Just Grown Ups

Last Friday night I was spitballing with a friend via text about getting some local musician to play old hippie songs on acoustic guitar at my upcoming book launch, and he laughingly suggested Bob Weir. 

Funny funny, right? Everyone knows I loathe the Dead with all my heart, but it was exactly as if by writing the words ‘Bob Weir’ in my feed, my friend had conjured the actual man up, much like that lake of ooze in “The Gone Away World” which, when people get dipped in it, their worst nightmares manifest in front of them. Because in true Gone Away fashion, less than 24 hours later I was sitting in an auditorium, awaiting that same artist’s appearance. 

Of course I was not really there to see Bob Weir. What had happened in the interim was that the morning after my text conversation, an ad popped up in my newsfeed saying there were still tickets to a Patti Smith appearance that night, and I went crazy and bought one. What the heck. It was Friday, I had nothing else to do, it was for a good cause, and I like Patti Smith. Of course, I’ve seen her perform many times, but not for ages: I think last time was at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, in 2010.

This particular show was a benefit for Pathways to Paris, a climate change initiative organized by the group 350.org, and it served also as a culminating event in the Global Climate Action Summit, a three day meeting of minds in San Francisco that is working towards the realization of the Paris Agreement and the ultimate decarbonization of the global economy. It’s an issue I care about, and I wasn’t able to go to the protests, so I felt the least I could do was throw money at it. It’s so obviously urgent, after all. On the night of the gig, two super storms, Florence and Makhut, were bearing down on the world. How long will it be til a climate disaster hits my own neck of the woods?

It was in that spirit that I decided to attend the concert, not because I thought it would be musically fantastic, but because sometimes you need to participate in social events like these to assuage your conscience. In my mind, Bob Weir was opening for Patti Smith, but when I arrived at the arena, the Masonic on San Francisco’s Nob Hill, it seemed it was the other way around. As I entered the building, I immediately saw a man in a floor length, tye dyed, crushed velvet hippie cloak, wearing a hat with a feather in it, selling Grateful Dead pins and yacking on his cell phone.  Plus, to add insult to injury, I  overheard him saying the dreaded word ‘chick,’ as in: “It’s by that chick over there.’ (The woman in question was well over 50, btw.) My ears felt soiled.

 In the lobby I stopped to take a picture of the 45 foot high “endomosaic’  mural, designed by Emile Norman. The 45 panels in it depict the history of California, or at least, Norman’s idea of it, circa 1958: as I was positioning my camera, a woman said to me, “I’m trying to decide if I should take a picture, but I’m really only interested in women’s issues.” She and I contemplated the panorama for a while, silently considering its version of the world.

Me (hopefully): “Maybe there’s a woman in the covered wagon?”

Inside the auditorium, things were less patriarchical but a lot more pious. The evening opened with a young girl, Rhiannon Hewitt, reading a poem she’d written about species extinction, and honestly, it was amazing poem, possibly the highlight of the entire proceedings. The next performer, Imany, was really good, as was the band from Greenland, Suluit. There was also a singer from Tibet, Tenzin Choegyal, backed by Tibetan children’s choir singing “Om Mani Padme Om,” as they do – they looked so sweet in their Tibetan robes, but later on I ran into the whole passel of them in the washroom and they were just as obnoxious as any passel of kids you’d meet in such a spot, covered in cheesecake crumbs.

Other moments, such as short speeches by Patti’s daughter Jesse Paris Smith (the organizer), by some teenagers who run a  youth activist group called Zero Hour, by climate scientist and 350.org activist Bill McKibben, who asked us to write postcards supporting the state’s divestment from fossil fuel industry to the next governor of California, and by actor Nikolai Coster-Waldau, who plays Jamie Lannister on “Game of Thrones” (“Winter is coming” yelled the audience, gleefully), were fine but less stellar, and I was particularly off put by the lady from the UNDP  that thanked the event’s sponsor, Salesforce.com. I’d spent a full ten minutes earlier in the evening driving up California street to the venue considering just how much I loathed the Salesforce building which now looms over the horizon wherever you are in San Francisco, like some kind of dark tower of Sauron. At night it flashes a giant green light show and it dominates every single angle of the city to an extent that makes it impossible to ignore. It’s existence couldn’t possibly be climate friendly, in any way, shape or form.

