The Stories We Could Tell

On the evening of my birthday, I went to see Tom Petty. It was a 45 minute drive up Highway 880 and through the Oakland Hills, the sky turning deep purple throughout, but the good news was, the car seemed to drive itself. It was like being in a Waymo or one of those new self driving ones. Instead of concentrating on the road, I was able to just space out and think about my life as my vehicle homed toward UC Berkeley.

Much has changed since I attended that school in the mid-ate 1980s but not the names of the freeway exits or the route from my hometown. Up the east bay I sped, 880-237-580-13, then down Claremont Avenue to Belrose and Waring and finally, Piedmont Avenue. As I passed the Clark Kerr campus I thought, 'if I see a parking spot after crossing Dwight, I’ll take it, if not, I’ll pay for parking.' But there was a spot, right on the corner of Dwight, across the street from where Bill Wyman’s old apartment, so I took it and started walking to the Greek. I was desperately in search of a scalper.

See, I didn’t have a ticket. I could have bought one, on Stubhub, for $70, but I don’t really like using that service and anyway, I wasn’t sure I wanted to go until about two minutes before I left for the concert. The gig had been rescheduled, which usually means lots of extra tickets, but I was getting pretty close to the venue without being solicited so it didn’t seem like that was going to be the case. Meanwhile, I walked past all the fraternities, which seemed to be in mid-party mode, and as I walked, and the shouts of the undergrads and the smell of beer and the familiarity of the sights around me mounted, I began to feel a little weird.

rush night. Alas.

So many memories, you see. Berkeley is the fount of it all, the place I learned to be a writer and a critic, the place I saw the most shows of all, the place where I was young. And, did I mention it was my birthday, and I was turning old? So…maybe not the wisest place to be.

On the other hand, I really love the Greek Theater, it is a magical venue. But as I closed in on it, what I noted wasn’t all good. For example, that new stadium. It wasn’t there when I was here, and it is…big. There’s a parking lot next to it and it said on it, “Show parking, $30.” THIRTY DOLLARS? That’s like…Levi Stadium bullshit. On the corner by the stadium, there’s this life sized statue of a bear that looks like it’s going to eat you. I couldn’t decide if I loved or hated that piece of art. On the one hand, it made me laugh. On the other, it was a bit like a commemoration of something extinct, like calling The Pruneyard in Campbell after the orchard it decimated, when the whole thing is one big cement jungle. No bears here now, that’s for sure.

scary golden bear

The bear stands at the corner of Gayley Avenue where you turn up to Strawberry Canyon.  We used to have morning practice there, and many a bad thing happened to me in that pool. It’s a little bit like my Abu Ghraib. So there’s that.

Also, across from the stadium, there was a building you could see into, and in the room that was lit up, there was a class in session. It reminded me of work. The students were staring at a giant smart board with a page from Canvas on it, just like my students will be doing tomorrow. When I attended UC Berkeley we didn’t have smart boards or Canvas, we just listened to lectures and took notes I guess. When I attended UC Berkeley I wouldn’t have dreamed of becoming a professor – nor am I one, really, not like the ones here, I am just a lame imitation of one, just like I am a lame imitation of a rock critic at this point. A simulacrum.

Presently I got to the Greek, and there were truly no scalpers around, and not only that, but a great shout went up and I could tell Tom Petty was going on stage. This surprised me, because I thought the show began at 8 and he’d go on at 9, but I guess I got it wrong and the show started at 7. It was 8:15 when he began, and I was outside the gates, considering my options. Stubhub had increased to $110, and the one ticket guy I saw told me he’d sell me a ducat for a hundred even.

“Nah, I think I’ll go home,” I said to my Man.

He seemed genuinely upset for me. “But you came all the way here!” Then he said, “C’mon, I’ll give it to you for less – what do you want to pay?”

