Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life

by Steve Almond

  5. Smoking More Pot Than Bob Marley and Possibly the Wailers Before Entering Graceland Why did I do this? Because I was secretly dreading Graceland, the preening necrophilia of the scene, that tawdry American knack for spiritual projection, for worshipping the wrong savior for the wrong reason in the wrong way. I figured getting stoned might make the experience seem more profound, and therefore less depressing. It’s the same doomed theory I continually apply to Hollywood films.

  I needed Graceland to be profound, at least a little, because I had driven seven hundred miles to be there, as a favor to my lovesick friend Tina who was, unbeknownst to me, a Devout Elvis Person. It was a bit like discovering someone is Born Again. You have to respect the purity, but you don’t really want to hear the rap. So I smoked bowl after bowl until I could no longer locate my mouth. We boarded a bus full of more Devout Elvis People, southern grandmas with big purses and sullen midwestern Goth kids and packs of cameraed Japanese. As we entered the estate, they fell into a collective and dreadful hush.

  A female staffer (blond, hot-kinked, erotically nervous) met us in the foyer with our audio kits. I kept forgetting I was wearing headphones and yelling at Tina: “HEY! YOU KNOW WHAT THE JUNGLE ROOM LOOKS LIKE? IT’S LIKE AFRICA IF THEY SOLD AFRICA ON THE HOME SHOPPING NETWORK! WHY ARE THE WALLS COVERED IN TWINE? DID ELVIS’ PARENTS REALLY SLEEP IN THESE BEDS? COULDN’T HE HAVE GOTTEN THEM BIGGER BEDS? THAT’S FUCKED UP.”

  This was Graceland in a nutshell. It was supposed to be about the grandeur of the King, but it kept being about his humiliation: Elvis sprawls on the white couchette in his media room with a plate of bacon, watching three TVs at once. Then he tries to beat back the fat with bennies and he can’t sleep at night so he sits up composing his list of enemies. Then he shoots at his radar range. Then he visits Nixon. Then he does karate and pulls something. Then he can’t get out of bed and they cancel the tour. Then he falls off his toilet and dies.

  Devout Elvis People were everywhere, snapping photos of gold records. The reverence was suffocating. I retreated to the top of a carpeted staircase and found myself staring into a darkened room. Where was I? Where was Tina? Why was there a rope across the doorway with a sign reading NO TRESPASSING? Wasn’t trespassing more or less the business model at Graceland?

  A voice beckoned me from the bottom of the stairs. “Sir!” A young man stood frowning at me. The name tag on his oversized blazer read KEVIN.

  “Where am I?” I said.

  “Those are private quarters, sir.”

  “People still live here?”

  Kevin said, “You need to come downstairs, sir. Right now.”

  Kevin was right. I needed to come downstairs. I needed to flee Graceland and take a hot shower. But the pot wouldn’t let me. It kept telling me that I should leap over the rope and breach the private quarters and find the bathroom where Elvis breathed his last and drop a symbolic deuce. Bad pot. Bad.

  “Are we going to have a problem?” Kevin said. He was trying to sound official. He touched at the tender spray of acne on his right cheek.

  I found Tina outside and we proceeded from the shooting range to the nearby Meditation Garden. Elvis was actually buried in the Meditation Garden, which I did not understand at all. Did Elvis consider death a form of extreme meditation? I wanted to ask Tina, but she was weeping. Nearly everyone around me was weeping. They were weeping and taking photos of each other and I knew that, in a few weeks, when they got their photos from Graceland back, they’d gaze at these images of themselves weeping in front of Elvis’s grave and start weeping again. And this thought made me sad for America, the great disconnect between our personal causes for grief and our actual tears, and though I was not sad enough to start weeping myself I did flee to the gift shop where, in a final spasm of defiance, I shoplifted an official Elvis wristwatch.

  5a. Failing to Recognize (the Very Next Morning) That the Man Preaching at Al Green’s Full Gospel Tabernacle Church Was, in Fact, the Reverend Al Green, Even After He Began Singing “Let’s Stay Together” Because I’d Assumed Al Green Was Fat Like Barry White No, I was not stoned.

