Seventeen In '88 - Installment 27: The Storm

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 Storm

Max had moved into another new place, an apartment on the outskirts of the city. I think it was brand new. It smelled of wood and clean carpet. That place became headquarters for the remainder of summer.

Elliot and I often spent the night there. In my memory we are there all the time, every day, as though we lived there. The truth is, we may only have spent the night there three or four times. The memory plays tricks like that.

This place inspired a great deal of strangeness, in mood and behavior. One night we walked to the gas station/convenience store up the road, where I bought a pack of cigarettes, despite the fact that I didn’t smoke. I guess I thought I might try. I mean, maybe I’m a smoker and I just don’t know it because I never really gave it a shot. On that same trip Max stole a case of cokes from a stack that was sitting outside the store. We walked back to the apartment that night feeling like rebels. Elliot, acting as the voice of moral consciousness, or more likely the voice of simple contrarianism, brought us down from our rebellious high by verbally berating us all the way. "I can't believe you guys are smoking and stealing now, you must think you're so cool."  

Elliot could talk. Luckily he was usually funny, sometimes insightful. One night he kept Max and I awake for hours brainstorming aloud about the ingredients of cheese. “Just what is it about cheese that makes cheese cheese?” A question for the ages. Or at the very least a question for the remainder of the summer. For the next few weeks it became something like a mantra; The cheese that makes cheese cheese. What is it?

I always slept under the bed. I have no recollection as to why I chose to do so. I remember being under there and falling asleep to the sound of The Balancing Act’s “Three Cards”. The Balancing Act was a folky college-rock band from L.A. that specialized in weird, upbeat little tunes with titles like “A TV Guide In The Olduvai Gorge” and “Kicking Clouds Across The Sky”. “Three Cards”, like most of their songs, is an acoustically-based tune with elliptical lyrics and a slightly ominous mood. Every song in 1988 seemed to have a slightly ominous mood. An undercurrent of weirdness – something happening here, but I don’t know what it is.

Patti Smith’s Horses was not really like that. All of its ominousness was worn on its sleeve, in plain view. Along with its mystery, its drama, its ambition. That all of these things are right there on the surface does not make the album any less effective.

The day I filched the album from the dirty backroom at my Dad’s place was the day of the storm. There may have been other thunderstorms in summer 1988, but this one sticks out because I associate the buildup of black clouds, the rumbling thunder, the wind and wetness and chaos, with the experience of hearing Horses for the first time. What better setting to hear all of those songs about breaking through, transformation, transcendence?

Elliot and I were over at Max’s apartment. We put the album on and watched the storm brewing from the bedroom window. It was all happening, man. That was the same window from which earlier in the summer, maybe earlier that day, we had watched Cindy McCaslin swimming down at the pool. She must have lived or known somebody who lived nearby. She was a classmate, older, sexy in a quietly intimidating way. She tended to wear black. Even when swimming, apparently. Her one-piece was completely black, making her pale skin almost porcelain in contrast.

On the stereo Patti Smith was singing “Gloria”. She’s at a party, bored (of course, parties are boring), looking out the window at a sweet young thing leaning against a parking meter. Wants to put a spell on her. That was happening and I was looking out the bedroom window at the black sky and the lightning and I was remembering that vision of Cindy McCaslin.

There’s something about summertime storms. They have more color, more crazy atmosphere than any other kind of meteorological event. The leaves on the trees are still green and alive and the wind is making them shake in violent waves. The rain comes down in odd spasms, maybe drifting, maybe pounding. The lightning making everything glow. And then Patti gets into “Birdland”, where the sky lights up with such a naked joy and the stars start to slip. Then on the other side it’s "Kimberly", a song about birth, specifically that of Patti’s sister. “Little sister, the sky is falling,” she warns, and outside the storm is at full throttle.

By the time she’s into “Land” she’s on the other side for real, and she drags you along with her. The (neon) boy is in the hallway drinkin’ his tea, laughing hysterically, surrounded by horses. He disappears, and Cindy McCaslin rises from the pool all aglow with water and electricity. She floats up to us at the window, smiling, wicked. We all disappear together.

