Lost Joy

by Camden Joy

  Their response was a two-song CD—a “concept single”—addressed to Ron Laffitte (their former A&R guy at Elektra). Lacking any context, I assumed, when first I heard how these songs hovered between sobbing and spitting, that they were telling about a cruel ex-, or possibly an elected official who broke our hearts. Are you ever honest with anyone? “It’s like I knew two of you, man,” goes the vocalist, discouraged, disgusted, “one before and after we shook hands.” The songs—“The Agony of Laffitte” and “Laffitte Don’t Fail Me Now”—manage to say things which no band, to my knowledge, has ever sung to a former record company. They’re not exercises in bratty name-calling and bellyaching. Whether people like Elektra Chairman Sylvia Rhone—who repeatedly assured Spoon she wouldn’t drop them until she did exactly that—deserve our pity or not, Spoon apparently think so. These songs do not lack sympathy. The singer sings as one who is intimate with betrayal, even expects it, for he himself has gotten through life—as Spoon’s only major-label title admitted—using a series of sneaks. This new release’s balance of blame and fury and guilt and impatience sounds creepily like Kurt Cobain will once he’s dug up and unplugged again.

  RATTLED BY THE RUSH

  S.M. STORMS AROUND LOWER MANHATTAN remembering the trees at dusk, how they’d once looked caramel-dipped, during those months of light and merry, and how brightly the taffy clouds of morning glowed after it was determined that nothing like parents or family mattered anymore; nothing; just candy. From that, what—frenzy? addiction? liberation? a decade earlier—he and Spiral Stairs, this guy, a friend from school, had begun the rock group Pavement. They were united in the decision to not call themselves by real names. They tried to make their first recordings appear like vinyl accidents, willful and erroneous, unhelpfully titled Slay Tracks: 1933-1969 and Demolition Plot J-7 and Perfect Sound Forever.

  S.M. supposes that people think he’s a bit, oh . . . pinched, because of how well he separates himself from his words, sees his songs as being sung in character and all that. He can’t help it. His speech drones, cuts, dismisses, has all the life of a dial tone. He wants to believe that he possesses “a new openness,” but just attempt to grant hundreds of interviews each year without developing a similar chilliness of soul and feeling like your every movement is monitored.

  The video cameras show that his dark hair is cut in its usual conservative manner. S.M. passes through a series of sugarhouse stalls where Chinese dogs sniff the cuffs of his pants and mop the concrete with their blue-black tongues. Spat-out candies in crinkled-up balls of plastic litter his path, open wrappers everywhere. S.M. fidgets with a candy in his front pocket but doesn’t unwrap anything. He knows that when people see this they think that he likes denying himself things, this is what the fans bicker about on the web, about this once when S.M. appeared to a certain reporter as if he weighed all of a hundred and twenty pounds and was overheard musing pleasantly about our ability to survive eating only air, and subsequently all this misinformation leaked out.

  He’s very familiar with this part of town, where the sugarhouse stalls are now. The neighborhood was torn up ten years before by riots, he’d been thoroughly kind on candy that night, and he’d seen the coppers on spooked steeds galloping down St. Mark’s, and the Argentine who owned the big sugarhouses ordering his muscle boys to drive a truckful of candimonium packs over to the squatters (just like in some Damon Runyon story) so that they had bottles to throw at the helicopters.

  S.M. lived right near here back then, with percussionist Bob, who had this hellish occupation with the transit authority at the time, driving a bus. Bob’d come home in a vulgar mood, sink into the couch and glare like an abused monkey. They’d unwrap a few candies and gratefully watch hockey players beat one another on the television set. By then the first few Pavement things had appeared to zero sales. Still, a baffling number of folks began to hear of Pavement. Nobody knew how or why. They crept into the dialogue like a good piece of vandalism, exactly as S.M.’d hoped—suddenly, anonymously, full of challenging implications. For a couple reasons—mainly ignorance and poverty—Pavement had left the studio with only recordings of studio accidents, first-takes, wan distortions, scratch vocals. To distract reporters from the bad mikings, S.M. talked as though by intention these were anti-songs, that they were committed to release the things that rock bands were supposed to record over; a brilliant strategy. In this way, Pavement became just as difficult to listen to as they were difficult to discuss.

  In the suburban outskirts, S.M. was satisfied to learn, Pavement’d attracted a host of word-of-mouth legends: it was said they were television stars recording under fake names, that they were a middle-aged academic performing a cultural survey via false identities and noise collage experiments. Periodically an individual would find Pavement quoted by some half-reliable source as speaking of the need for silence. Nobody knew where they belonged. There’d be this passed-out drummer in some smudgy ’zine above a caption that read, “If you were wondering what you missed when you missed last month’s Pavement gig—here it is!” This was the sort of information that was getting out. For a time S.M. succeeded so well in covering their tracks it seemed his Pave-men could turn out to be anything or anybody. Some reporter helped their cause when he wrote that they were building a band with the same surreptitiousness that insurgents make bombs; the reporter went on to say that he half-expected their identities to be revealed amidst a predawn ATF raid, babies in the background wailing, shopkeepers telling TV crews they had no idea that their quiet, well-behaved neighbors could’ve been “Los Pavementos.” S.M. dug that write-up.

