Pictures taken by Window-Boy. We were dying of the heat (metaphorically) while many Chicagoans were actually dying of the heat. It was an historic heat wave. The air burned when you inhaled. There had been a city-wide blackout. I took freezing cold showers. We walked to his place, past all the cars lined the sidewalks, the cars quietly idling, with entire families sitting inside, having picnics, mom and dad drinking wine, reading the newspaper, finding relief in the blasting A/C. He and I sat on the cool linoleum floor in his kitchen, drinking the last of the cold beer which we kept in a cooler with the last of the melting ice. I was moving to New York in a month. I was about to get extremely ill. Everything was ending. I was facing an entirely new life, the great unknown. And the heat wave was so extreme it was almost too hot to touch each other. Almost.
My talented brother Brendan O’Malley is an amazing writer and actor. He’s wonderful in the recent You & Me, directed by Alexander Baack. (I interviewed Baack about the film here.) His most recent gig was story editor/writer on the hit series Survivor’s Remorse. Brendan hasn’t blogged in years, but the “content” (dreaded word) is so good I asked if I could import some of it to my blog. He did series on books he loved, and albums he loved. I thought it would be fun to put up some of the stuff here. So we’ll start with his list of 50 Best Albums. I’ll put up one every Monday.
Brendan’s list of 50 Best Albums is part music-critique and part memoir and part cultural snapshot.
I have always loved these essays, because I love to hear my brother talk. I am happy to share them with you!
50 Best Albums, by Brendan O’Malley
25. Hüsker Dü – Zen Arcade
Punk rock was all about stripping away the excess of mainstream classic rock. Hardcore was all about moving past even the constrictions of the punk movement. This movement wasn’t chronicled in any broad cultural way but played itself out in inky self-printed zines and curbside club confrontations. 1983 was a moment of great promise in this small community, with everyone sharing a dissatisfaction with the status quo of “regular” music while simultaneously sensing some sort of zeitgeist shift.
Hüsker Dü came to the stage like marauders intent on defiling the sacred cows of non-conformity. Oh, we’re not supposed to have guitar solos? Well, just listen to Bob Mould shred on a flying V and know that Eddie Van Halen wasn’t the only guitar god slinging hash that year. We’re supposed to have mohawks and wear leather jackets? Just look at us in our midwestern shit-kicking get-ups. Drummers only sing in Night Ranger and The Eagles? Watch Grant Hart howl and pound.
Double album rock operas are bloated and pretentious?
Get a load of this, fuckers. Zen Arcade is 4 sides of experimental, emotionally wrenching, loosely themed, bone-crushingly heavy and tragic music. When word got out that Hüsker Dü was releasing a DOUBLE album, the hardcore community got its collective knickers in a twist.
When you look at the cover, you already know that this isn’t your basic 28 minutes of sloganeering and teenage anger. The stacked cars of the junkyard. The crude colorization. The two slightly stooped figures. An iconic image. One that perfectly captures the alienation and decay contained therein.
In an oft-told story, Hüsker Dü had been spurned by Twin/Tone Records, the Minneapolis record label famous for The Replacements. They fled the local scene and signed with SST, the mother of all ’80’s indy labels, which was owned and operated by Greg Ginn who doubled as the creative force behind Black Flag. This was a strange union of Midwest gay arthouse noise and sun-soaked Southern California cock rock.
The “gay” part of this story mirrors the strange oversight much of frathouse America had in ignoring Freddie Mercury and even the name of his band. Both writers in Hüsker Dü were gay but this never was discussed until well after the band broke up. American Hardcore, for all its supposed liberality and progressive thinking, was highly homophobic.
It is also important to consider the conditions under which Hüsker Dü recorded Zen Arcade. They flew to Redondo Beach. They did a bunch of speed. They recorded 25 songs in 40 hours. They mixed 25 songs in 45 hours. At the end of 85 hours, they’d spent $3,200 and they had a 4-sided monster whose reverberation is still being felt today.
Most of the songs clock in between 1:45 to 2:20. What this does is lend epic status to the songs that stretch out even to 3:30 and beyond.
We follow a disaffected teen as he runs away from home. This is never explicit in the lyrics but it has come to be common knowledge among fans of the band and album.
The opener is “Something I Learned Today” which careens around just the way a kid storming out of his house might.
It moves directly into “Broken Home, Broken Heart” which lets us know how our journey is starting.
The tone shifts with the third song, a shimmering acoustic chamber of regret by Hart called “Never Talking To You Again”.
The strange convergence of a punk anger and a folk sensibility makes for a tragic little interlude.
Things start to disintegrate and fracture here.
Mould sings of “Chartered Trips” which could be the actual trip the kid is on or a drug reference. Either way his surroundings have ceased to be familiar.
They are obliterated with “Dreams Reoccurring” which is an eerie wordless collage of piano and feedback.
“Indecision Time” is a buzzsaw of confusion.
“Hare Krsna’ shows us how a vulnerable lost soul could find comfort in such an erasure of a personal trajectory.
And that’s just Side 1.
During Side 2 the journey becomes increasingly treacherous. He moves “Beyond the Threshhold” through “Pride”, “The Biggest Lie”, “Masochism World” and eventually finds himself ‘Standing By the Sea”.
This song is a perfect Act ender, in that we’ve followed this flight, which has seemed to move from precariousness through false revelation and winds up in what ought to be a contemplative peace. But looking at the ocean is not a redemptive force. In fact, the waves of feedback create a mounting anxiety which threaten to sweep us away.
The sound, emotion, and energy of Side 3 are all at a higher emotional maturity. He has gone through the crucible of adolescence and has emerged scarred but somehow glorious.
In ‘Somewhere’ which kicks the side off, Hart howls into his past and tries to imagine a place where “the dirt is washed off with the rain / where there’s happiness instead of pain”.
Two songs later, Mould turns the view outward as the narrator starts to place himself in a larger context. “Newest Industry” throws us into a soylent-green type dystopia where individuals are sucked into a machine that uses them without regard for their humanity.
The familial anger of the teen who fled his dysfunctional household has realized that his parents are merely products of the society which birthed them.
