Seventeen In '88 - Installment 24: The Joys Of Driving Around Aimlessly

Seventeen In '88 - A story of teen angst, long walks, dirty jokes, haunted rooms, haunted psyches, records as refuge, roads like mazes, young love, bonding and unbonding, deep foreboding, senseless death, and innocence peeled away slowly, layer by layer.

The Joys of Driving Around Aimlessly

Early in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused one character says to another “So um, what have you guys been doing?” The reply comes with a faint shrug-of-the-shoulders; “I don’t know, driving around mostly.” 

That line sums up my memory of summer 1988 pretty well – it’s a blur of roads, tires, street signs, movement. Heat, listlessness, music. 

I guess driving around aimlessly is a long-standing tradition of American teenagers, but somehow the aimless driving around that I remember from 1988 doesn’t fit into the mold typified by the examples of Dazed And Confused or American Grafitti. Again, this is at least partly because in those movies, so much seemed to be happening. And in our little world nothing ever seemed to be happening. Yet somehow the memories of driving around aimlessly are still so vivid. Here’s a few now, in convenient paragraph form. 

Max is the only one of us who has a car, so he usually drives. When anyone else drives, the result is usually awkward, comical. One day Roger drives his parents’ car, and he lets me have a go at the wheel. I have had my license for a while now, but my experience with driving encompassed little more than the few blocks I drove in order to pass the driving test. Driving Roger’s car that day, I’m overly cautious to the point that the passengers in the car all snicker at my expense. I see a stop sign ahead, so I bring the car to a halt. “You know,” Roger says, deadpan, “You don’t have to stop so far away from the sign.” I look around and realize that I have stopped the car a good twenty feet in front of the sign. Everyone cracks up. 

Ramonesmania. I’m willing to believe that there might be a better soundtrack for driving around aimlessly in hot summer weather. I’m also willing to believe in Bigfoot, Tribbles, The Tooth Fairy and The Gentleman Ghost.



Max is driving, two or three of us are in the car with him. It’s daytime. We look to our right, and from out of nowhere we see a single unattached tire rolling side-by-side with us. For a dazed moment, we fear it may be from Max’s car. But it can’t be, we’re still riding smoothly. Suddenly Max is pulling over, shouting “Get it! Get it!” and I find myself leaping clumsily out of the passenger door and running full speed after the tire. Somehow, I catch up with it, grab it and haul it back to Max’s car. My hands and clothes are covered in black grime. Emily is nonplussed. “Why did you do that?” she asks. Max is quick with the reply: “Are you kidding? Free tire!”

If’n by Firehose. A loveable album right off the bat primarily because the band pictured on the cover is not actually Firehose, but Husker Du, who had recently broken up, thus inspiring dismay from all corners of the rock and roll universe. If’n also has a song called “For The Singer of REM”. We would have liked the song for that reason alone (though whether that title is a tribute or a tongue-in-cheek dig is up for debate), but it may actually be Firehose’s best song. It’s a rumbling, dreamy little tune, full of melody and momentum. All fragments and frayed corners, the song has an illusory quality - its misheard syllables and swerving rhythms pull you in and twist you around. “For The Singer of R.E.M.” is a puzzle - a maze for getting lost in. In that sense, it was the perfect song for the mood of that summer. 

We’re driving Emily’s little brother to a softball game. Elliot is behind the wheel of his ratty old hand-me-down car. He drives recklessly, speeding and swerving wildly. Upon arrival at the game Emily has to take her brother aside and comfort him. Elliot’s driving has frayed his nerves, freaked him out. Elliot and I exchange eye-rolls, but truthfully I am a little unnerved too.

Max made a mixtape, specifically designed for road trips, though we also listen to it when driving nowhere in particular, which is often. Talking Heads, REM, Violent Femmes, Patti Smith’s “Gloria”, The Modern Lovers’ “Roadrunner”, Television’s “See No Evil”. Costello, Clash, Ramones. Listening to this music is not an act of nostalgia, of yearning for a time that we may or may not have actually lived that may or may not have been wonderful or terrible. No, this music is alive, right fucking NOW, and we are living inside of it, and vice-versa. That’s the way it is, always, in 1988 and in 2012 and in 2036. Anyone who wants to argue otherwise is welcome to a swift punch in the gut.

Seventeen In '88 - Installment 23: Found A Job

Seventeen In ’88 – A story of teen angst, long walks, dirty jokes, haunted rooms, haunted psyches, records as refuge, roads like mazes, young love, bonding and unbonding, deep foreboding, senseless death, and innocence peeled away slowly, layer by layer.