Blackout and a few beats, a few quiet scratches on the guitar and then Patti Smith is ranting, moaning, riding the sea of possibilities. It’s all about those possibilities, isn’t it? You’re young and everything is ahead of you, and you might be able to do any or all of it, or none of it, depending on your level of determination or stamina. We were so schizophrenic, we thought we had plenty of both, but we were so full of fear and indecisiveness that we were breathless with it all. I think we just hoped we’d get lucky.

But none of that matters right now, because that sea of possibilities is so intoxicating, you just want to drown in it.

“Elegie”. Here come the ghosts. And I feel for the people who moved into Max’s apartment after we were gone, because that place was haunted before we got there, even though it was new - maybe it was built on an old Indian burial ground or something - and then we proceeded to leave behind even more ghosts. That place was filthy with ghosts.

“Elegie” is a song dedicated to the spirit of Jimi Hendrix, whose Electric Ladyland studios the album was recorded in. The song happens on some other plane, it's effectively both a haunting and a séance. “It’s just…too bad…our friends…can’t be with us…today,” is a direct quote from a Hendrix song, and Patti Smith sings it in a way that Hendrix likely would have appreciated - calling up spirits, dragging out the word “today”, stretching it into something unimaginably distant, far away, never coming back.

Spirits do come back, though. 

We were all there, that night, I remember it. Listening to that music and watching the storm outside. We were there, and we still are, and we will be again. Ha ha, then disappear.

Seventeen In '88 - Installment 26: Eleven Guidelines For Living According To My 17-Year-Old Self

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.

Eleven Guidelines For Living According To My 17-Year-Old Self

1. Stay up late.
“Morning people” must be deluded, or hypnotized by aliens or something. Mornings are awful. Everyone knows that. All that dew everywhere, and all those damn birds chirping. Shut up. The windows of the mind can only really open at night. If clarity is what you need, nighttime is ideal for organizing the clutter in your head. If abandon is what you need, oblivion can be so much more easily accessed once the sun is blotted out from the sky. Illumination happens at night, and in those early morning hours. Thoughts flow more freely. Inhibitions loosen. So make sure you don’t miss out on anything - stay up late. Sure, you’ll be tired tomorrow, but it will be worth it. You can sleep in Study Hall.

2. Records have all the answers.
Especially at night (see #1), and especially if you are alone. Without distractions, the music communicates so much more clearly. The needle on the vinyl, with the accompanying static and crackling, is a conduit to another, better reality. A journey to some other side. Speaking of journeys, music is also an absolute requirement when driving or riding around in a car. So make sure your vehicle has a tape deck.

3. Propriety is for suckers.
Tell the cold, unrelenting truth at all times, especially if it makes other people uncomfortable. There is joy in watching them squirm.

(This is one of the guidelines that 41-year old J.B. Bennett can’t really get with much at all anymore. Few things are more tiresome than the person who thinks it’s cool to be cruel, gross, or insulting in the name of honesty. Though really I guess it depends on the circumstance. Among the right group of friends maybe it's okay to joke about heartbreak or poor complexion or unwanted weight gain. Just, you know, maybe don't push it. At seventeen we did nothing but push it. Right over the edge and into a canyon.)

4. Walk.
Don’t “go for a walk” or “take a walk”, just start walking. You don’t need a reason to walk, but it can certainly help clear up the mind. Problems may not disappear, but you might forget them for a while. Think of it as an adventure. You never know what you might encounter. Try not to get lost, but don’t panic if you do. The Gods of Walking are watching, and they will guide you to the place you need to be.

