Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life (18 page)

This is assuming the best. For Drooling Fanatics are unfailingly blind to the liabilities of their own taste. I have subjected would-be lovers to such loin-parching classics as Tesla’s
Five Man Acoustical Jam
, Johnny Cash’s
At Folsom Prison
, and, on one dire occasion,
The Murder Ballads
. (If you have not yet attempted to remove a woman’s camisole with Nick Cave croaking, “I’m a bad motherfucker, don’t you know, but I’ll crawl over fifty good pussies just to get one fat boy’s asshole” in the background, you haven’t quite lived.)

Even when Drooling Fanatics get the tunes right, there is a lurking danger. Rather than attending to the unfolding carnal drama, we become preoccupied by the soundtrack. We begin to wonder if our dates are listening carefully enough. “Wait, wait,” we say, “you have to hear
this
part,” and “They use a moog when they play this song live” and “Can you believe it? A
moog!”
and pretty soon our date is yawning and saying how she needs to get some sleep, she’s got to vacuum out her car the next morning.

2. Sonic Presumptions
But okay, let’s say you’re the patient type. You find our enthusiasm endearing. You mistake our fanaticism for passion. For whatever reason, you get involved with us. Congratulations! You will now be subjected—more or less constantly—to the ridiculous bigotries so integral to the Drooling Fanatic self-esteem complex. We will squint at your CDs and when you ask why, we’ll say, “Oh no, nothing, I just didn’t realize Pearl Jam was still together.” We will help “revamp” your iTunes library, perhaps without your consent. We will drag you to shows in venues where hope has died. We will do this because we are dickheads. But the sad part is we’re not even trying to be dickheads. It’s just that music is the central expression of who we are, how
we
hope to be judged, and now that we’re together, well, you’re a part of that too, babe. If you possess a CD by the Spin
Doctors, we feel it is incumbent upon us to rescue you. We know you’re a better person than that, deeper, more authentic. It’s like we’re getting you off drugs.

3. A Perpetual Effort to Colonize
Life with a Drooling Fanatic probably won’t require a new address (our place is kind of cluttered) or a new set of friends (we don’t have many), but it will require a new musical sensibility. Because it’s not just a matter of getting you off your drugs. You’ve also got to get on ours.

Back in my El Paso years, for instance, I became obsessed with an album called
Road Apples
by the Canadian band the Tragically Hip. The music was rock by way of the Stones, overwrought electric blues, and I played it constantly. I was living over a grocery store owned by a pair of Lebanese brothers and when I came downstairs for a box of Pop-Tarts, I often could hear one of them murmuring
culled and wooed, bitten, chewed, baby it won’t hurt if you don’t move
in a glottal Arab accent.

Then my girlfriend moved in with me. She was a fan of Cannonball Adderley and Touré Kunda, artists who, like her, exuded a terrifying sophistication. I pummeled her with
Road Apples
. Pummeled as she cooked gourmet meals involving sherry and shallots, as we humped with eager, postcollegiate ineptitude, as she slept. My girlfriend came to like the Hip. She overlooked the band’s idiotic name and limited range. But she couldn’t bring herself to love them as I did and eventually moved out. There were, as Princess Di might have put it, three of us in the relationship.

Or consider (once again) The Close. Not only did he spend the entirety of his courtship dragging his intended to White Stripes shows, not only did he somewhat creepily begin appropriating the wardrobe of Jack White (posters of whom high-schoolishly plastered every square inch of his apartment) but he insisted their wedding party have a “White Stripes theme,” meaning everyone had to dress
in black and white and red. He did not force his bride to sit behind a drum kit, though I’m sure he lobbied.

I think we can all agree such behavior reflects rampant egocentrism. But there’s an even more virulent fantasy at work, I’m afraid. Drooling Fanatics honestly believe that if you come to love our music, you will love us. You will understand the exalted suffering and luminous desire we can’t ever quite articulate. Which brings us to …

4. Our Reliance on Songs to Access Our Emotional Lives
Here, it might be best to cite the pop culture touchstone of Drooling Fanaticism—the scene from the film
Say Anything
¹³
in which John Cusack stands across the street from Ione Skye’s bedroom with a boom box over his head blaring Snoop Dogg’s timeless classic “Bitches Ain’t Shit.”

Wait. Check that. According to Wikipedia, he’s actually playing “In Your Eyes” by Peter Gabriel. Fine.

So this was how people serenaded each other back in the 1980s. But it begs the question: is this the best you can do, John Cusack character guy? Romeo scales a wall. Cyrano praises Roxanne’s lilies. Even Don Giovanni, pretty much the ultimate scumbag of all opera, sings Elvira an aria. The Drooling Fanatic has neither courage nor talents of self-expression at his disposal. Thus, we must rely on our playlists to speak for us.

In the early stages of courtship—as, say, on the brink of a first kiss—I cue up tracks that announce
I am painfully sensitive and will love you till the end of time
. “I Was Just Thinking” by Teitur is a lock. As matters proceed, the compositions should suggest mysterious, possibly agitated, depths of feeling, the basic message being
I have been wounded and remain frightened you will wound me, but it might help if
you take off your blouse
. “Every Little Bit Hurts” by Paul Thorn works well. As for the serious business, I’m a proponent of songs that combine abject female body worship and a vigorous rhythm section (ideally “Pretty Brown Skin” by Roy Ayers).

But this is just me, of course, the same guy who once considered Nick Cave suitable foreplay. I would never deign to DJ someone else’s thunderdome. To do so would violate what I have come to think of as the Porno Parallax. To wit: If you’ve ever watched amateur pornography, you will have noticed that many of the videos, sort of unwittingly, capture the music playing in the room at the time. And thus, those of us who make the admittedly poor decision to watch amateur pornography must endure, along with poor lighting and ill-advised genital grooming, scraps of Quarterflash’s “Harden My Heart” or Riskay’s “Smell Yo Dick.” Not songs that
I
associate with erotic reverie, but presumably the very ones the lovers in question selected to inspire them to perform sexual acts on camera.

