Married, Buried, Yay Yay Yay

Last week it was announced that a twentieth anniversary edition of Nirvana’s In Utero album will be released in September. Twenty years? Holy crap.

It started me thinking about those days in 1993, being a Nirvana fan and waiting/wading through all the scandal and rumor in the run-up to the album’s release. Nevermind had sent such enormous shockwaves through the music world that every move Cobain and company made in 92/93 was noted in the music press with inordinate amounts of scrutiny and hysteria. Following it all could be both dizzying and numbing.

Of course the way the story played out seems inevitable now, with twenty years hindsight. At the time, though, the crazy sense of anything-might-happen was a lot of fun. Innocent, even. Will the band break up? Nah, they’re too smart to ruin such a good thing. So the cops came to Kurt and Courtney’s house to check on a possible domestic disturbance? But those two seem to have it so together, it’s gotta be a misunderstanding.

No, really, back then it was actually very easy to see it that way. Kurt so often came across in interviews as such an erudite, even-keeled fellow. When he said in that Spring ’92 interview with Rolling Stone that he wasn’t a hopeless heroin addict, it was almost believable. Especially if you were a hardcore fan, completely taken in by the notion that these guys really were the rock and roll white knights, sent here by some holy spiritual alliance of The Beatles and The Stooges and REM and Sonic Youth to save us all from the Skid Rows and Warrants then ravaging the rock and roll world with sickening doses of cliché and hairspray.

So when word got out in Spring ’93 that the newly-recorded follow-up to Nevermind had been nixed by the record label for being too uncommercial, there was no reason for panic. Nirvana were a smart bunch of guys, they’d find a way to get the music out there. We all eagerly awaited the surely awesome, probably much punkier batch of tunes, our imaginations fed by tantalizing titles like “Milk It”, “Rape Me”, and “Moist Vagina”.

Then there was the tentative title of the record: I Hate Myself And I Want To Die. Hilarious. See, Kurt Cobain’s making fun of his own (and his generation’s/audience’s) - propensity for unresolved anger and emotional confusion. What most right-thinking adults think of as just a bunch of whiny, privileged Generation Xers who oughtta just get over themselves, Kurt Cobain recognizes as genuinely confused people who are also smart enough to know that confusion shouldn’t stop them from moving forward with life. Self-awareness and irony, see?

Well, the humorous part of the title we got right, but we should be forgiven for not spotting how very black that humor actually was. I mean, look at the promotional video for In Utero’s release, with Bobcat Goldthwaite administering over the band as they give birth to a horde of plastic fetuses. These guys are not that serious.

Even when the album came out, for all of the noise and rage and gross body imagery, much of the focus ended up falling on lyrics that seemed at the time to point to a fairly healthy outlook. If Kurt could note that the pay-off from teenage angst had made him feel bored and old, how far away from finding some route to new found engagement and a youthful sense of purpose could he be? If he's aware that that legendary divorce is such a bore, shouldn't he be able to work through the emotional residue of his own childhood issues?

Maybe those questions were naïve even then. Too hopeful, too blinded by the intoxicating sound of gut-crunching drums and guitars that sounded like gnarly, slippery vines winding around your heart like aural intestines.

Still, I can't help but remember how hopeful the picture seemed then, at least as it was presented in the press, and here I am thinking specifically of the Rolling Stone cover story in which the band appeared dressed in suits with the headline "Success Doesn't Suck". Kurt sounded excited for the future. I don't think it was a put-on, he likely believed his own words at the time he spoke them. If his fans were sometimes willfully delusional, so was he. Artists are mirrors of their audience, but maybe the opposite can also be true.

Sometimes I imagine a Kurt Cobain who actually resembled the Kurt Cobain I really thought existed back then. One who wasn't cursed with a terrible mixture of chemical imbalance and family issues and drug dependence. One who was resolutely positive and determined to pull through the morass of fame and fans and addiction. Dedicated to art at any cost.

Maybe he could have started his own label and been a Jack White kind of figure. Only he'd reissue old favorites like Fang and the Marine Girls instead of old blues singers. (Though Leadbelly might sneak in there.) Maybe the celebrity aura would have died down and he could be an elder statesman figure like Sonic Youth or REM, or an omnipresent fount of ongoing musical activity like Robert Pollard or J Mascis. 

But maybe there's also an alternate world in which Hitler was a really likeable guy and Gandhi was a reprobate. We're stuck with this one, in which Nirvana was a shooting star and In Utero was the last fading glimmer in the trail. Where "Heart-Shaped Box" is an endless, gorgeous mystery and "Milk It" an impenetrable, fascinating beast. Where songs about elation, "Dumb" say, though "All Apologies" qualifies, end up sounding deeply sad. The guy, and the band, were hopelessly complicated, but those songs exist. That's enough. 

