Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life

by Steve Almond

  This is what struck me most forcefully as I sat around in grad school, hunting and pecking: how unafraid musicians were, the tremendous passionate rights they granted themselves. Forget exposition, backstory, the polite accretion of detail. They were in it for the impact. They wanted to fuck their fans up. Whereas us writers were left to toil in private, emptying ourselves onto blank pages and hoping someday our efforts might take root inside anonymous readers. We were emotional sperm donors. Was I seeing things a bit too dramatically? Well, of course I was; I was a graduate student.

  Graduation rid me of that privilege, but I remained inflamed by futility. To help matters along, I moved to a new city and wrote an eight-hundred-page novel about sixteenth-century Jewish mysticism, despite knowing nothing about the time period or topic. This tome took nearly two years to complete and put everyone I know to sleep. It was all quite prog.

  Joe Henry remained my role model. I still wanted to be able to tell stories the way he did, without bitterness or histrionics. Only I didn’t have melody or rhythm at my disposal. It felt hopeless. Then, one day, I was sitting around trying to write and failing and feeling sorry for myself and listening to Joe and this one line popped out of the speaker: Here comes the rapture of song and story. And this made me think of the opening line of the Iliad, which goes, Sing, Goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilles and its devastation. And this made me think of the lyric soliloquy delivered by Reverend Hightower in Faulkner’s Light in August. The connection in my head being that all language began in song and that the best stories inevitably return to song, to a state of rapture. For years, I had assumed that throwing beautiful words at the page would make my prose feel true. But I had the process exactly backward. It was truth that lifted the language into beauty and toward song.

  It was a matter of doing what Joe Henry did, of pursuing characters into moments of emotional truth and slowing down. The result was a compression of sensual and psychological detail that released the rhythm and melody in language itself, what Longfellow called “the happy accidents of language.” I wouldn’t have recognized it then, but I was trying to identify the process by which a writer might sing.

  Our Song

  It was Joe Henry who had triggered this epiphany, so I took the logical next step, abusing my marginal status as a “music journalist” to finagle an interview. It was my idea that Joe and I were going to become great friends, a dependable delusion among Fanatics. Well, I got the interview, anyway.

  And then something totally unprecedented happened: A few summers ago I received a remarkable e-mail from Mr. Henry. He knew me to be a writer and therefore attached a poem he’d composed on July 4th, asking if I “had any thoughts.” I did have a thought. Holy shit, I thought, Joe Henry just sent me something to read.

  The opening stanza described Willie Mays shopping for garage door openers at a Home Depot in Scottsdale, Arizona. I loved it, the unlikely collision of the archetypal and mundane. Then something unfortunate happened; the poem’s pathos sputtered into rage. There was a lot about how stupid Americans are. Red Bull was cited, as were the ravages of global warming. I was reminded (unpleasantly) of my own writing. And thus my next thought: I’m going to have to tell Joe Henry that his poem kind of sucks.

  By the time I’d composed my critique Joe had rewritten the poem and set it to music. He e-mailed me a demo of the song, just piano and voice. In its somber beauty, it called to mind Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” the dream of America as a holy wilderness whose decline is properly understood as a cause for lamentation, not sermons.

  Willie Mays was no longer being deployed as a frothing symbol of America’s greatness gone to lard. He had become a spokesman for the spiritual reckoning that would have to precede any national redemption. “This was my country,” he observed,

  This was my song

  Somewhere in the middle there

  Though it started badly and it’s ending wrong.

  This was God’s country,

  This frightful and this angry land

  But if it’s His will the worst of it might still

  Somehow make me a better man

  I now venture the following absurd claim: that this song, its very manner of composition, prophesied the end of the Bush Era, the false dream of aggression as salvation, the tireless denials and indecent projections of evil, and the beginning of the Obama Era, in its humility, in its bruised optimism and Afro-Christian evocations. I am not suggesting that Joe Henry set out to do anything other than express his deepest concerns. Only that these concerns were, to a startling degree, shared by his fellow citizens, as subsequent events would affirm.

