., “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg”). There’s great music from all phases of their career, or at least from the first, golden decade of it, but it’s hard to find a through-line from “My Girl” to “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone.”

Here’s a question we didn’t ask much in graduate school: how good is this work of art? How does the music of the Temptations[es] hold up? Is it better or worse than other music? These are questions that I sometimes waver on with respect to the Temptations and Motown more generally. I’m never quite sure if we undervalue or overestimate Motown. For certain rock critics, particularly Dave Marsh, Motown is the pinnacle of black popular music. When I discovered soul music in the early ’80s, however, I preferred the rawer, churchier Atlantic/Stax artists: Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, etc. The funkiness of the Funk Brothers was hard for me to hear, especially on those early, hand-clappy, finger-snappy, tambourine-happy Motown recordings like “Jimmy Mack” and “Baby Love.” And I was scornful of the subsequent Motown revival, sparked by The Big Chill soundtrack and the California Raisins, limited as it was to a few, overplayed songs. But there are riches in the Motown catalogue—plenty (I suspect) that I don’t yet know about. And re-listening to the Temptations this past week, I was reminded that they have a deep and deeply soulful repertoire.

I’ll single out two songs. “Since I Lost My Baby” (1965) has an aching lead vocal from Ruffin and a clever, economical lyric from Smokey Robinson describing how a happy world looks through the lens of heartbreak: “But fun is a bore, and with money I’m poor.” The arrangement is stately, and the vocal is restrained but no less impassioned than anything Otis Redding recorded. Three years later, they released “Cloud Nine,” their first song with Dennis Edwards singing lead. It’s a crackling, taut recording with a fierce, communal vocal inspired by Sly and the Family Stone. It’s presumably an anti-drug song, only pretending to praise the singer’s escape from the pains of this world: “I’m doing fine / On cloud nine.” But unlike many later songs on this theme, it avoids preachiness; if the singer is deceiving himself, he is capable of deceiving me as well. And then when I go on YouTube and see their clothes and choreography, it makes me think I’d give all my Anthologies to have seen them perform it in person.

—Will Pritchard

#401: Red Hot Chili Peppers, "Californication" (1999)

A normal day, just home from school, I’d dumped my backpack in my bedroom and was in a hurry to get to the basement, the unofficial sanctum of my burgeoning pubescence, so I could cram in a few hours of Ocarina of Time on my N64 before dinner. I was thirteen, drumming on my chest as I walked through the house and singing the only way a thirteen-year-old knows how to sing—with earnest—in a voice that can only belong to a thirteen-year-old—a dysphonic collision of pitches and tones reminiscent of a bagpipe in the hands of a boxer.

Dream of CaliForrrnicAationnnnnnn…
Dream of CaliForrni…caaaaaaaa…shunnnnn…

My father, sorting through bills and junk mail at the table, paused and turned to address me. “What did you just say?”

I was guilty of something unknown and quickly looked to defer blame. “It’s a song,” I said. “I didn’t write it.” As if my not writing the words precluded my having said them.

“Do you know what it means?” he asked.

“I don’t know, like, people want to go to California on vacation?” I offered. That was honestly the only thing I could figure, despite the song containing the lyric everybody’s been there and I don’t mean on vacation. Such was my obliviousness.

“It’s saying something about sex,” my father said. “Fornication is a word for sex.” He shook his head. “Don’t let your mother hear you saying it. Or your sister.”

Confused but exhilarated, I continued to the basement, where instead of flipping on the 64 and puzzling through the Water Temple, I popped in the Californication CD, pulled out the booklet, and began listening with new interest. Something about sex…well, sure…with lyrics like hardcore soft porn; young Kentucky girl in a push-up bra; live to love and give good tongue. But where else was sex hidden, and more importantly, what else was hidden with it?

*

I was ignorant, but not without good reason. Themes of this nature were totally absent from all of my previous experiences with music, as I’d pretty much only listened to—and again, in pretty much the only way you can listen to it, with earnest—Christian rock. Bands with songs titled “Hey You, I Love Your Soul,” “Straight Shooter,” “Superfriend,” “Super Good Feeling,” “Mighty Good Leader,” “Good People,” “Good Stuff,” “Love Liberty Disco,” etc. The message was pretty clear cut: You love Jesus and Jesus loves You and if Everyone would love Jesus then Everything would be totally overflowing with super awesome goodness. Granted, at thirteen I lacked any real perspective on worldly problems and didn’t have much to complain about, myself, but I still recognized that I didn’t feel like I was as good or super or awesome as those bands proclaimed was possible, and given everything I’d ever heard about “the difficult transitional period of the teenage years” I didn’t expect to feel that way any time soon. In fact, I desired this difficult transition, these changes that would happen, were happening, which would introduce a life that wasn’t so clear-cut and clean.

And what I found in Californication wasn’t clear-cut by any means, but instead an increasingly complex intermingling of the forces that compose reality. Sex was definitely present—the songs “Around the World,” “Get on Top,” and “I Like Dirt” practically pulsing with the sexual energy that made RHCP famous—touting the tangible mish-mashing of bodies that set the thirteen-year-old mind a-fervor. But paired with them were songs that presented a visceral pain within that sexual desire. “Scar Tissue” with its broken jaw and waving goodbye to ma and pa and with the birds I share this lonely view. “Emit Remmus” with cuss me out and it’ll feel all right. “Purple Stain” with to finger paint is not a sin / I put my middle finger in / your monthly blood is what I win evoking menstrual flow followed by black and white and red and blue / things that look good on you / and if I scream don’t let me go hearkening a sort of eagerly anticipated love-bruise.

But there was more than sex. There was drugs and addiction with “Otherside,” “Porcelain,” and “This Velvet Glove,” and within that examination a possibility of release from the turmoil through suicide. But what was most powerful was the yearning for understanding, a searching for meaning not only within the self, but as part of the collective conscious. See “Parallel Universe”:  Staring straight up into the sky / Oh my my, a solar system that fits / in your eye…Microcosm. Yet even within this recognition, there was a question, a longing to abandon what is present in hopes of  attaining what is real—see “Easily”:  throw me to the wolves because there’s order in the pack / throw me to the sky because I know I’m coming back. For the first hundred or so listens, I admit I would skip track twelve, “Savior,” simply because the first line, Dusting off your savior…, implied too much of a departure from the world I knew. Eventually I listened and found not a song about separating from Jesus, but resolving a troubled relationship with a father, and as part of that resolution, an embrace of all the good and bad in a manner that allowed true freedom: A butterfly that flaps its wings / affecting almost everything / the more I hear the orchestra / the more I have something to bring / and now I see you in a beautiful / and different light / he’s just a man any damage done / will be alright.

At thirteen, I didn’t know about sex or drugs or rock ‘n roll, hadn’t quite lived long enough to fathom what would be most difficult about becoming a real person in the real world. If anything, the album left me feeling that the looming changes of life would be more complicated than I could even begin to understand. Nonetheless, and perhaps all the more so, it seemed like the stirring doubts and worrisome questions were part and parcel, were in fact necessary for the transition out of youth to begin.

*

I don’t believe I made a conscious decision to turn away from the relentless opti-posi-simplici-tudes of my Christian-swaddled rocking, but a natural drifting occurred. And I hadn’t initially sought out the Red Hot Chili Peppers because I thought they held answers from beyond the pale veil. What first got my attention was actually an appeal to my very juvenile sensibilities, through the video game-inspired music video for the album’s title track. The video depicts the digitally-rendered band members passing through a series of quasi-Californian trials and tribulations—Kiedis punching a shark in the San Francisco Bay and ramping a convertible through (R)Andy’s iconic donut; Flea dodging murderous lumberjacks felling redwoods and a teenage bride with a baby inside; Frusciante stumbling through sci-fi/soft porn Hollywood basement studios; Smith snowboarding the Golden Gate Bridge—only to plummet through a ripped-wide San Andreas fault onto a subterranean platform where, transforming back to flesh, they receive both a “game over” and an option to proceed to the “next game” to which, before the screen cuts out, they select Yes.

As a kid, I perceived a set of crazy-cool wild adventures that made the music video entertaining, but as an adult, knowing the well-documented real-world hardships the members of RHCP underwent, I can’t help but interpret some connection between the video’s antics and their own transition as a band into a new realm of possibility and understanding. Some crazy shit went down…and we’re still here! What strikes me as most interesting though, is the end of the video/game. GAME OVER it says, not LEVEL COMPLETE. Failure, not success. And yet, the band members appear joyous to be united. And yet, the option for a NEW GAME appears. And yet, they choose Yes. And perhaps that’s the main difference between my Christian rock upbringing and the realm of Californication: the ability to ascribe a super good feeling, not in spite of, but because of the complex criss-cross of pleasure and pain, life and death, self-loathing and self-discovery, not judgment within in a dualistic realm, but appreciation as alternating currents within the same existence. Perhaps Californication presents its own brand of earnestness, not a whitewashing of the past and separation from the present, but a devotion to the complexity of everything and all as necessary constituents for life.

The chorus of the last track on the album, “Road Trippin’,” says, These smiling eyes are just a mirror for the sun. As the song ends, as the album ends, it fades out on an open-ended version of this line: These smiling eyes are just a mirror for…your smiling eyes are just a mirror for… For…for…for… For this and this and this and this. For everything and all.

—Colin Lee

#402: Nas, "Illmatic" (1994)

The closest that Illmatic offers to an ars poetica: "Genesis" sets the stage with a sample from the street's disciple, but right before the album starts in earnest with "N.Y. State of Mind" you can hear, real low, "I don't know how to start this shit."

The story goes that Illmatic debuted at a time when The Source was in its pomp and didn't want to give perfect scores to anyone, let alone some unsigned twenty-year-old. But with the advance release of Illmatic on their system, the editors let go of the old rules, and called it what it was: five mics.

There's another album and another story that keeps coming back around from that time: The Chronic represented everything agenda-setting about hip-hop at the time. Rolling Stone makes the claim that The Chronic is, at #138, nearly three hundred places better and/or more important than Illmatic. But The Source knew right away what the score was. They gave a young Nas the five mics—the declaration an album was a supreme classic, benchmark, institution—where they didn't opt to break the policy for The Chronic. There's a reason for that.

And a big part of it has to do with the crew of NY legends doing sublime work behind the beats; and it's got something to do with the rumble of the train passing through; it has to do with the jazz solos and it has something to do with the album's author, his block, and the meeting of history and future in his sound. The young Nas overlaid atop the Queensbridge projects gives a prophetic sensibility to the album cover. Everything about Illmatic represents.

