Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life

by Steve Almond

  Moving in Stereo

  In 1984, I left California for Wesleyan University, in Middletown, Connecticut, ready to embrace the incredibly exciting musical options available to nascent Fanatics. Such as, for instance, Wang Chung and Wham! and Willie Nelson and Julio Iglesias and all the girls that Willie Nelson and Julio Iglesias had loved before, though presumably not at the same time. Madonna’s undergarments were on MTV. Michael Jackson’s head was on fire. Corey Hart was wearing his sunglasses at night. It was a confusing time.

  I immediately fell in with the most confused guys on my freshman hall. Eric was a ska/punk aficionado (a skunker?) who tromped about in trench coat and porkpie hat, simmering with vaguely proletarian indignation. His favorite band was an obscure quartet called the Reducers, coastal Connecticut’s answer to the Ramones. Davey was a math geek from central Jersey, with all the charisma that description implies. His hero was Scraping Foetus Off the Wheel (also known as You’ve Got Foetus on Your Breath). Industrial music, it was called.

  We were all desperate for a show on the college station, WESU, but the orientation session was presided over by a cabal of pimpled upperclassmen who gave precedence to nubile frosh. Davey knew somebody who knew somebody, so he got a gig subbing on the overnight shift. I joined him in-studio, though he never let me talk into the mic, a foul-smelling lead device that hung pornishly over the soundboard. I was there to fetch him records, a pointless task given that all he ever played was Foetus, along with Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s amphetamized cover of “Born to Run,” which we both adored.

  I can’t remember a single class I took my first two years of college, let alone the ideas I was supposed to be absorbing. But I can remember with piercing aural precision my favorite songs: the jaunty fretwork that drove “Oblivious” by Aztec Camera, the sweet stuttered hook of They Might Be Giants’ “Don’t Let’s Start,” the ubiquitous fascist cabaret of Depeche Mode’s “Master and Servant.” Everyone was listening to the Smiths and the Cure. They were so romantically depressed, which seemed the thing to be, though I was more drawn to the horny angst of the Violent Femmes, whose debut was the lone cool album I already owned.

  One day Davey played me a copy of Run-D.M.C.’s “Rock Box.” It was the first rap song I’d ever heard and not at all representative of the genre, in that it was built around a guitar riff of Zeppelinesque enormity. Every time someone played the song in our dork kingdom I raced up and down the hall howling “Calvin Klein’s no friend of mine, don’t want nobody’s name on my behind.”

  Sophomore year I moved with Davey to an off-campus apartment overlooking a Dunkin Donuts. The place smelled like fried dough until it began to smell like garbage, thanks to Davey, and I fled to Israel where I endeavored to give a shit about Judaism and stuffed falafel in my piehole and panted after a woman who turned me on to Suzanne Vega. Her debut album was just out and we listened to those dark delicate fairy tales constantly, talking late into the night about God and love and whether we were ever going to do it.

  I climbed Masada that spring and floated in the Dead Sea and stowed away on a Greek ship. I walked past a Jerusalem pizza parlor half an hour before a bomb exploded inside. I humped poorly in various exotic locales. But the moment I remember as the most thrilling of that era was opening a package from my pal Evan and finding inside a bootleg of the Violent Femmes’ third album, The Blind Leading the Naked.

  The DJ Gene

  It is my belief that human beings have something in their DNA that makes them crave control of their sonic environment such that long ago, in the valley of Neander, cavemen would invite each other over for a party and the host caveman would start beating out his favorite rhythm on, say, a stalactite, hoping to attract the attentions of the assembled caveladies, until one of his guests came up to him and suggested a different beat. The host, trying to appear casual, would say, “Yeah, that sounds cool. Maybe we can do that beat later,” then resume drumming, at which point the other cavedude would press the matter—“Everyone’s getting kind of, you know, tired of that beat”—at which point things turned ugly.

  I have found nothing in the evolutionary literature to support this notion, though admittedly I have not yet inspected any of the evolutionary literature. Regardless, by junior year, my DJ Gene was pulsating violently. I had managed to insinuate myself into the WESU hierarchy by becoming a sports broadcaster, which led to my own predawn music show, and access to the thousands of LPs crammed onto the station’s splintery shelves.

