I don’t take for granted that I happened to tumble out of the birth canal at a favorable and exclusive set of lat/ long coordinates. That happy accident positioned me to receive the considerable benefits of birthright citizenship (for now) in a historically powerful and prosperous (for now) nation-state. Drill down to a greater level of specificity, though, and it becomes clear that those same fateful coordinates inflicted upon me the peculiar frustrations of life as a Cleveland sports fan. Earlier this week I moved Heaven and Earth—seriously: I could tell you stories—to get to the 216 and Progressive Field, only to see My Beloved Guardians drop consecutive games to Minnesota in excruciating style:

• Wednesday: the Guardos bring The Benny Hill Show to the diamond, give up six unearned runs, and lose by four.

• Thursday: the Twins win 3-1 in the 11th, after Cleveland bats go 0 for 17 with runners in scoring position.

In the three games played since I started writing this post, my jackass baseball squad has continued to circle the drain. And now I’m hearing that LeBron spurned the Cavaliers in favor of signing with … the 76ers?

Geography giveth, and geography taketh away.

But geography is just a part of the problem. I wasn’t just born into Cleveland fan bullshit—it was thrust upon me. I was raised, trained, programmed, and indoctrinated to receive it. And not just at the level of casual so it goes toleration. I was taught to seek out the bullshit, to support these sad-sack Cleveland teams with a commitment and intensity that would inflict maximum suffering on me and everyone within a 30-foot blast radius. I was up against it, sure, based on where I was raised. But it didn’t have to go this way. I came into this world as the proverbial lump of clay. Brimming with potential, I was molded into a perennial loser. Unbreakable curses were etched into my tabula rasa. I’ve used the passive voice a lot in this paragraph. I won’t name the culpable parties here: they know who they are and what they’ve done.

When England played Argentina in the semifinal two weeks ago, I watched from work. I had my office door closed and the game streaming on my computer display. Feet on my desk, relaxed, at the start. Then feet in the air, with raised fist punching ceiling tiles, after England took the lead. Feet tapping anxiously as the Three Lions dropped deep into their own end, in what even I, a football dilettante, understood was a grave tactical error. Foot taps accelerating as Messi et al. subjected the English to a bombardment they haven’t seen since the Germans rained down V-1 and V-2 hellfire during the Blitz. And finally, feet kicking the trash buckets and stomping out of the room when Argentina—predictably, inevitably—splashed in two late-game goals to advance to the final.

At this point, readers have surely taken note of the hard left turn this post just took. You came in hot about Cleveland—now you’re talking about England? Mmm-hm. And it’s not the abrupt transition you think, because they’re the same fucking teams. Only occasionally good enough to win, and when they are, they never do. Clevelanders remember the Drive, the Fumble, the Shot, the Braves, Jose Mesa, the $14 Million Grand Slam, the Rain Delay. England has the Hand of God, Beckham’s Red Card, Tuchel’s Blunder—and that’s just vs. Argentina. Crushing defeat can come from from any angle—you run into a buzzsaw or a superhero; you wilt in the moment or self-destruct; the officials actively or passively muck it up; hell: the weather gets involved—but come it will. Without fail.

And of course it just so happens that I am an England fan, too. How did this happen? I wasn’t born into it. I’m told I’m one-quarter English by descent, but that’s hardly enough to be dispositive on the question. I’m also half Italian, and whatever Italy have done lately, they can claim a long tradition of success in international football. I could have attached myself fully and completely to the Azzurri. (More on this later.) I mean, geez: in the absence of any meaningful soccer tradition here in the United States, I could have picked any team. I could even have become a full-fledged front-runner, chucking one team for another every four years, based on the FIFA rankings of the moment. Yet here I am in another blind alley, and it was my choice.

Unless it wasn’t.

I don’t think anyone can dispute that sports fandom is irrational. The word fan—short for fanatic—doesn’t just imply the abandonment of reason. It expresses it. Fandom acts on you at a base animal level and elicits all manner of irrational responses: wild mood swings, analytical dysfunction, misreading of evidence, the embrace of superstition, and very often the defense of the indefensible. And at the center of it all is the most reasonless practice of returning again and again to receive the same crushing disappointment. This is unlearned helplessness and the definition of insanity. On the desk just in front of me, at the base of my computer display, is a ticket from Caesar’s Sportsbook, folded into quarters. That slip of paper is a binding contract: I will be paid $3000 if the Guardians with the World Series. Rational people run casinos. They make boatloads of money by extracting it from idiots.

So it is that I spend spring, summer, and usually just the early part of fall alternately (1) dreaming up reasons why the Commissioner’s Trophy could finally, this year be awarded to the Guardians, and (2) emotionally cratering as their on-field play exposes fatal, incurable flaws in the composition of the team. To protect me from full-on meltdowns, I’ve installed a stabilizing app to run in the background and perform the unwelcome function of appealing to my reason: There are 30 teams in Major League Baseball, it says. If they each took turns winning the championship, your team would win once every 30 years.

—Ctl-Alt-Delete/ End Task/ Shut the FUCK up—

I could go on, but I think I’ve made my point. Fandom is conducted irrationally. Why, then, should we think that it can be created rationally? If you come in cold to follow a competitive sport and elect to support a particular team for sensible reasons—including first and foremost that they’re likely to win—then I would submit that definitionally, you are not actually a fan of that team. You’re doing something else entirely, and if you derive pleasure from it, God bless you. What I understand about spectator sports is that the fandom that sits and shits on your amygdala is entirely outside your control. It finds its way in by inculcation or by stealth, and choice has nothing to do with it.

I have told myself over the years that I can enjoy international soccer competitions differently than I do, say, baseball or college football. I’ll start a World Cup tournament pulling for a handful of teams. The U.S., of course, for whatever that’s worth, but also Italy and England. Scotland are fun—put them on the list, when they’re available. In support of my very good friend Glenn from Curaçao, I’ll back the Netherlands (and Curaçao, too, thisyear). My barbers are from Morocco and super-excited about their team: go ahead and throw them into the mix—along with Norway, because Erling Haaland is awesome. All this indecision is deliciously tactical. It’s a way of hedging my bets, so that I have at least one rooting interest to carry me deep into the knockout rounds. Having learned from bitter experience that exclusivity is for suckers, why shouldn’t I at least test-drive an open international soccer relationship?

Then the proceedings commence, and I find that I’m only punching the air and puckering the walls with curses when England plays. And it’s only in the immediate runup to England games that I’m firing off links on multiple text threads to “Vindaloo” by Fat Les (Apple Music, Spotify), New Order’s “World in Motion” (Apple Music, Spotify), and the singular “Three Lions” (Apple Music, Spotify) and all-capping IT’S COMING HOME to any- and everyone in my contacts list. You will of course note that all of the above is England-specific messaging, and it would be a non sequitur to send any of that out in support of any other team. But my point is that those other teams have their traditions, too—I just don’t care about them. I get fired up for England and only England.

I finally accepted, once and for all, that my heart was fully with the Three Lions in July 2021, when England matched up with Italy in the title game of the postponed Euro 2020 tournament. I watched the match in a VRBO house in the Poconos with twenty-some members of my extended family. Every person in the room was an Abruzzi by blood or by marriage, and accordingly every last one of us was supporting the Italian team. The only wrinkle or asterisk was in my case, because I also liked England. Before the game I tried on the claim that I was in a win-win situation. This was a sensible and politic position to take, and by the third minute of the match I would abandon it completely. Say what you want during the pre-game: once the ball starts moving, your heart will clarify the matter for you. And so I quietly and desperately pulled for Gareth Southgate’s eleven, who naturally lost on penalties.

Why this passion for England? Several reasons, I think, starting with the fact that I’m an all-angles Anglophile. I majored and Mastered in English literature, and on matters pertaining to the written word, I’ll take a starting eleven of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Sterne (see “Alright”), Dr. Johnson, Austen, Scott, Dickens, Woolf, and Orwell over any other nation’s delegation—and it’s not close. And for all that Americans invented rock music, it’s indisputable that the English perfected it. You’ll want to write your own lineup of world-beaters, but I’m sending out the Beatles, Bowie, Eno, Sabbath, the Clash, OMD, the Smiths, James, the Stone Roses, Blur, and Pulp, reserving Buzzcocks, New Order, Depeche Mode, the Boo Radleys, and Oasis for late-game substitutions.

I’m also a sucker for English television, a student of English history, and increasingly an admirer in the English parliamentary system. The BBC brought us Rumpole of the Bailey, David Attenborough, I, Claudius, and Monty Python. More recently and from a variety of sources we’ve been gifted—crikey!—MI-5, Luther, Sherlock, Broadchurch, Fleabag, Unforgotten, and The Crown. On the history tip there is so much that is fascinating and consequential: from the Viking invasions and Alfred’s resistance to the Norman Conquest, the establishment of the common law; from the Battle of Agincourt to Elizabeth I, the Spanish Armada, and the rise of the Royal Navy to Mad King George, the sun never setting (until it did), and the aforementioned Battle of Britain. I could give you eleven structural reasons why the UK’s is a more stable and durable republic than ours, but that’s easily another two thousand words and my MO here is to make only brief, snarky asides about politics. Let me just say that I used to listen to Prime Minister’s Questions weekly over my phone, and I always envied how articulate and substantive the cross-party engagements were.

So yeah, I love the hell out of England. Just the whole deal, and this was surely the reason why I booked travel to London at the first opportunity, after I graduated from college. On the long list of countries I wanted badly to explore, England came first. And three years later, when I quit my job in New York and had an open month ahead of me before starting law school, I went right on back to the UK and just happened to arrive when the ’98 World Cup was kicking off. Alone in my travels, I experienced a near-complete cultural immersion, so that I was bearing constant witness to the passion of English fans, expressed in conversations overheard in pubs, in tabloid headlines screaming from the newsstands, in the deeper print coverages on discarded papers I’d pick up on the seats of Tube and train cars. I was on hand and initially nonplussed when James truncated their Glastonbury set so that they—and we—could watch England on the big screen backing the Pyramid Stage. (See “Loaded/ Sorted for E’s and Wizz” for the full G’bury story.) But it wasn’t long before I was as caught up in the match as everyone else. For nearly two weeks I was fully marinated in Team England’s quixotic World Cup bid. How does an experience like that not stick with a guy?

And I don’t doubt, either, that England’s … let’s just say it: Clevelandness attracted me to their several hapless campaigns over the past 28 years. Recall everything I wrote in the first half of this post; now imagine it’s June 2026 and three World Cup teams are making pitches for my support. Team #1: We have the best player of all time, we took the trophy time, and we will do literally ANYTHING up to and including manslaughter to win a match. Team #2: We’re new[ish] arrivals, but we’re a growth stock. Just watch Kylian, Ousmane, and Michael magick the ball around the pitch. Team #3: Sixty years ago we won this thing, and we’ve done fuck-all since. If it’s not one thing, it’s another. But maybe this year we have a fighting chance?

Of course I’m picking Team #3. By nature and nurture, I’m condemned to do it.

Finally, let’s not discount the importance of England’s football anthem, which is “Three Lions.” David Baddiel is an English humorist, lately given to cultural commentary. I grealy enjoyed his six-part Radio 4 podcast, Sixty Years of Hurt (Apple Music, Spotify), released earlier this year, in which Baddiel describes the trajectory and predicament of English international football in the aftermath of the ’66 fairytale Cup win. In 1996 Baddiel and Frank Skinner, his cohost on the sports/ comedy series Fantasy Football League, collabbed with the Lightning Seeds’ hypermelodic Ian Broudie to write and record a song for the English team in the runup to the Euro ’96 tournament. Football’s coming home was the refrain—catchy as hell—and it naturally grabbed the imagination of punters across the country. Two years later, the earworm was still burrowing brainward, and they’d got the band back together to record an updated version for the World Cup (Apple Music, Spotify).

In the summer of ’98, one version or the other of that song was playing everywhere I went. In the pubs, in the street, on the radio, and of course there were the background chants bleeding through the broadcasts of England’s matches: IT’S COMING HOME, IT’S COMING HOME, IT’S COMING—FOOTBALL’S COMING HOME! Three decades later, football is still on walkabout, but there remains the hope that if we keep repeating the promise and we sing it with conviction, we’ll manifest an actual homecoming.

And down through the years, whenever I think about the England men’s national team—whether it’s Beckham, Scholes, and Seaman; or Lampard, Terry, and Rooney; or Pickford, Bellingham, and Kane leading the team—“Three Lions” leaps to the front of my mind. I love it so goddam much. Of course I had to buy the single back in the day. I haven’t held it in my hands for at least 20 years, but I bet it’s right over there in the L (for Lightning Seeds) section of my CD rack. Hold on a minute and I’ll go check. Yep:

There’s a part of me that always feels a bit fraudulent when I’m pulling for England. I’m not obsessively attentive: I don’t follow the qualifying rounds, I don’t watch friendlies, and before the major tournaments I always have to reacquaint myself with the roster. I surface every four years for the World Cup, and only occasionally for the Euro. I’m far from knowledgeable about the beautiful game (though again: I know a catastrophic tactical decision when I see one), and what seems most damning of all, I carry a U.S. passport. For sure the very lyrics of “Three Lions” show me up. I don’t know anything about, for example, that tackle by Moore, and I never saw Linneker score.

But then England crashes out of the knockout rounds, I’m gutted, and I don’t feel the least bit like a wanna-be. If anything, I’m a didn’t-wanna-be. And at its core—or at least so I believe—that’s just what a true fan is.

Seems like he’s always building a boat, I said to my daughter. Is that why his name is Noah?

The Pepper reassured me that no, boat-building only features in two of Noah Kahan’s songs (that we know of). These just happen to be her two favorites, which puts them in heaviest rotat-ion, which in turns causes me to hear considerably more about this particular preoccupation of the singer. I’ll buy this for now, noting that while Bowie and Byrne are two of my faves, neither of them felt compelled even once to sing about killing a giant with a pebble.

It feels like Noah Kahan came out of nowhere. I’m sure that’s not true, and my sense that he did probably just underscores that I’m all but completely walled off from What the Kids Are Digging Lately. Which generally speaking I’m cool with—picture Fortunato in the closing scene of The Cask of Amontillado, crying out in desperation to his troweling captor:

For the love of God, Montresor, hurry the hell up!

I wrote earlier, see “Los Ageless”/ “Young Lover”, about the methods I have applied toward maintaining sovereign control over what I have to listen to when I’m driving my car. The problem these days is that from time to time I’m reduced to being a passenger, and in that capacity I am subjected to all manner of outrages and offenses, with fuck-all I can do about it. And while I sit impotent and helpless in the shotgun seat, I have occasion to ponder the etymology of that term, and increasingly I’m wondering if this corner of the car isn’t in fact named for the weapon its occupant might choose to turn on himself, if he has to hear “Dance Monkey” (Apple Music, Spotify1) one more time.

I’m not always in complete agony. While I’m not softened up enough to sing along with the rest of my family—et tu, Kate?—I can at least tolerate “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” by Shaboozey (Apple Music, Spotify). Even if ultimately not for me, the concept of country/ hip hop fusion is interesting to consider. And if we assume contemporary country music as the starting point—the base spirit in this genre cocktail—well, of course I’m fully behind the mixologist throwing in shots of any- and everything he has handy to dilute it. Maybe especially hip hop, too, because at least from a sociopolitical standpoint, the convergence of rural and urban art forms (and fan bases) feels like a positive development in late-2020s, on-the-downslope America.

But we were talking about Noah Kahan, I think.

A while ago our family of four were in the car, road-tripping—this is less common, with the Bird now in college and the Pepper shortly on her way—and Pepper was deejaying from the backseat. Kate was driving, which meant all my rules and constraints were out the window. Suddenly there was folk music playing. The singer sounded sometimes like Bob Dylan, more often like Paul Simon, most often like a combination of the two. My kids were singing along with him and deeply committed to the work. Like, they were super-serious about it. When the song ended, they had a brief discussion, clarified one or two points on the lyrics, and started it over again. It seemed to me they felt it was really important to get all the words and notes spot-on correct. As if this were a prayer that, if not perfectly articulated, would fall a foot short of God’s ears.

Something different—something new—was happening here. Or at least this was my read of the situation, which likely had to do with the fact that I was observing the phenomenon from outside, like some kind of anthropologist. The other day I was driving up Route 2 working toward a mastery of Gareth Liddiard’s lyrics in “The Future of History” (Apple Music, Spotify): trying, failing, restarting the track. If I’d had passengers with me, it’s possible they’d have found me just as religiously invested in Tropical Fuck Storm.2 Maybe I was, maybe I wasn’t. In any case, I sensed that the song playing over and over again during this road trip—I later learned it was “Stick Season” (Apple Music, Spotify)—really mattered to the Bird and Pepper. It was reaching them in a way that I had not known music to reach them before, and it was very, very cool to see.

Last week Noah Kahan played four sold-out shows at Fenway Park. His arrival took the Bird and the Pepper by surprise. They’re not regularly on the prowl for live music, so their social feeds aren’t cluttered with announcements from local venues and LiveNation, like mine are. Looking back, I wish I’d taken note that Noah Kahan was coming before all the tickets were snapped up and relisted on StubHub at astronomical prices. I might have saved the Pepper some money. But it’s possible, too—likely even—that neither of my kids realized how badly wanted to see Noah Kahan until he played that first gig on Tuesday night and the buzz around these shows started to grow.

Kate suggested to the kids mid-week that they may want to go to the Saturday night concert, and this precipitated a three-day will they?/ won’t they? suspense subplot on Pearl Street that was simultaneously fascinating and exhausting. The Pepper has considerable sums in savings from her summer and Sunday jobs. I don’t know the present state of the Bird’s personal finances, but often as not he’s flat broke. There followed around the house many discussions about the secondary market for concert tickets: what sites provide fraud protection, how long resellers wait before dropping their prices, whether those below-market email offers on NextDoor are legit or will result in a back-alley mugging, and so on. I helped as much as I could.

In the end the Bird opted out, and the Pepper talked a friend into going to that Saturday show, which was the last of the four. This whole venture was on a knife’s edge until late afternoon/ early evening: the friend was in, then out and unreachable by phone, then back in again; there were logistics issues around getting the Pepper down to Fenway; the tickets she’d bought needed to be transferred by hand. At one point the Pepper was despairing that she could pull this all together before the listed start time of 6 PM. She was starting to get emotional. Through considerable trial and error over the years, I have learned that shouting YOU MUST CHILL in these moments is not an effective strategy and in fact tends to makes things worse. So instead I deployed the Socratic method:

Is there an opening act? I asked her. Yes, she said. When does Noah Kahan come on? I asked. 8:00, she said. Do you need to see the opening act? I asked. I have two more hours to figure this out, the Pepper said. And I went back to watching the England game.

She got back from the show around midnight, bubbling over with excitement. Kate was asleep, and I was sitting in this chair writing about Norwegian black metal. The Pepper extemporized easily five thousand words about how fantastic the show was—on the composition of the set list, the ebb and flow of the performance (now solo-acoustic, now back with the full band), Noah’s engagement with the audience, the powerful and pervasive sense of connection and community she felt from beginning to end. And she described how, after the show, Noah Kahan drove laps around Fenway Park giving shout-outs to the departing fans with a respirator over his face. So yeah: this was a watershed moment for her in terms of her relationship with live music, and it warmed me over to hear about it.

Most of the Noah Kahan I have heard before and after the July 11 concert has been in the context of riding shotgun with the Pepper around the Metro West, while she practices her driving. In these moments I’m not in much of a position to sit and absorb the music or the messaging. In fact, B.F. Skinner would probably tell me that Noah Kahan has next to no hope of ever claiming me as a fan, given the association that has accrued over time between his music and that particular unease a parent feels while teaching his kid to drive: i.e., being constantly at the edge of catastrophe with zero license to express how he actually feels about it.

Soooooo …. I think you’ve positioned the entirety of the car on the wrong side of the double yellow line. You may want to adjust for that before the oncoming traffic arrives. Right now would be terrific.

Yes: just like that. Well done, you!

I should say that overall she’s not that bad at this, and of course always getting better. That doesn’t mean certain songs by Noah Kahan, Hozier, and Zach Bryan won’t forever transport me to an instant where the light just turned red, my daughter is plunging Kate’s car into a crosswalk packed with pedestrians, and I’m wondering if I should say something about that or let her figure it out herself.

On Saturday I took the kids twenty minutes down the road to lunch. I was already at work on this post, so as we were snapping seatbelts on I asked them what about Noah Kahan especially appeals to them. They’re just good songs, the Bird said. The lyrics are interesting; they’re poetic. The Pepper agreed. Then they got to talking about how they identify with him, because he’s from New England. Born in rural Vermont, I said. But he lived here, one of them said. He sings songs about Watertown—the very town we were cutting across, in that moment, on our way to Brookline—and Storrow Drive and Logan Airport.

He seems to sing a lot about leaving home, I said. Does that resonate with you in particular, now that you’re going to college? The Bird said no. His college dorm is a ten-minute drive from our house. It just makes me proud of where I come from. The Pepper said Noah Kahan reminds her of her friends—friends she hasn’t left behind and won’t for another month, but that she thinks a lot about losing. These are the songs we played in the car while we were riding to Walden, or across Concord, or wherever. All of us piled in and one in the trunk. And I came to realize that at age eighteen she has reached the point where she is capable of nostalgia. A kind of anticipatory nostalgia, for sure, given that she still has opportunities to go on these Kahan-saturated car rides with her crew. Right now, while I’m writing this paragraph, she’s on a boat with several of them in Boston Harbor. I don’t expect Noah built it, but I wouldn’t be surprised, either, if he’s right there with them, strumming and singing through the speaker of somebody’s iPhone.

This was the sumtotal of insight I was able to extract from them on the drive to Zaftigs deli. Conversations have a habit of meandering, after all. And my line of questioning was continually interrupted by their good-natured bickering over which of Noah’s songs to play during the drive. Everybody knows that one, the Bird groused. Play one that’s more obscure. Yet the Pepper remained in charge and generally stuck with the hits. Soon enough the Bird had withdrawn his objections and was singing along. The Pepper had chosen Zaftigs, too. This is a common and lovable dynamic between the two of them. The Bird delegates decisions to his sister, then grumbles about her choice before sinking his teeth cheerfully into a bagel stacked with smoked salmon. They’re adorable, both of them: I know this because I’m so deeply involved in the adoring.

Usually I start a post knowing well in advance what the song will be. Not true with this one. “Stick Season” seemed too easy, and I didn’t know much else about the Kahan catalog. But then I had a stroke of luck. Before she left this afternoon for that boat ride, the Pepper spent some time seated at the piano, playing chords and singing songs. Lately she does this maybe two or three times a week. Meat and potatoes here are “Dreams” (Apple Music, Spotify) by the Cranberries and “Free Fallin’” (Apple Music, Spotify). I realize now that Tom Petty is likely as much of a precursor to Noah Kahan as Dylan or Simon, but with references to Ventura Boulevard instead of Storrow Drive. The Pepper will do some Florence + the Machine, too, and if I’m lucky “Here’s Where the Story Ends” (Apple Music, Spotify) by the Sundays, which sends me scampering off to record discreet video of her performance from the next room.

Of course, Noah Kahan gets his due in these sessions. When she got started today, Kate and I were two rooms away watching the World Cup Final kick off. In a case like this we’ll happily tolerate the Pepper’s interference with our TV time. (We feel a bit differently about the Alexa-assisted karaoke show tunes she likes to ham up in the kitchen.) After the Cranberries came Noah’s “Northern Attitude” (Apple Music, Spotify). Kate looked at me and suggested I write about this, too. And I decided on the spot that this would be my song. Not for nothing—as we say in these parts—but it’s one of the two with boat-building in it.

I played “Northern Attitude” again just now over Spotify. I’ve heard it a bunch in the past few weeks, but never in this setting: i.e., alone at my desk in a pensive moment, with the needle on my turntable bumping rhythmically over the runoff stripe on my played-through Eno record. Right here, right now, Noah Kahan just became considerably less distant from me. I didn’t feel like a third party to the transaction anymore. Much as I believe I’m impervious to these confessional, weighty discussion in the wee hours poetics—or put differently, as much as I had my guard up against it, because I was either indulging my reputation around here as a music snob or, to be more generous to myself, leaving this man and his music for Bird and Pepper to keep for and between themselves—“Northern Attitude” kinda snuck up on me. When that chord slammed at 0:49 and the music began to swell, I was … affected.

In light of this experience, I’m inclined to think that maybe I’m not condemned to hear Noah Kahan and recall the hair-raising hours I spent this summer with a student driver. I imagine I’ll remember instead precious hours I spent with my daughter before she left for school. And I’ll think about how I would put life, limb, and front fender on the line all over again for more of that time.

I think we all have (at least) a little something in us that is drawn to the Darkness. A certain fascination with the macabre. For the vast majority of us in civilized society, it’s a bystander’s fascination, a willingness—an enthusiasm, even—to consider humankind’s capacity to engage in the worst forms of cruelty and depravity, if never to engage in it ourselves. And of course there are the others, the very small minority, who actually roll up their sleeves and get after it. We don’t love the serial killers, the necrophiliacs, the black market organ traffickers. But I’d venture to say the social order requires a certain critical mass of them to be operating in the margins of society, so the rest of us can access the resulting lurid stories and images, in so doing quench our innate thirst for blood, and securely return to peaceable day-to-day living.

Did I just argue that society benefits from serial killers, necrophiliacs, and organ traffickers? That just as we want and need Colonel Jessup on that wall to defend the Free World, we also want and need one or more Ted Bundys in the wind, or at least relating their histories in jail, to rescue us from our worst animal instincts? Maybe don’t put those exact words in my mouth. I think it’s more accurate to say that humanity being what it is, there will always be Bundys, and Dahlmers, too. Taking this as a given, we would do well to make their crimes and pathologies broadly known to the community, rather than conceal them from the public record—first and foremost so that we can prevent like tragedies in the future.

But it’s important, too, for us all to understand what we do and don’t have in common with the psychopaths among us, the absolute monsters with whom we share 99.9% of our DNA yet have predilections and practices that are unimaginable for all of us who have the capacity for empathy and live on the right side of the law. One way to do achieve that understanding is to peer voyeuristically over the red line, to feel that actually-electric current surge up your spine when you acquaint yourself with the worst kind of manborne atrocity. Often enough we do this in the safety of our own homes: fast-forwarding to the part where Hannibal Lecter springs into action on his prison guards, for example, or lapping up all the grisly deets in Elizabeth Báthory’s Wikipedia entry.1 These experiences have common essential characteristics:

• First, we take a perverse pleasure in the gruesome details.

• Second, we feel emotionally conflicted: attracted and repelled, gratified and guilty.

• Third, by indulging the Darkness, we get the better of it. We beat it back down inside us and step back into the light.

This is the work horror movies do. And true crime podcasts, Jack the Ripper tours, and documentary productions about Vlad the Impaler. We’ve built a scaffolding of social norms around these experiences, to ensure both that we have continued access to them and that we take care not to seem to enjoy them too much. Folklore of all kinds—from the original sin doctrine to Lady MacBeth, Jekyll/ Hyde, and Dorian Grey to Lord of the Flies and Breaking Bad—teaches that we card-carrying members of Homo supposedly sapiens are all of us perennially on a knife’s edge, and all it takes to turn any one of us into a murderous predator is a saturation of bad influences. We should take care, then, not to get too deep into these blood-and-guts stories—or at least come up for air and a reality check now and again.

All this is self-exculpatory prelude to what I want to talk about today, which is my on-again/ off-again fascination with Norwegian black metal.

I don’t recall under what specific circumstances I first heard about the Oslo-based rock band called Mayhem. I only remember that point in medias res where I found myself at my desk at work, breathlessly reading the Mayhem Wikipedia page. And jumping off from there into the many and various online sources documenting the unqualifiedly insane world of Norwegian black metal.

During the course of this essential research, it occurred to me that passers-by had a sightline on my computer display, so I got up and closed the door. This was a smart move, because soon enough my Google searches turned up the photograph Mayhem’s guitarist, Euronymous, took of his lead vocalist’s exploded head shortly after Dead—this was the singer’s name, Dead—died by suicide in the band’s woodland rehearsal space outside Oslo. This was in 1991, i.e., before cell phones, so upon finding his work colleague (and possibly his friend) Dead dead, Euronymous’s first instinct was to hitchhike into town to buy a disposable camera, then ride back to the scene to capture this ghastly tableau for posterity. The resulting photo went into wide circulation after a fan got hold of it and used it as cover art for a bootleg Mayhem live show.

There’s more to this story than I need, or am willing, to recount here. The point is, this was a workday just like any other for me, except that suddenly and unaccountably I’d gone down a Norwegian black metal hellhole and spent an hour or more gleefully freaking myself out. When I regathered my faculties, I deleted my browser history—again: this was my work computer—and took the elevator down to ground level for lunch. Needless to say, I didn’t eat very much.

The death of Dead wasn’t the end of the Mayhem story. Not by a long shot. A year later a miscreant named Varg Vikernes turned up in Oslo and joined Mayhem as its bassist. By this time the black metal musicians in Oslo were pushing one another to ever greater extremes—and not just in their objectionable lyrical themes, aggro backing music, creepy costuming (corpse paint was a thing), wild stage names (e.g., Hellhammer, Necrobutcher), and theatrical performance gestures (often involving animal parts). They seemed also to be bidding to out-criminal one another.

Now a race to the extreme bottom like this one is the natural cross-product of insularity and competition. We see it more and more these days in our political process. State legislatures gerrymander congressional districts largely exclusive to one party, and in the ensuing primary election each of that party’s candidates strives to prove that they’re the bigger partisan whack-job. For its part, Norway’s black metal scene was masterfully configured to drive its members to the worst extremes of antisocial behavior. For starters, this was a matter of national pride: the Norwegians were honor-bound to prove they were harder-core than the death metal clowns to their immediate south in Sweden.

Second, the black metal subculture was founded on principles of militant rejectionism and the desire to shock. We tend to associate these aspects with punk rock rather than metal. Consider the Sex Pistols’ infamous interview with Bill Grundy (see “Helter Skelter”), their flirtation with the swastika, and so on. By contrast, metal fans are often content to cast themselves as outsiders disdainful of the mainstream but never directly at war with it. And at least in America, metal and punk keep to their respective silos: no one is asking for them to cross-breed, so they don’t. Whereas the black metal horde in Oslo was most definitely punk-informed, which opened the door to a hyper-combustible chimeric combination of punk’s lash-out principles with gruesome Satanic metal themes.

Finally, the group was by design exclusive and hierarchical. The epicenter of Norwegian black metal was Euronymous’s Helvete (translates to Hell, of course) record shop. Euronymous promoted an “Inner Circle” within the scene, to be populated with only its most committed and extreme adherents. Aaaaaaand Euronymous was in the practice of making necklaces with—so he claimed—recovered shards of Dead’s skull, which he then awarded them to fellow musicians based on his sense of their value as black metalers. Sort of a grisly combination of merit badge, holy relic, and Mardi Gras beads. The question isn’t what would you do for a Dead’s Head necklace?—it’s what WOULDN’T you do?

