Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life

by Steve Almond

  It occurred to me, as we cruised along the darkened shoreline of Minear Lake, that this was the central allure of rock and roll: the creation of a personal mythology. Rock and roll allowed people to lie about themselves, and to be sanctified for the extravagance of their fictions. This was how a mama’s boy from Tupelo became our gyrating Jesus, how a nasally Jew from Hibbing, Minnesota, reinvented himself as a hipster messiah. Rock had enabled Ike Reilly to buy Gatsby’s mansion and still shout the savage truths of punk rock.

  We drove around for another hour. It was like touring the Stations of the Cross for a proud sinner. This is where Ike punched a guy through a storefront window. This is where Ike dangled his pal over the highway. At home he allowed us into the main living quarters, with its mighty beamed ceilings. The living room had been converted into a basketball court with a regulation-size hoop for his boys, over which a giant poster of Dylan kept watch. We met his lovely wife, who faithfully recounted Ike’s domestic misbehaviors (Ike blasts the TV with a shotgun, Ike burns her wicker furniture in the backyard, etc.).

  The night wore on. New drinks slid down our throats. Ike prowled from one room to the next and we stumbled after. We’d awoken his need to be perceived as something more than an aging rocker trapped in his hometown. Outside, the depraved winds of January howled. The moon hung like an ice chip. Ike played us song after song, the unreleased shit, the heavy shit. He rang our ears with incandescence and would not let us sleep.

  The Close Mythology

  And weren’t we, as Drooling Fanatics, thrilled? I certainly was. But The Close had descended into a funk. He pulled me aside and insisted we leave.

  “Are you crazy? Ike’s playing us the unreleased shit!”

  “I gotta get out of here,” he snapped.

  We drove back to the hotel in silence, and I knew what it was really about because, for all our teasing, I had come to love The Close, and he was an orphan now, whether or not he chose to admit that to himself. His mother was gone, he’d refused to make his peace with her, to forgive her transgressions, and so, by the dependable math of Catholic guilt—and The Close, like Ike, was nothing if not a Catholic—he was now carrying her body on his conscience.

  I thought about the afternoon, five years ago, when The Close’s phone had rung and his voice had gone eerily flat. “How did you get this number?” he said, over and over. Then he hung up.

  “Who was that?” I asked.

  “My mother,” The Close said. “The whore.”

  It was like staring into a part of him I’d never seen before. Because The Close had always portrayed himself as a comic figure, a profane braggart who enjoyed discussing the size of his cock and the sexual damage it might inflict on his lovers. I’d always laughed at this trash talk, but now it was seeming much less funny, more like the revenge he sought for his mother’s betrayal.

  The Close had been her firstborn, after all, and loved by her with unusual fervor. He had loved her too, as a child does, which is to say helplessly. He was a sensitive kid, melancholy, the sort who needs a mama. But she’d split, and he’d turned to his father, a paragon of male virtue. The Close spent his life trying to live up to that paragon, often to the point of caricature. I’d seen pictures of him in his early twenties, when he was a semiprofessional bodybuilder, a ’roid monkey down in Myrtle Beach, greasing his delts and posing in banana sacks. This was all part of the act.

  But it didn’t last. Depression walloped him into the waiting arms of literature. He left central Jersey behind and shipped off to grad school and found in words, in the turbulent rhythms of Gerard Manley Hopkins especially, a new passion. How did one explain this to a family of blue-collar Italians? Hey guys, I’m in love with a repressed homosexual Jesuit priest poet. No, it’s not like that. Really.

  Even before literature, though, he’d found music. His life was like mine, like Erin’s, like the lives of all Drooling Fanatics, a struggle to reach the feelings forbidden within the confines of our families. He’d measured that life not in coffee spoons but in rock stars—Springsteen, Axl Rose, and now Ike, men who affirmed for him the rescuing power of personal mythology. This was why he’d insisted we split: it had been too painful for him to see Ike in such a needy state.

  He’d never admit to any of this, of course. That was part of his confounding charm. But I knew he was hurting, somewhere beneath the bullshit. Just before sleep, I asked The Close if he was doing all right.

