Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life
Page 1
Also by Steve Almond
(Not that You Asked): Rants, Exploits,
and Obsessions
Which Brings Me to You
(with Julianna Baggott)
The Evil B.B. Chow and Other Stories
Candyfreak: A Journey Through the
Chocolate Underbelly of America
My Life in Heavy Metal
To Richard and Barbara Almond
who continue to make beautiful music together.
We are ugly, but we have the music.
—Leonard Cohen
Contents
Intro: Bruce Springsteen Is a Rock Star, You Are Not
Gratuitous List #1: Bands Shamelessly Overexposed by the “Alternative” Press
Chapter 1: The DF Starter Kit (No Assembly Required!)
Interlude: Paradise Theater, American Classic
Chapter 2: Moving in Stereo
Reluctant Exegesis: “(I Bless the Rains Down in) Africa”
Chapter 3: How I Became a Music Critic
Interlude: Why Covering the Grammys Is Not as Glamorous as You May Have Been Led to Believe
List #2: Ten Things You Can Say to Piss Off a Music Critic
Chapter 4: Configurations (or How the Industry F’d Us)
List #3: Rock’s Biggest Assholes
Chapter 5: What Songs Do
Reluctant Exegesis: “Fade to Black”
Chapter 6: Nil Lara Was Our Messiah
Interlude: Five Really Stupid Things I’ve Done as a Drooling Fanatic
Chapter 7: On the Varieties of Fanatical Experience
List #4: Rock’s Top Ten Religious Freaks
Chapter 8: How Hip-Hop Sounds in a Canyon
Interlude: Winter in America with Gil Scott-Heron
Chapter 9: In Which Mr. Joe Henry (Rather Unwittingly) Becomes My Writing Coach
Interlude: A Mercifully Brief Survey of Prog Rock Lyricism
Chapter 10: The Mating Habits of the Drooling Fanatic
Reluctant Exegesis: “All Out of Love”
Chapter 11: The Marriage of Fanatico
Interlude: The Kip Winger Canon
Chapter 12: Burying the Dead with Ike Reilly
List #5: Top Ten Covers of All Time
Chapter 13: Why in God’s Name Am I Managing a Band? The Boris McCutcheon Story
Interlude: A Frank Discussion of My Mancrush on Bob Schneider
Chapter 14: How Dave Grohl Taught Me to Stop Whining and, Against Every Known Impulse in My Body, Embrace Happiness
List #6: I See Your Muffin and Raise You a Pirate: The Many Silly Names of Rock Star Spawn
Chapter 15: Dayna Kurtz Sings the World a Lullaby
Outro: Drooling Fanaticism in the Age of Actual Drooling
Appendix A: The Official Drooling Fanatic Desert Island Playlist
Acknowledgments
Permission Acknowledgments
Bruce Springsteen Is a Rock Star, You Are Not
On a warm spring night three years ago, The Close called me up in a state of agitation. He had something I needed to see. This was a Tuesday, late, but I was at loose ends, meaning lonely and despicable. “Right,” I said. “Let me find my pants.”
The pants were necessary because The Close had moved across the Charles River into Boston proper, whereas I was still in Somerville, a city sometimes compared to Paris by people who have never visited either place. I suppose it’s important to know that The Close and I were writers and that we spent most of our waking hours sitting at our keyboards making poor decisions, or cursing those poor decisions, or avoiding our keyboards altogether and feeling crushed by guilt, or (most often, actually) sitting at our keyboards not making any decisions at all because we were too busy cursing the obscurity to which we felt damned. Hey, it’s a living. Also: while both of us had enjoyed years of misbehavior, the terrors of adulthood were now gently breathing down our necks in the form of our gentle fiancées, who were moving to town in a matter of weeks. Oh, and mine was pregnant.
The Close was smoking on the windowsill when I arrived. Nearby lay his binoculars, used to survey the windows of the building across the street for women in states of undress. He had one chair in his place, amid the Styrofoam take-out boxes and freshman compositions with titles such as “Why Raymond Carver Bores Me to Death.” He gestured for me to sit and clicked on his VCR. “This is Bruce Springsteen playing the Hammersmith Odeon in 1975.”
“Since when are you a Springsteen fan?” I said.
“Just fucking watch.”
The Close was from Jersey and spoke the native tongue, a clipped, tough-guy patois that implied a life spent amid mobsters. This was (like so much else about The Close) patently fraudulent. He taught literature at a famous university and quoted the Terrible Sonnets of Gerard Manley Hopkins at least once an hour. Nonetheless, The Close was a creature of passion. He wasn’t going to shut up until I watched.
The lights came up on the E Street Band, several of whom were wearing white fedoras. Springsteen appeared in black jeans and a tattered leather jacket. This was not the Bruuuuuuuce of recent popular imaginings: the airbrushed hunk with ass by Nautilus, or the elder statesman in dignified soul patch. No, this was Primordial Bruce, the scruffy kid with a goofy underbite and toothpick arms.
“Understand: Born to Run has just come out. Bruce is on the cover of Time and Newsweek the same week. They’re calling him the future of rock and roll.” The Close had his tongue practically inside my ear, jabbering these hot words of praise and envy. “The guy’s got the world hanging off his dick and he’s twenty-five years old. Can you imagine?”
