Seventeen In '88 - Installment 39: Fall 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. 

Fall 1988 Recalled As A Series Of Random Glimpses, With Music  

First day of school. Roger and I try to ease the anxiety caused by the impending school year by telling ourselves that since this year we’re seniors and we drive our own cars we’re gonna be respected, dammit. At the opening assembly there is a group of cute sophomore-year alterna-girls sitting near us. We amuse ourselves by jokingly encouraging one another to go up to them, hold up our keys and ask “Hey baby, you need a ride? I'm a Senior, you know.” During the early weeks of the school year, and beyond, Roger and I spend an inordinate amount of time each earnestly trying to cajole the other into actually speaking to one of the girls. Neither of us will speak to any of them during the course of the entire school year.

Movie nights. Movies, movies, boy do we love movies. Even completely forgettable ones. A group of us goes to see a movie every Monday. Movie Monday we call it, ‘cos we’re not terribly creative. Among the now-largely-forgotten movies we see in fall 1988: Eight Men Out, John Sayles’ account of the 1919 Black Sox World Series scandal (a little dry but still pretty good, and fairly historically accurate); Clean & Sober, with Michael Keaton as a recovering drug addict (depressing, but fairly watchable, mainly due to Keaton’s performance - it supposedly contributed to his landing the lead role in Batman); Heartbreak Hotel, with David Keith as Elvis Presley, kidnapped and held hostage by teenagers in 1972 (Just…godawful. Director Chris Columbus would go on to direct Home Alone, Mrs. Doubtfire, and several Harry Potter movies). The absolute king of forgettable fall 1988 films however, is a little movie called Kansas. That title is just about the most compelling thing about it, which says a lot. It stars Matt Dillon and Andrew McCarthy – Regina asked Max and I to see the movie because she had a crush on the latter – in a film so unbelievably bland, so ridiculously uninteresting, that years later, when we stumble across it on late night television, Max has no recollection of ever even having heard of it, much less having seen it. I'd suspect the movie might be some kind of weird ill-remembered dream if not for the IMDB entry that confirms its existence.   

My job at the radio station requires that I endure some less-than-great music. In two different formats, even. On the Adult Contemporary side I am regularly Rick-rolled – “Together Forever” is Astley’s big hit in fall ’88 – and I probably hear The Beach Boys’ nausea-inducing “Kokomo” at least three times as much as the average American, which is a lot. And way too much. On the Country end, while I have to tolerate atrocities like Hank Jr.’s “If The South Would Have Won”, I also open my ears enough to realize that not only is some of that old stuff pretty great, but so are some of the more recent acts, like Randy Travis and Patty Loveless. Also, Highway 101’s “Do You Love Me (Just Say Yes)” combines and countrifies the unerringly sound musicality of classic Brian Wilson with the delicate, euphoric touch of early Beatles. Which is a damn neat trick.

Regina has a part-time job delivering newspapers after school. For the heck of it, I start to chip in and help. There’s something relaxing about it – folding and rubber-banding all the papers neatly, then making the rounds to all the same houses as the day before, the air slightly chilly, leaves falling all around. The day after our friend and classmate RD is found dead we have to look at his picture on the front page a good fifty or so times as we fold each paper. There was nothing relaxing about that.

NLCS Game 4. Dodgers down 4-2 in the ninth inning. Dwight Gooden cruising, on his way to giving the Mets a 3-1 series edge. I’m listening to the game on the radio in the car, but I get home during the ninth inning. I consider staying in the car to listen, but I figure Gooden’s about to wrap it up anyway, so I turn off the engine and head inside. By the time I get inside and turn the game back on the crowd at Shea Stadium has gone eerily silent, a sound that fills me with disbelieving joy. Turns out Dodger catcher Mike Scioscia has hit a game-tying two-run home run, a feat that sets the Dodgers up for a high-wire, against-all-odds victory, and ultimately a Series win. As long as I live, Mike Scioscia is welcome to come into my house, eat all my food, drink all my liquor and take any valuables that he may like. I will merely smile and say, “Sure Mike, anything you want, and thanks again for hitting that home run off Gooden back in ’88.”

