Six weeks after I started high school, I was sitting on the bleachers during freshman gym class, which I was already failing for refusing to dress for class, along with all the other weirdos, who were also refusing gym on principle. Andrew Semans, also of the ninth grade, came and sat next to me and asked, “Are you a punk or a hippie? I can’t tell.” I told him I liked The Clash, and he started drilling me about a million bands I had never heard. The next day he handed me a cassette tape, a mix made from a very specific subsection of his big brother’s record collection. Butthole Surfers, Babes in Toyland, Boredoms, BALL, Big Black, Bongwater on side one; Pussy Galore, Voidoids, Stooges on the flip. By week’s end I was a convert and punk-identified.
As punk rock began to ravage and motivate my life, so did my adolescent hormones. I began to pine for for the attention of punk boys, of which I knew three. One of which was Andrew and we could barely stand one another but were bonded by conversations about Sonic Youth. His friend Ted who wore a Jane’s Addiction T-shirt and was on JV bowling; he thought All Shook Down was the best Replacements record—making him a no go. Then there was Andrew Beccone, who was in the tenth grade, who wasn’t so much punk as he was proactively grunge.
He became my crush by default, by virtue of the fact that he knew my name and he knew who Hüsker Dü was, and at the time that was more than I had going with anyone else. His look was proto grunge, he wore his hair long and in a middle part, all his jeans were ripped, he wore a faded Mudhoney Superfuzz Bigmuff T-shirt and a flannel. He played drums in a cover band of sorts with his college-age brother; they were called Korova Milkbar and their only gigs were in their basement. Their repertoire read like a best-of Sub Pop sampler: Tad’s “Loser,” Nirvana’s “Lovebuzz” and “Floyd the Barber,” a Soundgarden song, a Screaming Trees song, and they usually closed their set with a Mudhoney medley that included an infinite version of “In ‘n’ Out of Grace” that would alternate between the chorus and long drum solos. Because I “loved” Andrew and wanted him to love me back, and though I was approximately 4 feet tall, had a mouth full of braces and looked as much like a 14-year-old boy as I did a 14-year-old girl, I took the only route available—I became a grunge devotee.
The process was simple: I made the rounds to every record store in the Twin Cities, spending my hard-earned babysitting and paper-delivery savings on anything with a Sub Pop logo on it, every release in multiple formats—Mudhoney, Nirvana, Fluid, Tad, Dwarves, Soundgarden, L7 and Dickless. I saved up $100 for the out-of-print Sub Pop 100 compilation. I mail-ordered five Mudhoney, two Fluid, and one Soundgarden shirt and then made my own Nirvana shirt with a Sharpie.
I parted my hair in the middle, ripped holes in the knees of my jeans, scrawled the names of every band I liked on my Chuck Taylor high-tops in pen. I am not sure why I thought dressing exactly like Andrew Beccone might lure him to me, but I wanted to show him we were kindred spirits in the world, toughing out our teenage times with Tad’s 8-Way Santa in our Walkmans.
Alas, the pose did not end there. I did things like casually wander past his classes as they got out, holding nothing but a Mudhoney tape in my hand, as if that was the only supply one needed for ninth grade. I took the same Russian class as him so that I would have the chance to tell him such things as I was considering getting a tattoo of Mudhoney bassist Matt Lukin, “once I got the money together.” My project for film class was a documentary on his band, and it was 20 minutes of carefully edited footage of band practices in his parents’ basement, and nothing but (I got a C-). I went to see Fluid twice that year, despite hating them, in hopes of seeing him at the show. When I saw him that following Monday, as I was artfully lingering outside his AP English class, I said “I figured I would have seen you at the show last night,” he told me he was no longer into Fluid. I was crushed. I had spent dozens of hours listening to their records—which I found to be unbearable—fantasizing and prepping for conversations about Fluid minutiae that we would one day have.
All soul soon left my pose. My obsession with detail slipped. I was coming to the agonizing conclusion that all of this, my teen-girl masking, was in vain. I’d dedicated several months and several hundred dollars on trying to cultivate a connection that was never going to be. Still, I wasn’t quite ready to give up the masquerade.
