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We Got the Beat

Longreads — Tue, 16 Jan 2024 10:00:00 +0000

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Lisa Whittington-Hill | Longreads | January 16, 2024 | 16 minutes (2,000 words)

We’re delighted to publish an excerpt from Lisa Whittington-Hill’s new book, The Go-Go’s: Beauty and the Beat. Here, we’re featuring chapter 3, “From Punk to Pop.” For more of Lisa’s incisive cultural commentary, check out “The Women Who Built Grunge” and “Live Through This: Courtney Love at 55.”

The Go-Go’s signed to Miles Copeland’s label I.R.S. on April 1, 1981. It’s fitting that the band would sign their record deal on April Fool’s Day since for many record execs the idea of women playing music was nothing more than a joke. After signing their deal, the Go-Go’s headed to New York City to record their debut album. Copeland hired Richard Gottehrer to produce the album. Gottehrer was a songwriter and producer who had success with songs like “Hang on Sloopy,” “My Boyfriend’s Back,” and “I Want Candy” by the Strangeloves. Gottehrer also started Sire Records with Seymour Stein and the label had helped launch the careers of bands like Blondie and the Ramones, which appealed to the Go-Go’s and their punk roots. Gottehrer had even produced Blondie’s 1976 self-titled debut album.

Gottehrer wanted to polish the band’s sound, slow down their songs so you could hear the lyrics, and make their music more accessible to a pop audience. “I told them they had to slow down, put the songs into a groove. The songs deserved to be treated with respect,”¹

Gottehrer told Billboard in 2016. He had a small budget of $35,000 for the recording and ended up going over budget by $7,500, which he paid for out of his own pocket (not to worry, he later made it back in royalties). The Go-Go’s didn’t want to record a new version of “We Got the Beat” for the album. They argued they already had the Stiff Records version and people seemed to like it, but Gottehrer felt Beauty and the Beat needed a new recording of the song and finally convinced them. The album also included the hit single “Our Lips Are Sealed” for which Wiedlin wrote the lyrics and music. The song’s lyrics were based on lines from a love letter sent to Wiedlin by Terry Hall from the Specials, as Wiedlin and Hall had been romantically involved, while the Specials and the Go-Go’s were touring with Madness in the UK. Hall’s band Fun Boy Three would also end up recording a version of the song.

While Gottehrer tried to slow down the band’s songs, what he couldn’t slow down was the Go-Go’s partying. The girls made the most of their time in NYC, taking advantage of the city’s nightlife and everything it had to offer. “This was when I learned that girls can be as disruptive and dirty as boys. Who knew? It might have been drinking, it might’ve been going out, looking for booty—I’m not sure if they were into their drug phase yet. But that energy and personality came across on the record,”² Gottehrer told Billboard. When the Go-Go’s heard Beauty and the Beat for the first time they cried, but they weren’t exactly tears of joy. They thought they were making a punk record and expected the record to sound like the band did live. Their punk sound had been given a pop polish by Gottehrer. “A couple of us were concerned about how our peers in L.A. perceived us. With the small amount of success we’d had, people said we sold out, we weren’t punk after all, blah, blah, blah. Hearing the album made us feel like they were right—we sounded like we sold out,”³ Carlisle told Billboard in 2016. The Go-Go’s were not the only ones who were upset upon hearing the album. Copeland thought Gottehrer had ruined the band by delivering a pop album. Like the band, Copeland was under the misconception that Gottehrer was delivering a punk album. Later, when the album went to the number one spot all was forgiven. Suddenly, Gottehrer was being heralded as a genius and the best producer ever by both the band and Copeland.

When it came time to shoot the cover for Beauty and the Beat, photographer George DuBose got the job, accidentally. DuBose wanted to shoot the band for Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine but was told the Go-Go’s didn’t have time because they needed a cover for their new album. He ended up photographing the cover. The band wanted a timeless feel to the Beauty and the Beat cover. They also wanted a cover concept that would save them the trouble of having to decide what to wear; the cover featuring the girls in white bath towels and face masks achieved both these goals. They tried several things on their faces but ended up with Noxzema because it was the only thing that didn’t crack immediately. The back of the album featured individual shots of the band members in the tub, shot in the bathroom of Wiedlin and Caffey’s room at the Wellington, the hotel they were staying at while recording Beauty and the Beat. The cover received criticism from journalists like New York Rocker’s Don Snowden who wrongly assumed record execs, and not the Go-Go’s, had developed the concept. “It’s a long way from the motley crew pictured on the Stiff single but if the Go-Go’s want to come across as new wave cutie-pie heart-throbs, that’s their business . . . But c’mon, the images—pouring bubbly in bubblebath, chocolates and trashy novels, hand on the telephone, the phallic rose—strike me as some 40-year old marketing exec’s fantasy,”⁴ Snowden wrote of the images on the album’s back cover.

The album cover was the first time I saw what the Go-Go’s looked like. I could finally put faces to my new heroes. In the days before social media, videos, and the internet, it was a lot harder to learn about your new favorite band. MTV would soon change that, but it wouldn’t launch until a month after Beauty and the Beat was released. Years after I first discovered the Go-Go’s, I was packing some records to move and noticed the similarities between the Beauty and the Beat cover and the cover of Cut, the debut album from the Slits. The Slits were naked except for loincloths and covered in mud, not Noxzema, but there was still the idea that both bands wanted to rebel against stereotypical, hypersexualized notions of what women should look like on an album cover. They were both powerful images that the bands chose themselves, which subverted the idea of how women should market their music. There was also the idea that the women wanted to conceal themselves, whether with face masks or mud, to keep a part hidden, especially from a music industry that wanted women to reveal themselves, and all of themselves, if they wanted to sell records.

As soon as the album was done, the Go-Go’s hit the road. The tours and the venues kept getting bigger. The band went from being the house band at the Whisky and playing small clubs to opening for the Police for their Ghost in the Machine tour in less than a year. Miles Copeland also happened to be the manager of the Police. His brother, Stewart Copeland, was the drummer for the band. Not only would the Go-Go’s end up on tour with the Police, but some extra money left over from the budget for a music video by the Police—$6,000 to be exact—paid for the Go-Go’s first video, “Our Lips Are Sealed.” The Go-Go’s didn’t understand the importance of video at the time; but when MTV launched in August 1981, they saw the difference it made. The girls goofed around in the video, driving around Los Angeles in a convertible, and splashing in a fountain. They hoped to get arrested for playing in the fountain, which they thought would make an exciting end to the video. The police didn’t care, but the video would be played nonstop on MTV.

The album cover was the first time I saw what the Go-Go’s looked like. I could finally put faces to my new heroes. In the days before social media, videos, and the internet, it was a lot harder to learn about your new favorite band.

While the band was opening for the Police and playing sold-out stadiums, Beauty and the Beat went to number one on the Billboard album charts and would stay there for six weeks. Beauty and the Beat had passed Ghost in the Machine by tourmates the Police, which was at number six. Sting brought the girls a bottle of champagne to celebrate. Finally, the police were paying attention to the band, just not the ones they had hoped when they frolicked in that fountain in the “Our Lips Are Sealed” video. “We Got the Beat” went to number two and “Our Lips Are Sealed” to number twenty. The Go-Go’s were everywhere, and Beauty and the Beat would go on to sell more than two million copies, making it one of the few debut albums to top the charts and putting the band on the same level as the Beatles and Elvis. Beauty and the Beat made the Go-Go’s the first, and to date only, female band to have a number one album, who not only wrote their own songs but also played their own instruments. The album was not only a success, but “also a harbinger of what rock would become, and a bridge between punk, the movement whose rebelliousness had quashed the excesses of classic rock, and the genre-fusing music of the 1980s,”⁵ said Hilary Hughes in her introduction to NPR’s oral history of Beauty and the Beat.

On November 14, 1981, the Go-Go’s appeared on Saturday Night Live with host Bernadette Peters and Billy Joel. Having to wait around the studio all day to play, the Go-Go’s passed the time with alcohol and cocaine. By the time they took the stage, they were so drunk they could barely play. A clip of the performance is available online and worth the watch. The girls could not only hold their liquor on live TV, but the performance helped them sell a lot of records. All this attention helped to move the band’s fan base beyond just college radio listeners and new-wave clubgoers. The band’s fan base was now younger, especially attracting teen and pre-teen girls, who worshipped the band and didn’t know what punk was, let alone about the band’s punk roots. When the Go-Go’s started they dreamed of spitting on Valley Girls, but those girls would soon be part of the band’s fan base and the band would be part of a film that featured those girls they wanted to spit at. “We Got the Beat” would end up being the opening theme to the 1982 film Fast Times at Ridgemont High, a film that would popularize Valley Girls, mall culture, and Southern California teenage adolescence in the 1980s. The film launched Amy Heckerling’s career, as well as the teen comedies of the 1980s from Sixteen Candles to The Breakfast Club.

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A 1981 Village Voice poll put Beauty and the Beat in the number ten spot. Revisiting the album for an October 2019 review, Pitchfork gave it an 8.3. “Though it was a far cry from The Canterbury, Beauty and the Beat is about what’s underneath the surface of pop music. Rather than relishing the California sunshine, the Go-Go’s evoke their Los Angeles, a glittery, gritty place where punks rule the streets after dark.”⁶ Reviewing Beauty and the Beat in November 1981 for Musician magazine, Toby Goldstein said, “Beauty and the Beat is the album those of you who were embarrassed by pop music can use to say that pop’s okay.”⁷ Wiedlin agreed with Goldstein’s assessment. “One of my great quotes that I ever said, if I can quote myself, was I once compared The Go-Go’s to Twinkies. I said, ‘Everybody loves Twinkies, but they’re ashamed to admit it,’”⁸ she told Songfacts in 2007.

“I remember thinking if we sell 100,000 copies, that would be amazing. We had no idea it would do what it did. I look back even now and say wow. We went from zero to one hundred in about two years. And what happened with the album—its success—was beyond any of our expectations,”⁹ said Carlisle. And while I don’t like reducing the Go-Go’s to sugary, sweet baked goods, that’s a lot of Twinkies.

Rob Tannenbaum, “The Go-Go’s Recall the Debauched Days of Their Hit ‘We Got the Beat’ 35 Years Later,” Billboard, May 20, 2016.
Tannenbaum, “The Go-Go’s.”
Tannenbaum, “The Go-Go’s.”
Don Snowden, “The Go-Gos Go !!,” New York Rocker (1980). The Go-Go’s. Rock’s Backpages. Accessed July 13, 2022.
Hilary Hughes, “How The Go-Go’s Perfected Pop-Punk,” NPR, August 5, 2020.
Quinn Moreland, “Beauty and the Beat: The Go-Go’s,” Pitchfork, October 20, 2019.
Toby Goldstein, “The Go-Go’s: Beauty and the Beat (IRS),” Musician (1981). The Go-Go’s. Rock’s Backpages. Accessed August 1, 2022.
Carl Wiser, “Jane Wiedlin of the Go-Go’s,” Songfacts (2007). The Go-Go’s, Jane Wiedlin. Rock’s Backpages. Accessed July 13, 2022.
Audrey Golden, “The Go-Go’s Beauty and the Beat: A 40th Anniversary Celebration,” Louder than War, July 8, 2021.

© Lisa Whittington-Hill, 2024. From The Go-Go’s Beauty and the Beat by Lisa Whittington-Hill published by Bloomsbury Academic on September 7, 2023.

Just a Spoonful of Siouxsie

Alison Fields — Thu, 25 Apr 2019 11:00:25 +0000

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Alison Fields | Longreads | April 2019 | 14 minutes (3,609 words)

She showed up on an overcast Friday afternoon in January. She barreled into the driveway in an old mustard-gold Buick with a black vinyl top, its back dash decorated plastic bats, novelty skulls, and dried flowers. She was wrapped in black sweaters, black tights, black boots. She wore clunky bracelets, loads of them on the outside of her sleeves. Her hair was long and henna red. She carried an Army surplus satchel pinned with old rhinestone brooches and Cure buttons. She was 19 years old. When I opened the front door and she smiled at me, I thought she was the most perfect person I’d ever seen.

“I’m Gwen,” she said. “I’m here to interview for the nanny job.”

That’s when I noticed the nose ring and I blubbered something incoherent, then apologized because I was both overwhelmed and mortified that someone this cool was going to come into my stupid house.

Gwen was not supposed to be the babysitter. Mom had meant to hire her classmate, a relentlessly chipper double major in theatre and education, whose performance in Pirates of Penzance had impressed both of my parents. After the show, Mom congratulated her on the performance, and asked if she might be interested in making a little extra money looking after her two daughters. The roommate agreed, but two weeks later, followed a boyfriend abroad. Sorry. Once in a lifetime opportunity. But my friend Gwen is available. You’ll love Gwen.

I did love Gwen. Mom, however, looked at Gwen the way she looked at me when I made her watch Desperately Seeking Susan and said, This is exactly what I want my grown-up life to be like — with some combination of confusion, distaste, and mounting horror. But Gwen gave good interview, and I begged pleasepleaseplease and my mom agreed, even though she wished that Gwen would ixnay the oseringnay. She could be a very pretty girl if she would just take that thing out of her nose and brush her hair and smile and maybe wear a little blush. You know, try not to be so weird.

***

I’d spent the first half of middle school trying not to be weird. I wore the right shade of frosted lip gloss. I bought the puffy high-top Reeboks. I wore them with the appropriate layers of slouch socks in peach, white, and light teal. I submitted to the same spiral perm the other girls had and spent mornings torturing my bangs with a curling iron. I smiled. I wore blush. And I still got heart-dotted notes on my lunch tray advising me to Kill yourself, fat dike [sic]. I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong. I thought I looked right and acted right. When I’d complain of the relentless abuse, Mom would tell me that I was taking it too seriously, Those girls are just as confused and lonely as you are. I’m friends with their mothers. I know! Had I thought about maybe smiling more? Was I brushing my hair? Maybe if I just tried to lose some weight? If you could lose 40 pounds, your grandmother will take you to New York and buy you a whole new wardrobe. You’ve always been a beautiful person inside — wouldn’t it be great if your inside matched your outside?

