by Camden Joy
Fans Wanted:
Chicago-area bnd with six releasd rcrdngs sks a following; infls W Nelson, B Eno, B Marley, Ltl Feat. Cpls OK. Serious inquiry only. No rcists, sxists. You: OTK/d, discreet, finan. secure, generous with papers, spiteful over posited drugging/abducting disappearance/replacement of the great middle-era Neil Young (“Ambulance Blues,” “Revolution Blues,” “Vampire Blues”), must be fond of genetic-transmogrification daydreams in which John Prine is molecularly crossed with John Fahey with Peter Tosh with Pere Ubu with the Grand Ole Opry. Saw you watching Merle Haggard, you carried well-worn copy of East of the River Nile. Wed. night mid-April. Your friends call you Philosopher King Poet. I stand there and watch. I want to say hi but . . . I’d still like to say hi. Hope I hear from you! Write Radio City Station.
AMAZING DISGRACE
I HAVE THE BAD HABIT of reading while I drive. Recently I was pulled over in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, behind the wheel of a pale-green Fairlane 289, a copy of True Life Memoirs of Bazooka Joe open on my lap. Stirred by the erotic misadventures of Mort, Joe, Ursula, and Zena, inspired by the defiantly surreal Bazooka Joe fortune which appeared as the bio’s epigraph (“There are more grains of truth than there are stars in the ocean”), I refused the breathalyzer, waived my rights, kicked the bastard police dog in its yapper, and—for good measure—mischievously let slip that I’d plotted to kill the officer’s tiny daughter with the intention of making his scrubbed peasant wife the mistress of Mort. In True Life Memoirs, this is approximately the attitude which resolves Bazooka Joe’s every ethical dilemma in three frames or less. In real-life America, the strategy was less successful: handcuffed into the backseat of a Carroll O’County squad car, I helplessly began urinating all over their plastic seats . . .
Was this a dream? As I recount this to you, such unexpected defiance on my part adds just one more implausibility to the whole affair. By then my experiences had begun to seem so far-fetched that I could scarcely believe any of this viewable footage was True Life. Out of nowhere, a telephone had jingle-jangled and Romanov forces were offering to pay me to write up the Montreal pop show of a band called the Posies. I had been Fed-Exed vouchers for transportation, with which I rented a 1966 Fairlane. It was while traveling to the border in this very Ford that the corrupting influence of the bubblegum kid and his turtlenecked buddy expressed itself on my lap. “Watcha gonna do,” I sneered at the cops, “throw me into rock-crit jail?” This attempt at humor became oddly self-fulfilling. It was precisely what they proposed to do.
Blithely perched on a bluff overlooking Berlin, New Hampshire, the Hunter S. Thompson Penitentiary may represent America’s most secret institution. The inmates (those I met) are primarily Canadian journalists. Ordered once upon a time to race down to NYC for the heart-stopping debut of this or that entertainment marvel, they had unintentionally disobeyed the arcane local traffic ordinances. Soon thereafter, they’d found themselves behind bars. Some have been there for many years, still serving out infractions they can’t fathom, dispatched from long ago to cover a show by Paul McCartney & Wings at Madison Square Garden or Dylan/the Dead at Meadowlands. Occasionally, too, that rare overzealous American gets tossed in.
The food is the inedible slop you’d expect, which hits the cafeteria tray sounding, looking, and—yes—even tasting like coffee grounds soaked in ketchup. It gets served three times daily and, though the food never changes, the name of the meal does. During my tenure at this place, my jailers alternately titled this same slop: “Lester Bangs’ Brains,” “The DeRogatis Blowfish Platter,” “Carducci’s Big Balls and Butt” or the ever-tantalizing “Hunter’s Mystery Catch.”
Locked up in a room with a chair, cot and toilet, I spent the rest of the Romanov voucher on bribing my guard, who reluctantly garnished my living quarters with a cell phone, a Discman, and the last CD single from these Posies. I then rang up the office and read my critique of this Posies show. I reviewed it in glowing terms, leaving out the parts about me not actually making it to Canada, about me calling now from a speed-trap stockade in New Hampshire; nor did I bring up Bazooka Joe and what that wisecracking pirate boy had made me do.
I closed my review in the following manner: “The Posies, two new Beatles named Auer and Stringfellow, have made four CDs in ten years. It has become the central mystery of the ’90s rock world how a band with such melodic gifts (not to mention studio mastery, big record company backing, talent at all instruments, ‘imminent breakthrough’ stamped atop every composition) have failed to become a People cover story. Like a center-seeking Clinton, these Posies unapologetically capitulate to reigning tastes, adapting their handsome materials to screechy grunge arrangements on cue in 1993 (Frosting on the Beater), more recently dressing the songs in once-again fashionable retro outfits (Amazing Disgrace). Whatever dues they still owed were completely paid up over the last several years, as they’ve humbly been playing the background roles of the two dead characters in Alex Chilton’s latest musical revue, thus permitting the so-called reunion of Big Star. Must they serve you eggs in bed before you crack your lids to acknowledge them with a shrug of thanks?”
