I liked In Utero a lot better than Nevermind because Kurt was singing about being a husband, which was both gauche and scary. It got under my skin. Singing about drugs and despair—no problem. Singing about lithium—kid stuff. But “Heart-Shaped Box” was about the fear of having somebody on your hands you refuse to let go of, and that was so new to me. I was terrified to hear somebody my age singing about it. On the radio.
The Unplugged music bothered me a lot. Contrary to what people said at the time, he didn’t sound dead, or about to die, or anything like that. As far as I could tell, his voice was not just alive but raging to stay that way. And he sounded married. Married and buried, just like he says. People liked to claim his songs were all about the pressures of fame, but I guess they just weren’t used to hearing rock stars sing love songs anymore, not even love songs as blatant as “All Apologies” or “Heart-Shaped Box.” And he sings, all through Unplugged, about the kind of love you can’t leave until you die. The more he sang about this, the more his voice upset me. He made me think about death and marriage and a lot of things that I didn’t want to think about at all. I would have been glad to push this music to the back of my brain, put some furniture in front of it so I couldn’t see it, and wait thirty or forty years for it to rot so it wouldn’t be there to scare me anymore. The married guy was a lot more disturbing to me than the dead junkie.
In Unplugged, Kurt begins with a wedding (“I doooo”) and spends the rest of the show living out the promise, sinking his fangs into a lover who has married him and buried him. He’s trapped inside her “Heart-Shaped Box.” She’s somebody he will never let go of, somebody whose cancer he’d eat to keep her alive, somebody he’ll never leave no matter how toxic she gets. This woman might be named Mary, like in “All Apologies,” or she might be named Anna Maria, like in “Come As You Are.” Or she might even be named Courtney. Either way, he’s stuck to her. He can’t let go. Till death do them part.
First one of them will die, then the other one will. They don’t know which one will go first, and it doesn’t matter. Eventually, you’re both dead, and then finally you’ll be as one, in the sun, and then it’s over, you’re married and buried and nobody will ever see you again. Where do bad folks go when they die?
The show ends with another scary marriage ballad, “Where Did You Sleep Last Night,” a song about a woman with a dead husband. Maybe she killed him, maybe she didn’t—we don’t know. But she can’t sleep in her marriage bed anymore. Kurt has nowhere to rest, so he stays awake and shivers the whole night through. Just an hour ago, Kurt was singing “About a Girl,” a groom singing “I do” over and over. But here he is alone, in the pines, in the pines, where the sun don’t ever shine.
When you get married, you hope you die before your lover does. (Do they? Do people wish this consciously? Do they admit it if they do? Al Green sings about it in “Mimi,” telling the girl he better die before she does because he couldn’t take it; do people talk this way in real life?) I hoped it, but I sure never said so because I figured Renée hoped the same thing. I guess it’s a long-term bet. When you get married, you make a plan to die, in a way. These thoughts had probably always been there somewhere in my brain. But I didn’t like the way Nirvana made me brood over them. I hoped they’d go away. I didn’t even tell Renée what an intense experience the Nirvana Unplugged always was for me—I thought that would make it worse, so I kept my mouth shut about it. I tried sittin’ on a fence like Mick and Keith. It didn’t really work.
I missed Kurt more the longer he stayed dead. He was one of very, very few male singers my age singing about love and marriage. The Notorious B.I.G. was really the only other one of his stature. Kurt and Biggie were the rock stars of my age who worried about the things I worried about, both of them in fucked-up marriages and yet writing songs about them that felt real. They gave me the sort of tiny wisdoms I got from surrogate older brothers like Al Green and John Doe and Lou Reed. They sang about morbid thoughts, about feeling ready to die, yet at least the way I heard their voices, they were fighting to stay alive. Maybe I’m wrong. Definitely I’m wrong; they’re both gone.
But when I listen to Kurt, he’s not ready to die, at least not in his music—the boy on Unplugged doesn’t sound the same as the man who gave up on him. A boy is what he sounds like, turning his private pain into teenage news. He comes clean as a Bowie fan, up to his neck in Catholic guilt, a Major Tom trying to put his Low and his Pin Ups on the same album, by mixing up his favorite oldies with his own folk-mass confessionals. I hear a scruffy sloppy guitar boy trying to sing his life. I hear a teenage Jesus superstar on the radio with a song about a sunbeam, a song about a girl, flushed with the romance of punk rock. I hear the noise in his voice, and I hear a boy trying to scare the darkness away. I wish I could hear what happened next, but nothing did.