Forty Thousand Men And Women Everyday

Recently at their Solid Sound festival in North Adams, Massachusetts, Wilco offered up a set comprised exclusively of  crazy-cool covers. The show was subsequently made available on the band’s website so listeners could enjoy rough-hewn renditions of classics by The Beatles, Big Star , The Velvet Underground, etc.

Listening to this set in the car today I was especially taken by one particular choice. “This song is for Tom,” announces Jeff Tweedy and there’s a nice little moment of suspense (What’s it gonna be? What’s it gonna be?) just before he uncoils the hypnotic opening guitar riff of Blue Öyster Cult's 1976 hit single "(Don't Fear) The Reaper".

 

Wilco’s faithfully eerie version of the tune struck a nerve in me somehow. They do it straight, without any implied tongue-in-cheekiness. And yeah, thank God, because it seems to me that the perception of this song has been distorted through the years in ways that do not do it justice. If people don’t associate it with whatever horror movie it was last used in (Halloween was the first, that '94 TV version of The Stand the most effective) then they often perceive it as just another ready-made classic rock standby – merely one among thousands of others by the likes of .38 Special, Head East, Foghat, etc. Or more likely, they think of it as the set-up to an admittedly hilarious Saturday Night Live sketch.

But the song deserves better, dammit. Seriously, next time you hear it, pay special attention, because it’s a fucking classic. As a record – a three-minute slab of sound that uses words, rhythm and melody to convey an otherwise inexpressible feeling – it’s one of the finest, most effective moments in the rock and roll canon, on par with “Ticket To Ride” or “September Girls” or “When Doves Cry” or whatever you think of as the high water marks of rock singledom.

The song is an anomaly even within the Blue Öyster Cult catalog. Prior to 1976 they were a very good heavy rock band, especially adept at mixing churning riffs with sci-fi/horror mythology. Maybe they were a little more literate that your average hard rock combo – Patti Smith and rock critic Richard Meltzer contributed lyrics – but even if they had come up with three excellent hard rock albums (and they had) there was still nothing in their pre-’76 repetoire that suggested they might come up with a Song For The Ages.  

And that’s what it is. All those swirling, windswept guitar patterns and chilly vibes - the track simply isn’t like much of anything else, especially anything on top forty radio in the mid-seventies. Comparisons to The Byrds aren’t inaccurate, that winding repetitive riff is very similar to “So You Want To Be A Rock And Roll Star” and the vocals have the same hushed, haunted tone as “Eight Miles High”. But there isn’t a twelve-string guitar within earshot, and if there is a hint of the American folk tradition that Roger McGuinn’s crew were so in thrall to, it’s only in the sense of foreboding and the acceptance of death’s inevitability that runs through Old Weird American songs like “The Coo Coo Bird”. Otherwise it stands outside barriers of time or circumstance, even those of the transitional dayglo-to-punk year 1976. 

BÖC would follow up their big hit with an album, Spectres, that only partially attempted to replicate the sound of "Reaper". The song titles give clues: "I Love The Night", "Celestial The Queen", "Nosferatu". But the album's biggest hit was "Godzilla", a return to heavy riffage that stands alongside the band's later "Burnin' For You" as one of those classic rock readymade standbys you can hear about forty times if you drive cross-country for a couple days listening to nothing but classic rock radio.  (Which I actually did once. Whitesnake's horrid "Here I Go Again" was the big winner repetition-wise.)

All of that other BÖC music is worthwhile, in its way, even if Wilco won't be covering any of those songs anytime soon. But hey, they came up with one indelible moment, and isn't that enough? Just because a band only produces one masterpiece is no reason to relegate that band and its finest accomplishment to the ghetto of "More cowbell!"

America Drunk On Itself

Outside it's all happening. I keep hearing the loud bursts of sound, random, like gunfire, with the accompanying lights flashing across the sky. Hell, I kind of wanna go out there and blend in with the commotion. Go crazy with noise and color and pig intestines and beer. Why the hell not? We're Americans, we can do whatever we damn well please.

What I’m doing instead is obsessively watching and re-watching a short clip of Dick Cavett interviewing Jimi Hendrix in 1969. It's just after Woodstock, where Hendrix played a searing rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner”. In his version the bombs bursting in air seemed to be exploding in torturous slow motion. Probably in Vietnam. 

Cavett wants to talk about the animosity engendered by any “unorthodox” interpretation of the national anthem. Hendrix is having none of it, he interrupts Cavett mid-sentence, speaking pointedly, assuredly: “Hey listen, that’s not unorthodox. I thought it was beautiful.”

