A Playlist Series
American Crisis Playlist #19
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Yesterday I discovered that when he was in school back in Syracuse, my therapist knew Delmore Schwartz and Lou Reed quite well. In fact, they sat at a bar called The Orange one night when a tune came on the jukebox that made them jump up and clap and eventually sing along once they learned the words.
That song was something about wanting to hold someone’s hand back in the winter of ’64. Kennedy was dead and everything, and four years later so would be another Kennedy, because in order to get a punk band called The Dead Kennedy’s….
But I’m losing my place here. I am being analyzed by a man who was good friends with Lou Reed, and I’m not sure how to process that information. Not that I’m struggling through any angst or pain because of it, but finding out that I am two degrees from what was once the Rock and Roll Animal is truly heady stuff.
I think of “Coney Island Baby,” as well as A Coney Island of the Mind. From beat to Beat to Beatle, the world drips in funny patterns.
Drop, Drop…drip…DROP
I saw Lou once near Lincoln Center as I strolled up Broadway. He stood next to a payphone, and standing with him was Laurie Anderson. I stared, and they, of course, knew why I stared. Instead of snarling or sneering, they smiled back. I wish I had more than a mental picture of that meeting, but the one I have will have to do.
I could have walked up to them and asked why “The Bells,” or how “O Superman,” but my shyness and certainty that I’d drool kept me walking away.
Over a decade later, I saw Laurie do a show at Georgia Tech, and near the end, she brought Lou on for a couple of numbers. My friend Mark was with me, and some of our students. I wonder if any of them remember?
Of course, Lou is dead, I’m still in therapy, and according to my therapist, our American crisis won’t be ending anytime soon.
I love it when my therapist tells me he’s going to burst my semi-optimistic bubble and then does so.
He also says Lou’s record The Blue Mask is his best. I say “Hell yeah,” even if I don’t agree. It’s a moment I could have longed for, and now it just went past, like Lou and Laurie watched me pass that fall day in New York. Maybe they wanted me to stop. And why not? I’m pretty cool, I think.
But as to our music, let’s walk, though not necessarily on the wild side.
AMERICAN CRISIS PLAYLIST #19
- “Kimmi in a Rice Field,” Mr. Twin Sister, from 2011’s In Heaven. Honestly, I have no idea where this band came from or how they got into my library. Who let them in, anyway? If it’s you, give me a shoutout because I want to hug you and kiss you and tell you how much I love you and them. I don’t know why Kimmi is in that rice field, but Kimmi, I’m standing there with you and I don’t know what we’re looking at, or feeling, or how long we’ll be here, though it might be longer than we think.
- “I Ain’t Ever Satisfied,” Steve Earle and the Dukes, back in 1987 on Exit O. If you think this is your theme song, who am I to argue, except that it must be mine. So you go your way and I’ll go mine. When I saw Steve at The Orange…Peel in Asheville a few years back, I’m sure he didn’t do this song, though I’m really not sure. He didn’t do “Transcendental Blues,” and I’m still upset or…not satisfied, so maybe all this is worth it. I thank my friend Les for one day, back in 1986, asking if I had heard of this kid Steve Earle. I hadn’t and a few Guitar Towns away I did. How has the time passed and will it keep on?
- “Ghosts,” Bruce Springsteen from his upcoming release, Letter to You. When I heard this song last week, I immediately thought of Steve’s song above. Don’t ask why. I find Bruce’s voice so soothing, and we’re going on forty-five years now. I wonder if my therapist and Lou wrote letters to each other after Syracuse? I’ll ask, but why wouldn’t they have? I used to write letters to everyone, including an old college friend named Anne, who died on me at some point after our letters stopped. It’s a shitty way to discover from your alumni bulletin that a friend has died. Are there others like me that turn to the death section of the bulletin first? Anne lived in Mobile, on South Ann Street. No shit.
- “Paranoid,” Black Sabbath. 1970. Paranoid. Because why not? I mean, aren’t you? 3 weeks away, and what can I do now that I’ve voted. So easy to turn in to a smiling poll worker. I assume someone will count it, too, and the fact that I use the word, “assume,” validates Ozzy and the boys’ spectral vision from my 14th year alive. That Ozzy is still alive is just as miraculous, I think. Can Ozzy vote? Does he?
- “The Community of Hope,” PJ Harvey, in 2016’s The Hope Demolition Project, and in that year, a more aptly titled LP doesn’t exist, even though she was a little off in the projection. I gotta say, that if I walked by PJ while she was standing at a phone booth, I would walk over and not past and ask her who she was calling and why and if she needed a dime or a quarter. What I’m saying is that I adore her sound and wonder what she was doing back when my therapist and Lou were dancing with Delmore to the Beatles? Yeah, she wasn’t alive then, but she is now. I would definitely write to her.
- “Here We Are in the Years,” Neil Young, from his live Tuscaloosa record, recorded in the year of our lord, 1973. Found originally on his first solo, self-titled album. My first love. I was there, in Tuscaloosa, with Freddy and Jim and Jimbo and Jane. “Time itself is falling so, spreading fear of growing old…” The fear is real and it’s happened. We were sixteen/seventeen then. We had not heard of D****d Fu**ing T***p, didn’t know he existed. Do we know now? Can we “relate to the slower things that the country brings?” Whatever they are? Subtle faces.
- “Till Victory,” The Patti Smith Group, from 1978’s Easter. Nothing subtle here, though I can’t believe this was ’78. Thought it was earlier, but that’s Patti, who surely walked past Lou on uncertain days in the Village or The Bowery. You know what I mean. I want to hold your hand until the damn election is called and then we’ll worry about what comes next with the militias and Q’ers and all the sordid stuff going on in what passes for people’s minds and hearts.
- “Positively 4th Street,” Bob Dylan, echoing out of a Greatest Hits album lost in my downstairs collection somewhere. I thought about using the no direction home “Rolling Stone” song, but I didn’t want to be that obvious, less positive than this. So much happens when Dylan plays and I can’t keep up. But I feel better and realize that in 1964, Highway 61 Revisited was still a year away. And “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was a year back. And Kennedy was dead.
- “Sharkey’s Day,” Laurie Anderson, from 1980’s Mister Heartbreak. Strange dreams. Later on the record, William S. Burroughs chimes in for “Sharkey’s Night.” I never saw Burroughs or Ginsberg or Kerouac, but there’s Laurie, living for me day and night. Strange and desolation angels. Inner demons abounding. Mr. Twin Sister Heartbreak.
- “My House,” Lou Reed from The Blue Mask, 1982. Delmore Schwartz taught Lou and my therapist Joyce’s Ulysses, my favorite novel. Schwartz was the model for Saul Bellow’s “Humboldt,” and in my first year of teaching at the college, I taught Joyce and Humboldt’s Gift, and didn’t know my therapist but did know Lou — though I hadn’t seen him yet — and wondered about how we walk so steadily over ground that others could never walk freely on, in, about. “A mist is hanging gently on the lake/My house is very beautiful at night.” And so it is in all its machinations and cardboard dreams.
Thank you, all who care. As usual, Noah Levy, Jessica Lee McMillan, Tre L. Loadholt, and so many others.
Here’s more riffing:
