Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life (13 page)

No matter where I went for those two weeks one song greeted me, from the Charles Bridge to the Warsaw Ghetto, from the flashing discos of Bohemia to the house parties of Katowice, from the street corners of Prague to the decrepit jazz clubs of East Berlin. Everyone was playing “Macarena.” Everyone was singing “Macarena.” Everyone was dancing the Macarena, a synchronized routine in which:

• The dancer extends his arms forward, palms down, then flips his arms over on the beat.
  

• The dancer sets his hands on his shoulders, the back of his head, and his hips.
  

• The dancer executes a pelvic rotation in time with the line “Ehhh, Macarena!” simultaneously executing a 90-degree jump-and-turn maneuver so as to repeat the same routine all over again.
  

• Steve shoots himself in the skull.
  

But okay, here’s the point, which is not to belittle the “Macarena” for its clobbering monotony, its almost heartrending dearth of imagination, but on the contrary to hail its popularity. What more powerful testament can there be to the universal psychotropic power of music? I myself despise “Macarena,” and yet I have been humming it for the past three days and my two-year-old daughter is now humming it and I’m pretty sure
she will never stop
.

A second major point is that Drooling Fanatics, while sharing certain essential sensitivities, express these sensitivities in distinct manners. We should not be lumped into a single vast Fanatic ghetto. On the contrary, we should be lumped into various smaller ghettos. A brief survey of the afflicted now ensues:

To properly capture the essence of Douchedom will require a return to the era of the “record store,” in my case a dusty emporium known
as Disc Diggers, located in Somerville’s Davis Square, where, despite being a regular for ten years, despite subsidizing what was clearly a failing enterprise, I was invariably abused. Typically, I would find a CD that looked interesting and ask a clerk if I could listen to it on the portable player I brought for just such a purpose. This would be the clerk who looked like Ric Ocasek and not the clerk who looked like Bunny Wailer though they were both perpetually surly, as was every other single employee in that store with the exception of the young hot girl whom rest of the clerks despised with the exception of the Bunny Wailer dude who was (I’m pretty sure) shtuping her. Ric would say no. It was the singular pleasure of his life to say no to guys like me.

Record stores have always been ground zero for Music Douchedom. What made Disc Diggers unique was the variety on display. Bunny Wailer was the Reggae Douche. Ric Ocasek was the Metal Douche. There was also an Alt-Country Douche, an emaciated Punk Douche, a trucker cap-festooned Low-Fi Douche, a bearded and gnomic Jazz Douche. For a few months in the late nineties, they even hired a Grunge Douche. What united all these guys was an aura of self-conscious failure. A number had failed as musicians. Some had failed in less specific ways, as disc jockeys or producers or even (God help us) music critics. And thus they’d landed in a used CD shop, where they wed the inexhaustible resentment of retail wage slavery to the calm sadism of minor bureaucrats. I was endlessly vulnerable to their contempt. I secretly hoped my purchases would meet their approval. They never did.

The question naturally arises: But aren’t you a Douche, Steve? You sure seem like a douche.

Not really.

In fact, I’m closer these days to a
Music Geek
(subcategory:
Aging)
, which is in its crucial aspect the opposite of a Douche. Geeks may indulge in situational snobbery, but their general outlook is absent of
malice. The more virulent form,
Inveterate Hipsterism
, often exudes a Douchy imperiousness. But Hipsters dream of conversion. The true Douche dreams only of crucifixion.

My hairstylist Linda is the foremost example here. The first hint is her cutting station, which is decorated with photos of Billy Corgan, who glares at you, bald and transcendently sullen, as if your decision to bother with hair—the styling of it, the having of it—is an offense. The other indicator is that no matter when I come in for a haircut Linda has always just seen a show. She has always just seen a triple bill of Poison, Quiet Riot, and Queensrÿche. She has always just seen Steely Dan and Elton John and Public Enemy. (“I was in the front row. Flavor Flav threw a beer right at my head!”) She has always just seen Black Sabbath, and has detailed opinions about the relative merit of the band’s new lead singer.