Those words work like music. Watching the bit over and over, it’s easy to become entranced. Those words, and the way Hendrix says them, take on the air of simple, ineffable truth. They have the same kind of impact, maybe more, as his guitar playing at its most expressive. Bob Dylan, speaking through Jeff Bridges, nailed the subtext of the Hendrix Anthem performance - though he may as well have been talking about the Cavett appearance - in 2003's Masked and Anonymous: "I'm not a traitor - I'm a native son." 

On the Cavett show you can hear in Hendrix's words a vision of (for) the country that he must have felt was just within grasp. One where every window is open and every rule is subject to change. But that's what it's like here anyway, isn't it? Isn't it?

Around this time Hendrix was workshopping a song called “Freedom”. It's a mean, funky song, with Hendrix zig-zagging between exultation and desperation, stretching and repeating the title word again and again, demanding "Give it to me, so I can live." That could be an echo reverberating from two years earlier, when in one of his most powerful songs he had cried "I don't live today".

It’s a slippery concept, freedom. We bandy the word about wantonly, not only in politics but in everyday life. I hear it applied to music all the time. “Rock and Roll is really about freedom.” “Jazz represents freedom.” “Punk means freedom.” You can find variations on this idea just about everywhere. This is freedom. There are a lot of different kinds of freedom.

For a country, and a people, who have freedom inherent in our very identity, it's a little odd that we spend so much time trying to define its parameters. And then trying to burst through them. Like a vicious circle, we're free to be free to be free to be free.

And then we're free to wallow in it. Like right now.

America - drunk on ideas, possibilities, freedom's ever-shifting meaning, and alcohol (mostly alcohol) for two-hundred thirty-plus years. 

Woo-hoo! 

Seventeen In '88 - Installment 43: Afterword/Afterward, Then Forward

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. 

Afterword/Afterward, Then Forward

First, a quick note. This is the final installment in the Seventeen In ’88 series. If you’re stumbling across this blog for the first time, this series has been an exploration of one person’s experience as a seventeen-year-old music geek, seen through the prism of the records he was listening to at the time, circa 1988.  There’s also, occasionally, for inconsistency's sake, some baseball stuff thrown in. The series is over now, but it’s all still archived here, in sequenced installments, if you’re interested in that kind of thing. (And why wouldn’t you be?) If you are interested, it probably helps to read ‘em in order, but damn, that’s a lot of reading, so if you only wanna read one or two, or three, I like this one, and this one, and this one.

Peace & Jaundice will be going on a brief hiatus over the holidays and will resume regular activity in January, hopefully with more music, more dirty jokes, and fewer boring stories of glory days. Though I won’t make any promises. 

Our story ends, appropriately enough, with neither a bang nor a whimper. It's more like a long sigh or groan. A motorcycle sputtering out. A record spinning in the locked groove at the end of a side, waiting for someone to flip it over.

Yeah, that last one.

Life moves in stages, extended periods of time, sometimes lasting a few weeks, sometimes a few years, usually defined by whatever mood or feeling is prevalent at the time. With the benefit or curse of retrospect these stages take on an all-but-physical shape, shades of shifting tones and colors, free-flowing, in and out of focus. The dividing lines, the beginnings and endings, are determined in hindsight, and usually defined by external, real-world events – a move, a new job, a romantic relationship starting or ending.

1988, the year I was seventeen, was defined by a sense of uncertainty – confusion, excitement and apprehension about the future; the exploratory, open-minded joy of young love, lust, and new friendships; the disillusionment that comes with the withering of those relationships and the harsh realization that everything, your hopes, your ideals, life itself, can be pulled out from under you at any moment, for no good reason.

In my little world, all of that uncertainty had a soundtrack, a series of songs and albums that defined and illuminated that time. Music, for me, was the most convenient way to make sense of it all, or to blur it all out so I didn’t have to think about it. They say, though as usual I’m not sure who “they” are (scientists? rock critics?) that the music you listen to at age seventeen is the music that stays with you, the music that you hear in the keenest way, that ends up meaning the most to you and defining the terrain of your emotional world. I don’t know if that’s true in a broad sense, for most people, but it’s probably true for me. To the point that the music during 1988 came to seem less like mere entertainment, an interesting diversion, and more like a divining spirit, a holy ghost.

That spirit’s next move was to possess my three closest friends and I, and convince us to go in together and start a band. This was our resolution to the annoyingly ever-present question of what to do with the future. That particular choice of future - our band - wouldn’t turn out to last long, about a year and a half, and it wouldn’t yield much beyond a few laughs, a lot of disappointment, more than a couple of fractured friendships, and a handful of very muddy tapes containing hours of amateurish if earnest attempts at being the next U2 or REM.

