Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life (17 page)

And then something totally unprecedented happened: A few summers ago I received a remarkable e-mail from Mr. Henry. He knew me to be a writer and therefore attached a poem he’d composed on July 4th, asking if I “had any thoughts.” I did have a thought.
Holy shit
, I thought,
Joe Henry just sent me something to read
.

The opening stanza described Willie Mays shopping for garage door openers at a Home Depot in Scottsdale, Arizona. I loved it, the unlikely collision of the archetypal and mundane. Then something unfortunate happened; the poem’s pathos sputtered into rage. There was a lot about how stupid Americans are. Red Bull was cited, as were the ravages of global warming. I was reminded (unpleasantly) of my own writing. And thus my next thought: I’m going to have to tell Joe Henry that
his poem kind of sucks
.

By the time I’d composed my critique Joe had rewritten the poem and set it to music. He e-mailed me a demo of the song, just piano and voice. In its somber beauty, it called to mind Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” the dream of America as a holy wilderness whose decline is properly understood as a cause for lamentation, not sermons.

Willie Mays was no longer being deployed as a frothing symbol of America’s greatness gone to lard. He had become a spokesman for the spiritual reckoning that would have to precede any national redemption. “This was my country,” he observed,

I now venture the following absurd claim: that this song, its very manner of composition, prophesied the end of the Bush Era, the false
dream of aggression as salvation, the tireless denials and indecent projections of evil, and the beginning of the Obama Era, in its humility, in its bruised optimism and Afro-Christian evocations. I am not suggesting that Joe Henry set out to do anything other than express his deepest concerns. Only that these concerns were, to a startling degree, shared by his fellow citizens, as subsequent events would affirm.

This is what artists do, actually—as the pundits fizz away in their bright studios, narrating our civic fate like a form of athletic combat—they transcribe the individual heart seeking a collective conscience, a reason to believe. You can certainly think of me as a sap for making such a grandiose statement, but listen to the song first.

I kept trying to find excuses to interview Joe Henry again. I wanted to know more about how he composed his lyrics and whether he’d ever written fiction and whether he’d be willing to ghostwrite mine. We never got that far. But in the spring of 2008 Joe did agree to appear on a panel I’d organized in Los Angeles about the relationship between literature and songwriting. He suggested inviting his friend Aimee, who was also a musician. Aimee Mann, he meant.

“Cool,” I said, as calmly as I could.

Mann was everything I expected: smart, funny, gorgeous, and high-strung. A decade ago, I would have developed a raging crush on her, just for the sake of humiliating myself. But our panel had been scheduled for Sunday morning at the very rock and roll hour of 10:30 a.m. Aimee did not appear amused. I glanced down at my list of questions and quietly scratched out the one suggested by a friend:
Can you talk about the symbolic undercarriage of the line, “Hush hush, keep it down now, voices carry”?

The most fascinating thing about the panel, for me, was that Aimee Mann felt intimidated talking about songwriting next to Joe
Henry. She went so far as to scoff at her reputation as a literary songwriter: “You mention that someone’s drinking coffee and it’s a Tuesday and suddenly you’re a genius. It’s a very low bar.”

Without exactly meaning to, she drove the point home by performing “Freeway,” the single from her album @#%&*!
Smilers
. The song was a wry character sketch of the suburban wastrels who populate Southern California. Then Joe got up to sing “This Afternoon,” a track from 2003’s
Tiny Voices
. The difference was impossible to miss.

Joe’s tale was told by a teenage prostitute in Havana who described his life on the afternoon Fidel Castro’s rebels captured the city. The details were precise and indelibly sad. The song cast the upheavals of history as a backdrop to the personal corruptions we endure. It was a Graham Greene novel, basically, set to soul music.

Am I suggesting that Joe’s song was “better” than Aimee’s? Nope. The crowd enjoyed “Freeway” far more than “This Afternoon.” It had a catchier hook and chorus. It trafficked in the simple pleasures we expect from a pop song. And by
simple
I don’t mean dumb; I mean accessible.

What I am suggesting is that Joe’s song was trying to transport us, trying to make us imagine what it would be like to be another human being. Aimee Mann doesn’t do that kind of work. She casts a gimlet eye on the world and offers her fans an “Aimee Mann song.” This is her solution to the crisis of sentiment: she assumes an ironic posture that protects her from excessive feeling.

Joe’s solution is more complicated. He wants to impart deep feeling, but he doesn’t want anyone to get the idea that he’s blabbering about his heart. So he invents a world where he can safely project his emotional concerns. This is the essential impulse of a fiction writer.

As I listened to the two of them, I got to thinking more broadly about the relationship between lyrics and artistic influence. The top of the charts will always be the preserve of those who voice the old tropes with conviction.
Since my baby left me and I’m crazy for loving
you and I want to rock and roll all night
. There was a time, before the rise of television and videos, when stars like Dylan or the Beatles made hits out of fictional creation. But today’s stars are much more like brands. Their personas—lovesick, nubile, wounded, enigmatic, whatever it is—have become the central product in all their songs.

