Muchness and Light

Well I know you will remember, 'cause the music is forever.

It's been a really busy year for me. 

• I finished losing 115 pounds.
• I had three surgeries to removed 120+ square inches of skin.
• I went to South by Southwest for the first time.
• I got to see both my beloved The Gracious Few and LIVE with their new lead singer on the same night.  (Plus some other band.  I forget.)
• I fell in love with the Mynabirds.  (Missing Patsy Cline song – "We Made a Mountain")
• I finally got to see the Afghan Whigs live and to meet Greg Dulli in a dark alley behind the Masquerade.  (And Ric McCollum and John Curley.)
• I filed for divorce.
• I released my first novel. 

Even with all of that, there's still something missing.

Wednesday night, I will finally get to see Concrete Blonde live. 

"What's the big deal?" you ask. 

Well, let me tell you. 

Sometime during my freshman year of high school, I went one weekend afternoon to the Southside Festival, which was a great little outdoor music and arts thing that used to take place in Five Points South in my hometown of Birmingham, Alabama.  Five Points is a funky little area, artsy and eclectic—and it was much less dirty then than it is now.  (At least it seemed that way.)  My friends and I hung out there on weekends and sometimes after school, sitting around the fountain, bullshitting and getting into far less trouble than we probably deserved. 

So this specific day when I was 14, some record label promo people were passing out albums to the crowd.  Yes, vinyl, in the 12x12 sleeve, and for free.  They handed me two: Pleased To Meet Me by the Replacements—who I saw play at Sloss Furnaces a couple of years later—and Concrete Blonde's self-titled debut.  I tromped up the rickety stairs to Charlemagne Records and also bought a Billie Holiday best-of collection, as well as Metal Circus by Hüsker Dü. 

(It was a very eclectic day.  For those in the know, I ran into Broderick Brakefield and Bryan Simmons, who'd missed their ride the night before and had been running around down there, barefoot, for a couple of days.)

I went home and locked myself away in my bedroom, planting myself on the floor in front my stereo.  I might even have stacked the records on the turntable.  I loved them all, each in their own way, but I adored Concrete Blonde. 

It was the first day of a now-26-year love affair from afar with the incomparable Johnette Napolitano. 

As I've discussed before, I'm an alto.  (Really, a contralto.)  I don't have a lot of patience for wimpy soprano voices.  And Johnette's voice was the farthest from wimpy I'd ever heard.  It was deeply female with the most amazing breath control ever.  Ever.  (Those booming notes aren't higher; they're simply bigger.) 

I was blown away.

So this goes on for years, but somehow I miss them live, over and over and over.  I was too young for the clubs they played.  My ex-boyfriend was an asshole who beat me up the night before we were supposed to go to Atlanta to see them.  I lived in Huntsville where they never played anymore.  They broke up. 

I was supposed to see them two summers ago during their Bloodletting anniversary tour.  I had ruptured two discs in my back and was in so much pain that I had to give the tickets away.  (I cried.  A lot.)

So when I went to Variety Playhouse with Growler and Mandypants a few weeks ago (for the Psychedelic Furs, thank you very much), I was thrilled to see that Concrete Blonde would be playing on December 19^th.  Finally, finally!, I get to do this shit after twenty-six years. 

It's the voice and the lyrics and the fact that she plays bass.  She does the most wonderful covers of Leonard Cohen and Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, in part because her voice lends itself to that.  But my favorites, undoubtedly, are the ones with the complicated harmonies, where Johnette seems to wrap her own voice around itself. 

And, ultimately, I owe Johnette Napolitano my life. 

There are a couple of people who know this story.  If you're one of them and you're hearing (reading) it for the dozenth time, I apologize.  This anecdote was in the first draft of what would become Persona Non Grata: A Story of Junkture.  It was cut entirely when I fictionalized the book, though Concrete Blonde still made mention.  (page 81, at the end of chapter 6—you can search inside the book on Amazon, btw) 

NOTE:  This is still incredibly difficult for me to go back to, to put myself in the place where I felt the things I write about below.  I can deal with a lot of my shit, but this is one of the most personally-shameful moments of emotion in my forty years, and I'm not callous about this. 

