Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life (9 page)

We all do this, of course. We develop brief, blinding crushes on songs like “You Light Up My Life” (or “Candle in the Wind” or “Say You, Say Me”
⁷
or “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go”). Then those crushes end and the musical artifacts we took to be genuinely inspiring and heartfelt and even redemptive reveal themselves as repetitive and crass, a kind of emotional propaganda, and we feel like suckers.

And that’s fine. That’s
okay
. For the Drooling Fanatic, life is littered with these vulgar infatuations, because of our sensitivity to the dramatic
capacities of music. We’re ready to fall in love, one song at a time. This is something I failed to note earlier, when I was talking about the pedigree of our breed. And it’s maybe the most important indicator of DF tendencies, which is that
we’re chronically emotional people who have trouble accessing our emotions
.

In my own case—though I suspect this is broadly true—repression was our family religion. I didn’t admit to anyone else that I was feeling sad or frightened or angry because I saw little hope of being regarded or soothed, and a good chance of being mocked. And so I started to hide these feelings from myself; they burrowed inward and took cover under a sarcastic bravado. When I wanted to numb myself out, I watched TV. But songs had the opposite effect. They became a secret passageway to emotion, a way of locating what I was feeling before I entirely understood it myself.

The earliest example I can offer takes place in the summer of 1971, when, at age four, my twin brother and I were transplanted from the suburbs to a commune in the rolling hills of Ukiah.
⁸
My folks were hoping for a rural utopia. What they found was an unsupervised summer camp. The tenor of those feverish months is best captured by the episode in which a man known as Big John wound up dropping acid, then climbing into the bathtub with Mike and me, despite being fully clothed. More than any particular moment, though, what I remember of that place is the song “American Pie,” which was always playing and to which people were always singing along. I didn’t understand certain words—What was a levee? How could one drink rye?—but I got that it was a story about saying good-bye to something lovely and doomed. It was the moment, so common in American social movements, when a dispiriting present gives way to nostalgia. There must have been other songs playing (this was 1971 after all) but I was four
years old and this was the one I needed to make sense of what was happening around me.

I’ve always been drawn to songs that make me feel bad and that make feeling bad feel good. These songs—Depression Songs—allow us to slough the small emotions that compose our defense mechanisms for the large emotions that make us feel genuinely alive. They convert self-pity into sorrow, anxiety into fear, grievance into grief.

To clarify: Depression Songs don’t make people depressed. They articulate a preexisting depression and, when they’re really cooking, they
ennoble
that depression. They offer tremendous relief to those of us otherwise prone to wallowing. Nearly all the songs I return to, the ones that have come to represent entire eras of my life, are Depression Songs. Everybody has his or her own set list, because the main ingredient in the construction of a Depression Song is you, the depressed listener.

If you play the song “Nothing Compares 2 U” by Sinéad O’Connor, for instance, my wife is instantly transported back to 1990, managing the cosmetics section at CVS, a shy fifteen-year-old mooning over one in a series of mulleted cads to whom she had pledged undying love. It’s all there: the knot in her throat, the heavy bands of blue eye shadow, the mocking promises on the glass bottles of nail polish it was her job to shelve.

My time-equivalent Depression Song—I confess this with little pride—is “Never Tear Us Apart” by INXS, which you might remember as the one with the video where the comely lead singer Michael Hutchence wanders morosely around Prague and then, right at the end, accidentally hangs himself while masturbating. It’s an addictive soul song built around synths, a quartet of plucked guitar notes, and various dramatic pauses. The vocals are overwrought in the best way. Hutchence tells his lover that they could live for “a thousand years/But if I hurt you I make wine from your tears,” and rather than questioning how that would work, or how such a wine might taste, or what, exactly, it would mean that you might want to use the tears of
your lover to make an alcoholic beverage, my intuitive reaction is to think, That is just
heavy
. This was certainly what I was thinking as I staggered across the soggy lawns of my college campus, having just enjoyed a one-night stand that I assumed would last for a thousand years and produce oceans of Chardonnay. My inamorata had a slightly different take. She cringed when she saw me the next day. We were not going to last a thousand years. We had barely lasted a thousand seconds.

