Life’s Rich Pageant

I.R.S., 1986

So, R.E.M. broke up.

I have to be honest: I didn’t exactly know they were together. I’m an R.E.M. fan, but I still tend to think of 1994’s Monster as their “new” album, because I’m pretty sure that’s the last of their albums I bought. However, lately, in part because I’ve been around a lot of mandolins recently, I’ve been revisiting their earlier albums and remembering how much I loved this band, and why.

They’re good. Really good. They make me raise my head up and sing along and sometimes even jump up and down. They clearly know way more about music — structure, harmony, all that academic stuff — than many of their contemporaries. They send me back to times and places far from here. They last.

In fact, they often get better over time: Automatic for the People and Monster were almost dirty secrets for me at the time of their releases, because R.E.M. was by that time firmly a popular band and grunge was happening and they weren’t “hard” or “loud”; I joined in with other alternative posers in whispering that R.E.M. were “sellouts” while at night I still listened to Drive over and over until I could fall asleep. Now, without such a time-based pop culture context (and partially because compared to a lot of popular rock bands now, R.E.M. is so obviously cool and dark and different), those “mainstream” albums of theirs play even better.

R.E.M.’s songs consisted of rock structures, harmonic vocals, and fine-tuned songwriting — with countryish suggestions via fingerpicking and a bit of twang in Michael Stipe’s voice. They were not a country band, but they were a rock band from Georgia. They wrote about some of the same things punk and grunge bands wrote about, but they felt… quieter. And they were good. Bill Berry, Peter Buck, Mike Mills, Michael Stipe: all in their own rights deft and skilled musicians who were so self-possessed they didn’t showboat with their sound, but instead were a group. This was a band, not a lead singer and some backing musicians (I’m speaking about their music and sound here, not about their cultural/celebrity image, which was decidedly and increasingly Stipe-centric). They even all sang harmony.

At the time, people thought this band was political, in the way that at the time a sixth grade me wearing a “save the rainforests” sweatshirt on the first day of school was considered political. In other words: not exactly activism, but earnest and concerned, especially in the face of most pop music of the 80s.

Party to their political earnestness and their emergence from an independent record label, was R.E.M.’s status as the poster band for “college radio”: alternative, indie, whatever you want to call it. I had heard about this when my friends got me into them in high school, but I was a decade too late to understand what college radio in the 80s meant to people who were actually in college in the 80s. I was a child in the 80s; by the time I got into R.E.M., I didn’t know about radio and the way it could build alternative cultures in the face of pop destruction and Reagan-era conformity. I didn’t know about the unique sounds this band was creating or that they were truly unique sounds– or how big their influence was on most of the other bands I loved in the 90s.

Here’s a fun exercise: put on “Old Man Kensey,” from Fables of the Reconstruction. The slow bass intro, the strength of single, dark plucked guitar notes. A droning repetition to the rhythm and the voice. Speed this up a tiny bit, put a little more angst and raw pain in the voice, make it louder and switch out the chorus pedal for a fuzzy distortion and let the song explode at the chorus … and it’s a Nirvana song. Something in the way. Repeat.

For me and my friends, who worshipped Nirvana and Pearl Jam and Madonna and Pavement equally, R.E.M. was about mix tapes and poetic phrasings, long sessions spent driving and singing along in bad harmony, a romanticized image of southern America, and hints at the political wrapped in the eternal emotions of rock and roll. But mostly, despite their cohesiveness as a group, R.E.M. was about the words.

Stipe is a poet. Let’s just be honest here. In the video for “fall on me”, one of my possibly favorite songs of all time, we see only the lyrics, in all caps, sans punctuation, running over upside-down images of humanity’s earthly follies:

Did you notice the lyrics?

A melody and a counter melody. The sky and the sky. There’s a problem feathers iron. Lifting and falling and there was a moment somewhere – my dad’s backyard, a bootleg live R.E.M. mix tape copied over and over via friend and friend, in the hammock, discovering the most immediate way for me to feel grounded: to lie on my back and look at the sky, through overhead leaves if possible, and pray — and ask — that it not fall on me.

Also something about the way humans think we can own things we can’t own.

