I’m late for my MRI and I’m running for the L train. Somehow I make it and do all my paperwork and take off my clothes and shoes and put everything inside my locker except for my phone because one of my regulars told me that if you ask them they’ll play your choice of music while you’re in the tube. I’m scared that when I get in there I’m going to get claustrophobic and I heard you’re in there for a really long time and I don’t want to freak out and then this will all be for nothing. When I was in kindergarten my mom had one for her knee and they left me in the room with the computer and told me not to touch anything especially not the keyboard or they’ll have to start all over. You can probably guess what I did.

I walk into the MRI room with nothing but my robe and my underwear and my phone in my hand. The tech looks like A$AP Yams. He’s talking to a light skinned girl with a fat ass. She’s fully clothed, not wearing a robe. A colleague perhaps. He takes his time finishing his conversation with the girl, smiling a big smile and wishing her a blessed day before acknowledging me.

The tech looks down at my hand. His bright expression dims. PUT ALL YOUR BELONGINGS IN THE LOCKER. I’m trying to ask about playing music, but I guess that was another MRI myth. My mouth opens and nothing comes out. PUT YOUR BELONGINGS IN THE LOCKER. He points to the room I came in through. Sorry, I say. I’m sorry.

I put my phone in the locker and get in the tube. The tech says nothing. I’m in there for maybe thirty minutes with nothing but my own thoughts. I don’t feel the slightest bit claustrophobic or freak out. The area between my shoulder blades has been on fire for like, two years. Probably more. Maybe now that I’ve paid a thousand dollars to get my neck examined with fancy state of the art magnets, they can fix it.

When I get out I walk to the room where I left my stuff and open my locker. Something smells bad. I put on my shorts and shoes and go to put on my shirt. There’s something on my shirt. Brown or maybe slightly red. It looks like melted chocolate that has dried. It looks like the streaks of hummus left in the container that you couldn’t quite reach with your chip or pita. I bring the shirt closer to my face, to inspect it. Just a few inches. I gag from the smell.

It’s shit. There is shit on my t-shirt. How did I get human shit on my shirt. On me.

I put my robe back on and walk into the reception area. I’m waiting behind people who are paying for treatment and recieving paperwork and scheduling follow up appointments and providing their insurance details. They are fully clothed in normal attire but I am wearing shorts and then from the waist up a robe. I reach the front of the line and address the receptionist. His face is kind and patient. I pause for a moment, unsure of how to proceed. Something happened, I say. In the changing room. He looks alarmed. What happened, he asks. There’s something in the locker. He says nothing, but he’s telepathically asking what it is. His expression says: what the fuck is in the locker, man? Maybe he thinks it’s a gun. A big rat. Maybe it’s a bomb threat written on a piece of notebook paper. Maybe it’s a severed hand or bloody samurai sword or a kilo of cocaine or a baby.

My voice lowers. I think it’s shit. I mouth the word: shit. The receptionist’s eyes widen. I don’t know how it got there, I say. I don’t say so outright, but telepathically I’m communicating that it isn’t my shit. I didn’t shit in the locker. I didn’t wipe my shitty ass with my own shirt and then put it in the locker before my MRI. Maybe the tech did it while I was in the tube. He looked really pissed. I don’t say that though. I say that I think maybe I got it on me on the train. 

The receptionist says he’s going to get me a plastic bag to put it in. I am then to leave the bag with the shitty t-shirt in the changing room where someone will dispose of it. My mind is racing. I look like an insane person standing in the reception area in my medical gown. What should I wear out of here, I ask. He says I can keep the robe, as if to reassure me. I wonder if they’re going to bill me extra for keeping the robe.

Back in the changing room, I turn the plastic bag inside out and use it to retrieve the shitty t-shirt, as if I was picking up a dog turd from off the sidewalk. I wash my hands and walk out back out through the reception area, alternately thanking and apologizing to the receptionist. Then I am standing in the elevator in my gown. Nobody says anything. I guess they think I just walked in shirtless off the street.

I walk down Myrtle Avenue in my robe, love handles and back fat clearly visible for all the people of Ridgewood to see. Maybe I’ll start a new trend and next thing you know people will be hanging out at Maria Hernandez Park in medical gowns. They already show off their fat gross stomachs in those midriff tops, why not this. Good thing I got shit on me in summer and not, say, the middle of January.

Looking up and down for somewhere to buy a shirt and I see an Army Navy store. I walk in and the cashier looks up at me wearing my medical gown like it's totally normal. Do you guys have Carhartt shirts, I ask. We actually just got some new colors, he says, pointing me in their direction. I pick out one in burgundy and hand the cashier my gown. Out on the street the sun is shining and I make my way back to Myrtle-Wycoff and then home.

At the time, I thought it was really interesting how dismissive John was of BEE and the band’s lyrics being used to open the novel Less Than Zero, even though Ellis, American Psycho, etc. have definitely eclipsed X in the popular consciousness. Recently, I saw the piece had been scrubbed from the Metro Times website, for whatever reason, so here it is again.

Once upon a time, in the mythical kingdom of the American 1970’s, there lived a group of young musicians who seemed to many as though they could summon all the ghosts of the Golden coast. Of Old Hollywood and the Venice Canals, and the Greyhound station in Santa Monica where so many young hopefuls arrived, and even of the place along Interstate 10 where the Desert finally recedes and a vast oasis of green appears as if from nowhere. And when they played it was like a séance with our past, where through hypnotic guitar sorcery and the spell their words cast, they channeled the sounds and stories of everyone who had ever been compelled to go West, from the Okies to the Flower Children, to those who came to prey upon them.

At this point, I should clarify for our readers that I am not talking about the Eagles, who have probably written the most famous song about being lured in by the mythology of California, only to pay the ultimate price. I am referring to the band X, who not only were seen a the time as the leading lights of the early Los Angeles punk scene, but also produced a body of work that now serves as a gateway to the time and place they inhabited. And in full view of history, their music sits alongside the work of Jim Morrison, Charles Bukowski and a small handful of other great poets, as art that is forever etched in the cultural fabric of the city of Los Angeles.

This weekend, the band’s original line up of vocalist Exene Cervenka, singer and bass player John Doe, guitarist Billy Zoom, and drummer DJ Bonebrake will appear at El Club in Detroit for two back to back performances. On both evenings, they will be performing one of their first two albums in their entirety. On the first night they will be playing their 1980 debut LP Los Angeles, and then on the second evening their 1981 album Wild Gift.

Doe, Cervenka and Zoom are all transplants from other parts of the United States, who each found themselves drawn to Los Angeles. John and Exene first met at Beyond Baroque in Venice, at one of the Literary Center’s very first poetry workshops. When I speak to the pair in separate phone conversations, Doe described a setting where many of the original Beatniks still hung around Venice beach, which is now West LA’s only remaining enclave of self-identified bohemians and weirdos.

