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.

Seventeen In '88 - Installment 32: The Phone Calls

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 Phone Calls 

One night in late summer Elliot and I were hanging out with Max at his apartment when the phone rang. It was around midnight. Max answered and a voice on the other end stated each of our names in turn, then hung up. It was an odd thing, but we didn’t really think too hard about it. We assumed it was just someone we knew doing something weird just for the hell of it. In our little group of weirdos that kind of thing happened all the time. We forgot about it.

A few minutes later, the phone rang again. I answered it this time. Same thing. Our names. Gruff voice, drawing out the syllables. Hang up. It was then that we started to sift through the possibilities of the caller’s identity. These were seriously limited by the plain fact that no one knew that we were all there together that night. Of course, any number of our friends might have guessed that we were, we hung out there a lot and most of our friends knew that. But why choose this particular night, this particular time, to make a random prank phone call just in the off chance that we might all be there at once? And if you’re gonna make prank calls, why not at least have a joke prepared?

A few minutes later the phone rang again. This time the caller engaged in a peculiar brand of conversation, disconnected words and phrases, sometimes touching on aspects of our personal lives - parents & girlfriend's names, our places of work, favorite bands. It was someone who obviously knew us pretty well. But no one we could think of seemed to fit the profile of someone who would do something so weird.  

During the hour between one and two a.m. the phone rang regularly every few minutes and each of us took turns trying to identify the voice. It was a male voice. Unusually deep, sometimes sounding as though it had been treated or filtered through some kind of electronic device. Standard horror movie stuff.

At this point, we were still having fun. The witty banter was flying. We pestered the caller as to his identity, to no avail. The caller still refused to speak in sentences, hewing to stray grunts and seemingly stream-of-consciousness fragments. Occasionally he'd say one of our names, as if to remind us that he knew them, in case we forgot. It was all very strange, but it was also kind of fun.

Then the phone went quiet for an hour or so. We were disappointed. We waited by the phone, dejected, still sorting through names trying to pinpoint the culprit, dismissing all of them for one reason or another. Ronnie Rawlings? No, he's at work, and probably wouldn't do something so odd anyway. One of Emily's brothers? No, they're too young, they wouldn't have the creative wherewithal, or the stamina. Then who?

Elliot sat in a chair with the phone resting on an arm, and when around three o’clock the phone finally rang again he picked it up and exclaimed “Thank God, we thought you’d never call back!”

For the next round of calls, the caller periodically played music – southern rock, country, not the kind of stuff that us or any of our friends could usually relate to, which further clouded the mystery. Who do we know that owns a Hank Jr. album?

At one point between calls we began to jokingly bandy about the possibility that the calls might be some kind of supernatural occurrence. Maybe a demon or a ghost. Maybe one of us calling from the distant future. Young and gullible as we were, though, we were still fairly down to earth by nature, so we dismissed that possibility out of hand. No way. Of course not.

At least, Max and I felt that way. Elliot, usually the sceptic among us, in this case held out for otherworldly. "You guys are just dismissing the idea that this might be something supernatural aren't you?" 

Well, yeah. But Elliot's willingness to believe must have planted seeds of doubt in my mind. I remembered New Year’s Eve and the ghost in the living room. I remembered the fear and confusion from being lost in the maze just a few nights before. And I remembered that ominous music from the dream with the sign pointing towards nowhere. Songs flitted through my head. Patti Smith’s “Elegie”, that eerie evocation of rock and roll spirits having flown (“its just…too bad…our friends…can’t be with us…todayyy”). The Meat Puppets’ “Two Rivers” rolling by, side by side, both flowing into a netherworld of ethereal guitar sounds and disembodied voices. Run Westy Run’s “Bye Love”; the far-away stillness in the sound, a farewell from some other side of what may or may not be this life.

It is, after all, life and life only.

Around the same time as the night of the phone calls, something horrible had happened in our little town. An elderly woman was murdered in her car in the mall parking lot. Stabbed to death. In broad daylight. The murderer got away and couldn’t be found.

It was difficult to comprehend. The town, and everyone in it, was shaken. Our town, like any other small American town, was not necessarily a stranger to violence or death, but this was different somehow. The sheer randomness, and the brutality of it. The fact that there was no apparent motive. The fear that the killer would strike again lingered in everyone’s mind, coloring the atmosphere in ways both perceptible and imperceptible.

