I was 24, I was an asshole. Not full-blown, but an asshole in the scope of me, which isn’t bad in the scope of dudes, but that’s nothing to hang your hat on. However, at that age what I did hang my hat on was pushing the envelope of trivial idiocy (see: getting drunker than one should ever be). And I’m not saying this from a holier tower - these days I just try to go to bed before my mind-driver punches the clock’s lights out. But I was a fool and an asshole for me and I did something so fucking stupid, so meat-and-liquor headed that I think about it once a month – and that number is probably conservative. I thought about it this morning (cried). It’s in that acrid sack of regrets high up on the shelf of life’s miserable closet. The sack of people you didn’t want to be. The Sack of Shame. Unable to decompose, this moment is in there with overreacting (another conservative, spineless description) to my dog getting in the trash for the third night in a row; throwing a rotten tomato at Jay Rozman when I was who-cares-how-old I’m too bummed out to do the math; in third grade calling my good friend Henry Slauson a redneck because little Napoleonic Adam Mace said it was so; telling a friend from my past, through grinding jaw at 3am in a Manhattan club, that if she needed to sow her oats before she got married…well, I’m nauseous. I think I was 24. Maybe younger. But in that same sack, around that same year, on that same island, I did what I cried about today, running through the woods, across the river and up a hill in my hometown in my 37th year: in 2007 I yelled at Conor Oberst to “Get Drunk!” at a Bright Eyes show at the Town Hall. You can roll your eyes. I wish I were pouring it on for the hyperbolic cheap seats. But my monthly shame-grapple with this despicable blunder from my young, stupid mouth is becoming bi-(monthly) the older I get because he’s given me everything, for better or worse, and it’s stop, drop and roll, always, every time, death and taxes the former. It’s better. And with the release of the new Bright Eyes record Down in the Weeds, Where the World Once Was (their finest work yet – my new favorite), I feel like it’s time to come, well, if not clean, at least loamy maggot-sack of shame in hand and say: I’m sorry. I crapped on my own Cheerios: I denigrated my Spiritual Snowplow.
* In my Bible-paper thin defense, I had seen them earlier that Spring at the Greek on the Cassadaga (my Ouija favorite) tour in Berkeley and Jim James opened solo and Gillian Welch and David Rawlings were on the bill and everyone played together and I think my Mans was pretty creamed and he was having a fucking great time and it was probably one of the top three favorite shows I’ve ever been to and then at the Town Hall show he seemed a little tight like he wasn’t having a great time but who the fuck am I? (no one) - one show was an outside stomper and the other an intimate seven night run in a historic theater. That a-million-miles-from-withstanding, shut your hollow two-dollar PBR leg-mouth, you under-informed twit. (I’m burning the Bible.)
My brother put on Lifted or The Story is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground (their masterpiece, my lonely favorite) as we started our first leg of a California to Vermont cross-country trip in his Ford Explorer. We were leaving Lake Tahoe. It was sunny. We were hungover. We had probably had a burrito. Got on the road at the crack of afternoon and he put the CD in and I was confused by the choose-your-own title but I was so entrenched in Steely Dan and Stevie Wonder and Steely Dan at that point in my life that I didn’t have the option to think it pretentious. I just thought: “that’s cool. (I think…)”. And the opening track starts – The Big Picture – and it’s some tape deck crackle, some back seat shuffling, a car door shutting, a conversation about directions to a party. “They’re in the car, too” I thought. “That’s cool.” A rhodes, an organ…a slightly out of tune walk-down acoustic lick. Something fluttered in my temporal lobe. And then. The Voice.
the picture’s far too big to look at, kid
your eyes don’t open wide enough!
“Rut-roh.”
and you’re constantly surrounded
by the swirling stream of what is and what was…
“You simple-winded bozo! You know not even NOTHING!”
So for the next eighteen years he helped me up.
I transferred colleges and every new day I woke up, put on my DiscMan headphones, walked up to class, deferred last night’s Busch Lights that were weighing me down, temporarily clipped the leash on the ever-present Eyore cloud that is “practice” which every mediocre college lacrosse player drags around with him, and for five minutes the world was fine, I was somebody resembling who I might someday want to be and, something – something else that I still sure as shit can’t put my finger on - was possible.
The rain it started tappin’ on the window near my bed
There was a loophole in my dreamin’, so I got out of it!
And to my surprise my eyes were wide and already open
There’s my nightstand and my dresser where my nightmares had just been
So I dressed myself and left then – out into the grey streets
But everything seemed different and completely new to me!
The sky the trees houses buildings – even my own body
And each person I encountered I couldn’t wait to meet…
Disregarding the risk of sounding exactly how this sounds: That’s when I started writing. When I started to at least try to use this fucked-up coiled spring of confusion for something other than an assured early exit. These songs tethered me to my own eternal unknown. They didn’t cozy me up to it but they helped me bat it around, helped me break the seal like when you find out you can get elbow deep in the compost tumbler – it’s just THINGS! I mean, don’t do it all the time because it’s still scary but it’s a relief to know you’re not gonna lose skin. I had lost my best friend a few years prior, I was a faceless lacrosse player majoring in Communications listening to my Old Man’s music with some Wilco on the side. I could make the joke: “well look where it got me”; some affectionate self-effacing blame thrown around as I am wont to do. But I can also say “Look where it got me”. I am certain the movies we’ve made, the scripts and stories I’ve written don’t happen if my Brother doesn’t put that CD in on that day in Lake Tahoe. So I get to campus, the song ends again, I probably get a breakfast sandwich from Blondini’s and decide to focus my vanilla-generic English major on Creative Writing.
