Seventeen In '88 - Installment 37: In Search Of Jolt Cola

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.

In Search Of Jolt Cola

As summer morphed into fall the tone of everyday life took on a stale, washed-out quality. The shock of RD’s death, combined with my own personal philosophical turn to a raw-nerved truth-at-any-cost outlook on life, had left a bitter aftertaste. The leaves changed color and the weather turned cooler, but the prevailing mood was one of listlessness.

By this time I had a way of finding the right records to illuminate whatever mood prevailed. Or the records had a way of finding me. Sly And The Family Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On had been on Rolling Stone’s list of 100 Greatest Albums the year before, so given my relentless dedication to lists, it was natural I should be all over it. The accompanying blurb called it a blues album, and that sounded like the right kind of formula to help dissolve some malaise.

The only thing I knew about Sly and The Family Stone was their appearance in the Woodstock movie, where they performed a glitzy, loose-limbed, downright inspirational version of "(I Wanna Take You) Higher”. Based on that, plus exposure to “Dance To The Music” and “Everyday People” on oldies radio, I thought they were some kind of feel-good funk’n’roll party band. Which they were, kind of, at least early on. But, as I was in the process of learning out there in the real world, life is seldom so cut-and-dried simple, and things are almost never what they seem to be on the surface. Also, change happens, to everything and everyone, and it can sometimes be really fucking drastic.

The album opens with a slow-building, burbling bass and drum pattern, accompanied by a strange, treated wah-wah guitar sound and a choir of woozy gospel-ish voices moaning in the background. Then Sly comes in, his voice a combination of resignation and bemusement, and sets the tone for the rest of the album: “Feel so good inside myself, don’t wanna move.” That line pretty much nails the feeling of the whole record - it's a long junkie nod, set to jagged, slow-motion dance rhythms.

The sessions for There’s A Riot Goin’ On were a darkly debauched affair. All of Sly Stone’s success, fame and money had fostered in him an ever-expanding sense of paranoia. He holed up in a sprawling Los Angeles mansion, surrounded by shady, gun-toting hangers-on with a never-ending drug supply, and beholden to a helpless creative obsession. He dubbed new parts over the master tapes so frequently that the sound of Riot is muddy and faded, an effect that only enhances the mood of alienation.

Like Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band, it’s an album about disillusionment. Growing up and growing down. Fooling yourself. Cop-outs and craziness. Sly is a spaced cowboy poet out and down without a friend in the asphalt jungle. Crying just like a  baby.

It’s an entrancing listen, if you’re in the mood. Which is to say, if you’re not in the mood for much of anything.

I was in the mood for taking my mind off of the fact that I wasn’t in the mood for much of anything. Which is where the Jolt Cola comes in.

The Sly Stone album had been lent to me by Regina’s father. Regina was a new addition to our group. Previously she had moved among the straighter, more popular clans of our class. She’d grown tired of the egos and petty backbiting there, and decided she needed a new crowd. It wouldn’t take long to realize that inflated egos and petty backbiting were just as prevalent among theater nerds, maybe more so. She hung out with us anyway, and we began to use the big, brand new house she'd just moved into as our primary center of congregation. And that's where we ended up on the night we all went looking to score Jolt Cola.

The Great Jolt Cola Search Of 1988 may have been an effort to show Regina how funny and cool and “offbeat” we were. Or maybe it was just another self-conscious attempt at weirdness for its own sake. We had a habit of taking a seemingly silly, mundane idea and creating a happening around it. This was a side effect of being young weirdos in a small town.

In any case, while other teenagers were out looking to score alcohol or pot or trying to get laid, we spent the better part of one Friday night scouring our town’s convenience stores for cans of Jolt Cola. The soft drink had acquired a strange notoriety in the mid-eighties for its crazy-high doses of caffeine and sugar. It was Coca-Cola on steroids. Which to us sounded like a fabulously absurd idea.