The side ends on an absurd note, as “The Tooth Fairy and The Princess” proves that fairy tales have become obsolete in a world that chews up and spits out its young.
Side 4 is where Hüsker Dü project Zen Arcade past noble experiment into the land of genius and generosity.
“Turn On The News” is their finest moment on record.
The narrator has synthesized all of his experiences into a new sort of consciousness. He is no longer trapped by his own story. He has looked past his own pain and sees how much trouble has befallen all of us. Hart screams for us to “Turn On The News” as Mould shreds a guitar into an unholy alliance between Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, the Band and The Clash. When you stop to think that this is essentially a live track, your sense of the album all of a sudden shifts into overdrive. This is a perfectly articulated world view.
And then they BLOW IT ALL TO HELL AND BEYOND. Earlier there had been the short instrumental experiment of “Dreams Reoccurring”. Well, when dreams recur, you wind up with “Reoccurring Dreams”.
This is the “Dark Side of the Moon” of the hardcore world. Thirteen minutes and forty-seven seconds of backwards looped screaming feedback guitar, piano plinking and crashing cymbals and drum rolls. When you commit to the whole piece it is like being dragged into a fun-house mirror where you can’t see yourself, you only see shapes and figures that have totemic and symbolic meaning. Moments happen and disappear. Then they reappear in different forms. Your sense of narrative and narration is stripped completely away. They make you forget that they are a three-piece power trio. Your perception of them will not hold.
If “Turn On The News” is the knockout punch, “Reoccurring Dreams” is a sick and twisted victory lap around a stadium that is tearing itself apart.
After this album came out, everyone knew that hardcore wouldn’t be able to hide its light under a bushel for much longer. The world was waiting.
This is a companion piece to my latest Present Tense column. I wanted to get even more into the apartment and its decor – Daniel Ouellette’s was production designer and Andras Kanegson did the set decoration. The apartment is part of why this film has had such a hold on me ever since I first saw it in 1994.
I’ll pull out the details that intrigue me. The thing is: the more I look at this apartment, the less I understand it. The more I squint at background details, the more questions I have.
What we know, from the script: Jackie has lived there for 5 years. She mentions it not being in the best neighborhood, so I wonder if it’s a converted warehouse-loft in what used to be a more desolate Tribeca area, or Soho, or the East Village. We’re talking early 90s. There’s a fritzing flourescent light in the hallway and Jackie mentions that “they” won’t fix it. So … this isn’t a high-end building with attentive landlords. She also says that even though she’s lived there 5 years, she’s never spoken to anyone else in the building.
There are gaps in all of this information, gaps where you can project meaning, make up your own stories about Jackie – in the same way you look at an Edward Hopper, his lonely nighthawks, and make up stories about who they are, what they’re waiting for, what just happened, what’s going to happen.
Jackie grew up in Long Island, and mentions having lived in The Bronx as well as Queens (“I moved around a lot”) … “making it” into Manhattan is a big deal for this tough girl from a lower income bracket (at least lower than Michael). This is not a realistic apartment for a woman with an executive assistant’s salary, but that just highlights the surreal atmosphere, the sense that this apartment is more a psychological space than a literal location.
This post is for those who plan on seeing the film after reading my piece, or for those who saw the film long ago and want to re-visit, digging into details that might have escaped notice on first watch (because they sure escaped my notice although on some level all of this was working on me). As I wrote in the piece, What Happened Was… despite being an award-winner was unavailable to be seen for years, due to the fact that it was never released (to this day) on DVD or Blu-Ray. It was released on VHS – I had a copy that way – but unless you had a VCR you were screwed. The film lived in my memory but it was only via streaming – it’s now on Amazon – that I could really examine this apartment, peering into corners, squinting at the details.
I’m as fascinated by the apartment as I am by the two characters. I have questions about everything. None of these questions can be satisfactorily answered. But you know that Noonan and his team know the answers. You know that Karen Sillas knows why Jackie has what she has on the walls, why her apartment is the way it is. Every object is there for a reason.
Glimpses/Fragments:
Jackie’s alarm clock: the little train goes around as the alarm sounds. Glass of wine from last night next to the clock.
The main area (there are no walls. It’s all one big space). That’s a fold-out couch where Jackie sleeps. She pulls out the book she’s written from underneath the coffee table, saying she keeps her stuff under there “because of my dreams.” This is never explained.
The eating area. Notice the curtains appear to be a light blue. It will be important later.
This shot looks out one of the windows of her apartment. When Jackie enters the apartment, behind the camera, her reflection in the window makes it seem like she’s out there in the night, stepping out of a door in the shadows on the city roof. This is not kitchen-sink realism.
The pink cake box on the counter. The photo of Martin Luther King, Jr. in the background. Blue and pink color scheme as I mentioned. Boy/Girl. MLK is an intriguing detail. It’s one of two things she’s hung on the wall.
Jackie has set up a little curtained alcove in the corner, an ad hoc dressing room.
Across the way, out the windows, you can see into other people’s apartments/offices. Strange things are happening. You have to make the meanings for yourself. Noonan keeps bringing us back to what’s going on “over there” in ways that feel increasingly hallucinatory.
And here is the second thing she’s hung on her wall. Is it somehow connected to the white china cat she is seen clutching in the opening shot, while she sleeps? Why does she sleep clutching the china cat? As she races around getting ready for the date, she drops the china cat, and it shatters on the floor. She then puts the pieces into the fish tank, because he’s at the door, the date is about to start. So is all of this connected – thematically – to the choice to have her have a Cats poster on her wall? Please do me the favor of recognizing a rhetorical question. This is what I mean when I say the film has all of these intriguing GAPS, and much of it emanates out from the set, and its details, surrounding the two characters with strangeness.
Like I said, she tosses the broken china cat into the fish tank. Noonan occasionally goes back to this image during the ensuing date.
Chandelier turned on, table set, candles lit and notice … now the curtains are pink.
The only thing even vaguely personal in the main area are some tiny black-and-white framed photos on the window ledge. For all I know they could be vintage photos she picked up in a second-hand shop and not personal items at all.