At 13, I figured my inside was something like the black hole scribbled in ballpoint on a spiral-bound notebook with such vigor that it turned glossy, then embellished with baroque doodles and four-letter words I wasn’t supposed to know. My inside would probably match Robert Smith from the Cure or, maybe the girl with the pale pink buzzcut, shabby tulle dress, and glitter-stained combat boots I’d spied out the window of a London cab with my horrified grandmother. Deep down, I did wish my inside matched my outside, but I doubted the reality would be great for either my mother or already nonexistent social life.

The week before Gwen came to interview, I watched a boy from my class — the Smirk — unzip his jacket and swagger across the cafeteria wearing a NAZI PUNKS FUCK OFF T-shirt until the apoplectic vice principal howled across the room and dragged him by the collar into the hall. In the melee that followed, most of the girls that hated me seemed shocked. Why would anyone wear that gross shirt? Do you think he’s a for-real Nazi? Oh my god, it’s like he didn’t even read The Diary of Anne Frank last year. I didn’t turn around and say, That shirt explicitly instructs Nazis to fuck off, Amanda. Can’t you fucking read? because I was at least three years from being that person. Also, I’d gone so electric at whatever shit the Smirk had just pulled, I lost the rest of the day trying to make out whether I now had a crush on the boy himself or just coveted his gorgeous bravado (both).

You’ve always been a beautiful person inside — wouldn’t it be great if your inside matched your outside?

I remember thinking the Smirk got away with that sort of thing because he was comfortably ensconced in a crowd of polo-shirted, over-achieving, country club kids — the masculine analogues to the girls that wouldn’t sit with me at lunch. He was also a dude, which gave him some wiggle room. And ours was a high-performing school in a hippie town, where some degree of tolerance for weird was baked into the environment, so long as it was the right kind of weird and you were the right kind of person performing it.

I didn’t think I was the right kind of person. I was pretty sure I would never be.

***

The second day with Gwen, she found me sniffling on the front step trying to dislodge spit balls and rubber bands from my hair. She sent my little sister and her friend upstairs to play. She made me a cup of spicy tea and we sat at the kitchen table. She listened for a while, offering little in the way of advice save Only fascists enjoy middle school. She took off her rings and let me wear them, and she told me stories about her life. She had a boyfriend named Justin. He was an artist and maybe a bass player. They hung out at a club downtown with a morbid name. It was full of punks and artists, freaks, goths, this lame dance crowd that comes in and glitters the toilets. Sometimes skinheads, but, like, not the racist kind. Sometimes Gwen and her best friend danced there — performances with lots of scary masks and candles and fake blood. Afterward, they’d all hang out, sit up on the roofs of buildings, consider the then-empty downtown scene, graffiti old warehouses, pretend it was the end of the world.

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Somewhere during her stories I lost track of my days. I forgot about the kids in the cafeteria and the girls in the corridor. Gwen’s tales were broadcasts from an alternate universe, but an alternate universe only three miles from my house, two blocks from my mother’s office. So close. Like seeing a door in the back of the wardrobe, I could almost be part of it.

By the end of the first week, I’d come home clamoring for details: Did the Nazis come back after you painted over their death threats with Barbie pink paint? Won’t you be lonely if Justin goes on tour? I can’t believe that abandoned building was full of old books and crinolines — those are two of my favorite things!

Gwen took me to her house for the first time about two weeks after she started working for us. She dropped my sister off at a friend’s house for a sleepover and endured my babble as I crawled into the front seat. I’d recently learned that the boys at school would temporarily suspend the spitballs and slurs if I’d ask them about their band T-shirts and tolerate their enthusiastic recitation of fan trivia. Did I know that John Bonham was the greatest drummer in history? Had I fully appreciated the genius of Eddie Van Halen? Was I aware that Bono was short for Bono Vox and that was Latin American [sic] for “good voice”? It definitely was not friendship, but it felt something like the distant suburbs of conversation. I told Gwen, “I’m learning a lot about music. Jason from homeroom said I should really get in to Pink Floyd. What do you think?”

At this, Gwen groaned and U-turned in the middle of 5:00 traffic. She drove me through a warren of streets up to a dilapidated bungalow in the same mustard-gold as her Buick. I followed her across the bowed planks of a cavernous front porch and into the house. It smelled like incense and cooking gas. Gwen dropped her bag on the floor beside a naked mannequin and started to turn on a network on string lights hung over the walls and tangled through a derelict chandelier. I gazed at shelves full of religious kitsch and records, broken vintage lamps with cigarette burns in their red velvet shades, a Pee-wee Herman doll riding astride a NO VACANCY sign. It looked like countless rooms in countless houses I would spend time in over the next 30 years of my life, at parties and house shows. But it was the first house I had ever been in that looked like that, and I might as well have been on the moon. I felt like I’d been invited into Versailles.

“Gwen,” I said. “Your house is so totally cool.”

She shrugged, said something about her roommates being filthy pigs, and directed me to a salvaged front seat of an old sedan propped against the wall. She turned on an old record cabinet and with her back to me said, “You should be able to talk to the boys about music. Not Pink Floyd, though.”

We started with the Cure, whom I’d heard, but not what she played. Then the B-52s. Then Siouxsie. Then Joy Division. She heated up leftover curry. I told her about the Smirk and the shirt. She explained about the Dead Kennedys — not really my thing, but Justin used to be way into them. She played “California Uber Alles.” She played Bauhaus. We went up to her bedroom, which was tented in black lace. I goggled at her collection of antique dresses. We listened to New Order, which I knew but didn’t know. She painted my toenails black. I tried on her sunglasses. She told me about hitchhiking to New Orleans and a guy there who said he was a vampire but was maybe just a con artist. I told her I secretly had a crush on the Smirk. She said she’d worked that out on her own. She drove me home at 9:30. My dad was home but hadn’t noticed we were late. Mom came home an hour later, exhausted from work, oblivious that my life had changed.

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The trips to Gwen’s house became more of a regular thing. Sometimes she’d frame it as having left something important — schoolwork, her wallet — at home and we’d end up spending the afternoon lounging on ancient velvet pillows in the lace tent. My 7-year-old little sister was less taken with the situation than I was. She thought Gwen was weird, Gwen’s house extremely weird, and Gwen’s associated detritus borderline unsettling. She didn’t like the music or the bathtub full of black balloons. She didn’t understand why Gwen didn’t peel the potatoes before she mashed them. I was too much an adolescent shitbag to pick up on the fact that my sister was bored and uncomfortable, and that maybe John Waters was a smidge mature for a second grader.

I didn’t think I was the right kind of person. I was pretty sure I would never be.

When my sister wasn’t around — unlike me, she had a schedule packed with playdates and extracurriculars — my afternoons with Gwen felt like we were just hanging out as friends. Sometimes we’d go downtown and wander around thrift stores and junk shops on pre-gentrification Lexington Avenue. We’d spend hours trying on gowns from the 1910s and 1920s in the back of dusty shops. We’d strut around displays of chipped china cups in sequins and lamé shoes, Jackie O hats and 1950s prom dresses, decaying Edwardian jackets, moth-eaten flapper dresses, shedding old glass beads and bits of silk thread all over the dusty floors. She’d buy me inexpensive gifts — a lapel pin, a magazine, a few sticks of incense, a plastic sackful of costume jewelry for $1. Don’t tell your mom we’ve been down here. She wouldn’t like it. I hid the rhinestones, the beads, the plastic bangles in a shoe box. Treasures from my best life. Totems that I thought could guide me out of the misery that was middle school in Asheville in 1989.

****

Sometime around the Ides of March, I had an apex shitty day. Both parents hassled me about my weight. I got heckled all the way to homeroom. My teacher told me she’d reduce my role to a walk-on in the spring play, because students that make Cs on group projects didn’t get the good parts. Then I got another U R SO GROSS HOW ARE YOU EVEN STILL ALIVE? note on the cafeteria tray and spent lunch in the bathroom stall, wishing I could ooze out between the tiles and never come back.

I went home with a stomach ache that lingered over night until the next morning. I told my mother I was sick. She let me stay home. Do you want me to call Gwen so you’re not here by yourself? I did, and Gwen came after her classes. She made me soup with ginger. We watched Heathers, which I’d seen before and The Hunger, which I hadn’t. At some point, I broke down crying about everything. How shitty everything was. Gwen listened. That’s really all she did: listen. Then we listened to the Cure and made collages. By afternoon, I felt like a person again.

After that, I woke up with a lot of stomachaches. Mom would fuss over me and go to work. Gwen would come after class. She knew I was cutting school. She might have even discouraged me, but I was pretty sure I never wanted to go back again. We watched movies and MTV, but after a while, we’d leave and go back to her house. I’d go with her to run errands — to the college, to the health food store, to the alley behind the nightclub where she bickered with her boyfriend, to the bookstore, the vintage store, the record store, the fabric outlet where she helped me pick out yards of cheap lace so I might drape my own bedroom to better resemble hers.

The day we got busted Mom called the house and couldn’t find us. She came home around the time we pulled up in Gwen’s car, giggling, under piles of bulk lace. Mom told me she was very disappointed in me and sent me to my room. She fired Gwen. I didn’t get to tell her goodbye.

Over dinner, Mom referred to Gwen as a terrible babysitter. My sister agreed. I tried to argue otherwise, but I was 13 and didn’t have the right words. Mom didn’t think much of my lace tent idea. It wouldn’t match the floral wallpaper, the white eyelet coverlet and matching drapes. I didn’t match my bedroom either, but I couldn’t seem to make anyone understand that. I cut off a few lengths of lace and put them in the box with my other treasures. The rest I wrapped into a ball and slept with for a while, like a security blanket. I wrote letters to Gwen, long confessions, tearful apologies, because I always thought it was my fault she had to go away.

I never sent the letters. She wasn’t in the phone book. In all those times I’d been to her house, I’d never bothered to find out her address.

****

By the end of my weeks-long truancy, it was halfway to May. People still gave me a lot of shit in the hallways, but I’d been gone long enough that they’d diversified. A boy I knew had pulled target du jour in the middle school lottery for no obvious reason. Like me, he looked and dressed and acted just like the other boys that picked on him. Unlike me, he wasn’t even fat. He came from the right neighborhood, had the right hobbies. He did everything exactly as he was supposed to. It wasn’t enough.

One afternoon, he boarded the school bus home. The bullies — themselves rich, popular, high-achieving white boys from nice families — waited until the driver was on the freeway and therefore could not easily stop the bus. They pulled the boy out of his seat and took turns beating him as the rest of the bus just watched in mute horror. By the time the driver could exit and stop the fight, the boy had to be taken to the hospital for numerous and severe injuries to bones and organs I didn’t even know people had until we all heard the report. The bullies were suspended, but all were back in class before the month was out, still popular, still tracked into the classes with the same privileges at the same school. The boy they beat up never came back. His parents moved him to a private school. People were careful not to mention his name.

I hid the rhinestones, the beads, the plastic bangles in a shoe box. Treasures from my best life. Totems that I thought could guide me out of the misery that was middle school in Asheville in 1989.

I was horrified by it, no-faking sick to my stomach. It haunted me for years. The kids at school had been talking about the attack for weeks before it happened. The boys planned it. People knew. It happened anyway, and people watched it happen. Those boys that did it still showed up to cotillion class and danced with the prettiest girls in the school. They went to parties. They impressed parents. They stayed successful, some of them astonishingly so, to this day.

I’d spent long portions of the year wishing I were a boy, because the boys seemed immune from the Hester Prynne hallway experience. They were allowed to not wear blush and be sort of chubby and swagger into the lunchroom in their Dead Kennedys shirts. After the thing on the bus, it occurred to me that as bad as it had been for me, as bad as all of seventh grade had been, none of my ribs were broken, no one had kicked me until I coughed up blood.

***

Four years later, when I was 17 with long henna hair, rhinestone brooches pinned to my satchel, wrapped in black sweaters and tights, my day student friends at my new boarding school and I had a running Thursday morning breakfast club at an ersatz ’50s-style diner. We’d get there at 6:30 a.m., drink too much coffee, and talk about music, movies, vintage dress scores, plans to see shows and sneak off on the weekend to explore the back alleys of downtown.

We were settling up out front one day when Gwen came in to work. She was older, blonder, without the bracelets or the nose ring, dressed in a server uniform. I smiled at her and asked if she remembered me. She said she did, but she seemed vague about it. Who could blame her? I’d been this kid she was paid to look after, a kid that cost her a job. She’d obviously grown up and changed. I didn’t want to be disappointed that she looked so normal, like she’d brushed her hair and put on some blush. But I was.

I wanted to tell Gwen I’d spent the past four years trying to make my inside match my outside, and that it’s hard work, especially when your fear of disappointing people is at least equal to your desire to be real. I hadn’t worked all the kinks out (I still haven’t), but I was sure any progress I’d made started with Gwen.

But I was with my friends. I was trying to be cool. It was 7:30 in the morning, for Christ’s sake, and it was dawning on me that Gwen was eager for me to move on so she could get to work. I blinked away whatever threat of weepy reunion and thanked her for listening to me all those years ago. “Seventh grade sucked,” I said. “You were just about the best part.”

She smiled. She looked stoned. Maybe she was. I thought she was still trying to place me. After a moment though, she asked if the kids at school were still giving me a hard time. “They used to call you names, right?”

