THE LAWS OF GRAVITY
LISA ANN GALLAGHER
Copyright ©2013 by Lisa Ann Gallagher
Smashwords Edition
THE LAWS OF GRAVITY – SET LIST
“So You Want To Be a Rock & Roll Star” – Patti Smith Group
“New Rose” – The Damned
“Home of the Brave” – Naked Raygun
“Kick Out The Jams” – MC5
“Paint the Town Red” – The Mangos
“Never Really Been” – Soul Asylum
“Last Days of Rome” – The Colors
“Ship of Fools” – Soul Asylum
“I’m Not a Loser” – The Descendents
“Autumn Song” – Just Born
“New Dreams” – Naked Raygun
“Continuity Problems” – Just Born
“Stranger on the Town” – The Damned
“Love Gone Sour” – The Colors
“Closer to the Stars” – Soul Asylum
“Find A Way Out” – Gangster Fun
“Brand New Age” – The Mangos
“High Expectations” – Inside Out
“Can’t Go Back” – Soul Asylum
“You Weren’t Much of A Lady” – The Generals
“Is It a Dream” – The Damned
“Old Hat New Tie” – Gangster Fun
“Sun Goes Down” – Angry Red Planet
“Knock Me Down” – Naked Raygun
“Love Will Tear Us Apart” – Joy Division
“Life Goes On” – The Damned
“Curtain Call” – The Damned
Prologue…
I’ve written several novels, hundreds of poems, a few short stories and boxes of journals but I consider myself more a storyteller than a writer. My own life is often stranger than fiction. I adore gathering friends around me, with a bottle of wine to regal them with tales of my adventures and misadventures. But there was a story I’d been leaving out.
I left Detroit twenty-two years ago, determined to beat the odds. I’ve kept the story of my past silent, for the most part. What I’ve created in the last two decades has been so much better and more meaningful than what I left behind. If I brought up the past, I feared, it would still have power over me.
Then, a few years ago, I settled down in a peaceful new home where I made new connections and eventually published my first novel. Suddenly and strangely, the past began to catch up with me. The cells and nerves that stitch you together store memories inside them and under my skin, like parasthesia, I felt my past prickle to the surface. I woke from dreams in a cold panic, dreaming that I was loved, that he didn’t die and that she had forgiven me. Memories of Detroit roared back in a tsunami of love and lust and really loud music. For the first time in decades I allowed myself to remember my punk rock past: the biggest blows, softest embraces, loudest nights and darkest of days.
I realized that by omitting this part of my story, I had deprived those who know and love me of such an important part of me. Everything had been colored by that moment in time, June of 1986, when I left home and the five chaotic years that followed. That break in the girl I had been and the woman I became.
I won’t give full names to those that share this story. Alive or dead, they are all real people and out of respect, I will keep their identities as ambiguous as possible.
So You Want To Be a Rock & Roll Star…
I was born in Detroit in December of 1967. Two sisters, Debra and Laura, followed. We looked like the all-American family. We owned a house in the suburbs with a poodle, honeysuckle bushes and a Baskin Robbins up the street. We attended public school and Catholic Church. I went to swim camp and took ballet and piano lessons. I was bright, did well in school and was surrounded by a warm extended family.
Music was always present in our home. My mom had been a Beatles fan and both parents had mellow musical tastes: Neil Diamond, Cat Stevens, Carole King. I heard a lot of Motown during my childhood and the popular music of the Seventies. Elton John, the Carpenters, Fleetwood Mac… but not a lot of hard rock. In fact, the serious Rock & Roll scared me as a kid. When I was ten years old, my best friend Julie told me she was going to dress as “Kiss” for Halloween. I thought she meant a Hershey’s Kiss and was rather flummoxed at the black, silver and platformed spectacle that showed up to trick-or-treat. Some months later, Julie and I got into a wicked fight and the worst thing I could think to call her was a “Rock & Roll Witch!”
My parents were just eighteen when I arrived in the world. They came from very different backgrounds: Mom was Jewish, upper middle class and Dad was Catholic, from a broken home. Like many young people of the late Sixties, they were very idealistic when they started their family. But the realities of life would take a toll, over the years. There was infidelity, alcohol abuse and domestic discord. I remember a childhood filled with tears and fights and broken toys.