There are plenty of reasons Joe Henry hasn’t become a household name. His songs run six minutes and often involve jazz musicians. But the main thing is his lyrics. Whatever marketable persona he might present remains too submerged in his art. The same is true of Tom Waits, for instance, or Randy Newman. These guys are like brilliant short story writers living in an era of celebrity memoir. And I’m not sure this is a bad thing.

The crowd at the panel had come out to hear Aimee Mann. She was the star attraction. But this fact made her seem oddly trapped: she had to be Aimee Mann. There was no room for surprise. Whereas, right at the end, when Joe got up and began to perform “Our Song,” a sense of wonder rippled through that auditorium. There was one woman in the front row whose face was alight. She had no idea who Joe Henry was. She knew only that she was going somewhere she hadn’t been before, and he was taking her there.

The Mating Habits of the Drooling Fanatic

A certain Elise——invited me to visit her upstate. We had met two months earlier at a literary event and instantly sensed in the other the avid temperament of the orgasmically needy. A series of quivering phone calls ensued. Elise had the dewy gaze of a Bollywood heroine and the relentless pep of a midwestern football mascot. I wanted to defile her. I wanted her to defile me. I wanted public gymnastics capped by a naked perp walk. If all that went well, we could get hitched and coauthor the Sex Addict Memoir.

This was during my era of Dismal Blind Dates (1997–2004) and I saw no reason to behave responsibly. I was still living in Somerville and scraping by as an Adjunct Professor of Bitterness. So I flew out to a writer’s conference near the college where she taught; that was how we rigged things. I stayed at her place rather than some hotel because why-not-save-the-money plus she-had-plenty-of-room. For two days we knocked around town, gobbling fried fish and trying to figure out how to jump-start the defiling process. At night we lay in our respective rooms, broiling in cowardice. The tension was idiotic and throbbing and awesome.

On morning three I woke up determined to act. I took a shower and slathered deodorant on my junk and when I walked out of her bathroom the stereo was blaring. The only way I can describe the music is to say it was mall-friendly, soft, synthesized, entirely devout in its stunted emotional ambitions.

“Who is this?” I said.

“Air Supply!” Elise said.

I searched her tender face for the slightest trace of irony.

“This is their
Greatest Hits,”
she said.

I closed my eyes and nodded. It seemed important that I not say anything snide. My mind lunged about for possible Air Supply repartee. The only thing that came to mind was a high school soccer practice where Jon Carnoy mentioned Air Supply and Dave Andersen and Danny Luotto started chanting “Fag Supply!” in what they took to be Australian accents.

And how were Air Supply doing after all these years? They were
all out of love
. They were
making love out of nothing at all
. They were (more broadly)
lost in love
.

If you are now thinking I rebuffed Elise because of her fondness for Air Supply, think again, friend. After seventy-two hours spent marinating in lust, you could not have stopped my dick with a Taser. When the time finally came, we auditioned numerous panting configurations, with much attendant grind and slurp.

The problem arose, as it so often does, upon reflection. Elise was supposed to be everything I wanted: brilliant, delectable, willing. But as I returned to Boston, as I furiously throttled myself to the memory of her haunches, my mind kept fixing on Air Supply. I kept seeing Russell Hitchcock in his lacquered mulletfro. Worse, I kept hearing his voice.
Don’t know which way to turn
, he keened.
Don’t know which boat to burn
. Right, I thought. The multiple boats. The bloody indecision over which to burn.

Did I honestly believe Elise lacked the emotional depth required to
be involved with me? Was this even possible? Indeed, wasn’t my willingness to dismiss this woman based solely on her earnest devotion to a soft rock duo proof of my own spiritual disfigurement?

In a word: possibly.

In fact, my reaction neatly encapsulates the romantic inclinations of the Drooling Fanatic. I could see, based on the Air Supply situation, that Elise and I were susceptible to different myths. Hers were starry-eyed and operatic, full of blond people in Members Only jackets necking on tarmacs. Mine were shadowy and downbeat and involved horny Communists engaged in light bondage. There was some chance our myths might overlap in the arena of depravity. (Perhaps the Communists were blond; perhaps the bondage could be staged on a tarmac.) But soon enough, Elise would be sighing a lot and asking why I listened to such sad music all the time. Did I have something against just being happy? And I’d be gouging up her Air Supply records, then blaming it on her dog.

Be it resolved: We are not easy people to love. We spend too much time listening to our music, explaining why our music is so brilliant, resenting those who neglect our music, and hating ourselves because we can’t make music. Our less obvious offenses include:

1. Inept Rites of Seduction
Anyone who has dated a Drooling Fanatic can recall the painful moment when it becomes apparent that he (or less often she) is going to try to use music to compensate for deficits of charm, intellect, and sexual prowess. You can safely conjure the usual mood-setting clichés—soft lighting, red wine, incense—as our Fanatic makes his way to the stereo, poorly pretending his musical selection is happenstance when he has spent the past week (at least)
worrying the aphrodisiacal merits of Miles Davis’s
Kind of Blue
versus Sinatra’s
In the Wee Small Hours
.