  At the time, the candimonium underground was in a disquieting state of free-fall. All S.M.’s friends were throwing their papers into the air in disgust, their bodies heavy with hate. In small venues in, for example, Los Angeles, sugarbrains felt obligated to grab the stage, whether they deserved attention or not; out-of-tune Dylan rip-offs would get up there and the crowd’d boo and boo, unaware that one of these bald-stringed, big-eyed boys would soon turn into Beck. One’s certainties were in turmoil; tastes were about to take a big turn; judgments changed hourly about what constituted a truly subversive lyric, a sincere rhythm. S.M.’s friends were easily moving twenty pounds of chocolate a day. The summoning of the “Alternative Demographic” was near.

  It was convenient, in a sense, that when S.M. didn’t fuck up, the band fucked up on his behalf; the first and biggest being Liberty Lunch, 1993, when they mismanaged their hugely important, super-industry-attended, make-or-break gig, after which Pavement’s live reputation was so utterly shredded it never thoroughly rebounded—their drummer had gotten so nervous he’d candied himself into oblivion, rushed so that it took less than twenty minutes to complete the set, while the rest of the guys just stared at one another, unable to believe it, as this—the chance of a lifetime—blew up in their fucking faces.

  Other conveniences and coincidences followed which helped to blur the precise meaning, point, sincerity of their music-making endeavor. For example, as someone had pointed out to S.M., Pavement’s first full-length work arrived in stores the same week that Argentina captured its most-wanted assassin. The quotes attributed to the so-called “Candy Killer,” and the leaked details of the Argentinian operation, segued seamlessly with statements attributed to the band on its press release. The impression thus engendered was that, with Slanted and Enchanted, elusive figures were coming above ground, emerging from the fog as a hard frost lay upon the fields like spun sugar.

  What always bugged S.M. back then was how—against the reporters’ newfound abilities to solve the mysteries posed by the band—so very few of these same reporters noticed the sudden coherence of his songs, their sound; that, yes, they could sustain a full song for the requisite number of verses and melodies, and knew how to alternate disconcerting ballads with droning narratives. Some half-baked reporter S.M. never really liked much ran this small thing about how Pavement was into noise in this charmingly approachable way, but what particularly ir
ked S.M. was that he didn’t elaborate—it wasn’t thick off-putting buckets of ratt box racket but Sonic Youth’s open tunings tentatively plucked on toy guitars. Live, S.M. tried to turn them into the quietest loud band around (it helped that they couldn’t afford big amps and effects pedals); he was imagining as his musical model the scared silence a Syrian man might experience when an agent of Mossad lunges toward the man’s left ear with a small lead-colored protuberance.

  Soon enough, it was widely acknowledged that they’d developed into songwriters. Young sugarbrains, purchasing Pavement’s Watery, Domestic, praised S.M. at this time for his irresistible melodies. Everyone thankfully put aside the thought puzzle that’d been Pavement’s enigmatic partnership between 1990 and 1992. Reporters started treating S.M. like a spokesman, inquiring about his hair rinse and emotional well-being instead of pop subversion and the goddamn situationists. On their subsequent record, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, one of his songs coyly did its best to make the case that Pavement should be allowed to have their secrets back (“Right now!”) but by then S.M. knew it was too late. They scored a hit, they mounted the big stages of the world. They even showed up on a late-night talk show, where S.M., thoroughly kind on candy, refused to shake the host’s hand before an audience of many millions. The secrets were out. Reporters no longer had to wonder what they looked like or who they really were. Some of the purists were livid. A few bitterly denounced how the band’s names were published along with their pictures—not taped as wanted posters in the post office but profiled as celebrities in glossy magazines. It felt like the world’s greatest prank ever . . .

  A light drizzle begins to fall and S.M. realizes, with an anguished pang, that for these last ten years he’s only been able to hear the music of others as competition.

  The rain smells of peppermint.

  Big butterscotch leaves are knocked off the dying trees.

  We won the revolution, S.M. suspects he’ll say to a reporter some day, but we may’ve been wrong. Transcendence cannot be found on a diet of junk. All S.M.’s friends are going snowblind, driving around in blizzards looking for the stuff, or chasing down distant glows on the southwest horizon. He knows more and more people who have angrily protested the oppressive order of things by buying solid fuel rockets on the black market, attaching them to Chevy Impalas, and blasting off; they leave behind only 3 ft.-deep craters in cliffs and smoldering metal. No letters of protest ever survive the crash.

  S.M. is aware that he hasn’t any surprises left. Hundreds of interviews each year will leave pretty much no internal stone unturned. All Pavement can do is to keep making records. But at the very least S.M. wishes they didn’t sound so spent as they settle into being rock stars. It’s like, onstage, he’s suddenly surrounded by old farts. The face of his bassist carries so many wrinkles he’s begun to resemble the father on “The Waltons.” Spiral, that guy from before, is married, losing his hair, becoming withdrawn. Percussionist Bob is fat now and owns a house. This whole project has turned into a real drag. Consciences crumble like confectioner’s sugar, S.M. thinks: everyone is a liar, no one tells the truth, and nobody cares about anything but candy.