But I was done. Instead, I sat on the curb for a bit and played on my phone, listening to Tom Petty from outside. He played “(I Dig) Rockin’ Around With You,” “Mary Jane’s Last Dance,” and "You Don't Know How It Feels" while I sat there, and the scalper, still looking wistfully at me, let his ticket go for $60. “There’s still Wednesday,” he said to me, and I just laughed. I have a lot of other uses for $60 right now. Anyway, Tom Petty’s music actually sounded good out there, really good: the Rickenbacker chiming to the top of its bent. It was thrilling, that sound – a real rock critic would call it Byrdsian, but to me it sounds like REM and Robyn Hitchcock and all the other bands I heard just after I abandoned Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen and the few other mainstream acts whom I worshiped in my youth. It’s churchy, at least to me. Indeed, just the other day I was IN a church – Szent Itzvan Basilica in Budapest – listening to a bunch of classical music played on their massive organ, and it wasn’t nearly as churchy as this.

saint stephens basilica, circa last week

When I was a youngster and attended UC Berkeley, you could go watch the shows from what’s now the lawn area for free. Now they sell those seats for upwards of $50. That seems to me to be a metaphor for the last thirty years. But the memory reminded me that there is something acoustically special about that particular block of Piedmont; and up I got and walked around. Across the street the sound turned to mud, but I criss crossed a little and sure enough, there was a spot on the steps of the stadium parking lot, 500 yards away, where the sound quality of the show was absolutely pristine. You could hear as well as if you were in the arena, no joke.

So I sat down and listened. He played a song called “Forgotten Man,” from his latest album (whatever that was, I haven’t been paying attention – I’m just quoting him); “I Won’t Back Down,” “Into the Great Wide Open,” and “Free Falling.” In short the hits kept coming, and they were so mainstream that you could have floated a boat down them, but at the same time, they kind of gave ‘mainstream’ a good name. I think it was that mainstream-y ness that made it so I could listen quietly to them, not even being in the arena, and enjoy them: there was nothing to see there, nothing Tom and his band and his many backup singers (whom I just had to picture in my head) could do to make the experience better; it was sonically just fine how it was.

“Don’t Come Around Here Any More.” “It’s Good To Be King.” “Crawling Back to You.” “Learning To Fly.” Some other songs I don’t quite recognize. And then I left, just before “Refugee” and “American Girl,” two of my favorites, but I didn’t need to hear them; I was satiated. Overall, though, you have to admit. His songs are just good, you know? The chords are so major. As I listened, I remembered a thing about him: I can play all these songs on guitar. There’s a song in particular that he used to sing that I learned when I was young—it’s actually by the Everley Brothers, but I associate it with Tom Petty.

And oh, the stories we could tell

and if we all blow up and go to hell

I can still see us sitting on the bed in some motel

singing all the stories we could tell..

All of sudden I was overcome with weltschmertz, I think it’s called, or some purely American variation thereof. Weltschmertz is a sadness for the distance between an ideal world and the shitty reality of it, and what I felt was like that only more tinged with nostalgia. That bed is just so very real to me. I sat on it so many times (allegorically)… At Bill’s house, for instance, down the street, and elsewhere in the vicinity. So I sat on the steps of the stadium parking lot, and I thought about that for a long long time, as the music of Tom Petty chimed out all around me; and then I got up and walked back up Gayley to my car. The frat parties were still raging, as they do, and to all intents and purposes, my birthday was over.  

Bill and I. road critics. Lollapalooza 92

Alone with Lucifer

The day I left the US I lost my ipod. Life in Europe involves endless modes of public transport, so being without a musical device can be challenging. I keep telling myself, this is how we all went through life when I was young, and when I was young was when I was happiest. But I am still fraught by the wailing babies and cockney arguments that I have been subjected to in the last few days. Plus – and here’s the rub – no Afghan Whigs' “In Spades” to obsess on, a loss which felt even more abject when I found myself on my way to see them in a secret city on the continent.

secret city

Yes, a secret city! The words conjure up something shimmering and hidden in a random Alp, a dystopian hideaway for when LUCIFER, the heatwave I had to fly directly into, intensifies -- but what I mean by ‘secret’ is, coming to this particular city was my little secret – it was a present to myself, a rogue moment of old, when I snuck away from my life a few hours too early, and cut time out of another obligation, so that I could have 24 hours to myself.

