Beginning an Imperfect Story About Music

(I am not quite sure where this is coming from or where it is going, but hours of Annie Lamott in the car and a few days with my younger cousins and nieces and nephews got me thinky about what it was to be the younger me. Which, you know, got me thinky.)

(Why am I explaining myself so much lately, all preamble-ish? Why am I constantly making up words? Because it's funner?)

What I remember mostly about being a kid on the verge of being something else is the smell of my records. Even new, right out of the store, they smelled dusty and worn out and like they owned me.

A new record was the beginning of a beginning: the needle down just right, the scratch, the scruff, the sound cranking out. I spent countless hours laying on hot Mexican tile and later on the wall to wall in my own room, listening. Listening. Quiet. 

The poems I wrote were questions answered in the lyrics of the records I loved. There was poetry everywhere, I told my mom, but on the record player most of all. Elvis Costello's words, that I scrawled down on paper as quick as he sang them to prove to her what I meant... because that's what I meant when I was six and called that thing I wrote a song... because this is what I meant when I said I wanted eight more dollars to buy a new record. For a while, other people's songs were all the writing I would do.

(Annie Lamott says little children sing all the time because they have not learned the difference between language and music. I listen to music when I write, but no one else hears it.)

When I was a kid on the verge, I was haunted by music more than any boy could haunt me. I put the record on in my bedroom, laid down next to its cover and read every word like an anthropologist, examining everything my eyes could see as much as my ears could hear.

Who were these people who "produced," who were these people "thanked" and since my guitar lessons were going increasingly down the toilet, how could I be that person who wasn't shaking the tambourine but shaking the hand? 

I read books about musicians, magazines about musicians, and did hauntings of my own in dirty caverns in Cambridge that sold records from England -- The Wooden Tops, Cocteau Twins, World Party. The names, even now, roll out and off the tongue like candy.

I listened to Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell and Joan Armatrading and I spent a lot of time imagining what love was like, like they made it sound. And when I was less on the verge, but actually kind of over it, being 17 and all, I tried to find that thing for real. Instead I found a Jim Morrison whose name was Jay, James Morrison in fact, which was weird, and he was, for a short and sweet time, all of the songs. 

The Kid showed up and it was perfect timing. When my cassette tape of Bleach fell out of the pocket of my ratty Deadhead backpack, the Kid picked it up and said, "You like Nirvana?" and so we pooled our money and bought more cassette tapes of more bands: The Lemonheads, The Jayhawks, Jonathan Richman. Even now, the names sound like road trips we took, like candy. 

I figured out how to shake the hand so we started to get shiny discs for free! Morphine, Bob Mould, Big Star, Golden Smog, Alejandro Escovedo, Josh Rouse, the McGarrigles. Even now, the names sound like a resume, like a lifetime ago, like candy.  So we haunted rock clubs together, me and the Kid, on guest lists, and he became my permanent Plus One. 

Jay closed the garage door on himself, when he was just 28, like he said he would. I shouldn't have been surprised, but I sobbed torrents and left work early. 

There are songs for that, and I am sure I own them, but I have never found the perfect one to sum it up. I haven't found the words in any song to explain what he did, to explain it away. Even now, with the Pod and the Tunes and the instant access to the things I have always and forever loved? Even now, with a floor of my own to lie on and listen? Even now, I can't find the one lyric, the only melody, the tiny taste of something so so sweet that it will make all that bitterness go away.