The horrible ex-boyfriend (Damien) and I had broken up for what would be the last time.  After four tumultuous years with him, I was a mess.  I was devastated when we broke up.  For the third or fourth time since I'd known him, I decided that ending my life was the only way I would ever be able to deal with the pain. 

I had a plan.  I had the implements.  I was crying vicious tears while driving on I-65 north in Birmingham, determined to do it as soon as possible.  My little car had a cassette deck, and my very favorite tape was a home-recorded, 90-minute thing that had Concrete Blonde on one side and Bloodletting on the other—my two favorite Concrete Blonde records.  Bawling my head off, I intended to listen to "Bloodletting" and all of the subsequent tracks from that records, all so dark and somber.  It's an amazing record, but all I wanted was to let my own heart find its reprieve in that sadness. 

Instead, what I got was "True", the first track from the other side of the tape. 

Well when I've had enough

I'll get a pick-up truck and I'll drive away,

I'll take my last ten bucks just as far as it will go.

 

Well sometimes I'm easily fooled,

Take a painful step and I get knocked back two.

I do all I can and it's all I can do to be true.

And if I had the choice I'd take the voice I got

Cause it was hard to find.

You know I've come too far to wind up right back where I started.

And they tell me who I should be,

I'll never let those monkeys make a mess of me.

I am who I am and it's all I can do,

But I'm true.

One more sunrise

Open my eyes up – true

One more sunset

Lay my head down – true

They talk you up and then they talk you down

And you begin to doubt.

Sometimes the reasons seem so very far away.

But I'd stop breathing today,

Cause if I can't walk proud, I'd rather walk away.

I do all I am and it's all I can do,

But I'm true.

I'd give all I am and I'd give it to you.

So true.

That was what I heard, instead of a song of a crack in the mirror and a bloodstain on the bed, about being turned into the walking dead. 

"What the fuck are you doing?" I screamed into the otherwise-empty car tearfully. 

I went home instead.

So every time I get really down, feel really lost and can't find my inner compass, that's where I go back, to that piece of time (still so fresh inside my mind) and remember that moment of pause that saved my life. 

Was it really Johnette Napolitano that saved my life?  Not directly.  But I don't know that I would've been listening to anything else, or that I could've heard anyone else quite so clearly that late afternoon.  But I did hear it, thankfully.

So now, twenty-six years into this love affair, her music is still so often the soundtrack of my life.  And of Tierney's.  Six Concrete Blonde songs were included in my playlists.  All of my friends know how much I love her.  Half of them love her, too, because I introduced them. 

Tickets for Concrete Blonde at Variety Playhouse are still available.  Wednesday, December 19^th, at 8:00 p.m.  I'll be the first show for me and Growler, as well as for Tierney.  Come say hi.  I'll be the glittery Amazon belting out every last song. 

My car became the church and I, a worshipper of silence there.

My friend Vicki T. posted on Facebook this morning about being frustrated day after day while driving, trapped behind the same slow driver on the way to her destination.  Her teenage son explained that he knew who the other driver was and why she drove so cautiously.  Then he topped it off with a little life lesson: "Just chill out and enjoy the drive, Mom."

I love to drive.  Really.  I don't have to drive fast or recklessly—that doesn't really interest me.  A friend told me recently about a week-long class he once took after buying a Porsche, on how to drive your fast car safely but really, well, fast.  It was a combination Defensive-Driving-and-Street-Racing kind of thing.  (Based on the wistful tone in his voice while telling me about it, I would say he loved it and still misses the Porsche.)

After my parents split up when I was eleven, my dad and I would often go for drives on Sunday afternoons before he took me back to my mom.  It was usually some Alabama back road that seemed to be in the middle of nowhere.  Years later, as I drove those same roads myself, I was often delighted to find that those twisting, rural lanes were really within a few miles of my home and that I had always known exactly where I was.

Learning to drive when I was a teen was an experience, certainly.  I had a rocky start driving with each of my parents for the first time.  Because my first car would be a manual, Mom and Dad wanted me to learn to drive a stick from the beginning.  (Shush it, you pervs.)  It was a 1983 Dodge Colt (really made by Mitsubishi), four-door hatchback with these stripes down the side that made a freaking horse, galloping along the sides of my car, in multi-tonal negative space.  It was the ugliest car detail ever, though there were at least three of them in the Birmingham-metro area, and those stripes would be replaced twice after car accidents.  As if learning to maneuver an automobile—steering and shifting gears and working the clutch—weren't enough, fifth speed was actually a second OD-labeled shifter that sat to the side of the main stick. 

