Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life

by Steve Almond

  A year later, Clay came east for a tour with his band, Sushirobo. I secretly hoped Sushirobo might suck, but I was out of luck. They sounded like Devo soaked in absinthe, frantic and playful and weird, with skronks of guitar noise and swirling distortion. Clay played bass. The instrument seemed to deliver small hammering shocks to his body. It was a thrilling set, though I seemed to be the only person in the bar listening. The rest of the patrons (young women mostly, in the black makeup of neglect) were there to see the next act, a metal band from Worcester.

  Afterward, I ran up to congratulate Clay and his mates. I assumed they would be whisked off to a hotel in a limo by their label. Then I remembered Clay was the label. They wound up crashing at my place. It was quickly made apparent how grueling it was to tour as an obscure art rock band, to drive hundreds of miles at close quarters, to absorb the fair complaints of wives and bosses back home, to walk around in clothing stiff with sweat, to dump your laundry into the washing machines of kind strangers, to maintain self-belief in the face of such persistent disregard. I’d gotten it all wrong, as usual.

  Sushirobo, for all its brilliance, would be gone before long. Anyone could see that. So would most of the other bands on his label. This was what made Clay a courageous figure. He was a Semi-Pro, like most musicians on this earth, a guy driven to reckless action by his Drooling Fanaticism. Music had deranged him in precisely the manner required to locate his heroism.

  List #4

  Rock’s Top Ten Religious Freaks

  1. Bob Dylan

  Nobody confounded the messianic aspects of his stardom better than Zimmy. He went straight from the coked-up carnival of the Rolling Thunder Revue to Bible school. F’ing brilliant.

  2. Johnny Cash

  Endorsed cold-blooded murder (“I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die …”) in front of a prison crowd consisting of cold-blooded murderers. Later kicked by an ostrich, resulting in abdominal injury, resulting in painkiller addiction, resulting in rehab and rebirth. God I love country music.

  3. Prince

  The second most famous Jehovah’s Witness to sing about masturbation. (Beat It!)

  4. Cat Stevens aka Yusuf Islam

  Converted to Islam at the height of his stardom, sold his guitars for charity, and devoted himself to religious philanthropy. World’s first career-suicide bomber?

  5. Dave Mustaine

  Metallica reject and Megadeth leader refused to play a gig with the band Rotting Christ. “I would prefer not to play on concerts with satanic bands,” he told fans. “That doesn’t mean I won’t.”

  6. Donna Summer

  Her orgasmic moaning fueled a twenty-minute version of “Love to Love You Baby,” which she dedicated to Christ.

  7. Alice Cooper

  Stage show featured gothic torture and mock executions via electric chair and guillotine. Like a passion play, but with strobe lights.

  8. Little Richard

  The man who inspired Dylan! Added bonus: totally not one bit gay.

  9. Gordon Gano

  Violent Femmes front man sacrificed his devout Baptist-cred when he sold “Blister in the Sun” to Wendy’s, leading to the ill-fated ad campaign: Wendy’s burgers—so delish they blister in the sun!

  10. Michael Henry McBrain

  Iron Maiden drummer dressed up as the devil on the “Number of the Beast” world tour in 1982. Then accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior 666 times.

  10. Noun, buh-daz-ler: 1. A plastic device used to apply rhinestones, studs, or other shiny objects to clothing. 2. The quintessence of American imperial achievement.

  How Hip-Hop Sounds in a Canyon

  The Drooling Fanatic seeks a sense of mastery before committing serious listening time to a musical style. He or she needs to understand what the genre is about, what makes it tick.

  Back in 1983, for instance, I saw my first punk rock show. This was during my ill-fated Week as a Punk Rocker, which coincided with my ill-fated Attempt to Sleep with a Punk Rock Chick. The venue was an all-ages club next to the Palo Alto Co-op—nothing says punk rock like bulk bin granola—and the band in question, just formed, was called the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I found the performance confusing. The songs didn’t really start or end, they just kind of crashed into being. The scrawny guys in front reacted by smashing into each other so as to draw blood in some charismatic fashion. For their encore, the Peppers came out wearing nothing but tube socks over their genitals. “That’s a band going nowhere,” I announced. And yet the Peppers’ appeal was clear: they allowed disaffected suburban kids to deliver a loud fuck off to the spangled costumes of New Wave.

  I’d never really gotten what hip-hop was about, either, until the Wednesday afternoon in 1995 when Frankie Tomasino proposed we bail on work and catch an afternoon ballgame. We tore up I-95. Frankie had his thighs jammed under the wheel of his red Civic and a beer propped in his crotch. As we sped north, the radio’s static resolved into a happy liquid throbbing. This was The Bomb, Miami’s premier pirate station, which broadcast from a bunker within the vast rutted perimeter of Liberty City. The Bomb didn’t operate like commercial stations. The songs never really stopped and the DJ talked over all of them. He took phone calls from female listeners and hung up on those who refused to reciprocate his intimacies. “That’s not riding,” he told them. “Let’s ride.” There were really only two categories in his world. Either you could ride or you couldn’t ride.

  Frankie hardly ever got to listen to The Bomb because his job was to sell advertising, which required merchants with an ad budget, of which Liberty City had few, the retail sector running more toward junkyards and unlicensed drink houses. The music swirled around us. I tried to pin down the melody—was it Billy Preston? Bill Withers?—but the song kept expanding to incorporate new samples, squiggles of trumpet, barrelhouse piano, bone-crushing drum loops. “What is this?” I said. Frankie grinned. He looked like a drowsy wolf.

  A Buick pulled alongside us. The driver was a big black guy in a tasseled nylon bandana. He glanced over at Frankie and Frankie glanced over at him and they both punched the gas. The pavement hummed beneath us. Palm trees ripped past. We were screaming down a highway littered with chunks of Jersey barrier, surrounded by immigrants and geezers, drivers unhinged from the laws of vehicular common sense. Normally, I would have sailed straight into a conniption. But the music was doing funny things to my fear receptors, blotting out the lethal possibilities. All I could think was: Wow, this is the coolest thing that’s ever happened to me.

  I was not unfamiliar with hip-hop, of course. I had pledged allegiance to Run-D.M.C. and Kid Frost. But the stuff pumping out of Frankie’s speakers was of a different order. It was the sort of music I always suspect the black community keeps hidden from the rest of us, the hydroponic shit grown in underground labs and silenced whenever Whitey comes within earshot.

  Some ancient, unfortunate breed of Ford materialized in front of us and Frankie flicked into the next lane. I glanced up and took note of the horizon, which was jittering, and here I began murmuring things. Hey man, I murmured, maybe we should lay off. Your car’s kind of shaking. There’s cops around here. Seriously. Frankie turned the radio up; the music was more or less driving the car at this point.

  We pulled even with the Buick. We were at a hundred, then 105, and the car truly was shaking and I began to think, regrettably, about Arthur McDuffie, the black motorcyclist who, on this very highway, in 1979, engaged police in a high-speed chase that ended with a bunch of white cops cracking his skull like an egg, triggering one of the worst race riots in American history, a scenario toward which we seemed to be hurtling, my proposed headline reading:

  DRAG RACING JEW TRIGGERS INNER CITY KILLFEST

  Dazed Suspect Tells Investigators “They Can’t Ride”

  Then the Buick’s motor started to spew smoke and his back end fishtailed and Frank chose this moment to hoist the beer from his crotch and toast the guy in the Buick, who was also listening to The Bomb. This was a large, angry hu
man being, someone who, it seemed reasonable to suppose, was not in the habit of being emasculated by a Cuban guy in business casual. Any second, I expected him to pull a weapon from beneath his seat, or perhaps his lap, and shoot my face off. Instead, he eased off the gas and waved his middle finger. Frankie howled. He pounded the top of the steering wheel. The music thumped on and on. “That’s how you ride,” the DJ shouted. His point being: This was hip-hop, the extraction of joy from mayhem.

  The Canyon

  Did I become one of those annoying overnight hip-hop fans? Not exactly. But I did listen to a great deal of the stuff that year, because I spent much of it in the James Scott Homes, the largest housing development in Liberty City, which was, like every other low-income housing project in this country, a village of women and children, a vast colony of dependence where wishes perished in unromantic stillness. Residents had a special nickname for Scott. They called it the Canyon.

  I had come to the Canyon to report on a disputed tenant board election, and decided there was a bigger story to be told, about what it was like for the kids growing up there. The idea was to get beyond the usual drive-by bullshit. For the most part I just hung out. I played spades with the mamas and brought the kids giant waxed boxes of Church’s Chicken and listened to the clamor of TV jingles and sirens and video game gunfire.

  The local playlist consisted of singles by artists such as “Big Mike” and “27th Ave” and “that fat boy Andre that steps with that girl that got a baby by Sherman” whose battered demos, cassettes mostly, scrawled with contact info, were passed from hand to hand. The songs were superb: extremely violent, extremely witty, an antidote to life as it actually existed in the Canyon, where the boys dealt drugs to transform themselves into figures of consequence and the girls had babies for the same reason, where the sheer tedium made people itchy for tragedy.

  I’m thinking now of the night I arrived in the Canyon to find that a boy named Trey had been shot in the face. Trey himself was eventually presented to me. His face had been shot, no question about it. There was some discussion as to whether I might want to see the entry and exit wounds. I said no, it was probably best to leave the bandages be.

  This shooting was a sad piece of news, and there were obligatory expressions of distress by the prevailing mamas. But the general vibe was one of breathless excitement. A story could now be told and retold. A cause for revenge had been inked. The morose and mangled Trey, a marginal figure before this trouble, was now a celebrity.

  Dear Mama

  This was the summer of 2Pac’s “Dear Mama,” which played in heavy rotation at the Canyon’s holiday barbecues and birthday parties and wakes. It was a love letter from all the wayward boys lost to the streets or the great time capsule of incarceration, a hymn to maternal endurance set to a luscious Spinners riff. “Even as a crack fiend, mama/You always was a black queen, mama,” 2Pac sang.

  Which was a lovely sentiment, full of Christian mercy, but also completely mystifying to me because wouldn’t being a crack fiend put a crimp in your mothering capacities, in terms of, for instance, spending your money on crack as opposed to food? You will forgive my naïveté. I was a Drooling Fanatic, not a social anthropologist.

  Still, it didn’t take a genius to see that most of the mamas (and aunties and grannies) in the Canyon were falling down on the job. I watched a lot of kids get smacked and marveled at the variety of objects with which one could smack a child: a shoe, a school binder, a block of cheese. One particularly remorseless creature, Doris, attempted to have her son labeled learning disabled, because such a label would trigger an extra social security payment. And Tammy—I didn’t even realize she had kids until the three of them escaped from the upstairs bedroom where she had them locked up.

  It was the boys with whom I came to spend most of my time. They were desperate for any kind of adult male attention and settled for me because, well, I was available. These were the boys who listened to hip-hop most devoutly, who blasted their eardrums with the songs. They knew all the words to “Gangsta’s Paradise” and “Ready to Die” and “Shook Ones, Part 2.”

  When I pondered it—and I did a lot, as I sped away from the Canyon, down the barren streets of Liberty City, with its bales of razor wire, its battered churches and liquor stores, toward my suddenly luxurious-seeming studio in Miami Beach—these songs were all asking the same question: How did one fashion a life of consequence from one without prospects? It was an American question, a question about opportunity, and it hung over the Canyon like a dark fog.

  Ghostland

  Sometimes I brought the boys with me. Sure. I had a car. I struck everybody involved as a responsible adult. Why not take a few of the shavers to the library or the mall or the beach? That was what they wanted, more than a big brother, more than a mentor: a getaway driver. It got to the point where there’d be a line of them waiting, kids I’d never seen before, whose mothers or aunties or legal guardians I didn’t even know.

  It was on one of these excursions that a kid named Nookie slipped a tape into my cassette deck. I just about drove off the road. The melodies were dark and percolating, a marriage of vintage jazz samples and loping beats. The lyrics were poetic without sentiment. “Who is this?” I said.

  “Simeon and them other niggers,” Nookie said.

  “Wait a second,” I said. “You know these guys?”

  Nookie’s face assumed an expression of indulgence. He set about explaining the connection, which involved a cousin who designed the logo for Simeon and his crew, Lastrawze they were called. According to Nookie, they operated out of an apartment on West Dixie north of Cagni Park.

  Then a song came on that was unlike anything I’d ever heard, a swirl of sirens and trumpets and a single moaning note wrung from the neck of a guitar. “Where I’m At (Ghostland)” was a travelogue of the grim precincts where the Strawze had grown up. But it was really about the emotional state boys were forced to occupy in such places, which lay somewhere between sorrow and nihilism, which was exhausting because it required a constant expenditure of courage, which treated the smallest sign of vulnerability as an invitation to assault, and made it impossible for them, ever, to simply relax. There are some guys, Simeon explained “who run around and crack jokes/And now some nigs is in the cemetery doing backstrokes.”

  This was all the more striking because the “Miami sound” of that era was dominated by 2 Live Crew, and expressly designed to inspire the greased vibration of female butt cheeks. Lastrawze cribbed obscure licks from Grover Washington and quoted Shakespeare. They rejected the gold-plated bluster of gangsta rap in favor of an authentic hip-hop naturalism.

  And often there’d be some moment during my field trips with those boys when one or another of them was momentarily frightened or humiliated and the trust went flickering out of their eyes. I could see it happen. The part of themselves open to feeling simply vanished. They had slipped silently off to Ghostland.

  Everything’s (Not Really) Gonna Be All Right

  One Saturday, I drove them to the zoo. The trip started full of hope but quickly went south because, as much as the boys hated the Canyon and dreaded the prospect of returning there, it was what they knew and where they felt comfortable. They were immigrants in the larger world, uncertain and fragile. It was Boo-Man who melted down at the zoo, no doubt because the zoo was on the same road that led to the correctional facility where his father was doing time. He threw himself against the fence of the peacock enclosure with an abrupt and very real violence, startling the animals, and I bent down to comfort him, but he wouldn’t speak or meet my eyes and I could see he was gone to Ghostland.

  So we headed home. Just north of the city my Tercel started to heave. I glanced down at the gas gauge, which read D for Dumbshit. I managed to coast halfway onto a shoulder. Trucks whizzed past us, blaring their horns. The car shook. Then an afternoon storm rolled in and brought with it a downpour straight out of central casting. At this point, the kids had the good sense to panic. I shouted at them to
calm-down-calm-down-calm-the-fuck-down-and-stay-in-the-car and ran howling into this biblical deluge. I was going to find gas. That was my bright idea. I had no idea where we were. I couldn’t even see a sidewalk.

  I fell down an embankment. I staggered some miles to a gas station. I paid two guys forty bucks to drive me back to my car. I failed to locate my car. I begged the guys not to abandon me. I considered what would happen if a police officer located my car before I could, what the state statutes might have to say about the reckless endangerment of five minors. Or would this be kidnapping?

  It cost me another forty bucks but I did find the car. The kids cheered and talked all at once about who had cried and who hadn’t and we went to Little Caesars for a pizza party, during which it began to dawn on me how out of my depth I was. What was I up to, exactly? I wasn’t going to adopt any of these kids, or get them a scholarship. I was writing a story about them. I was designing a brochure of their hardships.

  And it occurred to me then that hip-hop itself was a brochure, an invitation to consume the destructive grief of the urban underclass. Wasn’t that what made the genre so seductive—like the blues, like Negro spirituals—that its vitality arose from the cauldron of racial hardship? Was I supposed to ride with that? But then on the other hand was it right to impose a moral litmus test on music? That seemed repugnant and silly. I was (let’s remember) a Drooling Fanatic in my formative days. These sorts of quandaries made me ache with self-importance.