We were all mentally worn out from the events of the previous days and weeks. The murderer who had torn through our little town had been caught within a few days of RD’s death. He was, as might be expected, a particularly disturbed individual. At the time I felt only rage and bewilderment when I'd think about him. He was a year older than RD and myself, and I’d actually shared a split-grade classroom with him during one year of grade school. Once, we had each accidentally worn the other’s similar-looking coat home from school. My mother remembered that, and when she reminded me it absolutely sent a chill to the core of my being.

Such thin lines exist between us. What are the factors distributed among three kids of roughly the same age that leave one of them dead, one of them deranged and the other sifting through the details trying to make sense of it all?

Everyone felt drained. Or agitated. A strange combination - both worked up and worn out.

Some serious unwinding needed to be done, and the regular stuff - listening to records, driving around aimlessly, etc - wasn’t going to do the job thoroughly enough. We needed an event, the stupider the better. Nothing reflective or morose, please. As Otter said in Animal House: "I think this situation requires that a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody's part!" And we were just the guys to do it. 

We must have gone to about ten stores before hitting the jackpot. When we finally found the motherlode of Jolt Cola in a musty convenience store on the outskirts of town it felt like a real accomplishment. We cheered and laughed and celebrated. At the very least it was a small catharsis.

The subsequent sugar rush left me so monumentally jacked up that my memory of the remainder of the evening is sketchy - all a blur of jittery nerves and indistinct chatter. A swelling of raw commotion morphing into a slow fade, Sly Stone's spidery Riot rhythms emerging to carry us into the fuzzy early morning hours.

As the Jolt high was reaching its peak, someone put Sid & Nancy in the VCR. The viewing progressed in a rollercoaster arc, with everyone initially laughing and shouting at the screen, Mystery Science Theatre-style, carried along on the infectious momentum of Sid Vicious’ rise to punk rock fame. 

Then Nancy and the drugs come in and everything goes to shit. By the end the tide had turned, and as Sid wallowed in blood-drenched misery on the screen we all sat quiet, motionless, a group of sad-eyed zombies. 

The mood had gone full circle from listlessness to elation, then back to utter emotional fatigue. 

“Wow, that movie really put a damper on things,” somebody said.

Near the end of the movie Sid dances comically, pathetically, to a song by KC and The Sunshine Band. I could just as easily hear Sly Stone in that place on the soundtrack, slurring and moaning and yodelay-hee-hooing through “Spaced Cowboy”. A disembodied voice giving voice to a disillusioned spirit. That would have been a pretty good reflection of the mood in the room. Worn down. Drained. Nerves completely wrecked. Right back where we had started from.

What do we do now? 

Seventeen In '88 - Installment 36: And The World On A String Doesn't Mean A Thing

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 The World On A String Doesn't Mean A Thing 

"Have you heard?” Ralph Buckman’s tone was unusually subdued. “RD didn’t come home from work last night, and he never came in to school today.”

Immediately I knew. I think everyone did. One senseless murder had already happened in the mall parking lot just a few weeks before, so it was the logical, if awful, conclusion to jump to.

But it wasn’t confirmed until I got home that afternoon. Max called with the news. He’d been at work at the radio station and they’d been reporting about it for the last few hours. RD’s body had been found by the side of the road, on the outside of town. He had been shot in the head and his body bore tire marks.

When you get news like that, in the moment of impact the emotions are impossible to process. You don’t know what to think.

RD was a friend. I’d known him for about five years, since seventh grade. We'd shared a locker during our ninth grade year. He was simply one of the nicest guys around.

So then comes the question: Why him?

Of course, there’s no point in asking. Life is full of chaos, and the world is never lacking for deranged minds ready to snap at a moment’s notice. Maybe the kind of insanity that leads to murder is almost like a natural disaster – random and unstoppable.

But that’s logic talking, and logic has no defense against raw emotion. And after the initial wave of confusion and disbelief, the first fully-formed emotion that emerged was anger. Rage at whatever wretched excuse for a human being had carried this terrible thing out. I remember the next day at school Roger throwing his books to the ground and stomping on them and exclaiming “That’s for the miserable fucker that killed RD.” It felt really good seeing him do that. The feelings needed to be dealt with physically, somehow.