  9. You are to be forgiven if you don’t recall the heyday of the foam party. It was a European fad in which the dance floor of a club—usually a gay club—was flooded with soap bubbles, allowing revelers to pleasure one another under cover of suds.

  On the Varieties of Fanatical Experience

  I’ve been trying to make the case—in my own discombobulated case-making fashion—for Drooling Fanaticism as a spiritual condition, that music is, for some of us, the chosen path toward what William James called “a larger, richer, more satisfying life.” James was talking about God, but I’ll happily regard that as a term of convenience for That Which We Worship with Irrational and Perhaps Head-Banging Glee.

  In fact, I’m willing to argue at this point that we are all Drooling Fanatics, that every single human being carries within him or her the need for music and that we differ only in matters of degree and expression. If this were another sort of book—a book with intellectual self-respect, for instance—I would support this assertion with a tantalizing anthropological survey of musical devotion within indigenous cultures, and assorted neurological data vector astonishments. Instead, we’ll all have to settle for another bleak memory from my days as a bumbling lothario. This one takes place in various provinces of Eastern Europe, where I traveled in the spring of 1997 to woo a beautiful exchange student and was mistakenly bludgeoned by the Rosetta Stone of pop music.

  No matter where I went for those two weeks one song greeted me, from the Charles Bridge to the Warsaw Ghetto, from the flashing discos of Bohemia to the house parties of Katowice, from the street corners of Prague to the decrepit jazz clubs of East Berlin. Everyone was playing “Macarena.” Everyone was singing “Macarena.” Everyone was dancing the Macarena, a synchronized routine in which:

  The dancer extends his arms forward, palms down, then flips his arms over on the beat.

  The dancer sets his hands on his shoulders, the back of his head, and his hips.

  The dancer executes a pelvic rotation in time with the line “Ehhh, Macarena!” simultaneously executing a 90-degree jump-and-turn maneuver so as to repeat the same routine all over again.

  Steve shoots himself in the skull.

  But okay, here’s the point, which is not to belittle the “Macarena” for its clobbering monotony, its almost heartrending dearth of imagination, but on the contrary to hail its popularity. What more powerful testament can there be to the universal psychotropic power of music? I myself despise “Macarena,” and yet I have been humming it for the past three days and my two-year-old daughter is now humming it and I’m pretty sure she will never stop.

  A second major point is that Drooling Fanatics, while sharing certain essential sensitivities, express these sensitivities in distinct manners. We should not be lumped into a single vast Fanatic ghetto. On the contrary, we should be lumped into various smaller ghettos. A brief survey of the afflicted now ensues:

  The Music Douche

  To properly capture the essence of Douchedom will require a return to the era of the “record store,” in my case a dusty emporium known as Disc Diggers, located in Somerville’s Davis Square, where, despite being a regular for ten years, despite subsidizing what was clearly a failing enterprise, I was invariably abused. Typically, I would find a CD that looked interesting and ask a clerk if I could listen to it on the portable player I brought for just such a purpose. This would be the clerk who looked like Ric Ocasek and not the clerk who looked like Bunny Wailer though they were both perpetually surly, as was every other single employee in that store with the exception of the young hot girl whom rest of the clerks despised with the exception of the Bunny Wailer dude who was (I’m pretty sure) shtuping her. Ric would say no. It was the singular pleasure of his life to say no to guys like me.

  Record stores have always been ground zero for Music Douchedom. What made Disc Diggers unique was the variety on display. Bunny Wailer was the Re
ggae Douche. Ric Ocasek was the Metal Douche. There was also an Alt-Country Douche, an emaciated Punk Douche, a trucker cap-festooned Low-Fi Douche, a bearded and gnomic Jazz Douche. For a few months in the late nineties, they even hired a Grunge Douche. What united all these guys was an aura of self-conscious failure. A number had failed as musicians. Some had failed in less specific ways, as disc jockeys or producers or even (God help us) music critics. And thus they’d landed in a used CD shop, where they wed the inexhaustible resentment of retail wage slavery to the calm sadism of minor bureaucrats. I was endlessly vulnerable to their contempt. I secretly hoped my purchases would meet their approval. They never did.

  The question naturally arises: But aren’t you a Douche, Steve? You sure seem like a douche.

