The Importance of Music to Girls
Page 16
‘Listen!’ I commanded. ‘Just listen to this!’
‘Yeah,’ she offered. ‘It’s really …’
‘But listen to what he’s singing. I’m so bored with the USA! It’s great, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah?’
These were teenagers who had waterbeds and bongs but also statuettes of Mickey Mouse sticking his finger up, bearing the slogan: Fuck You Iran! They were not bored with the USA.
Beth’s most frightening friend was a man called Ron, or sometimes John, who was said to have a warrant out for his arrest. He was older, small and bald but ice cool. His eyes were absolutely black. He took us to clubs downtown, told stories of what happened to people he cursed at school, and while he slept with Beth, he made himself my protector. One night, Ron got me into a club called Crazy Mama’s. I was still seventeen and so could not enter legally. I was drinking White Russians and Brandy Alexanders, having never had cocktails before and thrilled that they tasted like Dolly Mixture because I was missing English sweets. I reeled across the room and into a boy who was wearing a dentist’s white jacket backwards (Devo!). He had spiky hair and a pierced ear, and I believed I had found the only punk in Ohio. Ron came over to explain that I was under his protection and after that we were left alone. He came back to stay at Beth’s, as many people did, and the next day I emerged to find Luke smirking outside my room. The punk was in the living room, where he’d found a guitar and was playing ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’.
‘He’s American,’ said Luke. ‘They’re like the Japanese and the Germans – they’re just not punk.’
‘The New York Dolls? The Velvet Underground? Where do you think punk started?’
‘Well not in fucking Ohio.’
It was true that Ohio was not the America I had envisaged from Velvet Underground albums and Jack Nicholson films. We knew east- and west-coast cities, and their music. We knew about swamps and prairies, deserts and mountain ranges. But no song or film or painting prepared us for the suburban mid-West. I passed judgement on the huge houses, cars and supermarkets, the lack of pavements, the tanks and guns, but I was dazzled by the infinite variety of ice-cream flavours, by air-conditioning and multiplex cinemas, drive-in burger joints and cocktails, tornado warnings and electrical storms.
What impressed me most was the night we went down to the banks of the Ohio river. I could not believe the veering American scale of things – that vast slow body of water which, in the dark, abstracted itself into presence and force, and then behind us, frail and unlikely and just as powerful, a scattering of fireflies.
In a shop window I saw a T-shirt bearing the slogan FUCK ART, LET’S DANCE. I copied it on to the back of a postcard and sent it to Daniel. It was the first love letter I’d ever written.
55
CCD
The ten minutes are up, except they aren’t.
I leave the village. Except I don’t.
The jig fades to silence, except it doesn’t.
NORMAN MACCAIG, ‘Notation of Ten Summer Minutes’
One of the last evenings I spent in Luke’s room was with Daniel and Sophie, when the four of us argued about whether or not lasting social equality was possible. We were bandying Gramsci on decadence, and Dostoyevsky, and while Luke and I were pessimistic, the other two insisted it could be done. None of us knew what we were talking about but the argument became so fierce that when Sophie and I parted in the bus station we were both crying and she sobbed, ‘This won’t affect our friendship, will it?’ Perhaps we cared about the world and what was going to become of us in it after all.
However much my parents left me to manage my own education, it was a given that I would go on studying. Sophie’s father had been the first in his family to go to university. Several of my friends would be the first to go in theirs because they had grants and could sign on in the holidays. We had no idea what we wanted to do with our lives, but university seemed like the right place to go to think about it.
The day we went to get our results, I understood that everyone else knew how to write essays and take exams. They could think clearly. I got what I’d predicted, CCD, and as I stood there with that slip of paper, I decided that I wanted a real education after all and I knew that it was too late. My parents seemed not to mind my failure, which was a kindness, only I wanted someone to ventriloquise for me, to say, ‘This is terrible! Something must be done!’ Only Julia warned me that it might be worth retaking my exams and reapplying. When I saw Daniel, I wept and he was astonished – more so because he had never seen me cry. ‘I didn’t think you cared,’ he said. Neither did I. (A couple of years later we would finally be able to talk of what had passed between us: ‘I didn’t think you cared,’ he would say then too.)