  Under his umbrella just then pops the head of somebody passing by whose face he can’t place, who reminds him to show up later at a bluegrass show. “I probably won’t like it,” S.M. mutters, as if to himself. “But I’ll go.”

  He doesn’t go. He’s on the floor of an apartment in Astor Place instead, later, with his head propped against a table leg, eating take-out pizza and, at long last, unwrapping a candy. There’s this hovering reporter in the room who’s clearly dead-set on mischaracterizing S.M.’s prepared remarks. But S.M. feels fairly accepting of it and takes it all okay because his good friend Bingo is also there, and Bingo is the only guy S.M. feels can aright him lately. Bingo; wonderful, incapacitated Bingo; reckless, unrefined, and worldly, with his every response hurtling skyward, with nothing balled up inside him or clenched or self-conscious; Bingo, with his immediate exclamations and denunciations and his exceptional gift for fiction (see Pure Slaughter Value by Robert Bingham). Yes, Bingo is very near, yes indeed, joking with the reporter about how S.M.’s voice is so flat you can nail legs onto it, string it with a net, and play ping-pong on it, har har, and then shouting about how much he—Bingo—wants to finish that goddamn novel, his first, handsomely berating himself and singing knowledgably of his most intimate failings—the novel having been sold and everything and now the agents and editors are pissed off over Bingo’s incessant sloth—

  Music from childhood plays on a turntable across the room. S.M. can’t keep from dreaming about the past, the better long ago times when he possessed Bingo’s insane lusts, when S.M. and his friends would lie on piles of dirty laundry dreaming big lucid futures, utterly candied, thoroughly kind, as they dribbled their brains like basketballs and bounced ideas on trampolines . . .

  He awakes to find that he’s telling the reporter about the first record and about how badly it was recorded, how they first’d sought a dry record with no effects, like Surfer Rosa, but then decided to drench “Here” in reverb, as if that one feat would give the record variety.

  Bingo looks up from the backgammon game he’s playing with his girlfriend. “Hey! Live, when you play ‘Here,’ you gotta not rush it, man. It’s a beautiful song! Slow it down!”

  S.M. rolls his eyes behind small, rimless glasses, sighs. “Okay.”

  Bingo glances back at the game board in time to see his girlfriend roll doubles. He howls bloody murder. He hates to lose. In a few months, Bingo will marry this woman; a few months after that, his heart will seize up after being administered too much sugar at once and Bingo will be dead. He’ll leave behind the novel (just completed), the wife, and S.M.

  “DEAR CMJ . . .”

  Publisher’s Note: These posters appeared September 4–7, 1996, concurrent with the 16th annual College Music Journal (CMJ) music festival in New York City. A collective of contributors was formed (“The CMJOY Gang”) to celebrate significant musical moments—past, present, or make-believe—that were missed by the music industry. The contributions were copied by hand in black ink onto sheets of coated poster paper. Below are the posters authored by Camden Joy.

  Dear CMJ,

  We left the coliseum discouraged, unable to distinguish the actual personnel of our favorite rock band from the life-like merchandise which sang and bandied about the stage, unable to discern actual flesh and faith from beneath the barrage of beverage ads circling in the sky. A satellite print-out on the giant screen kept us abreast of the band’s latest sales figures per “cube,” or cubic foot of product, a common unit for measuring wholesale distributors.

  We attended out of affection for music, but we left with promotional grab-bags stuffed with useless souvenirs and shrine trinkets, insulting publicity knick-knacks, toothbrushes shaped like guitars, salt and pepper drum kits, transistor chips cynically planted in everything, playing our favorite band’s number one hit.

  We sat on the hood of the car in the parking garage and tried to remember why we liked anything. It occurred to us, very simply, that maybe we didn’t. Day gave way to night, taking with it our hopes for contentment, our dreams of security. We found ourselves lost in remembering things the way they used to be, the way they might’ve been, the way they should’ve been.

  We found ourselves lost.

  We told anecdotes and jokes, argued what was important, what didn’t matter, what got missed, that whiff of the ineffable. We made each other cry. If history is written by persons named Victor, then who is writing rock history but the collaborators and cowards who make their many millions and move on? What of the master music-makers who make lousy businessmen, the unsung singers, the significant artists who were born to lose, The Greatest Lost Musical Causes That Ever Were who have ended up on the outs with the racketeers and mobsters who put on the shows?

  One of us suggested we kill the people in charge. We held a straw poll and voted the proposal down. Som
eone else made the motion that we kidnap unloved children and raise them in a made-up world. That proposition also lost. We got in our car. One of us insisted we march upon the cities where big decisions get made and declaim the names of forgotten heroes. The idea was narrowly rejected, though now we were getting close, you could sense it. At long last, we came to an agreement that we would write you open letters. Then we drove all night so that we couldn’t be here tonight.

  We are the CMJOY Gang. We like good music. Enjoy our reminiscences. Trust our advice.

  Dear CMJ,