Repo Man

San Andreas Records, 1984

Remember when I was talking about Joan Didion and  Tom Waits, and saying that perhaps I’d rather be from his California than from hers? I’d like to add to that by saying that this is also the California I’m from.

Repo Man is a cult film made in 1984 by Alex Cox. It’s about a guy, a car, capitalism, drugs, the possible end of the world, LA, some unseen powers, and a lot of punk rock songs. I’m sure it’s about some other stuff—it’s been forever since I saw it—but in my teenage memory, those are the things that stick. I had friends who were absolutely obsessed with this movie. I loved it, saw it many times, but I never knew all the lines like some guys did.

“Ordinary fuckin’ people. I hate ‘em.” –Bud, Repo Man

Pretty much anyone I knew in high school that was obsessed with this movie hung out across the street. You know what across the street is in high school, right?  It’s the steps of that big old wooden house with the big gate and the shading vines that provide a nice cover for lighting joints. It’s the small alley around the corner whose curbs cradle you when you’re making out or coming down or just having a break from the constant barrage of authority known as the high school experience. In some schools, it’s the parking lot, or behind the church, or under the bleachers. It exists in every teenage world: the place in high school where kids who are a little bit outside hang out.

I liked to move around in high school — I hung out across the street, and I also didn’t. But some of my favorite people were usually there. People who weren’t from perfect one-story craftsman family homes on the West Side but instead grew up in the mountains, by the beach, in ramshackle family situations, in unheated garage bedrooms, a little closer to the edge than other people liked to acknowledge.

In high school I didn’t do drugs, didn’t even smoke cigarettes, was fairly tame in my sexuality. I was from a comparatively sane family, I did theater, I worked hard, and I wore interesting clothes. But I had friends who were far more adventurous than I was. And I loved them, and I hung out with them. Across the street.

Get outta line, next neck on the block –Circle Jerks, Coup D’Etat

Once my high school principal actually tried to talk to me about hanging out across the street. I was in his office for something unrelated, and he mentioned that it seemed like I was hanging out “over there” with “the wrong element.” My parents worked at the university. I used to be friends with (actually, date) his own son. I was a bright girl with a bright future and I wouldn’t want to, well, you know… I stared at him, at first honestly not sure what he was implying. Then I told him I didn’t know what he was talking about, and my friends were some of the smartest people I knew, and I walked outside. And across the street.

People who have had to fight for their identities—and especially people who have had to do this as children and teens—guard them with a mixture of unwavering pride and a sense of underlying vulnerability that never goes away, no matter how black your clothes or scratched your arms or loud your culture. If you are a teenager and someone puts you down, hits you, ignores you, or even just doesn’t really notice you – or if you feel in some other way (culturally, sexually) disenfranchised, it shows.  If you can find something that somehow, with its mix of intelligence and fuck-you-ness and bitter humor, speaks to your feelings, you memorize it. It’s punk for a lot of people, or movies like Repo Man, or theater or video games or whatever culture catches you in that moment of vulnerability and allows you in.

I’m not crazy / you’re the one who’s crazy / you’re driving me crazy –Suicidal Tendencies, Institutionalized

Listening back, this music sounds much mellower than I thought it was at the time. Punk. It is so angry and so about rebellion. But it is also just, really, rock ‘n’ roll, no? Sometimes faster, sometimes yelling-er , but always about a guitar and a kid who wants to be heard. I must have heard these songs when I first saw the film – probably in junior high, considering the fact that I had an older brother. I know that I loved Suicidal Tendencies and their dirty lack of tact or melody. I loved The Circle Jerks even though I wasn’t even really sure what their name meant. Black Flag was a presence that invoked Cool even if I never got super into them – channeling disaffected teenagers everywhere with we’ve got nothing better to do than watch tv and have a couple of brews, dude. And just today I realize that this soundtrack album contains the first version of “Pablo Picasso” I ever heard, long before I knew who the Modern Lovers or Jonathan Richman are.

I’m glad to have listened to this music young. I’m glad to have identified, even tangentially, with the cultural place this record represents. This place of rebellion and humor all at once, this cult Hollywood outsider status of whatever was happening in the 80s and 90s in California that left such an impression. And I’m glad people listened to me when I was a kid. I wish they’d listened to more of my friends.

Because this record is about them. Kids. About the way it sounded to be a teenager in this place, dreaming of access to a car or money, avoiding the crush of pressures large and small, feeling acutely aware of our impending-apocalyptic era, the hot California pavement shaking beneath our skin every day, trying to understand and accept and get the hell out of and fall in love with where we were from. Across the street, in a cul de sac, or on the open radioactive road. This is California, too.

Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook

Verve, 1956

All through the night

What are your “comfort” albums? Everyone has one, or many: an ordered collection of musical songs that make you feel comforted. Comfortable. Safe. Warm. At home. You don’t have to think too much about it. You know it like you knew the slope of your childhood kitten’s nose. It has enough emotion in its songs to allow you to imprint whatever you need: in relation to your feelings, the record can accompany or complement or distract. It can be a joyously bouncy record to make you feel better or a sad, dark one to keep your woes sad company.