Really, I probably should have spent the last year writing about all of that instead of what happened before, in 1988. It’s a much more obviously compelling story than the one I did tell. Throughout these posts, one recurring theme is the Seinfeldian notion that sometimes shit seems to be happening even when nothing is happening. That’s what it felt like in 1988, much of the time. The next year and a half – the time that our little band was together - had way more actual drama, more intrigue and emotion, more crazy turning-of-events. It’s probably a story worth telling. Maybe I’ll tell it someday, but right now I gotta go back to living in the present. Inasmuch as I am capable of doing so.

So the formation of our band is a convenient dividing line, the signpost at the crossroads of the stages of life. Even the tone and effect of the music we listened to seemed to change. Around this time, U2 released Rattle and Hum and REM released Green, but both of those seem like part of the soundtrack to another stage, the next one, 1989. They don’t resonate in my memory with the same sense of foreboding or mystery that some of the music I’ve written about does. Horses, say, or Run Westy Run’s “Bye Love”. They don’t throw open the doors of the mind with the kind of crazy spontaneity and newness that Double Nickels On The Dime does, or define a feeling in the way that Talking Heads’ “Heaven” does. In fact, if this blog were a TV show, “Heaven” would play at the end of each installment/episode, over the credits.

Music does a lot of things, but for a certain kind of person, the best thing it can do is get you through. And since you never know when or from which direction the confusion is going to come flying at you next, especially at seventeen, that function – getting you through – is more useful than drugs, sex, religion or psychoanalysis could ever be. 
 

Uncertainty, then and now, can be both thrilling and frightening. As I wrote in the introduction to all of this nonsense almost a year ago, that feeling of uncertainty in 1988 was so powerful, so entrancing in some mysterious, indefinable way, that I’ve never really been able to shake it. There’s a kind of heaviness there, in both the positive and negative memories, that I’ve always been pulled back to. And weirdly, I’ve always felt a sense of obligation to it somehow, like there was something back there left undone, or that needed checking up on. And because my life is still made up of music, and I still listen to the music from that year with some degree of regularity, those memories were/are always resurfacing, reminding me of….what, exactly?

That’s what I wanted to find out, and why I started writing this. It was a therapeutic exercise, done mostly for my own psyche, to exorcise demons and to make them dance. I did my best to make it relatable, and tried to steer it away from meaningless self-absorption. I wouldn’t blame anyone for thinking it ended up in that territory anyway. But I’m hoping maybe somebody could or can relate somehow. 
 

As for me, it’s a cliché, but hey, whattaya know, it turns out I actually feel like a weight has been lifted. Whatever it was that my subconscious felt the need to address, that need has been satiated. I’ve learned a lot from it, actually. Not all that I learned is pleasant, certainly, especially the realization that I still adhere to so many of the beliefs, habits, and points-of-view that I did when I was seventeen. Man, it is going to be a lot of fun figuring out what to do with that.

Primarily, I learned the age-old truism that the memory is a tricky beast – coloring the events of your life with a retrospective range of emotions that don’t logically correspond to the truth or import of things as they actually happened. In other words, we remember things the way we want to. If it took forty-three posts for me to realize that boring old self-evident truth, so be it.

Really, it was worth it just for the sheer catharsis of expunging this stuff from my brain. As a means of self-therapy, I highly recommend it. 
   

So in that sense, it worked. Now it’s back to the everyday confusion of modern life. Forty-one In ’12.

Hey, some of the music from ’88 still works in that context.

Cue “Heaven”.

Seventeen In '88 - Installment 42: The Leaves

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 Leaves

Who knows why some memories fade while others linger?

Really, I guess neurologists or psychologists might have some idea, but I mean the question rhetorically. I think.

More accurately, I wonder why some small, seemingly insignificant moments will often over time take on an emotional heft completely out of proportion with their impact or import at the time that they occur. To the point that you recall them with the same sense of fondness or psychic gravity as events like births, weddings, or deaths.

Responses that include use of the term "over-sensitive weirdo" will be disregarded.

One night in Fall 1988 I was driving over to a friend's house when I passed under a cove of trees. At just the right moment a gust of wind came along, blowing a torrent of leaves down onto my car in a thick shower of color. I can still see 'em now, sweeping across the windshield, what seemed like a thousand leaves, swirling crazily, impairing my vision to the point that I nearly had to stop the car. It felt like the Gods Of Autumn were carrying out some weird ordaining, or baptism.

It was, somehow, a really moving little moment. One that has become even more moving in my memory as the years pass. A trick of the brain? Maybe. Probably. I don't give a rat's ass.

It was just one of life’s cool little moments, for whatever reason. Maybe a reason isn’t necessary. And here’s the thing, even if a reason is necessary you can make one up. You make things up as you go along in life. Not everything has to be logical.

