Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life

by Steve Almond

  Then my girlfriend moved in with me. She was a fan of Cannonball Adderley and Touré Kunda, artists who, like her, exuded a terrifying sophistication. I pummeled her with Road Apples. Pummeled as she cooked gourmet meals involving sherry and shallots, as we humped with eager, postcollegiate ineptitude, as she slept. My girlfriend came to like the Hip. She overlooked the band’s idiotic name and limited range. But she couldn’t bring herself to love them as I did and eventually moved out. There were, as Princess Di might have put it, three of us in the relationship.

  Or consider (once again) The Close. Not only did he spend the entirety of his courtship dragging his intended to White Stripes shows, not only did he somewhat creepily begin appropriating the wardrobe of Jack White (posters of whom high-schoolishly plastered every square inch of his apartment) but he insisted their wedding party have a “White Stripes theme,” meaning everyone had to dress in black and white and red. He did not force his bride to sit behind a drum kit, though I’m sure he lobbied.

  I think we can all agree such behavior reflects rampant egocentrism. But there’s an even more virulent fantasy at work, I’m afraid. Drooling Fanatics honestly believe that if you come to love our music, you will love us. You will understand the exalted suffering and luminous desire we can’t ever quite articulate. Which brings us to …

  4. Our Reliance on Songs to Access Our Emotional Lives Here, it might be best to cite the pop culture touchstone of Drooling Fanaticism—the scene from the film Say Anything13 in which John Cusack stands across the street from Ione Skye’s bedroom with a boom box over his head blaring Snoop Dogg’s timeless classic “Bitches Ain’t Shit.”

  Wait. Check that. According to Wikipedia, he’s actually playing “In Your Eyes” by Peter Gabriel. Fine.

  So this was how people serenaded each other back in the 1980s. But it begs the question: is this the best you can do, John Cusack character guy? Romeo scales a wall. Cyrano praises Roxanne’s lilies. Even Don Giovanni, pretty much the ultimate scumbag of all opera, sings Elvira an aria. The Drooling Fanatic has neither courage nor talents of self-expression at his disposal. Thus, we must rely on our playlists to speak for us.

  In the early stages of courtship—as, say, on the brink of a first kiss—I cue up tracks that announce I am painfully sensitive and will love you till the end of time. “I Was Just Thinking” by Teitur is a lock. As matters proceed, the compositions should suggest mysterious, possibly agitated, depths of feeling, the basic message being I have been wounded and remain frightened you will wound me, but it might help if you take off your blouse. “Every Little Bit Hurts” by Paul Thorn works well. As for the serious business, I’m a proponent of songs that combine abject female body worship and a vigorous rhythm section (ideally “Pretty Brown Skin” by Roy Ayers).

  But this is just me, of course, the same guy who once considered Nick Cave suitable foreplay. I would never deign to DJ someone else’s thunderdome. To do so would violate what I have come to think of as the Porno Parallax. To wit: If you’ve ever watched amateur pornography, you will have noticed that many of the videos, sort of unwittingly, capture the music playing in the room at the time. And thus, those of us who make the admittedly poor decision to watch amateur pornography must endure, along with poor lighting and ill-advised genital grooming, scraps of Quarterflash’s “Harden My Heart” or Riskay’s “Smell Yo Dick.” Not songs that I associate with erotic reverie, but presumably the very ones the lovers in question selected to inspire them to perform sexual acts on camera.

  5. Drooling Fanatics Struggle in Social Settings Of course we do. That’s us, by the way, hovering next to the dip. And no, we don’t know what’s in it that makes it so tasty. We’re busy mulling the music—what it is, whether it meets our standards, how we might seize control of the stereo. Indeed, the relational style of the Drooling Fanatic at a party might best be summarized as Asperger’s with a Backbeat.

  Unless, of course, two Drooling Fanatics encounter each other, in which case you can bank on an initial period of excitement, the swapping of multiple band names and at least one protracted spat. The writer Brock Clarke and I once argued for three hours in a bar in Clemson, South Carolina, over which was a more “important” band, Pavement (his pick) or Los Lobos (mine). I very much admire Brock’s work and like him as a person. But when I think about his defense of this idiotic premise I pity him. I am certain he feels the same way toward me.

  Becca’s Song

  Am I overstating the emotional incapacities of Drooling Fanatics? Probably. Very few of us say the things we should to the people we love. We find other ways to reach our deepest feelings. Drooling Fanatics just happen to use music.

  A case in point: I can remember staring out of my Toyota Tercel at snow tapering onto the low hills of East Tennessee while my pal Becca Moore sat in the passenger seat close to tears. I wasn’t the cause of her unhappiness. That distinction belonged to another guy, who’d moved in with Becca and led her to believe they might get married before reverting to the habits of his given species, the North American Bachelor Chicken.

  I’d spent some happy nights with Becca, getting wasted and listening to music and gobbling the grease bombs you can afford to gobble when you’re twenty-five. I was screwing around with a friend of hers, a sexy divorcée I had no intention of marrying because I was a North American Bachelor Chicken too. Then Becca’s Chicken broke her heart and she called me one night to say she needed to get out of town, bad, and should we do a road trip.

  The snow struck us both as overkill. Then a road crew appeared and began tearing up our half of the highway and traffic drew to a dead halt. This felt like a bad metaphor, the kind that yearned for a home in one of my short stories.

  Becca gazed at the snow. She was no weeper. Relentless optimism was more her style. She’d come tearing out of Indiana and built herself into a fearsome capitalist. She was like a lot of women I knew back then: brash in public, and quietly terrified in private. Her apartment was piled high with cross-stitch patterns and photo albums of other people’s children. And now she was staring thirty in the kisser, alone.

  Then James McMurtry came on my stereo and the first words out of his mouth were (I shit you not) Must be a cold front coming / ’cause I saw the eastbound C&O / And the coal cars were dusted with a half inch of snow. This was “Rachel’s Song,” the saddest four minutes released in that whole godforsaken year of 1996. I’d always assumed the song was narrated by a young widow driven to madness by mourning. But I heard it differently now. It wasn’t about death but romantic abandonment, the terrible shame of being left behind, which caused Becca to break down once and for all, to weep convulsively, because she was a Drooling Fanatic, like her ex, they had both loved McMurtry, and because songs held this power over her, they could make her feel the grief she wanted to feel and didn’t want to feel. The song ended and Becca wiped her eyes. “That was ridiculous,” she said, and began searching the map for alternative routes.

  I certainly knew what it meant to be haunted by a record. For me, that year, it was Howard Tate’s searing soul masterpiece, Get It While You Can, which I played at absurd volumes, burning through one chintzy tweeter after another. Tate was the classic sob story, a singer revered by the pros and stiffed by the paying customers. His heyday was in the late sixties but he was gone a few years later, leaving behind only his voice: angelic, confused, convincingly aggrieved. He kept getting mixed up with the wrong ladies, beaten down by those bad broads. That falsetto! I was sure he’d been sent to rescue me.

  Then I met a girl, and another aspect of Tate’s music was revealed to me. It was a kind of sexual tonic. Those honeyed horn charts. Those crisp drums and opulent organ riffs. When sprinkled over young lovers, the result was prolonged necking, very sleek frottage. We were dead in love for a month, bruising each other up in the sack, whispering the sweet lies of infatuation. It all curdled quickly enough and she began to tromp around town with my best friend. Howard Tate understood. All of his songs were about betrayal.
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br />   On those nights when I made the mistake of drink, I would stagger home and lie on the bathroom floor and listen to the tinkling piano of the title track, the mournful horns. Then Tate would start in: “When you love somebody, you take a chance on sorrow …” and soon I would be mumbling into her answering machine, asking her did she remember the time we did it during that snowstorm, how the window was open and my feet went numb with snowflakes?

  This is typical Drooling Fanatic behavior. As much as we might enjoy romance and its attendant dramas, we’re really just waiting for the versions of love that return to us later, in song.

  Reluctant Exegesis:

  “All Out of Love”

  Dedicated to those readers who find the previously cited conduct toward Elise immature, bordering on disreputable.

  I’m lying alone with my head on the phone

  Thinking of you till it hurts

  I know you hurt too but what else can we do

  Tormented and torn apart

  What I love so much about the soft rock ballad (SRB), and what makes it the musical equivalent of the romance novel, is that the words make sense until you actually focus on them. The first line presents a lovesick narrator who is “alone” and “on the phone,” a situation common to narrators of SRBs. But look again. The narrator’s head is actually on a phone.

  The year is 1980, so we’re talking about a large plastic device, possibly of the rotary genus. This act presumably mirrors, or serves as a masochistic expression of, the narrator’s anguish. He now addresses the object of his love. He acknowledges that she is also in pain. (Perhaps her head is on a phone as well.) These two represent an ancient archetype: star-crossed lovers. Powerful forces have intervened. They are Abelard and Héloïse, Romeo and Juliet, Britney and K-Fed.

  I wish I could carry your smile in my heart

  For times when my life feels so low

  It would make me believe what tomorrow could bring

  When today doesn’t really know, doesn’t really know

  The listener grows concerned. Having been informed of the epic forces aligned against our lovers, we are eager to discern their exact nature and potential remedy. Instead, the narrator reiterates his devotion. He concludes with a couplet that calls to mind Heidegger’s ultimate declaration in Being and Time (Sein und Zeit, 1927): “a primordial mode of temporalizing of ecstatic temporality itself must make the ecstatic project of being in general possible.” Translation: your smile, my heart, let’s roll.

  I’m all out of love, I’m so lost without you

  I know you were right believing for so long

  I’m all out of love, what am I without you

  I can’t be too late to say that I was so wrong

  The chorus has arrived. With it, our hope for clarity evaporates. We have been proceeding under the assumption that our lovers were somehow “torn apart.” We now discover what actually tore them apart: the narrator. He dumped her. More precisely, he dumped her after a long period of emotional neglect.

  I want you to come back and carry me home

  Away from these long lonely nights

  I’m reaching for you, are you feeling it too

  Does the feeling seem oh so right

  The problem is one of credibility. The speaker is playing the part of a victim when he is clearly the assailant. We must now endure his entreaties. He wants her to “come back and carry me home” (huh?) not because he recognizes in her precious qualities he once neglected, but because he’s lonely. Love in the realm of Air Supply is a lot like shock and awe: an overwhelming force that erases any trace of moral responsibility. What matters is that your head is on a phone and it kind of hurts because phones are hard and this pain is reflected in your voice, you are digging deep into your man-pain, you are truly coming clean, you are saying for the whole bloody world to hear, My bad, babe.

  And what would you say if I called on you now

  And said that I can’t hold on

  There’s no easy way, it gets harder each day

  Please love me or I’ll be gone, I’ll be gone

  Having already lied and groveled, our hero now turns to the next refuge of the abusive boyfriend: guilt provocation. If his ex, whom he dumped, refuses to love him, he will kill himself. Or maybe by “gone” he means only that he’ll abandon her (again). Regardless, he has established a clear pattern of deceit, obsession, and unsolicited contact that seems predictive of assault. It’s time for the bridge.

  Oh, what are you thinking of?

  What are you thinking of?

  Oh, what are you thinking of?

  What are you thinking of?

  I’m thinking about Elise again, actually. I’m thinking about how she knew the words to all the Air Supply songs she played for me. And I’m thinking about the fact that 98 percent of the people who listen to Air Supply are women and how much they must enjoy hearing men “express their feelings” and plead for forgiveness—even when those men are poised to inflict more damage. As in the romance novel or the Lifetime Channel original movie, the SRB peddles women a version of love that manages to hold them in contempt. It comes on like surrender and delivers abuse.

  But I’m also thinking (again) about the broader relationship between language and music, how melody and rhythm can animate dead language, which is on the one hand beautiful and inspiring and on the other hand disturbing, to have all these dead words stumbling the earth like zombies in makeup. And I’m thinking that this is what it’s like for me to hear “All Out of Love.” It’s like a zombie in mascara wants to bite my neck, a slow clumsy zombie but one with terrific stamina, as is so often the case with zombies, meaning eventually I have to sleep, or I trip over something I wouldn’t usually trip over, and the zombie gets close enough to chomp through my skin, and when that happens I don’t die, but the part of my brain that regards language as an instrument of truth dies, the part that does the honest work of investigating romantic ruin, the hows and whys of the emotional harm we do one another, and instead of feeling nauseated by “All Out of Love” I get choked up and try to sing along, which is when my friends realize what’s happened and put a bullet in my brain.

  13. The 1989 film about a lovesick dude who ardently woos an unattainable love object using a vintage New Wave soundtrack, stumbles into some vague form of self-knowledge, and thereby gets the girl. I believe I have just described every single character John Cusack has ever played.

  The Marriage of Fanatico

  It is fair to ask at this point how I ever managed to get married. That is certainly a question my family has pondered. A proper librettist—or perhaps Air Supply—would have drawn it up perfectly: my wife, Erin, and I locking eyes across a windswept piazza, plenty of loud obstacles in the wings (a dastardly count, a mischievous ghost, a buxom romantic rival capable of nailing high C). Alas, the truth is a bit lumpier. But I’ll start at the beginning, because our courtship only survived by the good graces of our Fanaticism.

  Act I: An Immodest Proposal

  In April 2002, my first book came out, a collection of stories. I was thirty-five years old, seven summers removed from grad school, and so desperate for regard that I would have approved the title Stupid Things My Penis Has Done. The publisher settled on My Life in Heavy Metal.

  Already, there was a bit of operatic fortune at work, because my future wife happened to be a former metal chick with literary aspirations. The only reason she came to my debut reading was because of this title. There she was on the appointed night, a shy woman with dark hair and sad blue eyes, though I wouldn’t have noticed her because the venue—a tiny bar in Cambridge—was hot and packed. Erin kept having to step outside to clear her head. She left before I even started.

  After the reading, Erin’s friend Kate approached me and told me about Erin falling ill and mentioned that their book club was reading my stories and I immediately volunteered to visit. I was all about chivalry that might get me laid. The book club visit turned out pretty awkward. Of the five members, the most
vocal was an ill-tempered lesbian doctor who clearly hated the book. Erin said very little, but she did mention that she was a writer, and naturally I urged her to call me for advice.

  A couple of nights later my phone rang. Erin wanted to say thanks, and to take me up on my offer. She had some stories she needed feedback on. I told her that I’d love to read one, but I was up to my neck in student stories.

  “You’re missing out,” she said.

  “I’m sure I am,” I said. “Maybe you could read one to me sometime.”

  She paused. “Sure.”

  “What would you be wearing at this reading?” I said.

  “I’d be naked, of course.”

  Erin was trying to sound casual, as if this were the sort of proposal she dispensed with some frequency. But her voice fluttered and both of us could feel, in the flushed half-second afterward, the abrupt acceleration of our pulses. Whatever it was we’d been up to previously, the real purpose of her call had been revealed.

  Act II: Drooling Consummation

  Erin showed up Saturday night and I fed her linguine with homemade vodka sauce and sweet white wine. We were both terrified by the audacity of what she’d promised. For all her bravado, Erin was a modest woman. And I myself, despite having published a book so graphic that a cousin of mine felt it necessary to transport it in a brown paper bag, despite the inevitable reputation this book saddled me with, remained crushingly insecure. The idea that a beautiful woman had shown up at my apartment prepared to remove her clothing flummoxed me. In my experience you had to do a lot of pleading before anything like that happened.