she must be tired of something…

It’s in Counting Crows’ mythology now: their first-ever appearance on Saturday Night Live, with the producers pressuring them to play “Mr. Jones” during their first segment on the show. Vocalist Adam Duritz held firm, though, and the band opened with the first track of August and Everything After, “Round Here.” Duritz was adamant that “Round Here” better represented what the band was all about, no matter what the NBC execs said, and he ended up getting his way.

Step out the front door like a ghost into the fog
where no one notices the contrast of white on white
and in between the moon and you
the angels get a better view
of the crumbling difference between wrong and right

Duritz has said repeatedly that “Mr. Jones” is a song about his dreams, while “Round Here” is nearly perfect in its depiction of longing and loneliness. I’ve always believed he was right in insisting that the band play the latter song first; it also set an unshakeable example that the band would do things its own way, even at the risk of the lust for stardom that fills every second of “Mr. Jones.” They might not have won many friends among the SNL crew that night in 1993, but they took charge of their career in a way that few bands ever do…and they never looked back. “This is our life,” Duritz reportedly said that night, and while he might have been mocked at the time for his seriousness, his will and his instincts would not be denied. And so America met one of its truly great bands through a poetic, meandering song about characters lost in this maze we call life, characters who might seem dead inside but reveal through the very force of their longing and loneliness that they may be damaged but remain very much alive. “We all want something beautiful,” Duritz sang in “Mr. Jones.” “Man I wish I was beautiful.”

but the girl in the car in the parking lot
says “Man you should try to take a shot
Can’t you see my walls are crumbling?”
then she looks up at the building
says she’s thinking of jumping
she says she’s tired of life
she must be tired of something

It didn’t hurt matters, of course, that August and Everything After was a truly perfect debut album, pitch perfect in every way. Produced by T-Bone Burnett and featuring backing vocals by Maria McKee of the band Lone Justice (who had a hit in the eighties with the Tom Petty song “Ways to be Wicked”), the band recorded the album in a house in the Hollywood Hills. The idea of such a collective had been explored before, of course, most notably by the Band, who recorded the classic Songs From Big Pink in a similar home studio. Still, it’s hard to say if anyone has ever done it better. The band lived and worked together for months, and ended up creating the perfect album for lonely people everywhere. And since we’re all lonely at one time or another, that means everyone, right?

There’s an ache that permeates August and Everything After, sometimes dull, sometimes sharp, always present. It’s an album that you might cry to if you’re so inclined, but it’s also a celebration of life in all its triumphs and shortcomings. Written and recorded with great care and love, it has become timeless in the twenty years or so since its release. It’s been a difficult debut to live up to, but the journey which followed has been well worth the twists, turns, missteps, and occasional spot-on beauty. No band could ever recreate an album such as August; Counting Crows haven’t even tried. It’s better that way, of course: the only way to retain any sort of viable and meaningful career is through constant experimentation and reinvention. That Counting Crows have succeeded so well is a credit to their collective genius; here’s hoping that Adam Duritz never forgets how it felt when he sang, “We’re gonna be big stars…”

bitter tears and babylon revisited

In an all-too-brief lifetime (1896-1940) of crafting some of the very finest American short fiction, Scott Fitzgerald likely reached his artistic peak with the 1931 story “Babylon Revisited.” Ostensibly about the effect on expatriate Americans following the 1929 financial meltdown and the subsequent Great Depression, Fitzgerald magically recreates the melancholy social atmosphere following the Crash and the oftentimes desperate attempts by the American expatriate community to enjoy the dregs of the decade-long party which has come down to what history now terms the Roaring Twenties.

Perhaps Fitzgerald’s most perceptive and sympathetic  critic, Malcom Cowley, calls Babylon Revisited “a new type of story, more complicated emotionally, with less regret for the past and more dignity in the face of real sorrow. “”At last I am mature,” Fitzgerald said around that time, with Cowley saying that this and other contemporary stories “are so close to his personal tragedy that the emotion is in the events themselves…which have merely to be stated in the barest language.” In this Fitzgerald comes closest to Hemingway’s famous “iceberg principle,” in which three-fourths of story remains below the metaphorical surface, a “new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understand.”