52 girls on film
MAY 1995
Every time I have a crush on a woman, I have the same fantasy: I imagine the two of us as a synth-pop duo. No matter who she is, or how we meet, the synth-pop duo fantasy has to work, or the crush fizzles out. I have loads of other musical fantasies about my crushes—I picture us as a Gram-and-Emmylou country harmony duo, or as guitarists in a rock band, trading off vocals like Mick and Keith. But for me, it always comes back to the synth-pop duo. The girl is up front, swishing her skirt, tossing her hair, a saucy little firecracker. I’m the boy in the back, hidden behind my Roland JP8000 keyboard. She has all the courage and star power I lack. She sings our hit because I would never dare to get up and sing it myself. She moves the crowd while I lurk in the shadows, lavishing all my computer-blue love on her, punching the buttons that shower her in disco bliss and bathe her in the spotlight. I make her a star.
I am always fueled by my synth-pop fantasies. It’s fun thinking up the names for these groups. These days I live a few blocks away from a store called Metropolitan Floors, which is the greatest synth-pop duo name ever, I think. I want to be in a band called Metropolitan Floors. (Never “the”—real synth-pop duos never have a “the” in their names.) According to the awning, “We’re More Than Just Floors!” I actually stopped in Metropolitan Floors once to look around, before the guy started asking me what kind of carpet I wanted and whether I planned to lay it myself. I was unable to bluff, since “I want to build some 1982 synthesizers and learn to play them and attract a girl to be my lead singer so we can tour the world and make people dance and pretend to be German”—didn’t seem plausible. I just took his business card and promised to call the next day.
I always pictured Renée and me in our synth-pop duo. I never told her about this. In my dreams, she tossed her fake-red locks and stood tall in expensive platforms. We had lots of band names: Multiplex. Metroform. Angela Dust. Unpleasant Pleasures. Schiaffiano. Criminally Vulva. Indulgence. Appliancenter. She never knew any of this.
It’s odd that I’ve never pictured myself as a solo rock star. I’ve always dreamed of a new wave girl to stand up front and be shameless and lippy, to take the heat, teach me her tricks, teach me to be brave like her. I needed someone with a quicker wit than mine. The new wave girl was brazen and scarlet. She would take me under her wing and teach me to join the human race, the way Bananarama did with their “Shy Boy.” She would pick me out and shake me up and turn me around, turn me into someone new. She would spin me right round, like a record.
It was a pipe dream—I could never play an instrument, not even a simple keyboard. In all my years of fiddling with keyboards, all I ever learned to play was “Way Down upon the Swanee River,” and even that required playing the melody by numbers (3-2-1, 3-2-1, 8-6-8, 5-3-1-2, thank you good night). Operating synthesizers and sequencers was way beyond my skill set. But when I slipped into my fantasy world, I was bolder, juicier than I was in any facet of my real life. I would turn from cherry red to midnight blue, sixteen blue, blue blue electric blue. So I would daydream names and clothes and set lists for this band. I would pick out our songs, and make tapes of our greatest hits. The band
name was one or two words; the album title was a pompous full sentence, like I’ve Been Undressed by Kings or I Cannot See What Flowers Are at My Feet. (There were even synth-pop duos who picked names that were complete sentences, like Johnny Hates Jazz or Swing Out Sister or Curiosity Killed the Cat, but this is just trying too hard.) And of course, I would pick out a new wave girl singer. That was the whole point.
The boy-girl synth-pop duo is my favorite band lineup. Yaz were the ultimate. After Vince Clarke quit Depeche Mode, he went and found a new singer, Alison Moyet, who sounded like a real person—quite a breakthrough in new wave terms. They laid it out in the Upstairs at Eric’s credits: “Alison Moyet—voice and piano. Vince Clarke—noises.” They called one of their records You and Me Both—two kids conning the world together, a boy who needed a human touch and a girl who needed a cerebro-electro henchman. They made a strange pair: Vince tense and introverted, Alison loud and rude. And according to legend, they hated each other in real life. But it was fun to imagine that one night Alison had reached out a hand, smudged a little glitter on Vince’s cheek, and left him never the same. You could hear it in the music, couldn’t you? I could. And I’d listen to those records and think, Well, if it could happen to him, there’s hope for all of us. Now she’s in control, she’s his lover. Nations stand against them, but he’s her brother. She’ll get to you somehow.