“I think maybe they still do,” I said, attempting a worldly affect. “But honestly it’s been a while since I’ve cared.”

I was halfway to school before I realized I wasn’t entirely full of shit.

***

When I was 19 and at my peak punk rock, I took a job nannying for a family in the suburbs of the C-grade Southern metropolis where I lived at the time. The kids were 9 and 13. The oldest was a girl who fought with her horrible, conservative mother — a mother who called her daughter horrible names. I took out my nose ring for the job, but I did plenty of Gwen-like things with those kids over the course of a year. I introduced them to ungodly music like the Cure, I took them to the art museum instead of making them sit silently upstairs and do homework. The 13-year-old threatened to hurt herself and run away from home. I told her to call me before doing either and that I would do anything possible to help her. I got fired from that job. I don’t regret anything I did with those kids, but I never nannied again. It’s hard to be Mary Poppins; it’s much, much harder to be Gwen.

* * *

Alison Fields is a writer in Carrboro, North Carolina.

Editor: Katie Kosma
Copyeditor: Jacob Z. Gross

Johnny Rotten, My Mom, and Me

Sari Botton — Fri, 22 Feb 2019 11:01:44 +0000

Kimberly Mack recalls the ways in which rock music bonded her with her African American mom, and how those fierce sounds helped them cope with the poverty, violence, and despair both outside and inside their Brooklyn home.

Read The Story

Johnny Rotten, My Mom, and Me

Kimberly Mack — Fri, 22 Feb 2019 11:00:21 +0000

Kimberly Mack | Longreads | February 2019 | 28 minutes (7,118 words)

“Will you sing to me?”

My mom’s pain had subsided for the moment, and her voice was strangely perky. Happy even. The morphine had kicked in. She was strapped in tight, on a stretcher, at the back of the ambulette. An assortment of pillows and towels cushioned her body to protect her from the impact as the wheels slowly rolled over each pothole, each bump, each uneven patch of street.

I had been warned that the ride from Midtown Manhattan’s Roosevelt Hospital to the Lincoln Tunnel would be the worst of it — a minefield for my 68-year-old mother, whose stage-four uterine cancer had metastasized to her liver and lungs and, as her palliative care doctor characterized it, “filled her entire abdominal cavity.” It was the pain that finally got my mom to visit the doctor seven weeks earlier. There had been other signs, but she had refused to go to the doctor before that, only repeating to me what I’d heard her say when I was growing up: “Doctors look for problems…they make you sick.”

It was August 2015. We were now headed by an ambulette service to my new home in Toledo, Ohio, ten hours away, where I was a college professor. The plan was for her to first spend a few weeks at a skilled nursing facility, so she could relearn how to walk after her recent long hospital stay. That would give us time to order a hospital bed and other medical supplies before bringing her to our house for in-home hospice care. I had been looking forward to showing my mom our new home ever since I texted a picture of it to her after we found it in June.

“Look, Mom!” I wrote. “I can’t believe the house comes with such colorful flowers. There are dark pink rose bushes in the backyard.”

“Oh Kim, it’s so beautiful,” she texted back.

“I can’t wait for you to see it,” I replied. And that was true. Neither one of us had lived in a house before.

***

It was hard to believe that this frail, soft-spoken person in the ambulette was my mom. After all, it was her voice — loud and strong, even booming at times — that had protected me from the pain and despair that surrounded us, inside and outside our home, while I was growing up. She defended the way she chose to raise me — offering material advantages she did not have growing up — despite my grandmother’s disapproval.

“You act like those white folks you love so much!” screamed my grandmother.

“That’s just ignorant!” my mom yelled in response. “Wanting what’s best for Kim isn’t a white thing!”

“Don’t you fucking call me ignorant in my house!”

My mother defended the way she chose to raise me — offering material advantages she did not have growing up — despite my grandmother’s disapproval.

But my mom was not always able to protect herself. I learned to always be on alert, because I was afraid something might happen to her. One morning when I was 7, and we were still in the room we shared, mom opened her mouth wide and wiggled one of her front teeth with her index finger. “Marvin hit me and knocked my tooth loose,” she explained, referring to her younger brother. Her tooth remained that way throughout my childhood. She never saw a dentist, probably due, in equal parts, to her fears and the expense. Of course, she eventually lost that tooth, and the others surrounding it.

It was her mouth that provided the boundary between the chaos and me. Sometimes she roared loudly in order to protect me. Other times, she used her voice to communicate softly to me that everything was going to be okay. Music was a comfort to us both. Mom introduced the Trashmen’s 1963 surf rock novelty hit “Surfin’ Bird” to me when I was 6, and I never got tired of jumping around to the craziest, most frenetic song I had ever heard. “A-well-a don’t you know about the bird? Well, everybody knows that the bird is the word!” I would twirl around, flailing my arms like a bird, until I fell down with mom looking on, smiling.

Her outsized voice was encased in a tiny, 5-foot-2 inch, 100-pound body — although her huge Angela Davis afro, and later her braids, along with her 1970s-style clothes, with fringes, tassels and colorful patterns, helped her to appear taller than she was. Her voice made it so we could survive in our claustrophobic little room in our apartment in the Marcy Projects in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, as my mom resisted the limitations placed on her by her family and community. Marcy was also rapper Jay-Z’s childhood home, making it an essential stop on the various current popular NYC hip-hop tours. But in the 1970s, the Marcy Houses were long-neglected by the city and in a state of grave disrepair, extremely dangerous, and mostly comprised of people whose daily lives were marked by poverty, violence, and quiet desperation.

That included us.

But it was my mom who made it possible for me to one day become the first person on her side of the family to earn a bachelor’s degree, two master’s degrees, a Ph.D., and to become a college professor.

***

I was a girl from the projects, but through a feat of my mother’s imagination, I was set upon a path to become much more than that. My mom was from the projects too — I spent the first nine years of my life in the same apartment she had lived in from the age of 12 with her mother and four younger siblings, but she decided while I was still in her womb that my life would be better than her own. Because of my mother’s intelligence and excellent grades, she attended Eli Whitney High School in Brooklyn in the early 1960s, then a predominantly white vocational school, yet she received little praise or support from her mother. My mother was the oldest, and probably, in some ways, too much like my grandmother. Despite all the ways they were the same, including their shared obstinacy and unshakable wills, my mother did the unthinkable: She decided she wanted something more for herself and for me. She chose to finish her high school education, she chose to make friends outside of the neighborhood, and she chose to work in white corporate America, which required her to take the subway every morning from Brooklyn to Manhattan.

My grandmother was sure my mother took a different path because she thought she was better than her, but perhaps more damning than that, she believed my mother wanted to be white. “You think those people give a shit about you?!” she would scream as my mother prepared her clothes for work the next day.

That whiteness wasn’t necessarily reflected in my mother’s outward appearance. Every morning she put on one of her silky rayon blouses — often in royal blue, her favorite color — along with dark slacks and high heels for her corporate job as a secretary at American Express in lower Manhattan. She wore her hair in cornrow braids, as did I at the time, and at home she dressed casually in flowered cotton tops and bell-bottom jeans. She moved seamlessly between work and home without having to code-switch — her speaking voice always sounding the same. She used the same speaking style at home as she did when she took me with her to her office, or when she answered her work telephone. “You sound just like one of them,” my grandmother would tell her.

Even though I was a young child, my mom treated me as a confidant. Sometimes she would talk softly as we lay in bed in the darkness. “I always wanted the real college experience,” she would say to me. “I wanted to go away to college, and at the right age.” She told me that when I was a baby, and she was 23, she took classes at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn, hoping to complete an associate’s degree. But then it was too difficult for her to juggle work, school, and me, so she had to quit. She also confided in me her disappointment that even though she’d flourished academically throughout elementary school and junior high, she ended up at a vocational high school instead of an academic one. “I always brought home As,” she said, “and nobody cared. But you’re not going to P.S. anything. You’re not going to be like these girls around here.”

My mom’s decision to send me to Packer Collegiate Institute, a private, pre-K to 12, college prep school in upscale Brooklyn Heights, with children who were predominantly white and affluent, illustrated her determination to open up a world of opportunities for me. This was in direct contrast with the other children in my family, and in my community, who faced limited futures as they navigated neighborhoods filled with crumbling apartment buildings, rat infested vacant lots, and shuttered businesses. My male cousins, who were every bit as bright and eager to learn as I was, walked or rode to their local public schools, and learned as best as they could.

My mother taught me to read by the time I was 3 and to write soon after that, and she created a mythology around my specialness that helped manufacture a bubble of protection for me. Every chance she got, she would remind our family members, and me, how ahead of the curve I was. “Kim, you never crawled like other kids,” she would tell me as I got older. “You rocked forward and back once, twice, three times, and then you leaped, like a frog, to the other end of the rug! ”

In time, even my most out-of-control uncles saw me as off limits, so the angry words and the violence were never directed at me. This was not something I figured out later in life. I was acutely aware of it throughout my childhood. Despite the drugs and alcohol, the violence, the fractured families, and the economic despair, my mother and I looked beyond the grim project courtyard and planned my escape. It began with my enrollment in 1974 as one of a small number of black students at Packer.

I was the first to be picked up by the school bus in the early hours of the morning, and the last one dropped off in the afternoon. While it was still dark, my mom would walk with me from our apartment through the courtyard to “the chain,” the long, metallic links cordoning off the entrance way into the north side of the housing complex and functioning as a landmark of sorts. Just on the other side of the chain, we would catch my bus. Known colloquially as a “short bus,” it was a smaller version of the long yellow school bus that many children know intimately. This prompted kids in the neighborhood to ask, “Are you retarded or somethin’?” I dreaded having them see me in the mornings. It didn’t help that I was not allowed to play outside without adult supervision. Since I was not in the courtyard as often as the other boys and girls, I was either shunned or mocked when they did see me. They’d ask, “Why you talk so white?”

My mother and I sounded white. While it seems odd that a socially-constructed racial category might be represented in a vocal quality, and it’s difficult to nail down the characteristics of white verbal expression, I guess I know what it is when I hear it. Lots of black comics seem to as well, and at 7 I knew too. A cadence, an accent. Whatever it is, my mom and I both had it. It confounded the rest of our family that my mom could make her voice sound like Carol Brady’s when she’d grown up in the same house and the same neighborhood as the rest of her siblings. My mom was proud that people mistook her for white on the telephone. It’s hard to say whether I mimicked my mom’s way of speaking, or if I mimicked the white friends I met at school. Maybe it was both. But I always sounded different from the people around me. Not black. Not like the others. Still, I insisted, “I don’t talk white.”

***

When I was in the third grade, a boy of 13 or 14 began showing up around the time my bus arrived each morning. He threw rocks of varying sizes at it, sometimes narrowly missing the windows. Our bus driver, a middle-aged black woman with a giant orange afro, threatened to stop picking me up if he persisted, so one morning my 24-year-old uncle decided to intervene. This was the same uncle who’d knocked my mom’s tooth loose. He was gentle and kind to me when he was sober, and he acted as a father figure. My own father was divorced from my mother, in the Army, stationed somewhere far away, and not in my life, so I appreciated my uncle’s positive attention.

As the bus drove off, I, and the bus driver’s children, who were there before the other Packer kids got picked up, watched as my uncle grabbed the boy by his collar and shook him around like a rag doll. I was mortified. Was he drunk? I couldn’t tell. But my fellow passengers were wildly entertained. “Ooooooooooh,” they screamed, pressing their faces against their windows as the bus pulled away. I looked down at my lap, and tried to make myself invisible. As embarrassed as I was by my uncle’s actions, even then I knew he showed up for me out of love. Plus the boy with the rocks never reappeared again.

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Elementary school can be difficult enough, but I had an hour-and-a-half commute each way from my apartment to Packer. I hated waking up at 6:00am when I knew some of my friends got up at 7:30 and walked to school. I feared, through a stroke of bad luck, running into one of my Packer classmates on the bus (operated by a private company that picked up some Packer students by special arrangement). My bus driver’s route began in Bed Stuy on the way to Park Slope, and then, eventually, Downtown Brooklyn and the Heights. But what if our bus driver decided to go a different way one day, and when I got on I saw one of my friends? I could not bear the thought of having anyone know where I lived.

My mom took great care to make sure I wore the same expensive, preppy clothes that my friends did despite the drain on her pocketbook — Osh Kosh B’Gosh overalls, plaid dresses, slacks with embroidered designs when I was younger, and Lacoste polos, Shetland wool crew neck sweaters, and Gloria Vanderbilt Jeans when I was in middle school. She took me on the subway to birthday parties and play dates at my classmates’ houses, and she gave me money for field trips to museums in Manhattan, and for fancy cabin camping trips in New Jersey.

I never had a single Packer friend visit me at home, so no one knew how I lived. Even still, I never quite fit in. Some of it was because of my race, but most of it was because my family was working class, at best, and I remained mystified by my friends’ lifestyles. A few of my friends owned horses that lived in stables outside of the City, while others would hobble to school on crutches on Mondays after their weekend ski trips.

***

Packer had been my mother’s idea and, at first, my grandmother was against it. In one of their many heated arguments, she warned my mother, “One day, you’re not going to recognize your own daughter!” While my grandmother stood at about 5 feet tall, she still cut an imposing figure. When she and my mother argued, with the specter of the words turning to blows, even though my mother was two inches taller, I feared she was at a physical disadvantage. Yet my grandmother’s words failed to deter my mom, and on my first day of school she proudly walked me through the immense playground known as “the garden” and into the little green schoolhouse designated for the youngest students.

Since I was not in the courtyard as often as the other boys and girls, I was either shunned or mocked when they did see me. They’d ask, ‘Why you talk so white?’

