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.

These Days

I'll be honest with you. My very favorite thing to do in the summer is get the hell out of my own pasture and explore somebody else's way way greener one. But most of the time, there's nothing for it but to just hang around town and try to appreciate the charms of your own little piece of the planet, however bland and horrid that may be. And it turns out there’s a great many of interesting things in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, including an abacus, an IBM 1401 Data Processing system, a self-driving car and a giant globe that you can play fun games with Google Earth on. For me, however, by far the most poignant is a diorama honoring the invention of the MP3. It consists of a giant photograph depicting a record store in 1979, under which there is a small selection of those old world platters known as vinyl in racks meant to simulate the experience of record store shopping.

computer history museum display

The racks are real, and so is the fun of flipping through them, but talk about history being written by the winners! That display can make you feel a little bit nauseous, much like the ones you see in museums honoring the Old West with a statue of a Native American warrior in full tribal dress, i.e. proud, dead, and completely conquered, their perfect image frozen in a time before the battle was so decisively won. The MP3 exhibit had that exact same edge to it, triumphant while at the same time grudgingly nostalgic about a past it can't stop itself from admiring. 

It is also, alas, pretty accurate about the era which saw the demise of the form, all the way up through the records (vinyls) they’d chosen for display in a ‘typical’ rack beneath the photograph. There were titles by the Eagles, Devo, the Stones, Duran Duran, Huey Lewis, Rod Stewart, Gerry Rafferty, Peter Gabriel, Steve Miller. I flipped and flipped, hoping for a record by a black person or a woman, but no. The entirety of jazz was represented by a single artist, David Sanborn, thus capturing much that is wrong with this kind of archiving. On the one hand, the selection was spot on. On the other – well, yuck.

That play list doesn’t represent what was actually available for sale in those years, but it is surely an exact facsimile of what the people who were inventing computers in California were listening to on the radio at that time (and I know this for sure because part of my dissertation research – and my upcoming book -- was on Steve Wozniak and his relationship to music). 

The rack looked so grim that I decided to re-curate it. After a little thought, I chose the five records I thought were worthy of display: Elvis Costello’s My Aim is True, the first Marshall Crenshaw record, the Waitresses, Chipmunk Punk (because they at least do a cover of the Ramones), and Jackson Browne’s Hold Out. JB only made it in there by the skin of his teeth, in part because it felt like honoring the ghost of Nico, and in part because I had a ticket in my pocket to see him perform in San Jose at the City National Civic that night.

my choices

Do you know that word ‘mood’ that kids say today when they feel something too deeply? Jackson Browne is a mood, and when I was very young, he was also bigger than you can possibly imagine. Wikipedia says he sold 18 million records, and at his height I didn’t know a single person who didn’t have at least one. Old punks, sorority girls, parents…he crossed all boundaries of fandom. Even some of the hip and groovy Paisley Undergrounders I knew in the late 80s grudgingly admired him because of his connection to the Velvet Underground. You can mock him if you want to, but I don't know why: his biggest single, “Somebody’s Baby,” underpins the scene in Fast Times At Ridgemont High, where Jennifer Jason Leigh loses her virginity to a callous older guy, and so evocative was its use therein that it’s hard for me to separate the scene from the song now. It’s like the opposite of when a product uses a song to sell itself: instead of fusing the song to the movie, “Somebody’s Baby” has replaced the screenplay in entirety, becoming shorthand for a particular type of high school experience in the early Reagan era. That the experience wasn’t a good one is exactly what makes the song so resonant – that is, what makes it ‘such a mood.’ Truthfully, his whole metier is one long paean to regret and regrets? I got a few. 