(Note: this is not my actual car.  Mine had the ugly stripes, but I can't find a picture of it.  This, however, is the awesomest picture imaginable of a 1983 metallic beige Dodge Colt without horse stripes.  I don't know these people, but I love them already.)

The good part was that I could fit six to eight people in my car if a couple road in the hatch, because no one was required to use a seatbelt then.  Plus I got 30+ miles to the gallon, and gas was never more than $1 a gallon then.  The bad part was that it was butt ugly.  Period. 

Eventually I mastered (mistressed?) driving a stick, eating and drinking, and smoking a cigarette at the same time, all while flipping over a cassette, singing, and conversing loudly with my boisterous friends. 

I attended the gifted-but-equal magnet high school that was in a centrally-located slummy neighborhood of Jefferson County, Alabama.  (The surrounding 'hood was the scene of no less than three murders during the four years I attended RLC.)  The school was about twenty miles from my home, so I had a good thirty-minute drive each way, five days a week.  I had dozens of different lines of travel leading to and fro, ranging from multiple options on the interstate system to even more routes of circuitous county and city roads, winding and twisting through the suburbs that lay between home and school. 

I saw spectacularly wonderful things during those drives, including a couple of VW buses covered in brown outdoor carpet (or somesuch), with huge, 3D ears and a tail and a snout, like a pig.  As DH describes them, "Just like an actual, gargantuan, petrol-powered pig."  The mouth opened and closed, and the tail spun around, while the van drove down the interstate.  As my friend Jen B. said, "Pig van sighting was a big day."  (In the interest of full disclosure, Jen also once stopped on the same stretch of interstate to attempt to catch a live, loose pig.  She says she only quit when she realized there was no way she was going to fit it into the back of her Datsun 210.)  My mom says she last saw one of the pig vans years ago, burning on the side of the road, though another blog mentions having seen one of them as late as March 6, 2006.

As upperclassmen, we had off-campus privileges and would often leave to get lunch or run an errand or just because we could.  My friends and I spent a great deal of time driving around, smoking cigarettes, and listening to music.  We often played a game where we'd flip a quarter at an intersection: tails meant we turned right, and heads meant we turned left.  I learned even more back roads and side streets and could get around virtually anywhere in the Homewood/Mountain Brook/Southside area of Birmingham. 

Driving and music have always been somewhat interdependent for me.  I can remember being in my mom's car when I was very young—in the front seat, no seatbelt, windows down because the car-with-black-vinyl-interior didn't have air conditioning—listening to Linda Ronstadt on 8-track.  I can't hear the Violent Femmes or Love and Rockets or the Doors without remembering specific, very happy moments in a car with my friends.  Nine Inch Nails and The Church bring back memories of fights with my ex-boyfriend—nasty arguments that turned violent, which started while I was driving.  Even now, I'm very specific about what music I take for road trips, and I will never, ever leave home without The Doors (The Best of the Doors), Steve Miller Band (Greatest Hits), Bob Marley (Legend), and Live (Throwing Copper), on CD in case my iPod dies.

 

In fact, what I miss most about working outside the house is the drive time.  I don't miss traffic, mind you, especially now that we're in Atlanta, which Forbes named the worst city for commuters in 2008.  But I miss the down time, in the car by myself, listening to whatever I choose.  Maybe it's something I love dearly that I'm singing along to over and over (literally, the same song ten times in a row), or maybe it's something new that I haven't had the uninterrupted alone time to absorb.  Or it could even be a podcast, usually of This American Life, that I haven't had a chance to hear.  It doesn't matter; it's the time on my own terms, thinking only the thoughts I want to think, which could very well be nothing more than I love this song! 

So, yeah, even when there's congestion and slow drivers and snarled traffic, tune that out and tune in to yourself.  Block every other hectic thing out and relish the sequence of moments that will never ever come again, and you might be surprised to find it a soothing respite from a crazy day.  Just chill and enjoy the drive.