  This is what artists do, actually—as the pundits fizz away in their bright studios, narrating our civic fate like a form of athletic combat—they transcribe the individual heart seeking a collective conscience, a reason to believe. You can certainly think of me as a sap for making such a grandiose statement, but listen to the song first.

  A Very Low Bar

  I kept trying to find excuses to interview Joe Henry again. I wanted to know more about how he composed his lyrics and whether he’d ever written fiction and whether he’d be willing to ghostwrite mine. We never got that far. But in the spring of 2008 Joe did agree to appear on a panel I’d organized in Los Angeles about the relationship between literature and songwriting. He suggested inviting his friend Aimee, who was also a musician. Aimee Mann, he meant.

  “Cool,” I said, as calmly as I could.

  Mann was everything I expected: smart, funny, gorgeous, and high-strung. A decade ago, I would have developed a raging crush on her, just for the sake of humiliating myself. But our panel had been scheduled for Sunday morning at the very rock and roll hour of 10:30 a.m. Aimee did not appear amused. I glanced down at my list of questions and quietly scratched out the one suggested by a friend: Can you talk about the symbolic undercarriage of the line, “Hush hush, keep it down now, voices carry”?

  The most fascinating thing about the panel, for me, was that Aimee Mann felt intimidated talking about songwriting next to Joe Henry. She went so far as to scoff at her reputation as a literary songwriter: “You mention that someone’s drinking coffee and it’s a Tuesday and suddenly you’re a genius. It’s a very low bar.”

  Without exactly meaning to, she drove the point home by performing “Freeway,” the single from her album @#%&*!Smilers. The song was a wry character sketch of the suburban wastrels who populate Southern California. Then Joe got up to sing “This Afternoon,” a track from 2003’s Tiny Voices. The difference was impossible to miss.

  Joe’s tale was told by a teenage prostitute in Havana who described his life on the afternoon Fidel Castro’s rebels captured the city. The details were precise and indelibly sad. The song cast the upheavals of history as a backdrop to the personal corruptions we endure. It was a Graham Greene novel, basically, set to soul music.

  Am I suggesting that Joe’s song was “better” than Aimee’s? Nope. The crowd enjoyed “Freeway” far more than “This Afternoon.” It had a catchier hook and chorus. It trafficked in the simple pleasures we expect from a pop song. And by simple I don’t mean dumb; I mean accessible.

  What I am suggesting is that Joe’s song was trying to transport us, trying to make us imagine what it would be like to be another human being. Aimee Mann doesn’t do that kind of work. She casts a gimlet eye on the world and offers her fans an “Aimee Mann song.” This is her solution to the crisis of sentiment: she assumes an ironic posture that protects her from excessive feeling.

  Joe’s solution is more complicated. He wants to impart deep feeling, but he doesn’t want anyone to get the idea that he’s blabbering about his heart. So he invents a world where he can safely project his emotional concerns. This is the essential impulse of a fiction writer.

  As I listened to the two of them, I got to thinking more broadly about the relationship between lyrics and artistic influence. The top of the charts will always be the preserve of those who voice the old
tropes with conviction. Since my baby left me and I’m crazy for loving you and I want to rock and roll all night. There was a time, before the rise of television and videos, when stars like Dylan or the Beatles made hits out of fictional creation. But today’s stars are much more like brands. Their personas—lovesick, nubile, wounded, enigmatic, whatever it is—have become the central product in all their songs.

  There are plenty of reasons Joe Henry hasn’t become a household name. His songs run six minutes and often involve jazz musicians. But the main thing is his lyrics. Whatever marketable persona he might present remains too submerged in his art. The same is true of Tom Waits, for instance, or Randy Newman. These guys are like brilliant short story writers living in an era of celebrity memoir. And I’m not sure this is a bad thing.

  The crowd at the panel had come out to hear Aimee Mann. She was the star attraction. But this fact made her seem oddly trapped: she had to be Aimee Mann. There was no room for surprise. Whereas, right at the end, when Joe got up and began to perform “Our Song,” a sense of wonder rippled through that auditorium. There was one woman in the front row whose face was alight. She had no idea who Joe Henry was. She knew only that she was going somewhere she hadn’t been before, and he was taking her there.