I missed my university place by one grade but I wasn’t going to waste time trying to improve on things. My imperative remained to get out and back to the city where I felt I’d left myself behind. Daniel was going to art school in London. Sophie went off to Lancaster.
CCD. I played it on the piano. It sounded neither here nor there – two side steps and a toe in the future. I had to be prepared. I didn’t have my own record player so I bought a cassette player and set about making tapes.
56
Seven years later
Nadya remembered what a beautiful expression – pleading, guilty, gentle – Gorny wore whenever anyone discussed music with him and what efforts it cost him to keep a ring of enthusiasm out of his voice. In a society where coolness, hauteur and nonchalance are judged signs of breeding and good manners, one must hide one’s passions.
ANTON CHEKHOV, ‘After the Theatre’
I was leaving hospital with my baby daughter. Her father came to pick us up and we walked gingerly to the lift, carrying this child towards the world. The doors opened on the ground floor and there was Daniel, on his way up to see me. He had made a card, a delicate print of a flower, roots and all, with the date of her birth stamped on the back. It reminded me of the forget-me-nots, or whatever they had been, that I’d once given him.
We stepped out into the street – me, my baby, her father and Daniel. It did not seem strange. Daniel had introduced us; they once lived in the same house. It was late autumn, chill and at five o’clock, already dark. I pulled my daughter’s shawl more tightly round her face and hurried to the car. Daniel followed and then waited.
‘Would you like a lift?’ It was all I could think of to say.
‘Yes. Thanks.’
The child seat was in the back and somehow Daniel ended up sitting next to the baby while I got in the front. As we drove off, I turned round to look at her. Was she really here?
Daniel leaned forward, ‘Actually, something awful’s just happened.’
‘Oh no!’ I had been staring at my baby, trying to grasp the fact of her.
He continued: ‘I was on my way to see you and I had this case of records with me, some of my best stuff. I had to change trains at Embankment and when I’d got off I realised I’d left the bloody case behind!’
‘Oh no!’ I said again.
‘Yeah, I ran back but the doors were shut and I swear I saw this man pick the case up. He might even have smiled.’
Next to him, my daughter’s soft and serious presence glowed. When did I last think about anything other than the baby?
Only I couldn’t resist. ‘So what was in the case?’
‘For one thing my Public Image bootleg and that’s incredibly rare …’
‘You mean the French import?’
‘Exactly. And then there was Charlie Parker live at Birdland 1949, which took me years to hunt down.’
‘And what about your Billie Holiday, the one where she turns up at that Armstrong gig and sings “Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans”, and she’s really ill and no one recognises her but then they hear her and they do and they go wild, you didn’t lose that did you?’
‘Yes.’
‘I love that.’
‘And I had this single in there, the first
pressing of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s “Electricity” …’
‘The unfinished black-card cover black-embossed? That was only available for about a week. I’ve got that.’
‘Yes. Well.’
‘And Can?’
‘Tago Mago was in there, I’m sure.’
And so we talked our way across the city until we reached a point at which it seemed sensible to drop Daniel off. My daughter, who in these first seven days of her life had been fractious and colicky, was out for the count. We’d sung her to sleep.
Acknowledgements
‘Grope pizzicato’ draws on ‘Big Brass Bed: Bob Dylan and Delay’ which appeared in Do You Mr Jones: Bob Dylan with the Poets and the Professors, ed. Neil Corcoran, Chatto & Windus 2002. ‘My papa’s waltz’ appeared first in German, translated by Roman Bucheli, in Der Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Some of the ideas for this book were explored in ‘On Punk Rock and Not Being a Girl’, a paper given at the Experience Music Project Pop Conference, Seattle, April 2005, for which opportunity I’d like to thank Marybeth Hamilton, Ann Powers and Eric Weisbard. The paper was subsequently published in Listen Again: A momentary history of pop music, ed. Eric Weisbard, Duke University Press 2007. ‘Secondary worlds’ draws on an article written for the Guardian. BBC Radio 3 broadcast earlier versions of ‘Plaine and easie rules’ and ‘As if in space’.