Exclusivity fans the flames of competition, and we see that dynamic at work here, as members of Oslo’s black metal gang fanned out across Norway setting fire to churches. Between 1992 and 1996 more than twenty churches went up in smoke, amid more than fifty arson attempts. There were assaults, too, and at least one random killing, after a luckless middle-aged man propositioned Emperor’s drummer Faust in Lillehammer. Faust later coldly clarified that his deadly stabbing attack in a public park wasn’t a hate crime per se: I was out there, just waiting to make an assault, he said. It was supposed to happen, and if it was this guy or someone else, it wouldn’t change the outcome much.

Hierarchy leads to infighting, and we had that, too, here, in spades. Seems like folks were wondering why Euronymous was—or appeared to be—in charge. You see a bit of this in the lookback quotes from musicians formerly on the scene, questioning to what extent this dude was a poser. You see a lot more of it in the incident of August 10, 1993, when the aforementioned Mayhem bassist Varg Vikernes drove to Euronymous’s apartment from Bergen, stabbed him 23 times, and left him for dead. Vikernes claims self-defense. Even if we accept that to be true (23 stabs in self-defense?), the homicide was evidence enough of some real conflict within the NBM scene.

When I gave earlier examples of the ways in which we use culture and content as a safety-valve for gratifying our baser impulses—the Ripper tours, etc.—I left out metal. I was saving it for this paragraph. Metal is a five-decade (and counting) worldwide cross-generational cultural phenomenon that has generated easily tens of billions of dollars of wealth marketing macabre fantasies to a species that can’t quit the Darkness. As an industry, metal offers a range of subgenres and intensity levels to meet the specific needs of the individual audience member.

Like the Ripper tours, metal is storytelling, except with musicians standing in as the fabulists, in place of striving English actors. Metal acts shock and spook and thrill us with their fantastic rocked-up tales of blood and guts and Darkness. What the musicians don’t do is go out and engage in the dark deeds they’re describing. They may perform some kayfabe occult rituals on-stage, sure, but nobody actually dies on the slab. We recall Ozzie eating the bat because it was an exceptional case, and he was eager to tell us afterward that he thought the bat was fake when he took the bite. The Norwegian black metal bands of the 1990s were distinctive and troubling because they crossed over from storytelling into action. The musicians occupied dual roles as bards and agents of the Darkness. And for sure the conflict of interest that inheres in telling stories about yourself drove them to ever greater extremes, in both roles: the need for content led to ever more dangerous and depraved stunts, which they would embellish even more in the telling. Put plainly: shit got real in Norway.

How did we end up here? Was this a case of scattered psychopaths finding a common interest and then a common cause? If so, there sure was a concentration of psychopaths in Oslo in the 1990s. These days you need the Internet’s worldwide reach to tap into your niche category of antisocial belonging. Could instead these have been ordinary kids, with the same latent capacity for extreme violence we all have in us through natual selection (hence our interest in these matters), who were led down a dark road by bad cultural influences? And what role was played here by unique social conditions in Norway, a stiff and morally traditional Christian society that just happened to have really permissive criminal laws? Faust was sentenced to just 14 years’ imprisonment and served only 9; for his murder and multiple arsons, Vikernes went down for only 16.

For that matter, could the actual Devil have had a hand in this?

The whys and hows of Norwegian black metal’s formation and metastasis certainly deserve consideration, given the lives lost and lasting damage done. But for now let’s leave these questions to the sociologists, so that (1) they can make absolutely sure youth culture never runs quite so amok again, while (2) the rest of us who are knee-deep in the what can wade out into even deeper and murkier waters. Michael Moynihan and Didrik Soderlind’s Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground (Amazon) is probably the definitive work on the subject, impressively researched with supporting oral history-type testimonials from the participants. The film adaptation could have been made in a pure documentary style, but alas, it was a docudrama, and a Culkin brother played Euronymous. I saw it in the theaters. It was fine—not great.

At this point you’re likely thinking, What about the music? Some time ago my good friend Glenn and I were driving back from a day trip to New York. We got to talking about the Norwegian black metal scene and how crazy it was. It occurred to one of us, almost as an afterthought, that we should take a minute to hear what NBM actually sounded like. Glenn was driving, so I cued up the music. I settled on Mayhem’s De Mysteriis Dom Sathanis LP (Apple Music, Spotify), the recording of which was most closely contemporaneous with Dead’s death and Euronymous’s killing. You’ll note the inverted crosses and batwings that bookend the band’s logo: scary-scary! We didn’t need more than a minute to decide this record was utterly unlistenable. Glenn has more of a tolerance for metal than I do, and even he called the question in a hurry.

Burzum is a different story altogether. This was and continues to be Vikernes’s solo project. He composed, arranged, and recorded four Burzum records through the early ’90s, until his extracurriculars got the better of him and landed himself in prison. Burzum is of course a Lord of the Rings reference. Rock dorks down through the years have obsessed over Tolkien, and NMB was not immune. In addition to Burzum, the scene included bands named Isengard and Gorgoroth. For that matter, around the time he turned criminal Vikernes was asking folks to call him Count Grishnackh. The Tolkien books notably do not assign the honorific of Count to the orc-captain Grishnákh. Varg gave himself that boost in status.

After I ran screaming from the Mayhem record—which I expect was exactly how the band would want a square like me to receive it—I looked into Burzum. The record I tried was 1995’s Filosofem. This was something different altogether: an experimental DIY production, played at a reasonable mid-tempo speed, rooted in principles of droning and repetition. Sort of like a metal Spacemen 3. What is more, there are electronics on this record, courtesy of a vintage analog synth Vikernes got hold of in the studio. And on the subject of available resources, Burzum recorded this record in the prestigious Bergen concert hall named for composer Edvard Grieg. Varg’s vocals are affected and distracting, but no more so than, say, Ian Curtis’s or Amy Winehouse’s. I can muddle through with them, given how interesting the music is.

Although this is probably a post best suited for Halloween week, I’m publishing it now because on July 4 I found and bought a copy of Filosofem on vinyl at Aux 33 Tours record store in Montreal. I’d been looking for it for a while. To be honest, I’m a little conflicted about owning this record. Like, I might have brought an evil talisman into my home … and I’m enough of a child of the 1980s that I haven’t fully banished the notion—pushed by unsophisticated and ridiculous people, I recognize (see “Let Beauty Loose”)—that rock ‘n’ roll can be actually dangerous. I can’t rule out that a saturation of listens to Filosofem will turn me to burning churches. Also, Vikernes remains, well, problematic. In prison he took up with Nazis, he has since developed and adopted a stupid ideology of pagan Scando-Aryan supremacy, and in 2014 he was charged and convicted in France of inciting racial hatred.

A while ago I staked out the position that an awareness of an artist’s background, history, and influences can enrich your experience of their music. This is the Krautrock journey I’ve been taking with Carla.2 Having said that, can I have it both ways? I.e., can I like some music because of who made it and other music in spite of them? The answer to that question has to be yes. Music is important enough to me that, if it’s good, I’m disinclined to let the objectionable politics or overall dirtbaggery of its maker put me off listening to it. Varg Vikernes has done a great many things that are contrary to law and my values. Making music isn’t one of those things.

But of course I’m protesting too much. My relationship to Burzum will always be complicated and discomfiting. I found my way here because—wow—this Norwegian black metal business is fascinating. It pokes and prods at my Darkness and scratches a particular, shameful itch. It’s not especially important to me that around the time Vikernes recorded Filosofem he was plotting arson and possibly murder. Maybe the music carries the imprint of a madman: I don’t think anyone can dispute that the sense of desperation that pervades Joy Division’s Closer flowed directly from Ian’s state of mind. But I don’t listen to a Burzum track like the aptly-named “Dunkelheit” (Apple Music, Spotify) to thrill over the fact that a killer wrote it, or that he was in thrall to the Darkness when he did. I listen to it because it’s good. And maybe I listen less than I otherwise might, out of a concern that whenever I drop the needle I give this man power—power I certainly don’t have, with the sub-100 read count I get for most of these posts.

At this point I’m talking in circles. Here’s the Take Take post on Norwegian black metal that nobody asked for or expected. The Darkness is in you. I suggest you give it ten minutes’ run every six weeks, then tamp it down, hug your loved ones, and go listen to the Sundays. (See “Can’t Be Sure.”)

Some time ago I was asked, as part of my role as an in-house attorney, to confirm that two persons under the scrutiny of the feds were in fact affiliated with my employer, as they had been representing in certain online sales pitches. I responded that I could not so confirm, and shortly thereafter I was served with a trial subpoena conjuring me to Cincinnati to testify in a federal criminal case. Folks like me who were born and raised in Ohio have rather strong feelings about this part of Kentucky and would prefer to steer well clear of it. It’s been said Cleveland DJs broke David Bowie in America; whether that’s true or not, we North Coasters are certainly aligned with him on the subject of the “Queen City”:

I was understandably distressed about the subpoena. To date I’d had few opportunities for business travel. There had been some talk of me going to Tanzania—this had enough legs that I’d gone to get a battery of vaccinations—but ultimately this had fallen through, leaving me embittered and my right arm riddled with holes. Zanzibar, Olduvai Gorge, the Ngorogoro Crater: I was super-jazzed for Tanzania. Cincinnati was a poor substitute.

This sucks, I told a colleague, whom for these purposes we’ll call Hannah. I had just got off the phone with the DOJ attorneys. On an earlier call they had explained to me that the defendants were likely to stipulate—which is law-talk for concede the point—that they in fact had no relationship or affiliation with my employer. They had no basis to say that they did, and it would be a waste of everyone’s time and the government’s money to have me fly out to testify to this fact at the trial. Now the prosecutors were telling me that no, the defendants had refused to stipulate, and my presence was therefore required in Cincy later that week.

It’s some real bullshit, I told Hannah. I could have been on safari, and what do I get instead—King’s Island?

Hannah shrugged. I agree it sucks, she said. But there’s nothing you can do about it. And right then I had a brainwave:

Hold on: what if I took the stand and testified in an exaggerated Scottish accent? Like, as a form of protest?

She laughed.

No, really. I swear an oath to tell the truth, the whole truth, and so on. Nothing in that oath says I can’t gussy up the truth in an outrageous Celtic brogue.

Let’s hear it, she said.

I gave her my best impromptu Scotsman’s testimony against the defendants.

I think the judge would find you in contempt of court, Hannah concluded.

Well, that’s discriminatory against the Scots, I said.

Sending you down for faking a Scottish accent?

They don’t know I’m not Scottish.

The FBI doesn’t know you’re not Scottish?

They don’t know I’m not American raised with a Scottish accent. Hannah rolled her eyes. This was a weak argument. My enthusiasm for this project had peaked with the mock testimony, and now I was on the downslope. Hannah was probably right: I’d get my wee arse handed to me by the judge.

Fun idea, though, she said.

Two days later I was at the courthouse in Cincinnati, and I was waiting out in the hall to be called to the stand. By this time I was, I dunno, 95% committed to playing it straight, with the remaining 5% perched on my left shoulder egging me on to do the Scotsman bit. It would be a masterstroke, the Five Percent said. A story you could tell for the rest of your life. Up rose the Other Ninety-Five to argue their side of the case, which boiled down to you’ll never actually do this, because you’re a sensible person. In due time the courtroom door opened. One of the prosecutors walked through it and motioned to me. I walked up to him. They just stipulated, he said.

Now? I asked. You’re kidding.

The prosecutor shrugged. You can go home.

The good news is, because I never had to take the stand, no one can say I chickened out.

This week and last, we’ve had the Scots—real Scots—in Boston. The Scottish National Team contested its first two World Cup matches in Foxborough, where the Patriots play. Scotland supporters have made a vacation and a meal of it. Fanning out across New England, turning up in force on Harbor Cruises and at Fenway, drinking the local pubs almost dry (they’re not interested in Bud Light). Joyful and ebullient, the Tartan Army sing, dance, and display a national pride that couldn’t fail to endear them to those of us with only aspirational brogues. The result has been nothing short of a love affair between the Scots and their reserved Bostonian hosts. Everyone in town is asking: Can we bring them back next summer? Or better yet, can we keep them here?

This is the essence of cultural exchange: a gracious and convivial by-invitation invasion, where proud hosts and guests meet, treat with, and learn to appreciate one another. And not in spite of their diferences, but because of them. It’s everything you would hope for from an event like the World Cup. The matches themselves are gravity wells, drawing in fan contingents from the world over. When you consider that those fans will incidentally have millions of in-person encounters with supporters from elsewhere, unmediated and unspoiled by the political class, the on-field results start to feel secondary. In fact, you’d be almost inclined to forget that FIFA’s inaugural Peace Price™ winner spent the tournament’s first weekend conducting his own petty autoerotic event, with bare-knuckled shirtless men beating one another senseless on government property. Except you don’t forget, because the contrast is so damned stark and infuriating.

My first exposure to the Tartan Army came nearly thirty years ago, in the summer of 1998 when I was traveling in England, Scotland, and Ireland. The ’98 World Cup Finals were held in Brazil, and the host team opened the tournament against Scotland. This was the last time the Scots made the tournament. I watched Scotland-Brazil a pub in London. The Scots held their own, and the game was tied until the 74th minute, when a corner kick doinked off a Scottish defender’s head into the back of the net. To that point the England fans in the taproom may or may not have been supporting their fellow Britons—they seemed ambivalent, or at least evenly divided on the question—but the own goal awakened a centuries-old disdain in the gathered crowd. Hoots of derision followed. Bloody typical, that, the guy next to me crowed.

A week later I was riding a series of trains south from the adorably-named village of Scrabster, where I’d boated in from the Orkney Islands, to Cairnryan, where I would take my next boat across the Irish Sea to Belfast (see “Columbia”). It was Match Day for Scotland, and supporters were jumping on and off the trains, catching rides into this or that town center to pre-game. And of course they were pre-pre-gaming on the train. A popular bit of gear in those days was the tam or horned helmet with a mane of wiry red hair glued into it. Seemed like everyone but me on the train was wearing one of these. Some of the supporters carried on drums, but it was enough, too, just to stomp on the floor of the train while they sang, and drank, and drank, and sang.

This was all sorts of fun, if not a bit alienating at the same time. I wanted to join in, but I didn’t know any of the chants, and I wasn’t having any luck deciphering them on the fly. The ’98 edition of the Scottish team crashed out at the group stage. I carried on with England into the Group of 16, where Beckham’s passing moment of madness won him a red card and the Argentines advanced on penalties. Bloody typical, that, too, right?

Depending on how this year’s finals go for the English, they may get a post here as well. But it’s Scotland’s week here at Take Take the Noise, and this presents conceivably all kinds of opportunities. I’ve already hit the Jesus & Mary Chain (see “Here Comes Alice”), Franz Ferdinand (see “Always Ascending”), the Trashcan Sinatras (see “People”), and One Dove (see “There Goes the Cure”). This is not to say that at some point I won’t stop in again on any of these four: it just won’t be today. Others can’t stand them (ha!), but I sure do love me some Rezillos, and I have a particular soft spot for their hyperspeed update of “Glad All Over” (Apple Music, Spotify) by the Dave Clark Five. Dig Fay Fife’s gloriously jagged accent on her way into the chorus: AND AH’M FAYLIN’ … both glad all over I bought their debut LP on CD years ago and a wee bit sheepish for passing on the vinyl copies that keep turning up at the shop down the road.

And there’s the understated pitch-perfection of acts like Belle & Sebastian and Teenage Fanclub and the Pastels—not to mention Cocteau Twins, whom I’ve name-dropped a bunch here lately. They’re not telling, but surely parts of my unconscious mind are working on a dossier to support a writeup of “Heaven or Las Vegas” (Apple Music, Spotify), or “Ivo” (Apple Music, Spotify) sometime in the coming weeks. Nor do I mean to exclude Simple Minds or Texas, any of the Postcard acts, or for that matter the goddam Bay City Rollers. As I cycle through all these names and more, I have cause to worry that by dedicating this week’s post to Scotland, I’ve set myself the impossible task of choosing one artist—hell, a single song—to stand in and represent the entirety of a proud, culturally diverse, and downright remarkable people, whose rich history goes back centuries, if not actually millennia.

The Boston Red Sox arguably did exactly this two Saturdays ago, when they rolled out the Proclaimers’ “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” (Apple Music, Spotify) over the stadium PA to thousands of Scots visitors. Being who I am, I looked past the abundant evidence that the Tartan Army’s on-site cohort loved every bit of this—

—and worried that we’d gone and pigeonholed the Scots with this song, which for all I know could be for them what “Cotton Eye Joe” (Apple Music, Spotify) is to the US of A.

Now don’t get me wrong: I love “500 Miles” and in fact could haver to you about it at length. The short version is I heard it for the first time at the movies with Kate in 1993, when it featured in Benny & Joon. Kate went out directly and bought the LP, Sunshine on Leith, which is a super-strong record top to bottom, and one I’ll always associate with our college years together. “500 Miles” is in fact one of a handful of our songs—and enough so that when our wedding DJ allowed us ten songs (just ten?) we could request in advance at the reception, the Proclaimers were top of the list.

If the World Cup hadn’t brought the Scots to town, I would likely still have the Proclaimers on my mind this weekend. I’m writing today from Hilton Head Island, where we’ve vacationed dozens of times over the years. It’s a special place for Kate, who spent so many late summers here at her family’s (alas, now sold) vacation home steps away from the beach. She does the driving around here—she knows all the ins and outs—and whenever she turns onto that particular cut-through road in Sea Pines that she favors, I start singing the Proclaimers. Place names have a habit of setting off songs in my head,1 so that the sign for Tupelo Road prompts me to sing, in my courtroom brogue: Sean, ah’d say the bayst one cayme from Tupelo, Messuhsseppy …

But “Sean” (Apple Music, Spotify) isn’t this week’s pick any more than “500 Miles.” Today I’m going with a song from the same record, “Cap in Hand” (Apple Music, Spotify), which I won’t say epitomizes my sense of the Scottish people—I’ve already aired my concerns about being reductive—so much as it touches upon certain aspects of the national character (if that’s not even too presumptuous a term to use here) that appeal specifically to me.

“Cap in Hand” is a protest song and an appeal to Scottish nationalism. But it’s not feral, savage, or embittered. It’s airy, lovely, and pervaded with melancholic humor. Consider this bit from the first verse: I can tell the difference between margarine and butter. I can say Saskatchewan without starting to stutter. But I can’t understand why we let someone else rule our land. Not so much expressed but embedded here is (1) a wounded but irrepressible pride, of the kind you hear when the Tartan Army chant, WE SING WHEN WE’RE LOSING, WE DRINK WHEN WE’RE OUT, AND WE TRAVEL WHEN WE HAVE NO REASON.

By the same token, the song communicates (2) a touching Romantic mix of defiance and resignation: We fight … when they ask us. We boast, then we cower. We beg for a piece of what’s already ours. Last year, after taking in the Pet Shop Boys and Oasis shows in Cardiff and London, the Bird and I rounded out our tour of Great Britain with a few days in Edinburgh. We spent one of our Scotland days riding a tour bus out into the countryside, and in between look-ins on the Highlands and Loch Ness, I re-read Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped in the coach. I’d first read the book as a kid, and I remembered all the shipboard plot points: the murder of the cabin boy, the siege of the roundhouse, and so on. What I didn’t remember was the (rather substantial) part about the Jacobite Rebellion and its aftermath.

Taking in the hopeless heroics of Stevenson’s Alan Breck Stewart, while our coach trundled through the stark northern landscapes where many of them might well have occurred—well, it had a certain effect on me. Standing behind Kidnapped, of course, were the stories of William Wallace, Robert the Bruce, and Rob Roy MacGregor, some of which the tour guide was covering over the PA. All this stirred in me powerful mixed emotions of empathy and admiration for the Scots. Now I’m sure many—all?—of us here are familiar with Ewan McGregor-as-Mark Renton’s celebrated rant, in Trainspotting, about how it’s shite to be Scottish, to be born into a people who can’t even find a decent culture to be colonized by.

On that particular day Rent Boy wins the argument, hands down. He is thundering, passionate, lyrical, and amusing: all traits we associate with certainly the Tartan Army, and Scottishness more generally. By his very example, Renton arguably makes his own case for Scottish pride. But with the benefit of more and better context, there are strong arguments to be made for Tommy’s side of the question, too; he’d just walked into an ambush, and he was not able too gobsmacked in the moment to make the case. It’s a beautiful—stunning—homeland, weathered and harsh and hardening in a way that bespeaks the virtue and perseverance of the people who occupy it. That they do so with such equanimity and good humor (although admittedly with the considerable assistance of whiskey and beer) is yet one more point to argue in the Scots’ favor.

The political situation will always be the political situation. But the world—and especially New Englanders, themselves the red-headed stepsiblings of wankers in Manhattan—loves an underdog. All the better when that underdog comports itself with grace, humor, and self-awareness. Cheers to you, Scotland, and here’s hoping we’ll see you again next summer. If you don’t come to us, maybe we’ll come to you.

Aw, man—you most definitely didn’t see this one coming. But here we are. This is another post prompted by my personal radio station on Apple Music. The song came on in the car, while I was driving Lila to a friend’s house. Wednesday night is an especially opportune time for a song to make a play to join the Take Take Playlist. I labor over the weekend to bang something into shape to post on Monday, I give myself a break on Tuesday, and it’s usually around 4 PM Wednesday that the Voice in My Head—it’s just one, settle down—surfaces to ask:

What’s your plan for next week? Do you even have a song?

This Humpday impulse to grab and lock in the first Substackable song that comes along—well, you can imagine it might subject me to all manner of potentially catastrophic missteps. It’s a good thing I have longstanding protective measures stitched into my day-to-day living. I won’t encumber you now with the particulars; if you’re interested, check out my “Feels So Good” post. For today’s purposes it’s enough to say that a guy like me only gets so many twirls around the sun, so at any given time I strive for maximum control over the music I’m hearing. There’s no quartet of sirens, blonde or not, gonna sucker me out into deep water: I know what’s going on out in the world, musically, and I noise-cancel accordingly.

Of course, my prophylactics aren’t failure-proof. An iPod, a phone, these days even headphones can run low on battery. Occasionally I enter a public setting, let’s say a ballpark, in the company of others, and I’m left entirely at the mercy of the venue’s organist or DJ. Hell, I may even find myself in a public house, with my guard down, and something like “Closing Time” (links withheld) by Semisonic springs from the jukebox without warning. That’s the kind of world we live in. What I’m not gonna do is sit down at this desk and bang out 1500+ words about what that godforsaken composition has done to me down through the years. Here at Take Take, we aim to keep things positive.

At any rate, it was Wednesday, after close of business, I was vulnerable to suggestion, and here came my Apple Music radio station with a good one in the First Edition’s “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)” (Apple Music, Spotify). Now definitionally—or at least close enough—the Algorithm is going to give me a song I like, and Wednesday’s events were no exception. I love this song to death. Yet on the road home from dropping Lila, with this song on repeat, I started really listening to it. Like, prepping-a-Substack-post listening. Soon enough, I was grappling with The $3201 Question:

Is this a guilty pleasure song, or is it actually goddam terrific on the merits?

Let’s start with the title. That’s a long-ass parenthetical. They could have gone with “Just Dropped In”: short, subtle, and sufficient. We all know what likely happened here. You had one contingent, including at least some of the band members, who thought “Just Dropped In” should have been the title. Let the listeners do a modest amount of sleuthing and figure out for themselves, hey, yeah—that’s the song where the guy sings about ‘the condition his condition was in.’ This was the aloof, playing-it-cool answer. Then you had another contingent, which surely included muckety-mucks at Warner Brothers, who were thinking we cannot leave this matter to chance. That goofy-fun lyrical hook absolutely must be stamped on every copy of this record.

The side favoring the junked-up title of course prevailed, with the losing side awarded a set of parentheses as a gesture of compromise. The music business is a business, after all, and subtlety is for suckers and artists. At least in part on the strength of its eleven-word title, the single went to #5 on the charts. By contrast, has anyone heard the earlier recordings by Teddy Hill and the Southern Soul (Apple Music, Spotify) and Jerry Lee Lewis (Apple Music, Spotify)? No, you have not, because they didn’t have the parenthetical.2

The title would seem to be a point in favor of a guilty pleasure designation, but you can’t make that point without at the same time acknowledging that <to see what condition my condition was in> is a fantastic hook, catchy as hell, and if you don’t believe me now, you will at some point over the next six days, after you wake up with this song in your head yet again. You’re welcome, and I’m sorry. And on that score, can we move this into the goddam terrific song category?

Not so fast. On this same to-hell-with-subtlety point, consider how loaded this recording is with canned psychedelic tropes. Start with the lyrics: up is down, in is out, reality is inverted, and so on. It reads like songwriter Mickey Newbury sat down to write a song about LSD, played all the existing songs about LSD, and took the average of what he heard. Also, he must have decided that from a signposting standpoint, it wouldn’t hurt to name-check the Byrds’ seminal psych track “Eight Miles High” (Apple Music, Spotify) multiple times. You don’t get this much eight-miling in an Eminem biography.

Add to this the guitar-played-backward bit that opens the song, the tremelo effects on the backing vocals and Glen Campbell’s (!) guitar solo, and the minor-key organ jam behind the third verse. You get the sense the First Edition had a list of Psychedelic Song Elements and were looking to check every last box. Now to be clear, I’m not arguing—as I did elsewhere, kindasorta (see “Im Süden”/ “Hard Coming Love”)—that these psychedelia tropes are tiresome. At least not as applied here: The First Edition (self-titled) came out in November of ’67 with this as its Side A, Track 3. “White Rabbit” (Apple Music, Spotify) had hit the shelves only nine months prior, and no one would accuse Jefferson Airplane of beating a dead horse. I.e., it’s not that this edition of A Song About Tripping wasn’t first. They just seem to be laying it on a bit thick—like the First Edition were determined to enter the Psych Rock Chili Cook-Off and weren’t going to leave any single ingredient out of the pot.

For all that, ask me what they should have left out, and my answer is nothing. Nothing! All of it works, and if this track and not “Eight Miles High” had been released a year earlier, I’d be asking none of these questions.

I’ve come this far and I haven’t mentioned the fact that Kenny Rogers is on lead vocals here. Kenny freaking Rogers. You want proof? Here he is, languidly reclining on a magic carpet (weird), performing—or at least lip-syncing—the hit single on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour:

What are we to make of this? I earlier noted that Glen Campbell supplied the solo on the studio recording. I think we now need to grapple with the fact that this isn’t a rock song played by rock musicians. This is a rock song played by country singers—by the Gambler (Apple Music, Spotify) and the Rhinestone Cowboy (Apple Music, Spotify), in fact. And if your reaction to this is that neither of them were country singers at the time, it’s still fair to say that they had it in them, and indeed Kenny and Glen went on to significant careers in that format. Does this exacerbate my earlier stated concerns about the authenticity of this song? In his memoir, Kenny says he did try marijuana a few times, but never LSD. Was psych rocker just an outfit these two tried on for a time, on their way to finding their true musical identities? “Just Dropped In” sounds about right. Hm.

Again, though—I wonder if I’m being fair. Who sang the song, whether they meant it, whether (and why) they chose to subtitle it, whether they released it on the front or the back end of a trend, and what any of the above says about whether they were trying to make a buck: is any of this worth considering, or should I narrow my focus strictly to what’s within the four corners of the song? This is the whole text v. context lit-crit controversy all over again, and there were good reasons why I dropped Anselm Haverkamp’s Intro to Literary Theory course in grad school: first, I had no clue what he was talking about, and second, I couldn’t stand grappling with meta-questions like these. (Weeks later I saw Haverkamp out in the street, on the sidewalk outside of Washington Square. He was lost in thought and ran into a street sign. At that moment I ceased to be ashamed that I couldn’t hack his class.)

So let’s keep it simple. Text matters, but context counts for something, too. I actually really like learning and thinking about the who, where, and under what circumstances music comes from. When you’re examining artifacts from the past, at least half—and probably most—of the pleasure comes from placing them in their historical (or pre-historical) context. Otherwise you’re just holding a chipped rock in your hand. And lately I have found that context can do as much important work drawing out the qualities of great art as the text ever does on its own. See “Your Time Will Come.” If I can learn more about an artist, a song, a recording and grow to like them more, then I shouldn’t count myself as blameworthy when I apply the same methods and end up liking them less. Maybe a bit foolhardy, though, for digging deep and ruining something I had previously enjoyed. It could be the trick is to know when and when not to ask questions.

But here I’ve already asked ’em. And on whether this “Just Dropped In (Please Buy This Record)” is a guilty pleasure or a song I can take pride in defending, I’m no closer to an answer than when I started, umpteen hundred words ago.

I suppose one test is whether or not I’d ever be willing to add the LP to my stacks at home, duly logging the new acquisition into my public-, or at least Discogs users-facing, record collection. On that score, I can say that I’ve had one prior opportunity to do so, declined, and probably won’t take it up again. Some time ago I saw an OG copy of The First Edition (self-titled) at the Rough Trade location in Rockefeller Center. I looked it over, spent some time thumbing through the record on my phone, ended up walking out with an altogether different One Hit Wonder record, which was The Right To Be Italian, by Holly & the Italians. So I passed on the one chance I’ve had to date to buy a first edition of The First Edition.

Right now you’re of course asking, What condition was it in? That right there is why we’re such great friends—both because you’re so clever and because you know me well enough to consider that I rejected not the album per se, but that particular copy. Well, you can be assured that the condition of the condition of the first edition of The First Edition that I found at Rough Trade that day was in fact VG+. My thinking here was that hell, yeah I would buy a full LP’s worth of self-consciously trippy tracks on the order of “Just Dropped In (Etc. and So On Yada Yada Yada).” But that’s not what I heard when I sampled the rest of the record in the store. Like, I really didn’t like any of those other songs.

So once again: points awarded for text, points deducted for context. And I feel like we’re at a stalemate. Every time I uncover a new datum or consider a new perspective that might incline me toward ruling this song a guilty pleasure, the song itself rears up in my head, sounds great, and brings me joy. On that score, I figure maybe I should take my own (late-arriving) advice and stop asking the question. The more I think about it, the less I know what a guilty pleasure is, but I do know a great song when I hear one. Kenny and friends, you’re off the hook. And while we’re at it, “Gangnam Style” (Apple Music, Spotify), “MMMBop” (Apple Music, Spotify), “Let’s Get Together” (Apple Music, Spotify) from The Parent Trap (1961): y’all get a break, too.

The point being, it’s fine if a song isn’t especially innovative or striving to be Great Art or the Cool Kids don’t dig it. I’m too old to care much at all about being a Cool Kid—if that ship is anywhere in my sight line, it’s only because it’s already sailed twice around the globe and is starting its third lap. Not all Art needs to be Great, Enjoyable works just fine, and there will always be somebody out there picking up the innovation slack (I think?), if Kenny Rogers and PSY aren’t up for it. And yes, it’s maddening that for every “Eight Miles High” or “White Rabbit” blowing the doors off, we have to deal with fifty imitators swarming into the castle yard behind them. But for all that—and pardon the sudden shift of metaphors—what are pioneers without the settlers who follow them? Answer: Just some stubborn dudes walking off into the woods, alone.