“LA never really had any respect for its landmarks, and still doesn’t. It’s always a city that’s changing. It’s got a certain wide open, ‘Anything can happen.’” John says. “And that’s what the east coast did not have for me. That’s why I left. The east coast is much more negative and people saying ‘Oh you can’t do that, its too hard,’ and “Don’t try that.’ Its like, ‘Ok, why don’t you just stay here and you do that, and I’ll do something else, and we’ll see what happens. Have a good time. Go fuck yourself.’”

Earlier this year Doe released his book Under the Big Black Sun – a collection of essays by some of the most prominent artists in the LA punk scene – which shares its title with X’s third studio album. It is his attempt to capture the creativity and eclecticism that typified the Los Angeles scene, which has often been portrayed as ugly, violent and semi-literate.

The book features chapters by both John and Exene, as well as figures like Jane Weidlin of the Go Go’s, who describes her time in LA’s punk rock flop house The Canterbury. Other contributors include her bandmate Charlotte Caffey, Mike Watt of South Bay art-punks the Minutemen, and Teresa Covarrubias of the Brat, who gives a much-needed account of the criminally underrated and under-documented Latino punk scene in East LA. Hardcore is also given its due within the pages of Under the Big Black Sun, and along with a chapter by Henry Rollins, Jack Grisham of TSOL offers a somewhat terrifying perspective on the nihilism and anti-social violence which so famously typified many punk shows at the time, and was a major fixture in the mainstream media’s coverage.

But it is balanced by a far more optimistic vision, and when I ask Exene what she remembers about the area, it sounds like she never soured on the city or its inhabitants, unlike the protagonist of their song “Los Angeles.” Precarious accommodation – the kind young transplants tend to inhabit – seems like a recurring theme in the band’s work (on “We’re Desperate” or “In This House That I Call Home”), but when I bring up the subject she takes exception to my choice of adjectives.

“Back then you could live in a 1920’s apartment for $300 a month. It wasn’t ‘shitty,’” she says. “It still had vestiges of old Hollywood. Schwab’s drugstore was still there where Lana Turner supposedly got discovered, which was a myth. The old architecture was still there. You’d get around on the bus. It was incredible. It was an incredible place.”

Early punk music is famously minimalistic, and sometimes anti-intellectual. But beneath the seemingly basic foundation of many of their songs lies incredibly sophisticated songwriting ability, and very un-punk proficiency by players Zoom, Doe and Bonebrake. While their early work is more identifiably “punk” than New York artists like Patti Smith or Television, X can perhaps be seen as bringing a similar literary and artistic sensibility to the West Coast. From his current home in the Bay Area, John Doe describes the cultural context in which their sound emerged.

“The thing is in ’74 or ’75 everything started changing, where people finally drew a line and said rock and roll music has gone too far afield from where it started,” Doe tells me. “We wanted to get back to rock and roll music being dangerous and being fun and being short songs and not just all technical - how many notes you can play and things like that. So that’s why it happened in New York and London and LA all within 18 months. Because people were just ready for it, and it was in the air. And that’s what I wanted to be part of.”

X spent several years as the most popular unsigned act in the city, before eventually being picked up by local independent label Slash records. Then, in 1980, they finally released their first full length Los Angeles, which is not only one of the great records of the early punk era, but perhaps a truly perfect album in and of itself. Songs like “Nausea,” “The Unheard Music,” and the album’s title track combined the Noir storytelling of John and Exene’s poetry with truly primal, locomotive chord progressions, and the searing feedback of child prodigy Billy Zoom’s lead guitar.

It did not take long for the group to develop a base of equally talented fans. The album features keys by Doors’ pianist Ray Manzarek, who also worked as producer on Los Angeles as well as three more successive albums. The album’s follow up Wild Gift picks up where it left off, and includes some of the band’s most overtly punk songwriting (“I’m Coming Over” and “Year 1”). Their third album, Under the Big Black Sun was released on Elektra records, and was a major milestone for the band, having grown up on the music of label mates like Phil Ochs, Love, and of course, fellow Los Angelinos Morrison and Manzarek. By the release of their fourth album More Fun In the New World, the chasm between Orange County hardcore and the roots-inflected sound of LA bands like X, Gun Club and the Blasters had grown. Their references to populist forms like country and folk became more explicit. It seemed clear that the music of X was evolving into something far more advanced, and accessible.

The mainstream media could no longer ignore them, and appearances on Letterman and American Bandstand served to elevate the band’s profile even further. In 1985 they parted ways with producer Manzarek, and released what Doe has since described as “that questionable heavy metal album.” Ain’t Love Grand certainly marked a shift in production values for the group. But it also includes some of their most memorable songs (“Burning House of Love” and “Around My Heart”), as well as some of Billy Zoom’s greatest guitar shredding (“What’s Wrong With Me”). By the mid-80’s, if you were a young person in Southern California, this music was probably a part of your life.

The same year that X released Ain’t Love Grand, something interesting happened. A 20-year-old author named Bret Easton Ellis, himself a Los Angeles native, published his first novel Less Than Zero.

In stark contrast to the world inhabited by X and their friends in the early punk scene, Less Than Zero was a tale of privileged West LA teenagers. But Ellis’s novel is bookended by references to X’s music, and begins with a reference to, of all things, their song “The Have Nots.”

“Oh I remember him calling me up and asking if he could use that quote and I thought ‘Well we didn’t write that,’” Doe says. “That was actually on a board game that we took that phrase from. So knock yourself out. I don’t give a shit. And then that was the last I heard of him. And then I kept hearing there’s this book where we’re mentioned. And I found that actually very weird and we have no connection with any of those types of people - any of that sort of young, rich Beverly Hills crowd. So I thought was very odd. I mean, it didn’t really ring true to me.”

I suggest to Doe that maybe this is part of the story as well - that in our world, there must be losers in order for there to be winners – and that maybe Clay and his friends in Less Than Zero are the Haves to the Have Nots portrayed in X’s lyrics. He is more receptive to this idea, but insists on keeping the two separate, and when you compare the vibrant and diverse artistic community described in Under the Big Black Sun to the ugly narcissism of Less Than Zero, he is probably right to do so. “That’s what we were fighting against, or trying to. To show that Los Angeles does have an artistic part of it, not just the superficial movie star bullshit.”

They continued to attract a range of high profile and influential fans in the art and music world, including John Mellencamp, who invited them to perform at Farm Aid. “The Have Nots” is one of X’s few explicitly political songs, but the band lent their influence to a number of causes throughout the decade, including several benefits in support of El Salvador and Nicaragua at the height of the Iran-Contra scandal. “People were being victimized by those policies,” Exene tells me, “And then they were sending the drugs up here and the guns back and forth. We weren’t allowed to send them Asprin.”

