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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
LINK |
Tuesday, December 26, 2006
DIVINE RESIDUE
Things were getting weird. The crowning strangeness was still a long way off - the visitation of a reality so fucked up it had the highly staged and inescapable quality of a nightmare - but like the poet whose epic I still haven't read I found myself midway on my life's journey, living alone in someone else's dream house, and teaching writing at a small college in the mid-Atlantic region. This should have been a cushy setup and I had no reason (being asleep) to think otherwise. But let me repeat: things were getting weird. Every morning, while the weather was still warm enough, I drank coffee and got my first words in outside on the screened-in porch, listening to the birds and the distant rumbling of exploding ordinance at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds. Whether they were detonating artillery shells, missiles, or smart bombs bound for Afghan wedding parties, I never knew - only that when something really big exploded on the other side of Chesapeake Bay, the birds would fall silent and the porch shook. Later, when I drove past fallow soybean and cornfields on my way to campus, planning that day's lecture for the students who - to my surprise - insisted on coming to class, as they say, religiously, I would listen to the album that got me through the year at ear-splitting volume, with the sunroof cracked: Separation Sunday by The Hold Steady.
MULTITUDE OF CASUALTIES
The Hold Steady
Seperation Sunday
French Kiss : 2005
[Buy It]
I spent a lot of time listening to Separation Sunday with the sunroof cracked that year, driving in circles around a college town where there was nothing to eat when I was hungry or making trips back to New York to try and take the edge off the strangeness of it all. It felt good to have an album again - that peculiar long-form progression of songs from the Vinyl Age that opened in your hands like an oversized book (if you were lucky) and merged with a period of life so effortlessly - even if, since I had bought Separation Sunday from iTunes, I had no idea who the members of The Hold Steady were, I had to guess some of the lyrics, and I would never feel the weight of the album as I slipped the cover back into its place. Blame it on repetition, or the genetic taste for narrative, or the fact that every song was like a guilty pleasure circa. 1986; but there were times - short-lived - when the songs on Separation Sunday took on the quality of my own memories. (Let me say it once more: things were getting weird.) I know something about religion, I know songs by heart that I haven't heard in twenty years, and there are days when it feels like being seventeen really is forever. A writer could spend a lifetime trying to spin what he knows about God, sex, drugs, and sadness into language; Separation Sunday covers all the bases in eleven songs, lasting, played in succession, right around forty-two minutes.
DON'T LET ME EXPLODE
The Hold Steady
Seperation Sunday
French Kiss : 2005
[Buy It]
I did what I always do when sleep gets hard and life seems bewildering - I went to church to share in the fellowship of strangers and soak up a little surplus mystery. I'd chosen a mega-church on the other side of the bay, affiliated with the Assemblies of God, where the Holy Spirit would be present, the A/V system would impress, and the message would be boiled down to slogans for self-improvement and easier living. I prefer to go to services at night, when the lonely and devout come out of their hiding places; it was fully dark by the time an attendant in safety orange waved me into an empty corner of the vast parking lot. I walked into the worship center, took the program that was pressed into my hand, and headed past the security detail on my way into the sanctuary. The band was in the early stages of warming up - a Bruce Hornsby-like ensemble with the leader on piano - and while they tinkered with their opening I chose an empty pew and watched believers filter down the aisles to their seats. It was a diverse crowd, some old, others young, a few Asian families arriving en masse, lots of retirement age white men in golf shirts, attached by the hip to their wives, and elderly black women in hats and colorful business suits. No one joined me in the pew before the service started, or afterwards either, when stragglers, getting into the spirit, clapped along to the band in the aisles and raised their arms high up in the air. It wasn't the kind of music that made me feel ecstatic - there was no danger in the melody, no promise of oblivion in the rhythm section - but then again, I was a visitor in that house of worship. I tried to let myself be moved. I closed by eyes when the time came. I waited for the Holy Spirit. I listed to the murmuring of tongues and tender calls to the savior ("I love you, Jesus. I love you, Jesus"). I didn't feel holy, or saved, or even vaguely transfigured. At the end of the service I bought a turkey sandwich from a church volunteer for $2.25 and ate it on the freeway in the dark, listening to The Hold Steady.
CRUCIFIXION CRUISE
The Hold Steady
Seperation Sunday
French Kiss : 2005
[Buy It]
I had looked forward to driving down Sunset with Beck's "Earthquake Weather" playing - loud - on the stereo in my rental car, but after a few minutes the song revealed itself to be entirely ball-less (what do you expect from a Scientologist?) and so I listened to The Hold Steady instead. I came to Los Angeles to haunt an international gathering of the Pentecostal movement and I spent a week in the convention center, on charter buses, in prayer groups, at church services, conducting interviews, chatting with holy strangers, and enduring prayers for my salvation with laminated press credentials hanging from my neck. I came because I was curious and I had something that I wanted to write; but I also came to the Pentecostals - let's face it - because I was feeling damaged. They knew this, despite my denials of any personal interest in being saved, and I grew to appreciate being at the center of a clutch of people calling out to the Creator. I met a woman who believed the Holy Spirit had entered her through the head and traveled down her spinal column (in the form of a gel) to heal a painful birth defect. I met a U.S. military chaplain, originally from Nigeria, who had seen too much misery in his two tours of duty in Iraq and came to Los Angeles to be healed. I met drug addicts, preachers, frauds, adulterers, nut jobs, holy fools blowing on shofars, Christian mimes from Pasadena, and a former cheerleader who spent hours by herself in a corner of the convention center, dancing with a flag in a gold one-piece bathing suit. They knew something I didn't - that is, how to be saved. And if their salvation seemed like a strange hallucination to me, who was I to argue?
BANGING CAMP
The Hold Steady
Seperation Sunday
French Kiss : 2005
[Buy It]
It was there in Los Angeles, among the Pentecostals, that I learned the truth about religion and saw the soul of Separation Sunday, a great rock record.
Or as the preacher said: Hey, sweet recovery.
C'mon
Won't you wade into the water with me?
. . . . . . . . . .
Benjamin Anastas is the author of An Underachiever's Diary and The Faithful Narrative of a Pastor's DisappearanceLabels: benjamin anastas, the hold steady
posted by Alex
LINK |
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
. . . . . . . . . .
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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