I wasn’t a happy kid – although it’s difficult to trace the roots of my discontent. I had been a happy baby and toddler but by the age of five I was sleepwalking, plagued with insomnia and ingesting small overdoses of my mother’s prescription medications. I felt disengaged from others. Being molested at the age of nine compounded my problems. I cried easily, was moody, bit my nails and had shatteringly low self-esteem. I retreated into fantasies. Friendships crumbled. School suffered. My parents thought I was a pathological liar. I suffered petty mal seizures that the doctors couldn’t diagnose or treat.
Books were my refuge. I fell in love with literature when I was ten and read the novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I became absorbed in this well-written classic, in a way that was different than the Nancy Drew and Little Women stuff I had enjoyed before. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is the story of a poor girl in turn-of-the-century New York, but it isn’t a children’s book. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn tells an honest and insightful story through the life of a child, but deals with very mature themes.
One chapter would have a profound and lifelong impact on me. Young Francie (the protagonist) is caught telling a lie by a teacher. Instead of berating the child, the teacher tells Francie that she knows the girl didn’t lie because she was devious but rather that she had an imagination and no idea what to do with it. She advised the girl, "In the future, when something comes up, you tell exactly how it happened but write down for yourself the way you think it should have happened. Tell the truth and write the story. Then you won't get mixed up.”
I recognized something of myself in Francie. I had trouble separating my imagination from reality during my melancholy youth. I took that advice. Tell the truth. Write the story. With that, my life as a writer began.
I evolved from a depressed young bibliophile to an ambitious junior writer. My first foray into fiction netted me the Young Author award in fourth grade. By eleven I was writing sequels to my favorite stories. I wrote a play and several novellas at twelve and by fourteen I was a prolific poet. I continue to have an active fantasy life but I no longer blur the line between reality and fantasy.
We moved to Tennessee when I was twelve. Relocation was a chance to connect with another branch of our family tree and my parents were eager for a new start. But wherever you go, there you are – right? My parents worked in real estate and the bubble burst, plummeting our income to the poverty line. We moved into my grandmother’s tiny two-bedroom house. These circumstances highlighted the problems in my parents’ marriage. I took to babysitting on weekend nights to escape. But I also found my second love while we lived in Nashville when my older cousins baptized me in the blessed church of Rock & Roll. From them I learned about Bowie, the Clash, the Sex Pistols. Something about Punk, especially -- that “Fuck you!” attitude -- struck a chord in me.
I was fifteen the
summer of 1983 and the situation with my parents had reached a boiling point. That fall my mother left my father and brought my sisters and I back to Michigan. Dad remained in Tennessee for a few months then relocated to Florida. We saw our father, thereafter, during the holidays and summer breaks.
I was a sophomore at Dondero High in Royal Oak. My best buddies, Lynda, lived a few blocks away. Lynda and I bonded through our mutual worship of WLBS – the alternative station broadcasting out of nearby Mt Clemens. WLBS played the music we both loved: American New Wave, Neo-Punk, Eurotrash Romantics. At the time, I was obsessed with U2. I remember playing the song “New Years Day” constantly that holiday break.
I spent a lot of weekends at Lynda’s that winter. I would sleep there and we would stay up through the wee hours, listening to WLBS. I would lie on the floor of her loft bedroom, with pictures of John Lennon and Jane Wiedlin gazing down on us. That Christmas, Lynda received a guitar and we decided to start an all-girl punk rock band. I wrote lyrics and sang and Lynda’s next door neighbor Chrissie played drums. Actually, it took Chrissie a few months to convince her parents to buy her a drum set, so she played on Tupperware bowls in the meanwhile.
We practiced on weekends, mostly playing covers. I attempted to write lyrics, hopeful that we would soon improve our musical skills. Lynda was becoming more practiced on the guitar; Chrissie had her drumset by the start of summer. We were so excited and it was such an exciting feeling to be in a band. Everything seemed so bright and light and possible at that moment.
