Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life (4 page)

But my larger point is that there’s no angle in hating on a particular song or band or genre. Our species is adaptable. That’s our evolutionary trump card. If the human ear is given a chance, not cowed into snobbery, it can find rewards in almost any form of music. I think here of a line by Robert Christgau, who for many years represented the gold standard of rock critic snark. Assessing the work of Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s
Brain Salad Surgery
, he wrote, “The sound is so crystalline you can hear the gism as it drips off the microphone.” The line is funny, an appropriate epitaph for a trio that was Spinal Tappish in its pretense. But when I think about that album what I remember is sitting around with my pal Dale McCourt, listening to the endless onanistic glissandos and howled couplets of “Karn Evil 9” (“Welcome back my friends, to the show that never ends!”). We loved that song. And there’s no arguing with joy.

Moving in Stereo

In 1984, I left California for Wesleyan University, in Middletown, Connecticut, ready to embrace the incredibly exciting musical options available to nascent Fanatics. Such as, for instance, Wang Chung and Wham! and Willie Nelson and Julio Iglesias and all the girls that Willie Nelson and Julio Iglesias had loved before, though presumably not at the same time. Madonna’s undergarments were on MTV. Michael Jackson’s head was on fire. Corey Hart was wearing his sunglasses at night. It was a confusing time.

I immediately fell in with the most confused guys on my freshman hall. Eric was a ska/punk aficionado (a skunker?) who tromped about in trench coat and porkpie hat, simmering with vaguely proletarian indignation. His favorite band was an obscure quartet called the Reducers, coastal Connecticut’s answer to the Ramones. Davey was a math geek from central Jersey, with all the charisma that description implies. His hero was Scraping Foetus Off the Wheel (also known as You’ve Got Foetus on Your Breath). Industrial music, it was called.

We were all desperate for a show on the college station, WESU, but the orientation session was presided over by a cabal of pimpled
upperclassmen who gave precedence to nubile frosh. Davey knew somebody who knew somebody, so he got a gig subbing on the overnight shift. I joined him in-studio, though he never let me talk into the mic, a foul-smelling lead device that hung pornishly over the soundboard. I was there to fetch him records, a pointless task given that all he ever played was Foetus, along with Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s amphetamized cover of “Born to Run,” which we both adored.

I can’t remember a single class I took my first two years of college, let alone the ideas I was supposed to be absorbing. But I can remember with piercing aural precision my favorite songs: the jaunty fretwork that drove “Oblivious” by Aztec Camera, the sweet stuttered hook of They Might Be Giants’ “Don’t Let’s Start,” the ubiquitous fascist cabaret of Depeche Mode’s “Master and Servant.” Everyone was listening to the Smiths and the Cure. They were so romantically depressed, which seemed the thing to be, though I was more drawn to the horny angst of the Violent Femmes, whose debut was the lone cool album I already owned.

One day Davey played me a copy of Run-D.M.C.’s “Rock Box.” It was the first rap song I’d ever heard and not at all representative of the genre, in that it was built around a guitar riff of Zeppelinesque enormity. Every time someone played the song in our dork kingdom I raced up and down the hall howling “Calvin Klein’s no friend of mine, don’t want nobody’s name on my behind.”

Sophomore year I moved with Davey to an off-campus apartment overlooking a Dunkin Donuts. The place smelled like fried dough until it began to smell like garbage, thanks to Davey, and I fled to Israel where I endeavored to give a shit about Judaism and stuffed falafel in my piehole and panted after a woman who turned me on to Suzanne Vega. Her debut album was just out and we listened to those dark delicate fairy tales constantly, talking late into the night about God and love and whether we were ever going to do it.

I climbed Masada that spring and floated in the Dead Sea and
stowed away on a Greek ship. I walked past a Jerusalem pizza parlor half an hour before a bomb exploded inside. I humped poorly in various exotic locales. But the moment I remember as the most thrilling of that era was opening a package from my pal Evan and finding inside a bootleg of the Violent Femmes’ third album,
The Blind Leading the Naked
.

It is my belief that human beings have something in their DNA that makes them crave control of their sonic environment such that long ago, in the valley of Neander, cavemen would invite each other over for a party and the host caveman would start beating out his favorite rhythm on, say, a stalactite, hoping to attract the attentions of the assembled caveladies, until one of his guests came up to him and suggested a different beat. The host, trying to appear casual, would say, “Yeah, that sounds cool. Maybe we can do that beat later,” then resume drumming, at which point the other cavedude would press the matter—“Everyone’s getting kind of, you know,
tired
of that beat”—at which point things turned ugly.

I have found nothing in the evolutionary literature to support this notion, though admittedly I have not yet inspected any of the evolutionary literature. Regardless, by junior year, my DJ Gene was pulsating violently. I had managed to insinuate myself into the WESU hierarchy by becoming a sports broadcaster, which led to my own predawn music show, and access to the thousands of LPs crammed onto the station’s splintery shelves.