  Not really.

  In fact, I’m closer these days to a Music Geek (subcategory: Aging), which is in its crucial aspect the opposite of a Douche. Geeks may indulge in situational snobbery, but their general outlook is absent of malice. The more virulent form, Inveterate Hipsterism, often exudes a Douchy imperiousness. But Hipsters dream of conversion. The true Douche dreams only of crucifixion.

  Concert Queens

  My hairstylist Linda is the foremost example here. The first hint is her cutting station, which is decorated with photos of Billy Corgan, who glares at you, bald and transcendently sullen, as if your decision to bother with hair—the styling of it, the having of it—is an offense. The other indicator is that no matter when I come in for a haircut Linda has always just seen a show. She has always just seen a triple bill of Poison, Quiet Riot, and Queensrÿche. She has always just seen Steely Dan and Elton John and Public Enemy. (“I was in the front row. Flavor Flav threw a beer right at my head!”) She has always just seen Black Sabbath, and has detailed opinions about the relative merit of the band’s new lead singer.

  I once asked Linda, who is well into her thirties now, how many concerts she’d seen in her life. Her final estimate was 3500. She has employed the Bedazzler10 on hundreds of occasions. She has been trampled. She once wound up on Weird Al Yankovic’s tour bus—“his driver is into gay porn, in case you’re wondering”—while her friend enjoyed the dubious carnal pleasures of Weird Al. And she herself once followed Whitesnake back to their hotel. She was seventeen at the time.

  It’s important to make a distinction between Concert Queens and groupies, though. Groupies attach themselves to particular bands and the attraction is centrally erotic. They dream of sexual possession. Concert Queens might find Ozzy Osbourne sexy, but they don’t really want to peel off his soggy underwear. They hunger for the bustle and the clamor and the adrenaline—the transporting pageantry of the show.

  The last time I visited Linda, she had just come off three consecutive Pat Benatar concerts.

  “What’s it like seeing Pat Benatar three times in a row?” I asked.

  “It’s the exact same show every night,” Linda said, “note for note.”

  Her tone suggested she recognized how depressing this fact was. But Linda is devout. She happily suspends all critical faculties when the stage lights come up. “It doesn’t really matter who’s playing” was how she put it. “The music just takes me away.”

  I wasn’t sure how I felt about this. It’s Linda and her ilk, after all, who keep the Benatars of the world on life support, who reduce rock and roll from a subversive cultural force to a tranquilizing commodity. And then on the other hand … who the hell am I to question the needs of my fellow Fanatics? There is, after all, such a giddy quality to the way Linda recounts shows. And she isn’t a giddy person by nature. During the time I’ve known her, Linda has dealt with some crushing losses. She’s watched the love of her life slip away from her, into a life of illness and addiction.

  This is why she needs the shows. They aren’t merely a form of nostalgic meditation, but a means of feeling alive in the face of misfortune. Some people turn to prayer or self-help affirmations or marathon running. Linda has concerts. “You know what I really love?” she told me one time. “When you get home from a show and you put your head down on the pillow and all you can hear is ringing. Because that means it was really loud and I was really close. I was right up against the speakers.”

  Collectors

  If you’re wondering if you’re a collector, ask yourself two questions.

  Do I own too many records?

  Do my friends and family feel I own too many records?

  If your respective answers are No and Yes, you’re a Collector.

  Consider Angela Sawyer. The first thing she told me when I visited her was, “I don’t think of myself as someone who has an overly large collection.” The second thing she told me was, “Watch your step.” We were sitting in Angela’s bedroom, which is perhaps 120 square feet. It contained ten thousand records. The living room contained another five thousand records, semiofficial property of Weirdo Records, the shop she runs out of her Somerville apartment.

  Most of the records in Angela’s personal collection fall into what she calls the “extreme” category: outsider noise rock, field recordings of frogs, sing-alongs featuring guys in cardigans strumming banjos. Angela does not like these albums ironically. She is truly enraptured by tracks such as “Pammie’s on a Bummer”—Sonny Bono’s account of a girl who smokes pot for the first time and turns into a prostitute. This is what sets Collectors apart from garden variety Drooling Fanatics. They’ve listened to all their albums and studied their historical context and formed thoughtful, even tortured, opinions about them. They’re obsessed with aesthetics.