Billy Zoom left X in 1986, and was briefly replaced by Blasters’ guitarist Dave Alvin for the band’s sixth album See How We Are. Over the next decade X would continue its pattern of growth experimentation, producing a truly incredible live album with guitarist Tony Gilkyson, as well as an album of country and folk songs under the pseudonym the Knitters.

As a solo artist Doe has produced an impressive body of alt-county and folk music, which have been well received by music critics and journalists, finding its way into motion pictures like The Bodyguard and Black Snake Moan “Country music, if you can even call it that anymore, is just all about ‘Who wants a beer?’” Doe says. “Is that it? That’s the song? ‘Who wants a beer?’ It’s such bullshit. But you know, the same thing with a lot of pop stuff. It all sounds like jingles for Pepsi and stuff. But beneath that, or alongside it is a lot of great music. The music business is in shambles but music is doing great.”

Speaking to John and Exene, it is clear that the music they grew up listening to is as important to them as LA punk. Appearing on NPR earlier this year, Exene told Fresh Air host Terry Gross that much of X’s music was a warning – that our true culture would one day be coopted by the corporations who had once foisted their arena rock upon us, to be used against the American people. I ask her if the reemergence of LA punk in the media and popular consciousness means it has been appropriated by the powers that be. She doesn’t. “Its too much of a wake up message,” she tells me. “I think at the end if you can live and be happy, and have a great fulfilling life, and love your friends and family, and do creative things, that is the best response.”

When writing an installment of 90’s Baby, my methodology has been to take inventory of all the things that I know I did or saw or experienced that particular year. Oftentimes, this will take the form of a list. Concerts I know I went to, or movies I know I saw, or albums I bought, or episodes of TV that I watched. Here’s sample from the list that I compiled for this post:

1. Calvin and Hobbes

2. Batman the animated series

3. Aladdin

4. Mighty Ducks

5. Newsies

6. Lessons of Darkness

7. Fire Walk With Me

In 1992, it was about a year or so since my family had moved from San Jose to the Detroit suburbs. For 11 out of the 12 months that year, I was seven years old. My memories mostly revolve around watching TV, listening to the radio, reading books, interacting with the kids at my school, and going to parties with my parents.

My second grade teacher was a lady named Mrs. Meyers. I don’t remember much about her except that she was a large, loud woman with a curly, bob type of hairstyle, and on one occasion she told the classroom a story about her son’s diabetes, which made him wet the bed. I can’t remember the point she was trying to make, but I think it was that we have to unite, as a society, to overcome the scourge of diabetes. I also remember working in a group with three or four other boys in my class. The output of our groupwork session was a sort of sketch or presentation which I’ll call “The first Black President,” which one of the other boys copied almost word for word from Eddie Murphy.

Talking about it amongst ourselves, we all thought it was really funny. But when we reenacted the performance for the class, no one laughed. And at the end, Mrs. Meyers closed her eyes and took a deep breath, as if trying to suppress an angry outburst, or maybe imagine she were somewhere else.

Along with the edgy and obscene comedy1 which was so popular at the time, the boys in my grade were all into extremely violent “R” rated movies, and sports. Terminator 2 had just come out the previous year, and when I’d go to the toy store with my mom all the action figures were from movies which I’d never seen - Robocop, Alien, Escape from New York, etc. I think maybe I was allowed to watch Batman Returns, but maybe not even that one. I lived vicariously through second hand accounts of grisly stabbings by the T-1000 or Michael Meyers or Sharon Stone’s character in Basic Instinct, or Clint Eastwood’s racist vigilantism in Dirty Harry. I have no idea how a second grader was legally admitted to a screening of Basic Instinct in the theater. On the weekends, I’d spend my Saturday afternoons flipping through the Cabela’s catalog which came through the mail, and looking at the guns.

Musically, I was mostly listening to Rap and R&B - on the newly launched 96.3 Jamz - which I would soon be disabused of by my peers, as I already described in this previous post, and also here. But for now, it seemed like Black music and movies and culture were everywhere around me. The sound I associate most with this time is the West Coast synth-whistle, which they were even beginning to incorporate into children’s music, if that’s what Kriss Kross is.

It’s interesting to me now, because although I was living just a few miles from the largest majority-Black city in the country, there were absolutely no Black people at my school, and this would remain the case until I went to college. My mother, who is from Bangladesh, was almost certainly the most melanated person in my world at the time, and on the occasions when she’d come to visit me at school I felt extremely self conscious.

Every other week or so my parents would take us to a party hosted by my mom’s friends in the local Bangladeshi community. The kids there ranged from my own age to high school, and probably one or two who were visiting from wherever they went to college. I remember that their style seemed very different from what I saw young people wearing at my school and the town where I lived. I don’t mean the girls who came dressed up in Saris or whatever, but that their style was generally a lot preppier, and there were also one or two kids dressed in baggy flannel and khakis like I saw in music videos. It feels like a very stupid2 observation now, but it seemed to me that they felt more of a shared cultural affinity with the other non-white people we were seeing in the media sphere and pop culture. But if I felt conspicuously non-white at school, I also felt a little too white in their company, and as soon as I was old enough to stay home by myself, I stopped going.

The year was also significant because of the Rodney King verdict and the rioting it set off across the country. In Detroit, Malice Green was beaten to death by two white police officers, whose nicknames were “Starsky and Hutch.” As I grew older, I got used to hearing adults in the suburb where I lived complain about the mayor of Detroit, Coleman Young, and blaming all the city’s problems on him. He hasn’t been mayor for like, 30 years or something, but I’m pretty sure they’re still at it.

The Twin Peaks movie, Fire Walk With Me, was released in theaters, and was a massive flop with critics, as well as long time fans of the show. Here is the review from the New York Times, where the reviewer basically says that Lynch gave up trying to make the story make any sense. The film has been rehabilitated to a great degree, but I think its an idea that has persisted to some extent.

I watched Fire Walk With Me for the first time just under a year ago. The plot focuses on Sheryl Lee’s character, Laura Palmer, who is largely absent from the series, although her death is the foundation of the story. Like so many things in the town of Twin Peaks, Laura’s life seems idyllic. But beneath the surface, in her home and in her bedroom, she is tormented by a malevolent spirit which has preyed on her since she was a child. And although she doesn’t understand the true nature of what is happening to her, she finds herself suddenly transformed from a child to an adult. “Your Laura disappeared,” she says. “It’s just me now.”

It sends her life into a tailspin, and at night, prom queen Laura is cast into a shadow world inhabited by evil criminals.

After I watched Fire Walk With Me, and looked back on the arc of my own life, I was overcome by the sense that something must have happened to me when I was very young. I still don’t know what it was exactly, but I know what happened next.

As with all the other years, most of my memories revolve around the media I was consuming. However, 1990 was a little different, because the previous year my immediate family and I had moved to San Jose, California. I think it was also the year my sister was born. I’m not going to ask her because that feels like cheating. But I’m pretty sure.