Dressed in a grey suit, my mom held my hand as I, wearing a new fall outfit, made sure to walk on each and every pinecone in my path. I still remember that Packer smell. It sometimes comes to me in dreams. The crisp fall air seeping through the tiny cracks in the closed bay windows mixed with the musty odor of the 129-year-old building. I sat cross-legged in a circle with my kindergarten classmates while the teacher read to us from a giant picture book. I was a mere three miles from home, but in every way the distance was incalculable.

My mother also broke ranks with our neighbors, in a different way: She flaunted her love of rock music, playing her Sex Pistols, Boomtown Rats, and Thin Lizzy records at top volume on Sunday afternoons just before her mother and the other black church ladies returned from holy services. My mom was a rarity: She was a young black woman who not only grew up loving rock ‘n’ roll, but she also embraced its offshoot, rock music, even as it increasingly became viewed as white despite its largely African American origins. Mom enjoyed 1960s blues-based transatlantic rock artists like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and the Animals, and she continued her love of the genre throughout the 1970s and beyond.

That wasn’t all she listened to. Occasionally she would play a disco hit single like “Le Freak” by Chic, or “I’m Coming Out” by Diana Ross. Once, while my grandmother was still at church, my mom, clad in her favorite blue jeans and a plaid blue shirt, put “Ring My Bell” by Anita Ward on repeat. Not only was it loud, but she easily played the song 20 times. It could have been more. I lost count. The important thing to know about that song is that it includes bell sounds and electronic bleeps, which everyone in proximity to our apartment couldn’t help but hear. I was just a kid, and I found it maddening. I can only imagine what the neighbors thought. But there she was, dancing and singing along obliviously in the living room: “You can ring my bell, ring my bell (ring my bell, ding-dong-ding ahhh).”

She rocked out just as hard to Johnny Rotten’s sneering vocals. It was a way of drowning out her pain. I would soon do the same, blasting music of all kinds to escape the epic fights between my mother and grandmother. My grandmother would yell, “Don’t you make me come over there and kick your ass!”

“You stupid old woman,” my mother would reply, “why don’t you just try it!”

My mother and grandmother fought hard. These arguments were about everything and nothing. They could erupt because of something small like my mother re-arranging some of my grandmother’s food in the refrigerator, or something more substantial like my mother’s decision to work a white-collar desk job rather than becoming a civil servant like her mother had. While they mainly engaged in screaming, cussing, threat-filled battles, occasionally my grandmother hit my mom, or threw boiling hot water that she heated up on the stove just as my mom escaped into our bedroom. But even though most of the time my mother emerged unharmed physically, the threat of a real fist fight between the two of them terrified me.

I lived in a constant state of vigilance when my mother and grandmother shared the same space. I became attuned to my grandmother’s moods. If she was softly singing or humming one of her church songs, I felt relieved, less afraid she would pick a fight with my mom. Sometimes the singing would come after a big blow up, and then I knew the combat was over for that night. I longed to hear my grandmother’s melodious voice, for it represented a temporary calm in our home. Most nights the peace came after the warfare.

On one such evening when I was six, the air had a familiar East Coast chill. Fall was giving way to winter, as Thanksgiving quickly approached. Nana stood in the middle of the kitchen, near the long, white, Formica kitchen table, with her hands on her hips. To me, my grandmother seemed possessed of herculean strength, which resulted in her being able to lift furniture a man might scoff at heaving, or carry multiple heavy bags of groceries or laundry without betraying the slightest hint of fatigue. As she stood barefoot, feet slightly apart, wearing her old, flowered nightgown and tattered, polyester, yellow robe, she looked enormous to me.

My mother also stood in the kitchen, having changed out of her work clothes and into pajamas and slippers. Even though she was super thin, she was also quite physically strong. It was probably around 8pm or so, closing in on my bedtime, but instead of having been put to bed by my mom, I still sat at my “little table” coloring as my mother and grandmother faced each other down. In an effort to make me an independent child so I could learn to rely on myself, my mother made sure I had what the adults in our apartment had, only in miniature. So by the time I was able to feed myself, I had my own table that sat in the middle of our kitchen. It was a red and white folding card table sturdy enough to hold a tiny, six-inch, black and white television, and the Panasonic tape recorder my mom gave me that I used to sing my favorite songs and tell my favorite stories into. Sometimes I would belt out current songs, like “Boogie Fever” by the Sylvers, and when I was older I would sing disco hits like “Boogie Nights” by Heatwave. Eventually, I sang songs I wrote myself. One favorite was “Under the Deep Blue Sea”: “Where I live is lonely. It’s dark, and degraded. If I could leave it, oh I’d take the chance. Help me! I’m stuck under the world! Help me! It’s lonely down here…”

My “little table” was also where I ate all of my meals until I was 9. When my mom and grandmother would argue, I would sometimes use the tape recorder. While sitting at my “little table” I would move the clunky black contraption to the center, press record, and begin the next installment in my makeshift radio show. My show didn’t have a set play list or program. It was a hodgepodge of spoken word, where I would read passages from some of my favorite books, tell corny jokes, and talk about what happened in my day. I would also sing songs and record all manner of media off of the TV, radio, or my record player. In one such tape that I still have, I preface my singing with, “Now I’m going to sing two of my songs I learned in school. I like them very much that’s why I’m singing them.”

In my head, I can still hear the refrains of a recurring fight my mother and grandmother had.

“If you don’t like it, you can get the fuck outta my house!” my grandmother would bellow.

“That’s great language to use around your granddaughter. What a great example you’re setting!” my mother would screech.

“I don’t give a fuck what kinda example I’m setting. This is my house, and if you don’t like it you can leave!”

“Whatta bully you are. You’re wrong and you just can’t admit it!”

“Get the fuck out!”

“I’ll get the fuck out as soon as I can!”

At this, my grandmother would lunge like a wild cat at my mother. I was always amazed at how quickly she could move from point A to point B when trying to get at my mother during one of their fights, despite her weight, and later, in spite of her damaged knees, hobbled from years of scrubbing floors in order to support her five children.

After years of practice, my mother had become pretty adept at getting out of Nana’s way when threatened with violence. My mom was never the physical aggressor, and the few times my grandmother was able to catch her and land a blow, my mother refrained from hitting her back.

This time, after watching the two grownups circle the kitchen table like a Tom and Jerry cartoon on an endless loop, my stomach flipped when my mother was finally caught. I was already a nervous child by that point, and I had in the last couple of years developed what would become a lifetime habit: biting my nails. I didn’t just tear at my nails, I would maul my cuticles, and sometimes even chew the sides of my fingers. This worked predictably to quell my anxiety. It still does.

My grandmother grabbed my mother and rather than hitting her, she began to pull her toward our apartment’s front door. I watched wide-eyed as my grandmother maneuvered herself behind my mom and began to push her with all of her weight to the threshold of the outside door. I was terrified, though I didn’t cry or make any sort of noise. I was good at making myself as small as possible in these moments. Nana managed somehow to hold my mother while she unlocked the two locks, opened the door, and shoved her outside. She locked the door behind her and calmly walked through the kitchen, down the hallway, and into her bedroom.

My mother rocked out just as hard to Johnny Rotten’s sneering vocals. It was a way of drowning out her pain. I would soon do the same, blasting music of all kinds to escape the epic fights between my mother and grandmother.

It was nearly winter, and as such the cold could be felt out in the hallway. My mom wore house shoes and a flimsy night dress. I was scared she might die. Everything went silent. I stood up and looked toward the door. I heard my mother’s knock, tentative, at first, and then more urgent. I wanted to open the door, but I was afraid of what my grandmother might do. Nana reappeared and walked past me toward the front door. I was afraid she might use a belt or maybe even make me go outside in my pajamas to pick a branch off a tree for a whipping, like those stories my grandmother told my mom and me about her own childhood down south. This had never happened before — and would never happen — as my mother threatened my grandmother with bodily harm should she ever lay a hand on me. I didn’t know that at the time, though.

I also worried that if I stayed in my seat and didn’t let her in, my mom might get very sick and die and leave me alone with my grandmother forever. So, shaking, I moved slowly toward the front door. I made quick eye contact with Nana. She had a bemused look on her face, almost sheepish. Perhaps she saw herself in that instant through my eyes and felt shame. I walked past her and slowly unlocked the door for my mother. Mom didn’t speak; she just shut and locked the door behind her. Shivering, she peered around trying to get a sense of the level of danger still present. There was none. Nana had gone back into her room, this time for the night.

***

When I was 9, my family moved from the Marcy Houses to the Breukelen Houses in the Canarsie neighborhood in Brooklyn, where I lived until I was 12. Our living room in my grandmother’s apartment wasn’t very big, and the bed where I slept was just a few feet from the beaten up, plastic-covered, green sofa that faced the TV. Next to the TV was a turntable, receiver, and speakers. On the other side of the TV, in the right corner of the room, sat another couch. The living room wasn’t much, but it was a haven for my mother and me. This was where we listened to music. Not together, like we did when I was very young, but in shifts. I had my bands, and mom had hers.

I sometimes liked her music. The Police, the Boomtown Rats, Thin Lizzy, and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were bands whose albums I was happy to play. Otherwise, I mostly enjoyed making fun of her favorite bands — Neil Young’s voice was high and nasally and Jim Carroll’s song “People Who Died” was just a bummer: “Teddy sniffing glue, he was 12 years old/Fell from the roof on East Two-nine.” My mom liked and spun a lot of my records, too, such as Blondie’s Eat to the Beat and Parallel Lines, and Cheap Trick’s All Shook Up. She particularly loved “Dreaming” by Blondie. Of course she did. I know she saw herself as she sang along: “Imagine something of your very own, something you can have and hold/I’d build a road in gold just to have some dreamin’.”

When I listened to music, I would sit on the couch staring at the LP covers and re-reading the liner notes over and over and over again. With all the lamps on in the living room, and sometimes the kitchen light too, I pored over my mom’s rock magazines — Relix, Trouser Press, Creem, Rolling Stone, Melody Maker, New Musical Express. My mom’s approach was completely different. Her music-listening sessions were like a ritual — there were specific, consistent steps that she took each time.

“OK, Kimberly,” she’d say, “it’s time for me to play records now.”

Mom stood over me as I sprawled on the living room couch. I stacked her music magazines neatly, and put them under the end table. My two well-worn favorites were the back-to-back June 1979 Rolling Stone cover stories about my favorite bands: Cheap Trick and Blondie. I loved Cheap Trick because their songs were heavy rock but catchy, and Robin Zander had an incredible voice. Debbie Harry was my idol. I admired her songwriting and her confidence. Before I asked my mom to buy Parallel Lines for me, I didn’t even know it was possible for a woman to front an otherwise all-male rock band. I put Cheap Trick’s Dream Police record back in its sleeve. By the time I stood up, mom had already turned the lights off. All of them. There was still light coming from the kitchen, but the living room was pitch black. She pulled out Freedom of Choice by Devo, put the album on the turntable, and cast a look in my direction that reminded me it was now time to leave the room.

As I sat in the kitchen, I heard the opening strains of “Girl U Want”: “She sings from somewhere you can’t see/She sits in the top of the greenest tree.” I mean, there was no way not to hear it. She played the music so loud everyone on our floor, and the ones above and below us, must have also heard. But she didn’t care. I took a quick peek, watching her dance with her eyes closed in the darkness. I knew she was happy in that moment, and that made me feel safe.

***

“Mommmeeee, I’m not an animal!” I ran into the living room doing my best Johnny Rotten, catching my mom between songs. Rockstar style, I sang into a microphone, my legs at a wide stance. I contorted my face, imitating Rotten’s famous sneer. The one I had seen in Melody Maker. It was 1979, and she had discovered the Sex Pistols after they had broken up, and John Lydon had already moved on to form Public Image Limited. My mom found the Sex Pistols through a Neil Young song. Young was one of her most beloved musicians, so when he sang about Rotten in his 1979 song “Hey, Hey, My, My (Into the Black),” she went on a mission to find out who Rotten was.

My mom was a fierce advocate for me, and she courageously battled every single obstacle placed in our path out in the world. Yet when it came to her romantic life — the vulnerable, personal, private space that had nothing to do with me — she was timid and fearful. I was 10, and by that time I had never known my mother to go on a date or buy a new non-work outfit for herself. Perhaps rock music re-introduced a world — really a multitude of worlds — where my mom was simply Jennifer. Where she was that pretty, confident teenager whose eyes locked with Creedence Clearwater Revival’s singer-songwriter John Fogerty from the front row of a New York City concert before I was born. When listening to Rotten’s take-down of the Queen, and all that the crown stands for, my mom was reminded of what it felt like to be that young rebellious girl whose mother and younger sister had to track down at a Central Park music festival because it was late and they were worried for her safety. Of course, she was fine. She knew how to take care of herself. And she told them as much. Rotten’s angry, shouted lyrics hurling from my mom’s mouth took her back to that earlier version of herself.

Rock music had the same effect on me. Through my mom’s old Creem and Trouser Press magazines, haphazardly strewn about the living room, I saw photographs of everyone from Mick Jagger to Iggy Pop to Robin Zander. Those images were always provocative, and the articles, which I read voraciously, were unflinching in their depiction of the rock ‘n roll lifestyle, replete with unapologetic tales of sexual conquest, illicit drug taking, and all manner of wanton rebellion. I would burrow into the living room couch absorbing these magazines for hours at a time. Sometimes I would imagine myself on stage with the band singing back up, and other times I would settle for being Zander’s or Blondie’s drummer Clem Burke’s date. Either scenario would take me away from the reality: I was a smart but awkward kid who didn’t truly fit in at school or at home. The profound shame I felt about where I lived — some of which I inherited from my mother, who kept the truth of where she resided from her own best friend — and the violence in my home, compelled me to also lie about my social class and seek refuge in music and in the fantastical stories I would tell myself about a different, more glamorous life I might have in the future.

