Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life (27 page)

But somewhere along the line we’d convinced ourselves that acts of imagination only had value if strangers would pay for them, or if they won fancy prizes, or if critics decided they had merit, notions that had proved a boon to the Myth of the Suffering Artist. Because now, in addition to the anguish that arises from trafficking in unbearable feelings, artists had to worry about these vile forms of regard.

It was a fucking crock, and I wanted to tell Dave Grohl as much. But we were too deep into our own fame charade to turn back at this point. Grohl did his best to make it bearable. He remained friendly and self-deprecating, and even though his estate was at the top of a mountain and contained a tennis court and a waterfall, he made a joke about how the terra-cotta roof tiles reminded him of a Chi-Chi’s franchise. When I mentioned that I’d be back in L.A. soon he asked why and I told him for a reading and he said, “Hey, I’ll have to check that out.”

We were standing in Dave Grohl’s circular driveway, gazing down upon the Valley of the Non-Famous, unto which I would be descending momentarily. A gleaming turquoise Harley was parked beside a
tiled fountain. I wanted to say,
Look man, you don’t have to try so hard
. But it seemed important to Dave Grohl that he be the sort of rock star who would show up at a reading interviewing him, and it seemed wrong, given all he’d taught me, to dash his hopes.

List #6        

Back when Erin first got pregnant we spent hours yakking about What to Name Baby. This is pro forma activity in the age of over determined parenting, as is giving your fetus a nickname. Ours became Peanut. There was a brief stretch during which we seriously considered making it legal, or at least enjoyed terrorizing the grandparents with this prospect.

Eventually our daughter was born and somewhere in the midst of this howling endeavor the gravity of the parental mission dawned on us. Yes, Peanut Almond exuded a certain snacky insouciance. But here was this actual person, very small, very frightened seeming. Giving her a gag name suddenly seemed just a tad indulgent. We settled on Josephine.

The fascinating thing about rock stardom is that it seems to impart the opposite lesson: that naming a child is an activity that should, above all, reflect the cheeky creative spirit of the parents in question. Had we been rock stars our child almost certainly
would
have been named Peanut Almond. Or Marzipan Almond. Or Chocolatta Joy Almond. And I know this because the roster of actual strange rock star child names is so expansive that they can only by catalogued by
genera. (As a special added bonus, I’ve made up one name per genus.
²⁰
Happy hunting!)

Dayna Kurtz Sings the World a Lullaby

You will have noticed by now an apparent gender bias in my Fanaticism. Nor can it have escaped your attention that I have some issues around attraction to men, who happen to outnumber women by a wide margin in the rock star category, anyway. But I’m going to suggest that the main reason my musical Dream Team is a sausage party is much simpler: I creep out female musicians.

I have certainly tried to inflict my Fanaticism on several, the most ignominious example being the night I showed up at a small club in Cambridge to see Shivaree and specifically that band’s alluring lead singer, Ambrosia Parsley, whom I followed backstage and stared at in mute wonder until security was summoned. I have made repeated efforts to secure an interview with Neko Case, but I can never get past her publicity people, who seem to have a sixth sense when it comes to Drooling Fanatics posing as music journalists. And yes, it is true that I once spotted Patty Griffin down in Austin and pursued her on foot, but she lost me in a strip mall. (I’m pretty sure it was her.) There is no shortage of female artists I find Droolworthy—Beth Orton, Bettye LaVette, Nikka Costa—merely a shortage of female artists who will have anything to do with me.

The single exception (and she happens to be my favorite female artist of all, so good luck there) is Dayna Kurtz. We met five years ago on a Sunday night in winter. Dayna was playing a dumpy bar in Cambridge, the same bar where, two months later, I would read from my first book and not quite meet Erin. There were four people when I arrived. I waited for the late rush. There was no late rush. The late rush was me. The moment Dayna opened her mouth the room was filled, instantly, with a deep human trembling.

I knew this was going to happen because I’d been taking her new record,
Postcards from Downtown
, intravenously. The other four people in the bar were there for dinner. They talked over her songs at such a volume that she eventually asked them to please quiet down. They ignored her. Dayna had every right to stop. But she gave herself to those songs, fully and without embarrassment. She sounded like Billie Holiday and Leonard Cohen whispering into the same mic, and her melodies were swollen with the complicated joy of sorrow.

Afterward, I went up to apologize for the loudmouths. Dayna was tearing through a hamburger. She wanted a quick getaway and for this reason she allowed me to help lug her gear outside to the car. Only there was no car. We walked up one block, then another, then turned around. The situation slowly dawned on her. “Fuck,” she said. “This is so fucked up.” She began to weep.

It would emerge that Dayna had driven seventeen hours straight to reach this gig, from a festival where she played for seven hundred fans and had the opportunity to share a bottle of wine and a hot tub with the folk god Greg Brown, events that would have marked the zenith of her career to date. Instead, she now stood in the freezing cold on a Cambridge street corner, following the worst gig of her life, her car stolen, with a twitchy Fanatic—hi!—as her sole consolation.

I had some good news, though. Her car had not been stolen. It had been towed. I knew this because my car was towed on a weekly basis. So I drove Dayna to the impound lot, got her aimed back toward
Brooklyn, and drove home flush with small-time heroism. It hadn’t occurred to me back then that the life of a musician could be so unglamorous. I had a lot to learn.

I am still waiting for Dayna Kurtz to become a superstar. I was sure it was going to happen in 2004, when she released the record
Beautiful Yesterday
, which featured a duet with Norah Jones. But the only song of hers most Americans have heard is the version of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” in the television ads for Sheraton hotels.

The fortunate part of this unfortunate situation is that Dayna remains accessible to me. We’ve become friends of a sort over the years, which is to say she’s read a couple of my books and I’ve listened to all of her albums five thousand times. In March of 2008, as she prepared to record a new album, she invited me up to her cabin to watch her work. The place was nestled in a valley on the western edge of Vermont, twenty miles from the nearest highway. I arrived in the late afternoon. The bales of hay looked as if Monet had painted them. The mountains were an iridescent green. Little tufts of cloud drifted across the fields. (These were lambs, it turned out.) Dayna appeared on the porch. She is a tall woman with wide-set eyes and a husky voice.

We took a walk through the local farmland. Dayna pointed out a barn where monks made artisanal cheese. The white birches shed elegant scrolls of bark. It was all quite Vermont. Dayna told me she did a lot of her brainstorming on these constitutionals, recording melodies and lyrics onto her iPod. She’d been hiking the area since she was a kid, back when the family cabin was a shack with no running water. It was still a pretty undeveloped area, but the cabin had been updated to “modern rustic” status. You could now listen to the brook babbling out back while lounging in the Jacuzzi.

Dinner was an Italian red sauce with country spareribs whose deliciousness was such that I would have eaten my own arm if covered in this sauce. Dayna had worked as a cook after graduating from UMass Amherst with a history degree. Her parents had hoped she might pursue academia or the law, but she was determined to be a folksinger.