  I was hopelessly intoxicated by the idea that I controlled the world’s stereo system, along with a giant catalogue of music, much of it advance material that no one had heard yet. I showed up hours early for my show to browse the new releases. That’s how I found All Fools Day, an album of swaggering Celtic soul by an Australian quartet called the Saints. That’s also how I found Folksinger, by Phranc, a lesbian folksinger with a flattop who crooned about celebrity coroners and female mud wrestling. After my show, I took these records into the auxiliary studio and listened to them over and over until one of the techies, in a moment of uncharacteristic pity, showed me how to copy records onto cassette. It was like hunting for treasure, particularly if I went trolling in the massive, unkempt archives where, one lucky morning, I stumbled across an old Fleshtones record that included the track “Hexbreaker,” a rousing anthem that sounded like the MC5 crashing headlong into Otis Rush.1 I played it at least once a show.

  I also began hitting up friends for musical tips. I was a resident adviser that year (official hall motto: Nothing That Could Get Me Sued) and one of my frosh—a Beverly Hills hipster—slipped me the debut album by a Scottish quartet called Del Amitri, recorded when the lead singer was about twelve. It was (and is) a perfect pop record: a brisk journey into romantic ruin. It wasn’t enough that I loved Del Amitri—or the Femmes or the Saints or Phranc—I needed everyone to love them.

  Why? Why wasn’t it enough for me to enjoy these fine musicians? Why did it immediately become my job to spread the good news? It’s a question that plumbs the heart of the Drooling Fanatic. There’s the genetic explanation, of course. And the younger-brother-chip-on-my-shoulder thing. But my compulsion had a tangled erotic aspect, too. I wanted to feel a certain kind of possession. Like any crush, it was partly about the narcissism of my own desire. And it was more than that. I wanted other people to feel what I felt, inside, when those songs came on. Deep down I saw them as a solution to the crisis of my loneliness.

  Reluctant Exegesis:

  “(I Bless the Rains Down in) Africa”

  I said before that there is no objectively “bad” music. I must now amend that statement. In so doing, let me cite Duke Ellington, who once famously declared that “there are only two kinds of music: good music and bad music. And by bad music I mean specifically the song ‘(I Bless the Rains Down in) Africa’ by Toto.” Ellington died two years before Toto formed as a band, which speaks to his prescience.

  What makes “(I Bless the Rains Down in) Africa” so bad? Mostly, it’s the lyrics. Also, the instrumentation, the vocals, and that virulent jazz-lite melody, which, despite the manifest wretchedness of everything I’ve just mentioned, means that you are no doubt conjuring the song even as you read this—those hypnotic banks of synthesizer and phony “tribal”-sounding drums—and without at all meaning to, sort of … grooving to “(I Bless the Rains Down in) Africa,” sort of digging it, sort of bathing in the buttery memory of sixth grade or tenth grade and hand jobs and lip gloss and really actually kind of remembering, or rediscovering, how much you love “(I Bless the Rains Down in) Africa” even as you’re hating yourself for this love. It’s complicated.

  So are the lyrics:

  I hear the drums echoing tonight

  But she hears only whispers of some quiet conversation

  She’s coming in 12:30 flight

  The moonlit wings reflect the stars that guide me towards salvation

  Our hero is waiting for a female whose plane arrives just after midnight. Got it. This
seems to place him in or around an airport, the sort of airport within earshot of drums. He can see the wings of the plane, which are lit by the moon and also, curiously, able to reflect stars.

  I stopped an old man along the way

  Hoping to find some long forgotten words or ancient melodies

  He turned to me as if to say, “Hurry boy, it’s waiting there for you”

  Suddenly our hero is no longer waiting around some poorly soundproofed airport. No, he’s on a journey, presumably outside. He encounters an unidentified old man. Contrary to the dangling modifier, it is the speaker, not the old man, who is hoping to find some long-forgotten words or ancient melodies. The old man will supply these, because the old man is African and all Africans, by definition, possess ancient melodies. The old African then turns to our hero. It is a complex physical gesture, one that manages to convey a vital and perhaps ancient truth: our hero must hurry! Why? Because “it’s waiting there” for him. What is “it”? Where is “there”? Only the old African knows for sure.