The main room again, only now we can see one whole wall is what looks like thick blue curtains. Turns out they are completely see-through, which we’ll learn a bit later. The whole apartment is an optical illusion in a way, or a space which presents itself as true, only to be revealed later that what you see is not what you get. She sleeps on a folding couch in the middle of a room – unfolding it and folding it back up every day – just so she can keep that space behind the curtain for one-purpose-only. AND, she doesn’t let that space behind the curtain spill over into the rest of the apartment. She has completely compartmentalized it.
Finally, we go behind the curtain into her red room. (Please notice that now that wall of blue curtains is pink. This all may be a trick of lighting – they may very well be the same curtains as before – irrelevant: what I’m talking about is how this space – so distinct – is in a state of constant flux. Even the colors change.) Now we’re in a totally red room where all this crazy shit is going on. Stuff on the floor, stuff piled up (the rest of the apartment is pristine to the point of being alienating) – AND, as this scene goes on, it’s like the space expands – we suddenly see aspects of it, corners, hidey-holes – you don’t see at first view.
LOOK at this space.
The “room” gets weirder and weirder the deeper you go into it.
He looks like he’s having a wonderful time on this date, doesn’t he?
The glowing kitchen. The layout of the space. I wish I could get a look at what pictures she’s put onto the fridge with magnets. Art prints? I could see her going to MoMA on a weekend, wandering around and buying some magnets in the museum store. It’s hard to picture her having personal photos. Maybe they’re old pictures of her grandparents at Coney Island or something, something she found in a box in an attic somewhere.
It was impossible to see the film for a good 10 years too (it was never released on DVD. If I wanted to see it, I had to bust out my VHS copy, not to mention my VCR.) It’s finally on streaming platforms – but the image quality is very poor. If any film deserves to be restored and re-released properly, it’s this one. Karen Sillas gives one of my favorite performances ever. Not fightin’ words. At any rate, go read my column and seek out this film if you haven’t already. I used as my organizing structure Olivia Laing’s great book on loneliness: The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone.
In the sonnet “My Father’s Dante,” Ernest Hilbert writes:
You were gone twenty years before I read
The book that draws me faster on to you …”
In a “grim winter mood“, Hilbert is launched into “the lessons I failed now to learn”, but the final 6 lines opens out into another space, his father’s voice speaking: “There is so much more to observe.” Observing isn’t about looking up and around, though. Observing requires something different: “we will descend, and see …”
The longing in all of this, the specific objects anchored to memory, the opening-up into somewhere else with a swift intake of fresh air at the end – are hallmarks of Hilbert’s beautiful poetry, poetry I’ve been reading for many years now.
Nostalgia can be a cliche: drench everything in golden light and assume the audience will swoon. In that form, it’s lazy. Nostalgia can be toxic too: ah, the good old days when everything was simpler and better. (For whom?) But in its proper form, nostalgia is a poignant mix of unbearable and sweet, a reminder that the word’s Greek roots, after all, are “homesickness” and “pain”. No “golden light of memory,” just a longing to get back home. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s work is steeped in this kind of effective nostalgia (and it shows up in his first novel, written when he was in college, so it was built into his sensibility from an early age). Ernest Hilbert’s poetry is filled with the swift sharp pang of nostalgia, not just for his own past but for other times, for objects, faces, smells, all of which he hopes might have something to say to him now. But when he strums his guitar in “Sing We,” the chords “will not / Resolve to songs I long ago forgot.”
In poem after poem in Hilbert’s beautiful new collection Last One Out (I love the double meanings in the title), messages are lost, they’re like light from a long-dead star. Years ago – 10 years ago! – I wrote about Hilbert’s collection Sixty Sonnets, mentioning this same haunting quality. There’s catharsis in his poems, a kind of opening-out-of-things in the final lines (forgive me: if there is a proper poetry term for this “opening-out-of-things”, I do not know it, I’m just using language that gets across how it feels). A lot of contemporary poetry stays in the minute details, without opening-out into another bigger space, or the opening-out is so mild it barely gets you anywhere. I’m not saying poetry has to be one or the other. I am not the boss of poetry. But Hilbert’s poetry, grounded in his life, his observations, his home, his family, his objects, has space in it beyond the personal, allowing for recognition, space for me to think, “Yes. Yes. I know that too.” Writing is an act of remembrance. Or at least it is an act of acknowledging the forgetting.
Broken up into separate parts, Last One Out is a progression from Hilbert’s childhood to his own experiences as a new father. (Full disclosure: I know Ernie.) The opening poems are haunted – quite literally – by memories, starting with “Welcome to all the Pleasures” where his grandfather – “German / With shoulders of granite, / Of beer and blue skies, / Blast furnaces” – tosses four-year-old Hilbert, who can’t swim, into the river. The poem ends with the child
Hung between what glows above
And what pulls below.
If I had to boil down Hilbert’s essence as a poet, it is this sense of “hanging between” the glow above and unseen forces – the past, memories, mysteries – pulling him down. Sometimes he finds equilibrium, trembling there, but it’s always slightly unstable, there’s always a pull one way or the other. A jar of fireflies “flash silent broadsides at our porch,” close enough to touch and yet also as distant as far-away “constellations of cold light.” Is there nothing in the vast space between? In “Recessional,” Hilbert describes being a child, hanging out in an empty church while his musical director father sat at the organ organizing “Bach manuscripts”. The poem is filled with images of both vast height (“the beamed vault of the nave”) and the pull of gravity, the cold stones of the floor. Child Hilbert crawls underneath the pews: “Never before would I have been so low / To the floor and childlike / … It felt like a discovery.” The height makes the depth possible and vice versa.
His poems are filled with images of other worlds, lost worlds, ancient Rome, a series of Atlantises, the detritus of wars long-over covered in dust and rust. These places, things, contain messages – incomprehensible, garbled, or lost – to this very observant man. Staring at Durer’s engraving of “St. Jerome in his study”, Hilbert perceives the room as
a drowned royal grave filled with sparks
And traces of an imagined world.