Honestly, I don’t remember if the murder happened before or after the night of the phone calls. So I’m not sure it was a factor in the way we responded to that night. Maybe it’s just the way the brain works in retrospect, but the fact of the murder seemed to be in the air that whole summer, even before it happened. 

So when we started discussing the supernatural possibilities it put a chill into the evening, despite our collective (admittedly somewhat shaky) inclination towards pragmatism, reality, cold hard facts. We knew the caller had to be someone we knew. But the calls increasingly wore our nerves down and with the late hour our defenses gave way to paranoia.

At one point, as if to test the supernatural theory, I picked up the phone and began reading passages from a Bible that was on hand. The voice on the other end reacted with full-on Exorcist-style moaning and animal growls. It shouted my name. I wish I could say that I thought it was just good weird fun, but the truth is it scared me shitless. 

Not too long after that we decided to leave the phone off the hook and try to sleep. It was five in the morning.

And then everything changes. In the days and weeks after the night of the phone calls, Elliot and Max and I each experienced unusual turbulence in our lives. Trouble at work. Trouble with family. Trouble with girlfriends. It became almost absurd. Jokingly, we attributed all of this misfortune to a malicious spell cast by the phone calls.

We did that jokingly, sure, but I think we really did almost believe it was true. Deep down, way deep down, we may actually have felt that what happened that night had really emanated from beyond, and whatever it was had pulled off some kind of bizarre curse.

Listen, as I write this, I swear I know full well that a simple explanation exists. I know that it actually was one of our friends or acquaintances playing an elaborate and really weird practical joke. But that doesn’t change the feeling of that night. Or the way that feeling colored our lives in the wake of that night.

And it doesn't change the fact that we never did figure out who it was. And it haunted us. We talked about it often through the next several years, never arriving at any conclusion, just acknowledging the eeriness and dread in the air that night and in the surrounding days and weeks.

Even thinking about it now, it still drives me crazy.

Seriously - who the fuck was that?

Seventeen In '88 - Installment 31: Three Songs For Late Summer (And Some Baseball Stuff, Too)

As 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.

Three Songs For Late Summer (And Some Baseball Stuff, Too)

As outlined here a few weeks ago, my guidelines for living when I was seventeen years old dictated that I listen to music constantly, and stay awake late at night, every night. So I really, really liked doing both of those things at the same time. Music + nighttime = ideal state of being.

My father had been a rack-jobber in the sixties and seventies, traveling around Tennessee and Kentucky stocking music sections at department stores and college bookstores and, probably, head shops. (Remember head shops? Do those places still exist?) So he had accumulated an enormous collection of vinyl. By my mid-teens I was regularly pilfering from this stockpile, every few months coming away with a new stack of records to memorize, translate, or save for possible use at a later date.

In mid-summer 1988 I got off with quite a haul. I wrote about Patti Smith’s Horses here a couple weeks ago, but there were three others that I particularly associate with those long hot summer nights, sitting looking out the window at the trees and the stars and the sky, imagining the world had stopped, trying to parse some kind of discernable path to take in what looked like a very cloudy future.

All year long so much of the music I listened to seemed to me to have an eerie, ominous tone, if not on the surface, then just underneath it. Right around this time, late summer, that quality seemed to deepen in the music. Really, the whole mood of summer ’88 is covered in that weird feeling. And I guess it didn’t help that there was a killer on the loose in our little town. (More on that later. Unfortunately.)

Back then the full-length album was the music delivery method of choice. I liked a collection of songs unified by some combination of sound, theme or feel. I still do actually, even now, in this age of bite-size media/culture portions. Still, I would always choose one song from each album as a representative moment, one track that seemed to sum up or reflect the gist of the feeling of the others.

Since it sits in the running order between two tours de force, Neil Young’s “Ride My Llama” is an odd choice to represent his Rust Never Sleeps. But Rust Never Sleeps is an odd album, moving wildly between boundaries of time and place, loud and quiet, violence and peace. “Thrasher” is a long, wordy folksong that unwinds in a series of imagistic verses that the rock press at the time pounced on as Young’s comment on the lost, faded ambitions of Young’s generation, particularly his pals Crosby, Stills and Nash. “Pocahontas” is a poignant, if surreal, exploration of savagery, destiny, and the mercurial nature of the American spirit. Yeah, really. “Ride My Llama” is just the strange little song stuck between those two. In comparison, it’s slight, sparse. But it has a powerfully weird feeling on it’s own.