Maybe I just needed a signpost, a totemic moment to serve as a bookend for that moment back in the winter, when I went walking in the snow and looked up at the flakes falling in the orange glow of the streetlight. The moment with the leaves serves as a convenient reverse-mirror image of that one.

Those moments were solitary ones. If you are, like me, a loner-ish, inward-drawn person, maybe it’s easy to understand how those moments can be so affecting. Thankfully, though, life doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and the best moments are usually the ones spent with others. Even if you are a weirdo loner type.

Once, around the same time as the night of the leaves, Emily and Regina and I spent an afternoon painting with watercolors. It was November 1^st, the day after Halloween. It was gray and cool outside, leaves everywhere. Max and I had been to Nashville the night before, specifically to go to the record store, where I bought Van Morrison’s Veedon Fleece. We listened to it as we painted.

That afternoon was one of the best of my life. Everything was so calm. Each of us was in a laid-back, open frame of mind. There was no melancholy, no foreboding, no weird undercurrent of insecurity or mistrust. Instead, the mood was one of tranquility, with creativity and quiet joy flowing freely.  

We listened to the Van Morrison album twice through. Veedon Fleece is a strange album, wistful and jazzy/folky on the surface, perfect for the mood of that afternoon, but beneath that surface moves a turbulent sea of ever-changing emotions. It’s an album haunted by memories of Van’s Irish homeland, which is brought to life in vivid green on the cover. Song after song explores the loneliness and longing of One Irish Rover. “You’re so fragile you just may break and you don’t know who to ask,” he sings in “Who Was That Masked Man” and you can feel the helplessness in his every breath. “You Don’t Pull No Punches, But You Don’t Push The River” is the title of another key song, and I’m betting even Van doesn’t know what that really means. But there’s a hint in there, somehow, of movement, of intense need, testing boundaries, the harsh ceaseless truth of nature.

Sometimes I think the great theme in Van Morrison’s seventies music is the inevitability of change. Little wonder then, that his music figured so prominently in my world during this time. Change was a fact of everyday life. Sometimes a painful one. That’s the way it goes during those teenage years. And all subsequent years, really. But especially the teenage ones.

“We stood and watched the river flow,” Van Morrison sings in “Country Fair”, a song where the sense of stillness, of yearning for something very far away, is so acute that it’s almost physically painful. He finishes the thought with this: “We were too young to really know”.

Chasing happiness can be a frustrating, disappointing endeavor. I’m a big believer in the idea that the best moments of life are the ones you weren’t necessarily looking for. You just get lucky sometimes, and more often than you might think. I also believe, to a certain extent, that you can create your own luck. So if I could go back and talk to my seventeen-year-old self I’d try to convince him of the same thing I’m going to try to tell my forty-plus-year-old self every day from now on. That is, you need to notice and appreciate more often those things like the time those leaves fell over your car, no matter how simple it seems, or how grossly romantic the idea might be.

And you need to set up more days like that time you and Emily and Regina spent the afternoon painting. Change happens, emotions flare up and subside, give way to other emotions. All of the hurt, the frustration, the flat-out knocked-on-your-back sadness of that time period lingers on to a certain extent, true, but none of that stuff can stand up to the pure untouched pleasure of great memories like that one, and that’s fuel for living.

“We were too young to really know.”

Boy, oh boy, were we.

Seventeen In '88 - Installment 41: Classic Rock Is The Naked Truth

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. 

Classic Rock Is The Naked Truth 

It was a dark and stormy night. Only not really. It was actually one of those nights where the threat of a thunderstorm seems to linger in the air for hour after menacing hour, without actually giving way to full-on rain and thunder. One of those nights where the wind is swirling and howling and lightning periodically flashes like some quiet, crazy strobe light. It was unnerving.

Regina and I sat in her kitchen doing homework. I was cracking up because Regina’s father and his new wife were in their bedroom, and Regina and I kept hearing moans and gasps emanating from behind the door. Regina was mortified. At one point we heard a series of slaps, sharp and rhythmic. I totally lost it. Regina just put her hands over her face and shook her head wordlessly. Looking back, I’m tempted to think it was immaturity, a lack of experience with the ways of adult sexuality that made me react with a bout of hysterics, but I also suspect it was actually just really funny. Maybe I’m still immature, but I’m betting you woulda laughed too.

It was in this atmosphere, with Regina and I attempting to concentrate on our schoolwork, trying to ignore the distraction of loud parental bedroom shenanigans, that the last ghost of the year made an appearance.