“No,” I said.
What struck me, in fact, was that Bruce looked frightened. He kept fidgeting with his cap and he refused to face the crowd. When he finally did speak, he sounded like a high school kid playing drunk. “How’s things going over here in England and stuff, huh? All right?” The crowd hooted and Bruce laughed so hard he began gasping for air. He wanted everyone to understand how outrageous he found the situation: all these posh Londoners turning up to see his little bar band. It was one of those awkwardly phony moments designed to conceal something awkwardly real. Bruce was stalling. He hadn’t quite answered the question that haunts all budding superstars: Do I have what it takes to be who they say I am?
In the background, Roy Bittan played a piano run straight from the Motown playbook and Max Weinberg cracked at his drum set. Bruce staggered back to the microphone, only this time he spoke in a hushed growl. Oh Christ, I thought, he’s gonna try the black preacher thing. “Yuh know, on the eighth day, He looked down on a bunch of drunks in this bar and uh—” Bruce wrestled the mic from its stand and again turned away from the crowd. “He looked down on a bunch of drunks in this bar on the eighth day, and, and with a wave of his hand he said …
Sparks fly on E Street when the boy prophets walk it handsome and hot
And suddenly Bruce was singing, urgent and raspy, and the crowd, released back into the music, erupted, because this was after all “The E Street Shuffle,” Bruce’s creation song, slowed to a half tempo, recast as an epic soul ballad, sent reeling back, that is, to its country of origin, the fuzzy AM radios in those big-finned cars he’d cruised as a lonely dropout punk, listening to Otis and Roy and Sam, dreaming he would someday be them: the man with the golden voice, the fearless band, who escaped his prospects not by forgetting where he came from but by commemorating its joys and hardships in song, and then, just in case anyone missed the point, Bruce steered his crew into a languorous version of “Having a Party.”
The crowd was plowed. They’d never seen anything like Bruce, never seen a rock star swan dive from naked terror into poise, never heard a band reclaim Amer
ican popular music with such raucous elegance. They played for two hours solid, culminating in a doo-wop rendition of “Quarter to Three” that ended (and started again) half a dozen times. Bruce twirled in the rosy light, soaked through and howling.
“Why the fuck should he stop?” The Close shouted into my ear-hole. “He’s fucking killing those people. That’s what I want, brother. Seriously. Enough of this shit.” He gestured at the drafts scattered on his desk, the pitiful, noiseless words, then looked at me with his big sad Jersey eyes.
“Where the fuck did we go wrong?”
Yes, Where?
The Close expected me to say something wise, of course, because I’m his elder and because I frequently suffer from the notion that I have wise things to say. But it was past midnight by then and I was feeling just as wrecked as he was. We were, after all, in the twilight of our bachelorhood, our last hurrah as Dudes Who Might Be Anything, and so the perpetual adolescent dream of rock stardom had lashed up from the depths and seized The Close and he had called me because, well, misery loves another idiot with a jukebox where his soul should be.
Later, having driven home and heroically resisted getting stoned, I tapped out this e-mail:
Now look here, Close: I recognize that what we do rarely lands us anywhere near the basic human plumbing of instinct. Whereas Bruce, he liberates the riot inside of us and shakes our butts for good measure. But you’re a smart enough dope to recognize that all language is an aspiration to music. Our only refuge is that people need what we do, too, our own quieter songs.
Did The Close buy this horseshit? I would say no.
I certainly didn’t. I couldn’t shake the notion that we had gone wrong somewhere, that we belonged to some special category of the thwarted. We spent an inordinate number of hours mourning the fact that we had not wound up as rock stars or one-hit wonders or near-misses or bar bands or wedding bands or KISS cover bands.
We had wound up, instead, as wannabes, geeks, professional worshippers, the sort of guys and dolls who walk around with songs ringing in our ears at all hours, who acquire albums compulsively, who fall in love with one record per week minimum and cannot resist telling other people—people frankly not that interested—what they should be listening to and why and forcing homemade compilations into their hands and then calling them to see what they thought of these compilations, in particular the syncopated handclaps on track fourteen. For the purposes of dignity and common marketing, it would make sense to call us something catchy like, say, Superfans. But I’m going to nominate Drooling Fanatics, which better captures the embarrassingly regressive aspects of our tribe.
As a rule, DFs don’t play an instrument. We don’t even dance especially well, though we do jump up and down at live shows and scream an awful lot, usually the names of obscure songs the band recorded but never released in the States, or covers it performed as a lark on a cable access show nine years ago, a grainy video of which we tracked down online and now own. Our bright idea is that these outbursts will ingratiate us to the lead singer, or maybe the deadpan guitarist, and provoke an invitation to hang out backstage after the show.
Do we want to fuck the lead singer, or possibly the deadpan guitarist?
A fair question. If the DF in question is female, and the band is male, the answer is yes. If the DF is male, the answer is also yes, though to a lesser degree, determined by the taboos imposed on homosexuality in the mind and heart of the afflicted. The central desire, however, is not carnal. As noted, the DF would like, most of all, to be the lead singer or the deadpan guitarist, and would frankly settle for the fun-loving-but-not-terribly-thoughtful drummer.