There were loads of new wave hitmakers who followed the same formula. Eurythmics were more famous than Yaz, though not as good (but I loved “Who’s That Girl?” and “Sexcrime (1984)”). St. Etienne was one girl and two boys. Blondie had Debbie Harry and Chris Stein. Nena had a boy, I think. The Divinyls fit the format, even if the boy technically played guitar. The Pet Shop Boys worked wonders when they had a new wave girl singer up front, like Dusty Springfield (“What Have I Done to Deserve This?”), Patsy Kensit (“I’m Not Scared”), or Liza Minnelli (“Losing My Mind”). It’s the perfect band lineup: You take simple elements—one boy, one girl—and use them to configure a whole pageant of sexual identities, dangerously mobile and dangerously musical.
The girl singer means it. She’s into it. She didn’t come for the finger food. Wherever she shows up—A song? Me? Well, if you insist—and before anyone can call security she’s dancing on a table. She wants an amen, and she gets it. So many amens, so little time. The girl singer likes to wave her hand when she sings, wiggling spirit fingers or just raising a no-I-can’t-go-on palm. Renée explained to me that this is a Southern Baptist thing. When you go to church, you raise your hand. It means you are testifying; you are under conviction. The new wave girl singer lifts her hand because she is giving witness to the spirit she feels, but she learned the move from other pop singers, not in church. Dusty Springfield always raised her hand whenever she sang. According to legend, she couldn’t remember the words, so she wrote them on her sleeve. I love that story, Dusty raising her hand to read her little cheat sheet. John Lennon couldn’t remember lyrics either. But it’s typical of Dusty’s brilliance that she turned her dirty little secret into a flamboyant flutter.
Hardly any synth-poppers made it as functional romantic couples. The only one I can think of is the Thompson Twins, and they chose to keep it a secret—they probably never even told the other guy in the Thompson Twins. But that fantasy is there in the music, anyway. The reality of boy-girl life gets harsh, but in my fantasy, the music keeps them together. Even when we know the people in these bands hate each other in real life, we hear something different.
Take the Human League. Everybody knows “Don’t You Want Me.” Everybody loves this song. Nobody would remember it except for the girl who sings the second verse. It’s some of the clumsiest singing ever smuggled into the Top 40, a common voice, a girl who has to be free and has no special reason to give, nothing clever to say. She’s just speaking her piece, and not even taking any pleasure in that. Part of the joy of the Human League is Phil Oakey indulging his vocal melodrama—“dooon’t! don’t you waaant me!”—versus the dippy flatness of the girls in the band. They sing “(Keep Feeling) Fascination” and they can’t keep a straight face. In the video, Phil is preening, seducing the camera, while the girls swing their hands back and forth, lock eyes, and know that teenage boys in America are watching closely to see their tongues flicker out when they pronounce the “l” in “love so strong.” I know I waited for that moment every time.
It’s a pop cliché that the ideal band partnership is between the guy who lives it and the guy who writes songs about it. Like the Stones: Keith Richards did all the drugs and broke all the laws and got busted in all the hotel rooms, providing raw material to inspire Mick Jagger, who wrote some of his best songs about how fucked-up Keith was. Or the Beach Boys: Dennis Wilson went surfing and hot-rodding and girl-chasing and around-getting, while Brian Wilson sat in his room writing songs about the fun he thought Dennis was having. (In reality, they were both pretty miserable.) Brian Wilson never went surfing in his life, but Dennis never could have written “I Get Around.” Think of Johnny Thunders and David Johansen, Liam and Noel Gallagher, Bob Stinson and Paul Westerberg, Elton John and Bernie Taupin, Ray and Dave Davies, David Lee Roth and Eddie Van Halen. In a synth duo, this dynamic is right out front. One partner hides behind a bank of synthesizers and watches as the performer takes the stage. One is voice, celebrity, performance; the other is music.