Or “Center City” which starts: “A bank was here.” (Side note: Some of this quality in his work resonates so strongly with me because I’m from Rhode Island where people give directions via landmarks that haven’t been there for 40 years, i.e.: “Take a left where the karate studio used to be.” The karate studio closed shop in the 80s, but locals nod, like, “Okay, I know where that is.”) Hilbert is haunted by what used to be here, either 20 years ago or 1,500 years ago. Sometimes the past sits on top of the present, kind of like those digitized holographic images which show you what a landscape looks like pre- and post-hurricane, or how a New York block changed over time. Hilbert never just sees “Now.”
Hilbert’s honesty is not just refreshing, but revelatory. In an early poem, he writes, bluntly, from the Chelsea Hotel: “My heart is a meteorite. / I am its crater.” Much later, near the end of the volume, he describes sitting on the couch on Super Bowl Sunday: “A poet as sentimental as I, as foolish / And as easily made up of failures / Sometimes as stupidly happy.” My eyes spiked with tears at “stupidly happy.” Maybe his past beckons like an Atlantis. Maybe some precious things have been lost along the way. But there is always the moment, the moment flickering with awareness of all that came before, “beacons” of light flashing from far away.
I mentioned catharsis, the opening-up quality in Hilbert’s work. He’s trying to communicate something to us: it’s not a belljar, it’s not a self-referential system. He’s looking at objects, and he’s letting us into his world, his way of seeing. In “Glacier,” he describes climbing with two friends to look at a glacier. The journey is arduous for him and he’s irritated (“I start to hate the two rising about me“, his lungs “scald“), he tries to move faster but “Lady Gravity wants me at the bottom.”) Up until now, this is a fine poem, creating a mood – as well as a structure for that mood – using images evoking height, pain, distance. Hilbert doesn’t stop there, though, and this is why I think he is special. As he reaches the glacier, his perspective opens up as the view opens out, and he is astonished by the sight before him of the precipice and the caverns below. Something melts away from him, but – crucially – there’s still a lingering sense of threat in the language: “smouldering” “treacherous reaches” “receding storm“. Not quite “the hills are alive,” now is it? But a crucible has been passed through, a barrier has been breached, and a transformation has taken place. He is caught between two poles again, the reaches of sky, the pull of Lady Gravity. The world is full of peril and nothing lasts forever, not people, objects, buildings, empires. Even the glacier will eventually melt.
But – to quote Metallica – the memory remains.
You can read more of Hilbert’s work at Poetry Foundation, and learn more about his other collections of poetry here.
My talented brother Brendan O’Malley is an amazing writer and actor. He’s wonderful in the recent You & Me, directed by Alexander Baack. (I interviewed Baack about the film here.) His most recent gig was story editor/writer on the hit series Survivor’s Remorse. Brendan hasn’t blogged in years, but the “content” (dreaded word) is so good I asked if I could import some of it to my blog. He did series on books he loved, and albums he loved. I thought it would be fun to put up some of the stuff here. So we’ll start with his list of 50 Best Albums. I’ll put up one every Monday.
Brendan’s list of 50 Best Albums is part music-critique and part memoir and part cultural snapshot.
I have always loved these essays, because I love to hear my brother talk. I am happy to share them with you!
50 Best Albums, by Brendan O’Malley
26. Nirvana – Nevermind
Quelle Chanson, Non?
My fifth year of college (!) was spent abroad in Orleans, France at L’Universite d’Orleans. Up until that point, I’d lived in Rhode Island all my life. From the time I was 15 until that year my main contact with the world outside of Little Rhody was through various punk rock bands.
This is what ’83 to ’91 looked like for me…
7Seconds were from out West and toured relentlessly, singing melodic breakneck hardcore punk that thematically took on “important” issues like racism, sexism, and “the-world-doesn’t-understand-our-mohawks-ism”.
Minor Threat were from D.C. and not as upbeat as 7Seconds. They were more attuned to the forces that lay behind the ills of society and therefore less inclined to sing passionately about being able to change it. They later morphed into Fugazi, another of my all-time faves.
The Midwest was represented by a two-headed hydra of searing punk rock, The Replacements and Hüsker Dü. The Replacements were the ill-advised Thursday night booze-off before a big test and Hüsker Dü was the all-night study session for a political science exam that devolves into a meth-fueled rage against some machine.
All these bands were connected to other lesser lights. Before the internet, there was DIY (Do It Yourself) punk rock. They started their own record labels, they printed their own LP’s, they drew their own posters. They toured the country in vans sleeping on the couches of their biggest fans.
Rolling Stone didn’t write about them, radio wouldn’t touch them with an any length foot pole, MTV was already in the business of creating megastars, and the majority of the public winced at anything that was LOUD. I vividly remember playing a Replacements song for a friend of mine in high school. This guy was a musician, a guitar player who liked heavy metal for Pete’s sake, but he simply COULD NOT HEAR THE SONG. All he heard was noise.
This scene would be replayed throughout the late ‘80’s for me, both in high school and in my first few years in college. I had my circle of like-minded friends. There were four of us. Tom, Justin, Joe, moi. We were occasionally a band, but more often than not we were intense spectators. To be a fan of this music meant a certain level of danger. Concerts were rag-tag affairs in which the crowd threw itself against itself as ferociously as possible. There were violent elements who were attracted to this kind of freedom and we often found ourselves rescuing punk maidens from slam-dance circles and avenging uncalled-for elbows with punches. Skinheads, completely missing the point, weren’t dancing so much as they were trolling for conflict. Depending on our mood, we either gave it to them or didn’t.
Outside the shows this underground element would collide with “normal” American life. The leeriness of capitalism was astounding. The feeling of “us vs. them” was overwhelming. Restaurants would refuse to serve you. Store owners would deny you their products. Business owners would REFUSE YOUR MONEY. I could romanticize that whole aspect as having added some level of enjoyment, but, to be honest, it just sucked. I had thousands of “what is the deal with THAT” conversations with my co-conspirators. The justifications we concocted on behalf of our oppressors could never quite be pinned down into any certain set of criteria. Suffice it to say, we were, by definition, outsiders.