I once asked Linda, who is well into her thirties now, how many concerts she’d seen in her life. Her final estimate was 3500. She has employed the Bedazzler
¹⁰
on hundreds of occasions. She has been trampled. She once wound up on Weird Al Yankovic’s tour bus—“his driver is into gay porn, in case you’re wondering”—while her friend enjoyed the dubious carnal pleasures of Weird Al. And she herself once followed Whitesnake back to their hotel. She was seventeen at the time.

It’s important to make a distinction between Concert Queens and groupies, though. Groupies attach themselves to particular bands and the attraction is centrally erotic. They dream of sexual possession.
Concert Queens might find Ozzy Osbourne sexy, but they don’t really want to peel off his soggy underwear. They hunger for the bustle and the clamor and the adrenaline—the transporting pageantry of the show.

The last time I visited Linda, she had just come off three consecutive Pat Benatar concerts.

“What’s it like seeing Pat Benatar three times in a row?” I asked.

“It’s the exact same show every night,” Linda said,
“note for note.”

Her tone suggested she recognized how depressing this fact was. But Linda is devout. She happily suspends all critical faculties when the stage lights come up. “It doesn’t really matter who’s playing” was how she put it. “The music just takes me away.”

I wasn’t sure how I felt about this. It’s Linda and her ilk, after all, who keep the Benatars of the world on life support, who reduce rock and roll from a subversive cultural force to a tranquilizing commodity. And then on the other hand … who the hell am I to question the needs of my fellow Fanatics? There is, after all, such a giddy quality to the way Linda recounts shows. And she isn’t a giddy person by nature. During the time I’ve known her, Linda has dealt with some crushing losses. She’s watched the love of her life slip away from her, into a life of illness and addiction.

This is why she needs the shows. They aren’t merely a form of nostalgic meditation, but a means of feeling alive in the face of misfortune. Some people turn to prayer or self-help affirmations or marathon running. Linda has concerts. “You know what I really love?” she told me one time. “When you get home from a show and you put your head down on the pillow and all you can hear is ringing. Because that means it was really loud and I was really close. I was right up against the speakers.”

If you’re wondering if you’re a collector, ask yourself two questions.

1. Do I own too many records?
   

2. Do my friends and family feel I own too many records?
   

If your respective answers are No and Yes, you’re a Collector.

Consider Angela Sawyer. The first thing she told me when I visited her was, “I don’t think of myself as someone who has an overly large collection.” The second thing she told me was, “Watch your step.” We were sitting in Angela’s bedroom, which is perhaps 120 square feet. It contained ten thousand records. The living room contained another five thousand records, semiofficial property of Weirdo Records, the shop she runs out of her Somerville apartment.

Most of the records in Angela’s personal collection fall into what she calls the “extreme” category: outsider noise rock, field recordings of frogs, sing-alongs featuring guys in cardigans strumming banjos. Angela does not like these albums ironically. She is truly enraptured by tracks such as “Pammie’s on a Bummer”—Sonny Bono’s account of a girl who smokes pot for the first time and turns into a prostitute. This is what sets Collectors apart from garden variety Drooling Fanatics. They’ve listened to all their albums and studied their historical context and formed thoughtful, even tortured, opinions about them. They’re obsessed with aesthetics.

This offers a stark contrast to, for instance,
Music Snobs
, who are obsessed with constructing an identity based on the contents of their iPod. Snobs want to know whether a record is “good” or “bad” and (most important) what these judgments say about them within a given social milieu. Collectors have pretty much given up relating to anyone else who isn’t a Collector.

But the question remains: what turns a Drooling Fanatic into a
Collector? My wife would certainly like to know. She believes I have a retentive neurosis, a notion I don’t dispute. It’s no coincidence that, in the years I was amassing my collection, I lived in no fewer than eight cities. My discs and tapes were the only objects that came with me. The rest of the memorabilia—the posters and photos and letters that felt so essential at the time—got ditched in closets.