What else?
DFs own at least three thousand albums at any given moment, with a core of our collection represented by any three of four configurations (digital, compact disc, vinyl, and cassette).
Despite a voracious appetite for new music, and a tragic misapprehension of our own cutting-edge tastes, we tend to attach ourselves to particular bands for long stretches, an affiliation that is both cloying and evangelical. We refer to band members by their first names. Friends, in turn, refer to band members as our “imaginary friends.”
Chances are, we’ve loaned money to musicians.
Chances are, we were DJs in college and had a show with a name so stupid we are vaguely embarrassed to mention it now, though we are quite happy to mention that we were DJs in college.
Chances are we’ve spent weeks in puzzled anguish over why our favorite band isn’t more popular, given how much the songs on the radio suck, though if our favorite band suddenly hit it big we’d feel more resentment than pride.
Chances are, the only periods of sustained euphoria in our lives have been accompanied by music.
No, Dude, I Really Mean It: Where’d We Go Wrong?
It’s not a talent thing.
I’m almost sure it’s not a talent thing. True, there are some folks who can’t hit a note without doing violence to it, and others (such as my dear wife, Erin) who have trouble with the rhythmic intricacies of the ABC Song. And there are always those annoying few at the far end of the bell curve—your Mozarts and Paganinis—endowed with talents that make God seem awfully choosy.
But it is my entirely unscientific belief that most people are born with the basic tools to become musicians. Britney Spears, for instance, has an inoffensive voice and the ability to suspend large reptiles from her boobs. The making, or rendering, of popular songs is more a matter of determination than aptitude. The central allure of American Idol (a show I have not actually seen) resides in this notion. It could be us. A bit of practice, a good tooth scrub, a few Xanax …
Consider the hubbub over Susan Boyle, the forty-eight-year-old Scottish woman who appeared last year on the British version of Idol. Standing onstage for her audition, Boyle looked like a Monty Python in drag. Then she opened her mouth and this epic noise came ripping out of her. Within a week, she was the most celebrated person on earth, an Emily Dickinson for the Internet age. The fame pundits enlisted to inspect phenomena of this sort took pleasure in noting how Boyle repudiated our pathological devotion to youth and beauty, as if rooting for a homely woman were cause for self-congratulation. But they missed the essence of her appeal, which was (and is) the powerful fantasy that a divine voice lurks within all of us, ready to obliterate all our liabilities and doubts and transform us into the stars we know ourselves to be.
The reason we are not all rock stars is because most of us are unprepared to do the sort of sustained and lonely work that would allow us to learn an instrument, let alone the broader language of music, let alone how to suspend a large reptile from our cleavage. And then further unprepared to compose our own songs and to perform them in front of other people and to do so with enough gusto that we might compel someone—many someones, actually—to pay for a recording of our songs. It’s a lot of labor, when you break it down. A lot of potential humiliation. So this book, though it will feature plenty of rock stars, and include many opinions related to rock stars, is centrally about what it’s like to be a Drooling Fanatic.
Disappointing, I know.
But most of human history—the vast underside—is about people not getting to do what they truly want to do. Prehistoric man, for instance, wanted to eat and fuck and sleep in peace, and he almost never got to do that. The inhabitants of the early republics dreamed of liberty, but most spent their lives in the yoke. Those of us with the dumb luck to be born in what we call the “modern” “developed” world can pretty much eat and fuck to our hearts’ content. We’ve got hours for dreaming, too, though a lot of that work has been outsourced to Hollywood. Consumption gets to be the star these days, because consumption pays the bills. I mean by this that American popular culture is almost entirely about consuming at this point and that any ideas or feelings expressed in the public domain arrive on behalf of products, generally with the gloss and subtlety of a fuck film. Welcome to the final stage of capitalism: porn.
But here’s a little
secret, between you, me, and the rest of the mall: buying shit isn’t enough. What we wish for in our secret hearts is self-expression, the chance to reveal ourselves and to be loved for this revelation, devoured by love. And thus, most of us go about our duties of commerce and leisure in a state of perpetual longing, with nocturnal excursions into the province of despair.
This book is for those of us who have converted such unrequited desires into noble obsessions. It happens to be about music (as opposed to ice cream or Picasso or the Dallas Cowboys) because music came before anything else, before language and large-scale war and liquid soap, and because music is the one giant thing America has done right, amid all it has done wrong. Music, that ancient and incorruptible bitch.
This Book Will Contain
Sometimes drunken interviews with America’s finest songwriters
The terrifying specter of Graceland stoned
A brief examination of my wretched music criticism
Recommendations you will often choose to ignore
A reluctant exegesis of the song “Africa” by Toto
Gratuitous lists
What Sort of Gratuitous Lists?
The sort rock critics are always making, only in reverse. For example:
Gratuitous List #1
Bands Shamelessly Overexposed by the “Alternative” Press
Sonic Youth
Yo La Tengo
Radiohead
Velvet Underground
Nirvana
Beck
Bright Eyes
Pavement
Red Hot Chili Peppers