Another lowlight for me was Eric Burden, though I may be being unfair here. He performed two songs, beginning with Ledbelly’s “In the Pines,” and although I like that song, choosing to sing a song about domestic violence in that setting was not the best idea, I thought. His next song, “Mother Earth” by Memphis Slim, was less tin-eared, but it did nothing for me. I know, I know, all those 60s English guys appropriated black music like crazy, Nirvana did it too, it is what it is, but I just didn’t like it. So sue me.

After Eric Burden, the Danish artist Olafur Eliasson did an arty thing with these cute solar lamps that we all had under our seats (you can click on the link to see a picture and get a description of the project). And then, to my great joy and amazement, the next performer was Patti Smith. 

The joy wasn’t at her appearance, it was because it meant that I wasn’t going to have to suffer through Bob Weir, since he was going to close the show. Perhaps the organizers knew that Grateful Dead people are open minded enough to enjoy Patti Smith, but Patti Smith people don’t have the same forbearance for the Grateful Dead’s music. Or perhaps, like me, she just wanted to go to bed early. Anyway, Patti performed four songs, one dedicated to the activist Rachel Corrie entitled “the Peaceable Kingdom,” as well as “Pissing in the River,” from Radio Ethiopia, an abbreviated version of “People Have the Power” and finally, “Because the Night,” which I now know what it sounds like without drums and guitar. She was accompanied by Tony Shanahan on keyboards and Flea on bass. Yes, that Flea. I forgot to say he performed solo as well.

He didn't look like this in real life

In short, Patti Smith’s performance was a token gesture, at best, and while I appreciated her presence, it reminded me of the problem with these kinds of benefits, many of which I remember from my distant youth:  Bangladesh, No Nukes, the Secret Policeman’s Ball, Live Aid, Live Earth. They all cast this same super earnest veil over their issue that doesn’t feel all that helpful. Granted, I didn’t expect Patti Smith to recite “Piss Factory” or sing “Horses,” a song about male rape that stands alone in the rock canon for its blistering violence and its insistently honest gaze, but I suppose I must have been unwittingly hoping for something transcendent, because that’s the kind of thing I’ve always experienced in Patti Smith’s  presence. The first time I saw her, in 1978, it was on the hottest day of the year and I took the Caltrain from my suburb and my cousin Jeff picked me up at 4^th and Townsend on his motorcycle. It was so hot in Winterland that I took my top off and a bouncer threw me over the barrier and walked me out the side of the stage and I remember my terror in thinking I’d never see Jeff again. At that show she sang “Horses” and “Gloria” and “Rock n Roll N word,” and  “You Light Up My Life,” and I don’t think I understood a single thing she said or sang about, but I loved the show and the cadence and the beat. I believe that seeing that show changed who I am very profoundly.

This is from the Winterland show

But another thing that has changed since then, and that is Patti Smith’s role in culture.  She’s no longer just a punk poet from the lower East Side or even in the lowly world of Grammies and charts and world tours and such like; rather, she wins the National Book Award and accepts Nobel Prizes and is made a Commander of the French Order of Arts and Letters and has an honorary doctorate from Pratt. I am surprised and grateful that she has been recognized for what she is, but even though Patti Smith has all the cultural and symbolic power a single human can amass in one life time, it’s nothing compared to the power of a Jeff Bezos or a Mark Benioff or the GOP to ruin people’s lives and wreck the planet.