5. Baseball is life’s best mirror.
It’s mostly slow, with action that happens in sudden bursts. Tension builds and recedes. Often, things go exactly as you expect they will - the good teams win, the bad teams lose. Don Mattingly can hit. Rickey Henderson is fast. Rob Deer will either strike out or hit a home run. Etc. But then the absolutely unexpected happens, and reality as you know it is altered, twisted. Sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. Game Six in ’86. Red Sox up by two, two outs. The weight of history lifting palpable. All odds smiling brightly in Boston’s direction. A few singles, a wild pitch, the ball goes through Buckner’s legs, Ray Knight streaks home and the Mets win. Sometimes you’re Knight, floating to the plate without touching the ground, drunk on euphoria. Sometimes you’re Buckner, walking away dejected, wondering what the hell just happened.
More often, you are simply an outsider, an observer, feeling whatever degree of joy or frustration your allegiance dictates. Sitting comfortably sipping a beverage, pontificating on the whys and the wherefores and the obvious-in-retrospect mistakes.
Some of the parallels are so obvious as to be clichés - hot streaks and slumps, diving catches and errors, line drives and dribblers. Striking out. Knocking it out of the park. The joy of victories large and small. The frustration of failure, the opportunities for redemption. But the most compelling reflection, the one that keeps people coming back to baseball and life, is the endless sense of possibilities. Hey, the Dodgers just might win this year. And maybe I’ll put together a band and we’ll conquer the world. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.

6. Ceremonies are lame.
If you can avoid it, don’t attend them. Weddings? Do as James Dean did and startle the congregation by revving your motorcycle loudly outside the church. Or do as my crazy Goth friend Regina did, and stand outside the doors shouting “She’s got syph!” Awards? Find something better to do, like Woody Allen with his jazz band that keeps him occupied on Oscar night. And if you win an award, toss it aside, destroy it, forget about it. Just don't whatever you do display it proudly on the mantle. Graduation? Don’t show up. What are they gonna do? Not let you graduate? (They might not. Paul Westerberg claims that this is why he never technically graduated high school.)

Truthfully, I never really held myself to any of the above. I so wanted to, though. And I was pretty good at living vicariously. I marveled at Elliot when he skipped out on having his Senior picture taken. I stood in awe as Chris Timmons tore up his Best Actor certificate. And I watched with envious glee when Max wore a bathrobe to the annual Speech Team Dinner. Peter Buck did the same at the Grammys a few years later. Pretty sure he stole that idea from Max.

7. Famous rebels are cool. 

Especially if they have a romantic, moody side. Think of the simmering emotionalism that links Arthur Rimbaud, James Dean, and Bob Dylan. Make sure to keep plenty of talismans around for inspiration. Books, records, photographs clipped from magazines. Posters of a brooding Dean or a sneering Brando. Copies of Illuminations, On The Road, and Hunter S. Thomspon’s Great Shark Hunt, preferably tattered paperbacks. Vinyl editions of Bringing It All Back Home and The Clash, with that cover picture of Strummer, Jones, and Simonon all looking like they wanna beat the crap out of you. Of course the overwhelming white/male/straight-ness of your little pantheon of rebellion and romance has completely escaped you and you'll need to expand the parameters of your relatable points of reference by great gaping leaps and bounds in the future if you really wanna understand what makes humanity human. And then maybe you'll figure out that so much of what you've admired is an illusion, a style, a stance, an artfully-captured fragment of momentary time that represents the tiniest sliver of incomprehensibly complicated lives, full of imperfections and contradictions and ridiculous complexity. But hey, for now, iconography rules. 

8. Don’t plan – improvise. 

As Jake Gittes says to his assistant, “Let me tell you something Walsh, this business requires a certain amount of finesse.” That’s as good an outlook on life as I’ve ever come across. So don’t worry about getting a ride home. You’ll find one. Go ahead and miss the bus. The resulting sense of freedom will be exhilarating. Maybe you’ll catch a ride with a friend. Maybe you’ll get to hang out with someone you wouldn’t normally get to hang around with. Maybe you’ll hang out with someone that you really shouldn’t hang around with. Hey, you may even have to walk. (See #4.) 