 

Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention’s We’re Only In It For The Money. From its Sgt. Pepper take-off cover to it’s smarmy version of “Hey Joe”, retitled “Hey Punk” (as in “Hey punk, where you goin’ with that flower in your hand? / I’m goin’ down to ‘Frisco, gonna join a psychedelic band”), it’s a record by smartasses for smartasses. As a budding smartass, I fall for it hard. The music is inventive, colorful, and funny, and the skewering of the hippie peace, love, and drugs ethos is especially attractive to my seventeen-year-old punk-besotted self. Also, song titles like “Hot Poop” are especially attractive to my inner five-year-old. It wouldn’t take long for my mindset to readjust, though, and nowadays while my sense of the puerile is still for-better-or worse intact – “Let’s Make The Water Turn Black” is still pretty funny – my tolerance for smarm has waned considerably, and as topical humor tends to do, most of the satire has aged poorly. It might be worth pointing out that the ugliest part of the body is the mind, but isn’t it also worth pointing out that the mind can be endlessly creative, useful, beautiful? And if simply asking that question makes me a damn hippie, I don’t give a rat’s ass.

  

One night while browsing for video rentals we stumble across a little gem called Attack of the Killer Bimbos. Being wholeheartedly in favor of stretching the bounds of pure, senseless stupidity to maximum, we rented it, of course. Everything about the movie has faded from my memory except one thing - an extra's delivery of one fantastic line. With all of the gusto of someone who’s been waiting his whole life for one big moment in the spotlight, and all the flatness-of-delivery of someone who has never acted in his life, a cowboy-hatted gent declares, southern drawl drawing out each syllable: “Oh, no! A bimbo with a gun!”

Emily’s brothers have a Nintendo game set. Since we hang out there all the time, Max, Elliot and I are all soon enough completely addicted to Super Mario Brothers. Our world for weeks on end becomes a blur of giant mushrooms, coins, fireballs and evil turtles. We’re so enthralled with the game that Emily becomes irritated with us, as we frequently end up staying at her house well past appropriate hours, sometimes even making ourselves late for work. When we finally figure out how to win the game, the feeling is anticlimactic, even bittersweet. Luckily, we soon discover Tetris.

Randy Newman’s Sail Away. Based on his fiery, blood-and-guts reading of Danny Whitten’s “Gone Dead Train” on the soundtrack to Performance, I pick up Sail Away expecting a raw, blues-based rock’n’roll experience. Instead it’s full of piano ballads and smooth orchestral arrangements. What it lacks in liveliness it makes up for in humor, with plentiful dashes of empathy to chase away any bitter aftertaste left behind by the also plentiful irony. Newman ends the album with “God’s Song”, an easy-target tune in which The Creator appears as a megalomaniacal beast who laughs at man’s prayers. More effective is the simple, piano-backed “He Gives Us All His Love”, which comes across as a straightforward hymn, like The Velvet Underground’s “Jesus”. But there’s a sadness in the sound that calls into question the singer’s sincerity, and a beauty that in turn calls into question whether the degree of sincerity even matters. Also, there’s “Political Science”, where the narrator wants to nuke everybody outside the good old USA. Everybody, that is, except Australia. "Don't wanna hurt no kangaroos."

The crystal ball, blurred. Elliot, Max, Roger and I have been discussing for months now the idea of starting a rock and roll band. As the weeks progress, the idea snowballs, taking on a seriousness that feels a little deeper than it probably should for guys so young. Before most of us (Max already played guitar) have even picked up an instrument, we have a name – Myth, taken from Robert Lynn Asprin’s Myth Adventures series of comedic fantasy books. One night I’m driving home and I stop by the park. The onset of autumn, with the cooler weather and dead leaves all around, has made me feel reflective, uneasy. I feel like a band, a life in noise and creativity, may be the only real way out of an otherwise hopelessly mundane existence. I walk over to a flat stretch of sand. Using a nearby stick, I write the word “MYTH” in big letters in the sand. I walk off wondering how long it will take for rain to wash it away.

Seventeen In '88 - Installment 38: Everything Passes, Everything Changes, Do What You Think You Should Do

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. 

Everything Passes, Everything Changes, Do What You Think You Should Do 

I’d always wanted to do that thing you see in movies where the guy goes to the girl’s house in the middle of the night and throws pebbles at her bedroom window. So I did. I’m not sure what I hoped to accomplish. Emily’s parents’ bedroom was right at the base of a very creaky stairway and they no doubt would have woken up if she tried to go outside. But I was caught up in the ridiculous romance of the idea, so I tried it anyway.

I’d just finished my shift at the radio station and it was after midnight. I was grateful to have that job, but I also found it to be an irritating distraction from my social life – I often felt like I was missing out on FUN. While everyone else was out doing wild & crazy teenage stuff I was stuck in a cramped little room listening to Rick Astley.