The year we moved to California was unusual because it was the year that both of the baseball teams from the Bay Area, the Giants and the A’s, were in the World Series. They called it the “Battle of the Bay.” In Game 3 of the series, something even more unusual happened. There was a massive earthquake, and around 63 people died when a section of the freeway and several other structures collapsed. I was watching Sesame Street at the time, so that’s what I remember. Or at least I think I do.

In terms of music, the biggest thing in my rotation was a compilation album by the Beach Boys, which is a bit weird, because as I’m writing this, Brian Wilson has just died. It took me a little digging to find it. It’s called Made In U.S.A. This is what the cover looks like.

I like the fact that it's a collage of the most American-coded stuff: a baseball, an astronaut, a Ford Mustang, a surfboard, a frisbee, a milkshake. A blonde girl who looks like she could be kind of a bitch, but in a fun way. It turns out that the artist who designed the cover is a marine named Keith Mcconnell, who served in Vietnam, and later in Operation Desert Storm. Between his time in the military, he worked on several projects for the Beach Boys, as well as a 10th anniversary poster for the Beatles. He also did some of the courtroom sketches during the Patty Hearst/SLA trial, which is another interesting Bay Area connection.

For the release of the album, the band did a cover of “California Dreamin’” by the Mamas & the Papas. I really liked the guitar part at the beginning, which is being played by Roger McGuinn from the Byrds. Here is the music video.

If you’re anything like me, you will have no idea that John and Michelle Phillips from the Mamas & The Papas are also in the video. That same year their daughter Chyna released an album along with Brian Wilson’s daughters Carnie and Wendy. They called themselves Wilson Phillips, and the album sold over 10 million copies.

You should bear in mind that 1990 was the most 80’s-like of all the years that decade, and the other thing I remember listening to extensively was a compilation of 80’s singles. It was tough to track down because the CD is long gone, and so many newer compilations have been released that fit that description, but after looking all over I’m pretty sure that it was the Totally 80’s album by Razor & Tie. I only say that with some hesitation because I distinctly remember the CD itself and the back cover, but I have no memory whatsoever of seeing the front cover with Robert Palmer, the Bangles, and Boy George. I have no idea who is top right and I’m not going to Google it. Sound off in the comments if you know.

This kind of music still makes up the bulk of what I listen to today.

In terms of my parents CD collection, the ones they were in their heavy rotation were The Other Side of The Mirror, by Stevie Nicks, Graceland by Paul Simon, and Brothers in Arms by Dire Straits. I also listened extensively to my aunt’s copy of Dangerous by Michael Jackson, especially the song “Black & White,” which kind of feels like it was created in a marketing lab to make people accept multiculturalism.

Reading back over what I’ve written so far, this might be the most boring installment of 90’s Baby to date. Hang on.

That year, the first episode of Twin Peaks premiered on ABC. In case you’ve never watched it, everyone loved the pilot, and then hated everything that came after for the next three years or so. Then, in the decades that followed, they decided it was the greatest thing ever, to the point where now my Substack feed is full of people writing about Fire Walk With Me more than 30 years after it came out. Having recently finished the entire series, I think my opinion is that it represents the best expression of David Lynch’s approach to filmmaking of anything I’ve seen, which I think is everything except for The Elephant Man.

There are so many analyses of Twin Peaks on the internet. The one I find most compelling, and that I’ve basically decided explains the show for me, is that the events we see represent the unconscious mind of Laura Palmer as it undergoes the process of compartmentalizing and repressing her childhood abuse. I don’t know if it’s a coincidence, but since I’ve finished Twin Peaks, I’ve found myself reflecting more and more on the nature of my own memories, and what might be buried in my subconscious from so many years ago. And I can’t quite shake the feeling that something is there, lying just out of focus.

One moment that I find particularly interesting in the pilot comes towards the end of the episode, when Josie Packard, the owner of the town’s saw mill, learns of Laura Palmer’s murder. The death has shocked the town so thoroughly, that Josie decides to close her business for the day. Many years later, when I found myself in a similar situation, I learned that this is actually not what happens when a popular young woman is brutally murdered in the prime of her life. Quite the opposite in fact. I’ll talk about that another time.

Here’s Sheryl Lee, who played Laura Palmer, hosting a 1990 retrospective on BBC 2.

Still, there were bound to be one or two off years. When I started writing these, I considered doing a separate playlist for each entry. But then I forgot. So when I set out to finally compile my corresponding playlist, it seemed like I had made a tragic error. Turns out everyone just kind of coasted on their previous work in 1996. The year fell in between Radiohead’s The Bends and OK Computer, between Green Day’s Insomniac and Nimrod1. I had a bunch of rules in my head for how the playlist should operate, because the goal is to transport you, the reader, into my young mind. Basically, to be included it has to be something I remember seeing that came out that year. Or if not something that was actually released in 1996, then a live version of older music someone was performing that year. It’s not a perfect system, but I believe it achieves what I set out to.

Here it is2.

It also had to be a good playlist above all, so there some notable omissions if a song was impactful, yet bad. I am curating a vibe, after all. Some of the songs I left out are: “The Beautiful People” by Marilyn Manson, “Until It Sleeps,” by Metallica, and “One of Us,” by Joan Osborne.

Speaking of Joan Osborne: I’m pretty sure one of the meta-narratives pushed by MTV at the time was that 1996 was YEAR OF WOMEN or YEAR OF THE WOMAN, or something like that. They loved those. 1997 was supposed to be YEAR OF TECHNO but for their retrospective they admitted they got it wrong and it was actually the YEAR OF SKA. 1996 was the Year Of Women mostly because of Alanis Morrisette and No Doubt, who released popular albums the previous year that they were touring in support of. I haven’t included any Alanis on the playlist because her shit has reached the level of saturation where I can’t stand to listen to it anymore. If I did put one on the playlist, it would have been “Hand In My Pocket,” but it was released in 1995.

One woman that I liked that year, and I still like, is Fiona Apple.

In 1996, she released her album Tidal, though I wouldn’t have listened to it at the time, because her only single in 1996 was “Shadowboxer,” which I thought was slow and boring. I love it now, so it’s on the playlist. A bunch of other good songs were released as singles the following year and made into videos, which is the only time when I would have heard them. The big one, of course, was “Criminal.” On the one hand, it feels really incredible now that she wrote that stuff when she was like, 17 years old. On the other hand it is kind of weird that she was that old in the video. I was actually not gooning to Fiona Apple back then, so I’m off the hook. All the women I was into looked like this.