At the end of the school year, I managed to get invited to a party where all three of the school’s grunge cover bands were playing. I would soon have the chance to see my crush-object one last time before the span of summer. I went to the party wearing a Soundgarden Louder Than Love T-shirt, which I had purchased for the occasion. I slouched up against a wall, peacocking my ennui, sipping a Miller Lite and pretending to be way into that, too. I was standing next to Andrew’s best friend, Mike, who was setting up a bass rig. I ventured to ask him what was this awesome record we were listening to? He gawked at me, appalled, “Uh? Louder Than Love?” I scrambled, mortified, and insisted I was too wasted to recognize Soundgarden, the most distinctive band of the grunge genre.
I then had the torturous experience of then watching Mike walk over to Andrew and relay this anecdote and then Andrew look towards me and snicker. I left the party, walked home and cried myself to sleep.
Less than a month later, I picked up a compilation called Kill Rock Stars. While my purchase was initially fueled by the inclusion of Nirvana and Melvins tracks, both potential conversation topics with Andrew, but something entirely different happened when I heard a band on side A, Bikini Kill. Kathleen Hanna’s rebel yell posted the bail from my teen grunge prison; I had found music that meant everything to me. The band’s Bikini Kill fanzine and the cassette demo meant I no longer had a reason to be obsessing over music that meant nothing. I was liberated from my days spent walking past some boy’s locker, loudly humming Nirvana songs. Bikini Kill songs taught me something that neither Mudhoney, nor Andrew Beccone ever could—that my teen-girl soul mattered. That who I was mattered, what I thought and felt mattered, even when they were invisible to everyone else.
PART THREE: NOSTALGIA
WHEN THE BOSS WENT MORAL:
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN’S LOST ALBUM
The American Prospect, November 2010
What is pop music for if not escape? It lifts us out of our everyday, our workday, to stoke and coalesce our fantasies about romance or an alternate life, away from where we’ve detoured. In 1977, Bruce Springsteen began recording the album that would become the landmark Darkness on the Edge of Town, and it was that escapist idea of pop that he was working with. Informed by Elvis, Orbison and Brill Building songwriters, he was penning from that tradition: grand, lovelorn tunes of cars and girls and memories that were easy to relate to. Springsteen was eager to prove himself more than a one-hit wonder off the popularity of Born To Run and feeling the schism between where his new success placed him and the blue-collar caste from which he rose. This schism is very much the place that pop is meant to offer escape from—and it’s what began to drive and shape Darkness. Springsteen wanted to speak from that unresolvable place, to confine the listener in that underclass discomfort.
Those tracks that didn’t fit that vision now make up The Promise—a lost album of sorts. These 22 tracks are immaculate—a glut of fine work from The Boss at the dawn of his prime. Some of the tracks here reappear in slightly different forms on Darkness and later albums (“Candy’s Boy,” “Racing in the Street (’78),” the opening refrain of “Spanish Eyes” would later appear in “I’m On Fire”). It’s easy to hear that some of these could have been hits for Springsteen—and wonder why they’re absent from Darkness. As an album, Darkness is lean and ready, marks of the influence of Springsteen’s recent conversion to both punk rock and Hank Williams; many of these tracks are ballads and polished anthems with large debts to the formalist sensibilities of Spector, Lieber and Stoller, King and Goff. More than their sound, what kept these cuts off Darkness is that the story that Springsteen wanted to tell was a moral one.
Darkness was an attempt to ask impossibly big quest
ions about life and liberty in America, what it meant to be a man, the meaning of work in a capitalist system, and, as Springsteen explained later, how to deal with sin in a good life. He spent five months in the studio with the E Street Band working out the hungry ghosts of his Catholic boyhood, until he found a way contain them in Darkness’ anxious blaze. He refused the gleaming pop tracks and lovelorn balladry that make up The Promise—turning “Because the Night” over to Patti Smith because he knew it was a hit, a song that would define him, and he wasn’t interested in that.