This is another guideline in the bunch that I seem unable to apply in my adult life, at least in the way I would like. This is unfortunate because I think it’s the only one that’s truly useful. These days I want to know exactly how things are going to work, where I’m going to be, and what’s going to happen when I get there. I miss that feeling of not caring, of just knowing that I’ll figure something out when the time comes. 

Once, a few members of the drama team went around to elementary schools to enact “The Night Before Christmas”. I was supposed to be Santa, but I missed the rehearsal and subsequently neglected to prepare anything before the performance. My teammates were angry and panicky, but I knew things would turn out okay. And they did - I just made up the performance as it went along, punctuating the reading with pulled faces and pratfalls. It went over gangbusters with the kids. I felt vindicated in my nonchalance. Of course now I realize that it was rude and disrespectful to put my teammates in that situation, and I wouldn’t want to do anything similar to friends or co-workers today. And I wouldn't. That's growth, right? Yet the memory of that attitude, that laissez-faire courageousness, still gnaws at me, and I often wonder - where the hell did I get the balls to do that, and where are those balls now? I would sure as hell like to find them. 

9. Emotion beats logic every time. 

And it never fails to piss off the ultra-logical people, which is a lot of fun to observe. This is another one that I can't really get fully behind now. It's a train of thought that is too often used to justify terrible ideas - especially in baseball, but also in everyday life. Still, I felt this one pretty keenly at the time, and since my 17-year-old self would have wanted me to I am going to repeat it, loudly. EMOTION BEATS LOGIC EVERY TIME. I mean, just choose judiciously where to apply. Also, style usually beats substance. Although sometimes the best style is no style at all, which is an idea that is often mistaken for substance. Sometimes by me.

10. Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens. 

When getting together with friends somebody always pipes up with “What are we gonna do?” So much mental energy is expended on deciding the best place to go, the coolest activity to participate in. Why does everybody always want to go somewhere, to do something? The truth is that some of the best times happen when nothing is happening. No big events (see #6) or grand plans are necessary. No emotional turbulence need be set in motion. Simply sitting around talking or listening to records (see #2) can be amazingly fulfilling. And if that’s still too little activity, try walking somewhere (again, do not “go for a walk”, just start walking and see where you end up) (see #4). Drive around aimlessly. Use some finesse (see #8). Action, noise & activity can be great, but if you need those things all the time to make your life interesting, you are probably a fairly uninteresting person to begin with. Which, yes, does sound counter-intuitive. But go with it anyway (see #11). 

11. Accept chaos. 

Even if it doesn’t accept you. Few things in life really make sense. Don’t bother trying to figure it all out. Some teachers will be good, others will be terrible, just learn whatever you can from whatever source. Some girls will treat you like dirt, brushing you off, barely acknowledging your existence, while others will drag you into a closet and teach you things that you didn’t know before. The Dodgers will be completely shut down by Pete Smith (lifetime 47-71, 4.55) one night, then another night they will win when Tim Leary, a pitcher, appears as a last ditch, no-other-options pinch hitter and drives in the game-winning run. (See #5.) Don’t worry about it. Just continue watching Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Get lost in it. It will make much more sense than real life. Soon you will get lost for real on long, dark, twisting roads. You will have crazy dreams that seem to radiate a sense of otherworldly prescience. You will receive repeated prank phone calls from a mystery figure who knows personal things about you and your friends. And soon your hometown will be terrorized by a crazed psychotic who ends up murdering two people, one of whom is a classmate and friend. Don’t try to figure any of this out. It will only drive you crazy and you will end up sorting through the details some twenty-plus years later, trying in vain to make sense of it all.

Seventeen In '88 - Installment 25: Summer 1988 Recalled As A Series Of Random Glimpses, With Music

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 1988 Recalled As A Series Of Random Glimpses, With Music 

The baseball world is all up in arms because Oakland’s A’s catcher Terry Steinbach, despite a poor offensive first half, is voted in by fans to start the All-Star Game. Rumors of ballot-stuffing by over-zealous A’s fans abound, and plenty of commentators make it known what a travesty they think it is that a guy who’s hitting .220 is starting the mid-summer classic. Terry Steinbach then proceeds to drive in both runs in a 2-1 AL victory, including a home run off in-his-prime Dwight Gooden.  For his efforts, he takes home MVP honors. Baseball is a wonderful thing. 