On New Year’s Eve, while Elliot and Max and I listlessly rung in 1988, Elliot swore he saw a ghost. We thought he was delusional, but the eerie feeling of that event continued to chase us down. Throughout the summer, amid the natural confusion of teenage growing pains and paranoia about the future, all set to a soundtrack of oddly ominous music, the prevailing mood had been one of dread; the atmosphere seemed to be always touched by a strange haunted quality. Then in the fall death reared it’s all-too-real-and-ugly head.

On the night of the hilarious sex sounds and the pseudo-storm Regina and I were sitting quietly at her kitchen table, concentrating hard, lost in academia, when only a few feet away from us the back door of her house opened, all the way, all by itself, slowly, with a sick creak.

Neither of us said anything, we just looked at the door, then back at each other, wide-eyed.  Beyond the door there was nothing but the black sky and the trees swaying madly in the wind.

We started laughing, a little uneasily. Of course it was only the wind that jarred the door open, but hell, it may as well have been a ghost. I like to think it was the same ghost from New Year’s Eve, having grown tired of hanging out with me and my group of friends all year, finally deciding to say goodbye and head off to haunt somebody else. Yeah, that works. Dammit, you create closure where you find it.

1988, or 1988 as I think of it, was ending. One phase of my teenage life was morphing into another. Life moves in phases. Maybe we make those phases up in retrospect, with the benefit of hindsight and all that. But still.

The soundtrack for this phase, late fall 1988, towards the end of my age seventeen year, was classic rock radio. One of the local rock stations had recently shifted to the then fairly new classic rock format, and it was still enough of a novelty that we listened to it all the time. In addition to the predictable Zeppelin, Stones and ZZ Top the station also played some selected modern acts. So these days whenever I hear “Angel Of Harlem” by U2 or “Never Tear Us Apart” by INXS it makes me think of driving to or from school in fall 1988. The sound of those songs makes the memory so vivid I can taste it, the sensation is almost physical. 

The personal connection between that time and those songs may seem like a quaint, virtually meaningless memory, but think of your own equivalent songs, whatever they may be, and the emotional resonance those songs carry with them. This is what music does. It’s a weirdly heavy thing. When I mention “Never Tear Us Apart” it’s more than some kind of wistful memory of bygone teenage days (though it definitely is that, too). It carries with it a kind of depth - part joy, part pain. Small doses of each, maybe, but still, it’s real. Like a scar.

And this effect can happen with great songs, mediocre songs, terrible songs, the whole gamut. Whatever hits you in a certain way, in a certain moment. Make no apologies. Maybe for you it was “Sea Of Love”, or “Stairway To Heaven”, or “Sweet Child Of Mine” or “I Want It That Way” or that stupid song about the way Mick Jagger dances. Er, I mean, I guess that song's not stupid. Especially if it means something to you. MAKE NO APOLOGIES.  

For me, one of the songs that hit at just the right moment in Fall 1988 was “Night Moves” by Bob Seger. These days I think there’s maybe a perception of Seger’s classic rock stalwart as a cheesy song, made up of cheap nostalgia and cliché. But so what? A good deal of life is made up of cheap nostalgia and cliché, who says you can’t revel in it every now and again, if you want.

I’d been hanging out with Regina regularly, and every night I’d drive home from her house and listen to the classic rock station. It was probably the night of the sex and the storm that I heard “Night Moves”. That seems like the right combination to lend extra resonance to the song.

We all have different lives, different experiences, but we also each have common denominator experiences, too, whether we want to admit to it or not. Clichés become clichés because they’re true, as the horrible cliché goes. 

So I’m driving home with the fall colors all around and Regina on the brain and Seger’s song comes on and for whatever reason I found myself relating to it in a way that I never had before. Seger sings about being too tall, says he coulda used a few pounds. I wasn’t tall, but I could relate to being gawky, physically insecure. Then he sings about he and his black-haired beauty, out past the corn fields, in his ’60 Chevy. I drove a gray ’82 Ford Escort. Not quite as romantic, but what are ya gonna do.  

Those kind of details don't matter anyway. What matters is the gist of it, and that’s outlined in the breakdown towards the end of the song. In the early nineties the comedy/folk singer Wally Pleasant had a song where towards the end he lowered his tone to a hush and announced “Okay, here’s the quiet dramatic part, like Bruce Springsteen would do.” I think he may have also been thinking of Bob Seger’s “Night Moves”. Maybe I’m a gullible simp, but the quiet dramatic part of “Night Moves” gets me every single time.

That night I actually pulled over so I could listen more intently to this song that I’d already heard a thousand times without really hearing it. So I’m sitting on the side of the road as Seger strums a few gentle chords and sings about sitting in bed listening to the thunder. Remembering a time he didn’t “have so much to lose”. I was acutely aware when I was a teenager that I should be milking each moment of those years while I could, but I don’t think I understood why. That line sums it up. You will never have so many roads open to you again, so little weight to carry around.