  11. Who is Chuck Prophet? Give me another forty pages.

  12. Oh, how I wish I could quote the rest of this song! But I cannot. I cannot because to do so would require express written consent from one or more multinational music corporations—which, it turns out, is only a little more difficult to secure than permission to reprint Blackwater’s internal memos—plus an unspecified payment, to be absorbed by your faithful Fanatic. So: yet another obstacle to writing about music. Despite the fact that there are literally hundreds of websites archiving song lyrics on the Internet, and that virtually anyone can quote lyrics, or, hell, even stream music to their heart’s content online, and despite the fact that most lyrics are of nominal literary value once stripped from their musical context—i.e., Miller, Steve, I speak of the pompatus of love—despite all of this, music publishers require, under the so-called Fair Use doctrine (an Orwellian construction if ever I’ve heard one) that authors not quote more than two lines or fifteen words without said consent, lest they be sued to the bejesus by a goateed lawyer with a vanity plate reading U R BROKE. And thus if I seem to be, in the course of this book, making elaborate and pathetically obvious efforts to limit my use of lyrics, now you know why. The end.

  The Mating Habits of the Drooling Fanatic

  A certain Elise——invited me to visit her upstate. We had met two months earlier at a literary event and instantly sensed in the other the avid temperament of the orgasmically needy. A series of quivering phone calls ensued. Elise had the dewy gaze of a Bollywood heroine and the relentless pep of a midwestern football mascot. I wanted to defile her. I wanted her to defile me. I wanted public gymnastics capped by a naked perp walk. If all that went well, we could get hitched and coauthor the Sex Addict Memoir.

  This was during my era of Dismal Blind Dates (1997–2004) and I saw no reason to behave responsibly. I was still living in Somerville and scraping by as an Adjunct Professor of Bitterness. So I flew out to a writer’s conference near the college where she taught; that was how we rigged things. I stayed at her place rather than some hotel because why-not-save-the-money plus she-had-plenty-of-room. For two days we knocked around town, gobbling fried fish and trying to figure out how to jump-start the defiling process. At night we lay in our respective rooms, broiling in cowardice. The tension was idiotic and throbbing and awesome.

  On morning three I woke up determined to act. I took a shower and slathered deodorant on my junk and when I walked out of her bathroom the stereo was blaring. The only way I can describe the music is to say it was mall-friendly, soft, synthesized, entirely devout in its stunted emotional ambitions.

  “Who is this?” I said.

  “Air Supply!” Elise said.

  I searched her tender face for the slightest trace of irony.

  “This is their Greatest Hits,” she said.

  I closed my eyes and nodded. It seemed important that I not say anything snide. My mind lunged about for possible Air Supply repartee. The only thing that came to mind was a high school soccer practice where Jon Carnoy mentioned Air Supply and Dave Andersen and Danny Luotto started chanting “Fag Supply!” in what they took to be Australian accents.

  And how were Air Supply doing after all these years? They were all out of love. They were making love out of nothing at all. They were (more broadly) lost in love.

  If you are now thinking I rebuffed Elise because of her fondness for Air Supply, think again, friend. After seventy-two hours spent marinating in lust, you could not have stopped my dick with a Taser. When the time finally came, we auditioned numerous panting configurations, with much attendant grind and slurp.

  The problem arose, as it so often does, upon reflection. Elise was supposed to be everything I wanted: brilliant, delectable, willing. But as I returned to Boston, as I furiously throttled myself to the memory of her haunches, my mind kept fixing on Air Supply. I kept seeing Russell Hitchcock in his lacquered mulletfro. Worse, I kept hearing his voice. Don’t know which way to turn, he keened. Don’t know which boat to burn. Right, I thought. The multiple boats. The bloody indecision over which to burn.

  Did I honestly believe Elise lacked the emotional depth required to be involved with me? Was this even possible? Indeed, wasn’t my willingness to dismiss this woman based solely on her earnest devotion to a soft rock duo proof of my own spiritual disfigurement?

  In a word: possibly.