“Just Dropped In (Only to Get Thrown into the Dock by a Manic Substack Writer)”: this jury of one finds you not guilty on all counts. You are free to leave my waking and sleeping brain at any time. Or stay, as you please. But I may start charging you rent.

2

Never mind what the streamers say in 2026; Teddy’s original 7” was titled “I Just Dropped In.”

My plan was to follow up my bit on the Inspirals with another Madchester post, maybe kick off a series. But then I saw freaking Chapterhouse the other night—35th anniversary tour for their Whiplash LP—and the Roses are put on hold yet again. Mani, Reni, Ian, and John: I’ll get to you soon, I promise.

Thirty-five years ago I bought Whiplash at the Princeton Record Exchange. I was hoping to stop back in on PREX (as they call it) this weekend, but we had twelve hours in town and I’m increasingly reluctant to drag friends and family—friends, in this instance—with me on my deep dives at record stores, unless they have turntables, too. And even if they do, I tend to outlast the other shoppers in my cohort by at least a half hour. What can I say? I don’t want to miss something—or worse, spend the rest of the day wondering if I did.

In any case, sometime in the fall of 1991 PREX supplied me with a copy of Whiplash on CD. I played that album a ton during my freshman year in college, in between spins of the Jesus & Mary Chain’s Automatic, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, PiL’s Greatest Hits So Far (yes: I’d discovered John Lydon), God Fodder by Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, and all the James records I could get my hands on. The Bunnymen record without Ian, Reverberation, was big in my rotation, too. Argue if you want: I’ll defend that record to the death (see “One Million Billionth of a Millisecond on a Sunday Morning”.) I should probably make a playlist from that year. [goes away for ten minutes] In fact, here it is. I’ll likely add to it over time, so hold off judging until I’ve pronounced it a finished product.

Chapterhouse in particular makes me think of my bedroom in 1915 Hall, where I put it to use ushering me into afternoon naps. The sonic overload of this record did some good work drowning out the curses and taunts of my room- and hallmates playing Nintendo steps away in our common room. That said, it speaks to the metabolism, brain hyperactivity, and circadian jackassery of an 18-year-old college student that he could drink three cans of Dr. Pepper, put on a thunderous shoegaze record at 3 PM, and rack out. But this was a regular practice for me, especially in the fall semester, as a result of which I heard the lead tracks on Whirlpool a hell of a lot more than its middle and back end. “Breather” (Apple Music, Spotify), “Pearl” (Apple Music, Spotify), “Autosleeper” (ha: Apple Music, Spotify), and at least the first half of “Treasure” (Apple Music, Spotify), before I ditched the waking world until dinnertime.

I added Whirlpool to my shopping list after I saw the video for “Falling Down” (Apple Music, Spotify) on MTV. The 120 Minutes Archive is increasingly becoming as essential a resource to this Substack as Setlist.fm. Both sites allow me to pin memories to specific dates—and more importantly, to validate and affirm (and sometimes remind and correct) what I only think I remember. The Internet attests that MTV aired the “Falling Down” video on August 25, 1991, right after “Happy” (Apple Music, Spotify) by the aforementioned Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, and just a few minutes before PiL’s “Rise” (Apple Music, Spotify). So that particular summer Sunday night, one of my last before I left for college, informed a fair number of my CD purchases in the months that followed.

Before I go further, I want to emphasize that I wrote that earlier paragraph, calling out Ned’s and Public Image Ltd. as side-riders with Chapterhouse in my 5-CD changer, before I consulted the Internet and found that MTV had clustered these three groups together in a half-hour stretch of programming I most certainly sat and watched. Accordingly, this was not a case of me checking a source and then retconning1 a “memory” that aligned with it. Though I may struggle in this very moment to remember the name of the play-by-play man on the Guardians’ TV broadcast2—I’ve only been listening to him for 25 years—certain associations stick unerrantly with me through the decades. And proving that they do feels rewarding.

Returning to subject …

“Falling Down” had those terrific wah-wah guitar effects. They’ve since been pulled from service, so that I didn’t hear them at the show—my one and only beef with a gig in which Chapterhouse positively rawked. The wah-wahs in “Falling Down” were a siren song to all of us binging on the Madchester scene back in the day. I heard those guitars, clocked the mop tops and baggy shirts in the video, and was properly motivated to buy Whirlpool at the first opportunity. When I did, I found Chapterhouse weren’t very much at all like the Stone Roses, Charlatans, or Inspiral Carpets. The sounds on “Falling Down” were … nonrepresentative. For all that, I quickly grew to appreciate the record for what it was, and unless you count Cocteau Twins’ Heaven or Las Vegas, this would be my first foray into shoegaze.

Of course now I’m putting two and two together and wondering if the band and I were set up. Could a savvy manager/ producer have whispered an instruction to the sound engineer in the Whirlpool sessions: suggest a wah-wah pedal? Maybe Chapterhouse went along to get along, they appeared later for the video shoot, and when shown the finished product were themselves surprised to see all the psychedelic tropes—double exposures, band members falling through space, flowers and feathers and so on. Maybed they asked pointed questions and management told them no no no: this is exactly the right play to reel in all the Roses fans looking for the next “Fools Gold” (Apple Music, Spotify). Fast-forward 35 years, and Chapterhouse have their fan base fairly in the bag. They run their own show now, and they don’t need no steenkeen wah-wahs.

I’ll allow the adjustment. After all, I came for “Falling Down” but I stayed for “Pearl,” a song that is absolutely in the running for My All-Time Favorite Song Ever Ever Ever. Not that I could ever (ever ever) definitively call the question—or stick with an answer for more than a day, if I did. But in simpler times, when I was faced with far fewer songs to sort through and had Billboard rankings more on the brain, I did maintain a practice of selecting not a weekly Personal Top 10, but certainly a #1 Favorite Song. And for the two-year stretch in between designations of “Enola Gay” (Apple Music, Spotify) and “Live Forever” (Apple Music, Spotify), “Pearl” had a firm grip on that top spot.

What did (and do) I like so much about this song? All the lush and desperate Romanticism of it, for starters. With its slow-side-of-midtempo cadence, those whisper-crooned vocals, and themes of love and loss, “Pearl” is a song that burrows ever deeper into your limbic system, the longer it plays. Here I am invoking OMD in consecutive paragraphs, but their “Never Turn Away” (Apple Music, Spotify) and Thompson Twins’ “If You Were Here” (Apple Music, Spotify) apply like means to like ends, inflicting upon the listener (well, this listener) the same kind of pleasurable ache that “Pearl” does. Yet of these three conceptually similar songs, Chapterhouse’s submission is (for me) the sharpest and delivers the cleanest cut.

You wouldn’t expect this from a shoegaze band pitted against two synth-pop acts. A band like Chapterhouse has a propensity to muck and muddy up their mix. And certainly there are several guitar tracks here, alongside probably a dozen more strata of sampling and instrumentation packed and stacked into the Jenga tower—and that’s before we even get to the vocals. Actually … [goes to check] … Google AI tells me the band recorded “Pearl” on 16-track tape, then added 8 more tracks in post-production. All this sounds about right to me, and I won’t trouble myself to confirm that Gemini didn’t hallucinate these facts.

With the caveat that I know exactly zero about sound engineering, I’d venture to say the challenge of producing a shoegaze record is to draw the principal melodies just far enough into the foreground to give them their due, without pulling them too far above the fray. In the latter case you get results like My Bloody Valentine’s “when you sleep” (YouTube) and “i only said” (YouTube), where Kevin Shield’s sculpted feedback samples stand fully apart from the mix and become the full earworm.3 When I first played Loveless I liked these two songs best, because I could access their hooks straightaway and with minimal effort. On subsequent listens these tracks have come to feel … I dunno, a bit gimmicky? I should be clear: I am not opining that Whirlpool is a better record than Loveless. Internet writers get doxxed and destroyed for far lesser provocations. But I will say that the gap between the two records is narrower than you think—and “Pearl” is far and away the best song on either release.

For that last proposition I could stand on ipse dixit, but let’s do at least a few hundred further words on why this song is so terrific. Putting aside the mood, which we’ve already covered, a big chunk of the song’s genius—easily a third share of the pie chart—is owing to the single-bar guitar hook that kicks off the track. This nine-note sequence carries through long stretches of the track and is central to the enterprise: enough that when it (and the beat) drop out of the mix, it feels super-consequential, like seas parting, just to make way for the sung verses. Importantly, too, a second guitar and bass play a four-chord sequence over top of the hook, one chord per bar, to render a simple and exquisite cycle-within-a-cycle effect.

Now let’s talk about the drum samples that comprise this song’s beat layer, because if the strings lift this song from sea level to base camp, it’s the drums that carry “Pearl” to the summit. Sample #1: John Bonham’s delay-treated funk hammer from “When the Levee Breaks” (Apple Music, Spotify). Sample #2: a snare-heavy beat artifact Schoolly D dialed up on a Roland TR-909 for “P.S.K. What Does It Mean?” (Apple Music, Spotify). It takes a genius ear to reach for these two disparate beats—hip hop vs. hard rock, ’80s vs. ’70s, man vs. machine—and stitch them together. Eat your heart out, Norman Cook: these two drum samples integrate perfectly and settle neatly under the strings, so that each of the four elements—high-register hook, chord progression, LedZep, and Schoolly D—contributes equally and distinctly to the production. Fire, air, earth, and water.

“Pearl” was one of three songs I submitted for discussion in our Mixtape Diaries episode about samples (Apple Podcasts, Spotify). The other two were the Beastie Boys’ “Rhymin’ & Stealin’” (Apple Music, Spotify) and “Kiss Them for Me” (Apple Music, Spotify) by Siouxsie and the Banshees. The Beasties use the LedZep beat in “Rhymin’,” and Siouxsie copped from “P.S.K.” for “Kiss Them for Me.” “Pearl” pulled from both and so supplied the connective tissue in a daisy chain of three standout songs with shared drum samples. I’ve gone all of eight paragraphs without citing Public Image Ltd.—that ends now, so I can note that Lydon and his gang also made use of the “P.S.K.” beat in the particular mix of “The Body” (YouTube) that appeared on the hits compilation I bought around the same time as Whirlpool. That Schoolly D beat felt positively ubiquitous back in 1991. Even so I wouldn’t source it until thirty years later, when I was researching a podcast.

Down through the years, “Pearl” still holds up. I would not recommend playing it right on the heels of “When the Levee Breaks,” or for that matter “Rhymin’ & Stealin’.” Chapterhouse sped up the Bonham beat a fair bit, so that when juxtaposed with these sub-80 BPM tracks, “Pearl” comes off as strangely hurried, undercutting the languid Romanticism that gives the song so much of its force. But aside from that there’s never a moment when I wouldn’t benefit from spending 4.5 minutes plugged into this song. I’ll punt for now on the question whether it’s the Best Ever.

The concert was terrific. I can’t remember the last time I saw a shoegaze band play live—it was probably My Bloody Valentine in 2013—and it turns out I was overdue for reminders (1) that shoegaze shows are loud as shit, and (2) that Side B of the Whirlpool record was about as loaded as Side A. For example, “Guilt” (Apple Music, Spotify): there are two brutal instrumental stretches in this song, massive with dissonant guitars and manic thrash-drumming. These jackhammer jams had a habit of, well, redirecting those afternoon naps I described earlier. “If You Want Me” (Apple Music, Spotify) comes next in the running order and is a welcome climbdown in intensity. I can attest that this one was prime mixtape-for-a-girl material: lilting vocal melody backed by glockenspiel, followed by a funky beat drop, followed by a hailstorm of guitars. This song has fewer than 500K hits on Spotify, which is a tragedy. And the deepest cut of all—double-meaning intended—is “April” (Apple Music, Spotify), a stunner of a track I never fully appreciated until I heard it played live. Makes me want to put on a wizard’s cloak, grab Kate, and waltz with her in the rain.

Sometimes a band’s first album is all you need. Not sure why this is. Some A-grade debuts have you desperate to get hold of the follow-up (to be discussed in the over-promised Roses post), whereas others leave you perfectly content. Chapterhouse caught me in between. Blood Music came out in 1993, and I stopped in on PREX multiple times to confirm they still had it in their racks. On easily a half-dozen separate occasions I held it in my hands and never pulled the trigger. This was at least in part because Blood Music came as a 2-CD set, and I was a man of limited means. But I also was just content with Whirlpool, and did I need any more Chapterhouse than was contained in its nine gorgeous tracks?

All this dithering came back to bite me at the show decades later. The mode of proceeding for these all-album gigs is the headliner plays the Chosen Record start to finish in the first set, leaves the stage, then returns to play select hits from their other releases. As I’d never got hold of Blood Music, or for that matter any other Chapterhouse CD, their second set was entirely new to me. All this was just fine, but it was getting late, the Cavs and Knicks were deep into the third quarter, and I was feeling a bit tired. I’d got what I came for in the first set, and in a turn of events I would never have predicted even five months earlier, I had seen The Best Song of All-Time, or at least one from the Top Five—Ten?—hm … let’s ditch the All-Time bit and call it My Undisputed Heavyweight Champion Taking On All Comers from Fall 1991 to Summer 1994—yeah, that’ll do …

I saw that song, played live, by the band that wrote it. Which is pretty goddam great.

Madchester seemed like a fun time—a burst of sunshine through the clouds, flooding the smoked-out North with color. The breakout came in late 1988, going into 1989. Industry gave way to ecstasy, strikes turned to raves, and picket lines became conga lines. The sudden splashdown of a day-glo indie dance scene provided a welcome pick-me-up after the trenchcoats-and-desolation vibe of the Joy Division years (’77 to ’80) and the Smiths’ wallow-at-home project (’83 to ’87). And yes, chemicals helped. If the mood shift felt abrupt to the practitioners, it was in fact a long time coming. By this time Britain was ten years deep with the Thatcher government, the opposition had tried everything short of armed revolution, now here came a rising generation to say fuck it, let’s drop E and dial up some beats.

You knew the scene had legs when the incumbents signed on. Sure enough New Order caught the acid house bug, as demonstrated on 1989’s Technique, which the band found time to record between all-night benders on Ibiza. For their part, James swerved away from their quirky folk/ fellow-traveler aesthetic into dance pop and bright colors. Here’s the cover of their “Come Home” 12-inch (Apple Music, Spotify), which I found in the Canary Islands and currently have on display in my office, and next to it a vintage baggy tee with the daisy logo the band originated around this time.

Around this time Johnny Marr ditched four-piece strings fundamentalism to strike up the collaboration that became Electronic. Clearly he’d got the message (Apple Music, Spotify). By contrast, Morrissey largely stuck to his guns and formula, after the breakup; Viva Hate came out in 1988 and was very much a sensible-shoes extrapolation of where the Smiths had been heading. Yet by the spring of ’89 Moz had released “Interesting Drug” (Apple Music, Spotify), an unsurprisingly shrewd reading of the social drivers of rave culture—and groovy enough in its own right to earn its share of spins at the Haçienda.

But these were the members of the Old Guard, brightening up to keep up. An altogether new generation of Manc indie artists were leading the charge here, with citrus-sucking sunshine (Apple Music, Spotify) beaming brightly through their arseholes (Apple Music, Spotify). At the tip of the spear were the afore-quoted Stone Roses and Happy Mondays, lifting ’60s jangle and funk references for incorporation into bang-up original tracks. The Roses and Mondays—and in particular front men Ian Brown and Shaun Ryder—had an effortless groove about them. Back in Ohio we stayed up late on Sunday nights (120 Minutes) to watch them stride slo-mo across desert vistas and down lagers on hotel rooftops. What we didn’t realize was that Brown and Ryder were perfecting a posture and attitude the Gallagher Brothers would later take worldwide.

That bit is fodder for Sky Sports footie pregame parody spots now, and it’s no coincidence that in each of these sketches the Stereotypical Mancs, anoraks and all, end up rocking out not to Oasis but to the Mondays’ “Step On” (Apple Music, Spotify).

Look: I’m proud enough to be a resident of Boston, home of Aerosmith, the Modern Lovers, J. Geils, the Cars, the Pixies, Throwing Muses, Belly, the Breeders … do I need to go on? Yet growing up where I did, when I did, with the friends and records I did, I will always have Manchester parked in the top slot of rock cities—and it’s not a particularly close question.

Last September I struck up a conversation with a Manc in a hotel lobby in Los Angeles. I’d just come back from that night’s Oasis gig at the Rose Bowl; he had plans to go the following night. We talked some about the show and what he could expect, then we shifted gears and discussed Manchester music more generally. I told him I was from the American Midwest—not sure he knew (or should have known) where Ohio was—and that my gang and I had spent the ’80s and ’90s fully obsessed with his hometown and all its bands. By the time I’d finished, he was in tears. It means so much to me to hear this, he said. To know that you care so much about my city.

And I wasn’t just blowing smoke. When I first traveled to England in 1995, the single most exciting part of the trip, at least as I’d envisioned it, was my plan to stop in on Manchester. It turned out I had to go fantastically out of my way to get there, due to a rail strike that had me taking three different local buses down from Edinburgh. When I finally got to town I didn’t know what to do with myself. I think I was expecting to see one or more rock idols around every corner. Anyone with even a dim understanding of statistics and the city’s size would have been disabused of that notion, but my enthusiasm was running miles ahead of my brain. Of course I could have looked in on the Haçienda, which was still open, if not still hot, at the time. Or I could have gone to Salford to take the copycat Smiths photo in front of the Lads Club, or to visit Ian Curtis’s grave in Macclesfield.

But it didn’t occur to me to see any of these sights—or I wasn’t resourceful enough to find my way to them—and my two abiding memories of Manchester are instead stopping by a shuttered Old Trafford (no game scheduled) and stupidly walking up and down Market Street in the city centre with my eyes peeled for Ian Brown, Peter Hook, and Tim Booth. Maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on myself: years later my friend Mark was in Manchester on business, and he ran into Noel in an Adidas shop on that same road, if I’m remembering the story right. Maybe I just wasn’t very lucky.

Rewind now to high school, when I had the Roses and Mondays heavy on my mind and stereo and was wondering what else I might be missing. I was hearing that there was by general consensus a Big Three bands on the Madchester scene, and third on the list were Inspiral Carpets. I had heard the Inspirals’ second single, “Joe” (Apple Music, Spotify) somewhere—maybe on MTV Postmodern? there’s no record it was ever played on 120 Minutes—and I went looking everywhere for a CD I could buy.

Soon enough I had my hands on the Cool as **** EP. Five tracks of flat-out organ-forward garage-punk. The last song was “Plane Crash” (Apple Music, Spotify), which at 16+ minutes was the longest track in my CD collection at the time. Clint Boon’s fat Farfisa play loads up the mix: you get the impression he has at least seven fingers down on the keys at any given moment. Compare the Bugs Bunny organs on “Find Out Why” (Apple Music, Spotify) to anything Ray Manzarek ever played, or for that matter the Charlatans, “Weirdo” (Apple Music, Spotify) aside. I’m not saying Clint’s organs are better. But they’re definitely louder.

As I play these songs now, they seem like a bit of a goof to me, and if the concept was to breed the Doors and the Damned, the latter supplied the dominant gene, at least at this early stage. Plane crash! Yeah yeah yeah! PLANE CRASH PLANE CRASH YEAH YEAH YEAH! I’m sure I tried to evangelize Inspiral Carpets to my gang—they were part of the Holy Trinity—but I don’t recall any of my friends especially caring. And in retrospect I think I understand the reaction. Where the Roses and Mondays were projecting their chill, Inspiral Carpets had deputized a cartoon cow as their PR man.

The Inspirals calmed down considerably on their first, grandly-titled long-player Life. For sure it had its share of manic episodes, but there were mid-tempo excursions as well, and even the occasional ballad. Re that last point, the standout track here is of course “This Is How It Feels” (Apple Music, Spotify), but I was still craving those mad Manc beats, and the Carpets’ menacing update of “Touch Me” (Apple Music, Spotify) on “Directing Traffik” (Apple Music, Spotify), along with the soaring “She Comes in the Fall” (Apple Music, Spotify), still get my blood going 35 years down the road. By this time I was content to enjoy Inspiral Carpets on my own. The organs and Will Byers haircuts were an acquired taste for alt-rock kids in Northeast Ohio. Two years ago I found an OG copy of Life in an antique store in Phoenix. I didn’t love the condition and didn’t pull the trigger. Am kicking myself now.1

The deceleration continued with 1991’s The Beast Inside, the kind of record where the reviewers talk about how the band has matured and you get a sinking feeling even before you drop the needle. Maturation might be a term for what happened here. Another read is that the beats, beads, and Es scene was on the wane, shoegaze was rounding into fashion, and a band known principally for its party organ was having to answer some existential questions. Still, grooves matter to me more than bpm, so that I could get behind songs like the title track (Apple Music, Spotify), “Born Yesterday” (Apple Music, Spotify), and “Please Be Cruel” (Apple Music, Spotify). For that matter, “Sleep Well Tonight” (Apple Music, Spotify), is every bit as lovely and moving as “This Is How It Feels.” Well, maybe not every bit, but they’d have done well to release it as a single.

For all that, at the time I was cool on The Beast. The sounds of Chapterhouse and Curve were waiting just around the corner for me, and this LP played like the band were trying to sand down their Madchester edges, toward passing themselves off as more of a regular ’90s indie rock band. Probably the high point was “Further Away” (Apple Music, Spotify), a 13-minute jam in the sinusoidal style of “Plane Crash,” but with a bit more sophistication. Graham Lambert’s guitars in the third and seventh minutes are ace—suggesting the kind of revelation any sensible listener has with the Doors, when it dawns on him that Robbie Krieger was the glue. Down through the years, often as not “Further Away” is the song I dial up whenever I need a bit of Inspiralation. Playing this album now, I like it a lot better than I did on first purchase. So maybe I’ve done the maturing?

The third album was called Revenge of the Goldfish, and if I was lukewarm on the Carpets after Beast, the title here was enough to pull me out of my Inspiral spiral. That leaves me just Cool as ****, Life, and The Beast Inside to root through in search of a title song for this post. Two nights ago I was driving Lila home from school, and I played bits of a handful of songs to her—first, to see what she thought of it, and second, to get her help choosing.

Of the several tracks I played, “This Is How It Feels” was the clear winner with the Pepper. In fact, she decided on the spot to add it to her Apple Music library. “Further Away,” “Sleep Well Tonight,” “Biggest Mountain” (Apple Music, Spotify), “Traffik,” “Beast,” and “Joe” were generally well-received, but none held a candle to “This Is How It Feels.” For all that Inspiral Carpets were creatures and standard-bearers of the funky-groovy, Es are good, smiley-button club scene of the late 1980s, the group’s enduring legacy is wrapped up in what is probably their least Madchester recording. The glass-half-full read of the situation is that faddishness and Farfisa aside, Clint and Graham had real songwriting gifts— enough so that my many friends and acquaintances who could never be bothered with the Carpets (y’all know who you are) would do well to dig into their catalog now.

At the end of it all, I’m going with “Joe” here. It’s jumpy and fun, Track 1 on the Cool as **** EP, dating from the time when T-shirts with that slogan (uncensored) were cropping up all over the city, their wearers were getting hauled before judges, and Inspiral Carpets were making money enough from the controversy to finance their own label. “Joe” supplies a dose of the the Carpets before they grew up, when the Madchester scene was green and wild and free and they, as much as anyone else, were feeding the frenzy. Maybe Ian Curtis was rolling over in his grave, but we also know he loved to dance. I like to think that if Ian had lived to see this new day dawn in the North, he’d have thought it was cool as fuck.

I didn’t write last weekend, because I was going to LCD Soundsystem shows instead. They did a four-night stretch at Roadrunner in Brighton. I bought tickets well in advance for the Friday night gig, after which I swapped out friends and went back for a second hit on Sunday. Friday brought the surprise—the ascent from I expect I’ll really like this to HOLY SHIT WHAT AM I SEEING?!? Sunday night, over the course of a close-to-identical set list,1 I was able to attend more closely to what I had seen two days earlier, break it down into components, work it through in my head—basically, I cracked open my brain to allow all of this rocking disco genius to splash over the gray matter.

Sometimes you’re just late to something. Years (decades?) late, and you have to own that. The irony of being late to LCD Soundsystem is that right around the time you’re finally starting to catch on, James Murphy in on stage in front of you singing “Losing My Edge” (Apple Music, Spotify), a song premised entirely on the essentiality of getting there first. Or at least on time.

I was there in 1968, James incants. I was there at the first Can show in Cologne. Oof: I didn’t discover Can until 2013, and I’ve never been to Cologne—only Munich, for that 90-minute layover on Lufthansa. Later in the song he name-drops Yaz, and y’all know how I feel about them, see “Mr. Blue.” You can cut me some slack for failing to clock Alison and Vince in ’82 when “Situation” (Apple Music, Spotify) first dropped: I was nine. But by ’89 at the latest I was a true believer. And I’ll be goddamned if on Sunday night I wasn’t wearing my Tago Mago T-shirt, pointing two thumbs at the Mushroomhead logo when Murphy sang the Can line. Ready and waiting, too, with a hoot and a holler when Nancy Whang slipped the synth scramble from “Don’t Go” (Apple Music, Spotify) into the live arrangement.

This was me signaling to the null set of anyone looking and listening that [ahem] I had a modest amount of common ground with LCD Soundsystem. That seemed important, because one thing that becomes apparent when you see this band live—what jumps right out at you—is that Murphy et al. are rock omnivores, rock historians, rock obsessives. Just like us. Of course James wasn’t in Cologne in ’68, either. Nor was he in the crowd with so-they-say David Niven two years later, taking in Damo Suzuki’s first gig as Can’s vocalist, fresh off the street where Schmidt and Czukay had found him (Damo, not David) busking earlier that day. But I’d bet the equity in my house that James knows that whole fun story.

“Losing My Edge” for sure means to poke fun at the here-first-and-before-it-was-cool mentality that prevails to this day among the rock literati. But it’s clear, too, that Murphy identifies a fair bit with the unreliable narrator with the lost edge. James himself occupies (I’ll say) the 91st Percentile of Cool, after all, and through the narrator’s catalog of his rock travels, LCD proffers the songwriter’s own itemized list of everything he thinks should be in The Canon.

But have you seen my records? This Heat, Pere Ubu, Outsiders, Nation of Ulysses, Mars, the Trojans, Black Dice, Todd Terry, the Germs, Section 25, Althea and Donna, Sexual Harassment, a-Ha, Pere Ubu [again], Dorothy Ashby, PiL, the Fania All-Stars, the Bar-Kays, the Human League…2

It’s notable that this was LCD’s first single, which is like leading off a book with your bibliography. Sure, you could trust Christgau et al. to back out your influences from the music, but the surer bet is to call them out by name in an exhaustive list within the four corners of the track.

… Joy Division, Lower 48, the Association, Sun Ra, Scientists, Royal Trux, 10cc, Eric B. and Rakim, Index, Basic Channel, Soulsonic Force (“just hit me!”), Juan Atkins, David Axelrod, Electric Prunes, Gil! Scott! Heron! the Slits, Faust …

Only an unrepentant music geek would be as forthright as this. And from my rightful place way over yonder in (I’ll say) the 44th Percentile, I admire the hell out of the approach.

Backtrack now, to Friday night (again, so very late, and I’ll get back to this) and I’m standing in the crowd at the Roadrunner while they’re playing this song. By this time I’m looking past the fact that I’m rickety and old, that between work and the Hold Steady show I’d stood for ten hours Thursday—bad planning: should have lowered the standing desk—so that I can’t feel my legs anymore. Paresthesias be damned: I am fully locked in to the LCD Soundsystem experience. Gripped, triggered, loving it. I’m not perfectly tracking the vocals, but I can pick out some of the names, and I think, Yeah, Dude is a geek like me.

And beyond “Losing My Edge,” there are these additional drop-ins: excursions from “The Model” (Apple Music, Spotify) and “Your Silent Face” (Apple Music, Spotify), leading into and out of “I Can Change” (Apple Music, Spotify) and “Someone Great” (Apple Music, Spotify), respectively. U2 do this a fair bit in their live shows, but never so deftly, so seamlessly as here, because LCD’s references are perfectly attuned to what they’re doing. Earlier in the show, in fact, when my brain started to go to work (autonomically, as it does) on the question of what combination of earlier artists does this act sound like?, I had decided that if LCD Soundsystem had to have just two parents—which is how meiotic reproduction works and that’s not necessarily a requirement for musical generativity, but let’s go with it right here right now as a metaphor—egg and sperm would be sourced from Kraftwerk and Funkadelic.

But then, as I continued to study the project and its constituent parts—synths, programming, drums, percussion, guitar, bass, vocals—I couldn’t help but think New Order. And the ease with which they were toggling between fill-the-room electronica and swaggering guitar rock: that’s New Order, too. In spades. It’s just that, with all due respect to Barney Sumner, LCD Soundsystem can also claim sophisticated lyrical messaging. And a bit more shimmy in their hips. It’s a party, Carla had promised me, when she first heard I was going to this Friday show—and after asking: Wait—you haven’t seen them before?

How was I so late to this? Years and years ago, Shaun told me all about LCD Soundsystem. On matters of music I trust Shaun more than probably anyone else in the world. (For more about Shaun, see “Golden Slumbers”/ “Carry That Weight”/ “The End”.) He mentioned that he’d seen them touring with Arcade Fire. Ooh: that’s another one. LCD are a lot like Arcade Fire, in that there are a ton of ’em on stage, jumping from one instrument to the next as they work through the setlist. Now just make Arcade Fire way more goddam fun. Like, if the Butlers, Regine et al. decided to push their sound entirely in the direction of “Sprawl II” (Apple Music, Spotify) and “Here Comes the Night Time” (Apple Music, Spotify). Anyway, so yeah: LCD Soundsystem toured with Arcade Fire on their respective second albums, The Sound of Silver and Neon Bible.

I most definitely saw Arcade Fire when they toured on Neon Bible. I don’t think I arrived on time for the opener, or at least I don’t remember any of it. Interesting: the Internet cannot confirm or deny that LCD opened for Arcade Fire in Boston on that tour, but Setlist.fm says they played the Avalon on May 11, 2007, the day after I saw Arcade Fire in the Orpheum. Hm. Anyway, on Shaun’s recommendation I went out and bought Sound of Silver, and I really liked it. I especially dug “North American Scum” (Apple Music, Spotify), which felt on-point as ever, by the way, when LCD played it to open their second sets last weekend. We are a shallow, crass, and hapless people, but all things considered, we carry it well on a Friday night.

I dug that second record enough to buy American Dream when it came out ten years later. Turns out I missed the third LP completely. For as much as I like Sound of Silver, I certainly never wore it out. Never learned the songs or even the running order by heart. Still, I had enough of it kicking around in my head that I was able to recognize “Time To Get Away” (Apple Music, Spotify), “Someone Great” (Apple Music, Spotify), “All My Friends” (Apple Music, Spotify) when they turned up in the set list. But it wasn’t until Sunday that I fell fully in love with these songs and the band that played them.