A pall was cast over the school. The next day, after everyone had found out, it rained. An extra shade of gloom. Trucks from TV networks showed up all the way from Nashville. During the daily announcements given by the student body president there was a moment of silence. We’d had those before, mostly for people who'd died in accidents. This was different. This situation had so much helplessness in it. I can still feel that silence now.

All year long, I’d been listening to music that carried in it an undercurrent of foreboding and dread. That ominous feeling could be possibly be written off as a fanciful teenage notion, a bit of willful drama to color the blander days. In the same sense that watching and re-watching Sid & Nancy or being creeped out by a Charles Manson interview was all in good fun, so maybe was divining a sense of fear and unease in the music. 

But this was reality. You couldn’t just switch it off. Why this? Why him? Why now? None of the facts added up to anything. 

Now all of that summer's music felt prescient, like it had been a warning. Maybe it was. Music can work that way if you want it to. If you let it.

After Max delivered the news of RD’s death, I locked myself in my room, shell-shocked, and put on side 1 of Tonight’s The Night. Neil Young had written and recorded the album in 1973, as a response to the deaths of his former bandmate Danny Whitten and a roadie, Bruce Barry. It’s a shambling, emotional wreck of an album. A drunken wake for departed friends. The song that resonated most, for reasons I’ve never been able to fully understand, was “World On A String”. It’s as close to a straightforward rock song as any on an otherwise mellow, country-ish album, and the ambiguous lyrics only hint at the themes of burn-out and loss that the rest of the album dwells on.

“It’s not alright to say goodbye / and the world on a string doesn’t mean a thing.”

I ran those words over and over again in my head. It was therapeutic somehow. The words made a strange kind of sense that I couldn’t quite make sense of. It seemed to apply to this situation, but I wasn’t sure how, exactly.

“It’s not alright to say goodbye”. That was a comforting thought, I guess. Who wants to say goodbye this way?

I had talked to RD just the day before. More accurately, he had talked to me. We passed one another in the hall as the late bell was ringing. He shouted out to me “You’re gonna be late, JB!” High School is a weird place socially - friendships come and go without any good reason. If you don't talk to a person for a while, you can feel like you're not friends with that person. RD and I didn’t have any classes together and hadn’t spoken in a while, and I remember thinking how cool it was of him to acknowledge me in such a friendly way despite us not having interacted in so long. That’s the kind of guy he was - solid, unassuming. 

“And the world on a string doesn’t mean a thing.”

I don’t know what that means. 

I don't know what any of this means.

Seventeen In '88 - Installment 35: The Breakdown

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 Breakdown

One Saturday night in September Elliot came by the radio station while I was working. He was distraught after a fight with his girlfriend. He called her from the station phone and the fight continued. It culminated in Elliot putting his fist into a wooden door, leaving behind an enormous hole.

I’d already been chewed out for having too many visitors during my shifts, and when I met with the station’s managers to answer for the damage, they more or less let me know that I didn’t have a whole lot of leeway left.

It was just a typical teenage fuck-up, the kind of thing that happens to most of us at some point or another, some of us more than others. But for whatever reason - and my reasons included not only getting yelled at by my bosses but also some accompanying pent-up psychological guilt issues that I’m still working through twenty-four years later - this event triggered in me an emotional and spiritual sea change. In the short term, it was simply a teenage nervous breakdown. In the long term, it was a complete rearrangement of my worldview.

In 1970, after the flurry of events that included his marriage to Yoko Ono and the breakup of The Beatles, John Lennon recorded his debut solo album, Plastic Ono Band. Lennon had been undergoing primal therapy in Los Angeles with Dr. Arthur Janov, a process that required he strip himself bare emotionally by revisiting pain repressed since childhood. The album is the aural equivalent of the therapy - bare bones production, simplicity of delivery (lots of one-word titles, “God”, “Mother”, “Isolation”), and complete emotional honesty. With some really gut-wrenching screaming thrown in here and there. Rolling Stone ran an interview with Lennon simultaneously with the album’s release, the now-famous “Lennon Remembers” cover story, during which Lennon revealed just how much anger, bitterness and contempt one man can unleash in semi-polite conversation.

