Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life (2 page)

As a rule, DFs don’t play an instrument. We don’t even dance especially well, though we do jump up and down at live shows and scream an awful lot, usually the names of obscure songs the band recorded but never released in the States, or covers it performed as a lark on a cable access show nine years ago, a grainy video of which we tracked down online and now own. Our bright idea is that these outbursts will ingratiate us to the lead singer, or maybe the deadpan guitarist, and provoke an invitation to hang out backstage after the show.

Do we want to fuck the lead singer, or possibly the deadpan guitarist?

A fair question. If the DF in question is female, and the band is male, the answer is yes. If the DF is male, the answer is also yes, though to a lesser degree, determined by the taboos imposed on homosexuality in the mind and heart of the afflicted. The central
desire, however, is not carnal. As noted, the DF would like, most of all, to
be
the lead singer or the deadpan guitarist, and would frankly settle for the fun-loving-but-not-terribly-thoughtful drummer.

What else?

DFs own at least three thousand albums at any given moment, with a core of our collection represented by any three of four configurations (digital, compact disc, vinyl, and cassette).

Despite a voracious appetite for new music, and a tragic misapprehension of our own cutting-edge tastes, we tend to attach ourselves to particular bands for long stretches, an affiliation that is both cloying and evangelical. We refer to band members by their first names. Friends, in turn, refer to band members as our “imaginary friends.”

Chances are, we’ve loaned money to musicians.

Chances are, we were DJs in college and had a show with a name so stupid we are vaguely embarrassed to mention it now, though we are quite happy to mention that we were DJs in college.

Chances are we’ve spent weeks in puzzled anguish over why our favorite band isn’t more popular, given how much the songs on the radio
suck
, though if our favorite band suddenly hit it big we’d feel more resentment than pride.

Chances are, the only periods of sustained euphoria in our lives have been accompanied by music.

It’s not a talent thing.

I’m almost sure it’s not a talent thing. True, there are some folks who can’t hit a note without doing violence to it, and others (such as my dear wife, Erin) who have trouble with the rhythmic intricacies of the ABC Song. And there are always those annoying few at the far end of the bell curve—your Mozarts and Paganinis—endowed with talents that make God seem awfully choosy.

But it is my entirely unscientific belief that most people are born with the basic tools to become musicians. Britney Spears, for instance, has an inoffensive voice and the ability to suspend large reptiles from her boobs. The making, or rendering, of popular songs is more a matter of determination than aptitude. The central allure of
American Idol
(a show I have not actually seen) resides in this notion. It
could
be us. A bit of practice, a good tooth scrub, a few Xanax …

Consider the hubbub over Susan Boyle, the forty-eight-year-old Scottish woman who appeared last year on the British version of
Idol
. Standing onstage for her audition, Boyle looked like a Monty Python in drag. Then she opened her mouth and this epic noise came ripping out of her. Within a week, she was the most celebrated person on earth, an Emily Dickinson for the Internet age. The fame pundits enlisted to inspect phenomena of this sort took pleasure in noting how Boyle repudiated our pathological devotion to youth and beauty, as if rooting for a homely woman were cause for self-congratulation. But they missed the essence of her appeal, which was (and is) the powerful fantasy that
a divine voice lurks within all of us
, ready to obliterate all our liabilities and doubts and transform us into the stars we know ourselves to be.

The reason we are not all rock stars is because most of us are unprepared to do the sort of sustained and lonely work that would allow us to learn an instrument, let alone the broader language of music, let alone how to suspend a large reptile from our cleavage. And then further unprepared to compose our own songs and to perform them in front of other people and to do so with enough gusto that we might compel someone—many someones, actually—to pay for a recording of our songs. It’s a lot of labor, when you break it down. A lot of potential humiliation. So this book, though it will feature plenty of rock stars, and include many opinions related to rock stars, is centrally about what it’s like to be a Drooling Fanatic.

Disappointing, I know.

But most of human history—the vast underside—is about people not getting to do what they truly want to do. Prehistoric man, for instance, wanted to eat and fuck and sleep in peace, and he almost never got to do that. The inhabitants of the early republics dreamed of liberty, but most spent their lives in the yoke. Those of us with the dumb luck to be born in what we call the “modern” “developed” world can pretty much eat and fuck to our hearts’ content. We’ve got hours for dreaming, too, though a lot of that work has been outsourced to Hollywood. Consumption gets to be the star these days, because consumption pays the bills. I mean by this that American popular culture is almost entirely about consuming at this point and that any ideas or feelings expressed in the public domain arrive on behalf of products, generally with the gloss and subtlety of a fuck film. Welcome to the final stage of capitalism: porn.

But here’s a little secret, between you, me, and the rest of the mall: buying shit isn’t enough. What we wish for in our secret hearts is self-expression, the chance to reveal ourselves and to be loved for this revelation, devoured by love. And thus, most of us go about our duties of commerce and leisure in a state of perpetual longing, with nocturnal excursions into the province of despair.

