Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life (10 page)

At sixteen, Erin moves into a friend’s basement. She hangs out with the metal chicks at school and cuts classes. She forms a band (The Virgin Saints) and finds a boy happy to relieve her of her virginity. Late at night, in her basement room, she writes poetry. She doesn’t want for ambition. It’s guidance she needs.

Sometimes, Erin still wonders how her life might have been different if she’d had some amazing teacher who put the right book in her hands. It’s an understandable wish. But she didn’t have that kind of fortune. What she had was “Fade to Black,” which, for all its bombast,
offered the essential lesson: that it was her job to document the unbearable feelings, to convert the bruisings of her heart into beauty.

Am I now suggesting that I find “Fade to Black” beautiful? Yes, I suppose I am. Or maybe I’m suggesting, more plausibly, that I love my wife and all she’s struggled against to become who she is and that “Fade to Black” is an indispensable part of that.

And let me add, as a crucial coda, that what makes “Fade to Black” so easy to tease is, upon further examination, what makes it so affecting. The lyrics sound
exactly
like the poems Erin was scrawling in her basement lair. The nature of adolescence, after all, forces upon us two conflicting desires: to confess everything, every mutilated impulse and bloated woe, while, at the same time, suppressing all incriminating evidence. The solution (as recorded in every teenage journal ever written, as affirmed at every heavy metal concert ever staged) is to encode these feelings and their explicit causes in abstract and overwrought couplets. It is this same impulse that drives the bravest among us from language into the cleansing howl of rock and roll.

In Erin’s case, though, she headed in the other direction. Like me, she eventually recognized the limits of her talent. And though she was for a time, no doubt about it, the best female heavy metal guitar player in central Connecticut, it was her devotion to words that got her to community college, then on to college, and graduate school. She found that larger life, beyond the reach of her parents, whom she loves now with great patience, from a safe distance. Like me, they will never truly understand what “Fade to Black” means, or how many Erins it has saved from self-annihilation.

Nil Lara Was Our Messiah

There was a big bunch of us back then in Miami, all in our twenties, eager and horny and half-formed, if that. There were only three things we knew for sure. We knew South Beach was blowing up. We knew greatness awaited us. And we knew Nil Lara was going to be the most famous musician on earth.

Every other week we gathered at a club called the Stephen Talkhouse on Washington Avenue, two blocks from the glittering neglected sea, to watch Nil and his band destroy pop music as we knew it, as something discrete and classifiable and safely secular. The place smelled of lemon rinds and Marlboro Lights and we drank the sweet drinks of our twenties and huddled close to flirt. Nil never started on time. If handbills said
DOORS AT NINE
, you were unwise to expect a note until eleven, though he did two sets, always. If you got out of there before three in the morning it was only because you were sick in spirit. Most of us worked at the
Miami New Times
, the alternative fishwrap, and you could always tell the morning after a weekday show, the smoke and beer stench rinsed but not ridden, the bluish dabs of missing sleep beneath our eyes, a dreamy ringing in our ears.

“Nil?” someone would say.

And we’d say, “Yeah, Nil.”

We’d say it like we were speaking the name of a lover because we were in love with Nil, all of us, in love with his voice and the way he flicked at his guitar and the moony hopes that surged through us when he had his band at full pace. There was one night in particular (whenever it was) an hour into his second set and he was playing “Mama’s Chant,” howling an Afro-Cuban incantation while we twirled beneath him, and he reached the bridge and passed the valley of solos and led his band into that bright clearing where the song itself exploded into something larger, a mood of cheerful chaos, the tiny dance floor being ectoplasm at this point, with all the usual suspects sloshing away—Lenny the Large and Tilson and beautiful Paloma and Floodie and yours truly, known in those days as The Spoon—and the old
conguero
, Baro, in a metronomic trance and Nil moving also, thumping his bare feet between the amp cables and, at some invisible cue, directing his keyboardist to play a familiar bubbling run of notes, at which point Nil burst out, “Very superstitious, writing’s on the wall,” so that for the next three minutes we were all Stevie Wonder, we were all blind black singers, exalted, swollen and nodding, even if Nil was the only one whose high sweet baritone could grant the notes their proper due, the only one who could gently bend the room back toward his song, which we figured would end the jam, would leave us all in a happy ruined heap of vodka fumes except that Nil began a high-kneed march and the bassist came in with a low drubbing and the drummer snapped at his kit and the guitarist (a towering shredder, a ferocious spider) nodded and came down hard on the chords instantly recognizable to anyone alive during the long slow death of prog rock….

And this was the holy shit of all holy shits, the moment when every single person in the Talkhouse (right down to the brooding bartender) felt the delicious howl of high school—the endless fascism of parents and teachers and The Man—come roaring out of our throats, like
we
were bricks, man, like
we
were the ones marching into the meat grinder and getting our soft hearts cranked into ground chuck; we didn’t even look around, we didn’t do anything but scream and scream and dance and scream and Nil got a frank look of pleasure on his face and shook his head because without meaning to he’d led us all back to the garage where fifteen years earlier he had played these exact notes and sung these exact words and dreamed of this exact moment, of a hundred souls ready to join his crusade and carry his banner into the world. These were the times when we knew Nil couldn’t miss, that it was only a matter of time until the world snatched him up and away from us, which made us a little sad but also chosen, which made us want to kneel before him, touch the hem of his garment, which sent us staggering out onto the damp sidewalks trembling with gratitude.