I hit the snooze button on this band for so long. What was I thinking? I figure a lot of it was anti-Brooklyn bias. As I scorn my yuppie elders, so do I detest my hipster juniors. While the former ride in black cars around Midtown and the latter swap kombucha recs in Brooklyn, I take my stand in Union Square, looking up- and downtown with a curl in my lip. This Gen Y Brooklyn scene never made sense to me. The trimmed beards and rimmed glasses, the Mitski and Sufjan Stevens and judgment: I have zero time for any of it. Now and again, friends send me links to Brooklyn Vegan. All of them are on matters of interest to me, and the underlying content is well-received, but couldn’t they have pulled the same LP drop dates, the same reunion tour announcements from some other-named platform? Whatever happened to The Village Voice?

But this is a thing we call prejudice, and its application has an equal and opposite reaction that rebounds on the user. For all the satisfaction one derives from marginalizing the object (here, Brooklyn-based LCD Soundsystem), it also denies the subject (me) the benefits of assessing and appreciating the object on its merits. Did my blind bias against All Things Brooklyn—which now I think of it was a particular way to process having lost my edge—cost me 10+ years of chasing LCD Soundsystem ecstatically at least around Boston, if not up and down the Eastern Seaboard? Seems like it did. And for all that I completely overlooked that James Murphy is three years older than I am.

So I arrived late late late to the party Carla described, and this was a missed opportunity. Putting aside the Brooklyn bias question, this whole experience speaks to the importance of trusting my friends. Shaun and Carla, for sure, but Mark, too, went positively evangelical about LCD Soundsystem’s live shows, in an early episode of The Mixtape Diaries (Apple Podcasts, Spotify)—describing a gig he saw in LA in 2016 as an electronic hootenanny … with disco and funk and dance … you’ve got keyboards and synths and computers and guitars and percussion and cowbell … and everybody’s freaking out and screaming and singing. And randomly and coincidentally, at 7:11 PM last Friday night, T-minus two hours, four minutes from Murphy et al. taking the stage at Roadrunner, Bob sent “Dance Yrself Clean” (Apple Music, Spotify) to the MTD text thread. Apparently he just thought it was important to bring up, as we all started looking toward the weekend.

I was out to dinner and didn’t thumb into the link. In fact, the first time I heard this song was three hours later when the band were on stage playing it, with the entire assembled crowd save for one uninformed clown singing along. In that particular moment I felt a little out-group—excluded from the present company, one might say.

You all know this already, but there’s a build to this song. Or not even a build, really, just three minutes of tuneful- and pleasant-enough groove before the beats and electronics come crashing down and blow up the room. The rest of the crowd knew this was coming—hence their enthusiasm. It hit me like a ton of bricks, like the Monty Python God-foot announcing something completely different. This was extraordinary, and enough on its own to draw me back on rested legs to the Sunday show. Just go and throw your little hands up, James sang, through the ionic crackle-blanket his team had slammed into the event space. It’s late. Oh, honey, it’s late.

But not too late.

There comes a point in parenthood where the kids want to challenge their father’s sovereignty over the car radio. This isn’t exactly Zeus throwing Cronus into the pit of Tartartus and claiming the Olympian throne. But it’s a similar dynamic, and when you’ve just pulled out of your garage and have a nine-hour drive ahead of you, the stakes can feel about as high.

For sure I spent years on the other side of this question. When I was young and disempowered in the backseat, I had to contend with AM talk radio: Pete Franklin—who was described in his Plain Dealer obituary as “the first man to make a street fight out of Cleveland radio, using a mix of egomania, hokum, and cruelty”—erupting on Browns fans, stultifying local politics with Ron Verb during afternoon drive-time, then Rush Limbaugh when that started happening. I still flinch when I hear the Pretenders’ rhythm section open “My City Was Gone” (Apple Music, Spotify), because Limbaugh used these first few bars as his outro to commercial breaks. On the weekends my dad would put on the Italian Hour with Vic DeCaris, on the off-chance my grandmother might call in to the show:

I’ve got Olga from Warren on the line. Olga, how are you?

Whereupon Olga would either proffer or request a recipe for beef braciole, and Vic would read out the essential ingredients and steps over the air to the several hundred Mahoning Valley nonnas in his listener base.

Okay, so that last part was fun, but the rest of it was absolutely a drag—I was legit scared of Pete Franklin for years: he was always one caller away from detonating, and I wasn’t clued in enough to his pet peeves to know when it was coming—and Tia and I were constantly lobbying from the backseat for some Hot FM 101 tunes. Now and again these requests were approved: just often enough for us to want to make our case every single time we were loaded into the car, including for the ten- to twenty-minute drives around town that comprised the better part of our Oldsmobile time. Ten minutes of begging, pleading, arguing, before Dad would relent—if he relented—and give us two, maybe three pop songs to purchase a fleeting peace from the litigants seated behind him.

Around the Circle of Life we go, and now I’m the one ostensibly in the driver’s seat, digging on Krautrock deep cuts, or worse, cycling through countless recaps of the same football game from the Buckeye beat writers I have loaded into my podcast feed. Two cars ago, when I had Sirius/XM Radio, the fam and I could all get to agreement on the new wave and classic alternative hits Richard Blade was spinning on Channel 33. But my sat radio subscription has lapsed, and left to my own devices, I’m likely as not to make audio selections that alienate the kids.

My daughter Lila, in particular, has been an agitator on these matters. She likes to argue. Always has. It surprised none of us when she joined her high school’s mock trial team two years ago, or for that matter when she became its co-captain last summer. This activity is perfect for me, she said. It combines arguing and performing. So when she first started piping up about what I had playing in the car, I realized I had ahead of me likely a decade or more of bitter back-and-forth with her on this subject. On the fly one night, and under considerable strain, I came up with a proposal. Here’s the deal, I said. You can deejay in the car, but if you play one song I don’t want to hear—just one—you’re done. Forever.

Lila’s first reaction was to protest. Bitterly. Both of my children have a keen sense of justice and fairness, and she instantly recognized the cramped incentive structure this proposal would impress upon her. Simply put, she would need to stay very much in the heartland of music she knew I liked. This whole <tell your parent you want to play a song for them because you think they’ll like it, but really that’s just a cover because you know they won’t, you just wanted to listen to your song> strategy—which we all practiced back in the day—was entirely out the window for her. And what was worse, the matter was entrusted entirely to my discretion. What if I didn’t apply the rule in good faith? What if she accepted this deal and I gonged her very first song, so that I could bar her from car radio governance into perpetuity?

Well, I’d have to be some kind of jerk to do that, I countered. Maybe that didn’t entirely assuage her concerns.

On the other hand, I’d made her an offer that, at least in theory, offered the glimmer of an improvement on the Krautrock regimen she was getting. In practice, this arrangement has delivered a productive peace that has held fast down through the years—and that at the same time has taught her a lesson or two about leverage in negotiations. Or so I like to think. After all, up to the point when we struck the deal, Lila and I had listened to and enjoyed hundreds of songs together, so although we were both fully aware our tastes weren’t perfectly congruent (or we’d never have disagreed in the first place), the known overlap was substantial. And Lila realized pretty quickly both that she had plenty of space in which to operate and that I was inclined to play it straight in my role as Song Arbiter. I can count on one hand the number of instances in which she’s pushed me and put her deejay rights meaningfully at risk. There’s Olivia Rodrigo, who I’m just gonna admit here today I really like, and Måneskin, who I don’t.

Now and again Lila still dials up that Måneskin song (Apple Music, Spotify), and each time I let it go, because as cringy as the band are generally, the song itself isn’t entirely objectionable, and I know that if I were to ring her up on this one I’d be walking us back to the very baseline of constant argument over car radio control I had sought to avoid. Also, I think it’s cute that forty years after I was listening to Jerry Vale and Vic Damone songs on Saturday mornings, Italy is trying to do rock ‘n’ roll—whatever errant conclusions they may have reached about how it should look and sound. In any case, I suppose the system has impressed a bit of an incentive structure upon me, too: namely, to eat the very occasional song that should fail on the merits and trigger imposition of the death penalty.1 For the rest of the time, my daughter and I bond, sing, and rock out happily together wherever we go. And I save the Neu!, Harmonia, and Rastakraut Pasta (Apple Music, Spotify) for when I’m alone in my car.

World leaders, take note [ahem]: sure, you can start with threats of devastation. But if you really want to make progress toward a sustained peace, you’re gonna need to make concessions, act honorably, and swallow the occasional pill.

Most of Lila’s deejay shifts these days are claimed on the road to or from school. Heaviest in her rotation are “This Is Radio Clash” (Apple Music, Spotify), “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll” (Apple Music, Spotify), “Rio” (Apple Music, Spotify) and “Hungry Like the Wolf” (Apple Music, Spotify), “Kids in America” (Apple Music, Spotify), “Piano Man” (Apple Music, Spotify), and really anything by Queen. “We Didn’t Start the Fire” (Apple Music, Spotify) leaks in from time to time. That one is close to the line, but for the above stated reasons I allow it. I’m thrilled she’s so into that particular Clash song. It’s a deeper cut than the others. Lila told me once that she wanted to pitch it for one of her dance numbers at school, but she figured the administration would snag on the giving deadly exhibitions of murder by napalm line. Years ago, when she was a baby and I was on a super-frustrating job search, I used to put on “Career Opportunities” (Apple Music, Spotify) and dance with her in my arms. I like to think that softened her up to Mick and Joe. And maybe wisened her up to the job market.

Lila and I are also in lock-step agreement on St. Vincent. Again and again she goes back to “Digital Witness” (Apple Music, Spotify) and “Los Ageless” (Apple Music, Spotify), and I’m all for those selections. For sure, these tracks are no different from any of the others, in terms of how we got here. I like an artist, I play certain of her songs to my captive audience, at least one of its members decides she likes her, too, and everybody wins. What is different is St. Vincent doesn’t date from the 1980s, and in addition to her rock elements, she brings a very 21st-century pop star sensibility to her recordings.

The other day a friend of mine referred to Annie Clark as the female David Byrne, which makes perfect sense until she effortlessly dashes off a dynamite guitar lick and you start thinking she’s got a fair amount of Prince in her, too. Of course that’s where the Gen Xers’ heads go, but Lila really digs her fruit-of-the-Madonna-tree contemporary female pop singers—Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, the aforementioned Rodrigo, now Chappell Roan. Only one of these artists has a foothold in my car, but all of them are Top 40 on the Pepper’s earbuds. For her part, Annie Clark most definitely has at least one foot in this female pop star camp, so that I think Lila and I meet fairly in the middle on the St. Vincent question, as opposed to so many of our other points of agreement, where it’s incumbent on her to come all the way to Papaville. For this reason, and because so much of what I admire in St. Vincent I see in my daughter, too—her command, her self-assurance, her creativity, singularity, and sense of style—I’m especially pleased that Lila and I can come together over Annie’s music.

The other day, when Lila put on “Los Ageless” on the drive to her school, it occurred to me that I don’t have many more of these rides to give her. It’s her senior spring, and her college offers just came in, putting the imminence of her departure front of mind and tear duct for me. All this happened in too much of a hurry. How can anybody have you and lose you? St. Vincent was asking, and I was prompted to consider the particular strain of complaints—wry observations, really—I have made over the years about the trail of destruction she leaves in the house, as she moves precipitously from one project to another. The glue-gun devastation at the craft table in the basement. The hailstorm of shredded Kleenex pouring out the clothes dryer. Her laughably low (60%? 70%?) success rate at getting popcorn from the bowl into her mouth. And how does she get pomegranate up the walls? It looks like a crime scene. Here’s an especially notable kitchen aftermath that I felt needed documented for posterity:

Come September, I’m going to turn the corner into a clean kitchen and it will feel like a punch in the gut. The crux and irony of it is that when My Beloved Pepper goes to school in the fall, she will leave behind one last unaddressed mess, and that’ll be me.

There’s a coda at the end of “Los Ageless”—it adds a full 90 seconds to the song. The beat drops out, and stood up in its place are a synth layer, some strings, and muted lamentations from Annie. Certainly a climbdown after the bopping heights of the track’s first three minutes. By this point in the song we’d taken the off-ramp from Route 2 into Concord, we had only a few minutes left before I dropped her off, and Lila didn’t want that malingering coda crowding out the other songs she had queued up to play. I think we can skip this last part, she said, reaching for my phone.

Let’s not be in too much of a hurry to get to the next thing, is what I was thinking … but didn’t say.

When I dropped off Lila minutes later, my heart was heavy: not for that day, but for a day to come much later, in August. I needed some kind of boost, so I brought back Annie. Back in 2017 I saw St. Vincent live here in Boston, touring on the Masseduction album. “Young Lover” (Apple Music, Spotify) stuck with me and has been one of my favorite tracks ever since, for the following reasons:

What a treat just now to find that exact ecstatic moment—from the very show I saw—on YouTube! If this didn’t kick your ass on the small screen, imagine standing in the room where it was played. For sure this song packs a wallop from its first note, but ultimately it’s the bridge that sends you soaring into the stars, like a ride on the Bifrost or a jump into hyperspace. Weighty lyrical themes here, about the overdosed boyfriend: not the sort of subject you’d commonly associate with transcendent acceleration. But that’s the genius of St. Vincent for you, and over the 5+ years since I watched her spin it firsthand I have periodically had to play this track in the car, at maximum volume, in the hope of recapturing the sensory bombardment and exhilaration of her playing and singing that bridge, on that Thursday night, at the House of Blues.

Turns out “Young Lover” was exactly what I needed to jerk me out of my funk and pressing sense of impending loss, even if just for a moment. Before I knew it, I had pulled out of my stagger and was parked down the road at the Cumberland Farms, filling my cup with Diet Coke, calling on caffeine now to sustain the rush of endorphins for, I dunno, another fifteen to twenty minutes, until I got to a point where I could function at my job. One bridge to another to another, station to station, day by day. Soon enough I’ll have full control of my car radio again, and as much as I didn’t ask for that and—yes, I’m saying this: I don’t want it—I at least know what buttons I can push to help me hold it together. First “Los Ageless,” for the fond memories and crushing sentimentality, then “Young Lover” to lift me out of the pit.

This seems like as good a week as any for me to write about Sinéad O’Connor. See if I can’t iron out the lump I’ve had in my throat for going on three years now, since that burst of texts came through over my phone sharing the news of her passing.

Two weekends ago I was back in Cleveland, and a handful of us went to the Rock Hall. They’ve got an exhibit about Saturday Night Live’s musical guests. It’s a trailing line item in SNL’s 50th anniversary program, consisting principally of video displays and costumes on mannequins. Tucked away around the corner is an interactive space with massive touch screens, where you can search through the performances and select whatever you want for replay—they’ve got them all. Jumping first to mind for me was the Patti Smith Group’s feral cover of “My Generation” (Apple Music, Spotify). From there I skipped ahead 26 years to 10,000 Maniacs playing “These Are Days” (Apple Music, Spotify). Alli and I had been discussing Natalie Merchant’s fashion sense1, and we were both interested to see her choice of couture for the SNL gig.

Both these performances are gripping, for altogether different reasons, and I feel like I could have spent the entirety of my three days in the 216 standing in front of these screens, dialing up one appearance after another, and it would never get old ([ahem] Apple Music, Spotify). That’s true at least in part because NBC is super-attentive about ensuring none of these clips land and stick on YouTube. Would it be the worst thing in the world if the network set up an on-demand site, where nostalgia-seekers like me could check in after dinner to watch clips? Sell the goddam ads; I’ll sit through the LiMu Emu (and Doug). What I’m not gonna do is subscribe to Peacock solely for Saturday Night Live and then have to mine the musical guest bits out of each individual 90-minute episode. I’m tired, old, and accustomed to having the content I want when I want it. An Internet without a free, ad-supported archive of SNL musical guest appearances is crude and debilitated, Exhibit ZZ that the world we live in is broken.

More on that in a few.

At some point I tore myself away from the touch screens to catch up with my gang. They were standing in front of an even bigger screen back in one of the principal exhibit rooms. That portal was cycling through a curated selection of memorable musical moments from SNL’s past 50 years, which included but were not limited to the guest performances. For example, they showed clips of the “More Cowbell” sketch and Kristen Wiig doing her “… AND I’M DOONEESE!” bit. All good for a laugh, until suddenly I was confronted with Sinéad O’Connor. Standing in a white dress in front of lit candles, singing, alone and a cappella, Bob Marley’s “War” (Apple Music, Spotify). I knew straightaway this was going to wreck me, but as always with her and me, I couldn’t turn away. The Rock Hall served up a good 90 seconds of her singing, for which I am grateful, before she then produced the picture of Pope John Paul II and tore it three times, and arguably destroyed her career.

It was not fair of them to spring her on me like this. Not in public, so as to make me suddenly a blubbering mess in front of my oldest friends, in an I-don’t-think-he’s-okay kind of way. And right about when I was finally getting over this surprise attack, I turned a corner into the Hall’s “Revolutionary Women in Music” exhibit and saw this:

And it all came flooding right back—just as it did a minute ago when I dug this photo out of my phone for upload here. By now this whole <see/ hear image/ audio recording/ video clip of Sinéad O’Connor —> tears well up> thing is a Pavlovian response, formed over multiple streaming sessions these last three years, wherein I settle in front of the TV, stream Sinéad videos, and release all my pent-up emotions. I don’t start these sittings with the intention of wallowing. I put Sinéad on so that I can watch her perform—to see her storm and sneer and howl and plead and ultimately dig her fingers into my heartstrings in ways arguably no other person not a family member or close friend is able to do. Whatever anyone may say about her, whatever prejudices they may harbor against her causes or character, no one can question Sinéad O’Connor’s capacities as a performer.

I suppose these nights—more often than not on Fridays, when Kate and Lila are out, Florian is of course at school, and I’m here on my own—provide a kind of emotional strength training. I don’t personally have it in me to storm and sneer and howl and plead. That’s never been how I’ve interacted with others. I’ve done the calculations and have decided that it’s not worth the trouble. By contrast, my sense of Sinéad is maybe she was altogether too practiced and frank in expressing her feelings, and she suffered a cost for that in her relationships. When Sinéad sang, it was clear the performance was channeling her emotions, drawing on her life experience. (If it wasn’t, then she was the best actress in the world and step aside, Meryl Streep.) So yeah: I’m gonna fairly conclude that, to take one example, “The Last Day of Our Acquaintance” (Apple Music, Spotify) is describing the fracture and dénouement2 of an actual love affair—probably her marriage to John Reynolds.

Is it useful—arguably even important or essential—for a human being with a soul to take a minute now and again to unburden himself of his anger, sadness, and anxiety? Sure it is. But I also appreciate that when you shift that load off your back, it has to go somewhere. I don’t want to put that grief on my loved ones, and I don’t think it’s fair, either, to drop it on strangers. Hence a third way: I put Sinéad O’Connor on my television set, and I sink into the couch and sob. Or I put her on in the car and I sing along, hard, by myself. Probably Catharsis Through Sinéad™ is an imperfect solution, but as a safety valve it works well enough. For sure, it helps that I’m generally not carrying a ton of baggage, for which I count myself lucky.

More than anything, what I do carry has to do with my sense of justice, how wildly out of alignment it is with the world we live in, and how for all the talk about that bend in the arc of human history, the gap lately seems to be widening. I know I wrote about this fairly recently—see “Det Som Aldrig Förändras/ Diarabi”—and I swear to God I’m not always in third gear on this. In fact, I had some other directions in my mind for April 20 post, but then last week another public figure got into a thing with the Pope, and the situation played out entirely differently than it did for Sinéad. Far from turning a blind eye to widespread sexual predation in the Church and the imprisonment, indenture, and abuse of young women in Ireland, specifically—Sinéad herself spent 18 months in one of the Magdalene Laundries—Pope Leo had only raised questions about our government’s recent elective decision to go out killing and destroying in the Middle East. For which he earned himself a puerile, graceless, scarcely literate social media attack from … well, you know.

Contrast Sinéad’s performance. Facing a live national audience, alone and vulnerable with no backing band, singing a note-perfect and bone-chilling reggae manifesto with her own personalized lyrical amendments. Few people remember the words Sinéad O’Connor sang before she tore up the Pope in effigy:

We know we will win. We have confidence in the victory of good over evil.

How are we feeling about that lately, gang?

On Friday night I went back and played Marley’s original version. The lyrics of course set out the preconditions for world peace, none of which should be controversial. For example: Until the philosophy which hold one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned … everywhere is war. You can’t argue with Bob and the Wailers’ rendition of this song. It’s terrific. But in the grand tradition of Sinéad O’Connor covering the songs of other musicians, her version prevails. It isn’t just better, or more powerful, than the original. “War” now belongs to Sinéad because it was the cross we nailed her to. Sure, the wood was cut from someone else’s tree, but it’s stained now with her blood, and only hers.

If we can fairly fault Sinéad for her tangle with John Paul in October of 1992, it’s that she wasn’t especially strategic in her approach. Not wrong in her judgment, but she’d laid none of the groundwork for her allegations, which were proffered entirely out of the blue, late on a Saturday night, in between a sketch called “That’s Not Yogurt” (oof) and “Daily Affirmation with Stuart Smalley.”

Until the ignoble and unhappy regime which holds all of us through child abuse, yee-ah, child abuse, yee-ah, subhuman bondage, has been toppled, utterly destroyed … everywhere is war. Children! Children! FIGHT!

Like, what was she talking about? And what did this have to do with that cute little man who does the Sunrise Mass on TV from Rome early Christmas morning? The indictment struck a lot of us, including me, as a non sequitur, and it was brought without supporting evidence. Of course, decades later, we do have that evidence. In fact, these days we’re confronting a trove of evidence describing an altogether separate but similar ignoble and unhappy regime, steeped in the abuse of children, and while we watch and wait, and wait and watch, for this latter-day regime to face justice—and some are suggesting because so many of us are watching and waiting—

EVERYWHERE IS WAR.

Hm. Sounds like the humorless bald chick Joe Pesci wanted to smack3 wasn’t just hyper-clued in at the time: she was prescient.

I could tear up a picture or two now, blow out the candles, and end this post here. It would make for a terrific mic drop. But as I think I earlier said, that’s not me. What’s more important than that, I think, is that we remember Sinéad O’Connor for who she was: meaning, we should consider the beautiful and chaotic displays of power and vulnerability that she gave us, before she was cast out by people who never deserved her in the first place. There are four videos I keep returning to, so that I can sob and sing on my couch:

• Her live performance of “Troy” at the Dominion Theatre in London, on June 3, 1988 (YouTube). The audio track is posted to Apple Music and Spotify, but for the full experience you most definitely need to watch the video.

• Her live performance of “The Last Day of Our Acquaintance” in Rotterdam on October 30, 1990 (YouTube).

These two are of a piece, showing her dynamic range, mastery of quiet-loud-quiet, sudden turns of ferocity, and facility with acoustic guitar.4 Since I already posted the “Troy” video in an earlier post (see “Sprawl 2 (Mountains Beyond Mountains”), it’ll be “Acquaintance” pasted in here.

• Her performance of “Mandinka” on Late Night with David Letterman, September 7, 1988 (YouTube). Two of my all-time favorite people (for altogether different reasons) in the same frame. With downcast eyes she walks meekly onto the stage set. Then Dave’s backing band gets started, she just switches on, and you can see firsthand what music did for her.

• Her appearance at the Bob Dylan Tribute on October 16, 1992, less than two weeks after the SNL appearance.

I don’t need to narrate this. You’ll see that she absorbs boos and abuse from the audience for more than two minutes before breaking into “War” all over again, but with a wild and tuneless abandon. Still defiant, but this video shows what she was suddenly up against and the toll it was taking on her.

Today’s song is “Drink Before the War” (Apple Music, Spotify), probably my favorite of her songs, which I was surprised and pleased to find holding second place (!) in Apple’s Top Songs list for Sinéad O’Connor. I’m seeing that this is likely because it was featured in an episode of Euphoria on HBO—I don’t know in what context or for what purpose, but I don’t need to. However we got here is good enough for me.

I could go on about Sinéad and Today’s Comparator. About how one stood courageously against war and corruption and the other can’t get enough of either. About how one never gets even the slightest hint of a comeuppance, while the other was required to bear up continually under her unjust deserts. How one of them titled an album I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, while the other demonstrates limitless greed at every turn. Better, I think, to end this post with these lines, which are something else and need to be sung all the way up into the red:

STOP TALKING ABOUT WAR, ’CAUSE YOU KNOW WE’VE HEARD IT ALL BEFORE. WHY DON’T YOU GO OUT THERE AND DO SOMETHING USEFUL?

Alt-Rock Chicks (“ARCs”), if you’ll pardon the term, were ever the apple of our eyes, back in the day. To the Malls we went looking—in nearby Eastwood on weeknights, maybe as far afield as Southern Park on a Saturday afternoon—casting our eyes up and down the concourse looking for striped tights, Doc Martens boots, and those signature bobbed haircuts, parted on the side and thrown down over one eye. If they weren’t subtle, they’d be wearing a Cure T-shirt—the one with Robert Smith in silhouette, holding his guitar and gazing off into the distance, captioned Boys Don’t Cry. Maybe, too, an oversized leather jacket.

There was never any kind of ARC uniform—the above and other style elements were just markers and signals, meant to communicate to us and others that their wearers (like us?) had opted out of the baseline teen hierarchy bullshit. If we’d dared to talk to them, we would have expected dry wit, sharp social criticism, and possibly, too, after a few minutes, that profound mutual understanding with a member of the opposite sex that we all ached for when the John Hughes movie ended and Simple Minds played over the credits.

We were, after all, the boys who pined for Ally Sheedy’s “basket case” character in The Breakfast Club, rather than Molly Ringwald’s princess. Or at least I was. And after Martha Quinn left us for parts unknown, I fell hard for Tabitha Soren, the pale waifish redhead who co-anchored MTV News. Too often my heart jumped when I heard the theme music announcing an upcoming news segment, only to have it sink in my chest when Kurt Loder turned up in Tabitha’s rightful place. Probably a fine human being, Kurt Loder. But screw him.

ARCs in the Mahoning Valley ranged from the Harriet Wheeler-types, with their upturned jean cuffs and occasional flowered dresses over shoe-cut Docs, to Full-On Goth Girls (“FOGGs”), jack-booted and copping Siouxsie Sioux’s black-on-white makeup chic, if not her teased coiffure. Hairspray was out of bounds and anathema to the ARCs, and for this (among a great many other things) we owed them our undying devotion. Come to think of it, Siouxsie herself had moved on from the Aqua Net by this time, if the video for “Peek-A-Boo” (Apple Music, Spotify) was any indication.

We all had our crushes around town. The Girl Who Worked at the Record Store. The Other One Who Worked the Movie World Box Office. Later on, That Girl in the Biker Jacket at Mean Mr. Mustard’s. None of these fascinations ever went anywhere. I don’t think we even got their names. We gulped, took our CDs to the sales desk/ stammered out the name of the movie (um—yeah, so, uh, just one for “Weekend at Bernie’s”?), plunked down wrinkled bills, and shambled off whence we came. So it goes: forever casualties of our own shyness. Then again, let’s not presume, either, that any of us were cool enough to have made any headway here, even if we had the nerve.

Then, from nowhere, a breakthrough. I’m a freshman in college, two states away from my gang back home, some subset of whom are enrolled at Ohio State. Around this time I’m burning through $150 a month in long-distance charges, just to stay caught up with friends. I’m on one of my weekly calls with the guys in Columbus, and Friend 1 tells me Friend 2 is dating an Alt-Rock Chick. And not just an ARC, but a Full-On Goth Girl.

<Pause at this point to note that I will use pseudonyms here, in deference to the privacy of the persons involved. Though probably half of the Readership knows who I’m talking about or could guess. Okay, resuming:>

Wait—what?!? I said to Friend 1, whom we’ll call Gord. Voted “Preppiest” by our graduating class earlier in the spring, Friend 2 was very buttoned-down in his social habits. Not very much of a risk-taker, and arguably the most careful of anyone in our crew, which wasn’t exactly populated with Sids Vicious or Keith Moons. That said, he was probably the most courageous of us, in terms of dealing with girls. Male rivals found his J Crew rugby shirts, pegged trousers, and Bass boat shoes triggering and tended to break bottles over his head, when they saw him chatting up their classmates. These assaults caused Friend 2 to lower his profile and avoid the rougher parts of town. We’ll call this friend Carlton.

Gord confirmed to me that Carlton had linked up with an ARC/ FOGG [not-]named Azrael, who was edgy, stylish, and gorgeous. I probably should have been thrilled to hear this news—happy on Carlton’s behalf, or some shit—but I wasn’t. I was annoyed. If I wasn’t Second Preppiest in Howland High’s Class of ’91, I was certainly a Top 5 Finisher in the voting, and with all that baggage even I wanted to beat up Carlton for his ridiculous shoes. And now suddenly he’d outflanked us all and was dating a FOGG? It didn’t seem fair and it didn’t feel earned. More than anything, though, I was jealous. Good on my brain for trying to recast that pettiness as a question of justice, based on how Carlton was continuing to dress. But in my heart of hearts I knew what I felt and why I felt it.

To be clear: I wasn’t super-affected by this news. As close as I was to Carlton and Gord (and still am today), I only dipped into the lives of these two for a couple hours a week, on Saturday afternoons after the Buckeyes played. Otherwise I got on with my life, which consisted of Tecmo Super Bowl tournaments, wing-eating contests, a shitload of History reading, and playing Tetris on the Mac until I bled out of my eyes. And I’d started writing for the student paper. This is me saying that upon first learning about Azrael, for sure I was irked, but I quickly moved on.

In fact I’d probably forgotten all about her by the time I got the next call from Gord, relating that the situation had soured. Turns out Azrael had a boyfriend at home—I feel like Gord described this kid as a practicing Satanist, so let’s call him Anton—and was cheating on him with Carlton. We can only speculate about how the boyfriend caught on. Could be a concerned third party reported out after spotting Az and Carlton PDAing in public, could be Anton hired a Jake Gittes type to tail his wayward lover around Columbus. Or maybe Az declared the affair to him in the course of an argument. Whatever happened, let’s assume Anton was a resourceful sort, because in addition to finding Azrael out, he was able not just to ID the Other Man but also to get hold of his mailing address—and this was pre-World Wide Web.

I mention the address because Gord was telling me Carlton had received a package in the mail the other day, and when he opened it, he found a sheep’s eyeball inside. Shortly after that, Azrael surfaced to explain to him that Anton had placed a curse on him—or was at least in the process of doing it. This was a Three-Stage Escalating Curse By Mail, starting with a sheep’s eyeball and ending with a dead cat. I forget what the middle one was, but I do remember that all this was going to culminate in Carlton taking delivery of the dead cat. And based on that information, Carlton was freaked out. Now he was on the line with me, unburdening himself of his many regrets and concerns regarding Azrael and Anton.