I used to do this kind of thing a lot but that was before I had a kid. When I was a rock critic. Nowadays, doing so requires much, much, much more planning….as well as a lot more guilt. What it doesn’t take that much of is money. Months ago, I bought myself a sort of hedge-ticket to the secret  city, in the hopes I could make this work, and it was well under a hundred dollars.

For a long time, though, it looked like it wouldn't happen. Then at the last minute, it did. The only thing was, the whole project was so time sensitive that the best I could manage was to book a flight arriving at 3 p.m. For an 8 o clock show, which I didn’t think was very safe, the way airlines are these days. Plus, customs, taxis, yadda yadda. But check it out: my luck was in from the moment I left London. My flight was half an hour early, customs took one second, my uber (Mustafa) came in 3 minutes…I was at my HOTEL a little after 3 p.m. WHEN DOES THAT EVEN HAPPEN? You know when it happens? In the past, is when. Before the size of the population and the madness at airports and on freeways and the whole TSA thing messed everything up. In fact, the whole experience on this trip was like the dark ages revisited – and I mean that in the best possible way.

See, it turns out, all you have to do, to make that happen, is know exactly what your perfect day is, and somehow or other I knew. I knew, back in May when I had to miss their gig in London, that it had to involve seeing the Afghan Whigs, and not in my own city. I knew it had to be at a venue that was small, not at a festival or someplace I’d been before, and I knew I had to go alone. When I looked at where I was going to be this summer, there was a single place that fit that bill, and it was Vienna, the first night of the second leg of the band’s European tour.

Vienna on a Friday afternoon in August feels like a Sunday in some religious town in 1952. There was no one on the street, or in the café’s, just me sipping some water and eating a pizza the size of a tea tray in some empty place on Wahringerstrasse and contemplating my luck. Because it is lucky, for sure, to be able to enact your perfect day. And this was my perfect day, no question about it. My perfect 12 hours.

The venue, WUK (Werkstatten und Kulturhaus), was perfect: some kind of an art commune funded by the government, housed in an old brick vine covered building, built approximately around the time America was founded. I am not sure what this place was, but it certainly housed a kindergarten, an art gallery, and a post office, among other things: when I went there early in the evening to check it out, there were four muslim women in burkas talking and laughing in the courtyard, plus an old guy grilling sausages and corn on the cob in a corner. Once, a long time ago in a galaxy far far away, I was at a place like this in Holland, and the sound man was a woman. At that time, I thought, “In my next life I want to be her.” But now in another life, I want to be a woman who lives in this place and brings up her child in the communal kindergarten – a woman like the one who performed in the band that played the courtyard a few hours later, who let her two year old play a pretend guitar on stage with the band the entire time.

I think they were called The Squatting Teachers. At least, that was a sticker on the drum. They were highly influenced by the Velvet Underground, but hell, who isn’t?

Anyway, after my reconnaissance mission I went back to the hotel and slept for a while, and when I came back the place was hopping. I had my long awaited aperol spritzer and then I went into the venue.  I figured that, having come so far, I should probably make the effort to stand at the front, so I staked it out during the opening act, Ed Harcourt. I liked Ed Harcourt’s music, it had a Whigs edge to it, emotionally, plus an impossible to miss musicianly-ness that made it all the more resonant.