Mom played Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols night after night for weeks. As she sat on the sofa, I waved my hands around, scrunched my face up and screamed the words to “Bodies” as loud as I could. Of course, the lyric was actually “Bodiieeees…I’m not an animal!” rather than “Mommmeeee, I’m not an animal!” Much like my deliberate revision of PIL’s song “Albatross,” changing “Getting rid of the albatross” to the nonsensical “Getting rid of the fireman’s grooooow,” the outrageousness of my misinterpretation was in direct correlation in my mind to the ridiculousness of the song. Mishearing, and getting my mom to laugh, were ways to strengthen our connection.

“This song is sooooo stupid!” I’d say.

“Kimmy!” she’d scream with laughter.

“What the heck is an albatross anyway?!”

I embraced rock music so I could bond with my mother. She didn’t just influence me by playing some songs I liked. She left her impression by both coaxing me into making music more central, as that was going to be a way to communicate and grow together, and showing me that music can soothe pain. When I listen now to “Dancing in the Moonlight” by Thin Lizzy, or Devo’s “Freedom of Choice,” those songs allow me to grieve for my mom, while also keeping her close.

Music helped me to truly know my mother. It bonded us, and I carry our shared love of music with me today. The last rock show my mom and I went to together was the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Stone Temple Pilots, and Fishbone at Jones Beach Theater in Wantagh, New York, in August 2000. This was the year before I left for Los Angeles, where I would live until 2015. She was just a few years older than I am now, and these bands were from my generation, but she — we — had a fantastic time. She continued to embrace new rock and pop music until her death. I have inherited this from her. Not only do I anticipate listening to new music for personal enjoyment well into the future, but I have also made popular music part of my career as a college professor, music journalist, and literary and popular music scholar.

***

In 2011, I was 41 and married, with plans to grow my family, and my mom was readier than she had ever been to be a grandmother. I looked at my mom moving in with us as the natural next step. As I spoke to her on the phone, I imagined her sitting on her bed in her tiny Manhattan apartment. She was 64 and had gained a lot of weight, now resembling her own mother. There was hardly a line on her face, but she had high blood pressure and difficulty walking, which she blamed on the excess weight on her small frame. “I want to help you when the baby comes,” she said. “I’ll take care of the baby during the day. It would make me very happy to do that. I’m ready to be a grandmother now.”

One day I looked in the mirror, and I saw a stranger. I aged years in a matter of weeks. Deep, dark circles appeared under my eyes, and wouldn’t go away no matter how much sleep I got.

I slowly took in my mom’s surprising words as I sat on the burgundy couch in the middle of my Sherman Oaks apartment. My mom was from the boomer generation that believed those over 30 couldn’t be trusted, and she fought getting old with everything she had. I was just a few years away from completing my Ph.D. I knew I wouldn’t be where I was in my career if it weren’t for all that she had done for me. I looked forward to her playing the Beatles for our child. I imagined accompanying our kid to his or her first concert, as my mom did when she took me to see Cheap Trick when I was 11. My husband and I soon embarked on our journey as prospective adoptive parents, a journey we are still on.

But then, after an initial cancer diagnosis four years later, my mom’s health rapidly declined. In six weeks, she went from the promise of her tumor being operable, with the chance of remission, to the palliative care doctor suggesting in-home hospice care. The unpredictable shifts in my mom’s prognosis created in me a psychic whiplash, rendering me unmoored in a way that I had never before experienced. One day I looked in the mirror, and I saw a stranger. I aged years in a matter of weeks. Deep, dark circles appeared under my eyes, and wouldn’t go away no matter how much sleep I got. I didn’t consider turning to music. I imagined it would make me feel worse.

“Sing to me.” My mother repeated her request as we were on the interstate headed for Toledo. I was startled, though I shouldn’t have been. After all, it was music that joined my mother to me from the beginning. Talking about music. Arguing over music. Listening to music. This is what we did together.

I knew it was a choice between the Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar” and “Lola” by the Kinks. Those were two of my mom’s favorite rock songs. My mom sang “Lola” to me often when I was a child. She might begin with the first verse in the kitchen after dinner, and I would join in for the second verse. Or we would engage in an impromptu call and response together before we went to sleep in our room. She would sing, “Lola…” And then I would sing in my child’s voice “L-O-L-A Lola.” And then she would finish sweetly with “lo lo lo lo Lola.” According to family lore, at nine months old, when I could only barely talk, I would hold on with one hand to the railing of my crib, letting the other arm swing lazily over the side. As I bounced up and down on my chubby legs, I would sing the “Yeah, yeah yeah, woo!” backing vocal of “Brown Sugar” with my mother. The British Invasion arrived in 1964, when my mom was 17. She liked the Beatles all right, but in the endless rock supremacy debates that pitted The Fab Four against The World’s Greatest Rock & Roll Band, it was hands down the Stones for her all day, every day. “The Beatles are nice,” she would say, “but the Rolling Stones are dangerous.”

It made sense that in the back of this ambulette, she wanted what comforted her — the music and the daughter that had given her life. I reached for my phone to find the lyrics to “Lola.” I didn’t want to get them wrong. I cleared my throat, leaned in close, and in a quiet voice I began:

“I met her in a club down in old Soho…”

I looked at my mom. She had her eyes closed, and her face looked peaceful. I sang the whole song. She opened her eyes and smiled.

“Sing it again.”

Here we were at our call and response rock ‘n’ roll best, all these years on.

The ambulette moved along. The ride was steady, as we were long out of Manhattan, and now on the smooth interstate roads. We still had hours to go. I hummed “Lola” to myself and grinned. As sick and delirious as my mother was, she recognized me, and she allowed me to comfort her. She let me soothe her pain with the Kinks — with music, the thing that helped her to survive.

It was then that I realized that in all of the craziness of the last several weeks, while my mom was still lucid, I had never shared what I wrote to her in the acknowledgments section of my dissertation. So I leaned in close:

“Mom, I dedicated my dissertation to you.” She beamed, and I continued: “You’re the best mother ever. I just want you to know that.”

“Give me a kiss,” she replied.

And then I kissed her on her cheek. She smiled again and soon fell asleep.

She died six days later.

* * *

Kimberly Mack is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toledo. Her book, Fade to Black: Blues Music and the Art of Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White, is under contract with the University of Massachusetts Press.

Editor: Sari Botton

* * *

Also In the Fine Lines Series:
Introducing Fine Lines
Gone Gray
An Introduction to Death
Age Appropriate
A Woman, Tree or Not
Dress You Up in My Love
The Wrong Pair
‘Emerging’ as a Writer — After 40
Losing the Plot
A Portrait of the Mother as a Young Girl
Elegy in Times Square
Every Day I Write the Book

Johnny Rotten, My Mom, and Me

Kimberly Mack — Fri, 22 Feb 2019 11:00:21 +0000

Kimberly Mack | Longreads | February 2019 | 28 minutes (7,118 words)

“Will you sing to me?”

“Look, Mom!” I wrote. “I can’t believe the house comes with such colorful flowers. There are dark pink rose bushes in the backyard.”

“Oh Kim, it’s so beautiful,” she texted back.

“I can’t wait for you to see it,” I replied. And that was true. Neither one of us had lived in a house before.

***

“You act like those white folks you love so much!” screamed my grandmother.

“That’s just ignorant!” my mom yelled in response. “Wanting what’s best for Kim isn’t a white thing!”

“Don’t you fucking call me ignorant in my house!”

My mother defended the way she chose to raise me — offering material advantages she did not have growing up — despite my grandmother’s disapproval.

That included us.

***

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***

Since I was not in the courtyard as often as the other boys and girls, I was either shunned or mocked when they did see me. They’d ask, ‘Why you talk so white?’

“You stupid old woman,” my mother would reply, “why don’t you just try it!”

In my head, I can still hear the refrains of a recurring fight my mother and grandmother had.

“If you don’t like it, you can get the fuck outta my house!” my grandmother would bellow.

“That’s great language to use around your granddaughter. What a great example you’re setting!” my mother would screech.

“I don’t give a fuck what kinda example I’m setting. This is my house, and if you don’t like it you can leave!”

“Whatta bully you are. You’re wrong and you just can’t admit it!”

“Get the fuck out!”

“I’ll get the fuck out as soon as I can!”

My mother rocked out just as hard to Johnny Rotten’s sneering vocals. It was a way of drowning out her pain. I would soon do the same, blasting music of all kinds to escape the epic fights between my mother and grandmother.

***

“OK, Kimberly,” she’d say, “it’s time for me to play records now.”

***

“This song is sooooo stupid!” I’d say.

“Kimmy!” she’d scream with laughter.

“What the heck is an albatross anyway?!”

***

One day I looked in the mirror, and I saw a stranger. I aged years in a matter of weeks. Deep, dark circles appeared under my eyes, and wouldn’t go away no matter how much sleep I got.

“I met her in a club down in old Soho…”

I looked at my mom. She had her eyes closed, and her face looked peaceful. I sang the whole song. She opened her eyes and smiled.

“Sing it again.”

Here we were at our call and response rock ‘n’ roll best, all these years on.

“Mom, I dedicated my dissertation to you.” She beamed, and I continued: “You’re the best mother ever. I just want you to know that.”

“Give me a kiss,” she replied.

And then I kissed her on her cheek. She smiled again and soon fell asleep.

She died six days later.

* * *

Editor: Sari Botton

* * *

Yearning for My Emo Days in Nostalgia-Inducing Asbury Park

mabel — Fri, 28 Jul 2017 12:00:59 +0000

Mabel Rosenheck | Longreads | July 2017 | 20 minutes (4,918 words)

On April 27, 2003, I sat with two friends in arena seats in Convention Hall in Asbury Park, New Jersey. Inside, the building looks like a generic mid-size concert venue, but its lobby is a fantastic, mammoth arcade and exhibition space with polished floors, square arches trimmed by Corinthian columns, and wrought-iron windows that sunlight pours through in spades. It is industrial, yet elegant. It is American, yet with unmistakable allusions to European modernity, to beaux arts style. Overwhelming the boardwalk and the beach, it is urban architecture that rises dramatically from the ocean, jutting out into the breakers, bearing the brunt of Atlantic hurricanes. It is a hard place to describe, but it is also a hard place to forget and an easy place to romanticize.

I’d met my friends the year before on an internet message board for a shitty pop punk band from Chicago named Mest. The internet was still figuring out what it was; we were still figuring out who we were. We were lonely and isolated in the suburbs of Connecticut, Long Island, and New Jersey. We found something we needed in this music. We found something we needed in each other.

It was a Sunday, and some of our friends had to leave to catch buses and trains to finish term papers and make classes on Monday morning. I was there with Dena and Deirdre, but we felt deeply the absence of Jillian, the last of our essential quartet. Jillian’s leaving that morning made the moment more melancholy than a Sunday hangover or an emo song alone, because something was missing.

Inside, we were about halfway up the stands on the left side of the stage, or at least that’s how I remember it. The seats were blue. The room was kind of a hazy gray with sunshine struggling to find its way through windows nestled into the top row, or maybe that was just the hangover, or maybe that is just the nostalgia.

I’d met my friends the year before on an internet message board for a pop punk band. The internet was still figuring out what it was; we were still figuring out who we were.

The band on stage was Brand New. Before they were playing Madison Square Garden and headlining Coachella, before Deja Entendu came out, when it was only Your Favorite Weapon’s particular brand of angsty emo with songs about breaking up with girlfriends and best friends, Brand New was on stage on day three of Skate and Surf 2003, a music festival in Asbury Park. They promised us there that tonight would go on forever while we walked around this town like we owned the streets.

We’d been down the shore since Friday afternoon. Jillian came down from Boston and met me in New Haven, and though she wasn’t there for that Sunday moment, Asbury Park was nothing without her, and the trip down was nothing without her. I had left college in Massachusetts and moved back in with my parents in Connecticut a month before. Jillian was in college in Boston, but not happy. Dena was in Philadelphia, finding her way well enough, but not quite enough. Deirdre was always the most well-adjusted of all of us, but I guess even she was looking for something. We bonded over 18-year-old existential loneliness on an internet message board, and that weekend we, along with a few thousand other existential teenagers like us, drove down I-95 and the Garden State Parkway to the parking lot of the Berkeley Carteret Hotel.

The Used performing in Asbury Park in 2003 (Photo by David Pomponio/FilmMagic)

With Jillian and Dena and Deirdre and everyone else, I had sugary teenage drinks with the back of my car open before the hotel room was ready. I had more drinks in our hotel room that day and that night and the next day. We watched a parade of punk rock lineage including post-hardcore bands like Thrice, screamo bands like The Used, and indie performers like Onelinedrawing. We shared a bottle of tequila with a guy with a straight edge tattoo. Then I made out with him. It was a frenetic good time, but as much as I remember the red angel wings I paired with a wifebeater and black vinyl pants, as much as I remember the Home Grown drum head that I used as a cocktail tray, as much as I remember the Kiwis that crashed on our floor, I remember Sunday afternoon sitting about halfway up on the left side of those blue seats in that hazy gray room that the sunshine didn’t quite reach. Listening to that song, at that time, and in that place, I felt closer to the people who were there and the one who wasn’t than I maybe ever have to anyone. We were a few girls in a sea of teenagers, in a beachside town where we didn’t live, but as much as it was a moment shared with the thousands of people who were there, I remember this as a small moment between us; I remember this as a place that belonged to us.