Jeff Weiss, writing in 2013 for Pitchfork, says that the album doesn't leave the block, but if you listen close, all the hoods and crews show up. The phrase repeated on "Memory Lane" is, after all, "comin' outta Queensbridge." As in it starts here, but there's no telling where it ends. Nas himself says he always knew he was born to leave the block, to travel the city, to hear and see what everyone else was up to. "And I'm from Queensbridge, been many places," he says. The block matters, but the orientation is towards the world. The curiosity gives the album a big force against sadness. Ill will may be gone, but there's a big world out there, and life left to live.

The five mic award has got to have something to do with the fact that Nas plays something of the role of, not reporter, but real-time-historian perhaps. He relays traumatic events and damning allegations alike with neither hyperbole nor judgment, but always as they relate to the arc of the block. He is in Queensbridge, steeped in its history, but always makes his way around town, and the sound he's cultivated is richer for it.

Played back-to-back against Illmatic, The Chronic sounds a lot less groundbreaking, earth-shattering, and cry-it-from-the-hilltops than the constant eulogizing suggests. And that's not to say that some of what came next for Nas didn’t sounded like pop next to his early work (not to say that "Hate Me Now" isn't great pop). For that reason, maybe it makes sense to keep them far apart. But make no mistake: Illmatic raps with a razor under its tongue. Who looks good next to that?

Certainly, we're not trying to say there's no place for pop in this world. But when someone keeps shit that real, arranging not just beats, but big questions, big opposed forces? When we argue with others, it's rhetoric, but when we argue within the soul, it's poetry. That's what Yeats says, anyhow. I reckon we got to call Nas' sensibilities poetic in that regard. Pure, molten intuition.

Satisfaction with the world comes only from the elements of the line falling delightfully—unthinkably, even—into place. Fragments arranged against the unanswerable, if you want to call it that. The menace and the tangible sense of mortality run deep; the sense of wonder is charged up; the rhymes are tight. There's no calling this pop.

Here's why it matters: let it run through your ears. Use headphones, or find somewhere you can listen: first, put on the big, loping, saccharine hooks of Jay-Z and Alicia Keys in "Empire State of Mind." Now, get Illmatic. "N.Y. State of Mind."

Seriously, try it. "There's nothing you can't do, now that you're in New York. These streets will make you feel brand new. The lights will inspire you."

"The city never sleeps, full of villains and creeps...I never sleep, cause sleep is the cousin of death." The closest he offers to a final thought can't touch "Empire State of Mind" for sheer vacuity and the normal empty platitudes thrown at the City of New York on a regular basis. All Nas wants you to know is that "nothing's equivalent to the New York State of Mind."

Nas's New York is devoid of pop-savvy swagger, devoid of claims to glamor. It's downright bleak at times. But with Nas there's no irony, no condemnation, no shame, no plastic reveling, no glorifying. Instead, Nas observes, thinks, offers subtle prescriptives, wrapped in the rich flow that he was known for. "The streets had me stressed something terrible," he says.

There's no lights to inspire where the young Nas is at—he lets us know "I'm livin' where the nights are jet black."

So what keeps the despair from taking over? What steers a line like "life's a bitch and then you die" away from trite pessimism?

Whatever it is, it's a fine line. There's a richness to the production and to the lines themselves that never falls far out of reach. Nas didn't invent jazz-rap. He just did it best. And he did it when everyone was trying to do G-Funk. For his troubles, he couldn't get an album deal. So finely was it balanced that the reasons for passing on Illmatic that keep coming up contradict each other: he was too hard, and he was also too meshed up in the soft, old East Coast sound.

What's a record executive good for, anyway, if we're in the age when they have no room to sell what they acknowledge as good, but not market ready? The world has passed a record exec by, but Nas tells you on the intro track, "Genesis," that when the shit is real, you do it without a contract. The thoughtful quality that informs the lines throughout each of the album's nine tracks suggests that he means it.

The speaker is thoughtful as hell, even as he recounts moments of crisis—running through the building lobby, "probably full of children / I couldn't see as high as I be"—in the active world and prone to moments of detached revelation—he's certainly no mere reporter. He reveals with evenhandedness, but there’s too much familiarity, too much resignation—he’s too close to just report, no matter how flatly the words themselves fall into flow.

If we talk a lot of shit about Jay-Z for "Empire State of Mind," we can also add that he's got some of the great one-liners to add enough introspection (only just): "Like God give a fuck: I'm just a crook on a song." But Nas has always pondered deeper while rhyming harder: "Woke up early on my born day...my physical frame is celebrated cause I made it one quarter through life some Godly-like thing created."

—Aaron & Jordan Fallon

#403: Lynyrd Skynyrd, "Pronounced Leh-nerd Skin-nerd" (1973)

This essay wasn’t supposed to be an essay. When I started writing, I had grand ambitions: a short story about a trucker and a girl he meets on the road, a girl whose not-uncommon beauty (it is the beauty of a young and slender girl) he can’t help but notice, even though she’s not much older than his own daughter. The attraction and the resistance of the attraction wouldn’t be the point of the story, but it was the tension I was going to begin with. And I was going to listen to Lynyrd Skynyrd and start with her hitching a ride and see where it took me.

But these posts have deadlines, and I am not, primarily, a fiction writer, and I didn’t realize how long this sort of thing can take, how difficult it can be to conjure lines of dialogue and learn your characters through them. I mean, I knew, I guess, but every time I start a project I think for some reason it will be easier this time, and it almost never is. All of this is to say: there is a tension in the songs in Pronounced Leh-Nerd Skin-Nerd that reminds me of driving a long way in the night and wanting things you feel uneasy wanting, of the way that, no matter how you try to repress it, you can’t ever escape who you are.

This evening I made, for the first time, a fruit crumble. I tossed chunks of nectarine and raspberries in sugar and then I added some shredded coconut and chocolate chips. As I added them I thought, there’s a chance this will overcomplicate things. I tried it anyway. It overcomplicated things. I didn’t ruin it or anything; the dessert still tasted good. But the surplus of flavors made it less immediately identifiable as what it was, and if I make a crumble again (which I probably will—what could be easier than tossing fruit in sugar, massaging cold butter into flour and sugar and salt), I will make it the normal way, the fruit and the dough and nothing else to distract from it, except maybe a little whipped cream.

You get where I’m going with this: Lynyrd Skynyrd is the good crumble, the conventional crumble, the one I did not make. Having fewer elements (I’m talking, here, mostly about how the album was released in 1973, before digital, computerized components manipulated music as they so often do today) somehow opens a space for a purer sort of complexity.

But I’m not here to assess the value of Lynyrd Skynyrd; time has already done that. I listened to the album in its entirety for the first time when I started this project, and I knew half of the songs. Not in a “oh I think I’ve heard this before” kind of way—I knew the songs. I wouldn’t call myself a Lynyrd Skynyrd fan, and I’ve never sought out their music. This album was released 13 years before I was born. And yet, I know those songs, just from being a person living in America. I bet you do, too.

What kind of wild and ridiculous success is that? I mean, wild. But also, ridiculous. Lynyrd Skynyrd is a band that still exists even though almost none of its original members are alive. I am a little confused but also delighted by this fact. They are, essentially, a cover band for themselves. There is an audacity to this but also a naivete, a simultaneous inhabiting that parallels the way their music is so sincere it descends into camp. They are so much the southern rock band that they’re bordering on a parody of southern rock.

I worried that writing about a trucker would be too obvious and unsurprising—that maybe it would be silly, to choose a character so clearly associated with this kind of music. Truckers and factory workers, blue-collar men who wear boots and drink whiskey and work long days, men whose lives are hard on their bodies. Men who own rifles, men who are more affectionate with their dogs than their wives, men who speak few words and never admit to crying. Rough men and terse men, men who know how to bellow. Men who never doubt their own ability to build a bonfire.

But these characters are the characters of the songs—they match the image the band has cultivated, the ones they market to, and so it seemed right, in a way. To worry about being too much when it’s Lynyrd Skynyrd we’re talking about is counterintuitive. And anyway, there’s something I love in those men—how they remind me of my grandfather, maybe, even though their music is something I know my grandfather would have dismissed. But maybe that’s not it, not really. I think it might be because there’s always some sort of crevasse between the image of the man and the man himself, and no matter how narrow it is, it is always deep.

I find this crevasse appealing; I want to peer over the edge. I want to build a bridge across it, or jump in, fall down through a tunnel of ice. I can never know it in others the way I know it in myself, but I want to, and this, maybe, is one of the things that makes me a writer. There’s a tension, I guess, wrought by that familiar adage: He’s not what he seems. And so, we come to expect that this is what literature or wisdom will show us as we get to know a character. I think it’s pretty rare that people aren’t what they seem. People, generally, are what they seem to be. It’s just that, often, that’s not all they are.

So, my trucker would be a trucker and the hitchhiking girl would be just that. The crumble that I didn’t make would’ve been only a crumble, fully inhabiting its crumble identity, and it would’ve been better. So I guess this is all my way of saying, I can’t think of a way to describe Pronounced Leh-Nerd Skin-Nerd beyond identifying it as southern rock, because it so fully inhabits that category. And I love the songs, I do, even as I don’t know how to feel about that love, even as I want to laugh at myself for loving them. The songs can’t help being only what they are. They also can’t help being more.

—Katelyn Kiley

#404: Dr. John, "Dr. John's Gumbo" (1972)

Cicero argues that great rhetoric should do three things to its audience: move them, instruct them, and delight them. Sir Philip Sidney steals this schema so he can define the fundamental operations of great poetry. And now I am stealing it to talk a bit about Dr. John's Gumbo. I understand how perverse it sounds to use extant categories to talk about an album whose very title refuses any easy reduction to its constituent parts. By the same token, I understand the joys that go along with certain kinds of perversity, as well as the simple fact that reading a recipe for a dish is never the same thing as eating that dish. And so I divide my essay into three parts, in order to give three glimpses from slightly different angles of this marvelous stew served up by Dr. John and his band.
 

To move: "Let the good times roll"

It's worth stressing that on Dr. John's Gumbo (or in it, maybe) "moving" means more than just the private feeling of a sublime whoosh. One might "move" literally, by dancing or joining the party for which the music serves as metonym. The aforementioned whoosh is a collective whoosh, a whoosh of participation rather than isolation—not that sublimity connotes isolation, but often we talk of aesthetic experiences as though they are exclusively private, a perspective which would make it impossible to talk about an album boasting nineteen musicians and performers, and featuring almost exclusively songs Dr. John himself didn't write. The "good times" here move, they roll, we are invited to join them and thus we in turn move, as in a parade, or a dance, or history itself.
 