This was poetry. This was a musical era in rock in which a lyricist could ramble free-associatively in semi-linked metaphors and imagistic expressions of emotion, and still mean something. The best lyricists of a certain kind still do this – Cobain, Malkmus, Jeff Tweedy? Thom Yorke almost gets there but doesn’t let go enough — but it is becoming increasingly rare in rock music, as hooks and guest-spots and statements take over our sonic media like so many status updates.

So I’ll throw on this record and be in the backyard, still years too late to know anything about context, and I’ll be only in poems, in finger-picked poems, under the sky, beginning to fall all over again.

OK Computer – Side 4

Side 4: "mo"

Side 1: eeny
Side 2: meeny
Side 3: miney
Side 4: mo.
Lucky. The Tourist.

I’ll make this short: I never meant to stay.

At night everything smells like roses, and it isn’t raining. But when you wake up, you know you’re just visiting. A tourist. It’s okay; that doesn’t mean your feet don’t hurt. But you walk on, eventually.

And years later, when you listen to certain albums, you can feel eternally linked to the places you were when you discovered them. And you can feel sick of them, sometimes, but that doesn’t mean the love isn’t there.

When you woke me up and I was dreaming in thick metaphorical surrender, messy consciousness and deep sobs and all, I immediately wanted to go back.

But every time, something pulls me out, and every time, I can’t forgive it. But I let it win.

 

OK Computer – Side 2

(…start with Side 1, if you haven’t yet)

Side 2.
Exit Music (For a film). Let Down. Karma Police.
Downtown. Downtown. Downtown.

We forget this about OK Computer: it’s not that big. When you split it up side by side, it’s even less big. A small voice and acoustic strum is often a beginning.

Last night found you pressed close between bodies and backpacks. The buzz of impending hearing-damage, the vague eroticism of bass in your stomach. Live and in motion. Not alone.

But this morning you are fuzzy when you wake. Small-voiced and acoustic.

You open your eyes and see new things: a lamp not your own, grey light slowly fading up through windows in directions you aren’t familiar with, your jeans on the floor next to someone else’s. Stacks of books and CDs, but not the ones whose spines you’ve memorized. Car keys and a pile of floppy disks on a smooth light desk. A bit further beyond the reach of your focus: a bare wooden bathroom door. It’s been humming since it got light out, which was not long after you recall calling it a night with the fair-haired and passed-out person next to you in this bed. Now from the door there are sounds of splashes and flushes and voices and who-the-hell-knows-what, so you lie still until they abate, roll over, discover a large window next to your pillow. You wedge your face between the slats of the blinds and watch the neighborhood out the window.

House by house they arise, in tandem, armed with dog leashes and unbelted bathrobes, awakened to porches splayed open by routine. They all seem to understand, inherently, what time it is. They all seem to know, complicit, what day it is. Saturday. 10am. No office today. Weekend clothes. Active homeowning. The Subaru needs to be washed. The cats need to curl. Those lavender bushes need some pruning. Honey, can you run some errands before the game? I made a list. Young newlyweds next door don ironed jeans and clean college sweatshirts and untangle the hose from the hydrangeas. Across the street, a matched pair of retirees act like it isn’t the same as any other day and brave the porch-swing with newspapers and polyester slippers embroidered “Oma” and “Opa.”

You let the blinds snap back, remove the dead-weight of the arm around your waist, roll onto the floor next to your jeans. Kneeling, you excavate your shoulder bag, pick up chunky black shoes, stand in a rush of exploded blood cells, and make for the door.

__

What happens with this song is that it’s the second side of something, and it starts slow. Because it’s starting again, on its own mid-stride legs, it’s not the relax-out you might expect, the breath of programming after the roughed-up mania of what preceded. What happens is what happens when you put something first that isn’t usually first: exit music, for a film. The film is the narrative truth-cliché, the morning after, the way we pack and leave. The twist is when we tire of it:

Now we are one, in everlasting peace, we hope that you choke.
___

___

The next scene is against and with the movement as a whole.

While you are tasting the dirt of the previous day in your tongue, others are scrubbed and ready to shop.