Does that sound sour? I’m sorry. That’s how the Pathway to Paris show made me feel. I fled it at 10:30, dropping off my protest postcard and my solar lamp in the big box at the door, and got in the elevator alongside 5 other Grateful Dead haters. It carried us to the bottom floor of the Masonic, so low that when you drive out there you’re at the very bottom of Nob Hill, in an area I’ll call Humble Valley, where the shadow of death is sadly in evidence in the wrecked faces of the bums and hobos and drug addicts who lie on the pavement all over it. They are a blatant reminder that the world’s gone horribly wrong.  Surely protesting, however one does it and for whatever cause, isn’t entirely futile. Yet I am afraid it is ridiculously naive of artists – and those who love them, like myself, for instance — to think that art can somehow save the day.

The Naked Truth about Juliet, Naked

Olympia Washington is the kind of town that has three independent bookstores all within spitting distance of each other, but my favorite is the one that sports a chalk board in front that says, “Never Judge a Book By Its Movie.” There’s a lot of truth in that slogan, of course, but it’s still almost impossible to resist going to see the film versions of the books you love. Love is love, after all. One is let down by it over and over again, but still I ran, I didn’t walk, to the filmed version of Juliet, Naked, my favorite book by Nick Hornby.

The film is nice. I liked it. But the best thing about it was that it forced me to reread the book, which is so much better. There’s a part in it, near the start, when the protagonist, Annie, disparages the album called Juliet, Naked (a collection of demos of a previous Crowe album called Juliet) by thinking, if she were still a teacher, she’d have played the two albums back to back to her class, “so that they could understand that art was pretending.” And that’s a little how I felt about the movie: that is, if I could, I’d make everyone read and watch both. The film does a great job of indicating the differences between a visual story and a written-down one. It provides certain notes on the finished product; adds some details, and updates the plot to include social media. But it can’t nearly capture all the nuances of what I truly love about the book. Or about the act of reading, for that matter.

Juliet Naked isn’t really an obvious prospect for a movie, anyway, since it’s about music, and films (like books)  about music are almost always less than music itself. (“Doing drugs is much more exciting than reading about doing drugs,” as my old editor used to say. “And the same is true of music.”) The plot revolves around a (fictional) artist called Tucker Crowe, who is a gloss on some kind of under appreciated reclusive genius like Alex Chilton or Ryan Adams, or Paul Westerberg, only he’s way less prolific than those men.

The back story tells us that in the halcyon days of the 80s, Crowe released a record called Juliet which a handful of fans revere in part because it was a good album, but possibly also because of its obscurity, and because Crowe, mysteriously, retired from performing and recording directly after it. The protagonist of the whole novel is Annie, who is the girlfriend of a man who is the de facto head of the Tucker Crowe online fan club. The book relates what happens when she starts an online relationship with Crowe, a circumstance that eventually allows her to pay the hapless Duncan back for the micro slights she’s endured at his hands.

In a sense, the whole plot is like an extended take on the scene in Annie Hall when an outraged Woody Allen brings Marshall McLuhan out from behind a billboard to explain “Understanding Media” to some loudmouth who has been butchering its intent in front of him in line: “What he really meant was…and here he is to prove it!!!”

That’s the broad outline, but as with all great books, there’s a lot more to it than just a fun and romantic revenge fantasy. I think the story could appeal to a wide group of readers, not just music fans, but to me that’s its key theme. Early in the book, Annie writes a disparaging review of  Juliet, Naked for Duncan’s fan site, in order to rebut Duncan’s assertion that it is better than the original album, and what pleases me so much is the way Hornby describes exactly what and why I personally began reviewing records. The record, he writes, “had somehow given her ideas about art and work, her relationship, Tucker’s relationship, the mysterious appeal of the obscure, men and music, the value of the chorus in song, the point of harmony and the necessity of ambition, and every time she finished a paragraph, the next one appeared in front of her unbidden, and annoyingly unconnected to the last.”

See, that’s how I write. That’s what I write. You can recognize that, can’t you? Then, even more astonishingly, Hornby goes on to describe not just how I write, but why I write as well. It happens when Annie reads Duncan’s review of the same album, and she gets so angry that her anger mystifies her. She was angered, writes Hornby, “by his smugness, his obvious determination to crow to the fellow fans he was supposed to feel some kind of kinship with…his pettiness, too, his inability to share something that was clearly of value in that shrinking and increasingly beleaguered community….