To instruct: "We're gonna mess around"

If asked to make a list of "didactic" pop artists from the 1970s, I probably wouldn't think to put Dr. John on it. I don't think anyone would. And yet Dr. John's Gumbo is a crash course in the musical history of New Orleans, a collection of the good doctor's favorite standards newly rendered in the studio by him and his band. Dr. John composed only one of the album's twelve songs. Does this make the title's possessive a cruel joke? Or is it a way of foregrounding what I've already called the collective imperative to participate in the music? Is this Dr. John's property, this gumbo, or is it something he has prepared to share with his audience? I'm inclined toward the latter, even as I can't quite give a full account of the complicated position Dr. John occupied (and occupies) with respect to black musicians and songwriters, in New Orleans and in the US more broadly. The "gumbo" is part of a larger party, and it gives back the results of its "messing around," it doesn't try to act as if it spontaneously appeared. Indeed, the liner notes to Dr. John's Gumbo, written by Dr. John, candidly detail the histories of the songs covered, as well as explaining in what ways Dr. John and his band decided to mess around with those songs. It's complicated, like I said, but we learn that this music didn't come from nowhere and it certainly didn't come from Dr. John alone. It, too, is historical; it, too, rolls, and through messing around Dr. John facilitates that roll. No one ever said pleasure was straightforward.
 

To delight: "Ha ha ha ha"

I deliberately chose a non-lyric to head up this section, the phonemes-that-don't-signify that form part of the call-and-response in the show-stopping "Huey Smith Medley." Dr. John's tribute to the great blues pianist is interesting mostly for reasons not having to do with the words (or the sounds made with mouths), but I use this to point out that the overall "delight" of the album is one that strategically avoids articulation or statement. If you were to comb through the lyrics, you would find numerous invocations and descriptions of joy and pleasure, of happiness and general well-feeling and being and feeling. But if this were all it took for an album to "delight," everything would delight, all pop would be the same pop. For Dr. John, the delight is that we can repeat stuff that's already been done, that repetition is not a death sentence but an enabling and liberating gesture. No wheels need be reinvented, no great sadness need occur about the death of the possibility of newness, when one can do a version of a song that's already there. That version, moreover, will never be exactly the same as the song it takes as its ur-text; "copying" or "covering" is simply an excuse to fail at doing something else that's already been done. The space of that failure is the pleasure of imitation and of tribute. We hear Dr. John's continuities with, and differences from, Huey Smith and Earl King and numerous other great artists everywhere on Gumbo. This, and the freedom to do it, the freedom of the impossibility of becoming someone else, underlies the delight in the album.
 

Volta:

But these are not three separate things. No movement without instruction; no instruction without delight; no delight without movement; and so on. The three categories usefully isolate aspects of a total machine, a whole, even autonomous (but not autarkic!), work of art. Dr. John's Gumbo excites not because I can check the boxes off as I'm moved, instructed, and delighted, but because listening to the bundle of sensations and perceptions that comprise the album invites me to participate in the process. I can't dance and right now I'm in a Westport, CT, Barnes & Noble, so that's out of the question; but is not writing about something a part of the process? And, knowing that what I've written will not be the same as listening to Dr. John's Gumbo, have I not done something analogous to recording a cover version of another song? I guess the takeaway from this album, other than that I want to listen to it again, is that the onus of having to start from scratch is a false one, it doesn't exist in the first place, and all there really is to do is go back and do something again in the hopes that something wonderful may happen. In Dr. John's case, something definitely did.

—David W. Pritchard

#405: Big Star, "Radio City" (1974)

Brooklyn Masonic Temple, November 18th, 2009.

There’s a beat-up white sedan parallel-parked on Clermont, three grown men sitting inside with the windows rolled down, even in this bracing November night air, and “Back of a Car” tipping out of their stereo. We’re walking to a bar before the concert, and we pass this car, and I make a note in my mind of these three grown men in their car, listening to Big Star. The voice of their hero, seeping through a tinny car stereo, into the ears of buddies, uniting them in the moment. This was life on that late November evening, on the verge of winter, picking up our thoughts from the ground where they whipped around in the wind with the fallen leaves.

Sitting in the back of a car
Music so loud can't tell a thing
Thinking 'bout what to say
I can't find the lines

We come back from the bar tipsy and buzzing, watching our breath appear before our faces, short-lived. It’s still cold inside, the vast hall filling slowly with concertgoers blowing into their hands to stay warm, lining up at the bar. We order beers and find seats in the balcony; I sit on the edge of my seat. My heart tingles as they arrive on stage. Alex is wearing a coat; he fiddles around in his pockets, pulls out a pair of reading glasses, then folds his coat and tucks it behind the guitar amps. I take a picture of this moment, finding it impossibly endearing - one of those moments that are so simple in life, a little bit of nothing, but the nothing that make up the majority of our existence here. Fiddling in pockets. Folding a coat. This is existence.

The photograph is out of focus; you can see the blur of my excitement, my hands shaking, alive with anticipation of the show ahead.

When Alex plays he prefers to stand towards the back of the stage, he’s almost shy, laughing while looking down at his shoes. No showboating. He’s uncomfortable in the spotlight, happier to live through his fingers as they travel up and down the neck of his guitar. Happier living through music. The consensus in later reviews of this show was that it was a little sloppy, a little careless, but in a way that made it a real Big Star show. Most people there were just happy to be there, to share the same space with a band that seems to never have really existed at all, that came and went, and then came back again, alive once more.

I take another photo that night of Alex; in this one Alex is blurry, walking back after the show to collect his coat again. It looks as if he’s barely there: as if he’s liminal, on the edge of life. A ghost. It’s a trick of photography, how cameras capture light, but of course since then I’ve attributed a far greater meaning to it.

Alex died almost exactly four months later.

You better not leave me here... How could you leave me here?
 

I didn’t really intend to make this an essay about death. This album isn’t defined by Alex Chilton’s death: it’s punctuated by it. It’s an odd, errant drumbeat. A closed parentheses on a footnote in the liner notes. It shouldn’t even matter. I set out, in fact, to write the precise opposite: I wanted to make it an essay about how alive everything is when I listen to this album. How underneath Jody’s drums on “Back of a Car” I can hear the hiss of summer insects outside the car windows, how there in Alex’s voice is a sunset, a good one. Sitting on a hill above a city, any city, your city, the sun setting, the car stereo on, your heart beating hard because you think you might be falling in love. That’s what this sounds like. Like those moments in life when you feel so alive and so head over heels in love with the world that you can’t imagine ever leaving it. I love you too.

Life is a messy tangle of shitty and awkward and boring moments, too. The whole album sounds to me like this kind of living. Like sloppy, honest-to-goodness real living. Drunk sex and vinyl booths in bars (“Mod Lang”) and the feel of your pillow on your cheek the next morning (“What’s Going Ahn”). A photograph of a bare lightbulb and a sex position poster in a blood red room. The crumpled up love letter that is “Way Out West.” Folding a coat.

And then, after all these moments, after the shitty and the boring and the euphoric, we go. Everything is here and then not here: those insects hissing in the background are only around for one season, before their song fades and we’re left alone to ponder what comes next. The leaves go brown and crisp and fall. We see our breath in the air. And there it is: mortality. Humming underneath everything. Reminding us what Alex sings in “Daisy Glaze”:

You’re gonna die. Yes, you’re gonna die. Got to go.
You’re gonna die. You’re gonna decease.

That’s it. That’s life. That’s being alive. The lyrics belie the music: that soaring guitar, those urgent drums. He makes dying sound so alive. Because that’s exactly what being alive is about: we butt our heads against our own mortality, and when we strike against death hardest, with the most urgency to live: that is when we feel the most alive.

Alex Chilton bumped around the universe, believing in astrology (of course he believed in stars!), fighting to stay alive himself some nights, drunk on couches, in booths at TGI Fridays, fucking and passing out. I like to think that when we die our atoms become a part of the universe. I like to think that these songs belong to the universe. That these songs make our universe. Those handclaps on “O My Soul” and “She’s a Mover” and that sloppy harmonica on “Life Is White”—they have entered the world, stirred the ghosts.

A haunting.

We should be terrified: we should be quivering in our shoes, waiting for the grim reaper to descend. I think he’s there most of the time. But I swear to god even Death stops to listen too when “September Gurls” comes on. I loved you; well never mind. And in that moment of carefree carelessness we’re so alive, and Alex Chilton is suddenly so alive, that we terrify the grim reaper himself, life fills our chests, and nothing matters in that moment. Not even death. Death is background to living, a hiss under the drums. End parentheses. Nothing matters, and at the same time everything—fumbling through coat pockets, waking up, seeing our breath in front of our faces—matters now more than ever.

—Zan McQuade

Photography by Zan McQuade

#406: PJ Harvey, "Rid of Me" (1993)

Last time there was a working bulb in that socket, I watched her through the mirror, in the shower, as she tossed her head back and around the way women know how to do. While sloughing off  the water hung up in all that hair seems like the primary intention of this motion, it’s just a secondary effect of a much more engaging ritual. A mystery is demonstrated when a body traces one momentary arch in space, there’s your primary purpose: the translation of subtlety into raw power, the way women know how to do. The Greeks talked a lot about furies and passions.  She knew the difference, and conflated them per her whim, blazing and terrifying as retribution and then the lightbulb blew, and then the light just went out. The explosion feathered tiny shards of glass onto the tile like moths. It was an unimpressive sound, I know, but noises get louder in dark bathrooms and the report felt like we were tied together and shot out of a cannon into night, like a release, like somebody putting a fire out.

Nobody ever changed the bulb, so I piss in the dark by echolocation now. Hand planted on the tile above the commode, tapping out a rhythm as though there’s a song in my head or I’m waiting. Sometimes I mumble melodies and words: “Show yourself to me and no one else. I’ll believe you.” But there are no words, no signs. Nothing. “Speak,” I’ll say, “I’m listening. God’s Truth. I’m not lying.” Nothing but the sound of a guy with his dick in his hand, listening for that pitch in the water—deeper in the middle than at the edges, like a tympany—that means you’re hitting your mark, finding some center, finally and for the first time in who knows how long. “Mary. Jane. Pollyanna. Where are you hid?”

She slept sometimes. After fever, after hair doused in gasoline got set alight and set free, and with all the blizzards and demons cast out noisily, then fury calmed, menace hibernated, and passion remained like a halo. I watched the moon come up through the window once. It laid a hazy, gauzy pall on our skin as it eclipsed behind the pendulous arm of a street lamp outside. Those high-pressure sodium vapor bulbs generate this ricking, tacking buzz; the same molecules that float in the ocean excited into a glow that, my hand to God, is the closest synthetic approximation of moonlight you’ll see.