The bed you woke up in is located in a small residential neighborhood, but it is not far from where you work. From the bathroom to the living room to the door you walk. Put shoes on in the driveway. Turn a corner just a minute and end up downtown and remember you do not live this type of life. You have commuted in shortcut: you know the right coffee place, but you didn’t travel to get there.

When you pass the first office building, empty as a weekend pause-button, you feel the beat pick up, hinting at darkness. You’ve stepped out of a fantasy experience of strangeness, exotic and rhythm-driven novelty, dangerous risk. And you’ve found yourself out on a familiar street, deep inside the drab realization that you are not lost. Better luck next time. You have to go to work.

Maybe if you were in a car, like everyone else, commuting at appropriate hours, in fresh-pressed cotton, on bridges and over highways, not under them. You’re coming, walking, working. They’re going, speeding, shopping. It’s the reverse-commute of the other half: we who live schedules in opposition to the flow of urban traffic. It’s being the only one on the bus on their way to work, and not going home. It’s realizing that doesn’t make you different, actually. You wish you could change your tshirt, but instead you fall into the trickle of people on the sidewalk. Disappointed people. When you arrive and you punch in at the clock in the office, you wish you could really just punch it.

___

___

This was when we didn’t all have computers in our bedrooms.

This is when we talk about the era.

Remember: we thought it was going to be something, the turn of the century. Remember when this was our fear?

If the progress of the songs on OK Computer can be read as a the musical denouement of the last millennium, if tracks like “Let Down” and “Electioneering” indicated a weariness of soul, a sarcastic self-aware somberness that embodies a generation stuck between computers and telephones, between analog and digital – if that, then “Karma Police” is when we really fucked up. It’s when we decided we were cool.

It starts normally enough, like we’re in the 90s: Everyone is going to or from work. Scraggly young people with the previous night’s exploits still on their breath are opening small stores, white paper coffee cups in hand. We sell goods there, but we don’t actually change anyone.

We sit on the loading dock behind the store and smoke cigarettes sometimes, watch our brothers and sisters across the street.

Across the street, other young people are building the era: monetizers in sneakers and shoulder bags and clothes bought new are opening glass doors in what once were buildings that housed goods. They are entering rooms full of tables and screens, incongruously lined up beneath walls made of brick and mortar. They talk about goods there but they don’t actually touch anything.

An acoustic guitar in an insatiable strum, a beat, sounds like alternative rock when it was an alternative to something.

Later, in the next millennium, we can try to join them. We can jump in and out, between the across-the-street existences, and we can feel how easy it is, to re-create the clock. We can make nouns into verbs if we want to, let the songs play themselves. The other young people look over at us, and they love us and desire us and they don’t see us at all. They smile like a cat and gesture to the brick, the glass, the shoulder bags, the lack of touching. They say, This is what you’ll get:

You get to join the club, be on payroll, walk forward knowing we stand in your blindspot at all waking moments.

___

The person you left behind in the clean bedroom around the corner is off the clock, still sleeping. It’s the weekend and the world is being built around you.

He’s not gonna call.

___

___

So you take back the guitar, the marching-forward progress of everything bass, pull it back in the mix and echo out with a high song:

For a minute there, I lost myself.

Strings would be appropriate here, inside your reckoning.

A hum and Oh of Greek-like chorus in song behind you.

The Ah and Eh of what is fast also becoming programmed: synthesized.

Sirens break it up as they always do, but the sirens are coming from inside the house. We are clearly moving towards digital.

Nothing follows.

OK Computer, Side 1

EMI, 1997

I’m going to listen to this record on headphones. The perfect album to accompany motion is one that is also best appreciated with left-right separation, with your brain acting as the literal division between. On vinyl, OK Computer has 4 sides, and I’m going to isolate my head inside one side a day for the next four days. Come on in:

Side 1.
Airbag. Paranoid Android. Subterranean Homesick Blues.
Southeast. Downtown. Northwest.

Later on we can talk about the era.

But first it starts with the sound of strings as though they’re being played by an electric guitar. Then the drums: the drummer who sounds like the most human machine ever built, a beat that demands action. Driving even in light moments. Sound. Things break clean when he sings.