As I took in all this information, I considered how much of Carlton’s freak-out was fully understandable, as opposed to the overreaction of a person—and this was the residual envy talking—who never should have been dating Azrael to begin with. For sure no one wants unsolicited biomatter sent to them in the mail, and all the worse if you know the sender is a Goth Kid you’ve been cuckolding on the regular. On the flipside, the remedy for somebody mailing you a sheep’s eyeball, a [something else], and a dead cat is simple and straightforward: you throw that shit away and forget about it. I never understood Carlton to be overly superstitious. Raised Catholic, yes, but it’s not like he or any of the rest of us understood that upon arrival of the cat, the curse was fully in effect and he was a dead man walking. When it comes down to it, what Carlton was facing wasn’t any kind of supernaturally-imposed doom so much as having to live with the knowledge that somewhere out in the wide world, there was an Anton who had markers of insanity, hated his guts, and knew where he lived.

On that score, sure: go ahead and freak out.

Just now I consulted a chatbot about whether this was a legit, lore-supported curse or just some bespoke bullshit Anton slapped together on the toilet between readings of Strange Tales. We all dissected sheep’s eyeballs in high school biology, so it wouldn’t have been impossible or even difficult to get hold of one of those. And when Gord and Carlton described the eye to me, sure enough it was preserved in formaldehyde. So it’s not like Anton went out into the countryside and harvested this organ with a melon baller, uttering Latin incantations while he scooped. Still: it seemed worth asking the Internet whether there exists any esoteric writing describing a curse founded on the presentment of an ovine sight organ. And if this was an Actual Thing, and it did involve three stages, maybe the chatbot could refresh my recollection on what the middle stage was.

The chatbot’s answer:

• There is no well‑known, canonical curse in classic occult literature whose defining feature is “deliver a sheep’s eyeball to the victim.”

• The components—animal eyes, sheep symbolism, and delivering a disturbing object as a magical threat—do appear in scattered folk‑magic practices and in modern, often improvisational or fictional material.

• Where such a practice does appear, it’s best understood as a symbolic, syncretic “contact curse” that leverages the animal’s symbolism and the psychological impact of the delivery, rather than as a formal, traditional rite with a specific name and lineage.

All this tracks. Anton was a dick, felt wronged, and had a rudimentary sense of occult practice. So he went to the Yellow Pages, found a nearby scientific supply store, and procured Stage 1 of a fully-fabricated three-stage “curse” protocol that had no gnostic or black magical underpinning and was really just a program of intimidation. I will jump ahead in the story now and point out that neither Stage 2, whatever it was, nor Stage 3, the dead cat, was ever consummated. I like to think I played a role in Anton ceasing and desisting from this project, and over the years I’ve derived some small amount of satisfaction from that read of the situation. But as I sit down here now and really think it through, it’s likely Anton just never had it in him to rustle up a dead cat.1 The sheep’s eyeball was enough to separate Carlton from Az; after that he could call off the dogs.

Rewind now to that moment right after Stage 1, when I first got the download on all this from Carlton and Gord. I hung up the phone, and I immediately got to thinking about Azrael. First, because now she was even more alluring. I mean, I’d already heard from Gord that she was a stunning GG who wasn’t above test-driving preppy kids like us. And now I knew that she consorted with men who were dark wizards and/or psychopaths—very likely just the latter, but still that was a cool kind of dangerous. Second, I was also considering the wellbeing of one of my very best friends, and I wasn’t sure I understood Azrael’s motivations here. Carlton cracks open a package with a sheep’s eyeball inside it, and bam! she is promptly on the scene, fully aware of what Anton is up to, and all-too-eager to talk about it. Was this some kind of honey trap she and Anton cooked up together to prank or extort a J Crew kid? Did she find the whole situation flattering to her vanity?

I rang Carlton right back. Give me her number, I said. I’m calling her.

Minutes later I was speaking directly with Azrael. I gave her my name, got started describing my relationship with Carlton—I know who you are, she said. Carlton talks about you. Okay, then—let’s get into it:

Carlton is freaking out, I said.

I know that, she said.

No, you don’t. Carlton is FREAKING OUT. At least 90% of this was me getting the point across that Carlton was FREAKING OUT and didn’t deserve this. Maybe 10% of this was me saying, (I mean, if it were ME, *I* probably wouldn’t be FREAKING OUT, but you know, he’s RISK-AVERSE …)

Well, what do you want me to do about it? she asked.

I want you to PUT YOUR BOYFRIEND ON A LEASH.

The conversation might have ended right there. There wasn’t much more either of us had to say to one another, and I don’t have any recollection of how she responded.

Long story short, the Carlton-Azrael relationship hit the skids. Whether there was any meaningful prospect of an enduring romance, a love for the ages here—we’ll never know. Carlton’s happily married with three kids. He did great. He’s fit, accomplished, he has all his hair. All this to say, I see no indication that the third of a curse that Anton cast had any meaningful effect on the progress of Carlton’s life. All’s well that ends well, I suppose. And by the way, nothing about this is intended to besmirch the general reputation of the ARCs and FOGGs of the late ’80s and early ’90s. Dude just happened to get hold of a live one here.

But there is a coda to this. Several months later, the Cure were touring. It was summertime, and I was back in Ohio. A group of us went up to the Coliseum in Richfield to see the show. Cure concerts are always terrific for people-watching, and that’s especially true if it’s 1992 and you’re an eighteen-year-old on the prowl for Alt-Rock Chicks and Goth Girls. We’d had our tickets punched and were slow-walking the interior concourse, taking it all in before we settled in our seats. At one point Gord and I were leaning up against the side wall, and a girl walked by. Just one among dozens (hundreds?) of ARCs crowding the Coliseum, but she stood out. A borderline Goth Girl: edgy, stylish, and stunning. I pointed her out to Gord.

He slapped his hands over his face. THAT’S AZRAEL, he said. Then he turned toward the wall, waiting for her to pass before he picked up again: And it’s UNBELIEVABLE that you just picked her out of a crowd. I laughed. Gord got serious. No, seriously: steer clear of that. She’s trouble. As if I were remotely in harm’s way here.

A half-hour later, we were watching the opening act. It was the Cranes, a four-piece from Portsmouth in the tradition of early Cocteau Twins, except that Alison Shaw’s vocals make you think of the REDRUM twins from The Shining. Gord and I were duly impressed, first with the music but also with the eligible ARC standing behind the microphone, who if memory serves was wearing a pair of those signature black- and white-striped tights.

The number that stuck with us was “Starblood” (Apple Music, Spotify), and funny enough, if you look up the Setlist.fm entry for this gig, it’s the only song listed there. A humdinger, this one: you can see both why they were ending their set with it and why Gord and I, and apparently the rest of the Internet, can’t remember anything else the Cranes played that night. Below is a roughly contemporaneous live performance they did for MTV Europe. Watch the drummer swing for the fences, with sticks behind his head on every upstroke. Wait for the guitars to land, slashing and grinding.

I’ll kiss you with my starblood, she sings. My wound is deep and may never be mended. Okay—is this a kind of seduction thing, or an act of retaliation? Some ritualistic incantation? Maybe A CURSE? The backing music provides the kind of mood that would indicate a curse—that strongly suggests we listeners would do well to avoid contact with Alison Shaw’s starblood, really at all costs. Yet for the four minutes the Cranes were playing this song, Gord and I were fixated on the singer.

“Starblood” ended abruptly. The guitar and bass players decided they were done, chucked their guitars on the ground, and stalked off-stage, with Alison trailing them. There were no thank-yous or waves, they didn’t linger for applause. The amps fed back beautifully-terribly, and the Cranes were history. Gord and I looked at each other and agreed: this was awe-inspiring and bad-ass. And one more case of us falling hard for the Siren Song of the Alt-Rock Chick.

Peter Gabriel has always been a tough nut for me to crack. I should be clear: I don’t dislike his music, and in fact I think several of his songs are terrific. (You could probably guess which ones.) The problem is I’ve always felt I should love Peter Gabriel, and it was just a matter of time before everything clicked, I took a deeeeeeep self-propelled dive into his oeuvre, and I never looked back. But to date it hasn’t happened for me.

Last July my feed served up this footage of a Genesis TV appearance in 1974:

On the strength of that still shot, I put aside my strong feelings about prog rock and watched the video. I won’t say I was mesmerized for the full 7:47, because at some point midway through I started hammering out texts to friends, link attached, insisting that they drop whatever they were doing and watch this immediately. This is how it is when you have a phone in your pocket. You’re available to be mesmerized for four minutes max, then your thumbs start to twitch and you have to tell people about it.

For sure Peter’s “Ace Frehley Meets Age of Aquarius and Technicolor Dreamcoat with Bonus Gene Simmons Bat Wings” vibe did exactly what it was supposed to do: it grabbed my attention and to varying degrees held it through the end of the video. (Contrast Mike Rutherford’s Barry Gibb getup and Phil Collins’ white overalls1, which did nothing for me. Any wonder Peter walked a year later?) The song PG and his white-clad backup band were rocking here was “Watcher of the Skies” (studio version: Apple Music, Spotify). There’s no disputing this is prog rock, full speed ahead and damn the music critics. Obvious classical influence, nerd-alert sci-fi lyrical concept, irregular time signatures, objectionable organ play horning into the mix: all that’s more than enough to flush this track into a prog designation. Yet by the seventh minute of the video, as I’m watching Peter herky-jerk up, down, and around with the tambourine in front of his face, I am digging the hell out of this and thinking:

Oh! Maybe my Pathway to Pete starts with Genesis?!?

That notion brought to mind the handful of reliable people who have come at me down through the years talking up the 1974 record, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (Apple Music, Spotify), which was Genesis’s last release before Peter went solo. I never acted on these recommendations, first because for the longest time I wasn’t gonna play any music dating from the dead period between The White Album and The Ramones, then after I moderated my position on the time frame (after all … NEU!), I still wasn’t ready for a concept album from a prog rock band. To this day I haven’t spent even a minute with Said Recumbent Lamb, but on that particular night last July, after taking in “Watcher of the Skies,” I was all spun up, and I went chasing other Gabriel-era Genesis live material, looking specifically for other instances of aggressive front-man costuming.

Pretty quickly I found this (zombie hobbit, old-Bono mask), this (flower-face, proto-Joker, Peter-hedron) and this (Aztec Oberon, reverse-mohawk)—all of which at some point surface some PG flute work, which I also have managed to get my head around recently, having severed that instrument’s longstanding primary association with Ian Anderson and reassigned it to Florian Schneider. This project required some mental reprogramming work, but five listens to Autobahn (Apple Music, Spotify) and five rewatches of “Ruckzuck” at Rockpalast (YouTube) should be enough to get you there, too. For sure Peter’s flauting in these live vids has more to do with Jethro Tull than with Kraftwerk. My point is I’m finding ways to work over, around, and through longstanding biases.

My read on ’72-to-’74 rounding-into-form Genesis right now is that I really like parts of it and really hate other parts. That’s basically where I stand with Led Zeppelin, too, which we can talk about another day. On the Zep side, though, it’s a song-by-song thing, whereas these Genesis song-cycles cover all kinds of territory, so that I might go through three or more wild mood swings within a track.

“Dancing with the Moonlit Knight” (Apple Music, Spotify), from 1973’s Selling England by the Pound, is one where for a significant majority of its eight minutes I am all-in. That folk-medieval opening, with Peter conjuring up longing and Romantic memories of Albion, featuring a Faerie Queene and the Thames river god, has real emotional heft, and as the band gets progressively (ahem) more involved, they manage not to fuck it up for at least 4.5 minutes. At this point, and not wanting to push my luck, I would have happily accepted a fadeout. Alas, the song blows right by that available off-ramp, and accordingly and unsurprisingly we find ourselves quickly hijacked to Cringey Jazz-Synth Land. The spell Peter et al. so effectively wove to that point is promptly broken, and the song becomes very much a product of its self-indulgent time.

“Watcher of the Skies” does similarly imperfect work. When they heavy-up that ratatat 6/4 theme with guitar, bass, and drums, I’m up off the couch like Beavis, punching the air: YEAH! YEAH! DAHkata duh duh duh duh DAH daDAH DADAdum DADAdum! Relatively speaking, Genesis do adhere to a kind of discipline here, never straying too far from that central theme. Still, you can feel the musicians chafing at these constraints the whole damn time. They want so badly to explore their instruments, flood this thing with snycopated note-slams and bullshit prog organ, and sink the effort. The mix is loaded with dark potential energy; it’s just that right when the other four are about to spring off into a song-killing instrumental tangent, Gabriel abruptly starts another verse. Almost as if to police them—and thank God for that.

I will allow that on “Watcher” and “Moonlit Knight,” the rock-to-wank ratio is considerably higher than on other tracks I’ve tried, such as “Supper’s Ready” (Apple Music, Spotify). Accordingly, until such time as I can dispense with other longstanding prog-based prejudices, these will be my two take-home songs from early Genesis. There may be others out there, but I expect it’ll be a few more years before I find them. I need to pace myself with this. Give me an afternoon every couple of months: I’ll dip in, swallow a handful of Tums, and moderately rock out. There’s a reasonably good time to be had with these records—just not the entrée to Full-on Peter Gabriel Appreciation that I hoped it would be.

More recently I tried digging into PG’s self-titled solo albums. Pause here just to note that he issued four such records and left it to us to disambiguate them. I half-hate that and half-respect it. Anyway, I found the first of these (“Car,” 1977) in the spanking-new vinyl rack on the ground floor of our spanking-new town library. Brought it home with a copy of Iggy’s Lust for Life to test-drive on the platter here. I played Car three times on a Sunday last month, and I have zero memory of what I heard. I know that I didn’t hear any of the objectionable elements that have slowed my roll on early Genesis. None too soon, 1977 did arrive, and Dude duly set aside prog for art rock. The short version is I feel here kinda like I do about Roxy Music: appreciative, attracted to the production considerations, and wondering why the tunes don’t stick. I mean, other than the gorgeous “Solsbury Hill” (Apple Music, Spotify), which of course I already knew but didn’t remember was on this record until just now, when I looked in again on the tracklist.

Jumping ahead to the Big Deal, which I understand to be the third record (“Melt”, 1980), a copy of which was on offer for a good price at the record shop just down the road, last I checked. As I’m now at the point where there aren’t many records I desperately want but don’t already have, I made a run at trying to like this one. Again, I love the hit, which here was “Games Without Frontiers” (Apple Music, Spotify).

(Side Note: the house next door to mine growing up had two Siberian Huskies named “Suki” and “Sasha.” I’ve belatedly realized that the neighbors probably picked those names out of “Games Without Frontiers.” They must have been Peter Gabriel fans! This tracks demographically: they were maybe ten to fifteen years younger than my parents and could well have cut their teeth on those early Genesis records. Knowing this now, I remember these neighbors entirely differently. Funny how that works.)

There’s more to like on Melt than on Car—or at least more that is of interest to me. I’m hearing Kate Bush supplied uncredited backup vocals, and Phil Collins contributed drums, but under Peter’s strict instruction that he must not strike a cymbal on the record. And of course in these sessions Phil was introduced to producer Steve Lillywhite’s “gated reverb” strategy for miking and recording acoustic drum play. Per the lore on this matter, Lillywhite invented and first used gated reverb on Siouxsie’s first record, The Scream (see “Helter Skelter”), two years earlier. From where I’m sitting, introducing Lillywhite to Phil Collins may be one of the most historically significant things Peter Gabriel ever did—and that’s saying something, because even if I can’t fall head over heels for Gabriel’s music, he’s had a massive and hugely influential career.

Probably the best way to explain the gated reverb effect is as follows: it’s what the drums sound like on those bad-ass Genesis and Phil Collins records of the early 1980s. The toms fill that Mike Tyson air-drums in The Hangover (YouTube)—that’s Mike’s favorite part of the song precisely because of the gated reverb. It provides a muscular and crushing sound that, while generally associated with the 1980s, for all intents and purposes belongs to Phil. Fills are fills—every rock song worth a damn has a fistful of them. But Phil’s fills, during this time period at least, are individually memorable, arguably generationally-defining moments. And that’s at least in part because the production ensures that they come down like a ton of bricks.

And now—[trumpet flourish]—we’re off to the races talking about Phil Collins. I may take the scenic route here sometimes, but eventually I do bring us home. I want to be clear about Phil: I always liked him. I earlier wrote that the Pet Shop Boys set me down the path to becoming an omnivorous and obsessive rock geek, see “Paninaro,” noting specifically that around the time I fell for Tennant and Lowe I was also listening to Phil Collins (it would have been 1985’s No Jacket Required) and the Miami Vice soundtrack, which of course had today’s title track slapped smack in the middle of it. So I might as readily have credited Phil Collins alongside the Pet Shop Boys, but my mind wasn’t disposed to go there—I think because in the rock world, or at least in my rock world, dweeby balding men in suits who used to be in prog bands aren’t cool. Adam Ant is cool (see “Kings of the Wild Frontier”), and the Pet Shop Boys are cool. And it was the latter who lit a fire under me to seek out and buy more stuff that was cool.

Fast-forward to 2026, and here I am casting about trying to find a way to get into Peter Gabriel, when I’ve had his white-overalled drummer kicking around in the background of my life for forty-plus years, just being awesome. Aside from the occasional misfire—“Another Day in Paradise” (link withheld) and “Illegal Alien” (Apple Music, Spotify) haven’t aged well, even if the latter, which he recorded with Genesis, is a good tune—all Phil did in the 1980s was travel the wide world with gated reverb in his holster, riddling the landscape with hits. And not just hits, but hits that were terrific songs. That “Easy Lover” (Apple Music, Spotify) collab with Philip Bailey of (as I just learned) Earth, Wind & Fire2? Amazing, and listen to the drums. And riding right alongside it are “Abacab” (Apple Music, Spotify), “Sussudio” (Apple Music, Spotify), “Take Me Home” (Apple Music, Spotify: DRUMS DRUMS DRUMS), pretty much all of Invisible Touch (Apple Music, Spotify), which did water down my beloved reverb effect with all its “state-of-the-art” electronic drum pad work (sigh), and so on and so forth.

Consider “Against All Odds” (Apple Music, Spotify), off the soundtrack to the movie of the same name. I (uncharacteristically) hated it at the time, but on a fresh listen, wow, does he deliver on the vocals. We tend to discount, or at least not consider, Phil Collins’s singing chops, but they’re right there, and well-documented in the historical record. Oh—and if I weren’t already inclined to effuse and enthuse about the guy, I just read the other day that this 6/4 ratatat business in “Watcher of the Skies,” that makes me turn into Beavis? Phil’s idea. And of course it was.

Yesterday, and for the first time in at least twenty years, I listened to “Mama” (Apple Music, Spotify), which is the opening track on Genesis’s 1983 self-titled record. The video was in MTV’s regular rotation back in the day, and it’s a barnburner of a song—particularly when you consider it was almost seven minutes long, opened the album, and served as its first single. In retrospect, it’s apparent that “Mama” means to take the formula from today’s title track and adapt it to a Genesis level of strangeness, which the band hadn’t entirely discarded after Gabriel’s departure. Same low tempo, same ominous feel, and with a similar bare-bones programmed beat pacing the track during its slow build. A new element is the strange hacking laughter from Phil, which evidently means to signal some kind of psychological deterioration. And true to the formula, the real drums arrive late, well after the midpoint of the track, but they come on like gangbusters, catapulting Phil’s vocals into a higher gear.

I played “Mama” three times on the drive into Boston yesterday. Arguably the mood of the song—conveying desperation and psychic fracture—was a perfect soundtrack for a guy trying to park his car in the North End on a sunny Saturday afternoon in the lamb days of March. But if I had been in a sensory deprivation chamber playing this over a Walkman, I think it would have rocked just as much.

Let’s turn now to “In the Air Tonight” (Apple Music, Spotify), because in addition to supplying a blueprint and jumping-off point for “Mama,” it is goddam awesome on its own terms. It’s another of these songs I’ve known for years, one that in fact I can’t remember not knowing, so that I have to labor to give it a “fresh” listen and fully grasp the genius of it. And I would urge you all to do exactly that: dial this track up on the streamers, pop on/ in your noise-canceling handphones/ earbuds, and crank up the volume. Six minutes later, I don’t think you will disagree with my hot take that it might be one of the best studio recordings—i.e., combination of composition, arrangement, performance, and production—really of all time.

The song came out in 1981, on Phil’s first solo record, Face Value. Whoever decides these things sensibly put it first in the running order. The single charted in the summertime—I was seven going on eight years old. I most definitely heard it on the radio and later, when I got access to MTV (see “Dancing with Myself”), I would have seen the video a handful of times, too.

Most of the video consists of what you see above in the still shot, which is Phil’s face pushed forward out of the blackness, singing the song. Looking back on it, I wonder if the director copped this idea from the judges and jurors presiding over the trial of Zod et al. in Superman (YouTube). It would never have occurred to me back in the day, but in my middle age it seems obvious that this video is the product of strategies consciously adopted to make little Phil Collins look like a bad-ass—including by obscuring his hairline (which they went ahead and cropped completely from the album cover). These visuals, combined with the icy electronics, delay effect, and sparse but effective guitars, present Phil Collins in full Gary Numan mode. But here he out-Numans Gary. The subtle intensity, the measured antagonism of the lyrics, even that one-off Vocoder trigger that kicks off the second verse: all of it fits neatly together to do one job, which is

TO LAY THE GROUNDWORK FOR THE PHIL FILL.

Of course Iron Mike spends his afternoons air-drumming this in Vegas. What human being with a soul hears this song and doesn’t? What drummer-type doesn’t cycle through all the follow-up Phil Fills as well? GATED GODDAM REVERB, people. Never employed to better effect than here.

I happened to be in Miami a few weekends ago. My friend Mike is in the habit of renting a convertible Mustang whenever he’s in Florida. As we rode over the bridge from Miami Beach on Saturday afternoon, I futzed around with Apple Car Play, trying to find that Miami Vice soundtrack. I was looking for the Jan Hammer title music; what I got was “In the Air Tonight.” Not perfectly on point, because the sun was high in the sky. In the show—the pilot, actually—the song played while Crockett and Tubbs were riding undercover to break up a midnight drug deal. Still, this is something all of you should add to your bucket list: drive around Miami in a convertible, with “In the Air Tonight” playing. Sit quietly with your driver or passenger, as applicable, and listen.

I haven’t given up on Peter Gabriel. I believe I will get there, eventually, and be much better off for making the effort. Phil Collins, though: he’s been with me—and I with him—all along. I just needed to take a minute to say so. Consider that omission addressed today. Whether this holder of eight Grammys, six Brit Awards, two Golden Globes, and an Oscar has been waiting for this moment, all his life is an altogether different question. But if you’re out there reading, Phil, I just wanted to say thanks.

Arguably the most valuable by-product of being professionally trained as an attorney is the ability to hold—comfortably—two conflicting thoughts in your head. Of course that’s true, you’re saying. It enables you to talk out of both sides of your mouth. Ha, yeah: lawyer jokes. I could counter that we attorneys are in fact better positioned than the rest of you to navigate the current “disruptive” moment, where we’re up to our necks in information of varying levels of quality and yet/ therefore unable to reach any meaningful consensus on actual truths. That sounds like good fodder for a post—just not this one. Today I am going to talk out of both sides of my mouth, in support of these two irreconcilable propositions:

First, Natalie Merchant is insufferable as a front woman.

Second, 10,000 Maniacs’ In My Tribe LP is a gutsy and glorious ’80s alt-rock document that never fails to move me when I play it.

I didn’t naturally gravitate to the Maniacs, or to this record. I think the follow-up, Our Time in Eden, had landed, with “Candy Everybody Wants” (Apple Music, Spotify) earning radio time, before I ever played In My Tribe all the way through. I feel like a good and trusted friend—Mark or Alli?—had left a dubbed-to-cassette copy of Tribe in my car, so that I was playing it on summertime drives down State Route 11 to Youngstown in the early 1990s. Unlike her diffident fellow traveler Michael Stipe, see “You Are the Everything”/ Swan Swan H,” Natalie’s articulation is crystal-clear on this record. I read yesterday that producer Peter Asher shifted her vocals to the front of the mix, as against the Maniacs’ earlier releases—presumably so that we might best receive Ms. Merchant’s important messages and, by the light of her wisdom, grow into better versions of ourselves.

Grappling with such weighty issues as child abuse, depression, illiteracy, alcoholism, and military recruitment, In My Tribe pulls few punches. In fact, it’s fair to say the gloves are off, with Natalie throwing haymakers at the several sad-sack pugilists she’s written into her songs as Foils of Direct Address. Each of these characters, having exhibited a character defect or made a wrong choice, is subjected to withering and earned sung criticism from the Maniacs’ lead vocalist. The foils are given zero opportunity to respond—don’t talk! Natalie commands, I’m tired of the excuses—and in this respect they’re hardly pugilists at all. More like sides of beef hanging in a walk-in freezer for Rocky Balboa to tenderize with his bare knuckles. Not that Ms. Merchant would approve of boxing. Or for that matter, butchering animals.

Honestly, there’s a Salvador Dalí-level of high-horsing at work here, and I kinda feel like I’m the guy on the side of the road, trying to fend her off with a crucifix. God knows how many faults Natalie Merchant would find with me. If not a box set’s worth, certainly enough to fill a double-album.

So why do I like this record so much? This might be a classic case of grandfathering—of an album long ago settling into my personal canon and holding a place in my heart forever and ever, amen—even as its righteousness and unrelenting moral judgments grate on my fifty-year-old brain. I am of course living in a timeline where America has given a despotic satyr the Grover Cleveland treatment, I distantly recall Natalie urging my peers and me to rock the vote, and a generation later I understand that people like her are exactly why Democrats lose elections. Yet for all that, and for as often as these songs of carping and disapproval set my eyes clanking around in their bone-dry sockets, at least half the time they squeeze real tears out of them, too.

Last Thursday I picked up a rental car in Bradenton, Florida. The counter clerk walked me out to the lot, so that he could take four score and seven “Before” pictures of the car. I wondered what about my black Nissan Altima warranted this level of care, but there was nothing I could do about it until he finished. Three, maybe four minutes into this project, a woman’s voice tore through the humid air behind me. Screaming, cursing, threatening. I don’t remember any of the messaging. It was all over the place and barely coherent, except I could pick out the dozen or more curse words, which were delivered with spitting emphasis. The abuse and contumely weren’t necessarily directed at me or the Hertz clerk, but we were the only people within her considerable shouting distance who weren’t secured within locked cars. I turned my head (discreetly, I thought) over my shoulder to get a read on the situation, and my eyes landed briefly on a pedestrian cutting across the lot. She flashed her high-beams on me, pointed her finger, and I turned quickly back toward the car.

Ansell Adams over there continued calmly taking his umpteen shots of the Altima’s left-rear fender. Maybe this woman was a regular in his scene, and he knew from experience she was harmless. For my part, I was in a quandary: I didn’t want to turn toward her, for fear I’d provoke her to make a beeline for my throat. But I didn’t want to turn my back on her, either. I settled on a diagonal bearing, looking toweard the neighboring O M Minimart, while the woman Yosemite Sammed her way eastbound through the parking lot. After the Hertz guy had captured and stored his required gigabyte of photographic data on this nonentity of a car, I jumped quickly into the driver’s seat and motored off down the road to meet my parents at the Mexican joint.

Something prompted me to play In My Tribe on the way. Not sure what it was. Could be that I’d just been verbally flayed on hot asphalt without warning or justification, so by comparison it seemed as good a time as any to take in Natalie Merchant’s considerably gentler, and admittedly more warranted, character critiques. Or I just wanted a welcome and familiar record I could sing to in the car as I flounced along Florida State Route 44, stopping for three-minute reds every 200 yards.

In any case, I can count three separate instances singing along with Natalie during that drive, gleefully complicit in her castigation of the moral inferiors in her tribe, when I felt a sudden twinge behind my eyes and my voice cracked. Three distinct moments listening to this record where I choked up. These weren’t out-of-the-ordinary, convergence-of-factors, just-the-right-mood-listening-to-Brian-Eno kind of experiences. See “1/1.” I knew perfectly well these tears were coming, because these same three lines get me every time I listen to this record. For decades now.

Let’s talk about each of them.

First comes “What’s the Matter Here?” (Apple Music, Spotify). Given their shared subject matter and time of release, I think it’s reasonable to put this track side-by-side with Suzanne Vega’s “Luka” (Apple Music, Spotify), a song we all love to quote-knock.1 “Luka” landed first, gaining airplay in May and June 1987, while In My Tribe was in post-production. This would mean the Maniacs were in the studio when Suzanne’s Solitude Standing LP came out on April 1. I like to imagine Natalie stewing in a corner of the studio, as “Tom’s Diner” (Apple Music, Spotify) transitioned into “Luka” over the PA and it slowly dawned on her that she would be second to arrive with a single about child abuse. That Suzanne had beaten her to the punch by a matter of weeks, and with a track that actually humanizes the kid in question, rather than using him as a prop for her own moral aggrandizement.

That young boy without a name, who Natalie says is her favorite? Suzanne actually spoke to him, and his name is Luka. This disparity is revealed in the first lines of the respective songs, and Nat only loses ground from there. In “Luka” the child speaks throughout, and through his voice we are shown the lingering and tragic effects of abuse—Luka supposes he deserves this treatment, either because he is clumsy or crazy. And given the chance, he would retreat from the world: I guess I’d like to be alone, with nothing broken, nothing thrown. Just don’t ask me how I am. Contrast the narrative polemic of the Maniacs song, sung from the perspective of an outraged bystander who fantasizes about upstanding but never does. Who gave you the right to do this? she demands to know. Get this through that I don’t approve. Yet by song’s end we understand this is just her inner monologue:

I want to say, “What’s the matter here?” But I don’t dare say.

Um, okay. Could you maybe place an anonymous call to Social Services?

I’ll allow that the lyrical thrust of “What’s the Matter Here?” is altogether different from what Suzanne is proffering in “Luka.” A fair reading is that Natalie’s standing down, her failure to meet the moment, is what she wants to talk about, rather than child abuse per se. We’ll learn from the rest of the record that swallowing down disapproval doesn’t come easy for her. Biting her tongue here has to be excruciating. Yet parent-child relationships, at least in those days, are such that third parties don’t get to intervene. Or as she puts it: He’s your kid. Do as you see fit. And for sure, there’s no fourth verse of “Luka” where the child pours out his gratitude to Suzanne for rescuing him from his brutal home life. Presumably he goes right back up to that miserable second floor.

In this respect, the Maniacs song is subtler and more complex than “Luka.” There’s certainly place for both songs in the world, in the summer of 1987, and in my heart. And much as I cringe when Natalie goes on record (twice) with Get this through that I don’t approve—as if this finger-wag from an alt-pop singer counts for anything in a post-Edenic world of rage and pain—once we push past that maddening line (twice), I can set aside my annoyance and allow my knees to buckle at this point in the bridge:

Oh, these cold and lowly things that you do, I suppose you do because he belongs to you. But instead of love and a feel of warmth, you’ve given him these cuts and sores that don’t heal with time or with age.