It’s about space travel, I guess. Neil meets a Martian who plays him some Martian music and shares some choice Martian weed.* “Like any other primitive would.” Then Neil decides he’s gonna ride that llama from Peru to Texarkana, for reasons unexplained. He does all of this against a backdrop of halting, choppy acoustic guitar, a haunted echo covering it all. I’d listen to it and look up at the stars and I wanted to be there with Neil and that Martian, even though I didn’t smoke weed.

*It could be Martian whiskey or wine, the song doesn’t clarify, but when dealing with Neil “Homegrown” Young, I just assume weed.

In addition to the ever-present ominous feeling, all of these summer ‘88 songs shared a common lyrical theme - travel. I’m only recognizing that in retrospect. Maybe that linked them in my subconscious. I knew I’d be going somewhere eventually. I just didn’t know where, and I was scared shitless of what the circumstance would be once I got there.

Bob Dylan sings about a similar feeling in “One More Cup Of Coffee”, from Desire, even if he layers it in a gauze of gypsy mysticism. Desire is all over the map, especially lyrically. It's full of long story-songs with tragic heroes and mystery figures harboring dark intentions. Some of these are drawn from real life – Ruben “Hurricane” Carter, in a song that oddly turned out to be a hit, and was used in the Carter biopic a couple decades later, and the mobster Joey Gallo, the latter of whom is depicted somewhat sympathetically. Lester Bangs called Dylan out for the latter in a great article called “Bob Dylan’s Dalliance With Mafia Chic”, probably rightfully so, though I guess it’s up to the listener to decide just how sympathetic the song really is.

Primarily I liked the album for its sound. Maybe it’s the violin, played by a just-picked-up-from-the-street Scarlet Rivera, and maybe it’s the aforementioned mystical tone Dylan spreads lyrically throughout the album like the Tarot cards on the back cover, but the album seems to have a kind of damp, wet quality about it. Maybe it was raining the first time I heard it, and I was looking out my window at the wet green trees, I don’t remember. I do know that I always like to imagine that everyone playing on the album is wearing streaked eye make-up with long colorful scarves and beads and bandanas and feathers. Not so far-fetched - that's pretty much what the participants of Dylan’s contemporaneous Rolling Thunder tour actually looked like.

“One More Cup Of Coffee” is the song that best captures the damp, mystic feeling of the album. I don’t know what the song is really about – there’s a mysterious, potentially deadly dark lady, with a weird family who can see into the future. Again, as in Neil Young's Rust Never Sleeps, the past, present and the future all converge. But Dylan’s song doesn’t have any of Young’s leavening sense of humor. There's a thick, dramatic atmosphere that borders on schmaltz, but beneath that there’s a real sense of foreboding, dread. Whatever reason Dylan has for traveling into the valley below, it doesn’t sound like he’s particularly looking forward to it.

Looking back, I guess I probably needed some respite from all that weird dread. That’s where baseball always enters the picture. (It was another guideline, one that still applies – baseball is life’s best mirror.) Often in the background on those long summer nights while this music played the baseball highlights would be flickering on my crappy little black and white television. I was and am an L.A. Dodgers fan, and being on the east coast meant that I would usually have to wait for the midnight or 1AM airing of Sportscenter to see the highlights from the west coast. On the night of August 20, 1988, a Saturday, the Dodgers entered the ninth inning down 3-2 to the Montreal Expos. I was at work at the radio station that night. Between punching in the latest Randy Travis and Highway 101 songs I was listening off-air to a CBS Radio Network feed of the game. This was the night that I realized that Kirk Gibson, rather than a simple mortal human being like the rest of us, might actually be Superman. 

Gibson had been having a great year, but plenty of players have great years every year. I was a pessimist, always convinced that the Dodgers would find a way to lose. I was ready for three quick outs, prepared to go home and watch highlights of a Dodger loss. Then Mickey Hatcher doubled, and Gibson followed with an RBI single to tie the game. 

Cool, I thought, at least now we’ll have a chance in extras. It’s probably a character flaw that I aim so low. Kirk Gibson, as always, wanted to win right now.

After a Mike Marshall fly out, Gibson stole second. 

Then things got crazy. 