The fact that I wasn’t really missing out on much genuine excitement did nothing to curb this feeling. I remember one night Emily told me that while I had been at work she and a few of our friends were hanging out at Burger King, as was the tradition at the time, when a group of other kids our age began throwing french fries and shouting “Speech fags!” in our clan’s general direction. This kind of thing wasn’t all that unusual, and it wasn’t particularly pleasant when it did happen. And yet I was still sad that I had missed out on it.

There were perks that made up for it, though. Like for instance we got to broadcast all the playoff and World Series games. So when they asked me to work on the night of Game One of the National League Championship Series, I jumped at it.

The Dodgers were my team, had been for about ten years, and this was my fourth playoff go-round with them. Unfortunately they were matched up against a stacked Mets team that had won the World Series only two years before and had soundly thrashed the Dodgers to the tune of a 11-1 record during the 1988 regular season. I didn’t expect the Dodgers to win. I just hoped they’d put up a fight, prove that they deserved to be there.

So when King of Shutouts Orel Hershiser made the Mets look hapless for eight innings I was relieved and elated. Riding high. Our ace is going to throw yet another shutout.

I should have known better. Things started to unravel in the ninth, Howell relieved Hershiser and it all culminated in a ball smacked off the bat of the late great Gary Carter that just eluded Dodger center fielder John Shelby’s glove to give the Mets a 3-2 victory. I felt like a balloon deflating slowly, depressingly.

Never get your hopes up. At least in baseball.

The mood was languid for the rest of the night. Max and I sat stone-faced, listening to the adult contemporary tunes cranking out on the reel to reel, one three-minute bit of saccharine after another. Air Supply. Richard Marx. Bread. Urgh.

 

Cat Stevens' “Oh Very Young” came up, and somehow that lifted my spirits. It’s a fey, cloying little tune, the kind of thing that I ordinarily might have considered a little too cute. But somehow, on this night, it sounded right – the melody unspooling like yarn and the lyrics advising young people to feel it all while they’re still young. “You’re only dancing on this earth for a short while.”

Maybe that’s what inspired me to go throw pebbles at Emily’s window. Maybe it was a combination of that and the recent up-close brush with mortality. You want things to last forever but you know they never will.

So I found myself out in the yard in front of her house, picking at the dirt near the driveway, trying to find suitably tiny rocks. Tossing gently enough to avoid breaking anything, but hard enough to make noise.

Emily didn’t respond. She told me the next day she heard the sound, but just thought it was a tree branch in the wind, or the house settling or something. It didn’t really matter. The romance of the moment shone through somehow, in some small way, despite the missed connection. Nothing happens and it still feels like something is happening.

 

Emily was so very bright, exceedingly mature, full of grace in body and mind. When she entered the picture earlier in the year she’d been somewhat shy and a little awkward, but in no time she became a central figure in our little clan, the steady hand that everyone turned to for guidance, for assistance in matters academic, philosophical or practical. A force of nonstop positivity. She was aware of her strengths, but she didn't make a big deal about it, a quality that made her extremely likeable, attractive. She was human like the rest of us of course, prone to the same lulls in confidence and errors in judgment that we all contend with, but somehow even her faults worked to enhance her preternaturally gifted aura.

“And the goodbye makes the journey harder still.”

There was too much going on in my mind. Job, death, school, future. My favorite team losing another playoff series. Ego and insecurity swarming around the brain like buzzing parasites. I was seventeen, and like most seventeen year-olds I had no idea what was going on. Around this time I broke off the relationship with Emily.

It was a little like Judge Reinhold's hapless character in Fast Times At Ridgemont High obliviously trying to tell his girlfriend hey, we’re gonna be seniors this year, and we really oughtta be free to explore, see other people. Just as awkward, not near as funny.  

I didn't know for sure if it was the right decision, but I was never too sure about any decision I ever made. I just knew something was wrong, and I had to figure it out.

There would be all kinds of regret, resentment, jealousies, accusations, recriminations, apologies, late-night phone calls and tear-stained letters ahead. Not only between Emily and I, but between almost every other member of our group. Everyone would fall in love, only to fall out with one another at least once, sometimes repeatedly, over the next several months. Sometimes the reconciliations would be very slow in coming. This happens to every group of close friends in all walks of life, doesn’t it?

  

But all that stuff is a long way away, and I’m only concerned with 1988, specifically early fall 1988, and what the mood was then, when the Dodgers were in the playoffs and RD died and Max, Roger, Elliot and I decided to start a band and Emily and I broke up. The latter was just one ending in a series. Stories don’t really ever have endings except the ones you create in retrospect.

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.

Seventeen In '88 - Installment 33: Back To Schooldays

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.

Back To Schooldays

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 soon enough.