Up to that point, any music I heard was either on TV, at my friends’ houses, on the radio, or something from my parents’ CD collection. I think that year was the year I signed up for one of those CD club deals they advertised in all the magazines, where you got 10 for a penny or something like that. Then once you got all the good stuff, they made you take one shitty CD a month at a massively inflated price. I’m trying really hard right now to think of all the CDs I got in that first drop. I know one of them was Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. I’m pretty sure I also got Ten and Vitalogy, by Pearl Jam, One Hot Minute, by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Collective Soul, by Collective Soul3, then maybe some Green Day and Nirvana stuff I was missing. I also got Bat Out of Hell by Meat Loaf, because I thought the cover art was cool. Then when I listened to the CD, I was shocked by how it sounded4. So it sat in my collection, more or less unlistened.

I was still languishing solely on network TV at my house. One of the things I watched on Sundays was Siskel and Ebert At The Movies. That year, I remember them reviewing David Cronenberg’s new movie Crash. Here is their review.

I was much too young to grasp the finer points of their conversation, but I understood the part about the characters in the film being sexually aroused by car crashes. It struck me as an incredibly stupid premise for a story. Many years later, I’ve read a handful of books by J.G. Ballard, on whose novel of the same title the film is based. Mentally, I’ve put him in a box with Philip K. Dick, another writer who’s work is mostly science fiction, and is often difficult for me to enjoy because the prose seems a bit clunky or inelegant. I find this to be true of Ballard’s early work. But not for Crash, which is beautifully written, having emerged from his (almost incomprehensible) earlier project The Atrocity Exhibition, in which he sought to create the literary equivalent of Surrealism. And as I now understand - like Roger was trying to tell me - Crash is ultimately a story about our sexual compulsions spiraling out of control.

Like much of Cronenberg’s other work, the film is also about the inevitable marriage of the human form with the technology we created, or the increasingly blurred line between the organic and the inorganic. I’m thinking of 2022’s Crimes Of The Future, but also of eXistenZ, and Videodrome. The themes are very “of the moment” but I find that all of his films are also pretty bad. So Gene and Roger were both right, in their own way.

Back in England, where my extended family lived, some other people were concerned about technology as well.

A new anti-capitalist group had emerged there, made up of former Earth First! activists. They were heavily influenced by the collectivist movements of the English Civil War, as well as the anarchist Hakim Bey’s book Temporary Autonomous Zone, and the itinerant lifestyle of the Irish Traveller community. They called themselves Reclaim The Streets. Other people referred to them as the “anti-roads movement,” “New Age travelers,” or even “crusties,” and “gyppos.” Their motto was “Roads are for cars, Streets are for people.”

Instead of marching from Point A to Point B, they held massive street parties in which they claimed they would create the germ of a new system, without the hierarchies or exploitation of capitalism5.

At the end of the party, everyone went home, and things more or less went back to normal.

And some other people had different ideas about how to oppose the system as well.

That year, I remember getting a phone call from my relatives in Manchester. There had been a bombing in the city center, and I overheard my mother say that the Arndale shopping center had been blown up by the IRA. At the time, the Arndale center was disparagingly referred to by some people as “the biggest toilet in Europe,” because of its white tile work, which I guess reminded them of porcelain.

After the bombing, they rebuilt the Arndale, and once again things more or less went back to the way they were. I even think it looks pretty much the same.

The film covers the period between 1971 and 1972, when the couple first moved to New York City. They landed in Greenwich Village, making fast friends with Jerry Rubin, David Peel, and AJ Weberman, of the Youth International Party. It was the peak of Lennon’s flirtation with Marxism, although his revolutionary tactics, like lying in bed all day with his girlfriend, seemed distinctly anti-materialist. In spite, or perhaps because of this, the music from this period is great.

I can see how the couple’s first two albums, which were widely panned, were an extension of Ono’s Grapefruit era conceptual work, which I also love. Listen to this album of harsh noise. Imagine it sounds like something else.

The film also covers the the 1971 John Sinclair Freedom Rally, at which Lennon and Ono famously performed. In 2018, I interviewed the aging Sinclair for a piece that later appeared in VICE. I met Sinclair at the Psychedelic Healing Shack in Detroit, after being greeted by Dr. Bob’s latest transient girlfriend. Though still a dedicated weed smoker, and self-described Communist, I was disappointed to find that Sinclair’s political views aligned most closely with what some (not me) would now describe as a lib-tard. He was extremely dismissive of Bernie Sanders and was still supporting Hillary Clinton for some reason, after she had already lost.

In working on the piece for VICE, I also interviewed the late Wayne Kramer, who’s band the MC5 was managed by Sinclair. At the time, I felt I could sense how much he disliked me through the phone, and was unable to use any material from the interview, or reach him for a follow up. At one point, I asked him if he had many political disagreements with his long time friend, Ted Nugent. “What do you think,” he asked me.

Subscribe now

Kramer was almost apologetic about his radical past. Here’s what he said to me:

“Some of it, at our best, at our most patriotic and revolutionary ideas… I’m not sure they were so revolutionary. All we were talking about were our rights as guaranteed by the Constitution. All we were doing was participating in the democratic process. Democracy is participatory. If you don’t like the way the government is doing something, you’re required to say something about it. You’re required to take some action, and that's what we were doing. So in a lot of ways the things that we fought for - civil rights, the end of the war in Vietnam, more sane drug policies, the end of police violence, the beginning of the environmental movement, health, education - these are all rock solid issues, these are the fundamental building blocks of civilization and they’ll carry on. There was also a lot that we said and did that was completely whacko. Like the idea of embracing violence as a viable strategy. Of course that was a terrible mistake. We were not very conscious of women’s rights and had a kind of chauvenistic [attitude] about our relationships with the women in our lives and that wasn’t very cool either. We did some good and we also messed some things up. Human 101.”

On a similar note, the climax of One to One comes after Lennon and Ono fall out with Rubin and the Yippies over their endorsement of political violence, in the lead up to the 1972 Republican National Convention, which Plastic Ono Band were set to perform at as part of their “Free The People” tour.

[SPOILER] The day is saved, however, when the couple plan another benefit concert at Madison Square Garden, raising $1.5m for developmentally disabled children at the Willowbrook State School in Staten Island. It’s really rather moving and there is some great footage from the show I can’t find anywhere else.

And with that, I’ll end on an Ono-esque note. Think of a better conclusion to this blog post. Write one yourself.

The house where my grandmother lives was bought by my late grandfather in 1982, for a sum of approximately 45,000 GBP. He paid for the house with money he earned working as a chemist, first in the employ of others and later, at a small chain of local pharmacies he owned himself, before the consolidation of the big high street chains. The start-up capital was provided by his former employer, after finding the job in the newspaper. The house looks like this.

Many years later, he got all the money for the house back, through a scheme called an endowment mortgage which I don’t quite understand.