Powerful stuff, there, and Ms. Merchant sings it with a conviction that lifts us (or at least me) finally out of Lisa Simpson Land to the heights of late-’80s 10-to-the-4th Power Mania. Accordingly, in the ten days since I resolved to write a post about Natalie Merchant, this verse has hammered at my consciousness. Certainly in my waking hours, but in my dreams, too, I suppose, given how readily it jumps to my lips when I roll over in the morning, shiver, quiver, and try to wake (Apple Music, Spotify).

The second moment I want to talk about (and yes, I’m taking these out of track order) comes on “Gun Shy” (Apple Music, Spotify). Here Natalie confronts her baby brother Jude, who two months ago joined the army, apparently while she was occupied with other matters. I always knew that you would take yourself far from home, as soon as, as far as you could go. [And as the song proceeds I think I understand why.] By the quarter-inch cut of your hair and the Army issue green, for the past eight weeks I can tell where you’ve been.

She says she doesn’t mean to argue or to hurt her brother’s feelings. I don’t mean to spoil your homecoming, Natalie insists, but in a moment of self-awareness that contributes greatly to why this record works as well as it does, she immediately adds … but baby brother, you should expect me to. Because there was a zero percent chance Natalie Merchant wouldn’t lecture Jude about this decision, calling out specifically her concern that he’ll be made into a drone of the state whose first impulse, when confronted with a problem, will be to spray it with bullets. There is a world outside of this room and when you meet it, promise me you won’t meet it with your gun.

Of course we have no idea what motivated Jude to enlist. It could have been the GI Bill. Or a craving for order, discipline, physical fitness, and a sense of purpose. (More than once I’ve wondered what I might have accomplished in this life, if I’d been put through the rigors of Basic Training or ROTC.) Rather than hear from her brother, Natalie would much prefer to speculate about what he’s thinking and feeling. So now does your heart pitter-pat with a patriotic song, when you see the stripes of Old Glory waving? I can’t tell if that’s taunting sarcasm or just womansplaining. Lindsay Bluth Fünke had her own penchant for performative activism, but did she ever corner Buster in this way, after he enlisted?2

Again, though, notwithstanding these objections, I goddam love this song, and most especially the uber-melodious gut-punch in the second verse: I hope the day never comes for “Here’s your live round, son. Stock and barrel, safety, trigger, here’s your gun.” There was no meaningful chance I would ever be drafted, but I sure had registered with SSS by the time I first heard “Gun Shy.” In fact, there may even have been a war on in Kuwait. All of which could explain why that line triggered so emotional a response from me, back in the day. Of course now, when on a monthly basis our military is yanked to this or that corner of the world to engage in ill-considered misadventures, I have two children I love more than my life, and I have zero trust that this government would not recklessly put them in harm’s way—yeah, sure, that bit is going to wind me up even more.

That’s separate and apart from the empathy I feel for Jude, trapped in a room with a big sister second-guessing the most consequential decision he has made in his life. Where were you eight weeks ago, Sis? (Note that it’s not clear, either, that Natalie approves of her sister getting married to a banker. This is the subject of the record’s next song, “My Sister Rose” (Apple Music, Spotify). Amid the jollity of the nuptials, Natalie instructs—possibly in a toast?—Sister Rose, take your mother’s place. Trade your home and your maiden name, for a list of vows and a veil of lace made a wife of you today. I may be carrying forward a bias I picked up from earlier songs, but I detect a bit of cutting subtext here.)

Finally, “Don’t Talk” (Apple Music, Spotify). I’m overdue to acknowledge the musicianship on this album, so I’ll do that now. There’s a bit of Mick Fleetwood’s drums from “Go Your Own Way” (Apple Music, Spotify) here. This makes some sense, considering the frayed-relationship subject matter, and I’m such a sucker for that beat. It registers as, I dunno, earnest and pleading. I couldn’t say whether that feel inheres in the rhythm itself or is a product of its association with these two terrific and powerful songs. And oh, these guitars! “Don’t Talk” is straightahead rock, a marked departure from the rest of the record, and the Maniacs really deliver on it.

Once again, Natalie has grievances to air—this time with her live-in romantic partner, who has come home drunk. As he is wont to do: forever tossing back more than [his] share, this guy, and blaming her for his shortcomings. You’ll look for a close and easy mark and you’ll see me as fair game. Unlike Jude, who passively receives his lecture, or the “What’s the Matter Here?” parents, who are never treated to what Natalie is thinking (and to be fair, would have no passable defense), Dude here is trying to get a can opener into the conversation. And Nat is not having it. Don’t talk. Listen to me instead. As with the other two installments in this Trilogy of Reproof, there is real nuance here. One reason Natalie wants Homo alcoholicus to keep his trap shut is she has a habit of taking the bait. She doesn’t trust herself with him.

Which brings me to the third, and for me the most powerful of Natalie Merchant’s tear-jerking lines on this record:

Your talk is the finest I have heard … so don’t talk.

I just don’t know how she does it, and for this reason, I feel like this post isn’t as fair to 10,000 Maniacs as I want it to be. Like, I know exactly why I find In My Tribe so exasperating. I can—and did—write at length about it. By contrast, I can’t with any precision pin down why I find the record equally exhilarating. It might be as simple as this: there’s that old adage that you miss all the shots you don’t take. Conversely, if you take all kinds of shots, many of them will miss, but some will hit the target dead-on. And I suppose that’s what Natalie has got up to here. Confidently and with commitment, she fires one arrow after another at her listeners’ hearts. The misfires can be brutal, but the hits are plentiful and forceful enough3 that you can find this record massively annoying and love it to death at the same time.

If that sounds like Lawyer Talk, it is. And I stand by it.

There’s an old joke that goes, If you’re young and a conservative, you don’t have a heart. If you’re old and a liberal, you don’t have a brain. Although I can’t embrace the sentiment—especially now—I’ve always understood the logic of it. It’s certainly true in my life that as I’ve progressed in age, I’ve turned away from wanting to change the world for the better toward just getting through this unscathed. Put differently, I don’t think it’s especially ignoble that my life’s goal is to get myself and my family into a position where current events and government bullshit can’t hurt us. Human beings want to boil up the atmosphere? Fine, sure. I’ll make sure we can afford our cooling suits. Americans want to put their civil rights, personal safety, and constitutional republic on the slab because some blonde chick lost a swim race to a person with testicles? Whatever. I’ve got a backup plan for EU citizenship. And so on.

Problem is these particular clowns are worming their way into my life, all the damn time. I can shut off the news, but I still have to go to work, where I’m on a 9-to-5-and-sometimes-weekends collision course with the federal government. I can plan an overseas vacation—set aside time to leave this capsized country in the dust for ten days, rally and recuperate. Nope: not happening, because the other day the U.S. President rubbed his two brain cells together and decided to start a war, and the Airbnb we booked on Crete is parked two miles from an American naval base.

Now I get it. I’m (fairly) safely ensconced in Boston, actually now on a plane to New Orleans, having adjusted my travel plans. No one’s raining down missiles on my city, demanding its unconditional surrender, nor am I one of the hundreds of thousands of Americans caught overseas, reading State Department warnings urging them to evacuate the increasing number of nations drawn into this conflict—while offering no useful plan or suggestion for how they might do it. So maybe I’m a dick to complain that I don’t get to go to Greece, or that I had to pay an ad hoc war tax in the form of a non-refundable Airbnb reservation. Far be it from me to begrudge a $900 involuntary contribution to the peace and prosperity we can surely expect on the far side of this whimsical detonation of the entire Middle East. You can’t lower egg prices without breaking all the eggs.

But for a couple days last week, I was in a bit of a snit about it all. Hemmed in by five-foot snowbanks, fending off seasonal affective disorder, with three more excruciating weeks to wait before the welcome distraction of baseball, I started to feel a little woe-is-me. A little self-absorbed. I even paused a minute to wonder if I’m the only autonomously sentient party to this simulation, and everyone else is an NPC working to stick it to me, just to see how I’ll react. And my reaction last Monday night was to watch videos on YouTube while I sat and stewed.

I started with Gary Numan’s “Metal.”

From there YouTube made all the calls, and they really got after it:

• “Eighties” by Killing Joke (YouTube). Lots of images of the earlier Ayatollah here, amid other grim reminders that history repeats, time is a flat circle, and I have to push, I have to STRUGGLE.

• “In the Flat Field” by Bauhaus (YouTube). Prompting me to keen along with Peter: I GET BORED. I DO GET BORED. IN THE FLAT FEE-HEE-HEE-HEE-HEEEELD!

• Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” (YouTube). If only. Stupidity and hatred have such a head start on this.

• “Rock the Casbah” (YouTube). The king called out his jet fighters. Drop your bombs between the minarets. A bit on the nose, that one.

• “Destination Unknown” (YouTube) by Missing Persons. Throwing my scrambled vacation plans back in my face. Life is so strange when you don’t know your destination. Fuck off.

• Bauhaus again: “The Man with the X-Ray Eyes” (YouTube). Not actually a video; just a series of still shots of the band. Which is fine because at this point I have seen too much: WIPE AWAY MY EYES.

I considered whether any of these songs had enough juice to carry a Take Take post. In another week, maybe—I reserve my rights—but in the here and now, I wasn’t feeling any of them, and that left me hurting for ideas. I needed something to prime the pump, and with Brian Eno still on my mind, I figured I’d see what a random draw could do for me. This wasn’t exactly an Oblique Strategies gambit. I don’t have a deck, though I should probably get one, if I’m going to generate 52 of these per year. Just a soft spin of the wheel on Apple Music, to see if some inspiration might arrive in the first handful of tracks. Up straightaway came the Dead Kennedys’ “We’ve Got a Bigger Problem Now” (Apple Music, Spotify). First in the queue, and a slam-dunk winner.

Today we’re going to talk about protest songs.

For decades rock musicians have reliably provided works that, if they didn’t galvanize or consolidate any viable opposition to The Man, at least gave you a useful frame for venting your spleen or melancholy. The sixties set the standard here, with “For What It’s Worth” (Apple Music, Spotify), “Blowin’ in the Wind” (Apple Music, Spotify), “Eve of Destruction” (Apple Music, Spotify), and others. Thatcherism gifted us “Stand Down Margaret” (Apple Music, Spotify) by the English Beat, Moz’s pre-rightward-lurch “Margaret on the Guillotine” (Apple Music, Spotify), Sinéad’s “Black Boys on Mopeds” (Apple Music, Spotify), and any number of Billy Bragg tracks, though we’ll call out “To Have and To Have Not” (Apple Music, Spotify) here, because it’s especially great.

The Reagan/ Bush Era gave rise to gems like “Two Tribes” (Apple Music, Spotify), “Ignoreland” (Apple Music, Spotify) by R.E.M., and Camper Van Beethoven’s “Sweethearts” (Apple Music). In the video for that Frankie track, Reagan and Chernenko lookalikes beat each other bloody in a boxing ring before the world explodes, Alderaan-style. Are we living in a land where sex and horror are THE NEW GODS?!?

No punches pulled there. “Sweethearts” is considerably more nuanced: unless you knew the President’s place of birth, you might not immediately have caught Camper’s drift:

’Cause he’s always living back in Dixon, circa 1949. We’re all sitting at the fountain of the five and dime. ’Cause he’s living in some B-movie. The lines they are so clearly drawn. In black and white, life is so easy, and we’re all coming along—on this one.

And they don’t call the man by his name until the very end of the song.

’Cause in the mind of Ronald Reagan, the wheels they turn and gears they grind. Buildings collapse in slow motion, and trains collide. Everything is fine. Everything is fine.

My Dead Kennedys title track slots in right here in the timeline. “Bigger Problem” is a sequel to and update of the Kennedys’ 1979 debut single, “California Über Alles” (Apple Music, Spotify). “California” wasn’t so much a protest song as an act of generational warfare. Jerry Brown—a Democrat!—had been re-elected as Governor of California, and wild-eyed DK vocalist Jello Biafra was conjuring up images of a Flower Power Gestapo:

I am Governor Jerry Brown. My aura smiles and never frowns. Soon I will be President. I will command all of you: your kids will MEDITATE IN SCHOOL!

Now it’s 1984. Knock, knock at your front door: it’s the suede-denim secret police. THEY HAVE COME FOR YOUR UNCOOL NIECE.

And into the gas chamber goes the niece. Whatever one might have thought of Jerry Brown, the notion that he might have gone full Nazi was very much a stretch. “California Über Alles” was never about politics—this was punk-on-hippie crime. Shots fired by the Blank Generation on elders who had unabashedly carried their counterculture into the State House.

Of course Jerry Brown never became President. Ronald Reagan did. Hence, 1986’s “We’ve Got a Bigger Problem Now,” an update of “California” that introduces swing band elements and some early spoken-word riffing:

Last call for alcohol. Last call for your freedom of speech. Drink up! Happy Hour is now enforced by law. Don’t forget our house special: it’s called the Tricky Dickie Screwdriver. It’s got one part Jack Daniels, two parts purple Kool-Aid, and a jigger of formaldehyde from the jar with Hitler’s brain in it we got back in the back storeroom.

This is fun, but when the punk rock comes back, it’s feral. The “California Über Alles” chorus remains on point—we’ve only added about 20 bpm and Jello’s emotional state is, well, proportionally enhanced. The theoretical zen fascists of the Brown regime have given way to the all-too-real and familiar Ku Klux Klan, n*****-knocking for the master race. If Biafra was sneering in 1979, he’s spitting now. WELCOME TO 1984, he sings. ARE YOU READY FOR THE THIRD WORLD WAR?

Oof. This was strong medicine—stronger, in retrospect, than was warranted. Now it’s 2026. Don’t we have an even bigger problem now? Don’t we need a third-gear Dead Kennedys, to meet this particular moment? We muddled through the Bush-Cheney years without their assistance, thanks to some stand-up work from Green Day and other Gen X balladeers. American Idiot (Apple Music, Spotify) documented the trauma and anxiety we all felt in the post-9/11 era. And played loud enough, Bright Eyes’ “When the President Talks to God” (Apple Music, Spotify) could strip the red, white, and blue paint off your neighbor’s toolshed. It turns out Biafra and his bandmates had a falling out around this time over disparities in royalty payments. While they litigated the matter in court, others dutifully picked up the slack.

But who is rising to the occasion now? The Trump Era protest songs have been uniformly underwhelming. I vaguely remember something from Eminem during the first term, but I couldn’t tell you what it was. [goes and looks] Yeah, I still can’t find it. James had a song called “Hank” (Apple Music, Spotify) that did some important work:

This crackhead’s tiny fingers accusing you of what he’ll do. White fascists in the White House: more beetroot in your Russian stew. Democracy sells easy—NRA high fives—Orlando, Sandy Hook, and Columbine. CCTV’s grainy. His rapture’s our decline. Hookers, hotels, showers, dollar signs.

The problem being that James have always had limited reach. I DMed Tim Booth back in 2018, urging him to play that one on the Lincoln Memorial steps. He never answered or complied. So it goes.

The stakes are higher this time around, and the big guns are coming out … and misfiring? Springsteen’s “Streets of Minneapolis” (Apple Music, Spotify) has a bit of a Billy Bragg flavor to it—and a dash of Dylan’s harmonicas—but metrically and lyrically it’s a slog. I appreciate that he got this out in a relative hurry, but it ain’t no “Fortunate Son” (Apple Music, Spotify). U2’s recent submission, “American Obituary” (Apple Music, Spotify), has a similar feel: heavy and a bit tired. Dropkick Murphys and Haywire 617’s “Citizen ICE” (Apple Music, Spotify) has some punk-rock oomph to it. Like “Bigger Problem,” it’s an update of an earlier Murphys track, “Citizen CIA” (Apple Music, Spotify). The ICE version has just the one real zinger of a line—too scared to join the military, too dumb to be a cop—and it’s over in under ninety seconds.

It’s not so much the case that rock music is too weak a medium to meet the moment—it’s just too slow to keep caught up. A Cabinet Secretary or press officer says something outrageous and the Internet is instantly flooded with reels and memes clipping the video and dropping punch lines. At the end of the day, Stewart, Colbert, Kimmel, and Meyers pick through the leftovers on the late shows. Whereas Bono and Bruce have to work out ABAB rhyme schemes, join their band in the studio, record, mix, and master before they can submit their social commentary to the streamers. They reasonably rush through the process and arrive two weeks late with something other than their best work. The Murphys got on the board more quickly, but only by repurposing an existing 87-second track.

It matters, too, that all the players here are over 50. The best protest songs are written by the rising generation, upon first close examination of the bullshit circumstances their elders have made for them—possibly when they’re at risk of being drafted. They reflect the shock, pain, and consequent rage you feel when you’ve hit full speed for the first time only to crash into a wall you never saw. John Fogerty was 24 when he wrote “Fortunate Son.” But we’ve covered this already: today’s 24-year-olds have ditched rock music as a medium of expression. See “Life on Mars?” They’re instead crafting the aforementioned memes and reels, they’re acting with an urgency and precision that the popular music production model doesn’t support, and accordingly they’ve vacated the protest song space to geezers like me mouring lost vacations and their tanking retirement assets.

This is a real climbdown from the mid-1980s, where the protest impulse ran so hot and deep, bands were reaching back three centuries for leaders to savage and causes to champion. A curse upon you, Oliver Cromwell, the Pogues’ Phillip Chevron spat in “Young Ned of the Hill” (Apple Music, Spotify), who raped our motherland. I hope you’re rotting down in the hell for the horrors that you sent to our less fortunate forefathers, whom you robbed of their birthright. And here came Billy Bragg, dredging up the cause of the proto-socialist Diggers uprising (Apple Music, Spotify): In 1649 … they defied the landlords, they defied the laws. They were the dispossessed reclaiming what was theirs.

Every crisis is an opportunity, Machiavelli or Churchill or Rahm Emmanuel said. Now, more than ever, the time is ripe for some blood-boiling political rants, set to guitars, bass, and drums. Specifically, I’m calling for someone to round out the DK California Trilogy with “Mar-A-Lago Über Alles.” If it will help grease the skids, I’ve even written the first line:

I am President Stephen Miller. I puppeteer an orange gorilla …

Jello, Klaus, East Bay Ray: y’all have the right of refusal. Squash your beef and take it from here, please?

Just a quick burst today—lots going on. Went for a drive Sunday night across Alligator Alley and up the Gulf Coast: Miami to Lakewood Ranch. I put Apple Music in charge for the last two hours of the trip. And I gotta say, the Algorithm was on fire. So much so that I dropped the vast majority of its on-the-fly programming into a Spotify playlist.

Now that’s unfair, you’re gonna say. Apple does all the work, and Spotify gets the spoils? Yes, but only because I have 17,000+ songs copied over to my phone in .mp3 and .m4a format, and Apple Music will erase them if I change my settings to create a shared playlist. I don’t know why that is, and you’ll have to ask the folks at One Infinite Loop. But here’s a compromise: I’ll text-link only to the Apple Music tracks in this post. And we can move on.

Lots of Krautrock and Tropicália here, which is to be expected, both because (1) I listen to a hell of a lot of Tropicália and Krautrock; and (2) I do so disproportionately on Apple Music rather than through the aforementioned .mp3s and .m4as, so these genres stand taller for the Algorithm. For all that, my kid manages the music in my car when I drive her home from school, which will explain the Queen entry. Bohemian Rhapsody (Apple Music) always hits the spot, especially when you don’t know it’s coming. Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me, for me, FOR ME … Now the guitar solo, and if you’re not careful you’re topping 95 mph on that straightaway through the Everglades.

The Boo Radleys track was a welcome inclusion. I’ve written before about the Giant Steps album, see “Lazarus,” and I even discussed “Thinking of Ways” (Apple Music), specifically, on an episode of The Mixtape Diaries (Apple Podcasts, Spotify). Sice’s voice is clear as a bell on this one, and I gather he understands I just went on vacation:

I gotta get away, step on the gas, go down …

“Stanlow” (Apple Music) was never on my super-long short list of OMD favorites, but if it comes on while you’re barreling west into a pastel winter sunset, you might decide you need to add it, going forward. The Long Blondes are back in my life, and none too soon. “Fulwood Babylon” (Apple Music) is Sheffield pop perfection—the bass line, for starters, and the mantra of people think I’m being perverse on purpose. Every snapped-off plosive is another bubble burst. And Kate’s mid-track spoken-word monologue has all the hallmarks of a Jarvis Cocker special, but … better?

Girls fantasise on school trips to galleries of men who don’t meet their parent’s expctations, who want to introduce them to illicit Russ Meyer films and dance ’til down to old Kinks records. These are the things you don’t understand. Quarter to ten: you’re wasting your time. If you want to know me, watch how I dance.

Chanteuses abound here, and of all styles, ranging from Björk’s extradimensional peals (Apple Music)1 to electronic blues variations from Alison Moyet (Apple Music) and Dorothy Moskowitz (Apple Music)2 to—and this was a surprise—Françoise Hardy. This wasn’t the first time I heard “Viens” (Apple Music). I gave it a try back home a couple months ago; I just didn’t register then how much I loved it.

I get the logic of how this personal radio station thing works. Apple has amassed enough data to inform spot-on predictions not just of what I might like, but what I want to hear right now. See “The Cutter.” What I can’t get my head around is how peculiarly in tune with my mood these songs were. Maybe it’s a chicken-and-egg issue: the music shapes my mood to receive like-mooded music? I dunno: nothing about the prior six tracks dressed or prepped me to receive Shane MacGowan’s bellowing on “Birmingham Six” (Apple Music), yet I can’t think of anything I’d have rather heard at that particular mile marker.

Which brings me to “Die Weiße Alm” (Apple Music), an obscure even-for-Krautrock tune off the Sergius Golowin record I mentioned over the New Year, see “Love Without Sound,” about which I enthused and effused a fair bit in our most recent Krautrock podcast (Apple Podcasts, Spotify). If you’re on the prowl for a German synthedelic rendition of John Denver, look no further than here. If you never in a million years thought you’d want to hear something like that, play it anyway and tell me I’m wrong. This is Golowin reimagining the natural glory of his Swiss homeland as Lord Krishna’s celestial paradise. It is to “Take Me Home, Country Roads” (Apple Music) as the Alps are to the Appalachians.

If in fact the logic of the Algorithm is that the music you get is the product of the life you’ve lived, then I must be doing something right. Or I at least earned myself a respite on last night’s drive up I-75.

On Wednesday afternoon I took the Red Line train downtown for my yearly physical. I was eight months overdue for this one. My doctor’s office is on Washington Street east of Downtown Crossing. Years and years ago, when I first signed on with my PCP, I worked a half-mile’s walk away. Now I live in Belmont and work in Cambridge, it’s not especially convenient to have my doctor located in Boston, and for a while I put off scheduling this visit, because I had it in mind to change to a provider closer to home. Finally I bit the bullet and put an appointment in my calendar. I caught a break in that Wednesday was a beautiful sunny day, with the temp peaking just above freezing. Give me a day this cold in November and I’d be cursing the heavens. But mid-week in February, after the blizzard conditions Sunday and Monday? 37 degrees and sunshine are a balm for the soul.

During the course of the examination I remembered why I like my doctor so much. I’m not sure he knows me. I’m not a regular in this office [knock wood], but he reads my chart off the computer and meets me afresh each time I come in. This time he noted where I work and in what capacity. The miserable intersection of my gig with current events piqued his interest, so we kicked that subject around a little. He urged me to get a shingles shot at CVS. On the topic of Varicella zoster, I mentioned that back in 2013 I had come into his office with blisters down from my crown to my shins, and he’d brought his colleagues into the exam room to consider the medical curiosity of adult-onset, second-time chickenpox. See “Once and Never Again.” My doctor made a face. He had no recollection of this. It’ll be in the chart, I told him. And that’s as much news as you’re going to get here about my physical examination.

Well, I suppose I can also say I went down the hall to have my blood drawn. From there I was sent through the locked door back into Reception. The clerk affirmed I had no co-pay obligation—thanks, Obama—and with that I took my leave of MGH Downtown. Earbuds in, thumbing through Apple Music on my phone to figure out what I was going to listen to on my walk back to the train station. Eno, I said to myself. Yeah, let’s do that. I’ve been playing a lot of Brian Eno’s solo material this week, largely because on Monday I started outlining the next-next episode of our Krautrock podcast (Apple Podcasts, Spotify), which will cover Eno’s collaborations with Cluster and Harmonia in the mid-/ late seventies.

Because I’ve never given it a meaningful listen, I settled on Ambient 1: Music for Airports. While I was cuing it up, the elevator door opened and closed. I got quickly to the button and called it back before it could get away. The opening tones of “1/1” (Apple Music, Spotify) folded around me as I rode down to ground level.

My earbuds have three settings: “Immersive,” “Quiet” and “Aware.” I’m not sure what the difference is between Immersive and Quiet. They both activate the noise-canceling tech and seem interchangeable. Aware works like old-school headphones, admitting some measure of ambient (ahem) noise. When I fired up this Eno record on Wednesday afternoon, I happened to be set to Aware, so that I could receive the needed auditory cues—[rush of doors opening], ping!, [doors now closing]—to send me after the elevator. (Contrast all the Immersive and Quiet stretches I spend down the hall from my office, missing one elevator car after another while I read texts or work the Pips puzzle on my phone.)

Aware is never my first choice—as I’ve previously noted, a principal and enduring objective (compulsion?) in my life is to achieve maximum abstraction from my environment through portable music players. See “Feels So Good.” The thing is, when I was out shoveling the driveway Monday night, the falling snow soaked through my knit winter hat, causing the wet polyester to trigger the earbud sensors tucked underneath. More than once this started my earbuds cycling endlessly through the three audio settings, which in turn set off Lady Bose shouting the changes into my ear—

Immersive! Quiet! Aware! Immersive! Quiet! Aware! Immersive! Quiet! Aware! Immersive! Quiet! Aware! Immersive! Quiet!—

until I could get my gloves off, my phone out of pocket, and my hat peeled up off my ears to make it stop. This round-and-round operated like an audio-only slot machine, and when the spinning finally stopped, I must have landed on Aware. I wasn’t aware I was set to Aware, but that’s the setting Destiny chose for me on Wednesday. Turns out this was a real stroke of luck, and here’s why.

With a backing soundtrack of “1/1” I started my walk up Washington Street. The immediate plan was to pick up a Diet Coke at McDonald’s, then ease on up to the Park Street T station. As I rolled back the Earth under my feet, my Aware setting allowed brief washes of sound to pass over me, over, under, between, and around the gentle piano and bass music not-quite-filling my ears. Order number 1636, said the woman at the counter. Can I see your slip? Two men talking on the way into a shop: Gotta drop your dollars, amirite? Yeah, gotta drop my hundy. Two college-aged girls behind me: I was like, I dunno. [pause] It was frustrating. EDM playing outside the food court on the corner of Washington and Winter. Church bells sounded the clock landing on 3 PM.

All these intrusions on my solitude, and ordinarily I’d have begrudged every one of them. But in the moment—I expect I’ll use that phrase, in the moment, quite a bit in this post—I was grateful to receive them. Each one flashed briefly and fit beautifully within the frame of Eno’s musical arrangement, before slipping away. This routine walk became non-routine, because unlike any of 17,000+ tracks I might have dialed up in my iPhone’s library—or for that matter any of the tens of millions in Apple Music’s—“1/1” was not going to cooperate with my longstanding program of abstraction. It had determined instead that I should spend the next seventeen minutes, twenty-one seconds in the moment.

My ears were already open, so next I opened my eyes, to examine the world around me. Not just to allow it to pass forgettably through my field of vision, while I composed a reply on a text thread or scripted in my head what I might say in my next meeting, but really to look at everyone and everything. To take it all in, process it, and value it.

I considered the street signs, the storefronts, the cabana-sized all-weather flower stand in the middle of the pedestrian roadway just past Winter Street, the luminescent bowed figures arranged on steps to nowhere, which I understand now is part of a series of art installations in the City’s “Winteractive” program (named for the season, not the street)—and which, now that I look at them, are apt enough representations of all of us as we move through the physical world at the direction of the Invisible Hand (see “My City Was Gone”), our Outlook calendars, and so many other unseen forces we don’t consider or recognize.

The sights are always there; you only have to accept the invitation to see them. This sounds straightforward, but it really isn’t. As I walked, I thought about a passage in The Phantom Tollbooth—one of many such passages that continues to stick with me, forty years after I last read this most important book in my life. In this particular one, Milo is told the story of the City of Reality, whose residents realized they could get to their destinations more quickly if they looked only at their shoes. As time passed and the community’s notice of its surroundings diminished to zero, the entirety of the city’s infrastructure faded into invisibility. Nothing quite so literal or dramatic has happened to Boston, but as I walked up Winter Street toward the park on Wednesday, I considered that I might have broken a spell I myself had been under, so that I might see, if only for the afternoon, what was never beneath my notice but too often behind it.

But that bit from The Phantom Tollbooth had to do with buildings and streets. Let’s talk about the attention I was suddenly able to give to all—no, not all: each of the people I saw while in transit. This one stopped on the sidewalk checking her phone, that one pulled up short at the corner in a wheelchair, this middle-aged woman huddled in a doorway with her head in her hands, that young man showing friends the new shoes he just bought. People in Bruins gear, surgical masks, Canada Goose parkas, security guard unis, day-glo work vests. Something about “1/1,” or so I believe, drew these people out. Or, rather, drew me out. The music sparked in me an uncanny interest in and warmth toward every last person whose life’s business carried them into my line of sight.

My default is to credit Brian Eno for this. But I could be wrong. Who’s to say what exactly steers the mind in a particular direction at a given moment in time? An unfathomably vast multiplicity of factors drive human psychology. Environmental suggestions certainly must count for something, but there are genetic/ evolutionary and physiological inputs, too. It just so happens I have a test result showing that my blood sugar was on the high end of the normal range just before I stepped out into the street Wednesday afternoon. Would a hangrier version of me listening to “1/1” have felt the same wash of love and warmth? It seems unlikely.

The suggestive power of “1/1” was surely enhanced by what I had earlier read and heard about Eno’s Music for Airports record. His aim was to develop a substitute for Muzak—a kind of music that was gentle and inobtrusive but did not put the listener’s subconscious immediately to work tuning it out. “1/1” locates itself in the liminal space between background and foreground. It absolutely makes a claim on your RAM, but only a small one—tapping into just enough of your consciousness to execute a very particular function, which is to burnish and shine up your immediate environment, so that everything and everyone you experience displays its own distinctive grace. I don’t know if Music for Airports works exactly as Eno intended it. I can only describe how it worked on me, in a moment of absolute serendipity after creeping up on me (if not my earbuds) unawares.

Of course, no moment can be perfect, and this one was no exception. Early on in my walk there came a point where the following thoughts occurred to me, one hot on the heels of the other:

• Hey—wow—you’re really going through something here.

• You’re going to want to remember this.

• Hell, this could be your Substack post for this week.

• You should be taking notes.