Did this status affect my view of said mainstream? In other words, was I as much of a douchebag to the world as the world was a douchebag to me? Of course not. I bought Thriller like everyone else. I rocked out to Van Halen’s “Runnin’ With The Devil”. I lusted over Sade. I never cared for Madonna, but I didn’t SPIT at people who did. I even had some classic rock in the collection. My tastes ran towards punk rock but I could appreciate Duran Duran, perhaps the weirdest boy band ever. And Prince was from Minneapolis like my other two favorite bands. What wasn’t there to like about Prince?
But my open-mindedness was definitely not reciprocated. For some reason the music that meant the most to me was not just disliked, it was seen as a threat.
So, college happened in there somewhere. In between punk rock concerts, I did a ton of plays at the wonderful University of Rhode Island theater department. I had a series of disastrous relationships and abused alcohol. I HAD A BLAST.
I kept three majors. Theater, English, and French. My youthful enjoyment of Inspector Clouseau had improbably turned into a major. Thus everything about my French studies seemed vaguely comedic to me. The opportunity to live in France for a year was going to be a laugh riot. I’d completed 4 full years of college and only needed 9 credits to graduate. 5 classes per semester equals 15 credits, so you do the math. Over the course of my two semesters in France, I only needed to do less than one semester of work. France was in trouble, people.
That summer wasn’t exactly a victory lap of an exit. I got Lyme’s Disease and went through a horrific breakup. I left the country an emotional wreck and very unhealthy. In fact, I took the last of my antibiotics right before I got on the plane, hoping they’d done their work. I invested in an expensive CD Walkman and a small set of speakers. I brought two notebooks of CD’s with me, perhaps 20 of my favorites.
My first couple of months in France were primarily recuperative. I went to classes with my other Foreign Exchange students, I ate pleasant dinners with my host family, I went to every movie in town to get used to listening to French when I didn’t have to respond. I read in my little dorm room. I ate the same meal twice a day at the cafeteria. Slowly the language unfurled itself to me and social situations became bearable.
Two of my American friends had joined a local American football team and made some French friends. This was what I was after. Instead of hanging out with my classmates, other non-French-speaking foreigners, I began hanging out primarily with French people. But America was about to reach out to me.
The campus of L’Universite d’Orleans is a 20-minute bus ride outside of the city of Orleans. We all began to spend far more time in the city and very little on campus. On one of these excursions, we stopped in at FNAC. FNAC (said as one word by the French, hilarious) was the French version of Tower Records. In a “holy shit I feel old” side note, Tower recently disappeared off of the face of the planet.
I’d been in France a couple of months and I’d yet to buy any music, preferring instead to start smoking. So I wasn’t all that into going to FNAC, to be honest. I loitered, looking at French chicks. A song came on over the in-store stereo system.
I AM NOT EXAGGERATING ANYTHING THAT FOLLOWS.
My memory of this moment is like one of those long unbroken movie shots … the camera starts up in the very highest corner of the store. The song begins and slowly the camera begins to swoop, capturing the silly French fashions, the funny haircuts, the multi-colored crazily-buttoned jackets, the pointy shoes, late ‘80’s American culture re-appropriated back to Europe and funneled inappropriately into Mass Appeal. The focus of the shot narrows in on the face of an obviously American post-teen. As the music builds, the camera nears his face as his mouth opens, his toes tap, his head bounces. He is obviously AMAZED at this sound. The sound obliterates everything else.
The camera stays in closeup. The song ends. The next voice you hear you have to try to imagine a little bit. Do you remember the morning rock DJ in your town? Do you remember the inherent utter hyperbole in their speech? Now cross that with Inspector Clouseau.
“Eh, mes amis, quelle chanson, non? C’etait le Number One des Etats Unis, la nouvelle son de …”
Interjection: Did I just hear him say that was the Number One song in the United States?
When I flew out of Logan Airport, the number one song was “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You” by Bryan Adams. It had just replaced “Rush Rush” by Paula Abdul. Those were the big hits of the summer. Think about that for a second.
Cut back to gape-mouthed post-teen…
“…la nouvelle son de Nirvana! ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ de l’album “Nevermind”.”
Dropping the camera metaphor, I could barely believe what I’d been hearing. I tore over to the Rock section and found Nirvana. Sold out. I had heard of them after they put out their Bleach album in 1989 but I hadn’t bought the album and knew very little about them. I was almost angry. That song was Number One??? What the hell was going on back there???? I turn my back for one second and all of a sudden everyone can handle loud music??? Not only can they handle it, but it is THE MOST POPULAR SONG IN THE COUNTRY????
I seriously thought about getting on a plane and flying back to the States.
Imagine you work for a political candidate, Mr. So-and-so. You’ve been tirelessly campaigning for years. You’ve poured your heart and soul into a race that people seem ambivalent about at best. By some fluke, you are on a deserted island when the actual voting takes place. Your isolation makes you wonder what ever compelled you to get involved in politics in the first place. A plane flies overhead. Instead of rescuing you, it drops a newspaper on your head. The headline says, “So-and-So Elected in a Landslide!”
I’d spent the better part of ten years catching flak for how loud and out of control my tastes were, how what I liked was actually an affront to decent American consumerism, and that such a horrific assault on art and sound was everything that was wrong with the youth of today.
Bryan Adams was considered a ROCK STAR. Huey Lewis (God love ‘im) was a ROCK STAR. Now, I have nothing against either of these guys, but … come on. ROCK STARS? I don’t think so. Rock stars scare people. David Bowie is a ROCK STAR. Mick Jagger is a ROCK STAR. They scared people! They might even have slept together just to show the world they could do whatever they wanted! ROCK STARS change how people view the world.
I have never felt such a sensation of vertigo as I did that day in that French record store. One listen of that song and I knew that NOTHING would be the same when I got back to America.
Name another song that could truthfully make such a claim.
One final note. I only got 8 credits and had to take another class when I got back Stateside. C’est la vie!
I reviewed Marianne & Leonard for Ebert, a documentary about Marianne Ihlen and Leonard Cohen, and their muse/artist relationship. Cohen’s love of her was immortalized in song, her picture on the back of one of his albums. She remains somewhat mysterious. Lots of great footage.
