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Wednesday, January 09, 2008
SENTIMENTAL FOOL
Roxy Music
Siren
Virgin:1975
[Buy It]
DREAMS NEVER END
New Order
Movement
Qwest:1981
[Buy It]
O.K., THIS IS THE POPE
Tones on Tail
Burning Skies 12"
Situation Two:1983
[Buy It]
MOTHER OF PEARL
Roxy Music
Concerto
Burning Airlines:2001
[Buy It]
If I had actually been deflowered by the saxophone player of Roxy Music when I was fourteen, how different would this story be? It was 1983 and, thanks to first-generation MTV and my sister's friend Ruthie (she would later reappear in our lives calling herself "Rutina," and even later still, the classic "Ruth"), who picked up a copy of "Avalon" for me in Harvard Square, I was listening to a lot of late, not-so-great Roxy Music on my crappy one-piece stereo console. Music was my life then, almost literally; I woke up to it before school, fell asleep by it at night, studied -- not so well -- with my favorite records on the turntable and lavished what little money I had to spend on imports and 12" singles in their thicker plastic sleeves, the extra layer of protection promising an experience that would cut right to the soul. I was certain that I had one, even if I didn't bother with the metaphysics -- where my soul resided, what substance was it made of, whether my soul was everlasting, etc. All I knew was that it throbbed sometimes, and that it had throbbed most often for a girl named Tori, who cut her hair in a bob, threw parties at her house and listened to "Wham!" with an irony that was beyond her years. (Some version of the Tori who I kissed in a bedroom that was already too small for her imagination is now married to Dennis Hopper and referred to as a "political activist" in Hollywood.) I knew from the beginning that she would break my heart - it happened with some squalid business under the banquet table at her junior prom - and afterwards I would console myself by listening to certain songs over and over again. One of the songs was "Sentimental Fool" by Roxy Music.Surely you cannot be leading me on?
Well if that's so, however can I love again?
How could I believe again?
Sentimental fool.
Knowing that your fate is cruel.
You ought to forget it. My best friend in high school was named Michael and we both had a secret that everyone knew but no one ever talked about. Michael's father had died suddenly in a car accident a few years before I met him, lending he and his brothers the aura that comes with having survived the unthinkable. It was something like grace, and something like a living death. I was being raised by two mothers in a fringe suburb across a highway overpass from the campus of the private boys' school where I went, lending me the aura, I understand now, of the probable faggot. I didn't make it easier by listening to bands like Roxy Music and wearing an earring in one ear, but I also didn't care what the bow-legged hockey players and their hangers-on thought of me. As long as they weren't snickering behind me as we filed into chapel and saying, just loud enough for me to hear, "Tori didn't even fuck him, fucking faggot."
Michael and I took the T into Boston every Saturday to go record shopping at the original Newbury Comics or play instruments in all of the music stores in the neighborhood. I am certain that we talked about music, dissecting the tracks of New Order's "Movement" for the moments that made them genius, or expressing hope that Tones on Tail would fulfill the promise of Bauhaus. But what I remember most about those weekends, now, is the silence. A silence over the record bins, a silence on the bus, a silence as we looked out the windows on the commuter train. When we got back to Michael's house we would repair to his bedroom and listen to the records, commenting every now and then on a lyric or some finer point of the production, and when the listening was done and there was nothing else to say we would fall silent again.
Was that silence filled with everything we knew about each other but never mentioned out loud? Everything that made us feel wary or somehow set apart from the others? (I have watched enough episodes of Freaks & Geeks to know that everyone stuck in high school feels that way.) Was the music we loved so much a part of who we were that we needed a break between each track of our conversation - a deeper groove for the needle to fall into before it rose to meet the next song, the next progression in our friendship?
When Michael's father had died the family sold their house - the biggest, brightest white mansion I had ever seen, with a circular drive and a tall wooden fence - and built a new, contemporary home on an adjacent lot. From the window of Michael's bedroom, where we listened to the records that we bought, you could see his family's former house in all its splendor. What was it like? I wondered while our records played, trying not to glance out the window too obviously. Was it hard to look outside your bedroom and see the life you'd lived before? The life that had been taken away for no reason? I don't know why I couldn't wait for the side of the record to end and ask Michael in those words. Maybe I was worried that it would disrupt the silent pact that we seemed to have made - or maybe I was just scared of what he would try and find out about my own unmentioned life when his turn came.
The first novel that I ever wrote, when I was nineteen, was set in Michael's house. Don't ask me what it's called now or what it was about, other than the silence and that view - I don't remember. It came within a hair's breadth of getting published when I was still an undergraduate. (The manuscript and letters from my agent at the time are stored away in my mother's attic.) Ever since then I have learned to make my peace with the unresolved ending.The rhythm of love
It must go on
Can't stop.
