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.
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The night before the first day of the new school year is always the absolute
worst. Do you remember the feeling of Sunday nights during the school year?
That sad, sick feeling you used to get because the weekend is nearly over and
you have to return to those gray walls and echoing hallways and musty textbooks
tomorrow? The night before the first day of school was like that feeling, only
amplified a thousand times over. Summer’s almost gone and the real world
beckons. Only instead of beckoning, it DEMANDS.
I always had to have something to get me through that night. Something with an edge (or something that I at least perceived as "edgy", whatever that means) to cut against the dreariness of school life. Van Morrison would describe the feeling pretty accurately with the title “Keep Mediocrity At Bay”, but Iggy Pop may have summed it up best in "Some Weird Sin" from Lust For Life: "When things get too straight / I can't bear it" and "the sight of it all / makes me sad and ill / that's when I want some weird sin / just to relax with." I had that feeling exactly. Only Iggy's idea of some weird sin was probably a lot more dangerous and further out than anything I would have had the nerve for. Or access to. Given the choice between cutting up my torso with a razor while completely zonked out on heroin and simply staying at home watching A Clockwork Orange into the early morning hours, I'd settle for the latter. To each his own sense of edginess.
And it was the latter I settled for the night before the first day of my senior year of high school. Kubrick’s film has always had appeal to the alternative/outsider crowd. I don’t think it’s the violence or the social commentary that holds the source of that appeal though. I think it’s purely a matter of style – the soundtrack of synthesizered-up Beethoven, or the design of the Korova Milkbar with the swirly lettering on the walls and tables made of plastic naked ladies. For heaven’s sake, the main character is wearing a bowler hat with suspenders, a codpiece, and one false eyelash, how could any arty outsider type resist?
Maybe there is something more complicated that draws people to A Clockwork Orange. The dichotomy between Alex Delarge’s obviously keen intelligence and his utterly amoral behavior is certainly a fascinating thing, and Malcolm McDowell's controlled, gleeful portrayal of the character is mesmerizing. He nails perfectly a facet of human personality that we all sometimes wish we didn’t have to keep under strict control – the desire to let go, to unleash the wanton, libidinous Id.
It was that sense of letting go that I think drew me to the other cultural artifact that got me through this time – the soundtrack to the film Performance, especially Mick Jagger’s sleazy, cataclysmic soundtrack contribution “Memo From Turner”.
In the movie Jagger plays Turner, a former rock star who has sealed himself off from the rest of the world in a shadowy, rambling London flat full of exotic ornamentation and occultish vibes. A sadistic gangster on the run from his employers rents Turner's basement flat, at which point the psychedelic sparks begin to fly. Turner and his female companion, the ever-bewitching Anita Pallenberg, have lots of fun playing mind games with their new tenant. Under the influence of some hallucinogenic mushrooms the gang enjoys a serious bout of gender and identity switching, much to the consternation of James Fox’s gangster. “I feel like a man!” he keeps shouting, though he's obviously beginning to doubt most everything, including the certainty of his own existence.
The subject matter, along with the Godard-influenced jump-cutting, was enough to fry my fragile seventeen-year old brain, but the movie really reaches a head with Jagger’s performance of “Memo From Turner”. The visuals could get the point across on their own - in the buildup to the song Jagger appears as a rockabilly dandy, teasing Fox verbally (“The only performance that makes it, that really makes it, is one that achieves madness. Right?” Right, of course.) Then he's a voodoo shaman, dancing wildly while brandishing, for some reason, a fluorescent light rod as a prop. And finally, as the song begins, Jagger becomes Fox’s gangster boss, in suit and tie, hair slicked back, singing to a roomful of heavies who begin stripping off their clothes as Jagger exhorts “Take ‘em off! Let’s have a look!”
But the song itself is the most powerful punch. It’s an explosion of razor-sharp sleaze, the words a torrent of mid-sixties Dylan verbiage shot through with William Burroughs’ sense of druggy nightmare. A menacing fuzz guitar figure carries the rhythm while slide guitar (which has to be played by Ry Cooder, though the credits are hazy, and have thus been the subject of much speculation, a fact complicated by the multiple known versions of the song) is layered on top for ornamentation. Jagger sings the song with a fierce combination of precise control and implied abandon, intoning the surreal, drug-and-death dealing lyric as though he knows answers to questions the rest of us haven’t even thought to ask.
He sings as someone apart from it all. That is, in a nutshell, why I think I found the song so powerful, and so useful. I played it every day before school for the first couple months of my senior year. It became ritual, a necessary motivating tool. Like aural coffee. Before going off into the cold, colorless school day, where I had to fake my way through the process of blending in, trying to be a part of it all, I desperately needed a voice from the other side to reassure me that another side did, in fact, exist.
It was a troublesome time. The events of summer, getting a job for the first time, trying to maneuver through the raptures and pitfalls of what was only my second real romantic relationship, not to mention random weirdness like getting lost or the night of the mysterious phone calls, or the very real murder that happened in our town, it was all getting to me as I geared up for my final go-round of school.
I knew I’d have to start making decisions soon, and that was something I did not want to do. As a result, uneasiness and confusion were the order of the day. Everything seemed off somehow.
It should have been a time of renewal, new beginnings. But all I could think about were endings. Like, for instance, the end of school life. Even given all of my confusion and dread re: the future, school couldn't end