“From a Buick 6” – Bob Dylan. The SOUND of his BAND … it’s so VITAL, jangly and raucous, so PRESENT. So is his voice, and the lyrics, and everything coming from him … but listen to that band. It’s visceral.
“Those Were The Days” – Mary Hopkin. A song I’ve always treasured, since childhood when I heard it for the first time. Maybe my parents had it? I don’t know. But its melancholy and nostalgia – something I couldn’t have had much experience with yet – spoke to me, in a wordless way, it was just a feeling. Not a personal memory, but maybe a sudden awareness of the collective memory, of looking back, of loss, of happier days in the past. Maybe it was me sensing what was to come (I’ve often felt that I did, from a very young age: somehow I knew my life was going to be rough). Incidentally, many years later, the man I loved – the man who, honestly, derailed my life – it may sound retro to say, but I’ve never claimed to be a modern woman, and definitely not in the realm of love – made me a mix tape. Because “those were the days” when you made mix tapes for people you love. He threw all kinds of shit on it, the tape had no rhyme or reason. I listened to it on my walkman, one blazing hot summer day. Things had already ended by then. And my knees went weak … or, more accurately, it felt like someone hit my knees from behind, making me buckle, almost fall over … when I heard the opening strains of “Those Were the Days.” I hadn’t even remembered my childhood response to that song, it had been buried, but it all came rushing back when I heard it again. He and I had never talked about the song. We were so connected it was, at times, downright spooky. I wrote about him – and “Those Were the Days” gets a mention – in the piece that started it all. My writing, I mean. My formal writing.
“Hope For Me Yet” – Marc Broussard. I only have a couple of his. Maybe it’s a little conventional, but I like it, and I really like his voice.
“Radioactive Mama” – Sheldon Allman. In my wanderings through the Internet, I came across a double (triple?) album filled with songs about the Cold War, and the atomic bomb, and the fear of nuclear holocaust. It’s a hoot, even though the songs are filled with such paranoia and fear – but it really gives you a sense of the time. Many of these are not only one-hit wonders, but you can’t find evidence of these songs anywhere else but on the album. Believe me, I tried. It’s a great snapshot of cultural history. After Mr. Allman kisses his “radioactive mama,” his teeth glow in the dark.
“Good Night Irene” – Eric Clapton. Live. I have so many versions of this song. I never get sick of it.
“The Auld Triangle” – The Dubliners. A favorite at the Bloomsday celebration I go to every year. Nothing like an entire bar of drunk people singing this in unison.
“A Place to Crash” – the great Robbie Williams. I believe he is now doing a “residency” in Las Vegas, which … really fits. I should get my ass out there. I love him. He’s a superstar. He is a pop-anthem-generator. I’ve been listening to him constantly since I first discovered him via his first album. I was in Ireland with my sister Jean, we were visiting my sister Siobhan who was in school there. And we heard this song playing constantly, from car radios, in stores, in restaurants, it was on once, twice, three times an hour. Finally Jean and I were like, “Who IS that?” Because he wasn’t getting that kind of radio play in the States, that’s for damn sure. Siobhan told us about Robbie Williams and his whole background. Boy band to superstar. Similar to Justin Timberlake. (The song we kept hearing, by the way, was “Millennium”.) I bought a cassette tape at a Virgin Records in Dublin and forget it, I was in from that moment on. Every song was good. This is his thing. He’s good at … everything? (Also: obsessed with Elvis, which makes his move to Las Vegas particularly perfect.)
“Serve the Servants” – Nirvana. After the mayhem unleashed by Nevermind, the anticipation was HUGE for Nirvana’s next. What would happen? (The pressure must have been insane.) It was the kind of situation where people were waiting outside Tower Records to buy their copy on release day. I love In Utero and I still remember the creepy thrill I got hearing the first strains of “Serve the Servants,” which is the first song on the first side. It blows the walls back.
“40,000 Miles” – GoodNight City. I don’t know who these people are. I don’t know why I bought this, where I heard it first. I own a lot of one-hit wonders. Most of this song is forgettable, but there are a couple of pleasing chord changes … which is probably why I bought it. The chord changes still please me.
“Mr. Sandman” – The Chordettes. Swoony harmonies.
“Spineless” – Alanis Morissette. One of her real ragers. I LOVE this song.
“Mother Mother” – Tracy Bonham. Talk about a rager. One of the anthems of my mid-20s. It calls up such a specific time and place. I was in a Virgin Records in Chicago – I think on Clark Street near my apartment – and I heard this incredible song playing on the airwaves, reverberating through the air. I asked a store employee: “Who is this?” “Tracy Bonham.” I raced to buy a cassette tape. Every song on the album is incredible. This was the brief moment – brief and precious – when real female rage was actually commercial. Maybe it’s better that it’s not commercial. But once Britney Spears started her onslaught on pop culture (I love Britney, don’t get me wrong), there was no more room for people like Tracy Bonham. It’s a loss. I came of age in the “female rage is normal and everywhere” era, and younger people would do well to remember that they haven’t invented anything. The only thing “new” around here is social media.
“If It Ain’t Easy” – Steve Carlson. He’s got a great voice, both gruff and melodic. This song is a toe-tapper for sure.
“Things We Said Today” – The Beatles. I learned how to harmonize by singing along with my parents’ Beatles records. Songs like this are why. The harmonies are easy, and yet … counterintuitive, in a lot of ways. You have to practice, you have to HEAR the harmony line to follow it. Once you hear it, it becomes obvious what should be happening. I still enjoy singing along with Beatles songs, following the harmony lines.
“Stalin Kicked the Bucket” – Johnny Dilks & His Visitacion Valley Boys. Member up above my mention of the Cold War/Atomic Bomb album? This is off that. It’s a gleeful hillbilly-yodeling folk song … about Stalin dying.
“Son of Sam” – Elliott Smith. He haunts me.
“Satisfied” – Sia [feat. Miguel & Queen Latifah). From The Hamilton Mixtape. It’s thrilling. I love Sia’s voice.