In all the old ballads, everybody’s pure, virginal skin is described as lily white; she slept as I watched the earth’s only satellite swing through the sky, and as I thought of a Cold War and of Yuri Gagarin, and as I wished that I could follow him as he chased Apollo who never knew that the sun could even set, and as I saw the moonlight and the streetlight on our skin, I saw that we were not lily white, that we were less than lily white.

Tonight at the foot of my bed there are stars at my feet. Outside, through the threadbare strokes of the mad sextet who practices infrequently and poorly down the hall, I heard a human howling. I was quickened and terrified by what sounded like someone actively, violently, removing their own leg in a panicked effort to forget a terminal, aching fever in the head.

That night, as she swung from the ceiling, she told me some things. Damn your chest-beating. Please just stop your fucking screaming. Good Lord, you never stop. I’m bleeding. Just you stop your screaming. She screamed this at me and called me by my name, Henry Lee, until I knew her words by heart, until I felt my heart become bigger, until I learned how to walk again with tenderness and rage in me: loud, and with a reason, with passion and fury and ecstasy. Ekstasis: outside of one’s self; so said the Greeks.

And I thought that maybe I had never come back after that light bulb exploded, and so I dressed and went out into the street.

Somebody was playing a Bob Dylan cover somewhere which should have been more pleasant, but which sounded like something breaking hard. I walked in the dark in wide train track circles under security lights. I crawled on my belly beneath a fence to the creek where storm-water overflow runs in miles of concrete basin. I watched ripples in the darkness for some time from the brush and bramble, and a snake wove between my legs, and I was reminded of what I’d heard: that our pre-human ancestors, the ones with acute vision, our ancestors who were better at seeing things like snakes in the grass; they were the ones who didn’t get bitten, who didn’t die from snake bites, and who had children, and by this winding, generations-long mechanism, human vision, the ability to see danger in dim light, increased. I thought of the return of the Year of the Snake and of the divinity of calendars, the divinity of wide wide arcs transecting space, and that you could stand still, for a lifetime, and take solace knowing that at least you’d ridden on the back of something, measuring the length and breadth of thunderstorms and birthrights, standing on the shoulders of a fifty-foot queen who has demands of her own.

I crawled under the fence, came back from the wastelands, and a dry smoke in the streets obscured my vision again, though it could have been the fog of morning that I caught in the face, that moistened my eyes. I wandered in the direction of home as the sky blushed through all the shades of dawn—peach and plum and Rose of Sharon—I saw a woman alone at a bus stop, gesticulating close to her chest, palm up, then pointing, as if in needful conversation with a confidant. As I drew near I saw a shawl, and a familiar calico, and, because it was day now, and not the night, the street light went out, the sodium vapor bulb given rest and repose, just as I walked behind her. I was unrecognized as the pretender. In answer to a question posed by her companion, whom I could not see, I heard her say this, only: …No. I’ve missed him.

I agreed, and I thought to myself, “Yes, I have missed him too. I too have missed him.”

—Joe Manning

#407: The Clash, "Sandinista!" (1980)

1. The Magnificent Seven: Wonderful. A high water mark for this entire album and such a promising start. Still, the song hints of the tragedy to follow, particularly when Joe Strummer rhymes “mobster” and “lobster.”

2. Hitsville U.K.: A Phil Spector-style rock and roll song. It is great. Legit great. Using pop forms to satirize is something the Clash was always good at. But doesn’t it just sound a bit too polished? I mean, when you have the means to record a song like this and your homage is this good you probably learn to see the world as the monster you’re mocking.

3. Junco Partner: Our first look at Clash-Dub. This is a mild success that, unfortunately, is a bellwether for the far worse experiments to follow. The Clash were always advocates of reggae/dub, so this development shouldn’t surprise anyone. Unfortunately, instead of taking dub elements and crafting them into the Clash sound, the whole enterprise sounds more like blue-eyed reggae phoniness. It’s Pat Boone doing Horace Andy.

4. Ivan Meets G.I. Joe: A Studio 54 reference in a song about nuclear war. It may have seemed revelatory in 1980 but neither of those subjects have aged well in the agit-pop department.

5. The Leader: A totally suitable Clash rockabilly song. If one were to play a game and attempt to reduce all 36 songs on this album to a more tolerable 12-15 songs, this would surely make the list.

6. Something About England: We are currently 1/9th of the way through this thing. If listening to this record start to finish were a family vacation, by now we’d have had a huge outburst at our annoying kids and be sitting in a too-silent car feeling wave after wave of guilt wash over us. Sandinista made us bad parents.

7. Rebel Waltz: I will bet $100 that this was the first song Wes Anderson ever heard. He was in SoHo, in a tiny shop that sold nothing but leather elbow patches and doll furniture.

8. Look Here: The first song that feels more like a rave or gag than anything serious. As a listener, you need to draw the line when bands do this sort of thing. Because someone definitely told them not to record this. And where once they might have felt humility and said, “Yeah, this is a waste of people’s time,” now arrogance pushes them forward. Ugh, you can just hear them all cracking up at how funny they are.

9. The Crooked Beat: The story goes that the Clash fell asleep in the studio holding their instruments and this is what they recorded. It became the inspiration for the “Found Footage” genre of movies which, by and large, are better if for no other reason than they don’t take so long.

10. Somebody Got Murdered: Somebody = the Clash’s legacy.

11. One More Time / 12. One More Dub: No reason to separate these two songs into two, individual lines. “One More Time” is great but then here comes more dub. And there is even a sort of skit on there. Because let’s face it, the thing that makes good albums great is always skits.

13. Lightning Strikes (Not Once But Twice): Parenthetical in the song title. WATCH OUT.

14. Up In Heaven (Not Only Here): Oh hey, look at that, another one. Probably a coincidence and not someone being clever. Incidentally, this is another awesome Clash song.

15. Corner Soul: And here, on a pretty bad album, is just a stunning piece of music. Bands do this to fuck with you. The brilliance of the song keeps you coming back to the album because, well, a few songs are good so maybe you’re just wrong about the others. “Corner Soul” absolutely shines at the midpoint of Sandinista. This is The Clash finding success with Dub. Topper Headon’s drums skitter, mimicking reverb echo. Strummer’s lyrics evoke rather than dictate and that gives the listener space to bring something of themselves into the song. It is the type of track that really gets you to wonder if you missed something in all the clunkers that surround it. It’ll make you second guess yourself. Maybe you just need to grow into it? Nope, Sandinista is a solid EP with 28 bonus tracks.

16. Let’s Go Crazy: This is a Prince cover. Check it out. It is good. (It isn’t either of those things.)

17. If Music Could Talk: If this music could talk, it would beg to be put out of its misery. Seriously, Clash sax? Like, smooth jazz Clash?

18. The Sound of Sinners: A gospel tune. You know where Bono learned to be a self righteous windbag with absolutely no self-awareness? He learned it from Sandinista.

19. Police on my Back: THE CLASSIC CUT. I feel bad for this song. It should be on a better album. It wouldn’t be too out of place on Combat Rock which, for the record, is a much better album. But here it is, withering. Consider this your last supper...things will not be this good ever again.

20. Midnight Log: Your basic rockabilly Clash song.

21. The Equaliser: Even a blind dub squirrel finds a dub nut. Hey, a broken dub clock is still right once every 36 songs.

22. The Call Up: This is proof of concept for Sandinista. If they took care and made everything as good as “The Call Up” or “Magnificent Seven” or “Corner Soul” I would be writing about one of the best albums of the decade. Something about the moment when 70s myopia exploded into 80s excess.  Instead, I have to march down, way down, way, way down, to goddamn "Washington Bullets"...

23. Washington Bullets: Joe Strummer wakes from a feverish sleep wrought with dreams about human tragedy and the modern condition. Frantically, he reaches for his bedside notebook and scribbles; “Washington Bullets = Basketball Team...but also Washington Bullets = actual bullets and American army guys.” He draws some boobs, too. Then falls back to sleep.

24. Broadway: This song drove me to drink...paint thinner. Also, another little skit! This one actually foreshadows a song to come. I bet it was all Paul Simonon’s idea.

25. Lose this Skin: Tymon Dogg, the singer on this track, was an old roommate of Joe Strummer, had an eclectic and varied career as a musician and would go on the play in the Mescaleros and so, it is with a heavy heart that I say his voice sounds like a helium fart.

26. Charlie Don’t Surf: Originally, I wanted to set this up as a big Heart of Darkness riff but, given the Apocalypse Now reference herein I felt like maybe I should take the high road...so I wrote that fart joke on “Lose this Skin.” #pulitzer

27. Mensforth Hill: I’m sure some of you are upset that I am taking huge cheap shots at the Clash. Well, this song is the reason. This is the entire reason.

28. Junkie Slip: I am now ready for the end times.

29. Kingston Advice: I say, “I got some advice for ya.” And then I squeeze a whoopee cushion.

30. The Street Parade: In here, somewhere among all those delayed guitars, is a pretty good song by the British band the Clash. They say if you look into a mirror, light a candle, put a picture of your crush into your pocket and then play this song, your student loans will double.

31. Version City: The Clash pretty much stop trying from here on out. “I’ve never seen such funky country” is a lyric they wrote. Surely, at least one band member was thinking, “I need to quit this band,” while all this was going on, right? And if not, were they all 100% onboard for the harmonica solo AND rehashing the “Magnificent Seven” riff?

32. Living in Fame: It just feels like the Clash decided to include a song by another band here. The focus of the song? Well, I am glad you asked. The focus of the song is that the Clash are a good band.

33. Silicone on Sapphire. “Let’s bring back that xylophone from 'Washington Bullets'…” - the Clash

34. Version Pardner: An old, old computer wrote this song based on listening to the previous 33 songs on the album.

35. Career Opportunities: OK, different versions of songs with reworked or repeated motifs on a record that is HEAVILY influenced by a burgeoning dub/sample culture? SURE. FINE. You stink at it...but fine. So what is your excuse for including a Kidz Bop version of one of your best songs from your first record, Mr. The Clash? The lesson here is that if you’re someone who thinks you’ll never fall off the rails, that your life will be good forever and the world is a wonderful, kind place...just remember...the original “Career Opportunities” was released in 1977 and this version dropped in 1980. It only took the Clash three years to go from alpha to omega.

36. Shepherds Delight: So, why are we here? What does it all mean? What have I done? Is there a God? Why did I basically trash an album that is, at worst, widely agreed upon as a top 500 record of all time? Well, because sometimes things can still be absolutely awful and totally essential. What a huge pile of crap. Dig in.