  It’s gonna take a lot to drag me away from you

  There’s nothing that a hundred men or more could ever do

  I bless the rains down in Africa

  Gonna take some time to do the things we never had

  We now have reached the swelling chorus, in which our hero, still awaiting his plane-bound paramour and, at the same time, questing “there” in search of “it,” confesses his devotion to an unknown love object that we can only assume is the female on the plane. This devotion is stronger than a fairly sizable militia. It is a devotion so overwhelming, in fact, that our hero—well, you already guessed this, didn’t you?—blesses the rains down in Africa. This tells us two things. First, he is north of Africa. Second, he is in a position to bless rain.

  The sudden introduction of Africa as a thematic element might seem dissonant, but is easily explained by the “Africa” creation story, as related by Toto keyboardist David Paich: “Over many years, I had been taken by the UNICEF ads with the pictures of Africa and the starving children. I had always wanted to do something to connect with that and bring more attention to the continent. I wanted to go there, too, so I sort of invented a song that put me in Africa. I was hearing the melody in my head and I sat down and played the music in about ten minutes. And then the chorus came out. I sang the chorus out as you hear it. It was like God channeling it. I thought, ‘I’m talented, but I’m not that talented. Something just happened here!’” Paich then worked on the lyrics for another six months.

  The wild dogs cry out in the night

  As they grow restless longing for some solitary company

  I know that I must do what’s right

  Sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti

  I seek to cure what’s deep inside, frightened of this thing that I’ve

  become

  Our hero is now clearly located in Africa, a place David Paich would very much like to go. We know this because there are wild dogs that cry out at night. It’s unclear why these dogs would seek “solitary company” or what “solitary company” might be, but never mind—Paich only had six months to work on the words. The dogs remind our hero that he is on a quest. In fact, he has a moral obligation whose looming presence he compares to a famous mountain rising like another famous mountain over a famous desert, although, intriguingly, the mountain in question does not actually rise above the desert in question because it is several hundred miles away. Regardless, our hero is struck by the realization that he is sick. He’s become a thing of which he is frightened. It remains unclear whether finding “it” “there” will remedy this deep-seated thingdom.

  What is clear at this point in the song is that David Paich recognizes the unique versatility of the word “thing,” which here alludes to a person of indeterminate turpitude while elsewhere serving as a noun simultaneously representing activities and possessions.

  Hurry boy it’s waiting there for you

  It’s gonna take a lot to drag me away from you

  That’s nothing that a hundred men or more could ever do

  I bless the rains down in Africa, I bless the rains down in Africa

  I bless the rains down in Africa, I bless the rains down in Africa

  I bless the rains down in Africa

  Our hero now reiterates his spiritual bond to Africa.

  Dear Drought-Plagued Continent, he is saying. You really remind me of this chick I want to sleep with. Something about you—maybe it’s the wild dogs or the ancient melodies or the starving children I watch on TV-makes me realize I’ve been working too hard. I need to give myself more time to do and consume things with my lady, who I wish would get here already. In return, I bless your rains.

  There are, of course, many muddled romantic fantasies with artificial backdrops in the pantheon of pop music. The remarkable thing about this one is that it expresses so many quintessentially American attitudes at once:

  The consumption of televised suffering grants me moral depth

  Benevolence begins and ends in my imagination

  Africa sure be exotic

  All this consuming and appropriating is tiring—break time!

  Rather than exposing us to the hard-won truth of individual experience, the song immerses us in the Karo syrup of an entire culture’s mass delusion. It is the lovechild of Muzak and Imperialism.2

  1. This description is a prime example of what I call an Obnoxious Rock Critic Moment (ORCM, pronounced or-kum). It is intended to suggest a false degree of sophistication via fancy words and/or allusions the lay reader probably doesn’t recognize, and which are not sonically precise but look good on paper. In the present case, though citing the MC5 makes sense, I have only a vague idea of who Otis Rush is—blues player, old, black?—because I was under the impression that he recorded the song “You Make Me Wanna Shout,” when, in fact, it was the Isley Brothers.

