Here’s the thing: we can choose to wrap ourselves up in flags and prayers and talk about building walls and fences and other each other until the cows come home. Or we can see a world where everyone is in it together, where in all corners of the earth we work hard, fall in love, form indie bands, and make esoteric videos.
It’s a truth of the human brain that we will always find what we are expecting to see. Why not let that be connection, what do we have to lose? Without a doubt we lose our humanity any other way.
I keep waiting for the classic rock station to catch up with my taste in music but it never does. Since I was born in the 70s to young parents I still keep the station on the dial (and I still call the tuner the dial) and click past it when I’m bored with the car CDs. The record for songs listened to in a row is holding steady at four, which I think was a 90s flashback day; most of the time I’m lucky to make it to two before changing the station. It’s not that I have any particular problem with bands of the 60s or country rock or all of that. It’s just that I grew up in Indiana and all my allocated classic rock minutes were used up about halfway through 1983. Also I kind of can’t stand most of the bands of that era (I’m looking at you, Beatles). Which is all to say that it’s a treat when I get to rock out to something I actually like on the radio. If you stranded me on a desert island and forced me to choose a classic rock band to listen to, I would have to pick The Who.
It doesn’t hurt that the lyrics warm the cockles of my anti-establishment heart. I hope to make social justice Saturday a thing during this musical adventure, but I make no promises about consistency.
I tend to have a thing for debut albums. All the heart and agony of the years spent creating and refining the music finally birthed out into the world as a tender offering. Or maybe it’s just the pleasure of discovering something new that I actually like. Either way, many of my favorite albums are debuts and this is one of the ones I can still listen to over and over, much to the annoyance of my industrial-music-loving life partner.
The first time I heard Counting Crows was in the Paris apartment of my college friend’s host parents. Said host parents were on a trip abroad and I was allowed to be there but not stay overnight and not touch anything. “Anything” in this case being the fantastic and detailed miniature African village laid out in the living room, each piece lovingly hand-crafted and brought back to France to be artfully arranged over the course of decades. Even now I think of those tiny huts and my fingers itch to move them around. We did not, however, touch them. What we did was listen to August and Everything After on repeat while drinking copious amounts of French wine, an experience made possible by her sister sending the CD from Berkeley which I reckon is probably still the epicenter of their fandom. Before I went on to start the school year in England, my friend dubbed it onto tape for me and I spent much of the next nine months listening to it while walking around Essex in the rain.
I never liked much of their later stuff despite loving this first one in its entirety. Twenty years ago I would have picked different tracks but it’s been cold and raining here all week and melancholia is the thing that calls.
Half my lifetime ago my friend in Philly introduced me to Absolutely Fabulous. I would take the train into the city and walk across town to his apartment where he’d feed me and we’d watch Ab Fab until it was time to go out for the night. Then we’d dance until 4am, get breakfast at a diner, I’d take a train back to the Main Line, and we’d do it again the next weekend. In those days before Netflix you had to be a dedicated fan to be able to watch a show over and over; even if I didn’t love it at first, the fact that he had recorded so many episodes on VHS made me give it a chance. Ab Fab is exactly the kind of British comedy of ill manners that my spouse can’t stand and I seem genetically predisposed to appreciate.
At the same time I was being immersed in it another friend was doing her best to sway me to the side of Pet Shop Boys fandom. I never quite got there but this perfect blending of television camp, musical camp, and attitude has been a favorite for twenty years and has made it onto every inspirational mix CD I’ve made for myself, from training for the AIDS ride to writing a novel in a month. Now that I’m a parent I see its appeal through fresh eyes: we can all use a fabulous wonderful individual who’s known us longer than our children have.
My grandfather spent the entirety of World War II in the British Navy yet I didn’t know that Veterans Day was a holiday until I lived in England for my junior year in college. My grandfather hated the war and generally refused to talk about it. He never told stories about those years or his childhood or his family. In junior high I interviewed him for my English class and that was the way my mother learned the names of her father’s siblings. In that interview he told me that he had wanted to be a painter but his father thought that was ridiculous; to get away from him, my grandfather joined the Navy after his 18th birthday on the first day of 1939 and the war started later that year. Over the years since, I pieced together a narrative of my grandfather that made sense of his moods and his immovable refusal to talk about the past. I learned from my grandmother that he was determined to be unlike his own father who gambled and drank away his paychecks; when they were first married my grandfather told her never to fight about money with him. He would bring her every paycheck and if the family needed more he would work to get it. Beyond that, he left the family finances up to her and wanted no discussions.
Throughout my life, my grandfather was a man who sought to surround himself with beauty. He never stopped painting and the walls of all our homes are adorned with his landscapes. Some of my favorite memories are of watching the inimitable Bob Ross at my grandfather’s house during summer vacations. He taught vocational painting at the local technical high school and worked as a house painter during the summers. Growing up with his eye we all gained an appreciation of aesthetics and the judicious use of color; our homes may not be fancy but they are almost uniformly well-painted. Flowers in the garden, opera on the radio, tall stacks of books from the local library: none of these things he loved could heal the impact on the family of war and alcoholism. Still, my grandfather never stopped trying, never stopped loving the family he had chosen, never stopped walking the path unfolding before him. Of course we wish it could have been different, for him and for all of us. Life and people are more messy than that.
One of the last things I did with my grandfather before I moved away from Michigan was take him to see Tosca. A production in a high school auditorium put on by my friend’s fledgling professional opera company, but a moving performance nonetheless. Before the show he sat in my living room and surveyed the paint job. “You did this yourselves?” he asked. “It’s not bad.” Pain and beauty ever intertwined, even before war. Even after.
If you had asked me ten years ago if I were a Tom Petty fan I might have said no. I might have said no about a lot of music that I realize now, in what I hope is only still early middle age, I actually love. I don’t own it but the internet lets me feel like I do and the hours I spent listening to it with people I love has made it my own. As a teenager I would never have described myself as a music fan. I mean, I loved music and still do. Being surrounded by people (and by people I mean guys) who were obsessed with music and artists and genealogies of bands and artists, the bar for “fan” was high and involved zines and 12-strings and 8-tracks and knowing who John Peel was. I was just one of the girls who listened. To the albums, to the singles, to the bands our friends were in, to the practices of the bands our friends were in, to the demo tapes, to all of it.
Tom Petty was a guy’s artist, this album the peppy accessible one that girls liked. Whatever. We all love it now. This song was on the first mix tape I was ever given, from a friend in a family of friends who were way cooler then (and now) than I. Years later, I hitched a ride back home over the holidays with a high school classmate who’d ended up at the same law school and we listened to this together almost the entire way. A few more years after that and I found myself in a bookstore singing along to the entire thing, back in the days when bookstore employees still got to choose what was playing over the speakers (or maybe only in Canada). Even now when I hear this song I can’t help belting it out and despite the lyrics so obviously to the contrary, it will always be about friendship to me. Which is what music has been in my life, making it an entirely fitting way to kick off this year of songs.
For the past few years my friends (and their friends) have been posting a song a day on Facebook accompanied by reminiscences and other noodling. 2016 was my turn; I’ve passed the torch to my friend Mike. Every once in a while I still post another song.
Kris’s songs are here and Kelly’s are here. Dan’s are entombed in social media and live on only in our hearts.