__

In the bathroom, the light from the afternoon sun sneaks through the half-open blinds while I’m showering. It’s always a battle, with the blinds. The sparkling pattern of hot water downstreaming in sunslants is so alluring that I leave the blinds open, even though that means the people across the alley, the ones with the fence-gnawing dog, can see me naked. But really, who’s looking up to the fourth floor at three in the afternoon on a weekday in residential Portland, Oregon? Everyone’s at work.

In the walk-in closet, I stand naked and clean and survey the wreckage. On the left, tremendous piles of records, some stacked horizontally in flat piles — the bad way to store vinyl, says my former roommate Dave — and some neatly rowed against the wall. On the right, the CDs, probably about a thousand now. Not that I count. Book-ending the CDs are, appropriately, the books, in precarious stacks that bleed over into the vinyl’s territory. Way in the back of the closet are the clothes, thrown not folded, on a small collapsible bookshelf. I stare helplessly at the clothes. They look a little forlorn, as possessions go, not sure where they fit in. “Not today for you, guys,” I apologize, turn around, default to the ratty jeans lying crumpled on the floor. Threadbare tank top, cracked old belt, black chunky kicks—my uniform.

Back in the diffusing steam of the bathroom, I flip down the toilet lid and stand on it. Perched on top, you can balance with one foot on the toilet and one on the rim of the tub and just barely catch a cropped view in the mirror of the space between your hips and your shoulders. I suck in my stomach, I make it flush with the jeans. Lift up the shirt a little. Look. Check it out: Yup, still skinnier than before, still didn’t get fat again overnight. It’s always a battle, with the fear. The key is to hop down from the toilet seat before you exhale and the small cushion of flesh relaxes into its usual over-the-belt slump.

In the bedroom/living-room/kitchen, the alarm clock on the floor says, brilliantly, in digital Don’t-Ignore-Me-Young-Lady red: 3:37pm. Fuck.

Grab the to-go cup of coffee (cold but I’ll get more downtown), the cigarettes from the table, the water bottle in the messenger bag, the keys in my pocket with the lighter, the walkman in the bag, chapstick, pen. Glasses check, wallet check, key check, bus quarters, ready.

Door, slam, keys, top lock, bottom lock — and it’s all taken about two minutes too long.

Charge down the grungy hallway, smell the dollar-store incense air, and wince at the fluorescent green glow. Through the two fire doors, down the three flights of stairs, and as the front door slowly hinges shut, the light at the crosswalk turns red. Across the street, the #14 Hawthorne pulls up.

But if you run for it here, they sometimes stop for you.

___

Radiohead’s OK Computer wasn’t an album I particularly loved, or even owned, until 2000, three years after it came out. At the time I worked, mostly pulling the 4pm-midnight shift, at a large general-interest record store in downtown Portland. I had resisted OK Computer because everyone seemed to like it just a bit too much. I mistrusted it: too popular, in the way that things can seem too popular when you watch large groups of people mindlessly acquiring them all day long. But my coworker Kevin kept pressing it on me, telling me that this sound, as experienced through headphones, is going to change my worldview, dude, seriously, major label or not, these guys have something – and he finally brought in a dubbed cassette tape of it for me to tote around in my old Walkman with the lid falling off of it.

Kevin was right – I slipped on my headphones on the bus one afternoon on the way to work and I was immediately blown … out. By these sounds, this perfect messy new pop, a sad and epic and incredible production value that I’d somehow never appreciated on store stereo systems or in other un-isolated places I’d overheard it.

The album became the only one I kept on my person at all times, and when I upgraded to a CD walkman I gave Kevin back his tape and stole a scratched-up used copy of the disc from work. In these beginning months of Portland I was often too poor or claustrophobic to take the bus, and too young to remember that bicycles existed, so I was often in transport – walking and bussing around the small cloud-sheltered city. It was in transport that this album became the sound of me, moving, usually slowly, from one place in my new life to another.

___

On the bus I sit, clutching coffee and walkman and bag, next to a very large sweaty man who can’t really contain himself on his side of the seat. A thin, plain woman in a matching denim dress and hat gets on just before the Hawthorne bridge. She sits directly behind the driver. I look her up and down — she’s jittery, alternately glancing to the back of the bus and dipping her small hands into her large purse every few seconds, pulling out something, unwrapping, nibbling nervously on it. As the woman starts to speak to the driver, I turn down my walkman to listen in.