—Steven Casimer Kowalski

#408: Sinead O'Connor, "I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got" (1990)

Devin decided to change. She told me to sit tight but then changed her mind. “Will you just look in on him?” she asked. “Make sure he isn’t dead.” She dropped her wine glass off on the kitchen counter and went back into her bedroom. I got up and peeked in on Troy, her boyfriend, passed out drunk in her waterless bathtub. He was face down and ass up. Orange vomit speckled the fixtures.

I watched his back inflate and deflate, inflate and deflate, and gave him a nudge with the tip of my shoe. I knew practically nothing about him besides what I could see right in front of me and what I’d heard from friends of friends, most of it not super flattering. He was tall, broad, handsome like a rock climber; he was also, I understood, a melancholic drunk who tended to grab things and shake them—like parking meters and people’s heads—and then get sad and apologize too much. Part of me wanted to pee into his beautiful hair. Instead, I backed out and quietly closed the door.

Down the hall, the door to Devin’s bedroom was open. I leaned just right and could see the bare skin of her back, the very edge of it, could see it stretch and move as she did, the shadows and indentations, the curve of it into her shoulder and the back of her neck. Then she moved forward and out of sight. Was maybe stepping out of her shorts.

“Drink another beer,” she said. She stepped into view again and in her movements I could make out the cage of ribs along her side, a purple cluster of bruises. In another scene I walked back to her bedroom, steady and with purpose, noiselessly, harmlessly, and pressed myself gently into her back, enveloped and coated her like warm wax. In this one I did nothing. I turned away, wondering how I’d arrived here, how my footsteps could possibly have brought me to this place.

I busied myself with her CD collection, which she’d stacked in tall crooked towers on a desk. “What time is it?” I asked.

“Oh, I think we’re beyond that by now,” she said. “It’s either late or it’s early.”

I wanted to glance back but kept my eyes on the cases. Browsing the titles I could trace our history, which stretched back like nerves. They were stacked in no discernable order but I started organizing them in my mind, finding all the points of intersection where our lives had overlapped and all the giant gaps in between where we’d drifted out of sight. So much of it was music that I hated—too caustic and pissy. She was “Bullet with Butterfly Wings;” I was “Tonight, Tonight.”

I ran my fingers over the spines, tapping each disc I recognized, marking them with invisible white dots. This one tasted like cigarettes and puke. This one felt like the worn cushion of a couch against my back in an un-air-conditioned apartment. This one was cold outside, and wet, and perfectly dark. This one had her fingers in my hair as I drifted near sleep. I turned around but Devin was nowhere to be seen.

At the bottom of one stack, pinned like a fossil under the strata, was I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got. It took some doing, but I wedged it free. The case had a busted hinge and came apart in my hand, and suddenly Devin was standing next to me, her arm a vine around mine, her cheek on my shoulder. She’d put on old jeans and a tank top and had gathered her hair back in a messy bunch. She looked very tired.

“Aw lookit,” she said. “Look what you dug up.” She took the half of the jewel case that held the liner notes and started flipping through them. She burrowed her hand in mine, took it out again. “Oh man,” she said. She rubbed her eye on my sleeve, tossed the liner notes down and walked away. I plucked out the disc, examined it for scratches. It was in pretty good shape.

“Don’t play that,” she said from the couch. She held a long, thin paintbrush and a small jar of paint. She dipped the brush and started painting her toenails white. “I don’t want to hear that voice tonight. It’s too perfect.”

The voice was everything. I’d said as much years ago when I first played Devin the album. I liked the softness of it, she liked the spit. It was the only time our tastes in music had so perfectly overlapped. This one was a bone-cold winter and a week under heavy blankets, when we sucked each other’s breath and lay together with our clothes on, when we put vodka in spaghetti sauce, when we sat shivering on her roof and I flicked the cigarettes out of her mouth if she didn’t smoke them fast enough, when we watched the first and last fifteen minutes of The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, when she pressed her nose to my temple and cradled my head in her arms.

It had been the voice—that voice which was strength and an ache, both delicate and jagged. I’d played her “Three Babies” and said, “Doesn’t this song make you want to weep?” She gave me a withering look, played “I Am Stretched On Your Grave” and said, “Doesn’t this song just make you want to fuck?” She played it over and over, that pulsing, rhythmic outro. She sang the words, though I could tell she’d never really listened to them, each time with a different look in her eye that I couldn’t quite seem to make sense of or translate quickly enough. We’d only tasted each other—only nibbled, never bit—and at the end of that week her father got sick and she’d gone home. I didn’t see her again for eight months.

I looked at her now, with her heel dug into the couch, staring emptily at her toes, and wondered if she was waiting for me to leave. From the bathroom came a thud that rattled the light fixtures. We both pricked our ears but neither of us moved.

“Maybe I should go,” I said. She looked at me but didn’t say anything. Her face was unreadable. “Should I go?” I asked, but got no answer. For a second I thought she might cry, though I’d never seen that before and would have no idea what it might look like. She finished one foot, brought the other up and started in on it.

I set the CD in its case and put the two parts carefully back together. I wanted to play it; I wanted it to communicate something for me. I thought about wedging it back into the bottom of the stack but then just left it where it was, sitting out separate from the others, figuring she could put it where she liked. There was another thump against the wall, but this time she did not look up.

I fidgeted, looked around. I thought she might be waiting for me to say something. “You want me to stay?” I asked.

She snorted. “Yeah. The three of us could have brunch together.” She leaned in close for the smaller toes. She was doing a pretty haphazard job, though she was staring intently.

“No, I mean.” I put my hands in my pockets, took them out again. “Devin, do you want me to stay?”

She laughed but it didn’t last, and when it was over her face went dim. Her mouth opened and closed and I could see her swallow. If there was something she was waiting to hear, this was as close as I would get to saying it. From the bathroom came a sound like strangulation and a series of poundings so violent I half expected a bare foot, a bloody elbow, to come bursting through the plaster. Devin looked at me and smiled.

“No,” she said. “Nope, I don’t.” She set down her paint and brush and stood up. We looked at each other over this long gulch. It was perfectly silent. Neither of us moved.

—Joe P. Squance

#409: The Doors, "Strange Days" (1967)

With his beaded necklace, oily ringlets, and feline glare, Jim Morrison peered over my bed throughout my years in high school. I don’t know what possessed my adolescent self to tack up this particular poster, as his melodramatic, shirtless pose embodied one of the many qualities of the Doors that I derided: the exploitation of Morrison’s charisma to maximize the band’s teenybopper appeal. But there he was, the Lizard King, Mr. Mojo Risin’, unblinking and aloof while I learned to knot a necktie, solve equations with two variables, and meander through the pentatonic scale on my Gibson. Sometimes at night, cocooned in headphones, I would rhapsodize about traveling through time to become the bassist the band never had. Gig after gig, our primal, organ-drenched vamps would entrance Morrison, beer sweat pouring through our clothes, as he prowled those stoned children in the pit. We want the world and we want it NOW. I avoided thinking about his beard streaked with grey, how bloated he looked in his last Parisian snapshots, how melancholy and deep his baritone sounded on “Hyacinth House.” Like most teenagers, I policed my fantasies for signs of consequence. Instead, in the flood of imaginary spotlights, my jazzy runs held our nightmare jams together as we careened from exaltation to madness and somehow made it back.

At the close of 1967, the Doors were America’s most dynamic rock band. With the exception of Love—their Elektra label-mates—no other California group from the late 1960s unified such a disparate range of influences and distilled them into an original, cohesive sound: blues, jazz, surf, flamenco, pop, psychedelia, chamber music, cabaret, and French surrealist poetry are all ingredients in the Doors’ cosmic stew. That the band recorded six studio albums in five years is nothing short of remarkable given their combative personalities, relentless touring, and Morrison’s various extravagancies. Their self-titled debut, released in January of that year, is the stuff of legend. The band’s sophomore effort, Strange Days—released just eight months later—is both hard to praise and hard to hate in its entirety. It is an album jarring in its uneven compositions, poor sequencing, and relative brevity (it only runs 35 minutes), yet it somehow maintains a brooding fortitude. Much like the Doors’ oeuvre itself, Strange Days is best remembered for its haunted songs of forlorn love and social disillusionment, which, four decades later, still endure as a visceral counterargument to the harmonious platitudes of the sixties.

The album’s strongest songs find the Doors unchanged in sound but far more cynical in worldview. The album’s kickoff track, the dismal and reverb-drenched “Strange Days,” made for a peculiar single, and its uninviting moodiness still renders it a poor place to start. Regardless, the propulsive bass lines from studio musician Douglass Lubahn and the song’s major-key bridge keep its uninspired melody from devolving into a rainy day personified. “Love Me Two Times” is a raunchy goodbye ballad that foreshadows the straightforward sound the Doors would discover on Morrison Hotel, which has always been my favorite among their records, as it captures them as The World’s Darkest Bar Band. “You’re Lost Little Girl,” with its subdued textures alluding to the Beatles circa Rubber Soul, harkens back to “The Crystal Ship” from their first album, with Ray Manzarek’s organ and Robby Krieger’s guitar in perfect conversation. “Moonlight Drive” is perhaps the only Doors song that is truly evergreen—it would have fit on any of their albums—the result of it being their oldest collaboration, honed by years of tweaking. Finally, “When the Music’s Over” is a gritty, growled retelling of that other ten-minute odyssey, “The End,” but lyrics of failed romance have been displaced by a mocking, self-referential examination of rock’s transitory bliss.

The bad material on Strange Days is truly bad, and only matched by The Soft Parade—the Doors’ one true flop—in terms of its inanity and disposability. I’ve never been able to fathom why “People Are Strange” has endured as one of the Doors’ iconic songs since it sounds like it was written by a twelve year old, and they perform it with the hesitancy of a cover band playing their first frat party. Campy and obnoxious, it begins as a show tune and ends as pub singalong. “Unhappy Girl” and “My Eyes Have Seen You” strain toward goth-pop, the latter of which sounds like a rip-off of the Zombies. “I Can’t See Your Face in My Mind” is too wispy and repetitive to be a successful song, which make it the stereotypical deep album cut that most listeners skip whenever the >> button is within reach. Last and certainly least is Morrison’s spoken-word poem “Horse Latitudes,” rendered with such mawkishness that it is impossible to take seriously. To this day, its hokey sound effects remind me of the Trojan rabbit catapulting over the castle’s parapet in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

As a lifelong fan, I’ve accepted that the Doors’ legacy is equal parts muck and magic, but reading Stephen Davis’s Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend in the fall of 2004 gave me context and compassion for the band’s various blunders. From Oliver Stone’s bombastic 1991 film to that starry-eyed book of myths No One Here Gets Out Alive by Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugarman, the Doors have always suffered from a lack of credible biography. Davis’s critical and objective meditation filled the gap. I read his book a year after visiting Morrison’s grave in Paris on a drizzly day of sightseeing with my friend Andy. My most vivid memories of that long, melancholy afternoon are study abroad clichés: trying to decipher a cartoonish city map written in French, searching out a lunch we could both stomach and afford, and shuffling through Pere Lachaise Cemetery with rain-sogged shoes. The following fall, I breezed through Davis’s tome on Sunday afternoons reclined in the tub of my drafty Toledo apartment—the grim irony of Morrison’s body being found in his bath escaped me—soothing the war wounds I earned playing pick-up football with my grad school pals. The bathroom’s emerald tiles glinted in the autumnal light, relics from the gaudy decade about which I was reading.