Babylon Revisited tells the story of one Charlie Wales, a onetime free spending and hard-drinking Parisian-American now paying the moral and practical cost of alcoholism and his onetime tendency to spend money as if it were printed from an inexhaustible supply. “I spoiled this city for myself,” Wales says. “I didn’t realize it, but the days came along one after another, and then two years were gone, and I was gone.”

“The snow of twenty-nine wasn’t real snow,” Fitzgerald writes. “If you didn’t want it to be snow, you just paid some money.”

And at considerable cost: Wales’ wife died of “heart trouble”  in Paris after he drunkenly and inadvertently locked her out of the house during a post-party snowstorm, and now his young daughter Honoria lives in the custody of his wife’s sister and her own husband. There is much resentment, of course, especially with his former sister-in-law, with which there had always been “an instinctive antipathy between them.” The sister, Marion Peters, bitterly blames Wales for her sister’s death, leaving Wales to become “increasingly alarmed at leaving Honoria in this atmosphere of hostility against himself; sooner or later it would come out, in a word here, a shake of the head there, and some of that distrust would be irrevocably implanted in Honoria.”

That particular thought strikes a bitter chord with any non-custodial parent, of which reluctantly I am one. Typically, I write of and disguise my own enduring pain through allusion and metaphor; I have come to realize that certain types of pain are so deep that they are beyond acknowledgment, far beneath the surface, far beyond even tears. Lately I have begun to wonder if I can even still cry, if the pain has burrowed itself so deep that it can no longer be expressed. It is an unhealthy thing, not being to acknowledge or address your own grief. I know it is, because it leads to hopelessness and a melancholy so intense that even the word depression fails to even begin to describe one’s emotional state. This is my acquaintance with unspoken grief, and, and it has certainly taken its toll during the last eight years. It’s always there, a black veil over my life, leaving me in some ways reluctantly frozen in time, forever seeing and dreaming of the two very young men from which I was once very nearly inseparable.

And as much as Babylon Revisited is a story of moral dissipation, it is also one of the enduring love between parent and child. Little wonder, then, that it affects me so deeply (and so differently than when I first discovered it during my early twenties, shortly before I became a parent myself). I empathize with Wale’s attempts to reclaim custody of his daughter, knowing all the while that my time for such a complete reconciliation is now long since past.

My youngest son and I, Aaron, traded some texts on a recent warm night on the great times we spent together: bookstore and photography trips, Starbucks’ visits and the like. I couldn’t help it; I cried for the first time in what seems like ages. And I needed a good cry in some ways; we all do, I suppose, at one time or another. After all, we can’t keep our emotions bottled up forever.

“I’m afraid we’ve lost the chance to make new memories together,” I said.

‘Don’t think like that,” Aaron said. “There’s plenty of time for that.”

“But you’re so busy. And you’ll be going off to college soon.”

“I know,” Aaron said. “But I sure hope there’s a way.”

“You’re not the only one. You’re all I ever think about.”

And, I must admit, I cried at the conclusion of Babylon Revisited:

He would come back some day; they couldn’t make him pay forever. But he wanted his child, and nothing was much good now, beside that fact. He wasn’t young anymore, with a lot of nice thoughts and dreams to have by himself. He was absolutely sure Helen wouldn’t have wanted him to be so alone.

Dedicated to Adam and Aaron

“phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust…”

Feeling decidedly old, insecure, passe, and uncool these days, I’ve decided to become as angry as the young Elvis Costello. To wit: have you seen the new iPhone commercial yet? The one where the Strat-wielding dork asks his phone how to play “London Calling?” (doesn’t anyone play by ear anymore?) It’s in Em, idiot wind. Play it in the cowboy chord formation for all I care. And pick up a Tele while yer at it. That’s what Strum played it on.