Then there’s this, sung so gently, so matter-of-factly: “Strange how the night moves…with autumn closing in.” The music lingers on the languid strumming for a while before building back up. Autumn, for Seger, in the case of this song, is obviously adulthood - unknowable, unstoppable.

I’d been freaking out about that unknowable future for the whole year, and suddenly here's Bob Seger, not solving any of my problems for me, but providing some kind of perspective, at least.

Things were changing. Phases ending, phases beginning. The creepy ominous feeling so prevalent throughout the year was fading. A fog was lifting, but new problems would fall into place, as they always do. The next few months would consist of a lot of clumsy maneuvering through a lot of stumbling blocks. I thought at the time that those would eventually clear up, but I was wrong. Way wrong. They never clear up. They just change shape, multiply, dissolve and reappear. All you can do is deal with it. Everything passes, everything changes, do what you think you should do. Bob Dylan said that.

The naked truth, the horrible truth, the wonderful truth, is that you make everything up as you go along. I said that.

       

Seventeen In '88 - Installment 40: A Howlin' Wind Runs Through Here, Or How I Missed The Single Greatest Moment In The Recent History Of My Favorite Sports Team

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.

A Howlin' Wind Runs Through Here, Or How I Missed The Single Greatest Moment In The Recent History Of My Favorite Sports Team 

October is my favorite month. (I mean, c'mon, who doesn't have a favorite month?) I decided on the tenth month of the calendar year pretty early on in life. After all, when you’re a kid, Halloween is second only to Christmas when it comes to the levels of excitement and giddy anticipation. There’s also the vivid atmosphere of October, what with the arrival of autumn and its colors and cool air and dying things. Scary movies, pumpkins, caramel apples. And then there's the baseball playoffs, and the World Series. 

Baseball has a history in which superstition figures pretty heavily. Players have their rituals, like Wade Boggs eating chicken before games, or Mark Fidrych talking to the ball, and fans have any number of weird little things they do in the hopes that it will help their team. In the mid-eighties, whenever the Dodgers were televised, I would often leave the room while the opposing team was batting, thinking that they wouldn't score  if I wasn’t watching. Don’t ask me where this logic came from, but it seemed to work often enough that I kept doing it. So yeah, all those great games pitched by Valenzuela, Hershiser, Welch, Reuss? That was actually my doing.

As the Dodgers moved through September and on through the postseason in 1988 I had a good luck charm in the form of a record – Graham Parker’s Howlin’ Wind. Don’t ask why it was that particular record, it just came to be, pretty much arbitrarily. Though the title track does certainly hint at the kind of mysterious voodoo the Dodgers seemed to be using in making everything go right for them.

It was also kind of a good luck charm in reverse, in that I would only listen to the record after the games instead of before. Which of course makes no sense, how can a charm work its magic after the fact? But seriously, man, logic is overrated. I mean, baseball is hardly ever logical. If it was, the Yankees would win every year. Oh yeah, the Yankees do win every year. So they’re the exception that proves the rule, yeah? No? Whatever.

Anyway, I don’t know why I chose this album of hard-edged, fiery British pub-rock to soundtrack the Dodgers postseason adventures. Upbeat as they were, all those exercises in r & b-inflected roots rock couldn't have been much further removed from the sports world, or even anything going on in the music world in 1988. Maybe the song titles tell some of the story; “Soul Shoes” exemplifying the verve and grit that the Dodgers brought to their play, “Gypsy Blood” the never-say-die spirit, “Not If It Pleases Me” the boundless confidence bordering on arrogance.

Nah, it isn’t any of that. I just happened to listen to it the night the Dodgers clinched a playoff birth. Being a creature of habit, or possibly a slave to weird self-imposed OCD-like order, I carried the new tradition over to listening after each game during Orel Hershiser’s pursuit of Don Drysdale’s consecutive scoreless innings record, then kept it going through the Championship Series against the Mets. Next stop, World Series.

Game One of the Series took place on a Saturday, and I had to attend a Speech & Drama tournament that day, which meant that I would miss the first few innings, possibly the whole game. So I set the VCR, and set off for the tournament that day safe in the knowledge that I would be able to watch the whole game after the fact as if I was watching in real time, an activity that would depend on not finding out the final score beforehand.

Turns out we got home that night around nine-ish and of course I couldn’t resist turning on the TV at Max’s house to see what was happening. I turned it on just in time to see the Dodgers rallying. Mike Scioscia had singled to cut the score to a 4-3 Oakland A’s lead in the sixth inning. Just as I had my hopes up, the very next batter, Dodgers third baseman Jeff Hamilton, grounded into a double play, killing the rally. I blamed myself for watching.