  This offers a stark contrast to, for instance, Music Snobs, who are obsessed with constructing an identity based on the contents of their iPod. Snobs want to know whether a record is “good” or “bad” and (most important) what these judgments say about them within a given social milieu. Collectors have pretty much given up relating to anyone else who isn’t a Collector.

  But the question remains: what turns a Drooling Fanatic into a Collector? My wife would certainly like to know. She believes I have a retentive neurosis, a notion I don’t dispute. It’s no coincidence that, in the years I was amassing my collection, I lived in no fewer than eight cities. My discs and tapes were the only objects that came with me. The rest of the memorabilia—the posters and photos and letters that felt so essential at the time—got ditched in closets.

  Still, I would argue that most Collectors are not guilty of an acquisitive defect but a peculiar blend of sloth and reverence. We’re too lazy to sort through our records and philosophically averse to disposing of them. I have certainly tried to purge. Every few months I head downstairs to our Serial Killer Room, fully intending to do something. Here’s what happens. I drag out one of my eleven milk crates full of CDs and I start sorting through them and inevitably find an album I haven’t heard in years, the unsung soul-pop masterpiece Back in the 90’s by the band Hobex, say, and the moment I put it on I’m transported back to Greensboro and the sweet misery of that era. It all returns: the fuming solitude, the sexy poet who lanced my heart, the yeasty clouds billowing forth from the extravagantly misnamed New York Pizza. And I think: Throw this album out? Is my wife crazy? It’s a fucking time machine!

  This is the thing misunderstood by those who don’t have unreasonable music collections. The record is not simply a storage device. Its value resides in the particular set of memories and emotional associations held by its owner. These are inseparable from the physical object, which is no longer a physical object but an article of faith.

  Semi-Pros

  Most musicians self-identify as Drooling Fanatics, and they exhibit many of the prescribed behaviors. But they don’t count in my book, because they violate the main prerequisite which is that you’re not a musician.

  There is, however, an entire population who has twined their lives around music, somewhat less than profitably. I’m thinking about the grizzled buskers and part-time cellists and YouTube aspirants, the folks who occupy that eager nexus between amateur and professional. Most of
all I’m thinking about my pal Clay Martin.

  I met Clay in the summer of 1988. We were glorified interns working at newspapers in Phoenix, appropriately stunned by the climatic artifice of the city. It was Death Valley with condos, a genuine Marxist nightmare. Our commute was like sitting in a Holly Hobbie Oven.

  I was in the nascent stages of my Fanaticism, having just earned my college degree, and I squandered much of that summer bickering with my roommate over the moral intent of the Warren Zevon song “Boom Boom Mancini” and attempting to find a woman stupid enough to fuck me.

  I wanted to be rooming with Clay. He was handsome and sweet-natured and he played guitar. Occasionally, he and his roommate Gerry let me sit in when they jammed. This meant Clay on lead and Gerry playing, if I remember this right, bongos, while I attempted to find the single note on a harmonica that didn’t destroy whatever feeble melodic momentum we’d wandered into. As happens when you’re twenty-one years old, a single pleasing string of notes, combined with alcohol and sleep deprivation, led us to the conclusion that we should start a band, or that we already perhaps had started a band and simply needed a name for licensing and touring purposes. We settled on “Coy and Smiley.” The band lasted a grand total of twenty-seven minutes. Then Gerry fell asleep.

  At the end of the summer, Clay headed up to Redmond, Washington, where he found a job with a new company called Microsoft. We all felt sorry for Clay. Poor Clay. He was never going to be a real journalist. He was going to become a Sad Computer Guy Loser who sent us postcards with cats wearing human clothing.

  Some years later, I visited Seattle and caught up with Clay. He’d taken an early retirement from Microsoft. He had a gorgeous girlfriend and a home in the coolest neighborhood on earth. He had launched his own record label. Oh, and he’d also formed his own band, which was heading to Europe for a tour. This was one of those mid-thirties moments when you take a look at the stale, half-chewed bagel your life has become and kiss jealousy on its smoky mouth.