“Listening to music was something she did too, frequently, and with great enjoyment, and Duncan had somehow managed to spoil it, partly by making her feel she was no good at it.”

I, too, went through life feeling like people thought I was no good at listening to music. Certainly they never ceased telling me that. And after a while, my response was Annie’s: sheer, unadulterated, rage. It bled out of me, onto the page – and that, in turn, infuriated other people. But that’s a different story altogether.

A few other comments on the film, for those who are considering going: obviously, it deviates from the book all over the place, adds some characters, condenses some scenes, even changes a few major details for more clarity, and the changes are stand-ins for things the book can elucidate much more clearly and at length. Some of these changes are totally understandable, if a bit Hollywood – the town she lives in is a cute as the set for Doc Martin, rather than the dreary (and hilariously named) town the book is set in — others, not so much: for example, a passage in the book that sees Annie listening to the new record Juliet, Naked in the kitchen while cooking, is elaborately staged in the film so that she is accidentally caught listening to it…in her bra and panties. You could argue this was to mimic the title, but obviously it is so we can see Rose Byrne in her bra and panties. Thanks, Hollywood.

For the most part, however, the changes are fine. London looks great, as does the seaside town she lives in. I thought Rose Byrne and Ethan Hawke were totally ace choices for the leads, they were both extremely lovable, and that’s important to loving this book. Also, there’s a scene that uses the song “Waterloo Sunset” that’s worth the price of admission. I am never not happy to hear that song, it is fucking un-ruinable anyway, and this particular use of it is wondrous. 

Juliet Naked isn’t exclusively for music geeks, though it may well help if you know (or are) someone like that. Rather, it's about the limits of nostalgia, and of art itself, to make life bearable. But it’s also about childless women who are unhappy with that state, and/or who have settled for men who can’t seem to grow up and join the real world, as well as people like Crowe, who are in mourning for their glorious youth. Maybe who it's really for is people who envy people like Crowe, because this book rips the wool off that myth and shows you the sad and complex parts of glamour - albeit in a kind and gentle way. Hornby's greatest skill as a writer is showing the humanity in deeply flawed people. Duncan, Tucker, and even Annie are pretty dysfunctional. But you never have to hate them for it, and because of that, you don't have to hate yourself for having so many of the same failings.

Perhaps the coolest thing about “Juliet Naked” – about Nick Hornby’s work in general — is that, despite the fact that the author clearly loves music as much if not more than any of us – he also has stepped back from it. He knows that all judgments about music are stupid because it’s all in the ear of the beholder. The film does this even better than the book, actually, possibly because, rather than alluding to Tucker’s music, we get to hear it, and it is pleasant and well made, but not specially special; in order to hear it as such you’d have to be primed, as Duncan and his pals are primed, to cherish the obscure for the sake of it. (Some of the songs on the soundtrack are written by Ryan Adams, Robyn Hitchcock, and Conor Oberst, and is said by the music director Nathan Larson to be modeled on the sound of the record Big Star Third/Sister Lovers.) I especially enjoyed a scene where Duncan inveigles a house guest into his basement lair to listen to the hallowed “Juliet” record, and we watch as the guest spaces out and stops listening, even as he gets more and more wrapped up in it. How many times did I do this to my own friends before I learned to never, ever, ever play music for people?

Spotify has probably changed this situation, in that people are less likely to do what Duncan does and force someone to sit down and listen in real time to music played on a real system in a real room that looks like a dungeon. Still, sharing your heart’s dearest music is never a good idea. Music is a private pleasure; it is treasured best in private. 

Telling people to read books or go to movies is much less fraught, however,and here I am telling you: Run, don't walk.