But that July I flew to Arizona to visit my grandparents and something changed. My grandfather brought home a box of books midway during my visit from the flea market. I found a paperback copy of Edie: An American Biography, a bio of Warhol muse Edie Sedgwick. Patti Smith (the singer) had been interviewed for the book and a poem of hers about this tragic 1960s icon within sparked something in me.
I had dabbled at lyrics for months but suddenly yearned for something deeper. I realized I wouldn’t be satisfied writing pop songs. I had to write poems set to music. I ended my vacation with a newfound perspective of rock music as high art and imagined myself a New Wave poetess. I flew home from Arizona with a notebook full of poems. But, during the next two months as we girls resumed practice, I became aware that my band mates might be leaning in a different musical direction than me. Lynda is an amazing, prolific musician. She’s the real deal -- a true Rock Star -- still playing music to this day. But at the time, she was more interested in Stevie Nicks and GoGo’s covers. I worried how I fit in with her image of our band, now named Inside Out.
My tastes were evolving, maturing. I was less interested in the wispy new wave groups that Lynda and I had initially bonded over. The punk icons I was interested in included Patti Smith, Jim Carroll and Nick Cave. I longed to explore the Detroit punk/poetry scene and looked for ways to get downtown, see and hear what was going on in the clubs.
On the night of October 5, 1984 Lynda and I joined two gals for a night out. Linda, a bassist, had auditioned for Inside Out that fall. She had a Mohawk and dark exotic eyes. Kathy had a crazy mane of red curls and resembled Poison Ivy from the Cramps. We drove to the Parthenon in Greektown for dinner then headed to their favorite clubs, a bar in Detroit’s derelict Cass Corridor neighborhood called The Shelter. They enticed us with tales of angry moshing and tribal rhythms and sweaty, banshee poetic trances and got me all excited for performance art, the Motor City way.
Instead, we arrived at a dank and dark empty warehouse space. The power was turned off. Local punks Kurt and Lacey loitered in a doorway. We sat on the floor, near a girl cuddling with her pet rat. The smells of black nail polish and burnt cigarette butts and Aqua Net permeated the air. Hypodermic needles and broken bottles were scattered in corners. Someone greeted Linda and warned her that the police would probably raid the place at any moment.
My first introduction to the Detroit punk scene was a bust. We headed out to Kathy’s station wagon, to return to the ‘burbs. As we exited, we stepped outside to a literal riot. The Detroit Tigers, moments before, had won the pennant moments before and the city had gone berserk. Guys were smashing in windshields with baseball bats, sirens screamed and horns honked. Prostitutes hugged homeless guys and little kids were moonwalking in the littered street. We dashed into the station wagon and raced north. Within minutes, we were in a mass traffic jam on the I-75 northbound.
I arrived home after midnight and well past my 10 p.m. curfew. I will never forget my mother running out in her robe, yanking open the rear door of the car. “Get your ass inside, young lady!” I turned crimson and whispered “Goodnight” to my pals. She forbade me to see Lynda for a few weeks after that.
My mother, sisters and I moved again that to Ferndale, just one suburb south of Royal Oak. Ferndale High was my fourth high school in three years, but I was relieved to discover that all the cool kids there, like me, were punks. I made a lot of friends that year. Peggy, who hung out with a bunch of guys all dressed like Jimmy from Quadrophenia, were called the Mod Squad. Terese, a petite brunette with Asian eyes became my closest friend. Terese was bright and funny and when I learned that she played the keyboards, I introduced her to the band and we soon invited her to join us.
Ferndale was also home to Sam’s Jams – a record shop affectionately called “Sam’s Pajamas.” Music was the center of my life that year. I saw U2 live the day after my seventeenth birthday during the Unforgettable Fire tour. We girls were about twenty rows back from center stage, standing on the seats of our chairs to see above the fray. Before the concert I met this guy Andy outside the arena. Andy had organized a canned food drive for the night of the concert and advertised the event at Sam’s Pajamas. I had seen the flyer and brought a couple cans of veggies with me. I brought them to the table Andy had set up in the parking lot.