Found A Job

In June of 1988 I got my first job. It was as a DJ at the local radio station. Max worked there, and my ex, Maggie, had worked there for a while, too. I had applied to work there the previous summer, even came in and made a demo tape, to no avail. Then my grandmother, who knew the owners, pulled some strings and helped me get the gig. It's who you know.

The station's format was split between Country and Adult Contemporary. Hank Jr. and Alabama on the AM side, Dan Fogelberg and The Eagles on the FM side. Despite my antipathy towards much of this music, the station was actually an extremely exciting place for a person of my age, interests, and temperament to work. I knew that it was a tremendous opportunity, which might explain why I was scared shitless when I started. I didn't want to mess it up.

Whenever I'm nervous about something, I turn to music or movies or writing to ease the tension. On the night before I started high school I stayed up late reading The Great Shark Hunt and listening to Weird Scenes Inside The Gold Mine, a Doors compilation. I wondered to myself whether Hunter S. Thompson or Jim Morrison felt anxious about starting high school. Probably not, I decided. Somehow, that made me feel better.

As I walked from the library to my first day of work, it was, of all things, a Grateful Dead song that helped defuse my nervousness. At seventeen I was under the impression that I did not like The Grateful Dead. In my indie/punk-centric world they were anathema, old hippies whose music amounted to not much more than pointless noodling. My father gently nudged me in the direction of changing my mind by suggesting I take a listen to American Beauty. It's probably their most accessible album; the songs are compact and catchy folk-rock in the vein of the earthy Americana of The Band or late-era Byrds. The music to me sounded elemental, like rainfall, or tree branches in wind. I was glad for the recommendation. Years later, in the liner notes to one of his albums Ryan Adams thanked "Black Flag and The Grateful Dead at the same time." That made me smile.

The song that came to my rescue was an odd little tune called "Candyman", a loping, laid-back country shuffle with lyrics about gamblers rolling "those laughing bones". Jerry Garcia and lyricist Robert Hunter wrote a series of songs with gambling imagery around this time, but "Candyman" is something different. Despite the customary ease the Dead bring to the song, the tone is quietly menacing.

In fact, the song sounded downright evil to me. Like at its heart it had been touched by an all-but-silent malevolence. "Good evening Mister Benson," Garcia sings, "I see you're doing well / If I had me a shotgun / I'd blow you straight to Hell." That was the way I felt about most authority figures in those days, (truthfully, I often still feel that way about authority figures) and it's that feeling I keyed in on as I walked to my workforce initiation.

The song helped calm my nerves, boost my confidence level, but my first day at work was still a fairly clumsy experience. I arrived and was immediately set behind a microphone, a veteran DJ guiding me through the process of organizing and airing commercials and doing on-air weather reports. The music was all on reel-to-reel, which makes me feel very old.

At one point, the DJ left the room, and there I was, alone as a song ended, unsure of what to do next. Should I say something? Play a song? What song? How? Should I go on the air and apologize for not knowing what the hell I'm doing? In a panic, I froze, and did nothing. Dead air. After a few excruciating seconds the DJ rushed back in and put on a commercial.

My subconscious must have really latched onto that feeling of sheer terror at being alone at the microphone, because in the years since I've regularly had recurring dreams that I am at the radio station, lost in a sea of unspooling tape and malfunctioning commercial carts. Hopelessly unsure of what to do next. I've had many jobs since then, but I never dream about any of those. Always the radio station.

Whenever I start a new job now, I remember that feeling and I try to draw on some kind of song or movie scene, something with an attitude, an edge of weirdness, to help me through in the same way "Candyman" (kind of) did that first day at the station in 1988.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. It's a cold, harsh truth of life, man: The Grateful Dead can only help so much before reality takes over.

Seventeen In '88 - Installment 22: Summer Lights

Seventeen In '88 - A story of teen angst, long walks, dirty jokes, haunted rooms, haunted psyches, records as refuge, roads like mazes, young love, bonding and unbonding, deep foreboding, senseless death, and innocence peeled away slowly, layer by layer.

Summer Lights

Everybody always wants to be somewhere else. Here is boring. Out there, elsewhere, that's where all the cool stuff happens. The crazy, creative stuff. All the familiar places, people, events - those things can only offer so much. Everybody wants new sensations.

In the '80's and '90's Nashville held an annual music and arts festival downtown called Summer Lights. It took place over the first or second weekend of June every year. It wasn't Bonnaroo or anything, but for the arts and culture-deprived of the nearby small towns it was an event worth looking forward to. Plus, it took place somewhere else.