For me a true comfort album isn’t a literal interpretation of or dialogue with whatever it is in my life that makes me feel the need for comfort. Instead, it’s a piece of music that makes me feel wholly me. A good comfort album makes me feel that I am returning to the roots of myself, in whatever way I choose to interpret that and for whatever reason I feel at the moment that I need that. This means it’s not my best friend’s, or my boyfriend from high school’s, or my coworkers’, although they may have been the people who first introduced me to the album. It’s mine. It is a piece of culture I can experience wholly on my own two intellectual and aesthetic feet. No associations required, except… well, all of them.

More simply put: a comfort album is one I really, wholeheartedly, innocently like.

Birds do it
bees do it
even educated fleas do it

Which brings me to Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Song Book. One of the most lauded vocalists ever singing one of the most lauded songwriters ever, on the collection that helped make Verve and Ella the legends they are today.

It’s a surprising record at times – sort of modern, suggestive, unendingly smart, with romantic lyrics and simply produced, seamless big band accompaniment. And of course, pitch- and performance-perfect Ella taking it light when you expect her to hit you over the head with it, all while Porter’s lyrics giggle and wink at you from over her shoulder. Pure vintage sound. It is a bit old fashioned, it does make me feel like I’m in an old film, and that’s as it should be.

This is musical music, a kind of record I have listened to and memorized since childhood. I loved musicals when I was young especially, and I spent hours lying on the floor with my best friend singing along to musical soundtracks on cassette and fantasizing that we were graceful and witty and agile soprano-voiced heroines of something romantic, something big and something showy. I knew the words to Broadway hits from Camelot to Grease to Cabaret– from indisputable classics like West Side Story (which is an intricate and musically progressive score, by the way, if you haven’t revisited it since childhood), to the schlock of Les Miz to compilations of songs from Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers movies.

What’s not to love in a musical soundtrack? All that is awkward about musicals lies in between the songs, or in the transitions to get to the songs. Take the songs and put them in the air without staging or sartorial confusion and you have the art of fantasy, pure, floating above the heads of two ten year old girls after school.

It was just one of those nights
Just one of those fabulous flights
A trip to the moon on gossamer wings
Just one of those things

I don’t even know how to begin to talk about Cole Porter. Cole Porter is one of the best lyricists and songwriters I have ever encountered, and popular and critical culture generally agrees with me. He is witty, urbane, heartfelt, and often startlingly modern. He lived a luxurious but often complicated life. You probably know at least five of his songs by heart even if you’ve never heard his name before. If you like Stephin Merritt, you gotta check out this guy.

In high school, I eased up a bit on the straight-up Broadway musicals of the 60s and got a tiny bit more selective as my taste began to mature. I also got the compilation Red Hot & Blue, an AIDS benefit CD that featured pop stars singing Cole Porter songs. I played that CD into the ground. David Byrne singing “Don’t Fence Me In.” Tom Waits growling that “It’s All Right With Me.” A lovely no-frills version of “So In Love” by kd lang. “Too Darn Hot” sexily modernized by… Erasure? Sure. It was the early 90s. The songs, though, hold up, making everyone sounds a notch classier and smarter than I thought they were. I knew some of the songs before, but I had never known who Porter was. That is the CD that made me realize musicals are written by people, and those people have names, and Cole Porter is the only name you really need to know when it comes to this style of song.

How strange the change
from major to minor
ev’ry time we say goodbye

Today, for a couple different reasons, I need some comfort. Today I want to feel like me, without the trimmings. I want to shed the effort of being “critical” about music and being “productive” about writing and being “intelligent” about expressing myself and whatever else I sometimes get sick of being.

So I slip on the first of these two crackly old records, the sleeve’s lamination peeling off onto my carpet, and I imagine I’m a very glamorous and romantic ten years old, singing, dancing with my best friend’s dad in the kitchen on the hardwood floor after school. She dances, too, thin arms extended like an egret against the red of the wooden countertops; he makes trumpet noises along with Ella and the band. And I’m witty, urbane, cultured, and self-sufficient. I’m comforted, sincerely, full of feelings once more. I’m home.

The Best of Bill Withers

Columbia Records, 1980

Saturday afternoon in Harlem

I listen to The Best of Bill Withers on a rainy morning in San Francisco, which is not generally the type of atmosphere I associate with Mr. Bill Withers, legendary singer/songwriter. To me, The Best of Bill Withers is all about “Harlem” – the song of that title and the city of that name. West Harlem, in 1996, to be exact. Which is interesting, because although he wrote that infamous ballad to the capital of Black America, Bill Withers mostly lived in Los Angeles. But I don’t care. This artist is not L.A. sunshine and freeways, or, today, San Francisco mist in the morning. Bill Withers is Harlem, that legend filled with grandma’s hands, Saturday nights, lovers and players and junkies and humanity buzzing around in the sharp high hat snap that hits it every time. Harlem of my first New York summer.