5. Drooling Fanatics Struggle in Social Settings
Of course we do. That’s us, by the way, hovering next to the dip. And no, we don’t know what’s in it that makes it so tasty. We’re busy mulling the music—what it is, whether it meets our standards, how we might seize control of the stereo. Indeed, the relational style of the Drooling Fanatic at a party might best be summarized as Asperger’s with a Backbeat.

Unless, of course, two Drooling Fanatics encounter each other, in which case you can bank on an initial period of excitement, the swapping of multiple band names and at least one protracted spat. The writer Brock Clarke and I once argued for three hours in a bar in Clemson, South Carolina, over which was a more “important” band, Pavement (his pick) or Los Lobos (mine). I very much admire Brock’s work and like him as a person. But when I think about his defense of this idiotic premise I pity him. I am certain he feels the same way toward me.

Am I overstating the emotional incapacities of Drooling Fanatics? Probably. Very few of us say the things we should to the people we love. We find other ways to reach our deepest feelings. Drooling Fanatics just happen to use music.

A case in point: I can remember staring out of my Toyota Tercel at snow tapering onto the low hills of East Tennessee while my pal Becca Moore sat in the passenger seat close to tears. I wasn’t the cause of her unhappiness. That distinction belonged to another guy, who’d moved in with Becca and led her to believe they might get married before reverting to the habits of his given species, the North American Bachelor Chicken.

I’d spent some happy nights with Becca, getting wasted and listening to music and gobbling the grease bombs you can afford to gobble when you’re twenty-five. I was screwing around with a friend of hers, a sexy divorcée I had no intention of marrying because I was a North American Bachelor Chicken too. Then Becca’s Chicken broke her heart and she called me one night to say she needed to get out of town, bad, and should we do a road trip.

The snow struck us both as overkill. Then a road crew appeared and began tearing up our half of the highway and traffic drew to a dead halt. This felt like a bad metaphor, the kind that yearned for a home in one of my short stories.

Becca gazed at the snow. She was no weeper. Relentless optimism was more her style. She’d come tearing out of Indiana and built herself into a fearsome capitalist. She was like a lot of women I knew back then: brash in public, and quietly terrified in private. Her apartment was piled high with cross-stitch patterns and photo albums of other people’s children. And now she was staring thirty in the kisser, alone.

Then James McMurtry came on my stereo and the first words out
of his mouth were (I shit you not)
Must be a cold front coming / ’cause I saw the eastbound C&O / And the coal cars were dusted with a half inch of snow
. This was “Rachel’s Song,” the saddest four minutes released in that whole godforsaken year of 1996. I’d always assumed the song was narrated by a young widow driven to madness by mourning. But I heard it differently now. It wasn’t about death but romantic abandonment, the terrible shame of being left behind, which caused Becca to break down once and for all, to weep convulsively, because she was a Drooling Fanatic, like her ex, they had both loved McMurtry, and because songs held this power over her, they could make her feel the grief she wanted to feel and didn’t want to feel. The song ended and Becca wiped her eyes. “That was ridiculous,” she said, and began searching the map for alternative routes.

I certainly knew what it meant to be haunted by a record. For me, that year, it was Howard Tate’s searing soul masterpiece,
Get It While You Can
, which I played at absurd volumes, burning through one chintzy tweeter after another. Tate was the classic sob story, a singer revered by the pros and stiffed by the paying customers. His heyday was in the late sixties but he was gone a few years later, leaving behind only his voice: angelic, confused, convincingly aggrieved. He kept getting mixed up with the wrong ladies, beaten down by those bad broads. That falsetto! I was sure he’d been sent to rescue me.

Then I met a girl, and another aspect of Tate’s music was revealed to me. It was a kind of sexual tonic. Those honeyed horn charts. Those crisp drums and opulent organ riffs. When sprinkled over young lovers, the result was prolonged necking, very sleek frottage. We were dead in love for a month, bruising each other up in the sack, whispering the sweet lies of infatuation. It all curdled quickly enough and she began to tromp around town with my best friend. Howard Tate understood. All of his songs were about betrayal.

On those nights when I made the mistake of drink, I would stagger home and lie on the bathroom floor and listen to the tinkling
piano of the title track, the mournful horns. Then Tate would start in: “When you love somebody, you take a chance on sorrow …” and soon I would be mumbling into her answering machine, asking her did she remember the time we did it during that snowstorm, how the window was open and my feet went numb with snowflakes?

This is typical Drooling Fanatic behavior. As much as we might enjoy romance and its attendant dramas, we’re really just waiting for the versions of love that return to us later, in song.

Dedicated to those readers who find the previously cited conduct toward Elise immature, bordering on disreputable.

What I love so much about the soft rock ballad (SRB), and what makes it the musical equivalent of the romance novel, is that the words make sense
until you actually focus on them
. The first line presents a lovesick narrator who is “alone” and “on the phone,” a situation common to narrators of SRBs. But look again. The narrator’s head is actually
on
a phone.

The year is 1980, so we’re talking about a large plastic device, possibly of the rotary genus. This act presumably mirrors, or serves as a masochistic expression of, the narrator’s anguish. He now addresses the object of his love. He acknowledges that she is also in pain.
(Perhaps her head is on a phone as well.) These two represent an ancient archetype: star-crossed lovers. Powerful forces have intervened. They are Abelard and Héloïse, Romeo and Juliet, Britney and K-Fed.