Growing up, I’d spend every other summer or so in England, which I had mixed feelings about. On the one hand, I was troubled by thoughts of what I was missing out on back home in Michigan, and the idea that it would somehow hinder my young friendships, which revolved largely around me going to their house to watch their cable TV. On the other hand, my grandparents had a much more sophisticated TV setup than my parents, and I was able to some degree to catch up all summer on shows like Beavis and Butthead, Ren and Stimpy, and many of the alternative/rock music videos I would have seen on MTV back home.

In England, they also had something called Teletext which felt very much like an early precursor to a web browser. It looked like this.

The only trouble, which also weighed heavily on my young mind, was that the charts in England are of course different than those in the United States. So while my friends back home were all listening to music I was interested in - generic alternative bands like Live, the Smashing Pumpkins, and Bush - the time allocated for rock music programming in England was all taken up by locally popular bands like Oasis, Blur, and Pulp, who I didn’t like as much. I was also confused as to why Bush, who were British, were not as popular in England as some of the other bands I’ve just named. I now realize that this is because they were a fake, corporate version of Nirvana which was being promoted by extremely sinister and nefarious forces within the music industry in America.

The other problem was that a lot of music I absolutely hated was coming out of Europe, so in practice I would have to hear it all summer, and then again for another cycle when I got back to the USA. Here are just a couple of the songs I’m talking about.

In 1995, another song which I hated, from the Four Weddings and a Funeral soundtrack, was all over the British charts. I won’t even name it because it’s so bad. The video and the song were both really boring. It felt like every time I was allowed to watch TV they just played that video, “Cotton Eye Joe1,” and Take That. It was like torture.

In the fall, however, I hit the jackpot. For some reason, I was in England for the release of the documentary series which accompanied The Beatles Anthology albums. I checked Wikipedia, and it was released during the period from November 26th to December 31st, which means I would have been there for both Thanksgiving break and Christmas. I can’t account for the two or three weeks in between, or why I would have been given almost an entire month off of school.

As I mentioned in a previous installment of 90’s Baby, I was single mindedly fixated on Nirvana and to a lesser extent, the Beatles. In the run up to the release of the documentary and the albums, the commercials for the series were all over the TV. Last month, while I was waiting for the sun to set so I could break my fast, I did a complete re-watch.

The series does a really good job covering the band’s early days in Liverpool, and the period they spent in Hamburg, which ended abruptly after Paul McCartney was deported for nailing a condom to the wall of a bar. It takes about four hours/episodes for the band to get to the USA. This is also the period I was most interested in as a 5th grader. I’m not sure if there is a causal relationship there, like I found it increasingly difficult to concentrate and retain information as the series went on. Or more likely, the simple nature of their early material was easier for me to get my young mind around.

I bought, or rather my parents bought me, the first CD collection in the Anthology series. It had all the corny songs from the first few albums, like “She Loves You,” “From Me To You,” and “Twist and Shout.”

Despite the fact that I was less interested in the later material, I also bought Magical Mystery Tour on CD. When the corresponding episode aired, I was at my conservative white grandparents’ house near Bradford. Two years later, during the 1996 General Election, they said they would have to “skip the country” if the Labour Party won. Tony Blair eventually became the Prime Minister, but my grandparents remained in the UK until their deaths in the 2010s.

My grandparents also liked the early Beatles material. I sat in their living room among all their palm crosses and books about creationism while the music video for “I Am The Walrus” came on the TV screen.

Then when John Lennon sang the line “you’ve been a naughty girl you let your knickers down,” they seemed really shocked, and my grandfather even repeated the line, to show everyone how upset he was.

The songs I liked the most from the album were the ones composed by Paul McCartney, like “Your Mother Should Know,” “Hello Goodbye,” and “Penny Lane.” I also liked “All You Need Is Love,” even though that one is a Lennon track.

To accompany the release of the Anthology, Apple Corps (the Beatles multimedia company) produced the songs “Free As a Bird,” and “Real Love,” which were based on recordings made by John Lennon, with additional instrumentation and vocals recorded by the other band members after his death. I distinctly remember the talking heads on British TV talking about how “bad” the songs were. As a young person with no critical thinking skills, I internalized this opinion as my own, and repeated it to everyone who would listen.

When I rediscovered the songs later in life, I found that they were not “bad” but rather, that they were incredibly beautiful. I’d encourage you to listen and decide for yourself.

As an adult, my favorite Beatles album is probably the Magical Mystery Tour.

Over the next two days, she racks up a $700 bill. Are you teaching my child to gamble, my sister asks me. We’re not gambling, we’re just… playing for money. So, gambling, she says. We’re learning how to do math, I say.

Then something happens, and my luck changes. My eyes are all itchy and dry. My niece wins this one. She says I owe her $1000.

When I first moved to New York I came with a lot of assumptions about the way things worked. One of them was that it was not a totally horrible idea to talk to the homeless people. They are human beings after all. Maybe they had some interesting stories to tell.

I related this to my boss at the time, who was a typical Philly guy. Trashy accent and everything. He’d get the train into Newark Penn, then to Midtown, and we’d spend the day together. He told me that he didn’t make eye contact with anyone on the street that tried to talk to him. This struck me as very sad. I thought he didn’t know much about the city because he didn’t seem to understand how long it took to navigate between the boroughs. There was the time that I showed up to a meeting in shorts, and he wanted me to go all the way to Queens just to change. The meeting was in Williamsburg, by the way.

My response was that you just have to stand your ground, speak to them calmly, and not let the homeless people know they’re scaring you, because if they sense weakness that’s when they’ll really start to fuck with you. Like a big dog. Like I was the bum whisperer. He didn’t even acknowledge that I had said anything. That’s how dumb he thought what I was saying was.

My typical day usually ended in Hell’s Kitchen, and then I would get the N train from the Times Square or 49th Street station, back to Astoria where I lived. I was walking my normal route and wound up in front of the Port Authority, on the side facing the New York Times building. Someone held a pamphlet out in front of my face. It looked like it had a bus on it. Maybe it was a tour package or something. The guy was wearing a polo shirt so it could conceivably have been his job. People with collars usually have jobs, don’t they? I didn’t really notice the guy standing next to him, and it didn’t register that they might have been a pair.

I was about to explain to the guy with the pamphlet that I wasn’t interested in what he was selling, when the other guy started talking to me. He wasn’t wearing a collared shirt. In fact, he wasn’t wearing a shirt at all. He was what people in the fitness community refer to as “yoked.” As in, he had the frame of an ox, which is a farm animal that wears a yoke, which is an implement used to pull a plough and till the soil. He wasn’t wearing a yoke or a shirt but he was wearing a durag. He had enormous pectoral muscles and deltoids and biceps and defined abs. He looked like one of those dudes you see in the prison yard. Like he was on every kind of steroid. He looked like that guy Kimbo Slice. It may have actually been him.

What he said was: “I will take you places no man has ever been.” I think it was meant to be an offer, like he was offering to have sex with me, for money. But it came across like he was telling me what was going to happen.

I took my boss’s advice and stopped making eye contact after that.