And then there’s the song “Hello, Mary” by David Baerwald. The melody alone is enough to put me on a crying jag, but the part that slays me is three minutes in, when the hero, who’s been talking to an old lover, trying to play things cool, suddenly blurts out, “I was looking at a picture, it was me and you, I think it was 1982, and you were sitting on my lap and my hand was on your breast and we were staring into each other’s eyes” and on this last word his voice rises into a helpless falsetto and you realize that, though he’s not in love with her, he’s still in love with that moment of loving her and he’ll never be rid of that feeling. That I was obsessed with “Hello, Mary” throughout my first failed love affair did not dawn on me as significant. I was twenty-one years old.

As for “We’ve Never Met” by Neko Case, I can’t listen to that one without drowning in the anguish of my first year in Boston, getting dumped by women who were only doing what I asked them to do, which is why I listen to it
all the time
. That weepy steel guitar and Neko’s velvety alto and Ron Sexsmith’s whispered harmonies. It sounds exactly like what I always wish Patsy Cline will sound like, but never does.
You were golden and I was blind, now it’s like we’ve never met
. I have yet to find a better definition of unrequited love.

These examples all derive from the predominant genre of Depression Songs, the Heartbreak Song, to which we might add several thousand
without much effort, including “Tired of Being Alone” by Al Green, “The Sun Is Gonna Shine” by Aretha, and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” Have I forgotten one? Oh yes, “Missing You” by John Waite.

Not every Heartbreak Song is a Depression Song. “Song for the Dumped” by Ben Folds offers the exuberant refrain, “Give me my money back, you bitch.” It’s not designed to bum us out, but to make us laugh (a bit ruefully) at the rage we throw in the face of rejection.

Depression Songs actually work better when they’re about something other than depression. This is why “Eleanor Rigby” is so much more compelling than “Yesterday.” Paul McCartney found a story, with actual characters who were able to personify a condition of solitude, whereas “Yesterday” is really just Paul whining.

“Eleanor Rigby” also has a more ambitious arrangement. George Martin recognized the song’s symphonic possibilities: the constricted moan of those strings, the rueful countermelody of the cellos, the squall of the single violin that trembles across the chorus. These decisions don’t just contribute to the mood of collective isolation; they
are
the mood.

On the other hand, one of the best Depression Songs of recent years, “Down the Line” by José González (an Argentine based, confusingly, in Sweden), includes nothing more than a voice, a couple of guitars, and a drum loop. González has a delicate voice, and he seems to be addressing a friend about an impending breakdown. But he chops at his guitar with a nervous urgency, and the melody keeps struggling against its own foreboding. “Don’t let the darkness eat you up,” González sings over and over at the end of the song, and you want to believe his pal is going to be all right but you also know, without wanting to, that he’s not, and that González knows he’s not. It’s a song about trying to save the unsavable, and it about ruins me every time I hear it.

On the other side of the coin is “Dance Music” by the Mountain
Goats. The song is two minutes long, with a peppy piano riff. It’s the kind of ditty that would make Trent Reznor break out in hives. But it’s actually way sadder than anything Reznor has ever written because John Darnielle, the singer, has the guts to reveal the tragedies of his life without hiding behind enraged slogans. He recounts a scene in which his stepfather throws a glass at his mother’s head. Darnielle then dashes upstairs and leans in close to the record player on the floor. “So this is what the volume knob’s for,” he sings. “I listen to dance music.” It’s a Depression Song about why people need happy music.