The first story I wrote in a small seminar of girls in hand-knit sweaters and dudes in black-rimmed glasses or Commando-Goth-Lite regalia was a Hunter Thompson rip-off that I wrote in one late-night push (we had one week to write the stories) on an amphetamine and black-market Chinese imported Red-Bull concoction. “I should send it to Esquire first” was my thinking but there was no second because that was the only magazine I knew besides Sports Illustrated and Sports Illustrated for Kids. And Highlights I guess. The story was returned to me, Professor Huddle’s comments on it short and sweet (“Triumphant!” “ImPORtanT!” “The voice we’ve been WAITING FOR!” were my guesses):
“Before I tear this apart, I will say one thing: Be yourself”. Feck.
I was a lacrosse player with a dead best friend following me around and I listened to Bright Eyes. My confirmation name was Cassius. I saw no self. But I quickly wrote a story about the former which saved my spot in the seminar. A few weeks after that, I leaned on the other two (dead friend, favorite band - I understood my Bible’s fate at that point). I even ripped a few Bright Eyes lyrics and folded them ever-so-not-so-subtly into the story – it’s a fine time to cop to that, it seems. “He takes all his words from the books that you don’t read anyway” Mr. Tweedy sang. I took some of my words from a song that most of those cats had probably DEFinitely heard. Did I rip from Conor? Yes. But those songs were a major part of who I was at the time. To NOT use them would have been false (which I’m now telling myself and agreeing with). Anyway, the teacher loved it and I was asked to read it aloud - which was a big deal in the class - and I will tell you that the air in that classroom as I rounded third on the story…no hit, no goal, no MDMA, most sex (and all sex up until that point) – you know what?: It’s hearing “This Is the First Day of My Life” for the first time. You can happily, sadly chase that for the rest of your days. That story, while it didn’t completely break me free of them, it loosened the jock-shackles. I wasn’t quite Batman AND Bruce Wayne, but I was an okay midfielder with a few readable stories. It widened the pool, tributaries and estuaries opening up; the girls with the hand-knits, salves, Hegel and Birks started to dig: I was a more palatable phony.
I will spare you my liturgical Oberst discography tour. Kindof. But there have been two songs in my life which upon first hearing them made me stand and scream for the Great Beauty but nothing came out because shut up and listen (me to the song, not you to me). The first happened when I was six or seven and I got “Who’s Next” in that big extraneous cardboard CD sleeve. I went to my room and I put it on the small stereo and listened – I had heard the song before but this was Compact Disc was mine, so I hadn’t had a proper selfish listen. Press play/pause. Synth sprinkling. Piano comes in D-A-G, I’m having a nice time. Keith comes in, I start balding. Pete swings away and I stand up and open my mouth to scream (squeal) but I’m little White John Coffey, a rainbow dust of desperate hope mists back into the speakers, the ether. Sixteen years later, the day it comes out, I go down to Pure Pop and buy the seminal (and my easy favorite) I’m Wide Awake, it’s Morning alongside Digital Ash… (my sleeper favorite). It’s gross out. I pop it in my Discman and…batteries are dead. At this point, I’m really scared because I’ve put so much pressure on this record I’ve yet to hear. What if we don’t fit? What if he doesn’t hit me? Not that I should be in the bulls’ eye of his lyrical and sonic aim. (There’s probably no way he’s ever even thought of me! Holy shit! It cannot be possible that you just thought that with me right here. Erase it, then!) Most-over: What if I’m not worthy. So I walk back to my girlfriend’s house who’s the worst but nobody’s home and my roommate was and…I’m guessing I have an especially tough time with the cellophane. But I get it off. And I put the disc in. I don’t want a beer. I just want to know what’s going on. I press play. He takes a sip of something, starts telling a story. He’s three years older than me and I’m hanging on his every word, every sip of that fuckin’ hot toddy or herbal tea he’s drinking. I mention our age gap not to point out my current fucked age but because if he were my age or just a year older would I have rolled my eyes and scrubbed past this indulgent intro? Well he’s not and I don’t and the plane starts fuckin’ goin’ down and the muted acoustic strum swirls my blood different like toilets below the equator and then, um, he starts hummin’ this little tune and it a-and, and-ah, it kinda goes like this, it’s kinda: One, two, One-two-three-four – commence balding when the guitar comes in and he starts singing, tells me I must rip out all the epilogues from the books that I’ve read and fuck and fuck and fuck and Jim James comes in with the high harmony and I stand up and open my mouth and I’m bigger, thicker little White John Coffey and the colors come out and if you walked into my awful girlfriend’s apartment at that moment and told me that in fifteen years I’d be writing Him a love letter of sorts, I’dve said “shhh! Wait - why’d it take so long?” and you would have to say “it’s kindof an apology” and I’dve said “What the fuck did I do?!?” And by then, hopefully somebody else will have walked in and I would have walked out to buy batteries and you’re a ghost so do whatever you want. But I followed Him.
