Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life (16 page)

In the fall of 1995, I fled the world of journalism for the incredibly lucrative realm of short fiction. This meant driving from Miami to the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, a school I had applied to—and I wish I was kidding here—because of its spiffy four-color brochure. As a parting gift, my friend Jim gave me a homemade tape with a couple of Joe Henry albums. This was the heyday of the No Depression movement and everyone was listening to that one Son Volt record. Jim was a staunch No Depression fan, meaning a) he worshipped country music; and b) he was himself depressed.

I figured Joe Henry was part of that scene. I slipped in the tape, but didn’t listen too carefully. Then, up around Pensacola, the song “Short
Man’s Room” came on. It was an elegant waltz of the sort that might have been played at a barn dance 150 years ago. The narrator seemed like a harmless eccentric at first. Then the fiddle reeled into a minor key and the second verse arrived.

Gradually, it emerged that this guy was the town drunk, a lonely old Indian descending into alcohol dementia.
I once thought I’d live forever
, he explained.
I pitched for the Indian leagues/But now I guess I’ve learned some better/You’re only as good as your knees
.

There were several reasons this song would haunt me throughout grad school. I was an aging jock living in an isolated carriage house with very low ceilings. I was sufficiently addicted to pot that I eventually stalked my dealer. But the main thing was that Joe Henry had written a short story. He had created a character and induced him to tell the truth. I would spend every day of the next two years trying to figure out how the fuck he did it.

I was entering a new phase as a Drooling Fanatic, a kind of literary apprenticeship. There was no TV in my life. E-mail was something you checked once a week at the library. I sat in a sweaty recliner crapping out rough drafts, with the boom box cranked. I read too, of course. I lay on my mattress and frisked library loaners for The Secret of How Not to Suck. But it was the songs that taught me the most.

I read Eudora Welty’s “Why I Live at the P.O.” like it was the Koran. But it took the Tom Waits ballad “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis” for me to grasp the essence of an unreliable narrator, how the poignancy of self-deception resides in its erosion. Cormac McCarthy was a dark monster of language. But if I wanted
poetic violence, I turned to Nick Cave’s
Murder Ballads
. For reasons that remain unclear, during this time I read
The Executioner’s Song
, all 1,072 pages. I couldn’t shake the feeling that Steve Earle had covered the same terrain more movingly in the song “Billy Austin.” It took him only six minutes.

Time was of the essence—that was the point. Us MFA plebs were like grubby windup dolls. Pull the string and we chanted Chekhov’s maxim: cut your first three pages. But Chekhov had nothing on Bruce Springsteen, who opened “Atlantic City” with the greatest first line in the history of pop music:
They blew up the Chicken Man in Philly last night/now they blew up his house too
. Was there a single person on earth who could resist the mystery of this line, with its promise of ruin?

I listened to these songs compulsively, as if by osmosis my writing might improve. It didn’t. My characters continued to sit alone in rooms, frittering with artificial woe. They remained dim figures, driven to action not by the defects of their own hearts but by the doomed impulse of all young writers, which is to impress the reader.

What else did I do during those two years? I glommed on to local musicians and hosted hootenannies at my place, during which I stood off to one side curled in a terrified silence. I shaved my head. I threw myself headlong into catastrophic affairs. Songs were the only regular company I kept and the only thing that tempered the self-seriousness with which I was afflicted. To hear the Smoking Popes croon “Let’s Hear It for Love” was to realize that erotic turmoil was not a subject suited solely to tragedy, but a variety of cosmic joke.

One of my favorite songs of that era, by a long-forgotten band called the Bogmen, featured a lisping narrator who ricochets between bitter harangues against his ex-girlfriend and tender confessions. The music was geeky R&B of the sort Kool & the Gang would have produced
if the Gang had gone to Montessori schools. I must have listened to “Suddenly” a thousand times, and every time I reached the final line
(Suddenly, I have found myself alive)
it roused me. I was trying so hard to absorb this idea: that all our defensive postures boiled down to human longing.

Let me assure you that—despite my highfalutin exegeses—I realize how pointless it is to parse song lyrics. Most people simply don’t give a shit about the words. I myself spent years not giving a shit about the words. Or worshipping words that were shit. (Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.) The fact that I can recite Styx’s “Renegade” from memory sort of says it all.

I was also an early devotee of R.E.M., whose lyrics were for years famously unintelligible. A few hardcore fans eventually managed to decode Michael Stipe’s mumbling, the result being lines such as
There’s a splinter in your eye and it reads “react.”
Did this discovery dim our devotion? Not one splinter.

This is because our gut response to a song derives from its melody and rhythm. The right tune can revive the baldest clichés and lend dignity to all manner of piffle. It is also why I feel such elaborate gratitude when a musician bothers to treat the language with care. I’m grateful to Bob Dylan for the line
The wind was howling and the snow was outrageous
, with its pained internal rhyme. I’m grateful to Mike Doughty for flicking an ash
like a wild, loose comma
and to John Prine for noticing that
the wind was blowing, especially through her hair
and to Antje Duvekot for her wistful declaration
with all the sand that gets into this world, we should all be motherfucking pearls
.

