Are We Still Here Yet?

One night recently I was sitting in the balcony at the Fillmore between sets by They Might Be Giants at when the song “The Waiting Room” came on. And I jumped. It felt as if I’d been kicked internally by a burgeoning baby, only it was a kick inside my brain instead of in my belly. I am a patient boy, I wait I wait I wait I wait. My head banged.

The woman sitting next to me did too. Only a minute before we’d been having the world’s dreariest conversation about the trials of high school juniors getting into college. But that now came to a sudden end, and she too bopped around.

“I know this song!” She shouted. “I love this song! What is this band again?”

“Fugazi!” I yelled back.

Her: “What did you say?”

“FUGAZI!” I shrieked it. My friends and I used to call it the Word of Power. “Remember? DC? Dischord? $5?  Straight Edge? ALL AGES?” 

And I gestured at her, scrawling an imaginary X across the top of my hand.

But she had no idea what I was talking about. It’s a lost world, that one.

It was a world I loved though, a womb that bred me to be what I am. Yet a few nights later, I sat by the wall in an All Ages club in Santa Cruz, feeling utterly disconsolate. A series of mistakes had led me there with my daughter to see a band called No Vacation, and I was about as unhappy as it was possible to be. I like No Vacation’s music, but my presence there, surrounded by super hip 16 year olds with Emma Gonzalez-haircuts, was inappropriate, to say the least. At one point, I saw one of my actual students, and I don’t know who felt worse about it, her or me. A lot of my colleagues refuse to use the gym at our university for fear of being seen in their underwear, and it was like that, only more awful.

The experience reminded me of a recent graphic story from the New Yorker called “Young and Dumb Inside” by Emily Flake. It’s about being a Jawbreaker fan back in the day and then going to see them at Riotfest and mourning for one’s lost youth. It’s a great cartoon and it captured something essential and poignant about being a fan of punk and post-punk in the 1990s, but it didn’t capture everything. Also, it implied, as I did just now, that going to shows when you’re older is terrible. But it’s not, or not always. It can be great.

Or at least I like to think so, and most of the time, I succeed in doing so. The No Vacation show was an anomaly, because I had ventured into the kingdom of youth, where I am, if not unwelcome, at best a sort of ghost or a serf with car keys and a wallet. But most of the time, being at shows is fine. There are really only two things that are fucked about going to shows when you’re older, and both are sort of imaginary. You could be felled by self-consciousness of being the oldest person in the room. Or you could be distressed for physical reasons, like being tired, not wanting to stand or touch people, or having stopped drinking. Those things are real, but they’re also just states of mind. Once you get rid of them, you can enjoy yourself again.

Being old has advantages. You can afford to go to more things. You can leave whenever you want. And you don’t sit around thinking about Some Boy, or who said Hi to you, instead of about more important things. 

So being an older rock fans has perks. Not so sure about being an older rock artist though, and especially not if you’re female. For that demographic, doing anything in public can be difficult, especially touring, which is why I have so much respect for two people I know who are living that hard life right now, Amy Rigby and Cindy Lee Berryhill. Both of them have new albums out, but they don’t sound alike, despite the fact that they are both of the same gender and play guitar. Cindy Lee’s record, “The Adventurist” sounds very West Coasty: think Laurel Canyon, Van Dyke Parks, John Doe's solo works. It’s hard to see her as a punk rocker, but then, neither are the Blasters, really: as one of the leading lights of the anti-folk movement in the late 1980s/early 90s, she injected folk and country into straight up rock. That shouldn’t have been considered a radical move but it somehow eluded radio programmers. Today, although she is beloved by many musicians and has a hardcore following of fans, she is hardly a household name.  

“The Adventurist” is her first record in a decade, during which she watched her husband, the critic Paul Williams, die and was left to raise their son singlehandedly. That fact only seems worth mentioning because it’s the kind of personal history that can derail a person’s career pretty thoroughly, especially if they are a woman, and because some of the songs (“Contemplating the Infinite in a Kiss,” and “An Affair of the Heart”) seem to reference that sad narrative. Others, like ‘I Like Cats, You Like Dogs,” are more joyous and catchy. Perhaps because of the bigness of her life events, Cindy Lee’s songs easily take on big themes: “American Cinematographer,” for instance, likens the panoramic tendencies of modern film-making to how we think about our lives: “In a small frame/I’ll paint a big story…your face is a secret territory/my love in your geography.” Their careful and pretty orchestration – strings, piano, etc. -- mean they could easily fit on a lot of Sirius XM formats, from The Coffee House to the Loft to Spectrum and well beyond.

In contrast, Amy’s music is more late night punk bar on the lower east side-like, i.e., it sounds like almost all of the bands you loved in the 1980s, the ones so influenced by the Velvet Underground and Big Star and the Beach Boys, bands like the Replacements and Miracle Legion and Tommy Keane. That means it’s relentlessly mid-tempo, with loud major chords, grungy production and singalong choruses, and it’s characterized by the kind of extremely clever but heartfelt lyrics that can, in a word or two, succinctly pop your feelings like a zit. She references a lot of the pop culture obsessions of People Like Us, the things we discuss on our Facebook pages, and the pretensions we had as children, and the way that modern life has left us disappointed and weak in the face of its ultimate betrayals, and other, more nuanced things about life. She plays music like she loves all the same bands as I do, but at the same time, she seems like she is a hell of a lot nicer than them. (Not that they're not nice, but, well...you might not want to actually hang out with a lot of them after the show.)

What’s great about Amy’s songs, though, is that they are not mean or condescending, and that she knows it’s not just us who feel life’s little betrayals: the opening track on the album, for example, speculates on what Philip Roth felt when he saw Bob Dylan receiving the Nobel prize for Literature (i.e. bad - although, the fact that, in her scenario, Dylan has an aol account is about as biting as Amy gets.) It’s good to remember, when you’re sitting in a nightclub reminiscing about your glorious past and your very indifferent present, that even famous people have such moments of self-doubt and humility. It’s not limited to peons. It’s the human condition.  

I've always really admired Amy for her fearlessness: I know of it, because she writes a great blog that refers to a lot of the issues I think about as well - you can access it here - and is truly unafraid of mulling over the aging process (which she once called “Middlescence”).  So maybe it's not surprising, that her new record, ‘The Old Guys,” refers specifically about having the “50-something Blues.”  On the title track, she allies herself with the vanguard, singing, “Still taking risks/I keep my hand in a fist,” before ending on a rueful note, “we become the old guys.” And on “Are We Still There Yet?” a rumination on how the past informs our present, she sings, “Turn the radio off so we can choose between CD and cassette/hail fellow well met.” 

That line alone is what links her record to Cindy Lee’s – and what links them both to myself as well. I am not a musician, but in other ways we are fellow travelers through this vale of tears, since we live in a society that does not want to hear about what it’s like to be an older woman, that doesn’t make it enjoyable to be an older woman, that doesn’t make it easy to be one, and that devalues that experience to the point where we internalize the process. What these two artists, and these two records, have in common is that they defy that. They are defiant. And I endorse that message.