Whether Springsteen was seeking to become rock’s beleaguered blue-collar conscience or he just wanted to be more than a standard-issue rock star is debatable, but it’s safe to assume that one doesn’t endeavor to spend years laboring over the allegorical language with which to best illuminate the spiritual longing of the American underclass if you aren’t fully convinced of your own powers. Whether Springsteen was interested in being rock’s great moralist is beside the point—Darkness is what earned him the job.
Listening to The Promise it’s easy to understand that if any of these tracks would have made it onto Darkness it would changed the record’s entire character. These are songs about kisses (“Fire,” “The Little Things”), 14 of them are about his feelings for a girl. All this lovin’ and radio-listenin’ and car-buildin’ on The Promise doesn’t emotionally square with a Darkness track like “Adam Raised a Cain”—a song about shouldering the legacy you inherit from your parents—or the album’s reckoning, “The Promised Land.” Even as desperate as “Because the Night” is—with Springsteen sounding so plaintive and vulnerable—it would have worked against the macho confidence he exudes on “Candy’s Room.” “The Promise” chronicles disenfranchisement from the American Dream and could have fit, but its bathos would have undercut the hope that is Darkness’ covenant with the listener.
While The Promise comes as a standalone double disc, it’s perhaps better to take it in its other form, sandwiched within the context of the Darkness on the Edge of Town box set; a reproduction of Springsteen’s notebook from the sessions, three CDs (The Promise and Darkness) and three DVDs, including a making-of Darkness DVD that is culled from archival footage from rehearsals and sessions and a phenomenal vintage concert performance. Seeing the scope of Springsteen’s bright-eyed intent and his commitment, to Darkness’ message, to his music, to his talent and his fans—believing in the power of music to communicate something so complex—makes the man seem heroic. By aiming to make such moral music, he made a new mimetic mold. Here we have the complete package, of all that you’d really want your rock stars to be—the longing loverman, the prove-it-all-night rock star, and the regular guy staking his guts to the stage, the craftsman capable of putting all your too-familiar restlessness into a song you’d wanna hear a thousand times.
The album’s emotional truth mirrors its political one. The Carter-era malaise to which Darkness was born is palpable. It was made in a time where no one could buy the lie anymore—a long, bad war had made that impossible. The album’s metaphor of longing, lost innocence and consequence is best illuminated on “Racing in the Streets”—the tale of good people adrift in their betrayal, wanting to “wash the sin off their hands.” Darkness is the album that established Springsteen as one of the great communicators of the American dilemma; the work of someone born to a country founded on moral covenant, always striving to be that exemplar city on the hill but forever falling shy of its mark.
VEDDERAN: NOTES ON PEARL JAM’S 20TH ANNIVERSARY CONCERT
TINYLUCKYGENIUS, September 2011
So, this weekend, my friend Leor joined me in the car and we drove for two hours to see PEARL JAM in the woods of Wisconsin for 12 hours! It was for work (Rolling Stone), but lord knows I love a spectacle and Leor loves Mudhoney, and he was literally the only person I could find with any sort of enthusiasm at the prospect of going to an all-day anniversary festival for old, old Pearl Jam. Pearl Jam, who I never have paid much real attention to, other than I see pictures of Eddie Vedder and think he is not aging a bit and is still rather handsome. Two nights before I watched the Cameron Crowe-directed documentary about the band’s 20 years; lord alive, there is not a more earnest and tenderhearted person in rock n’ roll than Eddie Vedder, in case you were doubting just how sensitacho he rolls. The part where his bandmates explain that a few records in he seized control of the band and essentially tried to turn the band into Fugazi and that it pretty much almost broke them up was pretty much my favorite part because THERE IS ALWAYS THAT GUY IN EVERY BAND. I was always that guy in all my bands.
Anyhow.
Deep into Wisconsin! We arrived and there were tons of bros and white hats and people keeping the rain out with football team ponchos and slitted trashbags, grilling out of the back of pickups, with serious tents and folding comfortable chairs, and it was like 4 p.m., and there were already people so drunk they’d given up on wearing shoes.