Suds-covered, groggy, and bruised, I finally saw the panoramic sweep of Morrison’s confliction and the band’s perseverance in the face of constant skirmishing. A bourgeois military brat, his childhood relocations left him a detached, habitual liar. (In his early interviews, he tells reporters that his entire family is dead.) Morrison’s secretive bisexuality compromised his ability to form relationships, and his covert liaisons were often a liability for his bandmates and their handlers, as their fortunes relied in no small part on his heterosexual machismo. Most significantly, by the time he was in his early twenties, Morrison’s alcoholism was the central force in his life. A dabbler in psychedelics, booze was his disease, and his adulthood was a prolonged drunkenness punctuated by brief moments of sobriety in which he wrote poems of naïve promise. In that tub, my silly, anachronistic yearning to be the band’s bass-slung backbone morphed into a young man’s appreciation and pity. When I closed my eyes and drifted off, I imagined Manzarek, Krieger, and Densmore wincing on stage amid the feedback squall, the slurred lyrics echoing through their monitors, and the manic adulation of fans who kept their arms outstretched in the arena’s clammy darkness. The band wore the shadows of Jim’s spoiled tragedy. Hunched and solemn, they shut their eyes until he howled again—bestial, unknowable, midnight’s clown.

—Adam Tavel

#410: Bob Dylan, "Time Out of Mind" (1997)

For three years I walked—we walked, I mean, James Brown and I—every evening near sunset, through the fields behind our house, through milkweed and Virginia Creeper and ashy stalks of dried brown grass, across the tiny winding inches-deep Rutledge Creek, which for a while James Brown was afraid to wade through and so had to be carried across.

In his lifetime James Brown—not my James Brown, of course, but the other one, the original, with that voice, those moves, with two legs instead of four—in his lifetime James Brown spoke and sang and shouted some wonderful words, among them these: You may not be looking for the promised land, but you might find it anyway.

I wasn’t looking for the promised land. I was just walking. One of my eyes had gone bad; I couldn’t read or write. I’d fallen a fair distance out of love with my own life. Walking seemed like a good idea, and James Brown always wanted to go with me. Somehow he knew the very moment I’d even simply begun thinking about setting off. He wagged his tail double-time, sidled right up to my feet, made sure he kept close. He had nowhere in particular he was trying to get to; he just wanted out.

*

There’s a whole lot of walking in Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind. The first words in the first song: I’m walking through streets that are dead / Walking, walking, with you in my head. Then one song to the next, the walking goes on and on: down dirt roads, through summer nights, into the middle of nowhere, through the mist and through the mind and along the line.

And when the walking stops, everything just gets worse: He’s pacing around rooms or standing out in the cold or crawling down avenues. He’s drifting in and out of a dreamless sleep or wading through high deep muddy water or praying for salvation laying ’round in a one-room country shack. He’s twenty miles out of town in cold irons bound.

I’m beginning to hear voices and there’s no one around, that weary croaking scorched husk of a cavernous voice admits. Well, I’m all used up and the fields have turned brown.

*

It’s in the fall, of course, with all that dying left to do in the cold months ahead and when you feel all used up and the fields have turned brown, that walking becomes a kind of sullen gray defiance, a march against rather than a journey toward. Walking in the fall, you understand that all manner of love and beauty has already been lost. You go on because, well, what’s the choice?

Everywhere, it seems, and all through time, anguish and longing, love and loss are the fuel that sets the afflicted heart aflutter. When I hear your name the death sweats come on me, the cantaor in flamenco cries out as though his side has just been pierced by a poisoned arrow. Sweet Jesus! Compañera, what I go through, loving you! Or he yelps with bitter resignation: I went to a field to cry like a mad man screaming, and even the wind kept telling me you loved someone else.

In fado the fadista, arms cast wide in grand supplication, laments:

My love my love
My knot of pain
My millstone of tenderness
My vessel of torture
This sea has no cure
This sky has no air
We stopped the wind
We don’t know how to swim
And we, we die
Slowly, so slowly

And here in America, in our many musics, all of which have roots tangled in the relentless horror and desolate hope of the African American, dark is the night and cold is the ground, love is careless and hearts are weary, and days are lonesome and long as we wander through a world of woe.

But hope, desolate hope: There's no sickness, toil, nor danger in that fair land to which I go.

*

After the uninterrupted unrequitedness of “Love Sick,” hope briefly bobs to the surface in “Dirt Road Blues,” the second track of Time Out of Mind, but it’s a grim hope at best:

Gon’ walk down that dirt road until my eyes begin to bleed
Gon’ walk down that dirt road until my eyes begin to bleed
’Til there’s nothing left to see, ’til the chains have been shattered and I’ve been freed

That’s about the same kind of miserably happy resolution you find in Walt Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” when the poet-child listens carefully to the sea waves and discovers that they are hissing melodious, laving him softly all over, the word of the sweetest song, and all songs…the low and delicious word Death.

*

In 1875 Whitman endured his second stroke. The first, two years earlier, did its damage to his left arm and leg. This second stroke took care of the right. He moved in with his brother George, living in the same room that his mother, who’d just passed away, had been living in until her death. Five editions of Leaves of Grass had been published. Whitman’s life’s work—his life itself—seemed about done. He was fifty-seven.

When he was fifty-seven, Bob Dylan seemed about done as well. He’d released a couple of covers albums. He’d unveiled a third volume of greatest hits, got feted for 30 years in the troubadour business, unplugged himself—had he still been plugged in?—for MTV.

Maybe that low and delicious word, the word final, superior to all, was ringing ever louder in his ears, and he went looking for some way to answer it. Maybe he’d just sat down for a spell, taken a rest.

Whatever the reason, in 1997, Dylan released Time Out of Mind and laid claim as firm as he ever had to wandering and weariness and misery, laid claim not to the barbaric yawp so much as the hoarse murmuring of the sea’s waves, trying to get to heaven before they close the door.

It’s not dark yet, he sings—and then there’s a wry smile, an acquiescence—but it’s getting there.

*

In the fall, as the sun began to set and James Brown and I turned to head back toward home, thousands upon thousands of starlings would take flight from a distant bamboo grove for their evening murmuration, a remarkable weaving and shimmering and shape-shifting display that never failed to leave me breathless. Then they disappeared, sank back down into the bamboo grove, and night began.

I been hurt all my life. I learned how to turn the pain around and get energy, and I learned how to be alone. Those are James Brown’s words.

Behind every beautiful thing there’s been some kind of pain, the old man that Dylan has become sings on Time Out of Mind.

Of course, that was nearly two decades ago. Dylan was only fifty-seven.

Even my James Brown, four legs and all, knows the classic reply to that line: He’s younger than that now.

Time Out of Mind—what exactly does that title mean anyway? That one has put time—and all its destruction—out of one’s mind? That for a time one was out of one’s mind?

Two decades later and Dylan croons Sinatra now like he hasn’t a care in the world, like it’s all been gravy, like he never bothered to listen to the low murmuring and heard the waves whispering that one low and delicious word.

Maybe he’s just sitting a spell, catching his breath.

—John Gregory Brown

Photography by John Gregory Brown

#411: Eric Clapton, "461 Ocean Boulevard" (1974)

I’ve been having stress dreams lately. Usually, as their name would suggest, they happen when I’m unusually stressed out about something—daytime worries carrying into the night—but I’ve been puzzled by them this time because that’s not the case. It almost seems like they’ve been happening because I’ve been so happy in the day-to-day. Apparently I am a person who cannot not worry. When my conscious self doesn’t, my subconscious takes over.

And so, the dreams. A dream in which I’m trying to convince my father not to sever his own arm from his body (he is doing it to save us, somehow, and I want him to slow down, to be sure there is no other way, but it seems I will not be able to convince him). A dream in which we are about to be buried under a wave of rubble, and I will not be able to save anyone. A dream in which I’m running down the street, rushing to get somewhere (by the time I wake I’ve forgotten where I was trying to go), and my legs keep moving slower, butting up against more and more resistance—I look down and see I am wading in water, I keep pushing and pushing against it, trying to run as the water rises, it never occurs to me to swim. A dream in which my mother and I are fighting, she is going to hurt someone if I cannot make her understand, she is never going to understand, in the dream I am so angry, in the dream I know I can’t stop until she listens but I also know she will never listen. A dream in which a boyfriend who is an amalgam of every boyfriend I’ve ever had—a series of boyfriends shape-shifting as one—betrays me over and over, in a different way each time. A dream in which I am an addict, with cravings I cannot control, and I watch myself do terrible things, I watch myself destroy everything, horrified.

Again and again, I wake unsettled. I wake worried or angry or ashamed. I wake frustrated with myself, my life, the ones I love. I wake in the middle of the night and shift to my boyfriend’s side of the bed, put my arm across him, I had a bad dream, I say, by which I mean a dream that made me feel bad, and he murmurs something unintelligible, pats my hand, and I rest my head against him until I fall back asleep. In the morning, he’ll ask what the dream was, and I will not remember. Or I wake in my own bed, throw the covers off and feel the fan move the air around me, take a sip of water, say out loud to myself, Settle down. Or I wake and it is morning. The dream life is not your life, I think as I shower, the dream life is not your life, let it slide away. I breathe, and the feelings linger even though they are not real. Settle down, I think as I make coffee. Settle.

I think Eric Clapton must have known that feeling. 461 Ocean Boulevard feels like one long settling down. A mellowing. An exhale.

From the image on the cover of the album, 461 Ocean Boulevard looks like a vacation. The sort of place where you can rise as late or as early as you’d like, sitting in the yard with a cup of coffee as the day begins or missing the morning altogether. At such a place, you’d wear clothes so comfortable they could double as pajamas, or you’d throw a big T-shirt on over a bathing suit and that’s how you’d go about your day. Because I am a writer, during my stay there, I would fill notebooks. I would read books I love. I would do these things, probably outside, in comfortable sunny weather, all day. It would be productive, but it wouldn’t feel like work. It would feel, instead, like an oasis.