Elliot had just seen the movie Fandango on television, a comedy about a group of college buddies taking one last road trip before venturing into the real world. As we left Emily's house to set out for the Summer Lights trip he commented that this trip would be like that movie, it would be our last fandango. I remember thinking "Last? You mean there's going to be a last road trip?" It hadn't occurred to me that they would stop. I thought it would always be us, out there - fun, music, comradeship, on and on into whenever. Is it really going to end?

For some reason, on the trip up at one point I found myself singing aloud "Take the Money and Run", the Steve Miller Band song. Everyone laughed, though I wasn't sure why it was funny. A couple minutes later that same song came on the radio. We all thought that was completely freaky. I guess classic rock radio is just predictable, but I like to think it was ESP at work. "And now we shall hear Steve Miller. It has been foretold!"

The festival was fun. It was my first time there and everything seemed BIG, like the first time you go to an amusement park as a child.

The best parts had nothing to do with the festival itself. We went riding up and down in the glass elevator at the Marriot hotel, a downtown Nashville young people tradition, and still a fun thing to do. Later, Elliot and I were standing outside the same hotel when we became convinced that an attractive woman was staring at us from across the street.

"She's looking at me."

"You're wrong. She's totally looking at me"

We stared back at her and argued the point for what must have been a good half hour. The woman was probably just waiting for someone, lost in her own thoughts. I don't remember which of us blinked first, but we never came to any conclusion. Maybe she wasn't actually there. Maybe she was just a figment of our over-active, testosterone-fueled imaginations. Or maybe she really was there, spending her Friday night standing on a busy street staring at two geeky teenage boys. In which case I hope she later got some help.

O where are you now, pretty Summer Lights lady?

The music at Summer Lights was a mixture of traditional southern musics - lots of fiddles, steel guitar, and exhortations to grab your partner and dance - along with the more slicked up Nashville southern country-rock stuff. There were plenty of young Nashville hopefuls, playing their hearts and guts out, doing whatever they thought an audience or a record exec might like.

Maybe we were snooty little music snobs, but it all sounded a little too by-the-numbers, too practiced to be of much interest.

If that music wasn't adventurous enough, we found some that was, in a cassette that Max picked up at Cat's Records. It was an album called In Gut's House by the No-Wave band Ut. They were an all-female trio originally from New York. In the mid-eighties they moved to London, where they found a kind of brief notoriety in the underground music scene. The influential British DJ John Peel liked 'em a lot, and I think it was probably one of his quotes displayed on the tape sticker - a declaration that Ut and REM were the only two bands that had made him cry in the last year - that caught Max's eye in the record store.

The music, though, we found mostly bewildering. The first lines are great, pulling you in, begging you to follow - "Going down, down to the marketplace / gonna learn to lie like an evangelist." From there it was all tangled guitars and skittering, disjointed rhythms, with singing that consisted mostly of unintelligible moaning. A violin wails nervously on several tracks. It was so off-kilter, so raw, none of us were sure about it. It represented an elsewhere we weren't sure was worth going to. Our reference points were limited, though. We weren't aware of the whole New York No-Wave movement, had never heard early Sonic Youth or any of the other possible British referents - The Raincoats, The Slits, The Fall. We were at a disadvantage.

Nevertheless, even if we weren't sure about it, it did represent something new, an antidote to the predictable. A kind of elsewhere. It was music that demanded things. It called and you were helpless but to follow, even if it seemed to be going somewhere vaguely frightening.

Yes. Follow it!

Seventeen In '88 - Installment 21: And It's Almost Independence Day

Seventeen In ’88 – A story of teen angst, long walks, dirty jokes, haunted rooms, haunted psyches, records as refuge, roads like mazes, young love, bonding and unbonding, deep foreboding, senseless death, and innocence peeled away slowly, layer by layer.

And It’s Almost Independence Day

Everybody always wants to be somewhere else. Here, now, is never good enough. But where do you need to be, and how the hell do you get there?

On the night of Graduation, hours after the ceremony, our little group of friends found ourselves somewhere on the outskirts of our little town. Someone in the group led us up a grassy hill, through weeds, branches, and menacing-looking trees. Eventually we came to a clearing at the top of the hill where the expanse of our little town could be seen, stretched out, all lit up like an exceedingly modest Christmas tree. It was quite a sight, really. I’d lived there my whole life, but I’d never been to that place before.