The new wave girl knows what pop dreams are made of. She knows that Debbie Harry was just kidding when she sang, “Dreaming is free.” She knows dreams are something you have to steal. The new wave girl scams on other people’s identities, mixing and matching until she comes up with a style of her own, knowing that nothing belongs to her, that she just gets to wear it until somebody else comes along with faster fingers to snatch it away. She knows pop dreams are a hustle, a deception, a “glamour” in the witchcraft sense of the word. She knows how to bluff and how to scam. She sings about counterfeiting, shoplifting, bootlegging, home taping. She’s in on the hustle—you steal it, it’s yours, it’s legal tender. The new wave girl knows all this, which is why she is dangerous. The new wave boy knows how dangerous she is, which is why he stands behind her.
The boy and the girl, together in electric dreams.
crazy feeling
APRIL 1997
May 11, 1997, was a lazy Sunday afternoon. Renée and I had spent the entire weekend lounging in the new summer sun, reading and listening to music. We spent Saturday night at home, just the two of us. She sent me to the bookstore and the fabric store with her shopping lists. After I got home with her loot—fashion mags, rock mags, Annie Proulx and Claire Messud novels—we sat on the couch eating Indian takeout and watching a terrible old Joan Collins/Richard Burton movie on AMC. It was called Sea Wife. Joan and Richard were stuck on a raft with two other guys after their ship sank. Richard was the only one who knew that Joan was secretly a nun, but she made him promise not to tell the others since the hope of sleeping with her was the only thing keeping them alive.
Renée assigned me to DJ duty while she sat at the sewing machine. We stayed up late that night playing CDs, mostly old favorites: R.E.M.’s Murmur and Reckoning, Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville, The Replacements’ Let It Be, The Feelies’ Only Life, Marshall Crenshaw. I remember the playlist because I left the pile of discs untouched on top of the stereo for weeks afterward. We listened to Freakwater’s “Wild and Blue,” Paul Revere and the Raiders’ “Just Like Me,” The Dream Syndicate’s “Halloween,” Everything But the Girl’s Amplified Heart, Buddy Holly’s Greatest Hits, Gregory Abbott’s “Shake You Down,” OMC’s “How Bizarre.” The top CD on the pile was the last one we played, Dean Martin’s Sleep Warm, which stayed on continuous play as we drifted to sleep.
May 11 was Mother’s Day, so we left phone messages for our moms. Renée did some more sewing and listened to the Baltimore Orioles playing the Seattle Mariners on TV. Joey Cora, her favorite Mariner, was having a good day. I was in the kitchen making lunch for Renée—cinnamon toast and coffee. Renée stood
up, took a step, and then suddenly fell over onto the chair by her desk. I ran to her. I held her up with my arms and tried to talk to her. I grabbed the phone with my right hand, propping her up with my left arm.
“It’s important that you remain calm,” the 911 operator said.
The coroner later told me that she died instantly, that pulmonary embolisms kill in less than a minute, that even if it had happened in a hospital, the doctors would have been powerless to save her. But I was still propping her up, trying to breathe into her mouth while the 911 operator gave me instructions over the phone. When the ambulance came, the EMTs came into the living room and one of the cops led me outside. When the cop asked me questions about Renée, I figured he was gathering information for the hospital. I was worrying that she might have suffered harm from the oxygen deprivation. The officer and I were leaning on his car, out on Highland Avenue. Every minute or so, our next-door neighbor would peek over the fence. One of the EMTs came out to talk to me. “We’re taking her to Richmond for the autopsy,” she said. “It’s standard procedure when somebody so young dies.”
That was the first moment anyone said anything about Renée dying. It seemed like such a long time before I heard my stupid voice asking, “She died?” The sun was streaking through the leaves in the yard next door. The upstairs neighbors’ air conditioner was right over my head, drip, drip, drip. The EMT said something about God, but she was just trying to be kind. Maybe it was a heart attack, she said; it was too soon to tell. I was sure they would find something in Richmond they hadn’t found here, and I knew they would be bringing Renée back later that day.
Love Is a Mix Tape Page 10