Love Buzz

On the evening of the day I landed at SeaTac airport, an airline groundskeeper stole a plane and flew it around the Olympic Peninsula, so the powers that be had to close all airspace around Seattle: every airport, every runway, every traveler, grounded, for fear of accidents. The incident ended tragically, but objectively speaking, I liked the idea of the Seattle area being closed off to the rest of the world for a few hours like that. With Pearl Jam playing at SafeCo Field, and Sub Pop’s 30^th birthday celebrations at the Mural and on Alki Beach, it was a good time for this beautiful city to just close ranks. 

I barely slipped in under the wire before the gates of the emerald city clanged shut on fandom, and that befits my role in this story as well. I’ve always been the observer, outside looking in, never one of the in-crowd but oh, so close to the action, and always, always, so admiring. From the very first moment I came here, sometime in the 1980s, I felt like I had found my people. I knew I would never be a real Seattle-an, but I wanted to be near them and absorb their very particular, very dark, very dry angst. I drew strength and courage from that, as have so many others in my wake; they allowed us all to feel that we were, in Pierre Nora’s terms, “participating emotionally in history.” I wanted to bear witness, and that is what I did.

  

Sub Pop Records plays a huge role in my career, so coming to their 30^th Anniversary party was a bit of a no brainer for me. The celebration took place on August 11 at Alki Beach in West Seattle, to which I bicycled from my friend Jay’s house up the hill. Half way there it started to rain lightly, so I bought a baseball cap at the merch booth and put it on backwards, and it was exactly like putting on one of those mythical talismans you read about it in fairy stories or Harry Potter, like a ring that makes you invisible or a cape that makes you brave. From the moment I had it on, everything was magical. The sun came out, and the bands went on, and I walked down the cement walk by the stages, and ran smack into my old friend Kim Warnick, and we hugged like there was no tomorrow. Both of us have experienced times when it felt like there wasn’t. But there was. And this was it.

And so Kim and I sat down on the verge of the beach, because Kim said she hates sand, and tried to catch up, but it was hard to do when there was so much to catch up on – and when Kim is the most popular person in Seattle. Walking around with her is like walking around with a Seattle Seahawk, everyone stops her and high fives her. Still, we tried to catch a few other bands – Metz, Clipping (Hamilton star Daveed Diggs band), Bully, and so on — before wandering over to the 57^th street stage to check out the food and art. The band on stage was School of Rock, playing Sub Pops greatest hits, and as we walked toward them, they burst into “In the Summer” – one of the poppiest songs by Kim’s band the Fastbacks. We both screamed, I think, and rushed the stage like idiots…it was such an incredible thing, so synchronicitous. I think Kim cried a little bit, watching those fifteen year olds sing her song.

It was that kind of a day though, a day of the super feels; a day when our mutual respect came due, and we all of us paid it back in one big lump sum. Later on I saw on FB that Charles Peterson ran into a man who had one of his iconic photos tattooed on his forearm, and I imagine the feeling was the same. Children singing your songs, teenagers blasting your images onto their very flesh…what a time it was to be alive, and what thing to have created! And yet, such are the vagaries of fame in America, that I am not sure those outside the magic circle – or those who didn’t make it to Alki Beach — quite understand what a great thing it was that the people of Sub Pop did, not just for grunge and for the city of Seattle, but for generations of youth, who still, after all these years, can’t hack the mainstream and its cruelty and violence, who long to escape from the banality of evil.  Sub Pop is the only company I can think of thatfor thirty straight years has both redeemed and romanticized the whole idea behind business culture. Nothing makes me happier than seeing the SubPop store in Seatac – well, unless I get to see that Alaska Airlines plane with SubPop stamped on it in person. I love the manifesto that they wrote, Evergreen style, that you can see on the wall in Terminal D there:

It reads, in part, "it is our intention to market and sell the recorded music and related merchandise of artists whose music some shifting definition of "we" really and truly love. We mean to represent those artists as faithfully and diligently as possible and hold out hope that this is enough for us to remain solvent in the face of the well documented collapse of the music industry at large. We also enjoy laughter, good times and the company of friends."

