chapter twenty-two “HE DOES WHAT HE DOES, I DO WHAT I DO”

EXCERPTED FROM “JUST SAY O.?,” AURAL, JUNE 1984

The twelve tracks on Temper are Opal Jewel’s first new recordings since 1976’s strident Weird O., and her second stab at escaping the shadow of the arresting work she once did with Nev Charles. Not that she hasn’t been busy in the intervening years: She’s made a steady enough career by grinding through a few dates at European rock clubs and discos, guest-lecturing on university campuses, even producing a well-intentioned if only modestly successful vanity project, an off-Broadway play about the friendship between the writers Lorraine Hansberry and James Baldwin. But all that time, she says, something she needed was missing—the jolt she gets in the recording studio, creating her propulsive kind of rock and roll.

This comeback album took Opal nearly two years to make: three months writing it, eighteen more wrestling it free from Rivington Records and transitioning it over to Sire. Then another few weeks in the studio, updating it on the fly with what she felt was stronger, more timely material. But, she says, never mind those hitches and delays: They’re in her rearview mirror now, and with what some might say is a foolish faith, Opal Jewel has her foot pressed hard against the accelerator. She’s zoomed past the peskiest questions—Will this album sell any better? Is it even any good?—and she’s steering her engines straight for the sky.

During our interview inside a midtown Manhattan café, where she’s drawing stares for her naked head and outrageously colorful outfit (more on that later), Opal insists she learned a lot from the harsh reception of Weird O. Those lessons, she claims, have prepared her to seize a new moment. “On those songs I went too far one way, maybe a little too hard, and I do get that people sometimes want to feel the music easier in their bones,” she says. “At the same time, I can’t ever lose sight of who I am—can’t ever get too lightweight, too meaningless. So with this record I aimed for that sweet spot in between.”

Has she learned anything from the massive success of her friend and former partner?

“I’d be an idiot not to take notes from Nev,” she says. “I’m proud of him. He’s doing well.”

Does she like the music he’s making, though?

“He’s doing very well,” she repeats.

So well, in fact, that with Brummie Bard, last year’s collection of story-songs, he’s been nominated for three Grammys, including Song of the Year for “The Lane Where I Lived.” This music is a far cry from the headline-making, direct-assault racket he used to make with Opal, but she says she doesn’t begrudge Nev’s quick breakthrough to the mainstream. Nor does she feel the need to trash Charles’s chart-climbers as everything wrong with popular music, as Public Image Ltd.’s John Lydon once did in a ribald interview with Tom Snyder. “Please quote me verbatim on this because I’m so sick of saying it: I’m not in competition with Nev,” she says, enunciating every word. She shrugs. “He does what he does, I do what I do. And if he gives a few of those millions he’s making to good causes, that’s all the better.”

If this new album hits big, I ask Opal, what causes would she help to sponsor?

“How much time you got?” she says in a scoffing tone, but her feet jiggle against the rungs of her stool with excitement. As usual, Opal Jewel prefers the scattershot approach—she’s got a thousand gripes and a list of demands to match each one. Ticking them down: She still wants dangerous bigots properly prosecuted, of course—her lifelong tribute to her slain collaborator and lover, the drummer James Curtis III. But she also wants addiction treatment facilities installed in urban areas hit by the scourge of crack cocaine. Women’s bodies to be their own, to do with as they please (cocks or fingers or tongues inside them; unwanted fetuses out). She wants public support for the arts, and for government watchdog groups. AIDS to be properly acknowledged, researched, and over.

On this last front, the overalls she’s wearing make a powerful statement. The set designer on that off-Broadway play she produced custom-made them for her, first painting the canvas material in overlapping black, red, and green markings, like an alternative camouflage. Screen-printed atop that backdrop, on the front of the overalls and the back, are two different headshots of the same young black man, each one bordered with safety pins. He is—he was—an aspiring dancer named Christopher Givens, the set designer’s homosexual lover. In the “before” photo on the front, Mr. Givens is smiling and healthy, eyes twinkling. In the “after” on the back, he is nearly unrecognizable. His face haggard and slack, skin ruined with lesions. Eyes dead dull.

“The front was taken in ’81,” Opal says. She turns around and keeps her back to me for the next several moments as she speaks, so that Mr. Givens’s visage haunts. “And this one on the back was taken just a year later. Now thousands of people are dead, thousands more are sick with this thing. And your all-American Gipper, he closes his eyes.”

Of the Temper song titled “Ron Is Gone”—one of the later additions to the album, Opal confirms—the reference is, in fact, to President Reagan. Though the lyrics feel reliably provocative, her vocals on the track go soft and dreamy, perhaps her appeal to those who’ve sniped that her voice is too loud and unpleasant for today’s pop radio: “We’d come out to drink the night / He and he, she by she / Whichever way we’d care to arrive / We are well again / Elegant / Dignified / Free.”

What does she mean by all of this, in the context of that title?

Still Opal keeps her back turned to me. “It’s my little fantasy,” she says, “of what might be, or what might’ve been for Christopher and all the other friends and artists we’ve lost, if the people who didn’t give a damn disappeared.”

So, if Reagan wasn’t president, there’d be a cure?

“It’s impossible for me to answer a question like that.” Her tone has turned cool and wary. “I just know things are getting worse with him in.”

Who will she back to fix what’s broken, then? Walter Mondale? Jesse Jackson?

She whips back around on her stool, incredulous. Mr. Givens now seems to laugh at me too.