And then, during the interval, I sat on the floor and went into a zen state as I awaited the Afghan Whigs.  In my zen state, I thought about all the times I have listened to In Spades, and how much it will always remind me of my brief time at Evergreen State and my life in the rain forest, and driving up to Tacoma and to Vancouver and everything else that happened there, which was all so weird and spooky. And I thought about other times I’ve seen the Afghan Whigs, particularly one time, in about 1993, or it easily could have been 1988 -- when they played a really awful bar in Carmichael, California, and I went with my friend Isabelle, and there was no one in the club hardly and one member of the band – the drummer? -- seemed to have lost a bet or something and arrived on stage stark naked.

That time, I remember, they played hardly any of their own songs – maybe none, it was all covers – which enchanted us: we were seeing them the next night in SF, so we got to see their ‘real’ set too. Maybe it was that time that cemented my notion that you should go see your favorite bands multiple times, in every possible venue, because they won’t always be good and you want to see the whole range of possibilities. Anyway, it was somehow the time that led me to this moment, some twenty five years on, to be sitting on the floor of this nightclub, about to experience what would turn out to be my favorite show that I’ve ever been too – which, given my history, is saying quite a bit. But there I was, center front, chest pressed against the stage, and it was exactly as if I had written the set list myself and the band was playing solely to me and just a few of my friends, in a room that I had maybe dreamed about.

It was a little bit unreal. But you can only imagine all the life experiences that occurred before to make that particular thing happen.

I know. I know. 25 years is a lifetime. And yes, I know I am an old lady. In fact, it is weird to think about that – earlier in the evening, at Hotel Olde Worlde, I was putting on mascara or something and I suddenly was like, “why am I doing this, I am an invisible old woman now,” and I stopped. It’s definitely a different state, a different state of mind. Because, you have to…to enjoy live music, you have to let go of that self-consciousness, which is one reason it’s good to be in a foreign country where you can’t even speak the language, and you know you’ll never see these people again. Or maybe that’s just me. It’s not right, but I know that I used to care what I came off like in public, and what I looked like in public. And there is still a very damaged part of me that still thinks older women – and men, for that matter, but less so - shouldn’t be rocking out at concerts, that it is not dignified or something.

And to be honest, that’s why I snuck to Austria to see this band, rather than just seeing them at home. I have tickets for the show at home, but I doubt when I see the Afghan Whigs in San Francisco at the Fillmore in October, I will stand against the stage and really rock out. I mean, I know I won’t. And that’s sad. But it’s true. I’ve been to the Fillmore so many times, and I will probably end up standing behind one of those poles, and seeing a lot of people I know, and it’ll be a good show, because the Fillmore brings out the best in people, but it holds five or maybe ten times more people than this venue, and anyway, to reiterate, I was just so glad to be  there at WUK instead. So glad. It made me happy to be me, and there’s not so many times I feel that way anymore.While I was waiting, I actually had the thought that I didn’t want the show to begin, because all too soon it would be over.

But time doesn’t stand still so presently, the Afghan Whigs came on, and at that I will draw a veil, because words fail. I didn’t take any pictures, because for one thing, I can’t stand to experience a show through a camera, and for another, I was so close to the band – and underneath them, sort of -- that the shots would have literally got their nostril hair, and that seems unkind and pointless.

 

 Suffice it to say that they played a ton of songs all of which I love, and sometimes they were played slightly different from the record – “Oriole,” my favorite song, was played way faster, and “Going to Town” was way slow, and some of the songs went off key, and some of them were truly sublime, and sometimes there was cello and violin in them, and sometimes, in contrast, as on “Arabian Heights,” four whole band members lined up across the stage with four passionately electric guitars raging out at us in a manner that made me supremely happy – but it doesn’t really seem pertinent to describe the show since it is a hole that I burrowed into that is my own personal nest and it has no room for anyone else in it. I can show you the set list, which I grabbed from Rick T. Nelson’s set up. And I can show you some pictures of the venue. But I can’t make you hear the Whigs the way that I hear them, that would be crazy. Indeed, what surprises me, is when I look around the front of the stage and I see all these other people who are clearly feeling exactly as I feel…exactly. Who are they and why do we have this thing in common? We are all strangers in a strange land, who are able for an hour or so to bind ourselves into this beautiful union. That’s what music does, I guess. It’s why music is magic. Because it does my wishing for me. Because for the time it is on, I have the ear of the Other.