This section started out as a lengthy riff mocking the lyrical shortcomings of Metallica, as well as depressed teenagers who play Dungeons and Dragons. This is pretty asinine behavior, in particular when you happen to be married to an ex-D&D geek who, at sixteen, learned the entire lead guitar part (solos included) to “Fade to Black.”

I wasn’t aware of this last fact, because my wife avoids talking about her teenage years. It’s a painful subject even now, though I didn’t realize how painful until she read my lame exegesis and began to talk about what “Fade to Black” had meant to her.

So let’s travel back to East Hartford, Connecticut, circa 1986. Erin is twelve years old, a shy sixth grader at St. Christopher’s. Like most budding DFs, she lives in the thrall of an older sibling, in this case Rob, two years her senior, handsome and popular and unruly, a badass with big hair. One day, Rob plays her a tape of a band called Poison. The album cover confuses her—are the members women or men?—but the music slices through her like lightning. Before long, she’s moved
on to the heavy stuff—Anthrax, Megadeth, Metallica. Posters go up on her wall. Her hair rises skyward in a fusillade.

Her parents, strict Catholics, are aghast. Erin has always been the good one, studious, pliant, the kind of kid who memorizes the lives of the saints. Her mother has developed the sweetly deranged fantasy that her daughter will someday play violin for the Hartford Symphony. Erin’s announcement that she is quitting violin to take up electric guitar serves as a formal declaration of war. Her father is dispatched upstairs to tear the posters from her walls, to confiscate all records deemed offending and redact the rest. Her mother will later carry a tape of Mötley Crüe’s
Shout at the Devil
into the backyard and smash it to bits with a hammer.

The mistakes are easy enough to see in retrospect. If one were writing a manual entitled “How to Ensure That Your Troubled Teen Will Fall into the Clutches of Heavy Metal,” Erin’s folks provide a useful model. But their sense of betrayal is honest and not without sympathy. Heavy metal is telling them everything they don’t want to know about their daughter: that she is angry, that she is a sexual being, and (most painfully) that she dreams of escape. What parent wants to be told such things?

In ninth grade, Erin transitions into public high school. She hangs out with the bad kids, her brother’s friends especially. Having grown up amid the obsessive sexual prohibitions of the Church, she now saunters the neighborhood in stretch jeans for the sheer pleasure of hearing men in cars honk at her. Her parents are convinced she has become a fallen woman, though she is in fact that far more common breed among metal chicks: a virgin seeking the power of a slut.

It is amid this feuding that Erin finds “Fade to Black.” Most metal songs are aspirational, wishful odes to hedonism. “Fade to Black” is a dirge about a guy so alienated he savors the prospect of his own suicide. The song strikes Erin as an epic transcription of her life. She, too, feels hopelessly misunderstood, trapped with no way out. For months,
she’s been scouring the want ads for rented rooms. But she has no money and no way to get a job.

She listens to “Fade to Black” over and over: the somber opening notes, the chords ringing out above the martial thump. She learns it on the guitar because she wants to be noticed by the older boys, and because she figures maybe she’d become a rock star and that will be her ticket out. She likes the ending best, after James Hetfield growls
“Death greets me warm, now I will just say goodbye”
and Kirk Hammett rips into his solo and the whole band starts to gallop, triumphant, unstoppable, a violent blur. She knows it’s fucked up that “Fade to Black” makes suicide heroic, but that’s how it feels, like she’ll be seizing control of her life once and for all, meting out the ultimate punishment to her parents.

Things get worse. They always do in this kind of story. Rob moves out of the house and the disputes between Erin and her folks escalate into physical altercations. One afternoon, she is pulled out of class by her parents and driven to a psychiatric hospital. Their goal is naïve, if not quite unkind. They want professionals to take away the wild mascaraed creature that dwells upstairs and return to them the docile, straight-A student they can safely love. They are genuinely shocked when the doctors suggest family counseling. Soon after, Erin arrives at school with an injured finger. The school nurse asks her what happened; she bursts into tears. This is when the social workers get involved.