“Do the Clam” – Elvis Presley. How absurd that this is the first Elvis song to show up on this shuffle. Lester Bangs was slightly obsessed with “Do the Clam.” He references it often. At one point he compares it to the Sex Pistols’ version of “My Way.” Who else would ever make that comparison? I mean, “Do the Clam” is such a deep cut you actually have to have listened to all the soundtracks. It’s absurd. I love Lester Bangs.
“30 Seconds” – Tracy Bonham. Off the same album as “Mother Mother.” That album brings back my whole Chicago era.
“Your Cheatin’ Heart” – Hank Williams. Classic.
“Love Me” – The Phantom. Primal PRIMAL rockabilly. Grunts, groans, screams. Think like a parent in 1958. This shit is scary. It’s so primal it almost tips into punk rock 20 years before punk rock arrived.
“Sober” – Pink. She’s got one of my favorite contemporary voices. Rock star voice.
“New Clothes” – Pat McCurdy. An old friend. From long ago. Still doing his thing. Hugely successful in the Chicago/Minnesota/Wisconsin area. For 30 years now. He’s got a cult following. I used to be (sort of) a part of it. I’m on one of his albums, too. He wrote a duet for us. Those were the days, my friend. Have you read our recent-ish conversation about Elvis?
“Money Honey” – Eddie Cochran. Live. I love his studio stuff but something is unleashed in these live tracks. Let’s be honest, it’s his sex drive. And it is a force to be reckoned with.
“Suicide Ride” – Ai Tunes. I have no memory of buying this. I also don’t really … like it? C’est la vie.
“Lonely Weekends” – Waylon Jennings covering a Charlie Rich song. I was wondering where Waylon had been hiding. And I’m still waiting for Jerry Lee Lewis to make an appearance. This is beautiful, you can feel the revolution in his stuff, how much it toppled the conservative Nashville sound. He’s so HONEST. You can FEEL it.
“Lonesome Town” – Ricky Nelson. His voice is perfection. Such a huge pop idol and now he’s associated with … what exactly is his legacy? I get the feeling it’s not accurate. Like he’s some benign bubblegum 1950s symbol. A typical condescending assessment for a pop star whose main fanbase is female. (Those who think he’s a symbol of 1950s bobby-sox innocence need to check out his “I Wanna Be Loved.” Yeah. He says “loved” but you can tell he means something else.) At any rate, he was a gigantic star and a wonderful singer.
“Choices (Yup)” – E-40. Best to blast this in the car as you drive to the beach, windows down. I love the structure of the song, too, its constant barrage of choices, requiring either a “Nope” or “Yup” in response. It’s great.
“Little Pigeon” – Chuck Sims. He appears to have been a one-hit wonder with this 1957 single. A pure Elvis imitation, showing the enormity of Elvis’ influence in such an extremely short amount of time. But this swings. I like it!
“Blue Christmas / Santa Claus Is Back In Town” – Elvis Presley, the first rehearsal for his 1968 “comeback special.” You can hear people chatting in the background. Elvis is single-minded, and never stops, but you can hear him having fun with it. Part of his hat-trick: this special could not have been higher stakes, but he sat in the middle of the whirlwind, calm, absorbing the stress and putting it back out there as a performance. Not to be tried by amateurs.
“Shame On You” – Indigo Girls. I love them, but I admit I’m all about Emily Saliers’ songs. Hers are my favorites. I can take or leave (and sometimes I can just leave) Amy Ray’s songs. This is one of Amy Ray’s. So … yeah. I’m ambivalent.
“Stratford-On-Guy” – Liz Phair. I’ve written extensively about her and this album. She “hit” while I was in Chicago. And she was in Chicago too. She felt “local” to those of us who were there. It was instantly obvious that Exile in Guyville was different, far above and beyond so much else that was going on. I’m still obsessed with this album. I still know the order of the track listing. This is second to last on the whole thing. She creates a whole world here.
“Needing/Getting” – OK Go. My love for them is unapologetic. Although this is nothing new. I don’t apologize for the things I love. Something about them really struck a chord with me. Their sound. Their demeanor. There’s very little “filler” in their stuff. For me, their stuff doesn’t get old with repetition. I’m always happy to hear from them.
“The Tennessee Waltz” – Jo Stafford. A 1930s singer, with a pure crystalline voice. I have many many versions of this song too. My favorite is Sam Cooke’s, who completely re-imagines it … but still: it’s a beautiful song. Elvis loved this song.
“Waiting for My Real Life to Begin” – Colin Hay. His stuff gives me an ache. Like a bruise on my arm I can’t stop pressing, just to see if it still hurts.
“Ready, Willing and Able” – Doris Day. From Young at Heart. I’m with Brian May. A perfect singer.
“Matchbox” – Carl Perkins. Such a pioneer. The real breakthrough, if you want to call it that, came from him. Merging country with rhythm and blues. He was part of a much larger moment, of course, but he was the one who was the songwriter, who started writing the zeitgeist, putting it all together.
“Throw Down” – Tenacious D. YES. I love how Dave Grohl said something like “I have played with the greatest rock band in the world” and he was talking about Tenacious D. Lol. Tongue-in-cheek for sure but it makes me love Grohl. Tenacious D rules.
“I Won’t Go Hollywood” – Bleu. I’ve been so proud that I turned someone onto Bleu, a person on Twitter I don’t even know. But he started posting all these tracks, thrilled to have made the discovery. I remember how I felt when I discovered Bleu. I was like … why isn’t this guy HUGE? Followed by: I am so glad this guy ISN’T huge. It means I can go see him play in a tiny venue where there’s barely 100 people there. But he is one of the best songwriters writing today (he writes songs for pop princesses throughout the world), and his VOICE. I wrote a huge piece about him. I won’t go too into it, but will just say I was openly suicidal at the point that I wrote what I wrote, dreaming and planning and rehearsing my checkout date. I was in such anguish it was literally unbearable. I couldn’t take it anymore. In the middle of all this, I went to go see Bleu, by myself, white-knuckling death thoughts. And even though I had a moment of almost terrifying dissociation on my way home through the dark city, by myself … I shiver even thinking about it … I didn’t feel like I was real, it was overwhelming … I went home and decided to write up my thoughts on the concert. Writing that piece got me through one more day. It gave me something outside longing for peace (i.e. death) to think about and do. Which is why when some Irish asshole commented “Love your work, but my God you need an editor” it felt like he had shot me in the heart. Please realize that people you don’t know may be going through something. The best quality of all commenters is those who know when not to comment. Second of all, Noel from Ireland: this site is FREE. If you feel a piece is too long, please realize that 1. it’s not all about you and 2. nobody is forcing you read something that’s “too long.” Baby want a bottle? I’m still mad. I’ll let it go eventually. Not yet though.