It may be my own nostalgia because of course since then life has gotten more complicated, or it may be the nostalgia attached to Asbury Park as the site of not just Skate and Surf in the 2000s but of Springsteen in the ’70s or vintage vacationers in the ’20s, but that weekend and that moment lives with me like few others do. Like few others do, that moment brings me both joy that it existed and sadness that it can no longer exist.

***

In our suburban lives and our urban colleges we’d been lonely and isolated. But in 2001, there were also message boards, and there was also AOL instant messenger. Not to sound too nostalgic, too much “back in my day,” but before Facebook and Twitter and Snapchat, there were message boards, and there was AOL instant messenger.

We bonded over 18-year-old existential loneliness on an internet message board, and that weekend we, along with a few thousand other existential teenagers, drove down to the parking lot of the Berkeley Carteret Hotel.

I don’t remember my first post to the Mest board. I don’t remember what it was about that site that seemed welcoming and accessible when others weren’t. I don’t remember how I made the connections I made. I know Jillian (here4ulaw) was first. We were talking one day about whether we could get to Asbury Park via public transportation when Dena (ekk), a Jersey resident, offered advice. Though Jillian was in college in Boston, she was from Long Island, the next town over from Deirdre (dorkmeister2000). Others would become part of our internet lives — and our real ones — 16-year-old Mollie (tasteofink) would join us when her parents would let her, and Amanda (benjisleftnut) was a fixture too — but Jillian, Dena, and Deirdre were the ones that made friendship seem to me like something that wasn’t impossible.

At the time, I liked to construct my identity in terms of the subcultural, outsider cache of old-school hardcore and punk rock. I still do. It makes me feel different, but also legible, as though I value something specific that is a little outside of the mainstream, but I’m still recognizable to kindred spirits. In my performative moments, I used to list The Clash, X, and Minor Threat as my favorite bands. I came into punk rock through The Clash and the Sex Pistols and the Ramones, through CDs I could order from Columbia House or BMG for a penny, through cassettes I could steal from my older sister. And when it came out in 2001, Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life changed the way I thought about music, and I devoured every band he listed there, every label those bands were on. Minor Threat’s Complete Discography made me think about the world in a new way. Hüsker Dü’s New Day Rising made me hear the world in a new way. It may be trite, but Black Flag’s Damaged sounded the way I felt. These bands were formative for my 17-year-old self. They did whatever it is that music does for so many teenagers like me. They gave me a sense of who I was, and a sense of who I could be.

Yet if, in my performative moments, I listed The Clash, X, and Minor Threat as my favorite bands, the bands I just as often listened to in my car were these older artists’ more melodic, more mainstream, more suburban, and whinier descendants. These were the pop punk bands and the emo bands. Where Black Flag and Minor Threat played as loud and fast as possible, The Get Up Kids, Saves the Day, and New Found Glory wrote songs with actual choruses and verses and hooks. Where hardcore bands howled about alienation from society, emo bands dwelled more often on the loss of their girlfriends. Emo bands also found homes on record labels like Vagrant and Drive-Thru that operated with the aspirations of majors rather than with the fuck you ethos of DIY indies from the ’80s like Minor Threat’s Dischord or Black Flag’s SST. Both hardcore and emo were expressions of white, male, teenage isolation to be sure, and earlier emo bands like Rites of Spring or Texas Is the Reason are a bridge between ’80s hardcore and 2000s pop, but it’s hard to mistake Embrace for The Starting Line, and I was just as much the latter as I tried to be the former.

So I was obsessed with the cool punk rock past, but I was never the hip, scenester emo kid who competed over who knew the more obscure band or had the more esoteric collection of colored vinyl. I listened to indie music, but I was never cool enough to go to basement shows of bands that would only become legendary after their demise. I have precious few stories about seeing artists before they “sold out,” but I did go to CBGB, and I did see Taking Back Sunday when their only album was Tell All Your Friends, and I did see Brand New when their only album was Your Favorite Weapon. And though these bands weren’t the ones that gave me the same sense of who I was that The Clash did, the people I met because of these bands changed my life maybe even more.

All of this began to happen in 2000 and 2001, right when emo bands like Jimmy Eat World and Dashboard Confessional started breaking into MTV, right when pop punk bands like blink-182 and Good Charlotte were having their moment. In the fall of 2000, when I was a junior in high school, I spent a semester abroad. It didn’t go well. I was depressed and suicidal. Being in a foreign country didn’t turn out to be the solution it had once appeared. Though it was what my dad wanted, going back to my all-girls boarding school was the last thing I could imagine would help. So I dropped out of school. Moved back in with my parents. And with a blue clamshell iBook, I started spending a lot of time on the internet, and I met Dena, Deirdre, and Jillian.

For a time, we lived for long threads and long weekends with stops at Irving Plaza (originally a Polish-American community center) in New York, the Worcester Palladium (an old movie palace) in Massachusetts, and the Birch Hill Nite Club (an old country club) in New Jersey. We took trains into the city and drove my green Subaru station wagon down Route 9 in the Garden State. We’d arrive early and hang out in the parking lot drinking Malibu rum with Mountain Dew Code Red and pineapple juice from red plastic Solo cups. We’d stay late with stops at Jersey diners, not yet ready for the night to end, not yet ready to go back to our parents’ houses or our college dorms, not yet ready to go back to the rest of our lives.

It may be my own nostalgia because of course since then life has gotten more complicated, or it may be the nostalgia attached to Asbury Park as the site of not just Skate and Surf in the 2000s but of Springsteen in the ’70s or vintage vacationers in the ’20s.

I don’t know if other people at those shows thought we were those girls. Inauthentic. Not really there for the music. Poseurs. But we didn’t care. Maybe because we weren’t there for the music, or at least not just. We were there for each other. I would’ve done anything for those girls, and I think they would’ve done anything for me. We’ve grown apart some in the years since I moved away for graduate school in Texas in 2008. I take responsibility for all that has happened, all of the times I didn’t say happy birthday, all of the times I didn’t know how to stay in touch, but even now that I’m back — trying, but mostly failing, at transitioning out of academia and into a high-powered New York career — we only seem to see each other when one of those old bands reunites, and I’m still not sure how to reconnect. I never used to think of myself as a nostalgic person, but if there is anything I am nostalgic for, it is for those days and those nights. It is for those girls and the person they brought out in me. They made me someone new. They made me someone capable of joy.

I don’t know if other people at those shows thought we were entertaining or pathetic, whether they loved us or hated us, whether we were ruining things or running them. But that didn’t matter. What mattered, I think, was that we not only had each other, but also had a space which we could occupy. In those parking lots, on those sidewalks, we took up space that wasn’t granted to us anywhere else. We were young women who didn’t have the garages and basements of band practice, who didn’t want the suburban malls that we were given as female consumers (though Dena did work at a Hot Topic). We didn’t think of it this way at the time, but Jessica Hopper’s formative essay “Where the Girls Aren’t” and eight years of graduate school has led me to understand those trips and what they meant to us in new terms. The emo music we listened to was The Get Up Kids telling us to “Forgive me for running off to find the one thing I have to do.” They were telling us to wait for our boyfriends while they went off to make art and follow their ambitions. The emo music we listened to was Saves the Day singing “Let me take this awkward saw, run it against your thighs,” linking sex and violence in ways that are not so comfortable for me now. So often this music — music sung by suburban white boys claiming rebellion through electric guitars and three chord songs or through shows at VFW halls and self-released EPs — denied subjectivity to the women these men idealized. They negotiated masculinity through emotion and vulnerability, but they didn’t think critically about the women in their lives, choosing instead to whine about them.

We didn’t think critically about it at the time either, or at least I didn’t, but those parking lots were a rebuke to just singing along and finding solace in someone else’s emotions. We were staking an active claim with our bodies rather than resigning ourselves to the passive role of the teenybopper and the groupie. Yes, we courted boys in bands — we laughed with Dan from Home Grown and tried to strike a deal for his t-shirt, we took pictures of the boys from Mest with a farting doll that looked like a mutual friend — but it was for our own amusement more than theirs. They were players in our game, not the other way around.

The struggle to find a space of one’s own is real for everyone, but even more so for teenagers who are always confined by their parents’ addresses. “Boys passing the bottle back to Pete on the overpass,” to quote the lyrics of Brand New’s “Soco Amaretto Lime,” is not necessarily so different from girls pouring drinks in the back of a car in a suburban parking lot. However, this search for a place of our own means something different for girls and young women who are still told over and over again that our place is in the home, that our place is as cultural consumers not cultural producers. My friends and I never started a band, never even talked about starting a band, but in those moments, at those venues, we, in some small way, remade cultural consumption into a statement about our place in the world. Through female friendship, through our very existence in public, we did something not as fans of a band, but as autonomous selves. We were more than cultural consumers, more than teenyboppers or groupies. No, we weren’t in bands, but together we defined who we were rather than letting even the bands we came to see do it for us. In some sense music brought us together, yes, but it wasn’t some male singer or macho guitarist who allowed me to make sense out of adolescence, it was a bunch of teenage girls from the internet who helped me take up space in a parking lot in Asbury Park.

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As much as I see now how aspects of that music are problematic — its whiteness, its masculinity, its construction of women — that music was the soundtrack to my growing up. And when I think about that music and that time retrospectively, I think about the women I knew whose friendship changed my life, and I think of our nascent feminism. I do also think about the boys I encountered in crowds, on Friendster and Makeoutclub and Mad Rad Hair, or in hotel rooms in Asbury Park. I used to ask strangers to make out with me in the pit. I asked a boy from Amish country (he wasn’t Amish) to pose with me as if he was my prom date, because I never went to prom, and I was wearing a tiara. I almost had sex with the tour manager for Senses Fail in the back of their van. I discovered that I was a woman with desire, and, in strange ways, those spaces — backed within them, as I was, by my friends — allowed me to act on that, to explore it, to grow up. This wasn’t a safe, high school boyfriend with a promise ring who either guaranteed purity or assured just the opposite. This wasn’t about love. This was probably reckless, but mostly it was fun.

For a long time, I defined myself in terms of depression and sadness and the anger turned inward that I’d felt from the time I was 11. It wasn’t until I was 17, 18, 19 that, because of these people, I began to see myself in new terms. I fear that I’ve lost that person now, but nostalgia reminds me of her; Asbury Park, with its own built-in nostalgia, reminds me of her.

***

In 4th of July, Asbury Park: A History of the Promised Land, Daniel Wolff traces Asbury Park’s identity as a promised land, but a promised land that never really existed the way so many dreamed it could. James A. Bradley, a Victorian converted Methodist from the Lower East Side of Manhattan, first developed the site in the 1870s as a Christian oasis and a wholesome middle-class destination for white tourists from New York and New Jersey and Philadelphia. Wolff argues that even though the place has its own history of racial and class conflict, of violence and segregation, the city has often been imagined as an idealized space that urbanites could escape to, a space for leaving behind the chaos and oppressive crowding of the modern industrial city. Asbury Park had pristine beaches, healing salt waters, and cool ocean breezes. It was designed as a contrast to the raucous, democratic space of Coney Island, but its identity was still contested by groups like the Ladies’ Christian Temperance Union, on the one hand, and, on the other, pharmacists selling “medicinal” alcohol at the turn of the century or bootleggers running rum during prohibition. As much as Asbury Park was a Christian promised land that vowed a virtuous escape from the corrupt city, it also has a long history of providing immoral amusements, not-so-innocent flirtation, and the threat of female sexuality in vintage bathing suits.

The struggle to find a space of one’s own is real for everyone, but even more so for teenagers who are always confined by their parents’ addresses.

Asbury Park’s heyday ended in the 1920s, but it is only since the last four miles of the Garden State Parkway opened in 1955 and since the opening of the Monmouth Mall in 1960 that the city has truly been in decline. People of color have been left behind in a community that no longer sees the tens of thousands of visitors who have moved on to more serene, less congested, whiter shore towns further south. The abandonment of the city by tourists was followed by urban rebellions in the 1960s. Rehabilitation was attempted in the 1970s, but unemployment reached 20 percent in the 1980s when sunny portraits of the resort’s revival finally gave way to much graver realities, though those realities were nothing new. In the 1990s, the private developers who were supposed to save the town by building new housing complexes went bankrupt. As it did for Springsteen in the ’70s, this boardwalk life seemed through. The promise of Asbury Park is a promise that has been broken over and over again.

In the new millennium, there was optimism that an influx of gays and lesbians looking for vacation alternatives to Fire Island and the Hamptons and hipster-types opening vintage shops and frequenting the bowling alley would revive the city with year-round attractions. But there was also recession. And there was also Hurricane Sandy. And so now the identity of Asbury Park is still being contested. There are those who want to look inward to the community — both new communities and perhaps more importantly old ones — and there are those who want to look outward (or backward) to middle-class, white tourism. There are those who privatize the vintage appeal of the past, who capitalize on history for individual, commercial gain as they bring in new, outside developers to take over the old Boardwalk and build new condos or luxury hotels, tearing down mid-century neon or dingy bars, and there are those who see nostalgia as a public asset and civic identity. But nostalgia, in any form, is dangerous, because it writes out these histories of opposition, instead imaging the return to a time when things were more wholesome or more pure than they ever really were.

For a long time, I defined myself in terms of depression and sadness and the anger turned inward that I’d felt from the time I was 11. It wasn’t until I was 17, 18, 19 that, because of these people, I began to see myself in new terms.