In jail I confirmed, through lonely lights-out morse-code messages we tapped on our stone walls with crude metal implements, that the failure of these Posies to hit it big haunts the rock critic in all of us (or at least all of us in there). In that way, the Gonzo Hotel (as we brothers called our compound) was one unendurably long music seminar, a camp bursting with pop-market theories and cultural didactics—opinions, opinions, opinions! Since radios and periodicals were strictly forbidden, the all-important rock news came disseminated via a grapevine of rumors. These info scraps were taken very seriously. Men stood up suddenly at meal-time to herald the impending liberation of gay music in phrases which were in turn flowery and apocalyptic. The etymology of the word “skronk” was hotly plumbed. Ritual fistfights erupted in the exercise yard between trip-hop enthusiasts and those more inclined to regard all jungle and techno off-shoots as musical dead-ends. A Courtney Love apologist sliced open a Kathleen Hanna enthusiast with the sharpened corner of a cassette case, while a trembling Cobain scholar mumbled sorrowfully nearby.
I could stand almost none of it. The guard had reclaimed my cell phone. Late afternoons I placed my chair atop my toilet against the southernmost wall and, standing tiptoe on the wobbly arms, tall as I could go, with a hand balanced against the ceiling, I could just peek out the window. Berlin sat in smoke some miles off, trimmed in neon. The light glazed everything in the same goopy pall, the sun not so much going down as moving aside.
A few feet from my window stretched the upper branch on a tall winter tree, stupid and lifeless. A shopping bag fluttered in the branches, snagged by the tree’s bony fingers. New to the situation, the bag was full of personality, confident of an eventual escape. Any strong wind might set it loose. The bag accepted all drafts and gusts without qualification, puffing grandly to its full size, bravely expecting both nothing and everything. I was reminded of my feelings for Marie.
And meanwhile, I sank deeper into a meadow of Posies than any person ever. I had, after all, just the one CD single to listen to—the song was “Please Return It,” a manly yarn by Stringfellow.
Now, focused in and stripped of ordinary ornamentation, I embraced what I’d always suspected but never had admitted to myself—that though I (like the rest at the Gonzo Hotel) grew besotted with the smell of all things Posies it was half the band I most truly liked—the vulnerable John Lennon character, this frayed Stringfellow, pinched of nose and congested with meanings, and not the voluptuous-voiced Auer. Auer’s songs gleamed more deliciously at first but came to depend on tired power chords and snarl-free vocalizings. In the end, they provided the hollow comfort of emerging victorious from a chocolate-eating contest. Having only this one song in hand, I no longer needed to feel guilty (as I so often did at home) for advancing past the Auer tracks, in effect editing him out of the group in favor of the urgent hayfever enigmas wheezed from this
knotty Stringfellow’s thin windpipe . . .
“Please Return It” starts with a command expressed so tentatively that the voice wobbles, unable to sustain the note. The singer, uncomfortable, wants back an “it” he’d really rather not address—A letter? His heart? He sounds rattled by how much the singing of this song is taking out of him; the more he says, the more he becomes required to say. He shakes his head. Look at the way we act, the things we say; so many factors, contradictions. “When we live the life we live, it’s never ours completely. Not completely.” What he’s asking for, he continues, it’s not so very much. It’s quite easy. “Put it back,” he recommends. He even suggests what he’ll do with it. “I can burn it.”
This last image ignites a fueled clarity to his thinking. He seizes suddenly on what, during the most honest moments of a denial-filled day, might register as his main complaint: “When you let me live my life, you didn’t do it completely.” It’s badly put but we know what he means. He is reminded of other impossible things he could stand to have back—“Like the year I spent comparing me to you; please return it.” How would he like these things returned? Swept dutifully from sight; “Like a servant, like a sewer. Please return it. Please return it.”
The song assures no return of anything, no definition of what’s being asked, no trust gained. The song regrets the bother and embarrassment of its own existence. Which is pretty much where—following an inadequate attempt to convince us there’s an upside, there has to be an upside—Stringfellow leaves us, in a prison of shyness and discomfort, after around two and a half minutes of music.
What had I learned? For several days I listened and waited. I gauged the window to be too narrow. But I discovered the ceiling panels could be pushed aside, and once above them I plummeted down a vertical air shaft and rolled free at the base of a tree. It was the tree outside my window. The plastic bag, still tangled on the treetop, was now frayed and tense, a limp remnant. It flopped resignedly. I waved up at my window, up at the emotionally trapped song I’d left behind in that cell, then headed down the hill to Berlin . . . to return to the land of Bazooka Joe.
MY LIFE IN EIGHTEEN SONGS
U2: “Ultraviolet (Light My Way)” (5:31), from Achtung Baby (Island, 1991). Last night she said her name was Marie. She described herself as brown of hair and eyes. She offered her measurements, which I failed to notice. I asked instead how old she was.
“Fourteen and three-quarters,” she replied. “Is that too old? Almost fifteen?”
