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.
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!