What is most interesting to me in writing about this period in my life, and the stuff I was watching or listening to, is that it forces me to remember things from a long time ago and think about the nature of my memories.

Sometime in the mid-to-late 90s, we started to get access to the internet in public places. There were internet cafes, which were a thing that still existed up until the 2010s or so. We also got the first computers with internet access at my school and at the public library.

One day I was at the library and I met two kids who I’d never seen before, which probably meant they didn’t go to any of the schools in the area. One of them was more my size and the other one was way bigger and wore a backwards baseball cap. I can’t remember too much about them beyond these details. I think the smaller kid had curly hair.

What I do remember is that after I had been talking to these kids for a little while and more or less getting along, the fatter kid started to look at porn on the library computer. There were signs all over saying not to do this. I wasn’t trying to snitch on him but what he was doing seemed uncool. The porn was pretty intense, Hustler type of stuff where you could see the girls’ entire vaginas and I commented that what he was doing was weird. My comment must have made him pretty mad because he got in my face to push me and later, outside the library, pulled a flick knife on me. This would turn out to be a recurring theme throughout my life.

In 1997, I finally got cable TV at my house. Until then I’d spent my weekends trying to catch up on Nickelodeon, and later on MTV, at friends’ houses. It's difficult for me to pin down details of when a lot of this stuff happened, but I know the year of this particular landmark because it happened to coincide with the final season of one of my favorite shows, Beavis and Butthead, which felt like a cruel joke.

That year, they ran an episode called “Cyber Butt,” where Beavis and Butthead force Stewart to teach them how to look at porn at the school library. The analogy isn’t perfect but I guess in this instance I am Stewart.

One other thing that I have clear memories of was seeing the news that Princess Diana had been in a major car crash, which would later prove fatal. Part of the reason I remember so vividly is because the initial news bulletin interrupted Saturday Night Live. At the time, watching SNL every week was really important to me.

This NBC news broadcast seems to have happened during a different SNL segment than I remember. I thought it happened during Weekend Update. Maybe it’s a time zone thing.

I also clearly remember seeing the first news that the Notorious BIG had been shot in Los Angeles, even though he was barely on my radar as a musician. By contrast, I have zero memories of Kurt Cobain’s suicide happening a few years earlier, despite the fact that I was single-mindedly obsessed with Nirvana and that was basically all I listened to. It has occurred to me that this information was either hidden from me by my parents or the faculty of the school I attended. It has also occurred to me that maybe I was so in love with Kurt Cobain that I repressed the memory. Or maybe that it was just so long ago.

The video for the single “Hypnotize” was all over MTV, but I can’t quite remember whether this was the case before or after his death. I liked the song but didn’t publicly acknowledge it for reasons I’ve already discussed in my other posts. The video seemed odd to me. I thought the beginning where they were being chased by the black helicopters for no reason was dumb. I also didn’t get why there was some other guy in every scene of the video who didn’t really say much besides “yeah” and “uh huh.” I’m posting it here as my way of finally admitting that I like the song/video.

Within a few months, I found out who that guy was, because his name and face were all over MTV, and everywhere else.

The first single from his album Puff Daddy and The Family was “All About the Benjamins,” which I hated. I still think it's a really annoying song. The second big single was “I’ll be Missing You.” This video is from the 1997 VMAs1.

Seeing people use the death of others in a self-aggrandizing way would also prove to be a recurring theme in my life. I have plans to write about that in another post.

At the time, I remember thinking how fishy it seemed that his career as a solo artist blew up right after the Biggie shooting. It felt like maybe he had something to do with it.

This represented a huge leap in my critical thinking. Just a few years earlier, I had seen Michael Jordan in a McDonald’s commercial promoting the movie Space Jam, and related to an older kid that Michael Jordan must really love McDonald’s, because he takes time out of his busy schedule to go on TV to tell everyone about it. The older kid told me that he was getting paid to say that stuff. It blew my mind.

I can still feel the embarrassment of realizing what an idiot I was, but I also think there is something to my hypothesis about the Biggie murder, and I am proud of what a fantastic judge of character I proved to be.

At the time I was still seeing the pediatrician I had been going to since first grade, an Filipina lady named Dr. Baraceros. The previous year I was exhibiting a confounding set of symptoms such as fatigue and swollen glands in my neck.

“Have you ever smoked marijuana, Adam?” she asked.

I insisted that I never had. My parents agreed to have me drug tested anyway. I waited anxiously for the test results to come back. Then finally: negative. I don’t know why I was so nervous - I really hadn’t. In fact, the experience would leave me so terrified of being drug tested and my parents finding out that I wouldn’t smoke weed until my junior year of high school. I did, however, take MDMA several times in 2000, after watching True Life: I’m on Ecstasy on MTV. The show made it seem like it fixed everything that was wrong with your mind, and you couldn’t really test for ecstasy.

It turned out I had somehow contracted mononucleosis, despite the fact that I had never kissed anyone. This was a given. I was somehow both small and fat, and unathletic and poorly adjusted and I dressed like shit. I had a weird wavy hairstyle with a part down the middle. Zero swag. Negative bitches.

Now I was in the pediatrician’s office again with another mysterious health condition: a rash on the back of my neck.

“It looks angry,” I heard her tell my mother from behind me.

In a way, the story of the rash started at my first concert, in October of 1998. A month before my 14th birthday I had attended the Rancid show at Clutch Cargos in Pontiac. I still had braces. The experience was incredibly powerful for me, and I walked away changed. I was ready to let PUNK1 and smoking cigarettes between periods become my entire personality.

Being PUNK would require a significant wardrobe overhaul, but it would ultimately take me several years to get my look dialed in. I credit the ecstasy with helping me achieve the necessary confidence and clarity of mind. In the interim period I was trying to be PUNK with what little resources were available to me. The nearest Hot Topic didn’t quite have what I was looking for. So I was forced to make do.

It was during this exploratory phase that I bought a disgusting mustard yellow sports coat with a pinstripe plaid pattern from the thrift store. I didn’t really know the most basic rules of thrifting (I don’t think anyone really did in 1999) and didn’t get the jacket, which had obviously belonged to a homeless and/or recently deceased person, cleaned. And so, of course, I wound up getting an insane case of ringworm where the back collar lapel touched my neck. If it had been 10 years later when I was hanging out with actual crust punks, it probably would have gotten me clout within my social circle. But people understandably thought the fungus colonizing my skin was revolting, and also my friends were noticeably embarrassed whenever I would wear the jacket.

I’d like to say I was being ironic or something, but the truth is I still didn’t really understand concepts like that. I took myself very seriously. Let me give you an example.

The summer of ‘99 I attended my first Warped Tour music festival at Phoenix Plaza Amphitheater. Or rather, the parking lot of Phoenix Plaza Amphitheater. The lineup looked like this:

It cost $25.