Inside, we went to our seats in the amphitheater. There were not a lot of people braving the rain for Mudhoney. I counted exactly five people who seemed to know the words. I ate a cheeseburger because I had to. Mark Arm, strangely, has not aged. I watched them doing the old hits and some new songs I didn’t know (did they put out a record I didn’t know about?) and the man was doing his Iggy wiggle and the new stuff all sounded like The Scientists and they closed with a Black Flag cover and I thought “Mark Arm must be doing a lot of yoga.” Also, I realized watching them that I think I last saw Mudhoney on the day before my 16th birthday, on the Every Good Boy tour, and I was seeing them, still/again on the day before my 35th birthday. I don’t know if that is weirder for me or to be them doing that, though being almost 50 and being in Mudhoney is probably a blast.
Around us on the impossible-graded slopes of the amphitheater (it’s at a ski resort!) were PJ fans who totally only cared about PJ but soon might be drunk enough to give into something sort of pop-heavy as Queens of the Stone Age, because they were bored (and they did). There were hundreds of people sitting on wet grass in the rain wearing a trash bag that was squishing them so they looked like a blackened SpongeBob and gulping down $13 neon margarita-frosties from concessions that were served in foot-tall guitar shaped cups, limp and slackened by booze, numb in Vedder-ticipation. The amount that dudes in our aisle were coming and going to the beer stands past our seat was like 4–5 times a set, for $14 tallboys. I do not think ever in my life I have been around so many people who were so actively wasted for such a duration, and I have been to SXSW several times.
And then, like three hours into our adventure, The Strokes played. I would think for some reason they would a be a little urban(e) and effete for this Midwestern crowd, but people were into it, even before Vedder guested on “Juicebox.”
AND THEN THEN, Dennis Rodman walked into the crowd in-between sets and people freaked out and it was strange. I saw no other celebrity, though I am sure maybe one more was there.
AND FINALLY, The Pearl Jam played. And played no hits, and played for almost three hours, and it was a real roller coaster. Mike McCready is truly one of the blandest guitar players I have ever heard. It is a testament to the rest of the band and especially Eddie Vedder that they 1. have the patience, as seasoned music fans, to sit through his soloing, which is both tepid and colorless, and 2. that they have hits in spite of his totally generic playing. But then again, I guess that is often how things get on the radio, so maybe that’s a lesser point. Also, it was smart of Mike McCready to not wear a spaghetti strap tank top like he did at PJ’s 10th anniversary. At least they seem to be through their decade-long bad hats phase.
Vedder is so straight in his connection to the audience, he’s Springsteen-ian in that regard, but without the rock ‘n’ roll showman part. He’s understated, the anti-rock-god rock god and that’s why people love him. It’s impossible not to watch him and eat it up. It feels good to do so. His banter is absolutely corny, like he is 15 and trying to explain why he loves playing music. He is letting that part of
him do the talking. Which is awesome and also really funny. More people should do that.
AND THEN THEN THEN: Chris Cornell came out, and lord, he has such lovely posture, and they did some Temple of the Dog songs and though I never liked that band, I reconsidered them for those 20 minutes and was impressed. Also, Vedder and Cornell are both freakishly well-preserved, especially when presented together. Everyone else looks like the Cryptkeeper in comparison. I bet there is an Internet underworld of Temple of the Dog slash fiction starring them. I don’t even want to Google that.
GRUNGE RETURNED AND I SAW IT.
YOU’RE RELIVING ALL OVER ME: DINOSAUR JR. REUNITES
Chicago Reader, April 2005
It was about an hour after dusk in the early summer of 1991, and I was sitting on a log in the half-woods near my parents’ house with a guy I’d met in the front row at a Dinosaur Jr. show. I had the names of my favorite bands scrawled in pen on the toe caps of my Converse high-tops (“Fugazi” on the left, “Dinosaur” on the right), and I studied them intently, trying to keep my teenage awkwardness under control. Two dorks alone in the dark, we avoided the obvious question by engaging in deep conversation: Was Dinosaur Jr. better with or without Lou Barlow?
The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic Page 6