Sitting in those arena seats fourteen years ago, I didn’t yet know any of this. I didn’t know how intertwined my own nostalgia could be with the nostalgia of this place that had been so contested for so long, had been so idealized for so long. Convention Hall opened in 1930 in this seaside, resort town on the Jersey Shore. Designed by the same architects who created Grand Central Station, it was the apex of economic development in Asbury Park in the first half of the twentieth century, intended to attract tourists to the Boardwalk more than to serve a self-sustaining community. Since its opening, it has served as a military officer training center during World War II, and it hosted a Mrs. America (not Miss America, but Mrs.) competition in 1952. In 1956, a concert there spawned a riot (labeled a race riot by local police) after which rock and roll music was banned from the city outright. It has seen performances by white-led big band jazz combos in the 1930s, by black rock and rollers like Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers in the 1950s, and, most famously, by Bruce Springsteen returning triumphantly home to his working class roots in the 1990s. Reflecting Asbury Park’s new hip, young residents, Convention Hall is currently a venue for women’s roller derby and punk rock flea markets.

When we were sitting in those arena seats in 2003, it was Skate and Surf, a large-scale celebration of punk rock and emo that was capitalizing on the place’s appeal as a shore town past its prime that might return there with some good ol’ rock and roll. When we were sitting in those arena seats, Brand New was on stage, and they played a song about staying 18 forever. They were twenty-somethings preparing already to be as nostalgic as they place where they were performing.

Though I clearly indulge in it, nostalgia is a problematic mode of understanding the past. It is too often about loss and innocence, about a time and place that is romanticized, a time and place that never really existed quite as we want to remember it. My memories seem so real, so accurately recalled, but I know better than to trust them. I know that memories lie, and yet I believe mine. I know that, like Asbury Park’s, mine is an idealized history, but I cling to it anyway, in part because it is easy, in part because it is joyful. Mine are memories that want to find a place in the present, because I want to imagine myself as someone compassionate, as someone who would do anything for the people I care about, for the people that care about me, but they are memories which I fear are simply naive artifacts of the past. They are artifacts I’m not sure I should retrieve. They are artifacts I’m not sure how to retrieve anyway.

If the past is a site of struggle, Asbury Park and I have something in common as we negotiate our longing for the past and our need to move forward. Asbury Park finds economic development in the restoration of Convention Hall, in the reconstruction of the Boardwalk with retro boutiques like Bettie’s Bombshells and the Silverball Pinball Museum, in images of Tillie, the grinning avatar of the now-demolished Palace Amusements. As municipal marketing wrapped around new construction declares, Asbury Park is “where the future is crafted from the past,” where “artistry is ancestry.” White vacationers now pack the beach, delighting in the city’s kitschy past while enjoying the amenities of remodeled hotels, fashionable restaurants, and modern stretch fabrics.

It was harder for me to return. Last year I came back to the shore looking for the past. I was alone. It was difficult. The loss of the past, the loss of those friendships, the loss of who I was when I was with those people, in that place was too fresh. Memories were everywhere with nothing new to replace them. There was no way to move forward. I was looking for a feeling of belonging, for a feeling of home, but like vacationers in the 1920s or the 1950s, I could only be a visitor to Asbury Park, to the past. In the end, I was more like Springsteen, looking for a way out, than I was like Brand New staying 18 forever.

Nostalgia, the longing for the past, the idealization of the past, has power. It reunites bands. It sells records and concert tickets. It reunites friends. Can it even rebuild cities? Nostalgia reminds us of things we valued before we faced jobs and homeownership and parenthood, before we learned more about gender politics and racial conflict and systematic economic neglect. But it must, if it is to be anything more than wistful, reckon with these harder histories.

Last year I came back to the shore, alone. The loss of the past, the loss of those friendships, the loss of who I was when I was with those people, in that place was too fresh.

Indeed, if those years of graduate school have taught me anything about nostalgia, it is that we must interrogate what we are nostalgic for. I have a feminist nostalgia for that kind of song, for that place, for those people, for that version of myself, but it is embedded in a sanitized nostalgia for Asbury Park, for Convention Hall, for all of the historical venues and all of the parking lots we took over and took apart. When I was there, I didn’t see the service economy that the shore is contingent upon. When I was there, I didn’t see the race relations that underpinned these venues and the very music that brought me and my friends together. I can write now about the gender politics of what we were doing and what it means to me, but it is harder to insert the West Side of Asbury Park into my narrative of Skate and Surf. It is harder for me to fit whiteness into this conversation because it is so normalized in the genre and in my experience. Nostalgia has power. It reunites bands. It reunites friends. It can maybe even rebuild cities, but who gets left out? Who gets left out when we build community around nostalgia for white, middle-class leisure, around nostalgia for white, middle-class emo?

So when Brand New sang the words to “Soco Amaretto Lime” in Asbury Park, when they sang about bullshitting with friends while you pass the bottle on the overpass, when they sang about wanting to stay 18 forever, they sang lyrics about us, yes, but those words were just as much background noise to something larger, at least for us, or at least for me. On their next record Brand New recited the lines “I hope this song starts a craze. The kind of song that ignites the airwaves. The kind of song that makes people glad to be where they are with whoever they’re there with.” Dena always resented that line. She resented the almost sarcasm with which this punk-rocker-cum-teen-idol called out our earnest relationship to “Soco Amaretto Lime,” a relationship that clearly wasn’t ours alone. He seemed to mock our investment, mock what this silly emo band meant to us, but maybe he also mocked the nostalgia that was already embedded in that song, and in that place, and maybe he was right to, but maybe we don’t need to give up on 18 either.

* * *

Mabel Rosenheck is a writer, historian, and historiographer with a PhD in media studies from Northwestern University.

Editor: Sari Botton

Yearning for My Emo Days in Nostalgia-Inducing Asbury Park

mabel — Fri, 28 Jul 2017 12:00:59 +0000

Mabel Rosenheck | Longreads | July 2017 | 20 minutes (4,918 words)

I’d met my friends the year before on an internet message board for a pop punk band. The internet was still figuring out what it was; we were still figuring out who we were.

The Used performing in Asbury Park in 2003 (Photo by David Pomponio/FilmMagic)

***

We bonded over 18-year-old existential loneliness on an internet message board, and that weekend we, along with a few thousand other existential teenagers, drove down to the parking lot of the Berkeley Carteret Hotel.

It may be my own nostalgia because of course since then life has gotten more complicated, or it may be the nostalgia attached to Asbury Park as the site of not just Skate and Surf in the 2000s but of Springsteen in the ’70s or vintage vacationers in the ’20s.

Kickstart your weekend reading by getting the week’s best Longreads delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon.

***

The struggle to find a space of one’s own is real for everyone, but even more so for teenagers who are always confined by their parents’ addresses.

For a long time, I defined myself in terms of depression and sadness and the anger turned inward that I’d felt from the time I was 11. It wasn’t until I was 17, 18, 19 that, because of these people, I began to see myself in new terms.

Last year I came back to the shore, alone. The loss of the past, the loss of those friendships, the loss of who I was when I was with those people, in that place was too fresh.

* * *

Mabel Rosenheck is a writer, historian, and historiographer with a PhD in media studies from Northwestern University.

Editor: Sari Botton

Yearning for My Emo Days in Nostalgia-Inducing Asbury Park

Sari Botton — Fri, 28 Jul 2017 12:00:46 +0000

A personal essay in which writer Mabel Rosenheck considers her nostalgia for a key time in her life: the summer of 2003, when she was a young, depressed adult attending the Surf & Skate music festival in Asbury Park with friends in a similar emotional space, whom she’d met on the internet.

Read The Story

How Temple of the Dog Pioneered a New Genre of Music Videos in the ’90s

Matt Giles — Tue, 09 May 2017 12:00:19 +0000

Matt Giles | Longreads | May 2017 | 15 minutes (3,772 words)

Last month, Pearl Jam was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Introduced by David Letterman, who looked resplendent with his chin-length beard, it was a fitting honor for one of the greatest rock groups of all time. “I feel like maybe we’re about halfway there to deserving an accolade of this kind of stature, but this is very encouraging,” said Eddie Vedder, Pearl Jam’s lead singer, as part of his acceptance remarks.

What was left unmentioned by Vedder and his fellow bandmates was the collaboration that directly preceded Pearl Jam’s formation more than 25 years ago in Seattle—a supergroup that enjoyed its own moment in the spotlight last year.

Temple of the Dog only released one album, but after a two-decade hiatus, the group reformed in June and announced a multi-concert tour across the United States. Normally, this wouldn’t have made headlines, but it did because Temple of the Dog was a mix of soon-to-be superstars from Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, including Jeff Ament, Stone Gossard, Matt Cameron, Mike McCready, Chris Cornell, and Vedder (who didn’t tour, but was in the original lineup). These rock gods had never officially toured as Temple of the Dog (there have been a few shows here and there, and every few years a video of Cornell and Vedder jamming out to “Hunger Strike,” the band’s hit single, goes viral), but this tour was the first time the musicians got together as the early-’90s super group. “We’re essentially a baby band,” Ament told Rolling Stone in a recent oral history of the band. “We’re 25 years down the road, but we’ve never toured.”

The tour renewed the attention paid to Temple’s “Hunger Strike” music video. Released three times over the ensuing decades, the video — sparse, loaded with symbolism, and an ode to both the city of Seattle and Andy Wood, the Mother Love Bone singer whose death both launched and inspired Temple’s founding — gained notoriety for helping to foment the wave of the ’90s video genre. You know what they look like: dark colors, set in nature, elderly individuals writing on a chalkboard, anthropomorphism, warped graphics, unconventional camera angles, and more. The TV sitcom “How I Met Your Mother” mocked the style in the 2013 episode, “PS I Love You”; the episode featured the alt-rock backstory of Robin Scherbatsky, whose breakout hit had all the ’90s music video trappings (including extras clad in flannel).

“There were certain things showing up in videos that were consistent through that time period, and we’d crack up every once and a while,” says Amy Finnerty, a music programming executive at MTV who first pressured the network to air the “Hunger Strike” video. “It’s not hard to notice a lot of videos featuring a sole lightbulb flickering or swinging ominously. The theme was noticeable.”

While Temple of the Dog released only one record, the creative implications of “Hunger Strike’s” music video reverberated throughout the industry. It was a call to action of the scene, which was still too early to be called grunge, and kicked off several years of artistic creativity, growing budgets, and the how a network—through programs like “Buzz Bin” and “120 Minutes”—wholly embraced grunge and alternative music. “Music was shifting, and the musical movement was shifting from what was on MTV,” says Susan Silver, who managed Soundgarden and Alice in Chains (and was, at one point, married to Cornell). “Not that there weren’t tons of nuanced videos, but we just didn’t see them very often. So this movement that was moodier and had different undertones and visuals became much more evocative to those watching as well as creating the videos.”

When Paul Rachman was first approached to direct the “Hunger Strike” video, the 29-year-old director was just emerging from an artistic rut. A native New Yorker, Rachman had cut his directing teeth on videos for Bad Brains, Gangrene, and Mission of Burma, but by the late 1980s, “hardcore was turning into speed metal,” he says. “Guns N’ Roses and Motley Crue are breaking, and all of a sudden, I was in this heavy metal world. I’m not that guy. There was this mountain of crappy music coming out. Every single one of them has to do a video, and every single one of them has to try to get on MTV. There’s an abundance going on, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it was good music. I wasn’t inspired.”

Though MTV was roughly a decade old, the network was still trying to figure out how to best utilize the music video medium. Though the channel mostly showed music videos, but there hadn’t yet been a dominant musical movement to which the network could align itself. Since the only videos being produced were financed by record companies, there was a small pool to draw from. Though some then-unknown performers like Cyndi Lauper and Madonna were able to break the mold and skyrocket to fame based on videos championed by MTV, the record companies made sure to crowd out all competitors, limiting the boundaries of what a music video could be.

“I don’t want to say ’80s bands were dumb,” says Juliana Roberts, a producer for The Foundry, Propaganda Films’ hard rock division. “But there was a formula at that point. There was a hot girl, a band performing live, or the band riding off on motorcycles with hot girls. It was very basic.”

“It was the big rock look,” says Rachman. “It was slick. It was all the same—big lights, big rock. The record companies liked that because they always knew that’s what they were getting. It’s like, ‘Oh, well let’s buy the red Cadillac, that’s this guy.’”

Hoping to foster an undercurrent of underground music that might crest into the mainstream (and score the thousands upon thousands of eyeballs the network needed), MTV launched “120 Minutes” in 1986. According to Dave Kendall, the show’s creator and an early host, its mission was simple: “This was a time when smaller bands could only get airplay on college radio [and] ‘120 Minutes’ provided the broadest exposure for the less commercial music videos.” The show, which lasted for nearly 1,000 episodes on MTV and MTV2, was a testing ground for videos the network’s executives thought might resonate—if they thought a video would blow up, it would premiere on “120 Minutes.”

But a group couldn’t just leap-frog from its Econovan to the primetime rotation. All new videos, regardless of the musical genre or artist, were submitted to MTV’s music meeting committee, a dozen or so staff members—all in their 20s and 30s—who met every Monday to determine whether the video had a place within the ethos. “All the music that played on MTV, regardless of the show, was cleared by music programming,” says Finnerty, who worked in the department in the early ’90s. “Four weeks or so in heavy rotation could really blow a band up.” If a group wasn’t ready for “120 Minutes,” though, their videos could land in the “Buzz Bin,” which was originally called “Hip Clip of the Week.”

“It was all about getting in the ‘Buzz Bin,’” says Rachman. “That could lead to getting in daily rotation on MTV and break out. It was a crap shoot.”

In 1992, Judy McGrath, an executive vice president and creative director for MTV, told the New York Times: “Music, visually presented, is the lifeblood of the channel. We need new music to keep our viewers stimulated and watching.”

Rachman had to, in his words, “fake it for a bit,” directing the “War Inside My Head” video for Suicidal Tendencies, which alternates between shots of the band performing and scenes inside the mosh pit, so when Silver tapped him to direct the second single for an up-and-coming band called Alice in Chains, Rachman was eager for a change. “Everything was a bit different in Seattle, and the sounds really connected with my upbringing in punk and hardcore,” he explains. “The city had a different slant.”