You may notice that the festival featured up and coming artists Blink-182 and Eminem. I refused to watch either set.

My close friends had been fans of Blink-182 early on, back when the band was still relatively unknown, or at least receiving limited airplay. Enema of the State had been released just a month before the Warped Tour came to Michigan, and the groups’ only singles to date had been “Dammit” from their album Dude Ranch, and “What’s My Age Again,” which failed to break into the Billboard top 50.

At the time, I hated Blink-182, opposed as I was to an idea I had constructed in my head of what could be considered “pop punk2.” Here’s the thing: I still don’t really care about Blink-182, and I think their music is for simple-minded morons. I like a lot of their songs, and they were so much of their time and place that it appeals to me on a nostalgia level. I think it’s cool that they had Matt Skiba fill in for Tom Delonge when he lost his mind or whatever. I don’t know. Something in me just can’t do it.

Since then, I have come around to enjoying a lot of music I once considered cringe and unlistenable. Here is an incomplete list:

Saves The Day

Electric Light Orchestra

The Smiths

The Eagles

Journey

The B-52’s

Bob Seger

Kenny Loggins

Robert Palmer

Wham!/George Michael

Wilson Phillips

The Vengaboys

The Beatles

As you may now realize, I am rapidly approaching the point where I can’t even keep track of whether something that I initially started listening to as a goof is something I have gone past simply “enjoying” and now earnestly “like,” or identify with. I would go so far as to say that people who take music really seriously are themselves cringe. Still, in my heart, I can’t bring myself to feel left out that I missed seeing Blink-182 right before they became huge. I stand by my decision, and think that was probably one of the coolest things I ever did.

The one that kind of eats at me is Eminem.

One popular notion of the time, and which seems to have been lost to history, was the idea many of us held that it was inappropriate for white people to listen to rap music. And I’m not talking about the way people use(d) their overt hatred of Rap and R&B music as a cultural signifier3, as a coded way of saying you didn’t like black people and they made you uncomfortable, until these notions were largely annihilated by Lil Nas X and the emergence of Country-Rap as a popular crossover style. The idea was that you couldn’t honestly relate to their experience and struggle, and to feign this would be disingenuous, and make you a poseur. Now that I think about it, it was an early precursor to the now-popular notion of so-called Cultural Appropriation.

Here is a video of white kids throwing trash at Eminem when he played Warped Tour that year.

On one level, I wish someone had sat me down and made me listen to The Slim Shady LP, because there’s a lot in there that would have spoken to me, if I had been willing to hear him out. I’m glad can look back now and appreciate not only his rare talent and the incredible music, but that he was authentic in a way very few of us could see at the time.

I don’t know as much as I’d like about Freud, but it strikes me as interesting how universal the ongoing struggle to feel comfortable in one’s skin - and construct a self-image that serves this function - really is.

In 1994 I was scared of a lot of things. I was scared of the ocean (I had watched Jaws before being thoroughly desensitized to on-screen violence, as my parents didn’t let me watch R-rated movies and we didn’t have cable), and of talking to girls, both of which I’m actually still scared of. I was scared that when I went to middle school someone would offer me marijuana. When I got there, I unlocked a new fear of the 7th and 8th graders on the bus, who loved to sing the “stupid dumbshit goddamn motherfucker” line from the Offspring’s 1994 radio hit “Bad Habit.”

I first heard The Downward Spiral by Nine Inch Nails that same year, in my best friend's basement. And as we all know, everything is scarier when it happens in a basement.

The layout of the basement was a big long rectangle with two upholstered chairs on the far end, facing the wall where the TV was. Under the cushions of the chairs my friend and his older brother had hidden several issues of Playboy magazine, taken from their dad’s head stash. They kept the magazines under the cushions so we could quickly hide them in case we heard their mom coming down the stairs, and pretend we were just watching TV.

We listened to a lot of music and watched a lot of MTV in the basement. Mostly Nirvana and the Beatles, although every other band that fit under the “alternative” or “grunge” or otherwise guitar-oriented categories were fair game. I had also listened to a lot of rap music in 1992 and 1993 - the first cassette tape I ever purchased was Shaquille O’Neal’s debut album Shaq Diesel1 - but my friends were decidedly anti-rap and R&B. So I adopted this position as well.

Once in a while my friend’s older brother’s friend Brian would come over and we would have a group hang. They were a grade or two above us and Brian was into bands like the Melvins and other far more edgy stuff I didn’t quite have an ear for. I was kind of scared of Brian, who lent my friend’s older brother a VHS tape that contained the first video pornography I ever saw. Brian and I are still good friends to this day.

One day Brian was saying some weird stuff to scare me, which everyone found hilarious. They then decided to fuck with me even further by playing what sounded like the kind of music aliens from the future would telepathically beam into the head of a serial killer who also owned a lot of keyboards. Their plan worked, and I had to leave the basement immediately.

The song that terrified me so badly was “Ruiner,” off of The Downward Spiral. Specifically the organs in the bridge section.

I now believe that Trent Reznor may actually have been channeling satanic aliens, as I learned much later that the album was recorded in the house where the Manson Family had brutally murdered Sharon Tate when she was pregnant with Roman Polanski’s child. One day, Trent Reznor ran into Sharon Tate’s sister at the grocery store in Los Angeles. He got scared and decided he had to leave the evil house forever.

The scary album is about a very sad and grouchy man who eventually kills himself. For some reason I can’t possibly fathom, it resonates with me very powerfully today.

The next time I remember hearing it was at the Birmingham Village Fair in Shain Park. Everyone told me to be careful there, because the previous year a kid from our school had been very badly beaten and hospitalized by Chaldeans from the school across town. I didn’t know what it meant to be Chaldean, although I now realize that many of the older girls who worked at the mini-market at the edge of my subdivision, who I had a crushes on, were that.

I was also scared of most of the rides at the Fair, but I had worked up the courage to go on the Gravitron, which is a ride that spins around very fast. On the ride, the carny operator played two Nine Inch Nails songs.

The first one was “Head Like a Hole,” off of Pretty Hate Machine. The other one was “Closer,” from The Downward Spiral. They sounded so different to my young ears that I didn’t even realize they were the same band.

Both music videos have a lot of spinny things in them. Now that I think about it, it’s even in the title of the scary album. Some very sophisticated curatorial instincts demonstrated by the carny. I wonder what he’s doing now.

Subscribe now

Looking for god

In my recent contacts

In the comment section

In the replies

In the lyrics

And the liner notes

In prayer

At the bar

After hours

Over coffee

Under the covers

And between the sheets

But for a moment it all stopped

And I could rest

Because I thought I'd found him

And he'd written your name

Next to mine

I’ve recently decided that I like auto-fiction, because pretending or making stuff up goes against God.

Go read my flash story ‘Midway’ at Hobart. It’s fiction.

.

Read more