It’s like this when you fall hard for a musician. It’s a crush with religious overtones. You listen to the songs and you memorize the words and the notes and this is a form of prayer. You attend the shows and this is the liturgy. You’re interested in relics—guitar picks, set lists, the sweaty napkin applied to His brow. You set up shrines in your room. It’s not just about the music. It’s about who you are when you listen to the music and who you wish to be and the way a particular song can bridge that gap, can make you feel the abrupt thrill of absolute faith.

For which we were all searching back then, being young and subject to the Drooling Fanatical hopes of youth. We felt we were part of
something larger. Why not? We were living in Miami Beach, watching the place transform before our eyes from a beachfront slum to a tattooed Riviera, the old Jews and the dope fiends and the deranged mumblers quietly nudged out to make room for Gianni Versace and Bobby De Niro and the parade of models who sunned themselves topless on the patch of beach around Fourteenth Street, watching the old palaces of the Art Deco district gutted, replenished, repainted in cake frosting colors, their nautical railings and porthole windows buffed to a gleam, made seaworthy again. The wood floors of my studio, at the corner of Meridian and Tenth, were forever dusted with sand.

This was back in 1991 and it wasn’t much later that I heard Nil for the first time, in a club called the Spot. I don’t remember anything else about the occasion (who I was with for instance), only that Nil was flicking at a tiny Cuban guitar called a
tres
and singing. He was too talented for the Spot, which was the kind of place where people came to do eight balls in the bathroom and get their photos in the social pages of local rags like the one where I worked. His songs had a melodic purity that could have derived only from the Beatles—you hummed them, they hummed you—but delivered in a style that incorporated the crooked rhythms of Cuban
son
and the stately phrasing of the
canción
, that struck the ear as both savage and exquisitely controlled, and he did this (mind you) with a three-piece.

I stood there screaming
Who
is
this guy?
and
Dude, are you guys
hearing
this?
and all the other things DFs scream, until my friends toddled off to the next bar and I was left standing about three feet from Nil, clapping too loud. I accosted him after his set and he handed me a vinyl copy of an album by his old band KRU, which I clutched to my chest like a teenybopper.

It took another year for Nil to put his band together and move to the Talkhouse. The crowds were small at first, mostly folks me and Floodie dragged from work. A nervous energy permeated the room the moment Nil began. We knew what our bodies wanted and Nil certainly
knew, but we were also frightened, being essentially suburban middle-class strivers who spent our days behaving in a manner meant to avoid embarrassment. This battle would rage inside each of us until someone worked up the nerve to start dancing, at which point everyone poured out of their seats.

This was the era during which I came to be called The Spoon, the nickname deriving from a pair of boots I’d bought used on Washington Avenue, stupendously ugly boots by any measure, fashioned in the cowboy style but cut off just above the ankle, as if the cobbler had run short on black leather and panicked. On the plus side, the slick wooden heel made a loud clacking when stomped on the floor—like someone playing the spoons. It would be nice to suppose I was given this nickname as a tribute to my percussive sangfroid. I certainly felt nimble. I had moves: the stomp, the sudden controlled skid, the splayfooted pelvis hop, the booty bop, the shoulder juke. It was during this era that I broke a woman’s foot on the dance floor at a Polish wedding in Toledo, Ohio, which should serve as the best and most disturbing testament to the delusions of grace I suffered during Nil’s reign. But we all felt like that. We all danced like that. We all believed he had been sent to liberate our secret wishes.

If this sounds grandiose, consider the larger messianic context. Miami was being touted as America’s designated City of Destiny, its ultraglamorous melting pot. This was partly civic marketing crapola, but it was also true that you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting a new cultural enclave and everyone seemed to know someone who knew an actual Santeria priest or a
curandera
or a Haitian dude who did voodoo part-time. Nil was our polyglot poster boy. The guy had mastered all the standard rock idioms
and
immersed himself in the roots music of the Caribbean and South America. He played fifteen
different instruments, half of his own invention. He dressed in billowing smocks and torn trousers—half crooner, half Caliban.

Nil also cultivated that trait so essential to rock stars: mystery. We knew next to nothing about him and swapped rumors constantly. He lived alone with a monkey. Gloria Estefan had propositioned him. He had grown up in the Amazon jungle. No, he came from Cuba on a raft. He was a
balsero
. That he was born in Newark and later moved to Venezuela (facts we would eventually unearth) hardly mattered.

Major label execs soon began turning up at the Talkhouse. David Byrne himself flew down from New York City to do his best geek schmooze. What a strange pleasure, to see those suits squeezed in at the edges of the bar. Nil could have moved to a bigger venue, but he enjoyed the heat of our packed bodies.