“Mr. Misunderstood” – Eric Church. A monster mega hit. So glad I got to see him at Outlaw Fest. He played solo. He said he was “terrified.” I need to see him again, with his band behind him. I love Eric Church so much.
“My Dad’s Gone Crazy” – Eminem. Another album where I have memorized the track listing order through sheer repetition. I consider this one of THE post-9/11 albums, 9/11 haunts it (particularly this track). Including his daughter on this is classic MM. Hailey saying stuff like, “Daaaad” in a scolding voice, like “Calm DOWN, Dad.” “I think my Dad’s lost it,” in her little mouse-voice.
“Gimme Shelter” – The Rolling Stones. It doesn’t matter how many times I’ve heard it. It still makes me shiver with dread. Have you read Bill Janovitz’s second-by-second breakdown of this song? What they have unleashed in the song cannot be undone or made better by “it’s just a kiss away” … but you can understand the attempt.
“The Red We Want is the Red We Got” – Elton Britt. From that Cold War album I mentioned. A swoopy dance song, about the American flag, which includes the immortal line: “it’s the right red, not the wrong red.” Oh boy.
“I Got a Woman” – Elvis, live onstage in Memphis. To anyone who thinks it was a continuous progression down needs to listen to this album. He’s on fire. In his home. One woman is losing her shit, and Elvis says at one point, “Honey, you have got BAD laryngitis.” hahahaha
“Too Fast For Love” – The Donnas. I loved these girls. I need to check in with where they might be now. I loved this album. They were tough chicks, a term I like far better than “bad-ass” (let me know when that awful word has been retired). The Donnas were tough little rebels, a little bit mean, and tauntingly loud. Teenage tantrums.
“Everybody Loves Me, Baby” – Don McLean. From American Pie. This album may very well be my first obsession, or at least the first one I remember. I had to be like … 4 or 5. All I know is that on show ‘n tell day in kindergarten, while other kids showed off their Barbies and gerbils, I stood in front of the class and sang the entirety of “American Pie.” And I was very frightened of the cover. I would stare at it, wondering what it meant, and why it disturbed me.
“A Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” – Little Richard. Nobody like him. Before or since. And doesn’t he know it!
“Mandinka” – Sinéad O’Connor. From The Lion and the Cobra. Great album, great song. I was so excited to read (and post) my brother’s essay on this album. He captures what it was like when O’Connor arrived.
“Rich Woman” – Robert Plant & Allison Krause. From their great album of duets. You wouldn’t think this pairing would make sense, but once you hear one track you wonder how you have lived without this album. I love Robert Plant’s comment that one of the appeals of the project was that he would get to sing harmony, something he had rarely done in his career as a lead singer. So awesome.
“Commie Lies” – Janet Greene. Hmmm, I wonder if you can guess this is from the Cold War album? This Janet Greene lady … I had no idea of her existence until this album. Her songs are vicious. A right-wing folk singer. She has a beautiful voice and a heart full of hate. I’d link to it on Youtube, but it’s been uploaded by someone who approves of its message. Now listen, I’m not a fan of Communism or Socialism. I know too much about the horrors done in Communism’s name to treat it with anything other than a skeptical side-eye. But this kind of propaganda is hallucinatory and damaging – a fascinating window into the time, that’s for sure.
“Danny Boy” – Jackie Wilson. The best version of this song. I don’t think there can be any valid argument. I mean, you can try, but I’m bored already. I have many other versions done by Irish tenors, famous Irish singers, and they are gorgeous, it’s a gorgeous song and it’s really fun and satisfying to hear people who can really sing take it on. Elvis does a version too and it’s beautiful. But Wilson takes it somewhere else, creating the bar with which all the other versions are measured – and it makes you understand – on a visceral level – while women would faint at his shows. Because he literally takes your breath away.
“Bossa Nova Baby” – Elvis. I absolutely love this. His performance of it is hilarious. Watch how he moves.
“Those Were the Days” – Dolly Parton along with Mary Hopkin, Porter Wagoner and the Opry Gang. Okay, this is eerie. Considering my monologue way up above about this song and the mix tape. Dolly kills it.
“Extraordinary” – Liz Phair. To those who complain Liz Phair “sold out” with this album, I say: LOL. None other than punk rock Paul Westerberg said that people’s so-called “sellout” albums are often super interesting, and even better than some of the other “pure” stuff – because it represents what the singer has always wanted to do and try, and when they finally get the chance, when money/producers at their fingertips, boom, all kinds of great shit happens. There isn’t a bad song on this album. Besides: I am not a fan only when Liz Phair does something I “approve” of. Exile in Guyville made me a fan for life. I’ll follow her anywhere.
“That’s Old Fashioned (That’s the Way Love Should Be)” – The Everly Brothers. Talk about harmony lines. If you want to learn how to sing harmony, if you want to practice, sing along with THEM. You can’t get more perfect than what they do with harmony.
“Roller Coaster Ride” – Eric Church. An awesome song.
“Never Been to Spain” – Three Dog Night. Elvis performed this in his live shows in the 70s, and he blows the roof off. LOVE it. But it’s a great song and I love Three Dog Night.
This was really fun, paying tribute to the insanely hot chemistry between Myrna Loy and William Powell (in everything, but for this essay I wrote about Love Crazy) and – my favorite – Jean Arthur and Joel McCrea in one of the best romantic comedies ever made, The More the Merrier. Check it out over on Film Comment: TCM Diary: The Chemistry Set
.
(I love the double meanings in the title), messages are lost, they’re like light from a long-dead star. Years ago – 10 years ago! – I wrote about 