And that’s how the songs on this album feel.

When I listen to rock music made in the ’60s and ’70s, I often think of my college boyfriend, who, when I was first getting to know him, declared that all music worth listening to was made before 1980. As far as I can tell, this is a sentiment not uncommon to nineteen-year-old boys.

They just don’t make music like that anymore, I remember him saying, which is true. At the time, I believed what he said not necessarily because I actually agreed, but because I thought he was smarter than me, that he understood things about music I did and could not.

But, so many years later, it still seems to me that the appeal of a lot of classic rock is undeniable. It’s music where you can really hear them playing the instruments. You can’t ignore that it was created by people. The songs have multiple components, and each component is a made thing. There’s a thrill to hearing them come together.

It was music that was satisfying to listen to as I rode in his car (a blue Honda Prelude, low to the ground), wearing sunglasses, windows down, late summer. I don’t remember listening to Clapton specifically with him, but we must have. I remember him telling me a story his father had told him about going to a Clapton concert—strangely, I remember him telling me the story (it was over winter break, I was visiting him, we were in his childhood bedroom) without remembering the contents of the story itself. When he talked about music it was often in relation to his father. Although he never would’ve said it so plainly, he prided himself on liking music that his father also liked.

I sometimes wondered if his love for classic rock had more to do with creating a space he and his father could inhabit together more than anything else, a space that helped him foster friendships with other boys at school who also hungered for communion with their fathers—and isn’t everything about this, really, for everyone, when we are nineteen? How to live apart, to be on our own but also, somehow, secure the connections we need but don’t understand or want to admit to needing? These are the beginnings of the lessons we will continue learning, dilemmas we face and overcome again and again as we assemble them into a life.

And while we are all knee-deep in that assemblage, here is a thing to love about music: it calms, consoles, and connects us as we leave each moment and catch the next. As we hang in that space between, holding nothing. As we ground ourselves again. Settle down. Settle. And the calm song sympathizes, Dear Lord, give me strength to carry on. And the calm song implores you, Plant your love and let it grow. The words to the song are simpler than the song. You exhale. It is a relief. This is your life.

—Katelyn Kiley

#412: Wire, "Pink Flag" (1977)

“No Elvis, Beatles, or the Rolling Stones,” Joe Strummer and Mick Jones harmonize—if that’s the right word—on “1977,” the B-side of the Clash’s first single, “White Riot.” With one catchy, singalong chorus, they clear away twenty-three years of (white) rock hegemony; the song’s very title is a call to look to the present, not the past, for pop vitality. The Clash record the song in February, 1977, and CBS releases it a month later. It isn’t the first U.K. punk 45—that was “New Rose” by the Damned, in 1976—but punk hasn’t yet spread far beyond New York and London. Still, Mark Perry has already claimed in his fanzine, Sniffin’ Glue, that “Punk died the day the Clash signed to CBS.”

During a late 1970 White House trip, Elvis Presley tells President Richard Nixon that the Beatles are a primary cause of youth drug use and anti-American protest, and leaves Washington with an honorary DEA badge—though the Beatles, of course, officially split eight months earlier, via a press release from Paul McCartney and a report in the Daily Mirror the next day. In 1977, Elvis, overweight and stupefied on a cocktail of Demerol, Desbutal, Dexedrine, Dilaudid, Placidyl, Quaalude, and other drugs, spends most days in his Graceland bedroom. (“The medicine within me / no doctor could prescribe,” he sings on “Way Down”—his last single, released in June, 1977—though Dr. George Nichopolous writes scripts, according to Joel Williamson’s Elvis Presley: A Southern Life, “for him for at least 8,805 pills, tablets, vials, and injectables” in the first eight months of 1977.) On August 16, paramedics find Elvis, in mismatched pajamas, dead on the floor of his bathroom. For decades, his fans believe that he staged his own death to escape the pressures of fame. The first Elvis sighting occurs on August 18, 1977: he is seen pumping gas into his Cadillac at a service station in Georgia.

In 1977, John Lennon, living in the Dakota on the Upper West Side, spends “entire days in bed, blaming his ill health on sugar, wine, tobacco, and marijuana, all of which he continually vowed to give up, though he lacked the willpower to do so,” according to writer Geoffrey Giuliano. Yoko Ono flies to Colombia with her Tarot reader to visit a “witch,” whom she pays sixty thousand dollars to perform rituals to help her husband’s flagging career. Upon her return, Lennon meditates, practices yoga and self-hypnosis, and resumes a macrobiotic diet. A month later, inspired by The 700 Club, Lennon announces to his friends that he’s been born again. In the Virgin Islands, Paul and Linda McCartney stay on a yacht in Watermelon Bay, recording songs for a forthcoming Wings album. George Harrison, in a 1977 television interview, calls promoter Bill Sargent’s fifty million dollar offer for the Beatles to reunite “crazy, you know? It’s trying to put the responsibility of making the world a wonderful place again onto the Beatles. You know, I think that’s unfair. I know a lot of people like the Beatles, but it’s like, eight years ago we split up, and it’s like difficult, you know?” Ringo, in an interview of his own, claims that he’s “getting happier all the time.”

In February, 1977, the Rolling Stones sign a four-album, $14 million contract with EMI Records. “None of it’s got anything to do with money, oddly enough,” Mick Jagger claims in a Rolling Stone interview later that year. “I mean, it translates itself into money, but none of us are greatly concerned with making money.… I just try to make the best music I can.” (Addressing his “staunchest critics, the English punk rockers,” Jagger says, “I think the Sex Pistols have copped out. Now they’re on the front of Rolling Stone. That’s a real cop-out. I mean, if I were Johnny Rotten, I wouldn’t do either. I’d tell them to go fuck themselves. But that’s not important. The important thing is the Sex Pistols are all right, and all that. Not a bad band, not the best…”) Keith Richards is arrested by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who find an ounce of heroin in his Toronto hotel room. (Asked by Rolling Stone if the band will tour if Richards goes to jail, Jagger responds, “If he were in jail for a long period of time, I suppose we’d have to. We can’t wait five years. In five years we won’t be touring at all…”)

Nostalgia is an easy target in 1976 and 1977: in the aftermath of Nixon’s resignation and the fall of Saigon, the United States celebrates its Bicentennial with a safe, selective reading of its history. The American Freedom Train, painted red, white, and blue, carries historical artifacts (George Washington’s copy of the Constitution, Paul Revere’s saddlebags, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s robes, John F. Kennedy’s draft of his inauguration speech) and Americana (the dress Judy Garland wore in The Wizard of Oz, a pair of Joe Louis’s boxing trunks, moon rocks) throughout the continental U.S. In Vincent Collins’s cartoon Bicentennial, produced by the United States Information Agency, a bald eagle hatches from an American flag egg with the sound of an explosion, and a cornucopia fires Model Ts, hamburgers, hot dogs, television sets, and baseballs from its mouth.

Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee prompts a similar outpouring of national pride. Bonfires are lit the length of the country from one the Queen ignites at Windsor Castle; a million people line the route to St. Paul’s cathedral to watch the royal family roll past in a golden carriage, on their way to a thanksgiving service, and another five hundred million tune in on TV; street parties are held across the country.

In such contexts, and in the context of 1970s rock, slagging Elvis, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones is neither revolutionary nor interesting, and pretty soon the tropes and gestures of punk have ossified nearly as much as those of classic rock. I don’t want to indulge fantasies of authenticity, but still, what sounded—or, let’s be honest, looked—fresh and intriguing in 1975 and 1976 is quickly co-opted and commodified by 1977. (“They walk around together / and try and look trendy / I think it’s a shame / that they all look the same,” Dan Treacy observes in 1978, in the Television Personalities’ “Part Time Punks.”)

In December, 1977, Wire release Pink Flag—maybe the last punk LP, maybe the first post-punk LP. In either case, it’s a necessary corrective to both classic rock and punk orthodoxies. Art-school graduates, the band (Bruce Gilbert, Robert Gotobed, Graham Lewis, Colin Newman) have taught themselves to play their instruments since forming the previous year. The record begins not with a jolt, but a plucked bass note and slowly building drums: this song, called “Reuters,” offers the report of “our own correspondent”—“prices have risen since the government fell, casualties increase as the enemy shell.…”—and indicates the cool detachment with which Wire approach songcraft. “It’s So Obvious,” a fifty-two second surge, makes the Ramones sound slow and makes the Clash’s B-side from earlier in the year sound like straightforward rock and roll. If those bands are punk, what is this?  The guitars crunch, the bass gallops along, the drums tick without flourish. But the lyrics express disgust mainly via the tone of voice in which they’re delivered. Colin Newman yelps, “This is ’77, nearly heaven, it’s black white and pink, just think, there’s more to come, hum hum hum hum, it’s so obvious. Well it’s all right, just listen, can’t wait for ’78, God those r.p.m., can’t wait for them, don’t just watch, hours happen, get in there kid, and snap them.” The entire presentation is precise-but-cryptic, almost an obscure mathematical expression. The best of the LP’s twenty-one tracks—only three of which exceed three minutes, and thirteen of which are half that length or less—consist of beguiling, stylized fragments: they’re at turns catchy, noisy, pretty, familiar, disorienting. The minute-twenty-five of “Mr. Suit” might be the origin of American hardcore, while the minute-nineteen of “Fragile” might be the most exquisite minimalist ballad of that era (at least, until Wire release “Outdoor Miner” in 1978).

“The whole idea around punk was that it was supposed to be new,” Colin Newman is quoted in Wilson Neate’s book, Pink Flag. “Where in 1977 it was failing in its promise was that it didn’t deliver anything new. Elements of punk were starting to look awfully like rock ’n’ roll, and that was the one thing I was totally convinced about: it didn’t matter what I was doing, it shouldn’t be rock ’n’ roll.”

Greil Marcus, in his 1978 Rolling Stone review of Pink Flag, pegged the band—the lyrics, in particular—as “almost hysterically Opaque” and “pointed straight toward art rock.” But what better response to an era of easy pronouncements and whitewashed histories than obscure utterances whose meanings can’t be diminished to the sloganeering of most punk—of most rock—much less the sloganeering of politicians on both sides of the Atlantic? I’ll take “Tears fall in slivers, you broke my shades, the light too bright, let me bury my heart” (from Pink Flag’s “Fragile”) over the single command I recall most vividly from the 1970s: “Have a Nice Day,” with the accompanying yellow smiley face.