Every record is a personal event. Open the jewel case, download it or drop a needle in the groove. On my run this morning I tried to rate them in my mind but I can’t, despite what I’ve said, so, as I’ve said, this new one’s my favorite. At the end of the Aughts the solo stuff ground through shoes and iPods on the Santa Monica bike path. I ran. Brakeless, worried, feeling too much or worried it’s not much at all. But that aforementioned age gap was – is important. I got the forecast. By the time he put the songs out that he wrote a few years earli—BANG! I know that victory is sweet even deep in the cheap seats. Fuck, thank God.
The closest I came to trolling – and I think that was before it was a thing (it wasn’t) – was when this dude I knew a few times removed gave The People’s Key a 5.0 review on Pitchfork. Out of 10. (So it’s definitely number my number one, stand alone favorite.) And by troll him I mean I emailed him and told him he was simply wrong and how dare he and what was he trying to prove – was he trying to out-cool himself and his smug peer fucks? But mostly I just stopped taking reviews seriously in this psychedelic snowflake prism of subjectivity we call life. It was 2011 and, yet again, I needed something and He threw me another line, and, crazy! The record was steeped in psychedelia and spirituality and I was having my third renaissance in mind-benders and I wanted to be better and see bigger and I was sick of this Me Against the World mantra and maybe I wanted in on this thing called love. He plowed, I ran.
If I could change my mind, change the paradigm
Prepare myself for another life
Forgive myself for the many times
I was cruel to something helpless and weak
But here it comes, that heavy love
I'm never going to move it alone
Here it comes, that heavy love
Tag it on a tenement wall
Here it comes, that heavy love
Someone's got to share in the load
Here it comes, that heavy love
I'm never going to move it alone
In Freedom, Jonathan Franzen’s (via Richard Katz) interpretation of My Mans’ tussle with sincerity gave anglo-schlemiels like me some validation, kinda. To see it in such a big time book was at once nice and awful which equaled relief in that he only got a fraction of the way there. But interestingly enough (to who? What a stupid way to start saying something…) the two share an allergen to being painted into a corner. See: when Franzen got squirrely that the Oprah Book Club sticker on The Corrections would deter the already receding male reader. 2a.) when Oberst got squirrely about the gaggle of sixteen-year-old girls singing the words to Lua, close enough for their doe-eyed sing-spittle to get on his pedals and Chucks back in Burlington, ’05. Both could be viewed as pompous reactions to adulation for fuck’s sake! but, hell: don’t hamstring me into a pigeon hole in the process. As a fan, it’s great – I wouldn’t want my rumproast-headed buddies to have Bright Eyes Hearts. But when you make something and you cast it out into the wind like a feather or a plastic bag (attached to a very high-end PR remote control plane), you want all the people in all the land to buy it, click it, give it as a gift to their girlfriend’s daughter (just don’t use it in a campaign, unless….BERNIEEEEE!!!!!). Yes, Conor Oberst is doing fine – the Lullaby League didn’t hurt his annual gross. I just…I forget. But, God: what I wouldn’t give to be hamstrung into a pigeon hole. Gross.
**Shit. Here I take a just a meager moment to toss praise on Mike Mogis – I’m sure none of this happens without his brilliant production, his sonic instincts surely play a heavy hand on why the songs are lodged in my marrow. And I’m sure Nate Walcott has an equal thumb in the pie that I’ll never be able to put my narrow sighted finger on.
In a Marc Maron interview years ago, Maron, in all his Maron-ness, interviewed My Guy like he knew what he needed to know: EMO, angst, pre-mee Boy Genius – the tired brush he was trying to paint him with, I wanted to shove right up Marc’s smarmy ass. “So – are you depressed?” Maron asked.
“Uhhh…I mean: who isn’t?”
And I punched myself right in the ear buds, cut the interview short, put on the latest record, and laughed and cried and ran it back .
“I mean: who isn’t?”
His sad isn’t sadder, his hope isn’t higher, his lonely just as lowly as the rest of us: he just accessed a path to sing about the Everest and the Mariana Trench. He found a way to articulate a brain swinging in the extremes; the labor of trying to find a day or two – fuck it: just gimme ninety minutes - in the middle. It’s Tachycardia to Barbary Coast (Later) (and that record’s obviously my final answer favorite). It’s right fucking there. It’s too fucking confusing. It’s fucking exhausting. I love my fucking friends. Leave me the fuck alone. It’s fucking sad. I’m fucking happy? I can’t fucking do it. It’s fuckin’ beautiful. Fuck. It’s my favorite. And I’m sorry I yelled that night.
I don’t need God or common law
to tell me right from wrong…
but when you hold me to your chest
I know where I belong
Thanks, Dude.