Like everybody else in the group, I was still filled with the nervous energy and adrenaline of that day’s competition. Yes, theatre geeks get hyped up about competition, too. Sometimes. So everybody wanted to get out of the house. “C’mon, let’s go do something.” As always, it was an open question as to what we might actually do. Small town. Limited options.

One of the things we liked to do, strangely, was hang out at the Holiday Inn. I think being there amid the bustle and energy of travelers, with the smell of room service food and swimming pool chlorine in the air made us feel like we were out on the road, elsewhere. It was an oddly invigorating, if only vicarious, sensation.

So I relented to the urge to get out, figuring I could listen to the game on the radio. Max, who had only recently become a baseball fan, and therefore hadn’t yet acquired the jittery, jangled nerves of the fan who’d watched his team repeatedly come close only to fall short, stayed behind to watch.

I drove. We pulled into the parking lot at Holiday Inn and Roger, Regina and Emily went in. I told ‘em I’d be in momentarily. It was the top of the ninth, and Alejandro Pena was setting the A’s down with relative ease. Oakland still led by a run, though. The Dodgers would have one last chance in the bottom of the inning.

I debated. I wanted to go in and hang out with my friends. Fun was beckoning. I didn’t want to suffer the disappointment of listening to the Dodgers lose.

I’d already endured 1982, when Joe Morgan hit a home run on the last day of the season to dash the Dodgers playoff hopes, and 1983, when the Phillies' Gary Matthews could do no wrong against the Dodgers in the NLCS, and 1985, when first Ozzie Smith and then Jack F***ing Clark may as well have just come over to the house of fourteen year-old rabid Dodger fan JB Bennett and stabbed him in the guts repeatedly with a sharp knife.  

Look, I figured, I’m taping the game, so if anything interesting happens, which it probably won't,  I’ll be able to see it later. Besides, nothing really good ever happens in Game One anyway.

I don’t even remember what my friends and I did. All I remember is a frantic, breathless Max, barely able to collect and contain himself as he recounted what had happened upon our return to his house.

What happened, of course, has passed on into the realm of baseball legend and American myth. The details have been hashed over so often that it's redundant to do so here, yet the moment retains enough sheer wonder that I can’t help but indulge a bit. Kirk Gibson, the Dodgers unquestioned on-field leader and all-around tough guy, who was not expected to play in this game if at all in the series, simply pulled off the clutchiest of clutch at-bats in a year and career that had already seen more than his fair share. With legs so banged up that he quite literally could barely walk, Gibson hobbled to the plate to pinch hit against Dennis Eckersly, the future Hall Of Fame reliever who had enjoyed one of his most untouchable seasons that year. Flailing and grimacing his way to a 3-2 count, Gibson finally launched one of Eck’s back-door sliders in a gorgeous arc to the right field stands for an I-don’t-believe-what-I-just-saw game-winning two-run home run. The stuff of Hollywood, the stuff of childhood fantasy, all that. 

And I missed it. Sure, I watched it on tape later (I still have the tape, 1988 commercials and all – I watch it after the season every year to remind myself that the Dodgers once tasted genuine glory), but somehow all these years I’ve felt like I missed out on the real magic of the moment. I’ve also suspected that had I been watching, it might not have happened. Such is the weird psychology of baseball superstition.

The impact of the moment didn’t really hit me that night. I thought of it as just another game that the Dodgers were lucky to get away with winning. They still had to win three more against a formidable A’s team that was probably way better than the Dodgers, at least on paper. I didn’t like the odds, and couldn’t allow myself to let one great moment get my hopes up.

Still, I had a tradition to uphold, so after watching the tape I went up to my room and as usual after a Dodgers win put on the Graham Parker album. “White Honey” (a song about cocaine, fitting for ‘80’s baseball) never sounded so lively, “Nothing’s Gonna Pull Us Apart” so determined, “Don’t Ask Me Questions” so defiant. And those ominous organ build-ups in “Howlin’ Wind” sounded extra eerie, spurring Parker on as he growls a warning that an ill wind is blowing, taking his breathe away. That song, so redolent of autumn’s chill, always brings to mind the image of Kirk Gibson limping around the bases pumping his fist whenever I listen to it now.

Gibson’s home run, of course, set the tone, and Orel Hershiser did much of the rest of the heavy lifting as the Dodgers brushed the newly-punchless A’s aside in five games. As a Dodgers fan, I’ve been coasting on that elation for twenty-four years now. A guy has to hold onto something in a world that sometimes seems so desperate, so thin on inspiration. After all, like Graham Parker sang, a howling wind runs through here, so we gotta rock before the fever is upon us all.