Driving around. Where the hell did we go? In circles mostly, though we would inevitably end up driving down the two-mile stretch known as “the strip” towards either Burger King or the Mall, or both. Burger King is the hangout, man. “The BK Lounge”.  Or, more commonly, just "BK". We go there and sit for hours loading up on refills of sugar and caffeine. We have what we think is an amusing little tradition of not cleaning up after ourselves before leaving. Years later when I find myself working in a fast-food place I realize how very un-amusing this little tradition actually was. Like the man said, karma’s a bitch. 

Camper Van Beethoven, Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart. We’re always on the lookout for the next band that can fit into our world as a symbol, an avatar, a mirror to reflect back our better selves.  Somehow, despite plenty of attractive traits – offbeat humor, rebellious spirit, crazy eclecticism - CVB never really took hold as part of our little pantheon. I wanted to love them – I mean, they had a violin player, just like Fairport Convention! Ultimately though, we tended towards bands who took either the heart-on-sleeve or seriously arty approach, with the Dead Milkmen as the exception that proved the bias. It’s a cool album, though, with a crazy-quilt mix of styles blended together by a keening fiddle and a good-humored sense of adventure. There’s the trad college-rock “Eye of Fatima”, the reggae-hued “Never Go Back”, ready-to-tango “Tania” and a non-ironic song called “Life Is Grand” which would provide a nice tonic for the darker days about to ensue. 

Emily’s younger brothers are skateboarders. And they are obsessive about it. Partly under the influence of their enthusiasm and partly under the influence of the hardcore music he loves, Roger also becomes obsessed with skateboarding. Which means that the rest of us also take an interest. Usually, I avoid anything that might result in bodily harm, but I think I was drawn in by the brightly-colored designs on the boards, and the way the whole culture seemed to operate under its own code, with participants speaking a kind of secret outsider language. Like a youthful biker gang. Roger might have had a knack for it. He certainly wasn’t too worried about getting hurt – I had once seen him insist on continuing a game of backyard football despite an enormous gash that sent blood flowing down his forehead. While he and Emily’s brothers are always attempting gravity and bone-defying feats, my own excursions amount to little more than breezing slowly down an extremely straight sidewalk. Ultimately, my interest waned as the need for self-preservation prevailed, though I may also have been a little self-conscious about the fact that I preferred Bob Dylan to The Circle Jerks. 

MTV has begun airing reruns of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. This is the first time the show has been seen regularly in America since PBS ran it during the troupe’s seventies heyday. Back then, I was a small child and my parents would let me watch because I loved cartoons. The surreal quality of Terry Gilliam’s animated bits was lost on me, but I loved the show anyway. I associated it with being up late, and being in on something that was kind of adult and scary. In the years since I watched and loved the Python films, so I’m really anxious to see the show again. I watch a couple episodes, and at first I’m surprised at how boring I find it. This isn’t funny, I think. This is just nonsensical, disconnected weirdness. But I keep watching. Slowly I become attuned to the show’s rhythm, its peculiar language of absurdity. I find myself almost hypnotized by it, and the show’s air of weird chaos begins to color my days. I want to get lost in that strangeness, that irreverence, that craziness. I want to be immersed in it, and sometimes I feel as though I am. I begin to realize that indulging in nonsensical, disconnected weirdness may be the only suitable way of dealing with the bewildering, inexplicable world we live in.