Now of course this is the sidetrack my mind would uncover, in a moment of transcendence. It’s the predictable result of four decades’ hard work deflecting boredom, of careful planning and consideration of all contingencies toward avoiding a situation where I’m abandoned and alone without meaningful intellectual stimulus for more than a minute. My mind is so trained to resist being in the moment that it was perfectly natural I would open up an internal dialogue where half of me was rapt, actually and possibly transformatively going through something, and the other half was fixated on logging as much of it as he could for later regurgitation in a blog post.

It’s like I was trapped in a poetic bind Wordsworth couldn’t have anticipated, because he never could have predicted a hinky brain like mine, toggling urgently back and forth between the conflicting imperatives of

• <gotta fully experience this crazy-pants overflow of emotion>

and

• <gotta take mental notes so I can recollect the hell out of this in my later tranquility>.1

I spent a good minute or two crediting both sides of this argument and getting increasingly irritated with myself. Ultimately I fought my way through to a compromise, whereby I would reinsert myself into the moment fully and completely (or as much as my hamstrung psyche would allow), until such time as I had arrived at the train platform, when I would open up a draft post and start splattering it with notes. By this time I had gained the top of Winter Street, just across from Boston Common. “1/1” was still playing—I think I noted it’s more than seventeen minutes long—and I decided to give myself more time with the song and its effects.

I walked past the entrance to the T station, took a few steps down the diagonal path into the park, then decided to double back into the Ladder District. There was so much more life on the city streets than in the park, and at this point I realized I was on the clock, that there would come a point where this visitation would be completed, the world around me would lose the glow of grace that Brian Eno’s music and my brain chemistry had impressed upon it, and I would be back dropped in front of a computer screen, puzzling through regulations and cursing out the government. I wanted to take in everything I could before that magic was gone.

It occurred to me that if all or even some critical mass of humanity—say, 20% of us—put on Music for Airports, set our headphones to Aware (if applicable), and walked out in the world, maybe we’d all suddenly gain the capacity to love each other. To put aside our prejudices and snap judgments, stop wondering if that passer-by voted for Your Gal or Their Guy, and recognize one another’s common humanity. World Peace Through Eno, I was thinking. Now four days later, on the far side of the start of Our Next War, it all sounds pretty quaint and naïve. But in the moment, as I considered texting the Apple Music link for “1/1” to my entire contact list, I started crying.

A few minutes later, “1/1” abruptly cut out of my earbuds. My phone was ringing. Goddammit. It was my friend and work colleague, Ellen. Talk about intrusions upon my solitude: in recent years Ellen has been nothing short of a force on this front. Kate and I are settled on the couch, fire in the fireplace, streaming Netflix on a Sunday night … the phone rings. Is that Ellen? Kate asks. Yep. Driving down Sandy Pond Road on a crystalline weekday morning, vetting a recent edit of a podcast episode … the phone rings. Ellen, it’s not even 9 AM. And so on. But for all that, I almost always take Ellen’s calls. She’s one of the all-time greats, and she recently retired from the office. I really do miss her.

But again: I was in the moment and going through something. Not this time, Ellen, I said, barely aloud, ducking past a college student coming up the snow-narrowed sidewalk in the other direction. I turned left off West Street, back onto Washington, registered and valued a dozen more pedestrians—some new, some I had seen before on this walk—then turned back up Winter to the train station.

As I waited on the platform for the outbound train back to Harvard, I pulled out the phone and Face IDed into my messages. I knew that doing so would put the lights out on this experience. The halo would go away, severing the sense of connection—no: more than that—integration with my environment, the City of Boston, and each of the lovely people I had encountered on my extended walk from 294 Washington. But it was easier than I thought to rejoin the “waking” world, because I understood that I can replicate this experience simply by resetting the conditions for it. I can do this in Harvard Square, Belmont Center, Progressive Field, or better yet: Logan Airport, where I am so often tired, defeated, and miserable.2 All I need to do is toggle my settings to Aware and dial up “1/1.”

Of course it won’t be the same if I try to make it happen, I thought. But honestly, even a half-approximation of the present-ness I felt back on Washington, Winter, Tremont, and West Street would be worth the time. And having logicked my way through to that consolation, I re-engaged with my phone. Ellen had left a message:

Hey I’m going to Smith Center. I’m gonna be sitting somewhere near Pavement. Come visit.

She of course thought I was upstairs in my office. The train arrived and I must have boarded it, but I remember nothing of the transit between Park Street and Harvard stations, as I had surrendered to my abstraction impulse and was vigorously thumbing out my notes of this experience and outlining this post. Upon arrival I disembarked, rode the escalator up to surface level, took two wrong turns (Where’s Pavement? Oh, right: she said Smith Center), then a right one, and I found Ellen seated in my building’s lobby, talking on the phone. She waved a greeting to me, and when she finished her call, I swooped down and gave her a hug.

It was the hug I wanted—still—to give everybody in the world.

I found an original pressing of Crossing the Red Sea with the Adverts the other day, at a record fair in Dedham. Drove down through a Saturday morning snow squall to a Holiday Inn off I-95 South, to get a crack at the couple dozen sellers set up in their ballroom. Slim pickings at first. I bonded with one seller over early Ultravox! and John Foxx. You ever hear a band called New Musik? he asked me. I shook my head no. They did that song “Straight Lines.” It’s amazing. He cued it up on his iPhone (Apple Music, Spotify). Didn’t really click for me. I listened politely for a few minutes, then moved on to another station.

Eventually I turned up in front of a seller who was proffering a couple-three boxes designated as The Harvard Collection. I asked about Krautrock, and the seller showed me a sealed copy of Tangerine Dream’s Atem. Yeah, okay—so I bought that. Turns out it was a 1987 repress and not the first pressing from ’73. I didn’t realize this until I had the label back home under the desk lamp. Kate’s been giving me some hell lately over my refusal to buy a pair of reading glasses. I buy many more latter-day reissues thinking they’re OGs, I may finally set my vanity aside in favor of some CVS readers. For record shopping only, though.

This Harvard Collection was pretty terrific. Lots of mid-’70s Krautrock, early punk and New Wave, and all kinds of Eno—including a vintage pressing of Cluster & Eno priced at fifty bucks. I passed on that, having bought a reissue last year. Still, though: never thought I’d lay eyes on an original. Then I saw the Adverts record: another first sighting for me, and I snatched it right up. On the way out I saw a second Adverts album, Cast of Thousands. As I sit here playing it now on Spotify, I’m thinking I should have bought it, too. Very different-sounding from Crossing the Red Sea, this one, coming out in late 19791 some time after UK punk’s expiration date. Still, its title track is a real barnburner. Took me a minute to get over the pianos—what is this? Meat Loaf?—but I’m fully there now. Wow. Great song.

When I think of English punk, four names jump straight to mind: the Sex Pistols and the Clash are my Washington and Lincoln, but then the Buzzcocks and Adverts are my Teddy and Tom. I realize that’s overlooking the Damned, who dropped the first single (“New Rose”: Apple Music, Spotify) and blew the doors off with their second record, Machine Gun Etiquette. And oh, geez: I just now remembered Poly Styrene and X-Ray Spex. But right now we’re playing the who you think of first game, and that list is necessarily going to be populated by the acts that can claim certain superlatives. I.e., the Pistols were my first love, the Clash had the best career arc, and the Buzzcocks are my favorite overall. And of all the punk qua punk bands2 on the London scene from 1976 into 1977, the Adverts were—to my mind, at least—the most intense.

Or at least that’s how they come off on record. From start to finish, Crossing the Red Sea sounds like blistered fingers on the frayed end of a rope. All four pieces fighting for their lives, with TV Smith’s desperate vocals riding bareback on top of the mix. There’s no sneering sarcasm here, a la Johnny Rotten, like in “E.M.I.” (Apple Music, Spotify), or for that matter any of Joe Strummer’s scoffing variety, as in “Julie’s Been Working for the Drug Squad” (Apple Music, Spotify). None of Pete Shelley’s melancholy, either, or Poly’s sing-song playacting. TV’s peers in the London scene each brought a signature something that made them distinctive, sure, but also blunted the force of their messaging. You hear none of that showmanship in an Adverts song. Every one of the tracks on Crossing is all-in, with no time for chit-chat, irony, or any kind of goof.

The album opens with the thunder and lightning of “One Chord Wonders” (Apple Music, Spotify), a bang-up re-recording of the band’s fabulously raw first single (Apple Music, Spotify). On paper the stakes here are low. For no particular reason at all, I’ve re-written this song’s lyrics as a haiku:

What if our band sucks

and you really don’t like us?

Whatever—don’t care.

Not exactly nuclear brinksmanship on the table. But then you drop the needle. Slamming rhythm guitar, frenzied drum play, power chords at the end of every line. The two-line chorus becomes an inverted call-and-response: The Wonders don’t care, say the band. WE DON’T GIVE A DAMN, TV answers. Gaye Advert drives her bass line into the red, and TV screams like he’s delivering a baby. Has apathy ever been expressed with this level of intensity? Consider Rotten’s …and we don’t care! at the end of “Pretty Vacant” (Apple Music, Spotify). It’s a terrific punch line. But TV and his crew are aiming for something altogether different. The Pistols grab you by the balls, but the Adverts go for the throat. And where Johnny rolls his eyes, TV looks directly into your soul and dares you to turn away.

This intensity is sustained through the Crossing record, which I’m comfortable—at least today—calling my favorite punk rock album. Yeah, sure: Machine Gun Etiquette, Never Mind the Bollocks …, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables. All nominees, all also-rans. None of them carry the urgency and power the Adverts bring to Crossing. The conceit of the Crossing the Red Sea title is that the Adverts are leading us from slavery to the Promised Land. But what exactly is “promised” here? The word new appears three times in this record’s track listing: “New Church” (Apple Music, Spotify), “Newboys” (Apple Music, Spotify), “New Day Dawns” (Apple Music, Spotify). You get the sense TV et al. found in this cultural moment an opening, a seam-split that, if they could just tear it open, would allow them first, to breathe, then to run free and settle … somewhere.

And tear they did. In the first minute of “Bombsite Boy” (Apple Music, Spotify), all the Adverts do is invent Goth rock a solid eighteen months before Bauhaus. And over the rhythm section’s sludge-stomp and two masterful pick slides, TV puts the listener in the shoes of a post-war street urchin, playing in the rubble of Britain’s exploded buildings:

Leapfrog over fences. Little time, less senses. Here by this railway cutting, life goes quick and goes without warning. That’s how life is in my bombsite dwelling.

Then silence, and in one of the great moments of recorded music, the turn—TV winds up and cuts loose, with the band stacking up behind him in full frenzy:

I don’t believe you have to be an idiot to get somewhere these days. I don’t believe you have to sell your soul and do what everybody says, or get carried away. Nowadays I fall among the empty shells and pray. Give thanks—I’m happy where I am.

From where I’m sitting, that sounds almost like optimism. And it’s for this reason, I submit, that there is no more desperate band in punk rock than the Adverts. You might think hope and desperation are incompatible, but a Cleveland sports fan will tell you otherwise. The difference between desperation and nihilism is the nihilist has relinquished that last dash of hope. I wrote earlier that the Adverts were blistered fingers hanging on the end of the rope, but I didn’t say they ever let go.

There’s no evidence TV Smith grew up picking through bombsites. His birth town of Romford certainly was battered during the Blitz, but he spent his formative years further inland, in a zone largely spared the ravages of the German rockets. So not literally a bombsite boy, but as a metaphor, it works. By February 1978, when Crossing the Red Sea was released, Blitzed areas of East London still had not been cleared. TV is saying, in essence: Here we are, the children of your wars, born into the hellscape you created and can’t be bothered to clean up. But I think I see a path forward out of here.

Where exactly that path might lead is not abundantly clear from this record. We know that TV and Gaye were living in Devon when the Pistols and Damned first lit the punk fuse. Hand-in-hand they scrambled to London to take their own shots on the scene’s center stage, during the Roxy’s 100 days of punk rock. So far so good: the activation energy, the nerve, the claims made on a languishing culture—all of this came from nowhere and was portentous of something: a future unimaginable six months earlier, yet still not fully imagined, at the point when all these bands went into the studio to record their long-players. The love or hate us, we’re here sentiment of “One Chord Wonders” was the vibe of April 1977, yet by November the Adverts were asking questions:

What are you gonna do with your new ways? What are you gonna do with your new wave? What about the new wave? Did you think it would change things?

“Safety in Numbers” (Apple Music, Spotify) comes a mere two tracks after “Bombsite Boy” on Crossing. Were the stakes gambled and lost so quickly? Perhaps not. TV’s third verse in “Safety” suggests that the promise of punk freedom is still on tap for the select few who truly believe in the movement. When it’s tricky, when it gets tough, when you need to feel like you’re good enough, all you pretty people who’ve been taken over had better start looking for your own answers. ’Cause there’s no safety in numbers anyway … or in a new wave. Words of warning here, that the insurgents might become the incumbents and enforce their own conformity.

Or as TV puts it more succinctly in “New Day Dawns”:

DON’T SCREW IT UP.

Possibly along these lines, I’ll note that when I was ever-so-briefly in a band with three classmates in law school—David on vocals, Bruce playing guitar, Jun on bass, and me on the drums—we each picked a song for the others to play separately and learn before our first rehearsal. My assignment for the group was “One Chord Wonders.” When we finally did convene, Bruce’s down-the-hall neighbors called in their noise complaint before we even had the chance to make a run at the Adverts cover. I.e., David never even got to sing the words I wonder how we’ll answer when you say, “We don’t like you—go away.” Our answer, as it turned out, was to apologize to the cop and have Brad meekly pack up his drums.

My plan for this post was to pick a song from Crossing the Red Sea, probably one of the three I’ve focused on here. But over the course of the week I kept going back to “Cast of Thousands” (Apple Music, Spotify), the opening track on that second record I didn’t know existed until three weeks ago, and which I still haven’t played through to the end. I read some more about what happened to the Adverts after Crossing. With punk rock on the downslope, if even in the picture anymore, TV, Gaye, et al. decided to explore new territory. And why shouldn’t they have? The Damned were working on their much more sophisticated second record at around the same time, and for their part the Clash were diversifying their portfolio to include reggae, rockabilly, ska, jazz, and R&B.

Cast of Thousands, Machine Gun Etiquette, and London Calling all came out in late 1979—in October, November, and December, respectively. You have to wonder if the music press savaged the Adverts’ record so badly at least in part because they put themselves first on the slab and therefore broke the seal on betraying punk principles. They certainly left the safety of numbers, prying open the four-piece DIY fundamentalism of the London scene to add piano tracks, synthesizer bleats, and interventionist post-production to the mix. All this surely provided enough of a shock that few critics were inclined to ask: Yeah, but does it work?

Yet on that title track, it really does. For starters, the Adverts have discovered the tactic of the slow build. “Cast of Thousands” notably does not start at 10 or higher on the Spinal Tap scale. In fact, I hear zero guitars until that brief plinky interlude starting at 1:10, and in the meantime there’s a crooning character on lead vocals who sounds more like Nick the Lounge Singer than TV Smith. None of this brings to mind the Adverts we crossed the Red Sea with, but it leaves abundant space for the band to grow into, as the song progresses. This is in stark contrast to Crossing, which is packed to the rafters right from the jump.

And so “Cast of Thousands” treats us to the glorious experience of hearing the Adverts drop the clutch mid-song and slam into high gear. I wasn’t sure what to make of all this “Baba O’Riley”-style (Apple Music, Spotify) ivory-tickling early on, but when it gives way to Jerry Lee Lewis piano slamming, I’m sold. And now it’s time for Maximum TV:

ALL THE HUMAN TORCHES CATCHING FIRE! (especially for you) CORRUPT POLITICIANS GETTING CAUGHT! (especially for you) POOR AND THE NEEDY, ROBBERS AND KILLERS! (especially for you) BANKRUPT STARS, COMPETITIONS, MID-AIR COLLISIONS! (especially for you) WIN THE HOME OF YOUR DREEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAMS!

Vocal harmonies, too, such as would be unimaginable when this band was on-stage at the Roxy. And synthesizer work—in case the thousand-voices, crush-of-modernity effect weren’t powerful enough in this song, the Adverts and their sound engineer wrap the whole package up in computer-Babel as the song rockets toward its climax.

RAPE! RUNAWAY WIVES! OTHER PEOPLE’S LIVES! BIRTHS! DEATHS! MONEY LEFT! MURDER, DIVORCE, SUICIDE! POLITICAL INTRIGUES, HOSPITAL CASES! BRITISH WEAPONS TO FOREIGN PLACES! EARTHQUAKE, FLOOD, BODIES IN THE MUD! POISON, CROWDS, CAST OF THOUSANDS!

THE GUNMAN OPENED FIRE! (especially for you)

Whatever happens on the rest of the record, this is the Adverts’ magnum opus, annexing the borderlands between “Gimme Shelter” (Apple Music, Spotify) and “We Didn’t Start the Fire” (Apple Music, Spotify) that we never knew existed, but of course they did, and it all makes perfect sense. And goddam rocks. With its angst, intensity, and commitment to minimalism, Crossing the Red Seas is the perfect punk rock document. “Cast of Thousands” is Something Else Altogether. The Adverts gave us both before they gave up hope, and I couldn’t be happier about the result.

I saw Terry Gilliam’s Brazil again a couple weeks ago. Digitally restored and touched up for a one-night engagement at the Coolidge Corner Theater, as part of their (sigh) Dystopia Now? projection series. This is one of my all-time favorite movies—Top Five, easy—but it had been a while since I’d seen it. I had copies on VHS and DVD in and after college, respectively, and at some point during the COVID lockdown I decided I was going to try to turn my kids on to classic movies. The Godfather, Dr. Strangelove, and so on. As part of this program I was able to sit Florian down to watch Brazil’s first 45 minutes. If you have children, then you know that Gen Zers’ attention spans are shot, if they ever existed in the first place. They have at best half a movie in them, and it’s a one-in-ten shot you’ll ever rope them back in for a second sitting.

The thing is, Brazil is classically one of those films you could ditch in the middle and still rank among your favorites. I won’t be the first or even the hundredth person to walk out on the Internet and describe this movie as Pynchonesque. So many of the substantive ingredients are there: deep-state power, paranoid slapstick humor, even the occasional song-and-dance routine. But also Pynchonesque in the respect that, sure, there’s a narrative arc, but very little forward plot momentum. You trundle along toward the required climax and denouement, but you’re never dying to know what happens—and in fact, you’d rather just keep riding through the film’s madcap world, taking in the sights.

And the sights are rich and plentiful. Gilliam assembles a suite of brilliantly conceived and perfectly rendered moments, loosely arranged along his dotted through-line. You can be forgiven for not being all that concerned about what will happen next to Sam Lowry, because what’s happening right now is so all-consuming and enjoyable. By the same token, I’ve started more than a few Pynchon novels—V, Gravity’s Rainbow, Vineland several times, and Inherent Vice—without ever finishing them.1 Each of these books is the very opposite of a page-turner, if only because the page you’re currently on is so goddam fun.

It’s not a stretch—or for that matter a criticism—to say that Brazil is a stitched-together series of thematically-aligned Monty Python sketches, with a handful of effects-driven dream sequences standing in for Gilliam’s signature animations from the Flying Circus. The concept hits all my buttons: it’s 1984 meets Python, with Tom Stoppard writing dialogue and a post-steampunk vibe. The technical elements are breathtaking: diesel futurism, dark interiors, brutalist design. Gilliam constructs a technology ecosystem that is off-kilter but recognizable to us: a world of patch cables and ducts and vaccuum-tube computer screens, dotted with flimsy motorized consumer trikes and soot-spitting megatrucks. Internal memos are circulated by old-school pneumatic tubes rather than email. It’s a credible extrapolation from, say, the Year of Our Lord 1962—just not ours.

The sociopolitical structures in Brazil are alien but familiar, too. On these matters we may not be able to comfortably say we’re riding an altogether different timeline. For all we know, Gilliam is reporting back from one of our possible futures. Brazil’s sprawling, tentacled government bureaucracy is largely non-functional when it comes to providing basic (“Central”) services—Robert DeNiro plays an insurgent HVAC specialist who ziplines into flats to do unlicensed repairs—but they sure do torture well. Hard to say whether we’re looking at a corrupt socialist or crony capitalism system here, but there’s little need to draw this sort of fine distinction. It’s clear enough that wealth, status, and privilege accrue as you climb the government ladder, and otherwise you can expect to live out your days in the bombsite slums.

The protagonist here is the aforementioned Sam Lowry, played by Jonathan Pryce. Sam is a workaday civil servant whose competence and good sense prop up his boss; he aches for something better in his life and is skeptical it could ever come via promotion. Any aspirations he has are tamped down into his subconscious: Sam dreams that he can fly, that he can rescue The Girl, that he can escape and resist a powerful and abiding evil that is determined to drag him down—sometimes literally. Gilliam’s messaging is obvious enough: Sam is the stand-in for every one of us who is hemmed in by The System. He soldiers through life acted upon rather than acting, and we find embedded in his trials and travails the absurdity of his world and ours. A dystopian Michael Bluth, with less of a penchant for sarcasm. So Brazil isn’t just Pythonesque and Pynchonesque: it’s a Picareseque, too.

There comes a point where Sam ceases to dither, gets off the dime, and take charges of his life … or tries to. This turns out about as well for him as it did for Hamlet. Sam’s Romantic spark, his awakening, his step out from under cover toward self-actualization—however you choose to describe this first and definitionally poor decision—puts him promptly and squarely into the crosshairs of the State. And not its bumbling paperpushers, either, as here come the bagging and atrocities experts.

This is a loud movie throughout, for eyes, ears, and brains. It’s not especially gruesome or shocking. It’s just … a lot. The screeching and bombings and chases and bustling and crosstalk and overall busy-ness of the scenes, setting, props, acting, and action—it adds up to a kind of sensory saturation. The film starts at, I dunno, 9 on the dial, so that you would think Gilliam has left too-little room to build into. But once Sam goes on the run, we’re fully in the red, and accordingly he, or we, begin to hallucinate. Never mind Spinal Tap’s run-to-11 amps. We ride at 15 or higher for the film’s last 20 minutes, before the crash-out and final credits.

Yet underneath all the maxing-out is a rather simple romantic story. Boy dreams of Girl, Boy meets Strikingly Similar Girl, Boy chases Girl, Boy may or may not get Girl before the government breaks his brain. All that’s fine, but it turns out that very little of the value and genius of this movie has anything to do with the plot. Really it’s all about the sight-seeing along the way. And depending on how you choose to look at the question, either Gilliam’s fixation on detail and each individual moment has the effect of crowding out the narrative plot, or the second-by-second richness and complexity of Brazil is an agreeable form of compensation for his rather bare-bones story.

On either of these points, I can sympathize with and will defend Terry Gilliam (and as necessary, Tom Stoppard). In my several runs at fiction writing, I’ve never been one for plot. Not that I’m against it or I don’t think it’s important. I’ve just never been good at it. Elevator-pitch premises fall to me out of the clear blue sky:

A masked woman does performance art in traffic, becomes criminal cultural icon.

What if Bowie were a shape-shifter and Iggy could absorb environmental toxins into his body, and they came together in Berlin in ’77 to save the world?

These ideas just appear, from nothing to something in a blink, so that yeah: it’s not wild to think there are unseen creative forces pervading our world, arranging visitations, serving up concepts. Then the time comes to write up a plot, and the Muse, the Holy Spirit—you choose—is suddenly three states away and doesn’t remember my name. I’m stood up, stiffed, and I’ve got nothing. So I turn to characters, which also come super-easy. From the big, rich, rounded protags and antags all the way down to the one-note disposables I write into a single scene. And once I have a character, I can write a backstory falling out of bed, because that’s just a matter of applying one’s learnings re the human condition, to reverse-engineer what made a character who he is upon first appearance.

Eventually, though, I do have to confront the vast, open, unpaved landscape in front of me. That’s an altogether different task I’m not suited for. Often the best I can do to gin up plot is introduce a stimulus—some random event—and see how the characters respond. I.e., knowing what I know about them, what would they say in this moment? What would they do? And so my dramatis personae meander along in the murky middle of the project until I can brute-force a modestly satisfying resolution for them. To be clear: this is no way to plot a narrative arc.

I think I fail with plot for the same reason I struggle to chart my own life’s direction. Perhaps taking too much to heart Lennon’s observation that Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans (Apple Music, Spotify), I find myself perennially in the grip of the day-to-day. The big-picture questions seem insoluble to me, and I run screaming from them into momentary occupations to settle and satisfy my mind. I bounce from an album or playlist to a podcast outline to a TV episode to a meeting to a 40-minute time block for written work to a meal with Kate or Trivia Night with friends. Through all these distractive efforts my capacity for long-term planning atrophies even further, so that my continued Muddling-Through-Without-a-Plan becomes ever more of a foregone conclusion.

I do have executive functioning, and I can think as far as nine months into the future. The other day I bought a plane ticket for April, and I’m already in talks with friends about what Buckeye game we’ll be going to this fall. But I have never actually mapped out a path forward for my life. Certainly not at the level of where I might want to be in five years and what I need to do to get there.

As with any other character I’ve created, I have a well-developed backstory. I can go full Procrustes when necessary and stretch, cram, and crop my past into a sensible narrative leading here—to me, as I am today, seated in this dining room chair trying to shrug off the James Taylor that Kate is playing over the in-wall speakers.2 What is this Substack, if not my own Remembrance of Things Past, set off by my replay of a Dead or Alive song (see “You Spin Me Round”)? Conservatively a thousand pages and 300,000 words into this project, and nearly all of it backward-looking. I’ve learned tons from this process. I’ve been able to identify persistent themes, tipping points, modes of thinking, crutches, biases, formative moments. I know I’ve only scratched the surface; after all, there’s a half-century of data here to extract and analyze.

As for what this character will do in the future, all I can do is send him into the next scene and watch. I will continue to live day-to-day, and in accordance with longstanding practice I’ll stop now and again and consider, to my surprise, how many hundreds more of these days have blown by since last I checked. These people who imagine themselves in X job earning Y dollars with a vacation home in Z-ville, and then go do exactly what they need to do to get there? Fucking zombies, man. Zombie geniuses. In this life I do what I can stand to do, and I will make zero sacrifices today for tomorrow’s gain, because I actually don’t know how.

So I can live with Brazil’s simplistic plot arc, because minute-to-minute, scene-to-scene, I’m hella entertained. I mean, I get why, particularly at the height of the Spielberg Era, a production company wouldn’t be enthused about it. When Universal first reviewed the final edit, they refused to release the film, prompting Gilliam to buy a full-page ad in Variety, reading:

Dear Sid Sheinberg

When are you going to release my film, ‘Brazil’?

Terry Gilliam

This letter reads a lot like my periodic cries of desperation out into the void, demanding to know why I’ve never published a novel, when of course I already know the answer. Well, two answers, because in addition to being unable to write plot worth a damn, I’ve never actually hatched a sensible plan for advancing my career as a writer. So yeah: I admire and appreciate Giliam’s approach to this movie, not just as a writer but as a directionless human being.

And I continue to fixate on Brazil because of my affinity with Sam Lowry, a connection I first felt watching the movie in college and still feel today. And why wouldn’t I? Sam is a middle-class white guy with a passable intellect, good sense, and modest connections. He has a foothold in the System and some measure of investment in it, because a cog like him is protected and secure inside the government machine. For all that, he’s ambivalent about both System and Machine. Perceptive enough to sense that following the rules/ playing the game leaves little space for human agency or the Romantic spirit, but at the same time lacking the courage to step away. And though he has seen enough of the government’s rough and error-prone justice to be morally troubled about it, when pushed on the question, his knee-jerk response is What? I suppose you’d rather have terrorists.

It’s not obvious that the existential malaise of a mid-career, mid-30s civil servant would mean anything to a college senior. But I felt much the same kind of ambivalence as Sam Lowry did; I just hadn’t yet jumped into the lukewarm pool water. Did I stand with or in opposition to the American “Dream?” Could I stomach forty to fifty years buying, selling, and processing in furtherance of someone else’s canned notion of what mattered? I thought I was clear-eyed: They’ve built this thing to reward you for your work sustaining it. It’s all a scam—a sucker’s bet. On the other hand, there was never a better, brighter, safer, more equitable or prosperous time—it being the mid-1990s—for a human being to be alive. Was I really prepared to set aside all my life’s teed-up advantages to hole up in a rat trap apartment in the Village, while I made Great Art?

And like Sam in Brazil I allowed myself to be swept downriver while I spent the next ten years deciding. Never swimming with the current, but not fighting it, either. It was a grudging careerism: find a stable situation, apply minimum effort for the maximum possible wage, advance only when required. And I channeled my inner Romanticism—the stuff of Sam Lowry’s heroic dream sequences—into writing. If I don’t have it in me to rebel, I’ll make a character who will. Or my particular brand of rebellion will be a kind of running off of the mouth. Maybe this was a step forward, or sideways, from Sam’s attacks on mythical monsters. And maybe a more effective safety valve, in that at no point in the past 30 years have I snapped and squared off against the indomitable State.

As important as Brazil is to me, I wouldn’t say that what happens to Sam served as any kind of cautionary tale, or that it taught me to get comfortable straddling the fence, or else. More like two things happened. First, I adapted. Over time you learn to take it easier on yourself. You come to appreciate that any stand you might take on your own—I HEREBY BOYCOTT THE SYSTEM— most likely won’t make a difference. And on the flipside, the stands you don’t take don’t leave you soulless and compromised. Sure, an invisible hand tells me where to go and what to do fifty hours a week, and in between time, it impels me to purchase and consume goods and services. Yet I still love, breathe, think, sing, feel for others, and write. I am not My Own Man, because there’s no such thing. But I’m better off than most.

Half-in/ half-out is how many of us spend our days. Anyone who is all-in or all-out has been truly brain-snatched and should be pitied, rather than admired. Sure, if I had stepped in with both feet, I might have a second home in Park City or London right now and could even retire. But a true believer never actually retires when there’s a third and fourth home to chase. Half-out gave me a family life. And sure, if I’d skipped off the conveyor belt to law school, maybe I had a shot at writing Author on my tax return. But I’d still be filing one every year. Half-in has brought me a level of comfort and stability. This isn’t a cop-out, I swear. It’s not some sophisticated lawyer’s defense for the 30 years he spent earning an upper-middle class income and listening to the Clash. Or maybe it is, but it has actual intellectual heft to it and the further support of my gut feel.

Second, the System met me halfway. Over time—and especially once we put the blacks and whites of the 20th century behind us—it’s grown more tolerant and supportive of our ambivalence toward it. Through the Internet we now have expressive outlets for cracking off bits of anger. The art we experience has helped carve out a middle space where we can ingest the benefits of this world while still critiquing what’s broken. For sure the current Administration is putting the squeeze on us, demanding that we either side safely with injustice or submit to AI processing of our socials and possible follow-up from the “Justice” Department. So maybe a mind-state of settled ambivalence isn’t sustainable going forward, and a guy like me will have to return to the question of whether he’s actually in or out—out now meaning holed up in a country house in Italy, far from the madding crowds. And funny enough, that looks a lot like Sam Lowry’s desired, and possibly attained (depending on your point of view) end-state.