  2. Did any of this dawn on me during the winter of 1983, as I wooed the lovely and freckled Ali Vickland in a variety of suburban parking lots? Hell no. I knew only that “Africa” was the ideal song for advancing my sexual agenda, in that it was catchy in a quiet-storm sort of way and implied that I was worldly and perhaps socially conscious and therefore—by some mysterious adolescent calculus best left unparsed—could be trusted not to talk publicly about the size and shape of her boobs.

  How I Became a Music Critic

  I very much wish I could skip over the part of the story where I take voice lessons and join a gospel choir. You really don’t want to hear about this, especially if you’re me. The short version:

  Having failed at piano—and putting aside a disastrous stab at saxophone—I decided late in college that I would follow in my father’s footsteps by singing. The only lesson I can remember in any detail is the week I attempted to sing “Country Death Song” by the Violent Femmes. The tune is about an insane hillbilly who throws his daughter down a well, and is sung in the manner one would associate with insane hillbillies, which is to say not a manner one would associate with formal voice training. I believe this is what appealed to me about the song. My voice teacher’s expression was the sort you see on certain trauma patients.

  Did I give up? No. That’s my problem. I don’t give up enough. Instead, I joined Wesleyan’s gospel choir, the Ebony Singers. I was allowed to do so thanks to a shortage of black men willing to sing the bass parts. Our section consisted of me and three other white guys. Picture a barbershop quartet. Now picture them surrounded by black women howling about the blood of the lamb. Now picture the white guys trying to clap along and stomp their feet. Now stop.

  My career as an Ebony Singer was meteoric, in the sense that something large and flaming (my ego) crashed into something larger and unhappy (an audience). This was the result of the choirmaster’s baffling decision to allow me to perform a solo in concert. I settled on a pitch two octaves above my natural range. I also did a little James Brown clinch with the mic. If the Aryan Nation were in the market for a Mome
nt of Supreme Whiteness, I believe I provided one. And nobody got hurt, if you don’t count the crowd.

  Bob Dylan Is Also, Unbeknownst to Me, a Rock Star

  Having by now established my bona fides as a nonmusician, it’s time to outline my career as a bitter hack, which begins with a summer internship in the sports department of the Peninsula Times Tribune, Palo Alto’s hometown daily. One afternoon, the City Editor stood up in the middle of the newsroom and announced that the music critic was sick and he needed someone to review the Bob Dylan concert that night.

  There was nobody around, aside from the sports goons and the mushrooms on the copy desk—populations deeply, almost tenderly, committed to the avoidance of discretionary labor. I alone volunteered. As a reminder: I was the intern in the sports department. I had written exactly one story for the paper. It was about luge. The City Editor closed his eyes and pressed the heel of his palms into the sockets. “You know anything about Dylan?” he said finally.

  Did I know anything about Dylan? What did I not know about Dylan?

  The City Editor exhaled through his nose. “Fine.”

  Alas, one of the few things I didn’t know about Dylan was who, exactly, he was. So it was off to the library, where people went before God invented the Internet and where I discovered that Dylan had recorded 150 albums. I had four hours to memorize them.

  The show was at the Shoreline Amphitheater, a venue built atop a landfill in Mountain View. Dylan had just released Knocked Out Loaded and would soon join the Traveling Wilburys. It was not a good time for him, though I didn’t know that. I found a seat on the grass and started taking notes (i.e. I scribbled adjectives that seemed to bear some relation to the songs he was performing). Only I didn’t know the names of the songs he was performing. I had to lean over and ask my neighbors, though I waited until after Dylan had finished a song because my neighbors were all Drooling Dylan Fanatics, though often Dylan tore through three or four songs in a row which meant I had to get the rundown from my neighbors before the next burst of songs, and frantically scribble arrows (in the dark) to indicate which adjectives applied to which song titles, along with observations of significant physical detail, such as, “Dylan stares at crowd” and “Dylan turns away from crowd” and “Dylan appears to need a blood transfusion.”