Hardly, Not Even by Run Westy Run. Of interest to us because the band was from Minneapolis, like the Hüsker Dü /Replacements/Soul Asylum axis, and their album was not only released on SST, home to the Hüskers/Minutemen/Firehose/Meat Puppets/etc., but it was also co-produced by Peter Buck of R.E.M. and Grant Hart of Hüsker Dü. It was a perfect storm of greatness that of course couldn’t help but be a letdown. Although I don’t think we were so much disappointed by the album as we were confused. Run Westy Run sounded nothing like any of those bands. The music was sloppy, diffuse, as though performed by a drunken, deeply weird roots rock band. The titles give a decent idea of the sound – “Yolk Of The Dumbwish”, “Drag Planet”, “King Of  Zebra Pants”. Loping, wildcat rhythms, the vocalist yowling and slurring over it all. It’s a strange, fiery, funny record, but given the expectations we didn’t really know what to make of it in 1988. It’s aged pretty well, though, and if you’re at all interested in the Minneapolis, SST or ‘80’s indie rock scene you might think of it as a minor classic.

Movies, movies, boy, do we love movies. Even crappy ones. A group of us went to the movies every Monday. Movie Monday, we called it, ‘cos we liked to give snappy nicknames to everything we did. 1988 was the year of Die Hard and Big and Bull Durham and Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, but the movie that sticks out in my memory as a quintessential Movie Monday movie is, of all things, Arthur 2: On The Rocks. I think it sticks out because I can’t really remember anything about it. All those other movies I can still give you a rough outline of the plot and the characters. Arthur 2, on the other hand, is just gone. Did he quit drinking? Lose all his money? Create an army of robot Liza Minnellis to wreak mascara-stained havoc on Planet Earth? I’m pretty sure one or two of those things happened, but I’m not about to watch it again to find out. 

“Two Rivers” by The Meat Puppets. On its surface another sun-splashed exercise in jangle, the song changes tone midway through, Curt Kirkwood's voice a disconnected moan calling up deserts, valleys, rivers. Nature. Serene on the surface, maybe, but there is more than a hint of the ominous underneath. A foreboding. A streak of dark clouds. Impending, impenetrable strangeness on the horizon. A parallel. 

The Play. Emily's mother drives us to Nashville to see a play directed by an older acquaintance. It's downtown, and everyone is dressed nicely. We feel sophisticated. Like real adults. Along for the ride is Randy Davis, who is a couple years younger than us. He's trying to figure out how to go about getting a girlfriend, and he asks Emily and I how we got together. The story we tell, fondly, amusedly, already seems a part of the distant past, as though we have been dating for many years. We have been dating for exactly three months. 

“Pocahontas”, by Neil Young. A folk song with a big, pretty melody. Words evoking open plains, sky, canoes on water. Suddenly it’s a scene of grisly violence, as white men come to Native American territory with their wagons and their guns and their savagery. The melody is still big, still pretty. Which makes the action seem somehow even more real, more alive. And it opens you up for the surrealism of the final verse, in which Neil and Pocahontas are lovers, and they sit around a campfire with Marlon Brando talking about the Astrodome and teepees and Hollywood. Time doesn’t exist. Everything happens all at once, forever. 

4^th of July. Emily’s parents took us all to our favorite hangout - yes, Burger King - and we watched our town’s fireworks show. For a good part of the several weeks building up to the holiday, Van Morrison had been a regular presence on my turntable, singing about how it’s “Almost Independence Day”. That lyric is metaphoric, I believe, but the song still lingered in my brain when Independence Day actually rolled around. Despite that, the memory of this night is not colored by anything that hints of the ominous, or the dark. There is no haunted quality about it. Thanks to the generous spirit of Emily’s family, and with an echo, maybe, of Camper Van Beethoven’s “Life Is Grand”, this night really was good wholesome fun for all, and you take that where you find it. 

The other side. One Friday night later on in the summer a few of us are sitting around on Emily's porch. It's hot. We're all feeling listless, not sure what to do with ourselves, with the evening, with the remainder of our youth. Talk turns to the previous summer, when everything felt new, exciting, touched by some kind of weird electricity. We look around at one another and wonder why that feeling is gone.

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.