Pitch Roll & Yaw: Liz Phair Lands At O’Hare

“Stratford-On-Guy” — my favorite airplane song

I have never been enamored of air travel, although, of course, I am grateful for the convenience it brings. There’s something to be said for Los Angeles to Chicago in four hours rather than the three days it takes by car. It’s not that I am afraid to fly, but I find sitting for hours in a cramped up cabin to be annoying and unpleasant. As if standing in the TSA security queue or waiting seemingly forever for luggage to emerge on the baggage carousel isn’t torture enough.

That said, there’s one thing in air travel that I find entirely magical — practically a religious experience, and that’s looking out the window while coming in for a landing at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport.

I’ve landed at ORD dozens of times over the years, and that amazing feeling always hits me as the wing dips and the plane begins a circular roll over downtown Chicago. Airplanes, or at least the ones I have taken, don’t fly a straight line into O’Hare. First, they fly over Lake Michigan, and then they curlicue around for the final approach. The sensation of the plane moving on all of its axes — up-and-down (pitch), left-and-right (yaw), and rotating on the wings (roll), while a city beautiful reveals itself is quite breathtaking: the majesty of the lake (at certain times of year, adorned with ice), the John Hancock building, Lake Shore Drive, the Sears Tower, the street grid extending from downtown to the edge of the city and beyond.

At twilight, it’s super special. The cabin fills up with an golden glow, and somehow, everything starts to feel different. For me personally, it’s the feeling of coming home, a feeling which I still experience even after having moved away from Chicago some 30 years ago.

So imagine my reaction when I first heard “Stratford-On-Guy,” Liz Phair’s paean to flying over the Windy City from her 1993 magnum opus, Exile in Guyville. It was an amazing discovery — here was someone who has the same reaction to the landing approach at O’Hare as I do! — except she expressed it far more articulately than I ever could, and she put it to music.

“I was flying into Chicago at night

Watching the lake turn the sky into blue-green smoke

The sun was setting to the left of the plane

And the cabin was filled with an unearthly glow

In 27-D, I was behind the wing

Watching landscape roll out like credits on a screen

The earth looked like it was lit from within

Like a poorly assembled electrical ball

As we moved out of the farmlands into the grid

The plan of a city was all that you saw

And all of these people sitting totally still

As the ground raced beneath them, thirty-thousand feet down”

– from “Stratford-On-Guy”, Liz Phair Exile in Guyville (1993)

So here’s Liz Phair, sitting in seat 27-D, staring out the window. As all of this is flashing by, it turns surreal as she imagines herself in a movie: the stewardess she likens to Brigitte Bardot, the landscape of the ground below she compares to credits on a screen, and she imagines she’s in a Galaxie 500 video (nice shout out to a great band that wasn’t around long enough).

This song resonated with me instantly, forging a deep connection. Not that any of this was unexpected. After all, both Phair and I grew up in the northern Chicago suburbs in the mid-’80s, a place and time that John Hughes immortalized in his movies. Sure, her hometown, Winnetka, was far more John Hughes-y, and certainly more posh, than the suburb in which I was raised (though my town was certainly pleasant and comfortable enough). Her high school, New Trier, was more Ferris Bueller-ish than the one I attended. Nonetheless, I can easily imagine having grown up with the likes of a Liz Phair. Perhaps I’m sitting across from her in English class as she churns out one amazing poem after another, or perhaps we’re whiling away the hours of a Saturday morning detention together, enjoying a “breakfast club” of our very own.

You see where this is going? Though a decade removed from high school, once I heard “Stratford-On-Guy,” and for that matter, the rest of Exile in Guyville, I developed a big crush on this petite young woman from just up the road. Her unfiltered take-no-prisoners language and style provided the perfect counterpoint to the comely charms that make up our first impressions of her. Liz Phair disarmed the unwary with her cuteness before clobbering them over the head with a giant “girl power” mallet, and this intrigued me. She was a true rock n’ roll warrior — brash, bold and unafraid of anything. The purveyor of what she herself referred to as “Girly-Sound,” she possessed incredible self confidence. It’s as if she were saying “I’m a girl, and I’m 5 foot 2, but try to mess with me and I’m going to f — you up big time.”

In 1993, she turned indie rock on its head. Hers was a bold statement, remindful of Helen Reddy’s “I am woman, hear me roar” declaration from two decades earlier. Phair herself told Raygun journalist Steffie Nelson in August, 1998: “Being emotionally forthright was the most radical thing I did. And that was taken to mean something bigger in terms of women’s roles in society and women’s roles in music… I just wanted people who thought I was not worth talking to, to listen to me.”

Almost every Liz Phair article ever written contains the famous contention that Exile In Guyville is a song-by-song refutation of, or at least a response to, the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. When I first heard this, I had my doubts. However, Phair confirmed this in a 2010 Rolling Stone interview, and she provided track-by-track examples of how her songs match up with their Exile on Main St. counterparts. Both albums consist of 18 tracks, and “Stratford-On-Guy” is the 17th track on Guyville, which places it opposite the Stones’ “Shine A Light.”

I am not certain as to how “Stratford-On-Guy” is a direct response to “Shine-A-Light.” The Rolling Stones’ gospel-tinged offering is supposedly about Brian Jones, the brilliant multi-instrumentalist and founding member of the band whose descent into drug addiction and tragic death is a well-known chapter in rock n’ roll history, and a pivotal moment in the story of the Stones. Though Mick Jagger is reported to have begun writing the tune before Jones’ death, clearly he was troubled by his longtime friend’s decline, and he saw the writing on the wall. Perhaps he was watching Jones from a distance, feeling powerless as the situation deteriorated, appealing for divine intervention — the “light” in “Shine A Light.”

“Stratford-On-Guy” is a musing on distance and perspective — Phair envisions herself as a character in her own movie. She examines her own life, the local hipster music scene (to which she bestows a sarcastic “Stratford-On-Avon” Shakespeare reference), and her city — Chicago — from hundreds of feet above the ground. The “unearthly glow” from her song may be the same “light” Mick Jagger sings about in “Shine A Light.”

As we contemplate the mysteries of our own lives, distance and perspective can provide deeper understanding. Our internal reflections are multi-dimensional and move in several directions at once, just like an airplane in the sky. Life never takes us on a straight flight path — instead, there are curves, and our lives revolve along several axes concurrently — just like an airplane. There is pitch, there is roll and there is yaw, but to complicate matters more, there is also the ticking away of time.

Sometimes it takes an hour. Sometimes a day.

But when one really listens, Liz Phair tells us, the noise just falls away.