  There was a lengthy pause.

  “I feel like Ikeal got very close to The Close today,” he said, in his loud Jersey voice. “He had a Close encounter. And as you could see, he did not want me to leave. He gave me drugs. He gave me songs. He damn near gave me his daughter.”

  “I meant more on an emotional level,” I said.

  “I think it’s accurate to say that she’s in love with me,” The Close announced. “She’s a girl of great heart and she recognizes another great heart.”

  We Are Only Here in Moments

  Was Ike Reilly sorry to see us go? I still can’t decide.

  I know only that we were ready to go, having put undue pressure on the tenuous bond that exists between the Drooling Fanatic and his or her beloved. It wasn’t that Ike had let us down. On the contrary, we left Libertyville more convinced than ever of his genius. It was what lived beneath his genius that spooked us, the immense doubt. We want, more than anything, to preserve our mythologies.

  We sloshed south toward O’Hare under clouds the color of old nickels. Our rental smelled of chemical despair. The Close drove with the casual belligerence of his native state. I wanted to be able to do something for him. I knew he’d make himself pay later for this trip and this made me feel very tender toward him, very responsible. Only I didn’t know what to do. Men can so rarely talk with any degree of honesty.

  So I let Ike rescue us, as he had so many times before. We are only here in moments, he sang. And later, from another song, Today we buried our mother/We laid the poor woman to rest/Everyone got a new suit/And my sister wore an ivory dress. And The Close—poor Close!—who so loved his mother that he could only hate her, smiled and sang along.

  List #5

  Top Ten Covers of All Time

  I hope it’s good and clear by now that I have no business rendering critical judgments of pop music. There is one area, however, where I lay claim to being an expert: cover songs. I attribute this not just to my ongoing effort to convince every musician I’ve ever met to cover the song “No Scrubs” by TLC, but to the fact that in 2003 my pal Tim and I launched a series called Cover 2 Cover. Writers read their favorite writers, bands played their favorite covers, people got drunk, Tim flirted incessantly, and I got to be the DJ. This required me to compile a library of five hundred covers, from which I now happily skim the cream:

  1. “Gin and Juice” by Snoop Dogg by the Gourds

  Turning nasty hip-hop ditties into earnest pop ballads has become an indie trope. The Gourds tear it a new asshole. They render an almost tuneless Snoop song as a gorgeously textured bluegrass epic.

  2. “I Just Wanna See His Face” by the Rolling Stones by the Blind Boys of Alabama

  The original, a muzzy jam session tucked away behind “Ventilator Blues” on Exile on Main Street, finds new life as a gospel classic. Black folks ripping off the Stones—that’s called karma.

  3. “Mother” by Glenn Danzig by Matt the Electrician

  So Erin and I walk into this club and there’s this dude thrashing on an itty bitty stringed thing (half banjo, half ukulele) and growling gorgeously. “Omigod,” I yell, “this is, like, the greatest song I’ve ever heard!”

  “Honey,” Erin says patiently. “This is a Danzig cover.”

  Fine. My judgment stands.

  4. “Straight to Hell” by the Clash by Phil Cody

  With apologies to Lily Allen, nobody comes close to Cody. He reaches into the guts of the song and produces a soaring elegy of disenfranchisement.

  5. “This Is Not a Love Song” by PiL by Nouvelle V
ague

  What a joy to hear the screechy original revived as a voluptuous bossa nova. Johnny Lydon and his rotten teeth are no doubt horrified. Good.

  6. “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” by Jimi Hendrix by Angelique Kidjo

  Covering Hendrix is a cottage industry. Kidjo creates an Afro space jam worthy of Fela Kuti. (Honorable mention to Bootsy Collins, who slips the scorcher “If 6 Was 9” a sex Quaalude.)

  7. “Takin’ It to the Streets” by the Doobie Brothers by Harry Manx and Kevin Breit

  Every time I listen to this sublime instrumental I forgive Michael McDonald all over again.

  8. “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” by the Four Lads by They Might Be Giants

  Because this is the whole point of a cover: you pay tribute to the source material while transcending it. What was a tepid swing tune explodes into divine weirdness via amphetamines and klezmer.

  9. “How Am I Different” by Aimee Mann by Bettye LaVette and “Take It to the Limit” by the Eagles by Etta James

  Or, in these two cases, lovely pop songs become soul classics. LaVette rips through the sadness and confusion of romantic abuse and produces an intoxicating rage. Etta takes the Eagles to church and baptizes their coke spoons in holy water.

  10. “S.O.S.” by ABBA by the Meat Purveyors and “She Drives Me Crazy” by Fine Young Cannibals by Dolly Parton

  And here’s the lovely thing I’ve discovered, which is that if you listen to enough killer covers—Dolly’s sly hoedown, the Meat Purveyors’ heartsick harmonizing—the very notion of genre starts to fall away, instruments, arrangements, none of it matters, all that matters is the song as a union of melody and rhythm, an expression of the universal language that is (in our moments of deepest need) a form of spiritual rescue, amen.

  16. My show, The Tip, was part of the growing Drooling Fanatic empire I had established two years earlier, when I began distributing “a quarterly e-zine” of the same name. The Tip 1.0 consisted of a mawkish sermon on the virtues of socialism, followed by ten CD recommendations. Technically, The Tip was not a magazine. Technically, it was spam.

  17. By The Close’s formulation: Ike + Michael = Ikeal.

  Why in God’s Name Am I Managing a Band? The Boris McCutcheon Story

  In the spring of 2003 I went to a Mardi Gras party at the Somerville VFW Hall. These guys started playing. They sounded like a Confederate marching band set loose inside a New Orleans brothel. There were, by my count, only four musicians on the bandstand, but that seemed impossible given the clamor. The drummer kept capping his runs with a sharp clack on the rim of his kit and the result was a delirious urge to bump butts with the person next to you. The hall was sweltering, but the lead singer wore a Sherpa hat with the earflaps down. He had chubby cheeks and a slightly stunned expression. Strangest of all were his lyrics, which he delivered in a drawl of indeterminate origin.

  Why can’t the whores (clack) blow the dandelions?

  Why do the girls (clack) always pass me by?

  I was hurt in an unusual way

  It made no sense. Except that the melody was a thing of such unbridled goofiness that this final line, serving as a refrain, began to infect the crowd, awakening in each of us the comic potential of our own self-pity, the conviction that we’d suffered some unprecedented romantic injury which our friends and family were simply dying to inspect. And thus whistles, shrieks, and hoots of “hurt!” started to rain down in the style of a tent revival. I spent the next half hour dashing around the party, trying to find someone who knew the band.

  “That’s Boris,” this girl said.

  “Boris?” I said. “Boris what?”

  She shrugged. “He’s from the Cape, I think.”

  Someone pointed me to a pretty blonde, the band’s manager, and I nearly tackled her. She happily supplied the singer’s full name (Boris McCutcheon) and a copy of the album his band was about to release, When We Were Big. I’ve tried many times to describe WWWB in the years since. I usually settle on something like “Sam Cooke fronting The Band.” This makes no sense, because Cooke had a silky tenor whereas Boris sings in a sandpaper baritone. The point of comparison has more to do with the commanding quality of each man’s voice, the immediate sense upon hearing them that you had better stop what you’re doing and listen. I’m also trying to get across that Boris is a soul singer, someone who draws on the traditions of gospel and R&B, even if the arrangements place him in the vast hinterlands of Americana. It’s like he’s found some hidden trove from the Smithsonian Folkways series and run them through a Motown filter.

  Boris Days

  And did I likewise, on that first night, assail the members of the band and buy them drinks and invite them back to my apartment to party until it was too late for Boris to drive back to the Cape so that he and his dog Pappy eventually passed out on a spare futon in my front room? I think so. Or maybe that was another night. There were a lot of them back then, because Boris and his backing trio—they would later be called the Salt Licks, but for now had no name—were soon playing the smaller clubs around Boston and I was coming out to every show, with a variety of women (Erin being one) who quickly discerned that I was more interested in the band than in them.

  There was, to take another example, the night the band and I constructed a chocolate Jesus in homage to the Tom Waits song. And the night Bones, the bass player, spent in panicked consultation with Poison Control because his dog Chopper had eaten one of my ant traps. Dogs were a constant in the Boris days, big friendly mutts who munched on poison or got sprayed by skunks or snarled at one another, doing their bit to add to the chaos.

  The essential chaos, the human nexus of it, was Boris himself, Boris of the broken trucks and disconnected phones, of the lost capos, of the songs scrawled feverishly on the backs of receipts smeared with motor oil and stashed in the tackle box with his harmonicas. He spoke in a soft growl and dressed like a mestizo farmer; he had no fixed address. One week he was crashing on a farm in Woods Hole, the next he was with Bones down on the Cape. His pattern of employment was equally erratic. My friend Mitch likes to tell the story of seeing Boris play a Brookline pub and bumping into him the next morning, fixing a sprinkler on the Boston Common. He’d taken a post as an irrigation manager for the city, though he departed some weeks later, after dropping his key ring down a sewer grate, a blunder requiring the closure of a major road and the deployment of numerous city employees along with a giant scooper. He would later memorialize this episode in the song “17 Scoops.”

  This was how Boris operated. The turmoil of his life invoked the refuge of music, where he found, if not quietude, at least an ordered universe. He knew which notes would produce beauty, how to arrange them, which details to include, the optimal tempo, how the song sounded in his head, and how to make it sound that way in the world—an act of scrupulous translation that is the essential vocation of a musician. In this pursuit, he could not have been more disciplined.

  And so for me there was really no choice but to see him play every chance I got, for the pleasure and inspiration, and because I knew this wasn’t going to last long, Boris was going to rocket to fame or explode into ruin or both. His band knew it too. But Boris was a genius, and genius establishes its own centrifugal force. They put up with a lot of shit on his behalf, cursed him regularly, and remained ravenous for his attention.

  The band had just formed when I first saw them. Over the next year they grew into the sort of outfit you always hope is going to appear in your neighborhood bar but never does. They were fast, loud, tight, completely in synch and somehow, at the same time, able to project the aura of drunken pals just playing for beer. Some nights the lineup included a lanky tuba player, much favored by the ladies for his disheveled Teutonic beauty. Or a stray mandolin player. Where did these folks come from? Nobody knew. They just appeared, vomited whole from the Borisphere.

  In early 2004, the band booked its first foreign tour—of Holland. I was sure this meant the band had arrived. I volunteered to ferry so
me equipment to the airport for Boris, but when I arrived at the apartment where he was crashing, nothing was packed. Gear and clothing lay strewn in a cyclonic tableau. Black electrical cord, miles of the stuff, snaked down hallways, over banisters, under sofas. Boris himself was red-eyed and muttering. He needed to burn two hundred CDs before sundown, to sell in Holland. It was four in the afternoon. It never occurred to me that this state of affairs might suggest a fundamental ambivalence in Boris.

  The Green Wish

  It would take another year for me to start to see things clearly, and I spent as much of that year as I could with Boris and his mates. I was doing other things too, such as teaching and writing and falling in love with Erin and breaking up with her. She loved Boris, too, and accepted that there were going to be some nights, many nights, actually, when I found it necessary to party with him and the boys until dawn.

  That spring, Boris invited a bunch of us down to Naushon, a small, undeveloped island just off the southern coast of Massachusetts. His mom held the august title of the island’s Livery Stable Manager and Chief Shepherdess, and her home had become Boris’s crash pad of last resort. Naushon was like something out of a brochure for Ireland: low stone fences, green hills dotted with sheep, hidden coves. There were thirty-five homes on the island and no roads. Boris took us on a winding hike to a house on the remote western end. He had something to show us.

  We found the place by late afternoon. All the doors were locked. Austin, the guitar player, spotted a screened window and we hoisted him up and he shimmied through and crashed to the floor. The air inside was thick with mothballs. Boris led us to a tiny parlor containing his surprise: a miniature keyboard that appeared to have been played last during the Spanish-American War.