Homer’s ‘Iliad’ on p. 10 is in the version by George Chapman. ‘The Vast Night’ p. 5, ‘To Music’, p. 78, and ‘Spanish Dancer’, p. 30 by Rainer Maria Rilke, were translated by Stephen Mitchell. ‘Equipped with the eyesight and absorption of wasps’ by Osip Mandelstam on p. 68 was translated by James Greene. Joseph Roth’s 1002nd Night on p. 156 was translated by Michael Hofmann. Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities on p. 175 was translated by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser. Anton Chekhov’s ‘After the Theatre’ (p. 193) was translated by Ronald Hingley. Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, p. 179, was translated by Michael Hulse. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, p. 42, and War and Peace, p. 85, were translated by Rosemary Edmonds. Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, p. 138, was translated by Hilda R. Rosner. Roland Barthes’ Mythologies, p. 160, were translated by Annette Lavers. Osip Mandelstam’s ‘The Staff’, p. 105, was translated by Robert Tracy. Grateful acknowledgement is made to Jon Savage for permission to reprint an extract from his review of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures, which originally appeared in Melody Maker, July 21, 1979, and is included in his book Time Travel: From the Sex Pistols to Nirvana (Vintage, 1997).
Helpful websites included:
www.westsidestory.com
www.martinhannett.co.uk
www.iancurtis.org.uk
www.themarqueeclub.net
www.cybertrn.demon.co.uk/atomic/
www.arthurlloyd.co.uk
For bringing this about, I would like to thank Courtney Hodell, Derek Johns, Paul Keegan and Julian Loose; and Philip Gwyn Jones for bringing it to mind.
For song and dance, and talking about them, I would like to thank Rachel Alexander, Sam Appleby, Simon Armitage, Lucy Astor, Richard Baker, Franny Bennett, Margaret Busby, Kevin Chicken, Jonathan Coe, Tony Crean, Pia Davis, Emma De’Athe, Maura Dooley, David Harsent, Lesley Henshaw, Ted Huffman, Kathleen Jamie, Jackie Kay, John Kieffer, Mark Kingwell, Elena Langer, James Lasdun, Andy Mac-Donald, Glyn Maxwell, Stephen Page, Don Paterson, Christina Patterson, Kate Pullinger, Alistair Roberts, Alan Scholefield, Katri Skala, Christianne Stotijn, Gregory Taylor, Raphael Urweider, Ian Wilson and Richard Wood.
Above all I would like to thank the family Greenlaw for everything along the way, Georgia Ardizzone for my further education, and Jonathan Reekie for something else.
About the Author
Lavinia Greenlaw was born in London where she has lived for most of her life. She studied seventeenth-century art at the Courtauld Institute, and was awarded a NESTA fellowship to pursue her interest in vision, travel and perception.
Her poetry includes Minsk, which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot, Forward and Whitbread Poetry Prizes. She has also published novels and works of non-fiction which include The Importance of Music to Girls and Questions of Travel: William Morris in Iceland. She has won a number of prizes and held residencies at the Science Museum and the Royal Society of Medicine.
Her work for BBC radio includes programmes about the Arctic, the Baltic, Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop.
By the Same Author
Fiction
MARY GEORGE OF ALLNORTHOVER
AN IRRESPONSIBLE AGE
Poetry
NIGHT PHOTOGRAPH
A WORLD WHERE NEWS TRAVELLED SLOWLY
THOUGHTS OF A NIGHT SEA (with Garry Fabian Miller)
MINSK
Copyright
First published in 2007
by Faber & Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
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London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2015
All rights reserved
© Lavinia Greenlaw, 2007
Cover: Benoit Jeanneton / PhotoAlto Agency RF Collections / Getty Images
The right of Lavinia Greenlaw to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–32617–4