Because honestly, these folks don’t have to bother. Most rockers have made a fine career out of rhyming platitudes. In fact, there’s a decent argument to be made that songwriters generally screw
themselves when they cavort with literature. Which brings us, unavoidably, to this….

Progressive rock is what happens when pop stars get a hard-on for high art. It’s what happens when they ditch guitar-based blues music in favor of symphonic suites composed on synthesized flute with a 13/7 time signature. More than anything, prog represents the profound danger of literary influence on popular music. Let us examine the case of Jon Anderson, a high school dropout who got his start on washboard in a skiffle band and dreamed of playing professional soccer but who instead joined the band Yes and started wolfing down Eastern philosophies.

“We were in Tokyo on tour,” Anderson explains to his fans, “and I had a few minutes to myself in the hotel room before the evening’s concert. Leafing through Yogananda’s
Autobiography of a Yogi
, I got caught up in a lengthy footnote on page 83…. So positive were the Shastras that I could visualize then and there four interlocking pieces of music being structured around them.”

I know what you’re thinking: who are these Shastras and where can I find their albums? Alas, Anderson is referring to a series of esoteric Buddhist texts. Fortunately, Anderson didn’t just read this footnote and forget about it, as so many rock stars might in the addled minutes before a show. No, he used the footnote as the basis for an epic double album entitled
Tales from Topographic Oceans
, which Yes released in 1973.

What is
Tales
about? It is perhaps more efficient to discuss what it is not about. It is not about dropping out of high school. It is not about skiffle. It is not about soccer. It is about, well, here’s a tiny taste:

I’m not sure it’s possible to fathom such profundity, even with a self instructor’s help. But I’ll try for a translation:
Help! I am being held prisoner by a penetration-craving Yogi! The reason these words seem to be arranged at random is because I have to speak in code. “Tender love” means genital fondling. Wait. Shit. He’s coming
.

Yes keyboardist Rick Wakeman was so bored by the record that he once ordered and ate an entire Indian meal on top of his Hammond organ during a performance. When I heard this story, I thought I might be in love with Rick Wakeman. Then it came to my attention that Wakeman himself released a solo record called
Journey to the Centre of the Earth
based on the Jules Verne story and recorded, I’m afraid, with a full orchestra. My favorite passage is entitled “The Battle.” It features a clash between two giant sea monsters “rising out of the angry sea” and ends with this pulse-racing play-by-play:

Journey
sold fourteen million copies. Jethro Tull’s 1973 concept album
Passion Play
was a number one record in the United States despite—or perhaps because of—lyrics like this:

If you want to understand where the defiant musical ineptitude and proud grunting of punk rock came from, you have only to look back to prog, a genre built on the spectacle of overcompensation. You will find the spirit of prog in the lute compositions of Sting, the agonizing tirades of Trent Reznor, and yes, even in Toto’s searing cultural explorations—wherever there are insecure rock stars maxing out the credit card of their own talent.

The lesson here is pretty obvious: musicians should wear their literary influences lightly. Having said this, I’m equally sure the opposite
isn’t
true. Literature can and should aspire to a musical condition.

This is what struck me most forcefully as I sat around in grad school, hunting and pecking: how unafraid musicians were, the tremendous passionate rights they granted themselves. Forget exposition, backstory, the polite accretion of detail. They were in it for the impact. They wanted
to fuck their fans up
. Whereas us writers were left to toil in private, emptying ourselves onto blank pages and hoping someday our efforts might take root inside anonymous readers. We were emotional sperm donors. Was I seeing things a bit too dramatically? Well, of course I was; I was a graduate student.

Graduation rid me of that privilege, but I remained inflamed by futility. To help matters along, I moved to a new city and wrote an eight-hundred-page novel about sixteenth-century Jewish mysticism,
despite knowing nothing about the time period or topic. This tome took nearly two years to complete and put everyone I know to sleep. It was all quite prog.

Joe Henry remained my role model. I still wanted to be able to tell stories the way he did, without bitterness or histrionics. Only I didn’t have melody or rhythm at my disposal. It felt hopeless. Then, one day, I was sitting around trying to write and failing and feeling sorry for myself and listening to Joe and this one line popped out of the speaker:
Here comes the rapture of song and story
. And this made me think of the opening line of the
Iliad
, which goes,
Sing, Goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilles and its devastation
. And this made me think of the lyric soliloquy delivered by Reverend Hightower in Faulkner’s
Light in August
. The connection in my head being that all language began in song and that the best stories inevitably return to song, to a state of rapture. For years, I had assumed that throwing beautiful words at the page would make my prose feel true. But I had the process exactly backward. It was truth that lifted the language into beauty and toward song.

It was a matter of doing what Joe Henry did, of pursuing characters into moments of emotional truth and
slowing down
. The result was a compression of sensual and psychological detail that released the rhythm and melody in language itself, what Longfellow called “the happy accidents of language.” I wouldn’t have recognized it then, but I was trying to identify the process by which a writer might sing.

It was Joe Henry who had triggered this epiphany, so I took the logical next step, abusing my marginal status as a “music journalist” to finagle an interview. It was my idea that Joe and I were going to become great friends, a dependable delusion among Fanatics. Well, I got the interview, anyway.