This book is for those of us who have converted such unrequited desires into noble obsessions. It happens to be about music (as opposed to ice cream or Picasso or the Dallas Cowboys) because music came before anything else, before language and large-scale war and liquid soap, and because music is the one giant thing America has done right, amid all it has done wrong. Music, that ancient and incorruptible bitch.

• Sometimes drunken interviews with America’s finest songwriters
  

• The terrifying specter of Graceland stoned
  

• A brief examination of my wretched music criticism
  

• Recommendations you will often choose to ignore
  

• A reluctant exegesis of the song “Africa” by Toto
  

• Gratuitous lists
  

The sort rock critics are always making, only in reverse. For example:

Gratuitous List #1        

1. Sonic Youth
   

2. Yo La Tengo
   

3. Radiohead
   

4. Velvet Underground
   

5. Nirvana
   

6. Beck
   

7. Bright Eyes
   

8. Pavement
   

9. Red Hot Chili Peppers
   

10. Sonic Youth
    

These lists are
not serious
. They are inserted into the text merely as a way of pissing off the critics.

Oh, yeah. Thanks to the wonders of digital technology, this book allows you access to the world’s first live-streamable CD, designed by me for the express purpose of eliciting your drool. All you have to do is go to
www.stevenalmond.com
and look for the button that says
Free CD!

Having written these last two words I realize that you have now put this book down and gone to your computer—oh, you were already at your computer? okay—and begun streaming your
Free CD!
and listened to some of the tracks and maybe even forgotten about this book. Which is cool. I don’t blame you. If I had a choice between a book and a CD, I’d do the same thing—and I write books for a living.

But assuming you’ve kept this book, I would ask that you hold off on listening to your
Free CD!
for a little while. The idea in my pointy little head is that you’ll listen to the tracks as we arrive at them in the text.

Sure.

The DF Starter Kit (No Assembly Required!)

1. It helps considerably if your parents are musicians of some sort
My mother, for instance, was an accomplished pianist who attended the High School of Music and Art before settling into the far more glamorous fields of parenting and psychiatry. In addition to her assigned roles as therapist, domestic slave, and mother to three savage monkeys (i.e. me, my twin brother, Mike, and our older brother, Dave) she played piano on a black upright Yamaha. Owing to the size of our home, the piano was located in what we savage monkeys thought of as the TV Room. This created a conflicting agenda, which in many ways crystallizes the generational dichotomy in our household: Mozart’s
Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor
versus
The Facts of Life
.

We barged in on her constantly, resentful of the attention she lavished on the instrument, and the serenity it seemed to grant her. Our father eventually affixed a latch to the door. Thus, the emblematic sound of our youth—a soft cascade of notes interrupted by ferocious pounding, then a muted sigh. Mom played beautifully.

Our father sang, starting in high school and later with the Harvard
Glee Club, a distinction we looked upon with the contempt to be expected of insecure male offspring. (Glee Club? Why not just announce you’re in the
Gay
Club?) He performed
Lieder
mostly, accompanied by our mother. Our father with his chin tipped slightly up, mournful German couplets trembling from his chest. His throat swelling with imploration. Such vulnerability! We were mortified.

Our folks were too stuffed full of intellectual ambitions for a life in the arts. They were the descendants of European Jewry, cultured people who looked upon music as one of the elevating pleasures of our time on earth. They listened as much as they played, folk and rock music, but most of all classical.

We wanted nothing to do with classical music, excepting the Bugs Bunny episode “Rabbit of Seville,” the viewing of which was as close as we came to a sense of musical communion with our father. He later dragged us to the actual opera, a decision he immediately regretted. Nonetheless, we could see how music soothed and transformed our parents and though we endeavored not to show them that we were impressed, we were and deeply.

2. Display just enough musical talent to suffer lessons
I am flattering myself here, as is my wont. I did not have talent. What I had was a greater need for parental approval. I have no idea how piano was settled upon, though I’m sure my own Oedipal longings played a central role. My teacher was one Rosanna Sosoyev, a diminutive Russian émigré with a carefully arranged omelet of ginger hair.

Mrs. Sosoyev was what I’ll call a “traditional” teacher. Before each lesson, she would inspect my hands, then send me to wash them. (On a few occasions, she marched me to the bathroom and washed them for me. This ritual—my hands in hers, the rose-scented soap, the warm water—was mildly erotic and deeply distressing.) She stressed scales.

Our lessons were like this: small, poorly attended battles of will. The only spectator was her husband, a spectral figure who glided from one room to another in a cloud of camphor. I like to imagine that I caused Rosanna Sosoyev at least one small stroke, but I am probably flattering myself again. My mother was the one who bore the brunt of my halfhearted practicing. She had to listen to me mangle Haydn sonatas night after night. I also smashed the keys with my fists. A lot.