I still had another year of school ahead of me, but a couple of us had graduated earlier in the evening. Elliot had strongly considered not attending the ceremony but gave in at the last minute. You weren’t supposed to applaud or cheer as individual names were read, but the obnoxious few often did anyway. I can remember the sound of my lone, weak “woo” disappearing into the expanse of sober auditorium silence as Elliot crossed the podium. Max was also supposed to graduate, but found out at the last minute he had to go to summer school for one last credit. He was pissed off, but we had also seen the Mark Harmon vehicle Summer School the year before, and it made the prospect of a few weeks of summer classes seem not so bad. I mean, all those guys did was party, play with fake gore, and burn stuff.

That night, looking out over our fair city, even though the predominant mood was one of relief, the sense of years stacking up began to take on new weight. We’d already been fretting over our fear of a bleak, unfulfilling future, but that fear had new meaning now that some of us had to face up to what’s next. Only instead of a feeling of What do we do now? it was more like a feeling of Do we have to do it here? 

In 1988 Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” was all over the radio, impossible to ignore. That song did a fairly good job of summing up the need for escape, that feeling that most of us have at one point or another that we need to be elsewhere. It resonated. Maybe too much for Chapman herself, who immediately pulled away from the spotlight. So much so that it’s hard to remember now how very famous she was in 1988, how ubiquitous “Fast Car” and “Talkin’ ‘Bout A Revolution” were. Did she find the elsewhere she wanted, only to realize she didn't want to be there either?

“Fast Car” was on the airwaves, with its yearning to punch “a ticket to anywhere” to “be someone.” I could relate, but all I could hear in my head was a song by Van Morrison that had come out sixteen years earlier.

In the early seventies Van Morrison made a series of upbeat albums celebrating domestic bliss, nature’s glory, and dancing under moonlit skies. They were solid, enjoyable albums. Even had hit singles – “Come Running”, “Domino”, “Wild Night”.

Then in 1972 Morrison suddenly turned back to the contemplative, spiritual searching of his 1968 classic Astral Weeks. 1972’s St. Dominic’s Preview marked the point of transition, and it closed with a ten minute song called “Almost Independence Day”, though “song” seems too small, too inadequate a word for the feeling at work.

It opens with Morrison humming along wordlessly to an increasingly intense, circular pattern on acoustic guitar before dissolving into an expansive, lurching two-note rhythm, time kept by a slow, woozy synthesizer. It could be the sound of waves hitting a shore, or clouds billowing black before a storm. In his fascinating study of  Van Morrison’s music When That Rough God Goes Riding (PublicAffairs, 2010), the critic Greil Marcus likened it to “the sound of a tugboat pushing through fog.” The feel is elegiac, but insistently, urgently so. A listener has no hope of escaping into the calm, safe retreat of melancholy. It’s an aural undertow. You’re caught up in it, and you have to move with it.

“I can hear them calling,” Morrison sings, “way from Oregon.” Oregon? Somehow, the specificity is jarring, the feeling in the song is otherwise so amorphous, vague. Later, Morrison would explain to an interviewer that he wrote the song after he received a phone call from a member of his old band Them, phoning from Oregon, but they couldn't talk because the connection kept fading in and out. The song kind of works that way too.

Disconnection gives way to a few lines about Van and his lady stepping out on the town, acoustic guitar arpeggios swirling around his voice so gorgeously that until I listened just now I had never noticed the lines about buying silverware in Chinatown.

Then he’s back out in the cool night, admiring the lights of the harbor. Listening to the fireworks. Watching the boats go by. And it’s almost Independence Day.

The song is a summoning, an incantation, a prayer. A lament, a reverie. It lingers on the fade, drifting, endless. Maybe it doesn’t want to let go. Maybe it doesn’t want to face whatever’s next, when independence finally, truly arrives. Maybe it can’t wait for that moment, but it just wants a little more time to mourn whatever’s gone on before.

Out in that field under the endless June sky, the song hovered over me, my friends, the grassy hill and the small town lights. Moving in waves. Surging and receding.

Music fits into everyday living in so many ways. Mostly it accompanies moments, adds textures and atmosphere. Inspires, creates diversion. Provides a signpost, a means by which to remember experiences.

Somewhere around summer 1988 the music stopped being mere accompaniment or diversion. It became something else. Something like…the boss. Around this time the music began to dictate the mood rather than simply amplify or enhance it. The songs began to inhabit the moments like possessive spirits. You were helpless and you had to do what the music said.

“Almost Independence Day”, mysterious as it was, as it is, told me a few things, but they all seemed to contradict one another, and I got lost. Then, as now, I found it very easy to get lost.

The one thing the song seemed to clearly say was “Be ready.”

I wasn’t ready. Not at all. For anything. But out there in that field, looking at the city that raised me, molded me, messed me up as surely as friends or teachers or DNA ever could, I knew one thing: I had to get the hell out of that place.