And then, they played “Faded,” and it was over. Our oneness dissipated, and I was briefly, void. I was also sweaty, so sweaty I had to go in the rest room and splash water on myself. In fact, the heat was a real feature of this concert; it was like a visible thing, another member of the band or something. There was a point during the concert when I wanted so desperately for the man next to me to spill his beer on my head, or for Greg Dulli to take a water bottle and squirt it at us – though I suppose with all the cameras out that’s a no-no now. It was that kind of hot where you know you won’t be peeing for a long while, because your body is absorbing every drop of moisture it can get. It was that kind of hot that made Frank Herbert to write Dune. It was that kind of hot that named this heatwave Lucifer, and I, for one loved it. I’ve rocked in this weather before.

So all too soon it was over, and I went into the bathroom to splash myself, and walk myself back to ye olde hotel to sweat out the night and think about my past. The only other time I was in Vienna it was to see the Pixies, and they also played one of the best shows I have ever seen by any band, ever. It was a standout show in a lifetime of standout shows. But this show, the Whigs show, was better. That night that I saw them, the Pixies were the best band on the planet playing at the height of their power; it was like electricity was pouring out of them, they were so ferocious. I think that the Afghan Whigs are in a phase right now that is similarly super-charged, although I also think this gig wasn’t faultless, like the Pixies one. The thing is, it wasn’t faultlessness I sought here, it was personal satisfaction, a kind of reassurance. And I got that. In spades.

In the morning, it was time to go to Budapest, still without an ipod, and thus at the mercy of a series of taxi drivers who, this being Central Europe, insist on playing radio stations that perennially play the Eagles.  The train – on which I wrote this blog – was packed. But before that adventure begins, I want to leave myself back there for a minute, back in Wien, walking down Wahringerstrasse at midnight, humming a fragment of the song “It Kills”: “Over and over, I get to know myself.” Truer words, you see. Truer words have never been spoken.

Queen of the World (PJ Harvey, August 11, 2017)

On the day I left Budapest, I saw an English language newspaper for the first time in 8 days. One glance at the headlines and I was like, Nope. What’s that quote from the Young Fresh Fellows? “I wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then,” and by then, I meant, yesterday. Because ‘yesterday’ – metaphorically speaking -- I was at Sziget Festival awaiting PJ Harvey in a bean bag chair, surrounded by Europop, techno beats, foreign voices and the pungent smell of sausages, and I thought I’d never get up again.

Sziget Main Stage during Rudimental

For one thing, I was in a bean bag chair. For another, I’m old, and I’d climbed Buda Castle Hill that day in 100 degree heat. (Remember Lucifer? If not, see last post.) I was exhausted.

So. Lying in a bean bag chair, staring at the Hungarian sky, thinking. It felt to me like the air was alit with information, buzzing across our heads like the fairy lights and the circus poles and the fireworks and the music. The whole place was rocking. I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation on rock festivals, but I’ll be honest: this was my first time attending one in seventeen years. Sziget is one of Europe’s premiere summer rock festivals, the Coachella of the Ottoman Empire. It takes place on an island in the Danube and calls itself “the Island of Freedom,” but the only thing that’s really free there is data charges – if you have a European carrier.

Still. You do get to take a boat there. Plus, I was there to see PJ Harvey, to which one can only say: fuck yeah!