I suppose that part of me is angry that the music of the Clash is being used to sell offshore-manufactured hardware, even though the song itself is conspicuous in its absence (permission denied to use the actual song, I hopefully assume). After all, I feel very protective of my bands; I always have. And these days I’m feeling very protective of the Clash.

the ice age is coming, the sun’s zooming in
meltdown expected, the wheat is growing thin
engines stop running but I have no fear
cause London’s burning and I live by the river

I bought London Calling, the album, as soon as I could locate a copy; I was only fifteen and otherwise much too young to know. If you must know, it wasn’t all that easy then. I lived in a very small town, fresh vinyl was scarce, and I couldn’t exactly order it from Amazon or whatever. I was amazed to find it, actually. And I’ve been living in those grooves for the last thirty-two years.

kick over the wall, ’cause government’s to fall
how can you refuse it?
let fury have the hour, anger can be power
do you know that you can use it?

I texted some Clash lyrics to my sons a few days ago; no reply. This happened once before…I shouldn’t have been surprised. But I wanted to share some music–and a band—that I love and care about so much. I suppose I simply wanted to share something with them. My oldest has always, to his great credit, loved the Clash. I thought at least I would receive a brief acknowledgment from him. But…nothing. I’m sure he was busy. Yes, that must have been it. He’s very busy and I’m becoming more irrelevant with each passing day.

I’ve been beat up
I’ve been thrown out
but I’m not down
no, I’m not down

Well, part of it is true, anyway. Or as Hemingway wrote at the end of The Sun Also Rises: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

“I never did believe in the ways of magic, but I’m beginning to wonder why…”

One of the small miracles in a lifetime of miracles is that the judgments we make about music when we are very young are quite often correct and perhaps even eternal. You have to be lucky on a couple of counts, at least: first, you must have the type of heart which allows beauty and music to speak to you, and then you must have the taste and discretion to open your heart to only the purest and most sincere examples of artistic expression. You have to be more lucky than you’re able to realize at the time; but if you are (and most of us are) then you find yourself in a lifetime dialogue with music which enters directly and purely into your very soul. If you are fortunate enough, you will often be solitary but never truly alone.

This isn’t an essay about what I’m listening to, or have been listening to for most of my life. My journey is unique like your own, and for the moment I believe I will uncharacteristically keep it to myself. I just wanted to say that I know what you’re going through, whatever your age, and that in some small way we’re going through it together. Sometimes our paths cross even though we shall never meet, and it is this sense of community and belonging which helps makes music so powerful to begin with. We all want to be a part of something larger than ourselves, after all, and music is so often our very first step into the endless possibilities of a much larger world. As I said, solitary but never truly alone.

As Rilke wrote:

Music. The breathing of statues. Perhaps:
The quiet of images. You, language where
languages end. You, time
standing straight from the direction
of transpiring hearts.

Feelings, for whom?  O, you of the feelings
changing into what?— into an audible landscape.
You stranger: music. You chamber of our heart
which has outgrown us. Our inner most self,
transcending, squeezed out,—
holy farewell:
now that the interior surrounds us
the most practiced of distances, as the other
side of the air:
pure,
enormous
no longer habitable.

I think I’m numb…

When, exactly, do you reach the point where you no longer enjoy having birthdays? I suppose that it’s as much of a variable as all other elements of what some of us mockingly refer to as the human condition. All I know is that I turned forty-seven last Thursday, that I didn’t like it, and that I’ve suddenly become one of those older people who never care if they have another birthday again. This, from someone who has always appeared far younger than their years. This, I think, must be time’s revenge, as virulent as it is delayed.

I wouldn’t mind it so much, I believe, if only I didn’t feel so emotionally numb, so incapable of either laughter or tears. I have been wondering for months now, actually, if I’m even still capable of love. I wrote yesterday (although typically obliquely) of how I no longer feel as intensely as I did before, and how terrifying that is for a person who relies on intensity of feeling for their art, their intellect, for their very existence. To put it simply: if I no longer feel, will I ever write or enjoy music again? Am I even alive?

my heart is broke
but I have some glue
help me inhale
and mend it with you
we’ll float around
and hang out on clouds
then we’ll come down
and have a hangover
have a hangover…

I hope that this is merely a trial, or something experienced by nearly everyone at one point or another. I fear that it is not normal, however, and that fear is currently dominating my life. I think I’m numb, I think I’m numb, I think I’m numb…

“my heart is like a broken cup; I only feel right on my knees…”