The resulting video was “Man in the Box,” and Rachman hashed out the video’s concept over fax with Layne Staley, the band’s lead singer. “It was all very loosely conceptual,” he says. “Layne had these ideas like a leaky barn and a baby with eyes sewn shut, so I took that into account as well as listened to the lyrics and the music.”

Though the finalized treatment — a sepia-toned video featuring the band in a barn, surrounded by pigs and cows, with an appearance from the Reaper (an elderly man with his eyes and mouth sewn shut) — was approved, Rachman had his doubts the day of December shoot: “As I am driving to the barn, I kept asking myself, ‘What the fuck am I doing putting this kind of rock band on a farm with cows and pigs?’ I just came to this sudden realization that there’s nothing like this on MTV. No other band is doing this.”

Released in early 1991, the video not only became an instant hit, but also a quintessential video in the ’90s genre. It codified the checklist for what a video in the ’90s would look like. In Mark Yarm’s Everybody Loves Our Town, an oral history of the Pacific Northwest music scene, Rick Krim, MTV’s director of music talent, explained how “Man in the Box” set the stage for videos like “Hunger Strike”: “I remember discussing in a meeting whether [to take] Alice in Chains or this band Thunder, which was a hair band that sounded like Whitesnake. There was a whole big discussion, and … we all picked Alice in Chains. The video … was pretty dark. Sort of the antithesis of a lot of stuff on the channel. Alice in Chains felt like it was something new, and Thunder felt like it was something old. When MTV opts for this Alice in Chains band over a hair band, that was starting the tide turning.”

Finnerty adds, “Nothing during prime time or regular rotation hours looked different. It was all Bobby Brown, Paula Abdul, or stuff that bridged the ’80s and ’90s. Anything that looked different and weird, that was good.”

Fresh off the rapid success of “Man in the Box,” Silver again tapped Rachman for another video. This one — “Hunger Strike” by Temple of the Dog — was a unique scenario. Andy Wood, the charismatic lead singer of Mother Love Bone, died in 1990 following a heroin overdose; it was a very fluid moment musically in Seattle, and two of Mother Love Bone’s remaining members of the band, Ament and Gossard, began to look for other musicians to jam with.

One of those who met up with Ament and Gossard was Mike McCready, but nothing materialized until Cornell, who was Wood’s close friend and roommate, started jotting down lyrics and writing songs in part to memorialize Wood. As he recently told Rolling Stone, “I don’t really remember doing much else after the funeral other than just being swept up in the grief of the moment, but after a couple of weeks I wrote two songs [“Say Hello 2 Heaven” and “Reach Down”] for Andy. I don’t remember recording the demos, but I remember the ideas and writing the lyrics because they were really different and they involved a real person…these lyrics specifically reflected Andy and my feelings about him.”

Silver, who was then dating Cornell, says, “He had been doing that kind of recording at home years before that, but those songs were very meaningful because they were part of the grieving process that Chris was doing at the loss of friend.”

Cornell eventually recorded those songs onto a cassette, and once Gossard and Ament heard the tracks, they convinced Cornell to form a one-off collaboration as a tribute to Wood: Temple of the Dog. The trio recruited McCready, Matt Cameron, then-Soundgarden’s drummer, and a recent transplant to Seattle, Eddie Vedder, who was auditioning to be the lead singer of Mookie Blaylock, which would later be renamed to Pearl Jam.

“Say Hello 2 Heaven” may represent the record’s emotional core, but “Hunger Strike” is the group’s masterpiece, and it is the first inkling of Vedder’s unbelievably powerful voice. Though Cornell originally thought the song was just filler on the album, Vedder transformed “Hunger Strike,” his baritone complementing Cornell’s higher vocal range, and the call-and-response classic was born. Cornell told Yarm, “He started singing the low parts for me because he saw it was kind of hard… suddenly the light bulb came on in my head, this guy’s voice is amazing for these low parts. History wrote itself after that, [and it] became the single.”

When Temple of the Dog’s album dropped in April 1991, it only sold 70,000 copies. Soundgarden was still somewhat underground, and the Pearl Jam’s Ten wouldn’t come out for several more months, so Rachman wasn’t sure what to expect when he met the group in his Seattle hotel room in mid-1991 to storyboard the subsequent video for “Hunger Strike. “Chris wanted to make something a little more of an ode and a film to Andrew, and didn’t necessarily want to be in the video as a rock band,” says Rachman, “whereas the guys who would become Pearl Jam were starting over. They wanted exposure.”

Cornell did have a particular vision for the video, mentioning in passing that it should be more cinematic, which shows the growth of the music video genre. During the 1980s, music videos were largely, if not entirely, shaped by the director and the record label, but now musicians were taking more ownership of the process.

“The individual artistry came in, and the band collectively started to influence the conceptual part of the video,” says Roberts, who was on location for the “Hunger Strike” video shoot (“I was producer, craft services, makeup, and transportation for Temple of the Dog”). She adds, “People were becoming more educated on videos, and what they wanted and didn’t want, and bands had a bit more control over how they wanted to be perceived.”

Wanting to stave off any potential creative disagreements later on, Rachman suggested filming out in the natural elements — another ’90s video hallmark. “‘Why don’t we make Seattle part of the video?’ he recalled asking. “The city is an inherent part of who you guys are, and who Andrew was.” Cornell became a location scout, taking Rachman to Discovery Park, the city’s largest park. It was an ideal setting. “Within 500 yards, I had bluffs over the ocean, a beach, a lighthouse, these abandoned barracks, the woods, and some tall weeds,” says Rachman. “I didn’t need to shoot anywhere else.” When he wrote his treatment for A&M, Temple’s label, it was brief — a paragraph about ‘the band hanging out in nature.’

Working off a low budget of about $40,000 or so, the shoot ran the full meteorological gamut: snow in the morning, sunshine over the Puget Sound, and a hailstorm that damaged Cameron’s drum set. And then there were qualms with lip-syncing. This was Vedder’s first video, and the singer (when he showed up to the shoot, he was wearing a hat and shorts, and Roberts mistakenly thought Vedder was taking coffee orders) did not want to lip-sync. “He kept saying, ‘This is so fake,’” says Rachman. “I told him not to look at the camera and focus on something else. Just find the music. That’s why he is staring off in the distance during his shots in the tall weeds.”

Scenes featuring Cornell sitting underneath a school desk in a darkened room were interspersed with the group jamming on the beach, in the woods, and around a bonfire at dusk. The video was a visual summation of Seattle and the Pacific Northwest, yet the video, which was released to “Buzz Bin” shortly after filming, still wasn’t an immediate hit. No one really paid attention. “It was an insider album, and wasn’t big pop culture,” says Rachman. “We all moved on with our careers.” And though it made “Buzz Bin,” the video wasn’t selected for prime time or “120 Minutes.” “If we tried to make it play early on, it wouldn’t have worked,” says Finnerty.

But 1991 was the year punk broke, resulting in albums from not only Temple of the Dog but the Pearl Jam’s debut album (not to mention Nirvana’s Nevermind and Soundgarden’s third album, Badmotorfinger), all of which propelled grunge and its alternative music cousins to the mainstream, blitzing any other musical genre. Music videos came along for the ride, and like “Hunger Strike,” the videos had a “far more soulful direct relationship to the lyrics and the stories,” says Mark Pellington, director of Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy” and Alice in Chains “Rooster” (among many others).

“Music videos weren’t being used just to break a band anymore,” he continues. “They were being appreciated artistically, and as such, they were seen as having a lasting impact. Videos were a bit grittier and darker and more aggressive. Part of it was we were not in the Reagan America anymore, and we were heading towards a democratic reaction to the populist Reagan years.”

Or as Kurt Cobain stressed during the filming of the “Smells like Teen Spirit” video, which dropped in the late summer of 1991, “the video had something that was truly about what [Nirvana was] about.” Musicians wanted to give their lyrics life beyond the page or radio waves, and as MTV and mainstream radio began to play these songs with deeply personal and evolved lyrics, it gave others freedom to write songs with more meaning. “It opened up a whole new playground,” says Finnerty. “People kept true to their own sense of music and authenticity.”

Adds Kendall from “120 Minutes”, “It was the music that counted, and like any art-form, certain bands and directors raised the bar, and inspired others to do the same. ‘120 Minutes’ offered them national exposure, so there was a real necessity for them to produce videos of reasonable quality. Because most of them had limited budgets, they had to find ways to be creative, and work with what they had. That encouraged the development of a more artistic approach.”

“The hot girl in a music video formula just got crushed,” says Roberts. “You didn’t see the hot girl for a while.”

Of course, once MTV committed to grunge and alternative, those small budgets blew up, jumping from anywhere between $250,000 to $750,000, which attracted not only more experimental and artistically daring directors, but also big-name directors who were just as keen to push the creative envelope. Finnerty was the first person at MTV to watch the “Smells like Teen Spirit” video, taking it from office to office while at the same time chaperoning her friends, the Smashing Pumpkins, around the network. “Once the movement got started, and people saw it wasn’t a fluke, we knew we had to commit,” says Finnerty. “We’d go to the record company and tell them to put more money behind a band, whether for music videos or getting the band on tour. Before grunge, MTV’s departments were bifurcated, but we started having a larger dialogue to line up a narrative properly.”

That was difficult for “Hunger Strike,” as Temple was an on-off collaboration, but once Pearl Jam erupted, MTV revisited the video and asked A&M, the group’s label, to recut it, focusing more on Gossard, Ament, and, especially, Vedder. The close-up, midway through the “Hunger Strike” video, soon became the singer’s signature look — “there’s a glint in his eyes,” says Rachman — and when the revised video debuted on “120 Minutes” in August 1992, sandwiched between Michael Penn’s “See the Doctor” and “Radio Song” from R.E.M., sales exploded. Within three weeks, more than 300,000 Temple of the Dog records were sold, the album cracked the pop chart’s top 25, and then eventually went platinum.

”It didn’t really get that broad attention,” Cornell told the New York Times, ”until someone at MTV put it together that ‘Oh, there’s this one video that we have that has members of both bands in it; let’s play it all day!”’

The video’s four minutes helped spark the imagination of successive directors and bands, and subsequent videos the next several years took inspiration from Rachman’s “Hunger Strike”, fueling the medium and ushering an era of more creatively driven and visually beguiling videos. Following Pellington’s success with “Jeremy,” which pieced together still photos, close-ups, and challenging imagery (according to the director, the 14-page treatment was “fairly ambitious”), he was commissioned to direct the video for the first single of Silverchair, an up-and-coming Australian band. During his first conversations about “Tomorrow” with the group, Pellington recalls, “They told me to just make it like ‘Jeremy.’ The band and the label was spending some decent bread, and they just wanted ‘Jeremy II.’ That thing was epic, and it cast a big shadow over a lot of my stuff for many years.”

“Everybody is ripping everybody off in art and cinema and music,” says Rachman. “At the time in the mid-’90s, there’s so much music video work being made, and not every video gets on MTV. There were just too many, and of course there was going to be riffing and similarities.”

As is the case with all pop culture, nothing is enduring, and the wave crashed just a few years after its early 90s’ peak. Budgets became too bloated, video shoots became too unwieldy, and MTV began to shift to original programming, lessening the importance of the music video within the network’s hierarchy. “Videos became a double-edged sword,” says Silver. “A director could throw out some idea they had in a dream and say it’ll cost $750,000 — without a storyboard. The video may or may not work, and no one was accountable.”

Still, the importance of Temple of the Dog’s “Hunger Strike,” and the videos that followed it, is monumental. Before the group embarked on its 2016 tour (its first as Temple of the Dog), a third cut of the video was made, incorporating some extra and previously unseen footage Rachman shot with his 16 mm Bolex camera. “They used my favorite stuff, which was Eddie and Chris under the table with a candle on top,” he says. “That’s my whole concept of remembering Andy.”

“All three of those videos can co-exist, because they represent different creative visions,” he adds. “I loved that song, and I loved that album. I had an old muscle car in New York, a 1970 Chevy Malibu, and I’d play the record nonstop on cassette. In a way, I hope Temple of the Dog doesn’t make another album. There should only be one.”

* * *

Matt Giles is a staff writer and chief fact-checker at Longreads.

While They Were Creating the Album, the Beastie Boys Were Also Creating Themselves

Cheri Lucas Rowlands — Wed, 26 Apr 2017 14:02:35 +0000

After their 1986 debut Licensed to Ill, the world had high expectations of the Beastie Boys. But their second album, Paul’s Boutique, was viewed as a commercial failure. The hip-hop trio then had the creative freedom to pursue whatever they wanted next, and the result, 1992’s Check Your Head, presented their most ambitious vision yet, and allowed Ad-Rock, MCA, and Mike D to finally come into their own. At Flood Magazine, Marty Sartini Garner describes how the Beastie Boys discovered themselves.

But the album is guided by a kind of audacity that refuses to recognize itself as audacity. It doesn’t even dare you to suggest that following the sunbaked rock of “Gratitude” with a conga-led organ jammer is a bad idea; it succeeds almost entirely on the power of the Beastie Boys’ conviction that it would succeed, that the contours of their map might be recognizable even if the landmarks aren’t. “They could relate and dig deeper with Check Your Head, because it fit their [evolution] in a lot of ways, too,” Diamond says of the audience they discovered when they finally took the album out on tour. “It may not have been the same trajectory of music that they discovered along the way, but they could relate.”
It was “this freedom to [try] shit and be inventive and use the whole century as a palette,” as Nishita puts it. “Let’s just smash it all together.”

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