“OMIGOD! I can’t believe it! It’s like, the more I keep eating candy, the more candy there is! Omigod! It’s SO MUCH.”

She squeals and gasps, almost orgasmic. She smacks loudly as she chews her candy, returns to her purse, starts rifling through it, searching desperately for something. She looks back at the bus, at me, at the gutterpunk boys in the very back seat. Out again at the window, the river, the slice of the driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror. He’s waiting.

“No I don’t think so No! SHIT! No, yeah, NO I paid okay I paid? I SWEAR. Oh fuck. Fuck. Just, just ― can I ride until 5th? We have to hurry, they might be here soon.”

In the rearview mirror, the driver gives a placating, dismissive nod. The Candy Woman is forgiven for not having a transfer.

I tighten my grip on my coffee, my Radiohead, my own wrist. The sign above my seat says, “Please Hold On.”

Light clouds over bridges fade into windows and houses, the world is flat and clean, the humans are broken and small and I am a long way from New York City.

___

When I arrived in Portland, I was fresh from a haze of college dropout years in New York and looking for somewhere quiet to rest before I could reckon with jumping back in to the manic affair that was my relationship with the City. But when I arrived, I found I didn’t know how to walk in this new and bright environment. The geography of cities that were not New York was not familiar. I hadn’t left the canyons and cramps of Manhattan in years, except directly, on airplanes. There were no people on the sidewalks dictating my pace, no subways beneath us rumbling at regular intervals. The buildings were short. From the distinctly Western houses, each separated from one another by space and sky, roses dripped over porches to litter lawns and sidewalks; even what they called “downtown” smelled like raindrops on flowers. I couldn’t smell a thing, I wanted to leave right away, I hoped I’d never leave.

It was quiet.

And in that quiet, I put music. I sold music. I carried music around. I put music on my head in the daytime and in my belly at night, pressing close to club stages as tightly as possible, waiting to feel it in my organs. So much music. Piles of music, like never before. And in that music, I learned again how to move.

I walked everywhere. My days were music videos, filmed in live tracking shots between my black foam headphones. The music I found in Portland moved my body, my senses, into a slower state. A visual reckoning that pushed out the havoc of survival that had become my dily rhythm in New York and allowed room for pacing myself. For working hard but not desperately. For stepping back for just a few yards to witness, from the outskirts of the Pacific Northwest, our great ongoing millennial folly. My body would move and change. I walked and I changed.

___

I was born again.

___

___

In the second half of your shift, you get in a rhythm, making your piles of takes and rejects and keeping the beat to the hum around you. You pick up the CD and a glance at the cover art instinctively dials up its artist, title, and salability from somewhere deep in the alphabet of your brain; you hold the jewel box by its topsides, between thumb and index finger; you swing the plastic cover open with a twist of the wrist; pop out the disc with your middle finger in the hole and your thumb on the rim; flip it over in a flash of reflective silver; tilt it beneath the light to scan for scratches; make the call; slam it back into its tray. You flip shut the lid with one hand, and relegate the thing to its proper stack: These we can’t use right now, These would be a quarter each, Two bucks for these ones, Four for the best. Cash and trade’s the same. Did you wanna look around first?
___

Somewhere in the middle there is a rush: An afternoon on a weekend, a whiny one needing help, or the dissonant crashbang of clutter,

Stop this noise, you think.

You think, When I am king you will be first against the wall.

Thom Yorke’s lyrics are, upon closer inspection, surprisingly literal.

Which doesn’t mean he doesn’t grate even when he whines. But he should be grating, after all; the fuzz and the layers this song is built on are worthy of their slight dissonance, like the clamor of that city you miss, like the way the sky clears only at night where you are, the way the crisp beats break clear in a chunky rock guitar hook, the sheer grunge of it all that makes the whining mean something.

___

Solos that don’t match mend themselves into angels singing, as clouds move over the valley of us, and then I was back at work.