Still, I would argue that most Collectors are not guilty of an acquisitive defect but a peculiar blend of sloth and reverence. We’re too lazy to sort through our records
and
philosophically averse to disposing of them. I have certainly tried to purge. Every few months I head downstairs to our Serial Killer Room, fully intending to
do something
. Here’s what happens. I drag out one of my eleven milk crates full of CDs and I start sorting through them and inevitably find an album I haven’t heard in years, the unsung soul-pop masterpiece
Back in the 90’s
by the band Hobex, say, and the moment I put it on I’m transported back to Greensboro and the sweet misery of that era. It all returns: the fuming solitude, the sexy poet who lanced my heart, the yeasty clouds billowing forth from the extravagantly misnamed New York Pizza. And I think: Throw this album out? Is my wife crazy? It’s a fucking time machine!

This is the thing misunderstood by those who don’t have unreasonable music collections. The record is not simply a storage device. Its value resides in the particular set of memories and emotional associations held by its owner. These are inseparable from the physical object, which is no longer a physical object but an article of faith.

Most musicians self-identify as Drooling Fanatics, and they exhibit many of the prescribed behaviors. But they don’t count in my book, because they violate the main prerequisite which is that you’re
not a musician
.

There is, however, an entire population who has twined their lives around music, somewhat less than profitably. I’m thinking about the grizzled buskers and part-time cellists and YouTube aspirants, the folks who occupy that eager nexus between amateur and professional. Most of all I’m thinking about my pal Clay Martin.

I met Clay in the summer of 1988. We were glorified interns working at newspapers in Phoenix, appropriately stunned by the climatic artifice of the city. It was Death Valley with condos, a genuine Marxist nightmare. Our commute was like sitting in a Holly Hobbie Oven.

I was in the nascent stages of my Fanaticism, having just earned my college degree, and I squandered much of that summer bickering with my roommate over the moral intent of the Warren Zevon song “Boom Boom Mancini” and attempting to find a woman stupid enough to fuck me.

I wanted to be rooming with Clay. He was handsome and sweet-natured and he played guitar. Occasionally, he and his roommate Gerry let me sit in when they jammed. This meant Clay on lead and Gerry playing, if I remember this right, bongos, while I attempted to find the single note on a harmonica that didn’t destroy whatever feeble melodic momentum we’d wandered into. As happens when you’re twenty-one years old, a single pleasing string of notes, combined with alcohol and sleep deprivation, led us to the conclusion that we should start a band, or that we already perhaps had started a band and simply needed a name for licensing and touring purposes. We settled on “Coy and Smiley.” The band lasted a grand total of twenty-seven minutes. Then Gerry fell asleep.

At the end of the summer, Clay headed up to Redmond, Washington, where he found a job with a new company called Microsoft. We all felt sorry for Clay. Poor Clay. He was never going to be a real journalist. He was going to become a Sad Computer Guy Loser who sent us postcards with cats wearing human clothing.

Some years later, I visited Seattle and caught up with Clay. He’d
taken an early retirement from Microsoft. He had a gorgeous girlfriend and a home in the coolest neighborhood on earth. He had launched his own record label. Oh, and he’d also formed his own band, which was heading to Europe for a tour. This was one of those mid-thirties moments when you take a look at the stale, half-chewed bagel your life has become and kiss jealousy on its smoky mouth.

A year later, Clay came east for a tour with his band, Sushirobo. I secretly hoped Sushirobo might suck, but I was out of luck. They sounded like Devo soaked in absinthe, frantic and playful and weird, with skronks of guitar noise and swirling distortion. Clay played bass. The instrument seemed to deliver small hammering shocks to his body. It was a thrilling set, though I seemed to be the only person in the bar listening. The rest of the patrons (young women mostly, in the black makeup of neglect) were there to see the next act, a metal band from Worcester.

Afterward, I ran up to congratulate Clay and his mates. I assumed they would be whisked off to a hotel in a limo by their label. Then I remembered Clay
was
the label. They wound up crashing at my place. It was quickly made apparent how grueling it was to tour as an obscure art rock band, to drive hundreds of miles at close quarters, to absorb the fair complaints of wives and bosses back home, to walk around in clothing stiff with sweat, to dump your laundry into the washing machines of kind strangers, to maintain self-belief in the face of such persistent disregard. I’d gotten it all wrong, as usual.