The beat of your heart
Is like a drum
Will it stop? Before I return to the backstage deflowering that didn't happen on May 27, 1983, a word of explanation. (And an offering to those readers of Moistworks who feel that there isn't enough music in some of the music writing found here.) I have been listening to a lot of Roxy Music lately on my iPod and the crappy stereo console I plug it into, although this time I am listening to the live quasi-bootleg "Concerto," most of which was recorded in Denver in 1979. This was after Bryan Ferry had won his power-struggle with Brian Eno and the wizard in a feather boa left the band, but it was before Roxy Music got lost in the studio and became a mechanism for burnishing Bryan Ferry's romantic image - they still sound like a band with a living pulse and not background music for retail. I got my copy of "Concerto" from a good friend who is particularly generous with his music files, and just to confirm that things do change for the better, this friend and I talk freely and often about politics, movies, books, birth, death, marriage, divorce, travel, food, work, family, the future and bands.
I saw Roxy Music play live for the first and only time - on the eve of the band's breakup - at the Walter Brown Arena in Boston. It was the first concert of many that I would go to while I was addling myself with music to survive high-school, and it was also the first of many that I would go to with my friend Michael. The Walter Brown Arena was more commonly filled with rabid B.U. hockey fans, and I found it exhilarating to see the place taken over by so many men - boys, really - wearing trench coats, open tuxedo shirts and eye-liner. Most of the girls, as I remember it, had made every effort to resemble the thin, spectral models from Roxy Music's album covers, although given that it was Boston and the social order among misfits was always a little confused, there were also girls with tall orange Mohawks, studded leather jackets and fists smeared angrily with crosses drawn in permanent black marker. It was hard not to envy them a rebellion that was so ecumenical in its rejection of the beauty standard.
When the lights came up and Roxy Music opened with "The Main Thing" from "Avalon" we left our seats and went down to the floor to get closer to the stage. I truly believed, in every filament of my fourteen-year-old nervous system, as we nudged our way through a polite New Romantic crowd to the front, that I was about to be transformed. A band that I had been listening to on my stereo for months was just a few yards away, playing songs I knew by heart - every one of them. The PA was louder than anything I'd ever heard, the lights onstage were blinding, the smoke machines were pumping out sweet-smelling mystery to set the mood, and Bryan Ferry, the weary romantic hero, was playing his role with the detachment of a serial seducer. The spell was nearly complete, and I nodded my head to keep the beat and let the experience wash over me. Hey, I kept on telling myself. That's Roxy Music. That's Roxy Fucking Music.
A few songs into the show, with my eyes pinned mostly to Bryan Ferry or to the college girl with the ripped T-shirt dancing like a diving bell nearby (I saw her everywhere that year - I still see her in my mind's eye, summoned by certain songs, and she looks like a version of Tori that I never knew), I noticed that Andy Mackay, the band's tall and fluid saxophone player, was staring at me. It seemed so unlikely and anomalous that at first I let it pass; but as the show went on and the hockey rink grew smaller, sweatier and more intimate, his staring grew more insistent, even playful at times, and I stared back without acknowledging the strangeness of it all, thinking, well, that I was at a concert for the first time and this must be the thing to do. I remember feeling embarrassed by the attention, a deeper than usual flush rising on my cheeks, and I looked around expecting Michael and all of the other people standing near us in the crowd to have noticed what was going on. But they were watching the show in varying states of boredom and ecstasy, and I found myself alone with Andy Mackay and his desire. It made me feel special, it made me feel weird, and when he continued staring at me through the set list, even finding me between notes when he played long lilting solos on the oboe, I turned away from him and watched the rest of the band instead. Every boy by the age of fourteen has encountered the look of implicit invitation in a grown man's eyes, and for some unfulfilled reason, on the night of May 27, 1983, I received an invitation from the saxophone player for Roxy Music.
That's it. I hope it's not a letdown. You can argue that what I just described was a dream or a projection, but I was there that night, and I know what passed between us. It was one more thing that I never talked about with my best friend Michael - I didn't mention how I felt the whole way back to his house, although I was troubled - one more experience that owes its birth, and its persistence over time, to music.
Later, as I grew up, I would see bands closer to their peak and end a thrilling night with exactly who I wanted to at a late-night party or in a sleeping bag in someone's basement, intoxicated by the warm body I was so into I had it memorized - scars, freckles, blisters, the ghost of a hickey on her neck from the last time we'd been together. I couldn't even remember the feeling of heartbreak. It was then that I understood why Andy Mackay had done nothing wrong - nothing wrong at all - by picking me out of the crowd and inviting me to let him fuck me when I was fourteen.
Does that make me a sentimental fool?
. . . . . . . . . .
Benjamin Anastas is the author of An Underachiever's Diary and The Faithful Narrative of a Pastor's DisappearanceLabels: benjamin anastas, rock
posted by Alex
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