Andy had light brown hair in a mullet and wore John Lennon glasses. We talked about music and poetry and politics and we arranged to meet soon to discuss all three further. He was a good friend and I had a crush on him. He had a girlfriend so we never consummated our attraction, but he inspired my literary career at an early age. Andy was very socially conscious. His parents had marched with Dr. King in Selma during the early Sixties and through Andy I became more curious about the world I lived in.
Meanwhile, Inside Out now had a couple of original songs including a rhapsodic ballad I wrote called “Disintegrating” which was dominated by a crunchy synthesizer sound. We were still on the search for a bass player that winter so we could set up a recording, but then I quit the band.
I don’t remember why I quit. I don’t recall if the decision was the result of the insight that my band wanted different music than what I wanted to perform – or the distraction of my new interest in becoming a fanzine editor. I figured if I couldn’t be the next Patti Smith, maybe I’d be the next Lester Bangs. A teenaged, female, drug-free Lester Bangs, anyhow. I tried out for a couple other groups but my heart was really in writing.
Fanzines were the musical blogs of the 1980s. Everyone read them. Oh, the more commercial rags like “Rolling Stone”, “Creem” and “Melody Maker” were hugely popular as well. But “Maximum Rock & Roll”, “Flipside” and the wide range of band-specific fanzines weren’t far behind.
I began work on the first edition of my ‘zine, Explosion! in the winter of 1984-1985 while attending classes at Ferndale High and working after class for the school district. I spent every possible moment absorbing the alternative music movement and emulating my fellow rock journalists. My bedroom was littered with articles and photos torn from magazines. I still hung out with both Terese and Lynda. We would go to Oakland Mall and gawk at the sexy guy who worked at B. Dalton Booksellers or loiter at Sam’s Pajamas, reading the Metro Times and poring through used LPs from the U.K.
That holiday break I flew to Ft. Lauderdale to visit Dad. While I was gone, my mother met a guy, fell in love and became engaged a few months later. The following summer she announced that she was moving us from F
erndale to Saint Clair Shores (an hour east) so that she and her fiancé could move closer to where his children lived. This would separate me from my friends. I didn’t have my driver’s license yet and was frustratingly dependent on others for transportation. Plus, this would be my fifth high school. Resentful and hurt, I left home that July and stayed with Terese’s family for several weeks. But eventually, I capitulated and joined my family and soon-to-be stepfather in their home.
South Lake High was the antithesis of Ferndale. Students came from St. Clair Shores (rich and ultra-white) and Grosse Pointe (rich, white and often Mafia babies). I was more of an outcast than ever before. My army coat, black hair and attitude set me far apart from my classmates. My mother said I dressed like an Italian widow. I got spit at, pushed into lockers and openly laughed at.
I was in a fragile state as I prepared to turn eighteen. The death of my godfather that fall, isolation, thoughts of suicide, unrequited puppy love – I had all the basic ingredients of teen angst. My only comforts were music, the magazine and the few precious moments I spent with the girls. I escaped to Linda’s or Terese’s every possible weekend that I could, where I would watch Inside Out practice. My relationship with my mother became more and more strained. I threw myself into the magazine.
I had high hopes for Explosion! and I was eager to succeed in the business of rock journalism. I took a word processing class and spent every lunch hour squirreled away in the library computer room, writing. I had penpals throughout the U.S. and begged them each for articles.
The first issue of the ‘zine was focused on the Social Justice movement in Alternative Rock. I attended a rally that spring in Washington D.C. with Andy. The theme of the event was “US out of Central America.” Punks with towering mohawks rubbed elbows with civil rights leaders while hippie teens splashed in the Labor fountain outside the Department of Justice. I found it fascinating how Punk Rock had become a socio-political movement. Bands like Minor Threat, Dead Kennedys and the Minutemen motivated their followers to rebel for the causes they believed in. I was inspired by them and the first issue of the magazine was about post-punk politics and how much we hated Ronald Reagan and Tipper Gore. There was an obituary for the Minutemen’s D. Boon written by my LA-based pen pal Cinel and reviews of releases by The Dead Kennedy’s and Siouxsie & the Banshees.
The Laws of Gravity Page 1