I’ve had very little to say for months now; even my internal dialogues, usually so rich with words yearning to be written, seem strangely mute and barren. Never did I think that I would be unable to write, to create, yet now I fear that my intellectual decline has decline. Perhaps it is only melancholy, or depression. Perhaps it is too many years of loneliness, disappointment, and estrangement. Perhaps it is merely ennui, or a normal fallow period of life. Rilke, after all, waited years to complete the stunning Sonnets to Orpheus after the beguilement of an effortless beginning. Words may yet return to me. And yet…

And yet I notice changes deep within my heart which make me fear that I will never again experience the thrilling intensity of daily life itself. I rarely read anymore, for one thing. Books are no longer a comfort. Even the deep feeling of music escapes me. I am changing in ways I don’t understand yet; I don’t particularly like the person that I am becoming. Perhaps, now that I think about it, I don’t like the person that I’ve been all along.

I know there’s a place you’ve walked
where love falls from the trees
My heart is like a broken cup
I only feel right on my knees
I spit out like a sewer hole
yet still receive your kiss
How can I measure up to anyone now
after such a love as this?

You. You. You. Ah, you.

saying goodbye to R.E.M.

I find that I’m missing R.E.M.–missing the idea of R.E.M.–more and more as each day slowly passes us by (it hurts, and everybody hurts). I miss Michael Stipe’s surrealistic early lyrics, the Rickenbacker jangle of Peter Buck’s guitar, the inventive counter-melodies and melodic bass of Mike Mills. For the first time since I was a sophomore in college, I face a world without R.E.M. The breakup took me completely by surprise: I’m bereft, uncertain, tentative, as if I just lost a lover or a child. I think I’ll take a week or so and listen to little else than R.E.M., trying to touch that part of myself that fell in love with them in the first place.

They shifted the statues for harboring ghosts
Reddened their necks, collared their clothes
Then we danced the dance till the menace got out
She gathered the corners and called it her gown

I’m having trouble dealing with this. R.E.M. has been a sort of spiritual touchstone with me, one of the few bands able to give me chills for creating the perfect moment on record. Their music has always been perfectly economical, nothing wasted, like a musical prose poem. I always felt that R.E.M. was a secret shared between me and other like-minded fans, a club with it’s own rituals and signs. I always believed that it took a true fan to understand just how great they were, whether in their murky, early eighties incarnation, or the glam blast of their mid-1990s output.

There’s a secret stigma, reaping wheel.
Diminish, a carnival of sorts.
Chronic town, poster torn, reaping wheel.
stranger, stranger to these parts.

Watching R.E.M. from the second row during a 1995 concert, I nodded at Michael at the conclusion of “Country Feedback.” The performance seemed beyond applause, beyond simple admiration. Applause didn’t seem good enough. So I nodded at Michael, and he nodded back at me.

I wish I knew what came next. I hope that individually they’ll keep making music, and that someday far in the future, they’ll walk out together onstage again. But I know in my heart that they won’t. That day is done, and we’ll keep on living as best we can without them.

There’s a problem, feathers iron
Bargain buildings, weights and pulleys
Feathers hit the ground before the weight can leave the air

I will never be that young or that much in love again.

talk about the passion

As one diarist sums up in the wake of R.E.M.’s decision this week to call it a day, the band was dedicated like few others to “making music on its own terms.” Respected by their peers on a level enjoyed by few other bands, R.E.M. forged a 31 year career out of a handful of exquisite influences: the glistening, Rickenbacker-driven janglepop of the Byrds, a melodic take on seventies’ glam, the d0-it-yourself ethos of punk. R.E.M.’s peculiar alchemy was called many things over the years (college rock comes quickly to mind, the band being “alternative” before there was such a genre), although the band stubbornly defied categorization in releasing such stylistically disparate albums as Out of Time, Automatic for the People, and Monster (all released during the midpoint of the band’s career, a period which coincided with their critical and commercial peak). Part of the “fun and fascination” of being an R.E.M. fan, as Rolling Stone once reported, was never knowing what direction the band would take next. To their great credit. R.E.M. never made the same record twice.