In the meantime, the in-between time, which is all we have: here’s to coasting through life, scene to scene with no master plan, half-in and half-out on the question of what, if anything, you might owe to the supposed bigger picture. So far, so good.

“Brazil” (Apple Music, Spotify)

Around this time last year, my father-in-law, Charles Lacey Compton Jr., passed away in his sleep. We were able to be with him, at his bedside, which was a blessing. Lacey had been in the hospital two days earlier, fighting off complications from his advanced Parkinson’s Disease. There came a point where he swore off any further intercessions to prolong his life. I want to go home to die, he said. These are words that, due to my own psychologically fraught relationship with death as even a general concept, I could not imagine speaking out loud. Kate and I caught the earliest flight out to Salt Lake City the next morning, arriving in time to escort Lacey out of the hospital.

When the discharge papers came through, he piloted his motorized wheelchair down the hall to the elevator bank, angled it deftly enough into the cramped space of the elevator, dinging its interior walls just once. When the doors opened on the ground floor, he was off like a shot, charting not the straightest line to the front door. But making his way nevertheless. Up the steep-slope ramp into the van Kate’s brother had parked just outside the hospital entrance, where his children locked the chair in place for the twenty-minute ride home.

Hospice arrangements were in progress. There were phone calls, deliveries of equipment. I don’t know why you’re going to all this trouble— Lacey said, pausing to breathe, as he often did at this point, in the middle of his longer sentences. —to figure all this out. Another breath. I’m going to die in the next two days. It wasn’t clear if he was making a prediction or expressing an intention. But either way, there was a flat certainty in this pronouncement that we were inclined, in the moment, to disregard. Lacey had quite reasonably been speaking about death a fair bit in recent months, I suppose as he did the hard work of getting his mind around it. As badly off as he had been in the hospital, the last course of antibiotics he’d received there seemed to have beaten back his pneumonia. It seemed likely we would have him with us for a while longer.

How long did we think? Maybe six weeks, someone—Kate, I think—said.

Lacey died in the wee hours of Sunday morning, February 2, 2025. If we draw out the Groundhog Day analogy, his life had become winter. Six more weeks of it were on the table, or so we supposed, but some part of him—just his body? was his will engaged in this?—declined the offer. He put his shadow behind him, turned toward the light, and rode off into it.

I was asked to write Lacey’s obituary. I had done this before, for Kate’s mother, more than twenty years ago now. There isn’t much to writing an obituary. You follow a strict template and you report facts in plain language. No room here for any poetic turns or florid prose, because there is only one person on stage here, and it very much should not be the writer. Because I am who I am, I succumbed to weakness and included a sentence that edged ever-so-slightly away from the obituary style. One or both of Lacey’s children rightly struck that sentence from the document.

I could crack a joke here and say that of the millions of words I’ve typed over the years into umpteen iterations of Microsoft Word, Gmail, Outlook, Blogger, Substack and other platforms, maybe a tenth of which I’m proud of, it’s most certainly the two unsigned obituaries that have found the most readers. But that’s as it should be, given their subjects.

This custom we have, where we take a loved one’s full sixty or eighty-four years of life experiences, of impressions left on the world and so many people it, of the love they felt, the thoughts they had that were uniquely their own, the books they read and the songs they sang—the yards of hair they grew and either cut, pulled out or lost—and we set all that aside in favor of six hundred flatly factual words: I have to say I have struggled with this. You would think that death is the Last and Greatest Reduction, but here comes the local paper a few days later to boil off everything that was singular and important about the life of the departed. Then you find yourself behind a laptop at your late father-in-law’s dining room table, and you come to see that the obituary conventions are a kind of rescue and respite for the writer, who would otherwise be sweating every choice he made, to include this or exclude that, feeling all the while that he was editing away a life. But the writer can’t be blamed for this, when he’s only following the rules.

I started this post a year ago, but then I stopped. I reached this point in the progress of my thesis, and I questioned whether it was appropriate—particularly at that moment—to continue. A year later, and with Kate’s blessing, I feel like I can take this up again. And I can write about how I, a latecomer and interloper—as Lacey once playfully introduced my sister-and-law and me to some friends—understood Charles Lacey Compton, Jr.

The relationship between father-in-law and his son-in-law is necessarily an awkward one, in that it proceeds from the proposition that whether or not the interloper believes he’s good enough for your daughter—let’s put entirely aside whether he actually is—he has asked her a very pointed question, on the off-chance that she might think he is. The morning after we got engaged, Kate called her parents from New York City. I wasn’t on the line, but I was standing by and could hear Kate’s half of the conversation with Lacey. Brad asked me to marry him, she said. [pause for response] Well, I said, yes! I laughed aloud as this played out. He was buying himself time. It was two, maybe three seconds, but at the tail end of parenting, every second counts. I only supposed this was true at the time. Now that I am the father of a daughter, I can confirm it, and I can hold in my head two conflicting propositions: first, that no one ever will be good enough for my daughter, and second, she will find and lock down the love of her life.

I first met Lacey sometime during my freshman year in college, when Kate brought me home with her to Northern Virginia. Straightaway we went out to lunch. He advised the waiter, in a twangy rural accent, that he had a life-threatening tree nut allergy. He was emphatic about it. Oof, I thought to myself. This is a serious person. Did Kate say he was a lawyer? Minutes later they brought him a salad with nuts on it. He rightly but also brutally took the wait staff to task over this. I could die, he said, as the blood crashed out of the faces of two waiters and the maî·tre d’. Do you understand me? I COULD DIE. And I thought to myself, I’ll be sleeping in this man’s house tonight.

Over time—and by time I mean the next thirty-four years—my anxiety level around Lacey did steadily, if never precipitously, recede from this high watermark somewhere between serious unease and sheer terror. If you’ve spent any amount of time with Kate and me, then you know the story of a particular trip we took to visit Lacey at his first home-in-retirement on Hilton Head Island. Not long after we arrived, Lacey mentioned his plans to dig a hole in the front yard. I don’t remember what it was for—maybe he was planting a tree. But he asked for help.

Kate looked at me. I gulped and said, Sure. Happy to help. I should say that at this point in time we’d been married for, I dunno, ten years. The following morning, at I don’t know what hour—I can only say it was well before I was inclined to get out of bed, yet late enough for it to be sweltering outside—I heard Kate say to me: He’s out there digging that hole. You need to go help him. So I got dressed and went outside.

What are you doing? Lacey demanded, when he saw me walking down the driveway. I’ve got this. Well, this tapped right into a pathology I have, which is that I’m afraid to offer help to anyone who might appear to need it, for fear of offending them.

Oh, um—I knew that, I told him, wracking my brain for a cover. I’m just out here to play basketball. And I went into the garage to get a ball and spent the next twenty minutes joylessly shooting hoops in the 90-degree heat and Carolina humidity, while my father-in-law dug his hole. Later that night, Lacey made several pointed complaints about how his back hurt from digging that hole all by himself. But—I began. Kate looked at me and shook her head. Don’t go there, was the message.

An important thing to know about Lacey was that he was always in charge. And I mean always, right up to the very end of his life. He was never one of those aggressive, domineering alpha males. He was just in full command of his life and habituated to making his own choices. And what I came to understand over time was that he had in fact worked very hard, often past endurance, and taken considerable risks, to put himself in the driver’s seat of his own life. Lacey’s father was a farmer, lawyer, and judge, a stern patriarch and a pillar of his community. Growing up as Charles Lacey Compton, Jr. came with certain burdens—expectations of comportment, sure, but also for his professional life.

On the first subject Lacey put down markers early. Consider the Manassas Water Tower Graffiti Incident, a central story in Compton family lore. He and some friends had done this bit of dirty business on Saturday night. With a glint in his eye Lacey would recall to us how on Monday morning he was called to the high school principal’s office to answer to police, marveling at how quickly they had cracked the case. Then the punch line: one of the tags on the tower read CLC Jr. He caught hell at home for that one. From there Lacey pool-sharked his way through college, sinking enough eight balls to pay for the brand-new convertible that he drove to Las Vegas, as he told us in his last year of life, to see the Rat Pack.

He followed in Charles, Sr.’s footsteps at least as far as law school, and it was expected that upon passing the bar he would join the family firm. But Lacey wanted to be his own boss, and he struck out on his own, and in the years that followed he became one of the most successful land use lawyers in Northern Virginia. Here’s another well-worn bit of lore, and like the water tower a little thing, but illustrative:

Periodically—maybe it was weekly: I don’t remember—Lacey’s father treated his family to a Sunday meal. In regular attendance were Charles, Sr. and his wife, Lacey and his two siblings, and their spouses and children. Three generations of extended family to feed. Charles, Sr. had lived through the Depression and never quite shook off the frugality that those rough economic conditions, now long gone, had impressed upon his family. Accordingly, he regarded it as an extravagance to drink anything but tap water when he was eating out. And if he were treating, he expected that everyone in the family would follow suit.

One day Lacey ordered iced tea. The table went silent, somebody gasped, and Charles Sr. flashed a look at his firstborn son. Lacey shrugged and said he wanted the tea, and he would pay for it with the money he earned at his firm.

I heard these stories, about the vandalism and the pool-sharking and the iced tea, several times down through the years. In the moment it never occurred to me to consider why these were the stories Lacey wanted to tell, and retell, and tell again. When he was reminiscing about bygone times, whether they were simpler or just different, Lacey often would started a sentence with You have to understand …, before going on to provide an essential bit of context. I always figured this was a verbal tic. We all have our favored empty words and phrases that we tack on to our sentences. As a podcaster, I obsess over the project of editing them out.

But now—again with the advantage of distance, and appreciating that a better version of me would have considered this while Lacey was alive—I’m inclined to spend a minute reassessing whether that throwaway phrase, you have to understand …, was actually important, in its own right. At the core of all of the several stories Lacey told and retold were themes of self-definition, independence, and even defiance. And he was asking us to understand what he’d been up against: the mores of the time, his rural small-town upbringing, the expectations he carried as Charles Lacey, Jr., his father’s force of personality, among other things. Now I see that Lacey was telling us not just who he was and where he came from, but in fact what he’d fought through in order to take command of his life.

Belatedly now, too, I understand why there might occasionally have been some friction, when our gang of four flounced into his foyer with our ten pieces of luggage and mud-caked boots. We spent many vacation weeks at Lacey’s house, and there were often contentious moments. He was very particular about, well, a great many things, and as parents of first small children, then teenagers, and at all times loud and untidy children, we introduced considerable disorder and disruption into his just-so retirement. Hell, I appreciate that I personally contributed more than a third share of that disorder and disruption. A baseline level of exasperation hung in the air during these visits, with some attendant grumbling and occasionally a sharp word from the master of the house.

At some point we passed into a phase where we received advance written notice from Kate’s stepmother about what we must and must not do in the house. As an example, we were advised that we should dry the kitchen sink basin after using it, because water would damage the copper.

There came a point where I boiled down my son-in-law’s predicament to this:

Here I am approaching middle age. I have a grown man’s responsibilities, and increasingly an older man’s aches and pains. Now I’m on vacation and I’m scared to leave a bowl unwashed for more than five minutes after I’ve finished my cereal.

At the end of a visit to Virginia after Christmas one year, Lacey pulled me aside to say that the first few days of our visits were always hard for him, because he had to adjust to our being there—but the week after we left was even harder, because now he had to get used to being without us. I don’t specifically remember that he opened this discussion with Brad, you have to understand … But if he didn’t, it surely was implied.

I should say: I’m the opposite of a take-charge personality. I’m the very opposite of a risk-taker, too. I am deferential and indecisive, I go along to get along (up to a point), and I am an avowed practitioner of conflict avoidance. Accordingly, I would wait four minutes max before rinsing out that cereal bowl, and I always swabbed the kitchen sink afterward. I’ve often thought about what my life would be like if I had even ten percent of Lacey’s nerve. I’ve often wondered, too, what Lacey thought about a guy like me marrying his daughter. But over time we both came to appreciate the complementary roles we played—and supports we provided—for Kate.

Not long before he died, Lacey sat me down in his dining room and told a story about how back in the 1980s, he and a client who had land interests in Central America were nearly kidnapped by paramiliaries in Costa Rica. Eyes widened around the room—not just because the story was wild, but also (I think) because he was describing a rare moment before the Parkinson’s when he was very much not in command of a situation. Kate had never heard this one before. Neither had her brother. Maybe in that moment he would have told that story to anyone, and it just happened to be me in the chair. But I like to think he was opening up to me about this because he understood who I was, the command I’ve never had, and how I’m (mostly) just fine with it, so that he could show an instance of that vulnerability, too. That’s surely a reach, but it’s natural, isn’t it, to look for meaning in moments we spent with those we’ve loved and lost? Especially toward the end?

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that Lacey was possibly the most generous person I’ve ever known, and that late in life he found an almost limitless capacity for making friends, drawing into his orbit in Park Meadows a plentiful and loving community of neighbors and caregivers. When you went out with him to dinner, he knew everybody on staff in the restaurant—and there were many restaurants. If you want to know who Lacey was at the end of his life, consider that the contractor who serviced his mobility scooters (he had several) came to the celebration of life that we hosted at his house the weekend after he died. Lacey was always the Boss, but in these final years he also became the Hub—the center of a vast and always growing network of kind and caring people that he convened and held together with his personal magnetism, good humor, and strength of spirit.

Parkinson’s takes away control. Or at least it does for basic functions like motor movement, breathing and swallowing, and speech. It’s a bad enough disease for anyone to suffer, but it was a cruel irony for Lacey to get it. You don’t beat Parkinson’s, but Lacey wrote a blueprint at least for ensuring it doesn’t beat you. He planned and plotted and labored past endurance to ensure that he retained the greatest possible quality of life for the longest possible time. At times this led to adventures: for example, his careening through a steakhouse on a motorized scooter set to rabbit speed (we had toggled it down to turtle and were overruled), doinking off a seated table for six in the process. We can add that story, and countless others, to the file with the water tower and the iced tea. All manner of facilitating gadgets passed through the house, including this mobility device with tank treads that enabled Lacey to ride up the beautiful mountain trails behind his house—often as not leaving us in the dust as he went.

Late in the afternoon on the day before he died, Lacey saddled up on his indoor scooter and rode it into the kitchen. Willy Nelson’s “On the Road Again” (Apple Music, Spotify) was playing over the Sonos speakers. I watched him carefully as he ran this lap around the island, in case he should get take a corner imperfectly and get the scooter stuck. But I shouldn’t have worried. Lacey steered the vehicle skillfully through the narrow channel, past the oven and refrigerator and the aforementioned copper sink, stopping now and again only to confirm that everything was in order and in its right place. One last inspection before he relinquished his command.

Does anybody remember the Sire Records CD Music Samplers? These were single-CD compilations sold by the label at cut-rate pricing to promote acts on their alt-rock roster. Between 1987 and 1994 Sire released seven of these samplers, titled Just Say Yes (1987), Just Say Yo (1988), Just Say Mao (1989), Just Say Da (1990), Just Say Anything (1991), Just Say Yesterday (1992), and Just Say Roe (1994).

My first compact disc player was a single-drawer Sony that I red-whited into my existing stereo system. I bought it in high school—so necessarily between 1987 and 1991, but I think I can narrow that window a bit more. The first two CDs I bought to spin on that player were Depeche Mode’s Speak & Spell and The Best of OMD. That OMD compilation was released on February 29, 1988, and I had it on cassette a good long while before I bought the CD for the two bonus tracks. I remember buying Rattle & Hum on CD the day it came out, which was November 4, 1988. So it follows that I must have got hold of that CD player sometime between February and November 1988.1 By the time I graduated in May 1991 I had Volumes I through IV of the Sire samplers in my CD rack, with Volume V shortly to arrive later that summer.

That’s my long way around to saying these samplers were, as much as anything else, the soundtrack to my last three years in high school. And at least on me, they worked exactly as the promoters at Sire intended, in that they got me to buy a ton of Sire-issued albums.

The Sire samplers were dirt-cheap and loaded with songs. Just Say Yes and Just Say Yo went for $7.98 at a time when studio albums on CD went for fifteen bucks. Both of Yes and Yo had fourteen tracks by fourteen artists and runtimes of over 60 minutes. Later titles offered even more bang for the buck. Mao and Da topped out at over 78 minutes, and Anything clocked in at 75:10. That’s about as much audio as you could pack into the CD format.

The concept was simple. They’d give you remixes and rare B-sides of the big-ticket bands you already knew and liked. Just Say Yes and Just Say Mao led off with remixes of Depeche Mode’s “Never Let Me Down” (Apple Music, Spotify) and “Everything Counts” (Apple Music, Spotify). But the CD kept spinning when those tracks were done—really, were you going to put down your NES controller to turn it off?—and next thing you knew the Bunnymen were playing, then the Mighty Lemon Drops, James, the Smiths, Figures on a Beach, and the Wild Swans. Every one of these follow-on acts to Depeche Mode on Just Say Yes gained a foothold in my music collection.

If you didn’t like all of what you heard on a Just Say sampler, you loved a good-sized chunk of it, and accordingly you went right out and paid full freight for albums by the artists who clicked with you. By my conservative count, based on what I heard on these five samplers, I bought 24 Sire-issued CDs in high school and college, plus another handful after that and God knows how many on vinyl over the past five years. The Sire samplers operated like loss leaders, but I expect they earned money for the label all on their own. How much did it cost to make, package, and ship a CD in those days? Surely a lot less than $7.98. Maybe the artists were entitled to royalties, but it’s not wild to think, either, that the label had an argument to pocket all the revenue, net of costs.

Generally speaking, Sire put some time and thought into the branding and cover art, which is to their credit, given that at this price point, they probably didn’t need to do it. For sure they got off to a rough start with the Just Say Yes sleeve. It’s an open question whether Bugs Bunny actually dug ’80s alternative rock or was just fulfilling his contractual obligations for the parent company. Warner Bros. had bought Sire back in ’77 and immediately put Bugs to work flogging punk and new wave records. With that precedent set there was no meaningful impediment to him serving as the cover model for the Winter 1987 sampler.

All good in concept, until Bugs came out of costuming in a black (leather?) jacket, shades, Jams shorts and red hi-tops. This was a wrong turn at Albuquerque—fumbling squares in Marketing trying to tap into the kids’ sense of what was cool. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that someone my age or slightly older bought this CD, joined the Lampoon, and graduated from Harvard in time to write the Poochie character into The Simpsons in 1997. The parallels are too striking.

Someone might have phoned in a clue to Seymour Stein after this, because it was Bugs’ lone appearance on the Samplers. For Just Say Yo they substituted an actual white rabbit, and on Volumes III and IV we were looking at a Photoshopped Mao Tse-Tung and a caricature of Gorbachev—the latter lip-printed with a Sire logo on his forehead in place of the birthmark. Mao and Da were fun covers: Mao especially, with the yellow, fuchsia, and sea-green color scheme and a shot of the Chairman grooving, finger snaps and all, on the back of the case.

We of course understood that Just Say Yes was riffing on Nancy Reagan’s Just Say No campaign. Beyond that nobody thought especially hard about what Sire was trying to communicate with its branding. It would be a stretch to say they had trotted out Bugs to counter the First Lady’s anti-drug messaging, even if General Mills would later put a rabbit on that beat (ha). The odds were just as long that record execs were actually promoting Maoism or late-stage Soviet Socialism. Gorby’s perestroika? Maybe, but far likelier still there was no ideological program here and the promo team was just pushing buttons. Tweak America by slapping a left-wing revolutionary icon on the cover of a CD; tweak Mao by slapping a rave sticker on his chest and using his likeness to drive sales. And so on.

Also, am I crazy to think that Black Grape copped the Just Say Mao concept for the cover of their first record? That’s a trippy colorized headshot from one of Carlos the Jackal’s fake passports.

In any case, Volumes V and VII were most definitely aimed at impressing a higher social consciousness upon the listener base. The Just Say Anything sampler took aim at the PMRC. Alas, Tipper Gore never became First Lady, but she would serve as a suitable bookend boogeywoman for Nancy, four years later. Speech bubbles on the Anything CD cover declaimed that OUR FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHTS ARE IN JEOPARDY and CENSORSHIP IS A DANGER TO A FREEDOM—all because a Senator’s wife had prevailed upon the record industry to slap labels on CDs warning of explicit song lyrics. Just Say Anything led off with “Warning Parental Advisory” (Apple Music, Spotify), a song written and recorded by John Wesley Harding and Steve Wynn specifically for the compilation:

Warning this is a parental advisory. The words on this disc are in no way offensive. They’re just gonna say what you already know. The words that you hear will just pander and please you—and leave you much duller than you were before.

Strummed out on an acoustic guitar, the song hearkens back to protest songs of the late 1960s, but updated to a proper 1990s formula of equal parts sloganeering and trash-talk.

Next up intentionally on purpose came the killer eponymous track from Ice-T and his hardcore band Body Count (Apple Music, Spotify). Here the Sampler CD earned its own warning label: Don’t you need a gun, you stupid dumb dick-sucking bum politician?!? Tell us what to do! Fuck you! And here I am on a Friday night pining for the good old days, when threats to the social order were ten years away from becoming tamed television regulars on NBC (rather than vice versa), and the nation’s constitutional controversies were positively quaint.

Volume VII was Just Say Roe. I didn’t buy this one. In fact, I don’t even remember it coming out. Presumably Sire wanted to talk about Roe v. Wade because around this time Planned Parenthood v. Casey was on its way up to the Supreme Court, raising the strong possibility that the abortion right announced in Roe would be junked by the conservative Justices. What a record company could expect to do about it was another question. I suppose there’s a version of history where Anthony Kennedy’s kid left this CD in his father’s Honda Civic, Dad let it play on the way to work, and the Waterlillies’ “I Am Woman” cover (no link found) moved him to change his vote and uphold the right to choose. But I haven’t seen anything like that in the Casey lore.

Of course I’m going to be snarky about this kind of thing. Just Say Roe, Rock the Vote—I could never abide these hail-mary Boomer bids to jump-start a social consciousness in the day’s youth. At best, these were there the political equivalent of dressing Bugs Bunny in Jams and rolling him out on a skateboard. I loved R.E.M. to death, and I could tolerate Natalie Merchant preaching at me, provided she had her backing band with her. What I didn’t need were rock stars cropping up in PSAs to nag at me about my civic obligations. I’ve already gone on record with my feelings about PSAs. See “(Keep Feeling) Fascination.” What I said in that post went double for the political stuff back in those days, when I was [ahem] a strong supporter of the status quo.

Anyway, they say charity begins at home, and for all their ham-handed efforts to rouse Gen X out of its I-think-laudable self-absorption—what? you’d rather we were insufferable activists?—Sire Records might just have treated their bands better. James appeared twice in the Sire Samplers, with “Ya Ho” (Apple Music, Spotify) on Yes and “What For” (Apple Music, Spotify) on Yo. Both these songs are on the band’s second record, which Sire mothballed for a year before finally cutting it loose—with negligible promotion—in September 1988. Sire had the juice to sign all manner of promising indie acts. Indeed, the write-up on James in the Just Say Yes CD booklet says the band were “snapped up by Sire’s tireless scouts.” Yet it seems the label lacked the resources and/or attention span to see their signees through to the record store racks—or even to know whether they had done so. That same write-up on Just Say Yes included the following promo blurb:

“Ya Ho” from the Sire album If Things Were Perfect … Available on LP and Cassette (1/4-25657).

That album doesn’t now and never did exist. There are zero corresponding entries on Discogs. In fact, ten more months would pass before “Ya Ho” saw the light of day, on an album called Strip-Mine that is one of my all-time favorite LPs. You’d think a mutual parting of ways was in order, but when the band reached out to explore that option, they couldn’t even get their label to return their calls. Ultimately James were able to invoke a clause in their contract entitling them to terminate their relationship with Sire, because the company had failed to communicate with them within six months of receiving the Strip-Mine masters. From there James signed with Fontana, and the rest is history.

It bears mentioning that the album version of “Ya Ho” is a full minute longer than the edit Sire pubbed on Just Say Yes, which is nowhere on the streamers. If you ask me, nobody needs to hear that extra minute. I’m reading between the lines here, but it seems the label was happy enough dropping the tighter, more sensible edit on a promo compilation—and for that matter, assigning it pride of place smack between the Mighty Lemon Drops and the Smiths. Ten months later, after all manner of biting and kicking and scratching, we got Strip-Mine with a more sprawling and self-indulgent version of the song. Maybe band and label were at odds on matters of editing? If so, I can see Sire’s point here. But you don’t solve problems with radio silence.

From where I’m sitting, I credit the Sire samplers for turning me on to one of my all-time favorite bands. “Ya Ho” was a bit folksy for me when I first heard it. I can’t say I immediately ran out looking for James records like I did for the other bands on Just Say Yes. Nine months later Just Say Yo came out, with “What For” as its Track 12. Today I won’t think of any sad things, was the opening line. Will not think of torture or the rape of nature. That came in hot, but Tim was only raising these subjects to set them aside and get swept away by this beautiful day! What for? Tell me, tell me: what for? Yes: this was exactly the kind of can’t-be-botheredness my Gen X sensibility was craving.

So how could I get my hands on more James? The Just Say Yo booklet mentioned a first album, Stutter, but nothing now about the follow-up. In fact, the Yo profile of the band is positively seething with passive aggression:

“Psss—did you hear that new group we signed? Man, they’re weird!” No, not weird. James. Not as in Dean (though Morrissey is a big fan). As in four men with some very unusual, sometimes caustic, sometimes surreal and totally individual songs to parlay to a world that needs a little something different to shake things up a big. Which the band did on their first album, STUTTER, a dollop of post-punk, post-modern strangeness thrown on top of an often uncomprehending music world.

Reading this with the benefit of hindsight, you have to figure Sire had at first thought they’d found their next Talking Heads, then found them a bit too difficult to sell, and were now in the process of writing them off. Still, the copywriter found a way to thread the needle, so that a certain kind of kid with a certain kind of sensibility would need only one last nudge—an MTV clip of the band playing “Sit Down” at Glastonbury—to become a full-on fire-breathing James fan. In the time since I’ve bought something like 21 individual releases, the Gathering Sound box set, and countless T-shirts and other merch, both from the band website and at live shows, of which I can count at least sixteen. Maybe I didn’t need a Sire sampler to just say yes to James. But when something has worked out so well, you certainly wouldn’t go back in time to screw with it.

But I’ve already written a bunch here about James (see “Sit Down”/ “Panic” and “Johnny Yen”). What I’d like to do now is take a minute and honor a handful of standout cuts I remember from the Sire samplers—and revisited this week.

One massive track was Depeche Mode’s 7-inch “Mega-Single” mashup of “Behind the Wheel” and “Route 66,” which like many of the songs I’m thinking of here is not on the streamers and would be lost to history, had an Internet hero not posted it to YouTube. Depeche Mode broke the seal on electric guitar with their “Route 66” B-side (Apple Music, Spotify), proving the concept for their smash-hit “Personal Jesus” (Apple Music, Spotify) two years later. “Route 66” standing alone is too much of a good thing, and I much prefer the several mixes that integrate its raunchy stomp with the mesmerizing electronics of “Behind the Wheel” (Apple Music, Spotify). This is most artfully done on the Just Say Yo version, which clocks in at an economical four minutes, twenty seconds. Just you try to find it anywhere else.

Another long-lost and preferred remix is the version of “Accidentally 4th Street (Gloria)” Sire posted to Just Say Mao (YouTube)—on the strength of which I shelled out for Figures on a Beach (self-titled), when against all odds the CD turned up in the shelves of the NRM in our mall. The sun rose in the west today—accidents in the land in the free! The album version of “Gloria” (Apple Music, Spotify) is more of a slog, towed forward by a rugged rhythm guitar that seems to be struggling to keep up. No such drag with the tight remix on Mao. I love the bitterness and cynicism in Kaczynski’s verses, love it even more when he flips the coin going into the chorus: I love this world harder in my imagination than my conscience will allow.

Sire must have seen shoegaze coming in summer 1991, because in addition to posting a My Bloody Valentine track (Apple Music, Spotify) on Just Say Anything, they set aside 6.5 minutes for Ride’s drone epic, “Today” (Apple Music, Spotify). Gardner and Bell’s guitars on this track reach all the way to the vaulted ceilings of your soul. It’s pure melancholic bliss, and an easy choice for a college freshman looking to woo a girl with a mixtape—even (and maybe especially) with its few and ambivalent lyrics.

Now finally we arrive at this post’s title songs. First is “Galbi” (YouTube) by Ofra Haza—yet another remix that has eluded the streamers. This one led off Just Say Yo, marking a rare departure from Sire’s early practice of installing a Depeche Mode track right up top to reel in the listener. It’s a well-earned pole position. This particular mix pits Haza’s adaptation of a Yemeni love poem against London club beats. The track starts with an incongruous audio test: Welcome to the complete sample library, volume 1. [Uh, dude: it’s volume II?] On the left … now on the right. Then the acid house elements pour into the mix, in stunning complementarity with the traditional strings and Haza’s quavering vocals.

Gutsy of Sire to pitch this exotica to American alt-rock kids, but we caught it. When I wrote my Mixtape Diaries gang yesterday with the YouTube link to this song, Mark answered straightaway to cheer me on.

“Timebomb” (Apple Music, Spotify) is an altogether different animal. The Royal Crescent Mob were a four-piece neo-funk act from Columbus. This is skate-punk party rock at its finest, replete with sampled squeals of tires and police sirens. The vocal rap, Funkadelic wah-wah guitars, and manic rhythm section scream Red Hot Chili Peppers on paper, but the final product sounds completely original. Getouttamyway! Getouttamyway! I’m a timebomb. This track was good enough on the merits for Sire to position right between “Body Count” and “Crazy” by Seal (Apple Music, Spotify) on Just Say Anything. That’s solid company, there. Two months later, in September 1991, Nirvana’s Nevermind landed, and by the end of the year the Mob’s upbeat and eclectic sound was, I don’t think coincidentally, shoved off the Sire roster.

We’re never gonna survive unless we get a little crazy … On with the body count.

Record companies gonna record company, and it seems like Sire record-companied in a very particular way, which was to sign all the original and interesting acts they could, chuck them at the unforgiving wall of the U.S. music market, and kick to the curb any- and everybody that didn’t stick. Was this a humane project—offering struggling bands the lifeline of major-label support, only to cut it the minute the going got tough? Probably not, and there’s a reason why I decided not to pick Belle & Sebastian’s “Seymour Stein” (Apple Music, Spotify) as this post’s title song.

For all that, though, the Sire CD samplers—or at least the first five volumes, Just Say Yes through Just Say Anything—represented a particular kind of wall-chucking that I’m going to struggle to condemn. And that’s because so many of the artists and so many of the songs that Sire sent hurtling through the air on these cheap-as-fuck CDs landed with me and will stick forever.