Jackson Browne cast a long shadow in the late 70s but by the time the 1980s came around with its rap and its punk and its new wave and its cynicism, he was easy to make fun of, both for his extreme earnestness and personal commitment to lost political causes, and also the way that his sound – which his pals the Eagles monetized into a mushy stew of crappy lyrics and turgid tempos — seemed like the antithesis of everything one liked about rock. Also, there is something vexing about him that I can only describe as his weirdly stubborn inability to be truly intersectional in spite of almost monumental efforts to be so. For example, although he clearly loves and admires world music, you never heard anyone say the word “corazon” with a more gringo accent (although that’s probably pretty much how I say the word too).  And the whole paradigm of the handsome solo artist surrounded by virtuoso musicians, and the female backup singers (inevitably women of color) standing 20 feet from stardom, is hard to defend, especially if, like me, what you really prefer is a really ugly band like the Afghan Whigs putting four really loud guitars up front and singing songs about fucking.

And yet...?

And yet, going to see him perform this summer was required of me, in the same way that not being in Portugal anymore was required of me. You can't deny your place in the world. So I returned to Jackson Browne on this night with no expectations, and the second he began, at 8 pm on the dot, with a new song called “Some Bridges”, I was thrown into the past, like the proverbial boat born back against the current. “Some Bridges” reintroduced Jackson Browne’s sound to me — it, like his visage and haircut, has not changed (at least if you’re not wearing your glasses, which I wasn’t), but it was only on the second song, “That Girl Could Sing,” that the ubiquity of his role in my mental playlist sank in. My cousin Jennifer took out her phone and started Shazaming and I put my hand across hers. No need, actually, because when it comes to this shit I am the human Shazam. I can name that song in 3 notes – except in the case of “Doctor My Eyes,” which I named in ONE.

Pretty much what he looks like without my glasses on anyway

In truth, the music of JB is a little TINY bit older than my peak era, such that I actually remember that when this song came out, I thought it was called “Dark To My Eyes,” and I still secretly sing it to myself that way.  Indeed, listening to him retrospectively, I see how Jackson Browne really keyed me to a particular way to think about and even hear music and lyrics; to focus in on them alone, and to vaporize the thrumming lap steel and other accompaniments such that they seem natural and unimportant by comparison. They aren’t, but that’s what the best singer-songwriters can do. Many of Browne’s best tunes and lyrical images in his work seem simple and true and beautiful, the musical equivalent of Raymond Chandler prose or Ed Ruscha paintings, steeped in a vision of California that I lived very deeply, in another world, a long time ago. Hearing anything from Late From The Sky, Running On Empty or The Pretender reminds me of the California of my youth: of driving all over the state in the back of a station wagon to diving meets in places like Woodlands and Visalia and Escondido and Petaluma, of a thick carpet of golden rippling down hillsides and poking in and out of forests, of the ocean and the sand and the smell of water and chlorine and something else that I would now recognize as the smog-free scent of an endless summer.

In addition, Jackson Browne’s best work raised the kind of questions and stakes that the majority of popular music out there today won’t go near. After all, “The Pretender” is a song about the shortcomings of what Walter Benjamin called the dream state of capitalism, or as he put it, the hell space the sits between “the longing for love/and the struggle for the legal tender,” while “For A Dancer” and “For Everyman” are as haunted by grim death as the most shell shocked of murder ballads. And of course there is his masterpiece “These Days,” one of the best beloved and most covered songs for literally generations of musicians. Written when he was 17, it is the song Holden Caulfield would have written if he’d wandered Manhattan two decades later, crystallizing that specific angst he felt into 3 minutes of musical perfection.

To be honest, I felt like I outgrew both Holden Caulfield and Jackson Browne a long time ago but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t much that was worth listening to in both of them, a non-toxic emotional resonance which is in too short supply today. Ten years ago I might have spent half this column mocking Jackson Browne for that, and maybe railing on the song “Red Neck Friend,” but today, I say fuck that. Honestly, the last time I was in the City National Civic was to cover Ted Nugent for the San Jose Mercury News, and if you’d told me then that idiot’s world view and politics would be the ones prevailing over America over and above the ideals of Jackson Browne, I would not even have believed you. These days -- these days – I can only think of one response to the terribleness of the current zeitgeist, and that is to become a kinder and more thoughtful person to everyone around me: that is, to become the kind of earnest person who listens non-judgmentally to the music of Jackson Browne.