___

__

Later, after closing up and doing the drawers and the trash and the checking of the alarm, Jeannie told me about her aliens. We watched the sky as dark as pine trees above us in her truck’s camper shell in a parking lot up some hill and I thought it seemed likely, up here. More than in California. The skies have a particular sheen and they are like angels and up here, in the northwest way, they can be singers.

___

___

The idea is, this is all the experience I go through in my head, deeming what you might just think of as a bus ride, or a day.

___

The Band

Capitol Records, 1969

A few things I know about The Band:

1. They’re Canadian, mostly. Just like fellow great rocker Neil Young.

2. It was this band the vaulted and honorable Bob Dylan chose to help him become electric, to turn folk into rock, to play Judas to the quiet strumming of the 60s and step right out towards the 70s, 80s, future, end.

4. These boys on this album cover look like any boys on Valencia Street now, when I hit the corner from my apartment and trip on them standing by the fancy sandwich deli/corner store – always in groups of threes and fives, walking in tight clusters or standing next to piles of bicycles, wearing beards like fathers and rough plaid coats that summon the spirits of working class men most likely last embodied by their fathers’ fathers’ generations, before boys all left for the city and realized that new urban poverty was easier, in a way, less work and more girls, and before tiny drugged out angry boys in Seattle ever existed and wore these shirts, too. I can see the boys on this album cover playing to the Monday night crowd at Amnesia, except of course nowadays there would be less instruments and more electronics, and the music would somehow still be rock and roll despite its country acoutrements. And I would really like it but feel like it’s academic in a way: studied. Feel like it lacks some sort of genuine.

5. But the musicianship is impeccable and the songs are still catchy as heck. I like these early contained years, 1969 or so, best. Honest, I wasn’t ever a Last Waltz girl, not that there’s anything wrong with that.

6. I have been having sing-a-longs with my friends lately. Two, sometimes three guitars, strummed with bar chords and the simplest of rhythms, favorites of the rock and pop and blues genres across decades sung to chords we looked up on the Internet. We are usually full from some awesome dinner, smiles and lyrics and melodies projected and sung into each other’s sated and shadowed faces in dim living room light or dark garage hang-outs. Sometimes I have mixed feelings about sing-a-longs, am a bit reluctant, and I’m not sure why. Is it because we’re not very “good”? Is it my youthful stage fright rising again, a fear that magically only visits me when music is involved? Is it because I miss earlier sing-a-longs, with punker guitar players in smaller apartments in harder cities when I was younger and hungrier?

Max has an American folk song he’s learning on the mandolin called “Cripple Creek,” and before my friends and I play the traditional version of the song in Kevin’s garage in Oakland while we drink away the week with homebrewed beer on old couches, Pete and I are bound to go off for a bar or two of The Band’s “Up On Cripple Creek” and I’m bound to wonder internally how these pretty kids from Canada ever got into American traditional music and decided it spoke for them. Or how we did, for that matter. Kevin tells us there was an influential miner’s strike at Cripple Creek, Colorado (there’s also a Cripple Creek in Virginia), and I tell Pete that next time we’re just figure out the chords and play The Band’s version.

The traditional song Cripple Creek is dirty, the lyrics filled with ribald metaphors and dudes gettin’ some from loose ladies and a songsongy chorus that echoes out of Kevin’s garage and down the MacArthur Boulevard hill in the early night and bounces over Lake Merritt like a memory long after our group attempts at playing it. Once a visiting friend-of-a-friend played this song along with us, a real solo from an actual trained and practicing musician, using the mandolin like a violin and plucking out the melody below her fair chin. That’s how I hear it now, always, and also I hear myself singin’ The Band’s version with a fake musical Southern accent and I hear how far away we are from wherever Cripple Creek really is, wherever it was in 1969 and 1869 and I wonder how close The Band thought they were really getting to it. They weren’t stupid, no doubt. They saw it and waded in it and also knew it wasn’t theirs. But somehow in doing so it became theirs, too. Perhaps that’s how those boys on Valencia feel about their plaid jackets, or how us amateurs in the garage feel about our ripped guitar tabs. We’re doing this. And so, it’s ours.