Montreal reliever Joe Hesketh unfurled a wild pitch, moving Gibson over to third. At least, that’s what usually happens in baseball when the pitcher throws a wild pitch, the runner moves up a base. A base. Gibson, however, partly because he recognized that the foul ground at Dodger Stadium covered a whole lot of territory for the ball to roll around in, partly because he wanted to utilize the element of surprise, and partly because he is made up of nothing but pure unfathomable guts, barreled right around third, like a bull, or a very fast steamroller, and came all the way around to score, sliding into home and slapping it with a passion normally reserved for Game 7 of the World Series. 

In fact, less than two months later Gibson would author one of the great moments in World Series history. Even if you're not a baseball fan you've probably seen it; Gibson, on two bad legs, pumping his fists as he limps around the bases after hitting a shocker home run to win the game. That was one for ages, but when it happened I simply felt it as an echo of that August night against the Expos, when Gibson would not be denied. And even if Gibson had never had that World Series moment I’d still remember that earlier night, that incredible sense of determination.  

I guess all that doesn’t really have anything to with music, though. Except insomuch as music and baseball have always been entwined together in my little world, twin strands of ongoing, limitless lifeforce. And except insomuch as I probably had some of this music playing on the stereo as I waited to watch the highlights. Dylan’s Desire, or Neil Young’s Rust Never Sleeps. Or Richard & Linda Thompson’s Pour Down Like Silver, which was the other big album around this time. 

Pour Down Like Silver is the Thompsons' spiritual album. In the mid-seventies Richard and Linda Thompson had converted to the Sufi religion. The effect it had on their music was significant. Wikipedia says that Sufi “is popular in such African countries as Morocco and Senegal, where it is seen as a mystical expression of Islam.” Again, with the mysticism. It’s all over the music, along with a profound sense of stillness. Even when the songs are about movement, stillness wins out – “Jet plane in a rocking chair / roller coaster roll nowhere.”

Richard Thompson fans are especially passionate about the darker aspects of his music. A series of fanclub releases in the eighties bore the title Doom and Gloom From The Tomb. Pour Down Like Silver is not necessarily dark, but it is certainly deep, working as it does from a place of intense spiritual yearning.

Which is not to say that the songs can’t be appreciated right here on Earth. In fact, most of them could be interpreted as simple love songs. Even if, as in “Night Comes In”, amid some of the most vivid, searing guitar-playing of Richard Thompson’s career, the lovers dance until they fade away. Presumably leaving this realm to be closer to God.

The song that really got to me on those summer nights, the one that really grabbed hold and wouldn’t let go as I sat looking out the window, contemplating the heavens, or waiting for the baseball highlights, was “Beat The Retreat”.  The song shares plenty with some of my other favorite music of the time. Like Van Morrison’s “Almost Independence Day” it moves at a funeral pace, with huge billowing clouds of empty, open space.  Like Run Westy Run’s “Bye Love”, the sense of resignation, regret, is almost too much to bear.

Unlike “Bye Love”, though, it isn’t about leaving, it’s about coming home. So much of the album is about having a change of heart. In “Beat The Retreat” the singer has wandered off, away from home and loved ones, out into the wild. With a heavy heart, he’s now returning. Really, it’s probably allegorical, the singer has moved away from God, and is now trying to get back.

Who knows why this affected me in such a powerful way when I was seventeen. I didn’t have any inclination at the time to come home to God, or to come home at all. I only wanted out.

It’s altogether possible that I interpreted “home” as home plate, and the singer as Kirk Gibson storming around third on his way back where he belongs. Everything is a baseball metaphor. Yeah? No? Sigh.

Really, it was just the sound. And that feeling. That feeling of yearning, of searching for something else. Somewhere else. Whether it’s in that dark valley below, or on a spaceship with a stoner Martian.

Something about late summer, the air, the atmosphere, seems to break life open for all kinds of possibilities. That can be invigorating, but it can also be frightening. I’m not sure whether I heard all of this music as a key for letting those possibilities free, or a door for shutting them out. It worked both ways, I suppose. 

Hell, it doesn't matter. For years I've carried around this memory of these songs that, combined with what was going on in my world at the time, produced this distinct and terrible ominous feeling. But most of these memories are actually fond ones, and it's taken me writing all of this nonsense to realize that. Looking out that window, listening to Desire, waiting to watch the footage of Gibson roaring home. It was just life. Life and life only. And life needs a little color now and again, even if, often enough, the shades go dark.