“Fine,” I chuckled. “If that’s alright with you.”
“I guess so. I mean . . . I don’t have any control over it, really. It’s just my age.”
“And you’re Marie.”
“Oh, I . . . Is that what I told you before?”
“Yeah.”
“Right, that’s the name then.”
Marie . . . could she have pierced me with two more loaded syllables? Breezes blew against the stiff hinges of my heart. A creak issued from within my chest: Marie! Of all names, why did she have to use that one? Once, with all my might, I had gone for Marie . . . but she’d eluded me . . .
Last night, on my end, I asked too many questions while, on her end, a radio played. Although Marie cost me $29.40 for ten minutes, the long-distance bill would indicate I spoke with the western province for forty minutes—this has been agreed upon when the service took my order. In truth, Marie was not in the western province; she seemed to be in the central zone. I recognized the radio station, the DJ’s voice. I could’ve easily tracked her down through it.
I insisted on an account of the filthiest thing she had ever done. Marie wasn’t exactly positive what it was. I encouraged her to make something up. She tried. It didn’t sound convincing nor would she flesh it out per my follow-ups.
“Baby baby baby,” blasted the radio behind her. “Baby baby baby. Baby baby baby.”
Sometimes when I am blue, the best medicine in the world is hearing a stadium hit recognized by millions (say, Alanis Morrisette’s “Uninvited” or Pearl Jam’s “Corduroy” or the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Scar Tissue”) and feeling connected, for approximately five minutes and thirty-one seconds, like we are all in this together. Playing on Marie’s radio now was one of the very few U2 things I could stomach. It sounded so effusively naughty just then I nearly cried.
Three times the service called back before patching Marie through. Each time they had requested everything—my full name, the name of my hotel and room number, my employment number, vehicle permit number, date of birth. They wondered how I’d voted in the last plebiscite, what year I graduated from middle school, my height, weight, preference of girl, preference of topic. I indulged their inquiry, regarding myself as thrillingly violated, interrogated, the focus of an imminent police raid, a pending assault. I imagined writhing while the SWAT boys pinned me to the wall, with one hand nailed up in the air and both ankles bolted bloodily to the baseboard, leaving one hand free to masturbate. Wishful thinking.
“I’m in the black,” went the radio. “Can’t see or be seen.”
“What do you think I’m doing right now?” I asked Marie. She couldn’t begin to guess. She considered it sufficient to provide murmurings of artificial ecstasy, a few low grunts and extended vowel sounds.
“Now we lie together,” U2 observed in the background, “in whispers and moans.”
“Tell me,” I hissed.
“Tell you what?”
“Say it. Say, ‘That’s a Bono No-No.’ Say it.”
Marie did as she was asked.
’Til Tuesday: “No One Is Watching You Now” (3:44), from Welcome Home (Sony, 1986). My sales route consists of a single square tower rising to a three-story conical roof. It contains many thousands of families, mostly ancient folks and single mothers with multiple offspring, who rarely make promising customers. My sales pitch has grown sooty with disgust as I clomp up and around the disorienting stairwell with my case of miracle knives. In one apartment, a bashful lady offers me a cup of coffee. She is in her late forties, rather plump. She encourages me to lay my wares out on the kitchen table, though she can afford none of them. She craves the companionship of any pitch, even mine. On her small TV, the government channel plays the music video of “Voices Carry,” starring that new-wave chick with the ungodly dye job who sings a lot like a robust Chrissie Hynde but writes a lot like a tender Elvis Costello. I’d forgot all about them. The kitchen is hot from baking. It smells of spiced pecans. Unexpectedly, I think of Marie. Why hadn’t I asked about Walter? Hadn’t she gone to him after leaving me? Hadn’t they meant everything to one another? Weren’t they the eternal couple? But no: They’d split up. I feel relieved that I hadn’t brought it up over the phone to Marie; it was the right thing to do. But no; it’d not really been Marie, my Marie, the fabulous; just some child working to confuse me. The bashful lady pulls on a pair of mittens, opens her oven, and removes a butternut squash pie topped with coconut sprinkles. I agree to try a slice.
Iggy Pop: “Tiny Girls” (2:59), from The Idiot (RCA, 1977). Last Saturday she said her name was “Tokyo Rose” but she plainly appreciated my calling her “Rosy.” I loved her, of course, though in a way that was difficult really to articulate. She spoke timidly, knew only a few English nouns, scored extremely low on her conjugation of verbs. Rosy was a straight $2/minute.
She lives in the western province with her grandmother. Her mother sent her there for school. She “like go fast in car, real fast, top down, desert, night.” She “touch self this morning, bed.” She asked my help in a wide range of things, from explaining what I did for fun to aiding in a description of her bosom. “Nipples like erase pencils,” she repeated many times. “What you call, what you call,” she would begin and I would teach her the names of painful acts, the kind you might meekly suggest to a loved one after decades together, and she would say “Yes! Yes! I much like!” The call was more a language lesson than an erotic undertaking, but I picked up the tab like a gentleman.