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Wednesday, February 15, 2006
Three Variations on a Theme by Max Weber
I.
I don't think I even knew what a cover song was. I knew that my older brother had come home from the record store where he worked after skipping school with an album called Black Market Clash, and that the album had a song on it I liked called "Pressure Drop," [MP3] and the song reminded me of another one I'd heard when our mother, years before, in a period of her life when our living room would fill up at night with strangers sitting on the floor, passing around a pipe, and laughing so hard it didn't sound like laughter anymore, had played the soundtrack album to The Harder They Come late into the night. Who was this band that could take a song adored by the activists, effeminate graduate students and bra-less weekend hikers that my mother had socialized with then and remake it into something harder? Recognize my yearning all the way across the Atlantic with a twin wail of electric guitars? And who was my brother now that he knew enough to bring an album home that slapped my mother's hippie friends around like that? It was the first time my brother became a charismatic figure in my eyes instead of a petty tyrant who used to beat me up whenever he felt like it. Soon he would road-trip to New York for one of the seventeen live shows The Clash played at the Bond Casino in Times Square and - because his rebellion was moving fast - buy a studded leather jacket, shave his head and start a hardcore band [MP3]. I was still lost as far as music went, although I did know enough to borrow his copy of Sandinista! whenever he wasn't home and play "Police on My Back" until the vinyl scratched.
II.
My mother and her partner bought a house and we moved to the suburbs. Did I mention that my mother was a lesbian? (My mother is a lesbian.) Now picture the boy from the last paragraph, a year older now, trying to explain to his new suburban friends where his second mother sleeps at night without lying. My brother's room was upstairs in the attic, although his residency was short-lived; he would be kicked out of the house for skipping school to practice with his hardcore band and pissing in a garbage bag he kept hanging in his closet. I had my own room on the second floor, paneled in knotty pine; my sister was next door, forever doing her homework in a bedroom as immaculate as my brother's was vile. My classmates in junior high school wore flannel and listened to unbelievable crap: Aldo Nova and Billy Squier. There was no way to backslide from The Clash, at least not quite that far, and I consoled myself in the middle ground of my favorite album that year, The Kinks' Give The People What They Want. My favorite song was a romp about a missing DJ called "Around the Dial" [MP3] - the lament of a loyal listener whose barometer of cool has gone AWOL.
Where did you go, Mr. D.J.?
Did they take you off the air?
Was it something that you said to
The corporation guys upstairs?
It wasn't the pressure,
You never sounded down.
It couldn't be the ratings,
You had the best in town.
Somehow I'm gonna find ya, track
You down.
Gonna keep on searchin',
Around and around and 'round and
Round . . .
I played this song for my cousin Pele when our Swedish relatives came to visit us that spring, hoping he would find the song's depiction of frustration, loneliness and devotion to an invisible comrade-in-music as compelling as I did. He waited politely at the end of my bed in his bright white tennis outfit while I fell quiet and turned up the volume. We were the same age (12). He had come to school with me that week and remarked, over a lunch of pizza and tater tots in the cafeteria, that I was two years behind him in my math class. He played competitive table tennis at his school and grew sullen whenever I called it "Ping Pong." For weeks after he had left, girls with Def Leppard hair would stop me in the hallways and ask when my cute foreign cousin was coming back.
"So?" I asked him when the song was over.
Pele shrugged and gave me a non-committal smile, the same way he shrugged at almost everything I showed him. He seemed disappointed by what he found in America, bored with our lives, and determined to be sweet about it. It was almost as if he had read Max Weber's theory of 'charismatic leadership' and decided that he was in the company of a follower - in a country full of them. There was no need to point it out.
"So what's your favorite band?" I asked, blushing as I slipped the Kinks record back into its sleeve.
"Ultravox." [MP3]
III.
A Dungeon Master is a childhood leadership position marked by a kind of anti-charisma. In the order of Dungeons and Dragons (or "D & D"), the Dungeon Master is supreme, the world's Creator, Referee, and, more often than not, Supplier of Beverages and Snacks. If the players he oversees are aware that they are strange, unpopular, and invisible to girls - and they are - then they are also aware that he - the Dungeon Master - is even stranger, more unpopular, and will probably be a virgin until he is 25. They need him to play the game and hate him for what they're doing out of necessity, for who they are.
Buffy had been our Dungeon Master for the long, intricate games of D & D we played on the island off the coast of Maine where my family spent its summers. Buffy's house was on a ground moraine above the water, with big picture windows, and since the island was often enveloped in fog, we played in isolation from the world, a fire cracking in the stone hearth, the sun fading in and out and crows shrieking at the seagulls from the treetops.
Buffy had been permanently altered by the prissy nickname his parents had given him; he carried the stigma of the social pariah. His bowl cuts were crooked. His jeans fell down and showed the pallid cleft of his ass. He leapt wildly at loud noises and kept an arsenal of nunchaku and throwing stars. As the Dungeon master he was also our DJ during those summerlong games of D&D and, while he tolerated the bands that my friend Geoff and I liked - Ultravox, New Order, The Cure - and that would eventually lead us out of social isolation when "New Music" caught on, Buffy's taste was more esoteric and unforgiving. Unrepentantly so. His favorite albums were Brian Eno'sBefore and After Science and Here Come the Warm Jets. We hated him for this! And so with music, on a fogged-in island off the coast of Maine, we played out the drama of outcasts who want to be normal and their friend who refuses to compromise.
There we are, the three of us, in the woods with a battery-powered boom box. Sitting on a balancing log or swinging from a knotted rope in the Outward-Bound style ropes course Buffy's father has built behind their house to make his son more popular. Nunchaku and freshly sharpened throwing stars are strewn around. The woods are peaceful. Buffy cues up one of his stalwart Eno songs - "King's Lead Hat" [MP3] or "Baby's on Fire" [MP3] - and a charge fills the spruce- and mushroom-scented air. We hate him! We always have! For his odd relationship to clothing, for his tolerance for cacophony and Eno's perverse idea of a pop song, for the way he walks in the woods at night without carrying a flashlight and bumps into deer. Who bumps into deer? Soon Buffy is tied to a spruce tree, resigned to another afternoon of bondage, not even pleading with us, while Geoff and I are winging throwing stars past his ear, threatening him with his own nunchaku. "Eat it, Buffy! Eat the carbon steel!"
He was our friend. We hated him. And I have to ask: was it something dark inside of us that made us turn on Buffy the way we did, or was it all Brian Eno's fault?
. . . . . . . . . .
Benjamin Anastas is the author of An Underachiever's Diary and The Faithful Narrative of a Pastor's Disappearance
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Credits: "Pressure Drop" available on Super Black Market Clash; "Wolfpack," by D.Y.S.; "Around The Dial" available on Give The People What They Want; "New Europeans" available on Vienna; "King's Lead Hat" and "Baby's on Fire" available on Before and After Science and Here Come The Warm JetsLabels: benjamin anastas, writer's week
posted by Alex
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