In 2001, PJ Harvey won the Mercury Prize for her album “Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea,” and she did so again ten years later in 2011 for “Let England Shake,” putting her in the Guinness Book of World Records. Yet when someone in Budapest asked me what kind of music she played, I was at a loss. I could name some song titles, but none he’d know, and as for the sound…Punk? Blues? Folk? Jazz? Indie? None of those words work. You could call her a blues artist at a considerable stretch, because she does cover some real blues songs – her version of “Wang Dang Doodle” is, in my opinion, as good as the original, or at least it’s transposition of gender and power makes it  deeper and more personally meaningful to me than the original, and that’s saying something. But a fan of Etta James (or Bonnie Raitt) would be startled to hear this jagged and edgy, harsh music put in that category.

John Peel once wrote that Polly Jean Harvey “seemed crushed by the weight of her own songs and arrangements,” but that’s not exactly right: what he must have meant was that we are. Her art is demolition. She eviscerates songs and reconstitutes them so that their notes and emotions are rubble, carefully sifted and then built back up into brand new edifices. And then, she has this band: nine, count them, nine men in black, and it is breathtaking to see her conduct them; to see them conducted by her. They are her commandos, and she is a witch controlling a coven of scary old white male warlocks, and what a sight that is to see. More than any other female artist I have ever seen, she demands complete attention.

I was close up but my camera sux.

She demanded it of me at Sziget, and she got it. Having just come off a show high in a tiny nightclub where a wall of guitars pinned me to the ground all night, I may be forgiven for thinking that an outdoor daylight festival full of drunken Magyar revelers was possibly not the ideal venue for her, but I was wrong. There in the crowd, I pushed forward to the very edge of the crush, to the place of danger where it becomes uncomfortable, and there I stopped. The terrain we were on was quite unpleasant: bottles and cans and other detritus stomped into a melange on top of a “floor” made of screwed down plastic, but the sky was an awesome pale violet color when she ascended the stage, and it was lit up with Festival fairy lights, and her sound, when it began, well, the only way to say it is, it tolled.

Imagine seeing an artist so good that you can ignore them for 16 years and when you check back in they are far, far better than you remembered. That was what this was. The best shows are the ones where you suddenly think, mid-show, that there is no better place to be on earth than where you are at that moment, when you feel like the artist is literally sucking the air out of the sky in order to form the music out of it, when it seems like what you are hearing must be being heard all over the continent. This was it. I haven’t followed her catalog since 2001, but I knew each (unknown) song intimately - it was as if I'd been listening to  ”Dear Darkness.” “The Ministry of Social Affairs.” “All and Everyone.” “The Words That Maketh Murder.” “The Wheel.” “The Community of Hope,” and other numbers from her last three albums for years. Hearing them for the first time in this context was like a sonic deflowering. It was extremely intense.

Only at the end of the set did she play some cuts from “my” era: “Fifty Foot Queenie,” “To Bring You My Love” and “Down By The Water,” and they were fantastic, a chilling distillation of anger, remorse, and the brutality of lust – but they were not even my favorite songs of the night.  “Fifty Foot Queenie” – hey, I’m king of the world, you ought to hear my song/ ah, come on measure me, I’m fifty inches long – surely now evokes the pathetic tweets of our dear leader, but the later material, from the last two records, though, is if anything even better suited to these crazy times. To reflect on the deaths of soldiers 1500 years ago, to describe WW I, to honestly assess the awful abyss of love and death and psychosis, to speak the unspeakable about the ravages of living life, feels so fucking apropos right now that it’s positively cathartic.

Here's to witches and their craft

And Polly never spoke throughout her entire set. She merely sang, stared, and welded a saxophone, a pixilated Lisa Simpson with a swans down fascinater on her head. Near the final number, “River Anacostia,” she broke the spell by introducing her bands members – Mick Harvey, John Parish,etc. – and, one by one, they all came forward to the front of the stage. Some beat drums, but the drums faded out, until they were all singing a capella, a ten person line of intensity, creating one long black stare that pierced the Hungarian night.

Then: silence. Blessed, blessed silence, 'til the clock started ticking a gain and we were blasted back into the here and now.