In 1977, I begin first grade in Miss Charamella’s classroom at May Street School. What I know of pop music comes through the AM radio in my parents’ car, or the sixty or so LPs—Motown and Stax, folk, and, yes, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones—my mother’s younger brothers haven’t borrowed from her permanently. Like many others, I discover punk only well after the fact: and when I do, the Sex Pistols, the Ramones, the Clash, the Dead Boys, et. al., sound too obvious, too simple, too similar to the rock they allegedly deposed. Instead, I fall for Joy Division, the Slits, Swell Maps, Public Image Limited, Wire—the bands that follow the initial wave of punk, that twist and distort whatever expectations I bring to their music. I find Pink Flag at Rockit Records in the second half of the 1980s. Many of us believe, at least sometimes, we should have been born earlier: if, when I look back at it now, 1977 seems to involve so many fantasies—the fantasy of a reunited Beatles or an Elvis alive and well somewhere in hiding; the fantasy of a national past that never existed; or, in the cases of, say, disco or Star Wars, the fantasy of escaping a reality that feels boring—then maybe my fantasy is to have encountered Pink Flag when it came out, to have experienced it not just retrospectively. But the past is never the ideal time in which to have lived.

The Clash appropriate—homage or parody, take your pick—the sleeve art of Elvis’s first LP for their own London Calling in 1979, around the same time CBS promotes them as the “only band that matters,” and around the same time they maybe start believing it. That same year, Wire release 154, their third LP in three years, and on tour, as if to undercut rock’s reverence for past hits and crowd favorites, they play almost exclusively new material. And as McCartney did at the start of the decade, the band offers a statement to the British music press effectively announcing their break-up in business terms—a split from their label, which becomes a lengthy hiatus as band members pursue various solo and side projects. Mike Thorne, Wire’s producer and unofficial fifth member in the late ’70s, says that “The head of EMI put it quite succinctly. Something like, ‘A record company is not an Arts Council.’” It’s an easy observation, since the company is doing well via its other commodities. The Rolling Stones, still recording under that contract signed in 1977, release Some Girls in 1978, and its first single, “Miss You,” goes to #1 on the Billboard chart in the U.S. (“Beast of Burden” and “Shattered” also make the Billboard Hot 100 in 1978 and 1979.)

As the elections of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and Ronald Reagan in 1980 demonstrate, cultural nostalgia is a potent force. If ostensibly forward-thinking punk fans and music critics can’t be bothered with interpreting ambiguities in a Wire song, then certainly the flag-waving revelers and paradegoers of 1976 and 1977 don’t “want to have,” as President Jimmy Carter infamously invites them in one televised speech, “an unpleasant talk…about a problem unprecedented in our history,” or to be warned that “the oil and natural gas we rely on for seventy-five per cent of our energy are running out.” They don’t want to be told (as Carter does two years later, in his “Malaise Speech”) that the nation suffers a “crisis of confidence…that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will,” nor scolded that “human identity is no longer defined by what one does but by what one owns.” They don’t want, during a series of strikes in the coldest winter in recent memory, to hear Prime Minister James Callaghan return from the Caribbean to claim that only a “parochial view” of labor unrest suggests there is “mounting chaos” in England. No, they want a smiling, rugged former movie star—or a no-nonsense, tough-talking grocer’s daughter— to tell them that everything is okay, that everything will be okay, that nothing is required of them but a little cheerful hard work: Have a Nice Day.

—Joshua Harmon

#413: Minutemen, "Double Nickels on the Dime" (1984)

for Bill

I've been watching a lot of spaghetti westerns lately. Which is to say, it's hard to talk about Double Nickels on the Dime in a way that doesn't simply repeat some aspect of the dense web of mythologies that has woven itself around the album, not to mention the Minutemen themselves. And so I will approach things slantwise, in the hopes of resisting the temptation to indulge in one or more received narratives for as long as possible.

My slant, in this case, is the spaghetti western. How slanted this slant will turn out to be, I don't know; Boon and Watt seem to share a polemical ambivalence about mass culture that a director like Sergio Leone happily foregrounds every chance he gets. Moreover, in a concerted and reflexive way, the spaghetti western, like the standard Minutemen song, is about its own tropes, in the sense that things are framed so that we cannot naturalize what we perceive as we perceive it. The shots—and sounds—are made, and it is that made-ness we are asked to take in and consider. A song like "Viet Nam" makes a clear political point all its own, but it does so by invoking the decade and a half of protest songs that came before it. The guitar plays a riff that would be at home in any Gang of Four song if you slowed it down by half, while the lyrics clarify the difficulty of protesting something in a medium with stark limits on its capacity to protest effectively. The lyrics, short as they are, are worth quoting in full:

Let's say I got a number
That number's fifty thousand
That's ten percent
Of five hundred thousand

Oh here we are
In French Indochina

Executive order
Congressional decision
The working masses
Are manipulated

Was this our policy?
Ten long years
Not one domino shall fall

I don't mean to say the politics here are somehow insincere, but the song is "about" political songs as much as it is about colonial exploitation of the working masses. The gambit here is to strip away allegory or figure and just say the political things, just as in every movie in the Dollars trilogy Clint Eastwood sells his services and his signature squint to the highest bidder, and tells us as much. The question, here invitingly asked, is whether or not we can make effective moral or political arguments in a particular medium—a film or a song—and, more pointedly, whether we can make these arguments in a totally serious way. It's a hard question to ask, and one that still needs repeated asking today. It's also the strongest point of contact between a spaghetti western and Double Nickels, both of which begin with fealty to the redemptive power of art and end in a hail of bullets and dynamite. I'm tempted to call it satire, provided we all understand by that a single impulse: the Minutemen want to blow shit up.

The feeling here is historically specific, hinging on an attempt to deal with the fact that all the seeming political foment of the 1970s and its protest songs could not stop the ascension of Ronald Reagan to the presidency. "Reagan," here, inaugurates such despair and rage precisely because he is not the evil mastermind that Richard Nixon was. He's a cartoon become flesh, a total joke of an evildoer twirling his mustache, what we thought was the stuff of allegory but which now actively lives and breathes in the Oval Office. You can't make fun of Reagan because he does the work for you. He's his own caricature! Protesting him feels futile, and he's folded a rebuttal to any conceivable protest into his very way of being. Protesters degrade the culture, they're children. And Double Nickels is an album that metabolizes this comic-strip situation. Everything from the slogan to the verse-chorus-verse format of the political song falls short in the face of actual, real evil, which, pace Hannah Arendt, isn't banal so much as it is cartoonish.

Illustration by S.H. Lohmann

Not to grant Reagan too much power. He's a comic-book villain, though not as handsome as Lee Van Cleef or Gian Maria Volonté. But he's also a cog, one among many representatives of the interests of the ruling class, and I think Minutemen make music that's aware of this. Their name, after all, comes from a joke about a 1960s reactionary group that sent bomb threats to Angela Davis. They know that the right wing is serious business, but that most attempts to describe it in earnest end up sounding like jokes. This brings us back to the sonic frenzy of Double Nickels in yet another way. The album is a hodgepodge, a gigantic pastiche and collage of influences and types of instrumentation. It refuses to commit to a single set of tropes, instead hoarding them, magpie-like, under the banner of a concern that extends beyond a musical scene and its internal debates and investments. That is, as songs like "Viet Nam" or "Untitled Song for Latin America" (one of my favorites) demonstrate, Boon and Watt are far from Marxists, but they also sieve the rivers of politics in Marx-ish fashion, looking for root causes rather than contenting themselves with repeatedly denouncing what amounts to a collection of symptoms.

The dynamism of Minutemen's aesthetic morass comes from a commitment to particularity and to the inadequacy of particularity in and of itself. Every particular implies a universal with which it forms an intractable contradiction—this is the basic tenet of dialectical thinking. And Minutemen are thoroughly dialectical. Their basic formal question runs something like this: how is it that the punk and protest music of yesteryear, which so emphasizes its freedom and individuality, sounds so much like other popular music, and sounds so much like itself, as to become self-contained and hermetic? The answer to this question is that there is no way of separating off punk from pop, even if everybody at a given Black Flag show agrees that the state and capitalism are bad in ways that everybody at a Van Halen concert doesn't. Thus songs like "Political Song for Michael Jackson to Sing" start by naming their imbrication in the systems they want to protest, insisting that you can't have Minutemen without the King of Pop, using this tidbit of pessimism as the basis of a great optimism: namely, what happens if we start out knowing that as makers of popular music we have already failed, and then go from there? What can a popular song do?

The answer to this question is always Utopian on Double Nickels, whose musical archive spans genres and generations and brings together British punk and American folk protest with great speed and dexterity. It's as if Mike Watt and D. Boon are interested in practical rather than theoretical "punk"-ness, as if "DIY" for them, ideological though it is, should be a doing and not just a slogan. "Archive" may not be specific enough to describe how Minutemen treat the music they draw on; it's more like a lending library, they visit constantly and always take new items with them. What if we could, this music asks, make music however we wanted and out of whatever we wanted? What if that was a formal principle rather than a matter of content? If Johnny Rotten said he was antichrist and anarchist, Watt and Boon did their anarchy, made it a living and material force, in their music.

The result of this is something like watching Eli Wallach run around in a graveyard in the famous scene from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly: we are aware that this is nothing narratively new, that it derives its visual and its feelings entirely from what came before, and yet the brazenness with which the camera states that we are in the presence of artifice exhilarates and delights us. So too with Double Nickels: it is an album that says "I borrow" in ways that overwhelm the listener, even if the songs don't crack two minutes in most places. Much can be said about the pleasures of derivation, but here it feels like a way into a genuine sense of human activity or agency; like an endless array of possibilities are at our disposal, should we attempt to engage with them. Such slogans sound dangerously close to ad copy or what you hear in a marketing department, which of course makes them that much more perversely delightful in the context of a band like Minutemen. So too my comparison to westerns: in bringing things together, one stands to discover something about those things and about the activity of combination. We can hear that discovery, and the joy that attends it, in every song on Double Nickels.

—David W. Pritchard

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

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

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

Illustration by Annie Mountcastle

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

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

“Where did you get this?” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

“No,” I said.

“What?” she said.

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

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

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

Illustration by Annie Mountcastle

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

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

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

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

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

—Emma Riehle Bohmann

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

Photograph by Marie Sicola

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

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

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

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

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

—Eric Thompson

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

Suburban ranch homes lined up quietly in the summer dark.

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

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

Illustration by Lena Moses-Schmitt

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

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

*

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

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

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

—Jack McLaughlin