SPF 30 exemplified these values. Most free festival concerts generally have a lot of drawbacks, like drunken crowds and horrible toilets and too much sun and horrid noise. Sub Pop, if you can believe it, circumvented all of that entirely. According to my local friends, they made a concerted effort to include the community of West Seatle in their aim, using local vendors, replacing worn out amenities, and ensuring that the area was safe and pleasant all night long. The four stages (named Loser, Flippity Flop, Harsh Realm and Punky) were stretched out along a lengthy area, so that everyone was able to fit comfortably in to the stagings, and if they didn’t feel like fitting, they could go walk on the shore or even sit in the water and watch from a boat craft, or from a bar on the main drag. It felt comfortable rather than crowded, despite its estimated 50,000 person capacity. From every angle you were being bombared with beauty, either the Seattle skyline, the Olympic Peninsula, or the sound itself, green and grey and black all over, lapping lightly on your footsteps, swallowing up your pain.

Meanwhile, as the day continued, the weather remained Washingtonian, i.e. cool and mild, and the sound and the toilets were perfect, simply because so much care had been given over to making this experience exactly what a festival should be like. Weirdly, since Sub Pop is the opposite of hippie dip, it was a literal love festival, with people simply shouting their love and appreciation at each other, hugging and kissing and moshing in the pit. It was the festival to end all festivals, a consummation devoutly to be wished.

 

It’s hard to write about everything that happened or all the bands that played at this all day festival, because there was so much going on, so I will confine myself to writing about the Fastbacks. Back in the day, I didn’t just love the Fastbacks, I lived their lives for them — at least on paper. There is just a certain type of band that I can get into the skin of and say what I think they want and need to be said, and for that, I have been duly rewarded with friendship. I mean, it all happened organically - years ago I saw them a ton of times in my home town and then I took it to the road: once we drove to San Diego in their van and played in someone’s backyard in Chula Vista and after the show was over there was a fight and someone shot off a gun. Another time I went to Park City Utah where they played a party after the screening of the documentary “Hype”: Michael Stipe was in the audience, as was Sandra Bullock. Later on in life, they took me places I’d never been to, like Istanbul and Budapest and Vienna, where they opened for Pearl Jam in stadiums large and small, and in exchange, I wrote about them obsessively. I remember one time I was at some conference – SXSW or NMS or CMJ or something, and someone said, they hated the fact that people like me “had so much power” over which bands became popular and I said; “Dude, if I had any power whatsoever, the Fastbacks would be as big as the Beatles.”

The Fastbacks aren’t as big as that, but those who love them lovely dearly and I count myself as their number one fan. They haven’t played live in a many years due to various unfortunate events, and I was thinking as they took the stage, only to crush the crowd with Kurt’s melodious speed runs, Mike’s massive backbeat, and Kim and Lulus casual deftness with those powerful guitars, how they were probably the first or only punk rock band I saw with girls playing instruments, and how their songs always seemed so untainted by ideology or idiocy. I could watch Lulu and Kim in a way that I could not watch anyone else, as if they are me and I am them, and I still can, even as we all push sixty. Those two women have lead the way for me to know how to be a person in this world, and for that I am forever grateful. 

When Mudhoney took the stage, it was as if they were flaying the collective eardrum of the Puget Sound. That sound — the murky guitars all covered in buzz, the stupifyingly loud drumpoundary, and then Mark Arm’s exquisitely undercutting it all with his flat, deadpan howl  — it is the epitome of grunge, is it not?  Honestly, someone needs to deconstruct why that a skinny bespectacled man shrieking “touch me I’m sick’ can inject such weight into an otherwise mute art form, but it’s not going to be me: I watched Mudhoney briefly from the sandy shore and then I unlocked an electric limebike and start riding off into the sunset with their music reverberating into the night. I wanted to leave the scene in the same way that I arrived, mid-song, mid-shout, mid-story, mid-Subpop, mid-Seattle. I want that feeling to never end.