“We have always been a band in the truest sense of the word,” writes bassist Mike Mills on the breakup.” Brothers who truly love, and respect, each other. We feel kind of like pioneers in this–there’s no disharmony here, no falling-outs, no lawyers squaring-off. We’ve made this decision together, amicably and with each other’s best interests at heart. The time just feels right.”

According to a carer summary in The Atlantic, “R.E.M. released 15 albums, an EP, and one early rarities collection (Dead Letter Office) between 1982 and 2012 (sic). Six of these went platinum. In terms of critical and eventual popular acclaim, R.E.M.’s run between 1982 (their debut EP Chronic Town) and 1998 (the chilly, buzzing Up) ranks with the peaks of any great American rock band.”

I came to the band a bit late, I must admit, not becoming a huge R.E.M. until the release of their fourth album, Life’s Rich Pageant, in 1986. I wore out three cassette tapes of that album, though, memorizing every Homeric twist and turn of favorite tracks such as “The Flowers of Guatemala,” “I Believe,” and “Begin the Begin.” I drove and sang along to the album countless times, so much so that even now the songs sometime seem to play on permanent repeat in my mind. This was my first R.E.M. album, and in many ways it has remained my favorite. It’s the album I go back to to remind myself of why I became such a big fan to begin with.

birdie in the hand
for life’s rich demand
the insurgency began and we missed it

Guitarist Peter Buck: ”Mike, Michael, Bill, Bertis, and I walk away as great friends. I know I will be seeing them in the future, just as I know I will be seeing everyone who has followed us and supported us through the years. Even if it’s only in the vinyl aisle of your local record store, or standing at the back of the club: watching a group of 19 year olds trying to change the world.”

twentieth century, collapse into now…

I’ve been trying for months now, and at times trying pretty hard, to dislike the latest R.E.M. album, Collapse Into Now. It’s admittedly a rather odd position for this quarter-century+ fan to be in,and I’m concluding that it’s a position which doesn’t quite fit. I like this record, as much as I tried not to. I like the reminiscent touches of mandolin, accordion, and Rickenbacker jangle and drone. I like the varying styles and points of view found in Michael Stipe’s lyrics. I like the reliability of Peter Buck and Mike Mills, and the certainty that as much as the sounds and songs sometimes seem to come from left field, they all have their antecedents in R.E.M. history.

In fact, it’s that very diversity which makes Collapse Into Now such a rewarding listen in this era of cyber-noise and hypertext attention spans. From the “Turn You Inside Out” drone of the opening track, “Discoverer,” to the choral sweep of “Me, Marlon Brando, Marlon Brando and I,” this seems not so much a departure as a reckoning of all that came before (and apologies for all the hidden references to the R.E.M catalog). It makes sense somehow for R.E.M. to be releasing this record in 2011, as much as it made sense for them to release Fables of the Reconstruction in 1985 or Life’s Rich Pageant the following year. This record and it’s predecessor, 2008′s Accelerate, make it fun to follow R.E.M. again. It’s not a landmark record; it’s just another twist for a band whose point has always been the journey, not the destination.

And the best part? R.E.M. never makes the same record twice. In a couple of years, God willing, there will be another new album to come to terms with. And we’ll begin the begin, all over again.

season of mists

It rained last night/early this morning. And now it’s cool out (or Cool ‘n’ Out, as the Joe Strummer song goes), probably in the low to mid sixties. I’m hoping, of course, that the rain and cool temps here in mid-September will help us to have a colorful autumn; I’ve always thought that a cool and wet September helps somewhat. We’ll find out, I suppose. We’ll find out one way or another.

I’m listening to Joe Strummer, obviously. Adam had mentioned to me on the phone a couple of days ago that he was listening to Joe; he’s been on my mind ever since. I’ve even been texting Adam some random Strummer lyrics, or rather, the lyrics to songs which have been playing on repeat in my mind.

 Me: I’m with the coma girl and the excitement gang.

Adam: I’m in class. Listen to Joe and stop texting me! 

Me: I will, sir!

Adam: Ha! Talk to you later.

And now, suddenly it seems (at 1:54 PM), the clouds have parted somewhat and there’s a hint of sunshine on the landscape. Which means, of course, that the front which brought the rain moved through rather quickly, it’s effect quite fleeting and perhaps not truly measured until high autumn days.