  In fact, my reaction neatly encapsulates the romantic inclinations of the Drooling Fanatic. I could see, based on the Air Supply situation, that Elise and I were susceptible to different myths. Hers were starry-eyed and operatic, full of blond people in Members Only jackets necking on tarmacs. Mine were shadowy and downbeat and involved horny Communists engaged in light bondage. There was some chance our myths might overlap in the arena of depravity. (Perhaps the Communists were blond; perhaps the bondage could be staged on a tarmac.) But soon enough, Elise would be sighing a lot and asking why I listened to such sad music all the time. Did I have something against just being happy? And I’d be gouging up her Air Supply records, then blaming it on her dog.

  I Fucked a Drooling Fanatic and All I Got Was This Lousy Mixed CD

  Be it resolved: We are not easy people to love. We spend too much time listening to our music, explaining why our music is so brilliant, resenting those who neglect our music, and hating ourselves because we can’t make music. Our less obvious offenses include:

  1. Inept Rites of Seduction Anyone who has dated a Drooling Fanatic can recall the painful moment when it becomes apparent that he (or less often she) is going to try to use music to compensate for deficits of charm, intellect, and sexual prowess. You can safely conjure the usual mood-setting clichés—soft lighting, red wine, incense—as our Fanatic makes his way to the stereo, poorly pretending his musical selection is happenstance when he has spent the past week (at least) worrying the aphrodisiacal merits of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue versus Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours.

  This is assuming the best. For Drooling Fanatics are unfailingly blind to the liabilities of their own taste. I have subjected would-be lovers to such loin-parching classics as Tesla’s Five Man Acoustical Jam, Johnny Cash’s At Folsom Prison, and, on one dire occasion, The Murder Ballads. (If you have not yet attempted to remove a woman’s camisole with Nick Cave croaking, “I’m a bad motherfucker, don’t you know, but I’ll crawl over fifty good pussies just to get one fat boy’s asshole” in the background, you haven’t quite lived.)

  Even when Drooling Fanatics get the tunes right, there is a lurking danger. Rather than attending to the unfolding carnal drama, we become preoccupied by the soundtrack. We begin to wonder if our dates are listening carefully enough. “Wait, wait,” we say, “you have to hear this part,” and “They use a moog w
hen they play this song live” and “Can you believe it? A moog!” and pretty soon our date is yawning and saying how she needs to get some sleep, she’s got to vacuum out her car the next morning.

  2. Sonic Presumptions But okay, let’s say you’re the patient type. You find our enthusiasm endearing. You mistake our fanaticism for passion. For whatever reason, you get involved with us. Congratulations! You will now be subjected—more or less constantly—to the ridiculous bigotries so integral to the Drooling Fanatic self-esteem complex. We will squint at your CDs and when you ask why, we’ll say, “Oh no, nothing, I just didn’t realize Pearl Jam was still together.” We will help “revamp” your iTunes library, perhaps without your consent. We will drag you to shows in venues where hope has died. We will do this because we are dickheads. But the sad part is we’re not even trying to be dickheads. It’s just that music is the central expression of who we are, how we hope to be judged, and now that we’re together, well, you’re a part of that too, babe. If you possess a CD by the Spin Doctors, we feel it is incumbent upon us to rescue you. We know you’re a better person than that, deeper, more authentic. It’s like we’re getting you off drugs.

  3. A Perpetual Effort to Colonize Life with a Drooling Fanatic probably won’t require a new address (our place is kind of cluttered) or a new set of friends (we don’t have many), but it will require a new musical sensibility. Because it’s not just a matter of getting you off your drugs. You’ve also got to get on ours.

  Back in my El Paso years, for instance, I became obsessed with an album called Road Apples by the Canadian band the Tragically Hip. The music was rock by way of the Stones, overwrought electric blues, and I played it constantly. I was living over a grocery store owned by a pair of Lebanese brothers and when I came downstairs for a box of Pop-Tarts, I often could hear one of them murmuring culled and wooed, bitten, chewed, baby it won’t hurt if you don’t move in a glottal Arab accent.