The day I moved to Harlem, I took the Metro North train into the city from Yonkers, where I was crashing with friends who were in college up there. I got off at 125th Street, remembering that my new apartment was at that street and Broadway, and I soon realized I had a long walk across the entire width of Manhattan before I reached the West side from the station.

So I started walking. A 19-year-old white girl from a hippie town in California, a too-cool-for-school college dropout who’d lived in cities a bit already (SF, Boston) but had never really been in New York before. There I walked, lugging a duffel bag the size of myself down the Main Street of Harlem in 90 percent humidity on a Saturday afternoon in the first week of summer. It was bright out, and blurry. There were corner stores, streamers flapping from awnings, sidewalk sales bustling in every direction. There were the famously burned out buildings, which beneath the boards looked beautiful (or formerly so), and the famous Apollo Theater, and there were loud taxis and chugging buses and the hot exhaust breezes they blew on my hot red face as I lugged all my possessions down that hot, famous street.

And it was loud; the cars and the honks and the music crowding the stifled air around me. From every storefront speakers pointed at me, most playing HOT 97, New York’s hip-hop radio station, or blasting home-made, for-sale mix tapes of HOT 97-endorsed singles side by side with local un-signed emcees. It was May, 1996, and the soundtrack of New York City at that moment was the Fugees (“Fu La La La…”) and Junior M.A.F.I.A. (Biggie Smalls was alive and happening) and Lauryn Hill was hanging out with Nas singing about “If I Ruled the World.” This was the summer before Tupac was killed, and days before that guy from Sublime OD’ed, sending my roommate into a deep sadness I could never come around to. (I never really liked that band.) In addition to the music blaring down 125th street there was a chorus of voices, too, friendly and amused, the shouts of shopkeepers talking to one another, customers, kids, people sitting on folding chairs outside. These voices mingled with direct addresses to me from bystanders– “Hey white girl, what are you doing up here?” “Are you lost, shorty?” — in a mix that quickly became the daily background noise of my time spent living uptown.

But mostly there were people. I had never before seen people out and about in this way, when the combination of unbearable heat and East Coast in-your-face-ness combines to put everybody outside, just out, sitting or standing or talking or working or waiting for something to heat up or cool down. That summer-in-the-city feeling I grew to love, the unspoken knowledge that the rich and privileged have left town for cooler shores and all that’s left of the city is owned by whomever wants to come outside and be in it.

Living in Public

In New York, and in Harlem especially, there was a sense of public life I had not previously encountered. On these warm sticky days and nights, we all had transparent lives, whether we were standing outside or in hot apartments with all the windows opened wide to the passing city. We all listened to the same songs, heard the same neighbors’ drama, knew the same sound and vibration of the train rattling overhead every few minutes. This was and is still one of my favorite things about New York– everybody there (and especially the not-rich) lives in public. That’s why they always give you a paper bag even when you buy just a soda at the corner store, or something as small as gum, or cigarettes. Because in a city packed tight vertically and horizontally, privacy is a luxury. Most people just live our lives in view of everyone else. A paper bag with every purchase is the New York economy’s way of saying hey, here’s added luxury value to your day: no one can see what you’ve got in there. Come again soon.

Just weeks later I’d be walking down 125th street to the strains of “No Diggity,” the BLACKstreet song that samples Bill Withers’ “Grandma’s Hands” and features Dr. Dre and Queen Pen. And later that first day, after I reached the apartment, I would put my Bill Withers record on the portable record player/boombox combo my roommate imported from her previous year’s dorm room and blast “Harlem” while I unpacked. Because when you’re 19, music is that literal. So, even decades later, that summer remains “Harlem” –  three girls, plus various paramours and friends, sharing a one bedroom apartment just below 125th Street. This was my first time living in public, outside, in the streets. This was 125th Street at the crest of a new wave of gentrification, and we were middle class college-age kids smoking weed and kissing friends in front of Grant’s Tomb at night, running out to the Bread Store to get short light & sweet coffees in the morning, walking down avenues in afternoons. Smoking cigarettes inside. And listening to Bill Withers.

I left Harlem after six months and two apartments; the short story was, I wanted to live downtown and in my own place. And I wanted, also, very much, though I wasn’t able to verbalize it at the time, to not be the white person who gentrified Harlem. Harlem is one of my favorite neighborhoods in the world, and at the time I felt I didn’t want to be one of the people who ruined it. That’s not to say that it wasn’t already ruined by a variety of forces in many very real ways for a great many people who lived there and couldn’t just move on out whenever they wanted — Harlem was and is complicated. And of course gentrification, with all the loaded meanings that word unpacks, happened, and of course I was part of it, and I never felt quite right about that, but then of course no young white kid would say they did. But at the time I did the only thing I could think to do, and I stepped out (and into another rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, but that’s another story.)

I took my Bill Withers record with me, but the only song on it forever after that was “Harlem.”