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.
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.