I was hopelessly intoxicated by the idea that I controlled the world’s stereo system, along with a giant catalogue of music, much of it advance material that
no one had heard yet
. I showed up hours early for my show to browse the new releases. That’s how I found
All Fools Day
, an album of swaggering Celtic soul by an Australian quartet
called the Saints. That’s also how I found
Folksinger
, by Phranc, a lesbian folksinger with a flattop who crooned about celebrity coroners and female mud wrestling. After my show, I took these records into the auxiliary studio and listened to them over and over until one of the techies, in a moment of uncharacteristic pity, showed me how to copy records onto cassette. It was like hunting for treasure, particularly if I went trolling in the massive, unkempt archives where, one lucky morning, I stumbled across an old Fleshtones record that included the track “Hexbreaker,” a rousing anthem that sounded like the MC5 crashing headlong into Otis Rush.
¹
I played it at least once a show.

I also began hitting up friends for musical tips. I was a resident adviser that year (official hall motto:
Nothing That Could Get Me Sued)
and one of my frosh—a Beverly Hills hipster—slipped me the debut album by a Scottish quartet called Del Amitri, recorded when the lead singer was about twelve. It was (and is) a perfect pop record: a brisk journey into romantic ruin. It wasn’t enough that I loved Del Amitri—or the Femmes or the Saints or Phranc—I needed everyone to love them.

Why? Why wasn’t it enough for me to enjoy these fine musicians? Why did it immediately become
my
job to spread the good news? It’s a question that plumbs the heart of the Drooling Fanatic. There’s the genetic explanation, of course. And the younger-brother-chip-on-my-shoulder thing. But my compulsion had a tangled erotic aspect, too. I wanted to feel a certain kind of possession. Like any crush, it was partly about the narcissism of my own desire. And it was more than
that. I wanted other people to feel what I felt, inside, when those songs came on. Deep down I saw them as a solution to the crisis of my loneliness.

I said before that there is no objectively “bad” music. I must now amend that statement. In so doing, let me cite Duke Ellington, who once famously declared that “there are only two kinds of music: good music and bad music. And by bad music I mean specifically the song ‘(I Bless the Rains Down in) Africa’ by Toto.” Ellington died two years before Toto formed as a band, which speaks to his prescience.

What makes “(I Bless the Rains Down in) Africa” so bad? Mostly, it’s the lyrics. Also, the instrumentation, the vocals, and that virulent jazz-lite melody, which, despite the manifest wretchedness of everything I’ve just mentioned, means that you are no doubt conjuring the song even as you read this—those hypnotic banks of synthesizer and phony “tribal”-sounding drums—and without at all meaning to, sort of … grooving to “(I Bless the Rains Down in) Africa,” sort of digging it, sort of bathing in the buttery memory of sixth grade or tenth grade and hand jobs and lip gloss and really actually kind of remembering, or rediscovering, how much you
love
“(I Bless the Rains Down in) Africa” even as you’re hating yourself for this love. It’s complicated.

So are the lyrics:

Our hero is waiting for a female whose plane arrives just after midnight. Got it. This seems to place him in or around an airport, the sort of airport within earshot of drums. He can see the wings of the plane, which are lit by the moon and also, curiously, able to reflect stars.

Suddenly our hero is no longer waiting around some poorly soundproofed airport. No, he’s on a journey, presumably outside. He encounters an unidentified old man. Contrary to the dangling modifier, it is the speaker, not the old man, who is hoping to find some long-forgotten words or ancient melodies. The old man will supply these, because the old man is African and all Africans, by definition, possess ancient melodies. The old African then turns to our hero. It is a complex physical gesture, one that manages to convey a vital and perhaps ancient truth:
our hero must hurry!
Why? Because “it’s waiting there” for him. What is “it”? Where is “there”? Only the old African knows for sure.

We now have reached the swelling chorus, in which our hero, still awaiting his plane-bound paramour and, at the same time, questing “there” in search of “it,” confesses his devotion to an unknown love object that we can only assume is the female on the plane. This devotion is stronger than a fairly sizable militia. It is a devotion so overwhelming, in fact, that our hero—well, you already guessed this,
didn’t you?—
blesses the rains down in Africa
. This tells us two things. First, he is north of Africa. Second, he is in a position to bless rain.

The sudden introduction of Africa as a thematic element might seem dissonant, but is easily explained by the “Africa” creation story, as related by Toto keyboardist David Paich: “Over many years, I had been taken by the UNICEF ads with the pictures of Africa and the starving children. I had always wanted to do something to connect with that and bring more attention to the continent. I wanted to go there, too, so I sort of invented a song that put me in Africa. I was hearing the melody in my head and I sat down and played the music in about ten minutes. And then the chorus came out. I sang the chorus out as you hear it. It was like God channeling it. I thought, ‘I’m talented, but I’m not that talented. Something just happened here!’” Paich then worked on the lyrics for another six months.