Lurking underneath all the bile, though, was a feeling of spiritual exhaustion, a sense that a great deal of questing was coming to an end. So as emotionally searing as all of it was, it was also cleansing. Not only for Lennon, but for any fan who might be following along and who might be able to relate in some way. Even a teenage fan, seventeen years later.

Yeah, teenagers are really susceptible to the “Society is bullshit and nobody understands me!” mindset. And Lennon’s work is rife with clichés - “Working Class Hero” alone has about fifty.

But clichés are born of truth, as the cliché goes. And Dylan-derived and platitude-ridden as it is, “Working Class Hero” is also a powerful piece of work.

They hurt you at home and they hit you at school

they hate you if you’re clever and they despise a fool

‘til you’re so fucking crazy you can’t follow their rules.

Sounds pretty damn incisive, if you’re so inclined. Then elsewhere on the album there are the virulent dismissals of any and all figures of authority, spiritual guidance, leadership. “God is a concept by which we measure our pain,” Lennon sings, before giving philosophical walking papers to, among others, Jesus, Buddha, Dylan, and Beatles. Hearing him sing this, beautifully – listen to the way he stretches the word “now” in the phrase “now I’m reborn” from one syllable to five, downward, like water through a drain - felt like a confirmation, permission to go ahead and trust yourself.

Which is where the trouble comes in. Even Lennon acknowledges it in “Look At Me”, questioning his own motives, desires, identity.

"Nobody understands me!" Well, yeah. Nobody, least of all you, yourself.

On the day that my bosses scolded me I walked over to Emily’s right afterwards and basically broke down. In my own small-scale, much more private version of Lennon’s 1970 Rolling Stone interview I unloaded a storehouse of built-up emotions – rage at perceived familial pressures and failures, frustration with my own sense of inadequacy and ineptitude, and hopelessness for the future, one that seemed to hold no promise of any genuine fulfillment.

Emily, with her typical sense of empathy and grace, took it all in, and offered boundless comfort just by the simple act of being there and listening, and being compassionate. I was so grateful for her existence. Still am.

The next day I stayed home from school. I’d had perfect attendance for three straight school years prior to that day. I resolved to sharpen my outlook on life. To stop caring so much, or, that is, stop caring at all, about the limitations imposed by groups of people whose values I didn’t share. 

But if you’re going to do that, you at least need to define your own set of values, which I wasn’t so good at. It’s a lot easier to rail against the things you don’t believe in than it is to stand up for what you do believe in. All I believed in was music. But I didn’t know how to apply that to anything.

Similarly, there’s a fine line between simply wanting to break free of convention, of the strictures of religion and society, and turning into a complete asshole. I think I intuitively knew that, but it didn't really curb my momentum. I'd had a revelation, dammit! As a result I’m afraid I skirted into asshole territory way too often over the next few weeks and months, verbally berating other people for their adherence to “the rules”, failing to show up for school or club meetings or planned gatherings of friends, staying out all night and worrying my mother, this last a particularly insensitive move in light of the fact that there was still a killer on the loose in our little town.

Yeah, well, what can you do? Seventeen. You don’t know who the hell you are or what you’re doing, you just know you want to be yourself and do what you want. You’re prone to big emotions. When the changes come, they come jumbo-sized.

I remember one night Max and I were out driving around, discussing the ridiculousness of everything and everyone - teachers, religion, bosses, family, college. I remember saying “Man, it feels so good to just not care.” We drove along and we listened to R.E.M., The Ramones, Violent Femmes, The Clash. 

Whatever. I mean, it did feel good. Really.

Seventeen In '88 - Installment 34: Nice, Neat Rows Of Zeros

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. 

Nice, Neat Rows Of Zeros 

On Labor Day we took a quick trip to Nashville. It was quick because I wanted to make sure we got home in time to watch the Dodgers game that night. Elliot, who was not a sports fan, at all, asked me why I cared so much.

Good question. Why did I care so much? In answer I made up something about how the Dodgers represented to me the underdog, the oppressed, the least likely.

Which was fairly ridiculous. It was true at the time that outside of the Boston Red Sox the Dodgers probably had more heartbreaking late-season and postseason meltdown moments than any other team. But the Dodgers were also one of the three or four most successful and prestigious franchises in all of baseball, so the idea of them as down and out lovable losers was pure fabrication. If that was really my reasoning, I would have been a Cubs fan.

The real reason I cared was something a lot less romantic, and it exposes a kind of psychological issue that I am to this day not particularly comfortable with. Simon Reynolds in his book Retromania speaks at length about the peculiar mindset of the record collector - the person with the insatiable need to collect and file things. The gratification that comes from organizing arcane artifacts somehow makes up for some emotional aspect that’s missing from the collector’s life. The collecting fills a vacuum by providing a means to control the chaos. When I first read the paragraphs that explicate this idea in Reynolds' book, I had to put the book down and exhale for a moment. It was hitting too close to home.

I became a baseball fan mainly because my father was a baseball fan (and a Brooklyn Dodgers fan who maintained allegiance when the franchise moved west, then duly passed it along), but also because I have always been an obsessive collector, and one of the early manifestations of this impulse was that in addition to comic books and Star Wars memorabilia I also collected baseball cards. I learned early on that there are few things in life more relaxing than separating a bunch of baseball cards into neat stacks according to a subjective-as-you-wanna-be system – by team, by star quality, by position, by funniest name, the latter a category in which Jack Fimple and Bill Mooneyham reigned supreme.

As noted above the impulse to categorize and file of course translated well to music collecting, and my record collection expanded exponentially. From the age of fourteen on, I basically morphed into a Nick Hornby character – always seeking some precious new rarity, memorizing trivial rock minutia, composing endless lists.

Lists. Boy, oh, boy, lists. These days, with the advent of limitless information sharing, pop culture-related lists have become an everyday, commonplace thing. We’re inundated with them daily, to the point that it all feels more than a little meaningless. But in 1988 I took any rock-related list I could get my hands on and basically tried to memorize it.

On that Labor Day trip to Nashville I bought Randy Newman’s Sail Away and Frank Zappa’s We’re Only In It For The Money, both of which I’d learned about from a list. Rolling Stone’s 1987 “100 Greatest Albums Of The Last 20 Years” special issue, to be exact. (In 2010, with the purchase of Paul Simon’s Graceland, I finally completed my collection of every album on that list. It wasn't near as gratifying a moment as I would've guessed in 1987.) (And yeah it took me 24 years to finally buy Graceland, sue me.) Elliot saw my purchases and asked “So what list were those on?”. He knew me pretty well.

My fascination with music lists may actually have been born of baseball fandom, in a way. It's all in the organization, all those names and numerals neatly arranged in rows. Poring over box scores, player stats, making up imaginary lineups, ranking favorites - it’s all a way to organize facts, ideas. You can’t control life, but you can keep track of the numbers.

My sense of numeric symmetry would be gratified that Labor Day night as I watched youth pastor look-alike Orel Hershiser mow down the Atlanta Braves to the tune of a four-hit complete game shutout. It was the beginning of a historic run that would see Hershiser break fellow Dodger Don Drysdale’s twenty-year-old record of 58 and 1/3 scoreless innings. God, the box scores of those games were beautiful. All those zeroes, one after another, looking so round and perfect, symbolizing dominance. That it was the dominance of a guy who looked even nerdier than I did was a bonus.

That day, Labor Day 1988, when we took the trip to Nashville was the last of the carefree, innocent days. The last in the win column before a serious losing streak. Everything was about to take a turn for the dark. 

Man, life is a messy, haphazard thing. I don't care if it's a weird psychological issue, let me have my stacks of neatly arranged vinyl, my lists of greatest British folk-rock albums, my ultimate all-time Dodgers line-up. These things are so much easier to deal with than the uncategorizable sprawl of everyday living.