“Oh, honey,” she says. “How we gon’ get anywhere, with you dreaming so small?”

CAPSULE REVIEW OF OPAL JEWEL’S FINAL ALBUM, AURAL, MARCH 1988

Stew (Uprising Records)

Opal Jewel has yet another new label but the same old devils on Stew, her self-produced third solo rant. As the title suggests, she’s dumped various styles into the pot, everything from reggae to rap (even trading verses on “Did I Stutter?” with a charitable KRS-One). But it seems that time has continued to dull her palette: Instead of serving up a richly layered conceptual treat, she’s oversalted the finished product with preachy lyrics and the tired feminist shtick that wore out two albums ago. Hard to imagine even the most nostalgic Mercurial dipping a spoon into this. —Phil Francisco

PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT FROM “INSIDE OPAL JEWEL’S CLOSET,” MTV’S HOUSE OF STYLE, FEBRUARY 17, 1990

Todd Oldham: Now all these explosions of color I just adore, but it’s a little different vibe from the character you’re playing in Any Witch Way. Can you tell us about her style?

Opal Jewel: Augustina is like the grand dame of the coven—347 years young and a classic, honey. Maybe a little too much old-lady lace for my speed, but that’s all right, the all-black suits me fine.

---

To be clear: Any Witch Way, costarring Opal Jewel and released in theaters two years after her last album flopped, is a terrible movie. The plot is stupid, the F/X subpar. Opal’s costumes, clearly not Virgil-vetted, comprise a dingy heap of voluminous rags; next to her fellow witchy time travelers (Swoosie Kurtz and Penelope Ann Miller, both outfitted in wispy pastels), she looks sexless and old. Anyone who’s ever seen this “comedy” could argue it is among the more desperate moments of Opal Jewel’s career, a marker on her downward trajectory into a decades-long silence. For her Black fans, though, the cringe factor is acute. I still remember the first time I saw it, on VHS with my first girlfriend in college, and how, whenever Opal jerked her neck to the side or pooched out her lips, we threw our hands up over our eyes. Watching her image flattened for laughs, stretched toward the most obvious stereotypes about sassy Black women, felt to us like a horror show.

And yet, as with Opal’s later albums, there is something worth noting in her committed performance. Following my most recent viewing—in my apartment on a Monday afternoon, as I pondered the frightening decline of my own career—I concede that her character, Augustina, one of three guiding witches posing as substitute teachers at a white-bread Midwest high school, has by far the best lines. In the moments I got terribly annoyed with the main character (played by Christina Applegate), Augustina rose to the occasion as my avatar. “Lemme get this straight,” she snipes to her kindlier witch sisters after their blond protegée gets tripped at the homecoming dance by her crush’s girlfriend. “I’m conjured back here after hundreds of years, and this dummy still can’t work a protective spell?” And Swoosie Kurtz and Penelope Ann Miller try to hold the incorrigible Augustina back, try to keep her off the dance floor, but she charges from her station behind the punch bowl, whooshing away the crowd of bopping white teenagers with a flick of her fingers, and the camera zooms on her disgusted face as she peers down at the floor and barks the only line from this movie you probably know….

Damn it, Becky! Get it together!

I first saw the GIF pop up this past January, posted by an old friend on Twitter. The looping clip has since been repurposed for various outrages involving white women, but on that day the attached caption, punctuated after the ellipses with the laugh-cry emoji, was “Serena Williams Be Like…”—presumably a commentary on the news that endorsement queen Maria Sharapova had been trounced, for the eighteenth straight time, by her imagined rival during the quarterfinals of the Australian Open.

I laughed at this viral gold for a good ten minutes (I’m only human, after all, and on top of that a Serena fanatic). Then I marveled that it existed, period. Even I had not remembered this moment from the movie until I saw it all over my social feeds. I could imagine that some anonymous internet genius had been reading the headlines about Bree Newsome^I and the history of Confederate iconography; I could see them digging toward the same place I’d once been—the bottom of an Opal Jewel rabbit hole. But this fresh convert was a millennial kid, with access to much better technology than me: They’d unearthed this B-minus-minus of movies, in a high-definition format to boot, and then had the patience to make a perfectly edited GIF of it, cutting the clip right at the moment when Opal, having delivered her epic lines, slices her eyes to the side. Whoever it was understood the culture and the language and this current moment of Black exasperation, and was nodding to the eerie relevance of Opal Jewel in them. Whoever it was knew that this bit would land.

In Opal’s garden in March, during the last interview before our standoff at Bob’s memorial, we talked about what new audience might be ready for her. I pulled up the GIF on my phone and played it for her—she said she had never seen it before. I studied her as she watched it; I expected her to cackle, same as everyone else. Instead her top lip curled as she studied the device. She adjusted its distance from her face as if trying to snap the screen into focus, then started tapping at it, shaking it.

“The damn thing is skipping,” she said, and thrust it back at me.

“Oh, no no,” I said, taking it from her and squatting beside her chair. “It’s supposed to do that. It’s a GIF. It loops. Like a highlight. See?”

We watched it together a few times, and I couldn’t help but laugh again.

She smiled but shook her head at me. “I guess I’m old, because I don’t get it. Is it supposed to be funny?”

I smiled back. “It is. Have you heard about ‘Becky’?”

“Yes, that’s the girl in the movie. That was the character’s name.”

“Right, right, but…” I briefly considered trying to explain “Becky” and memes and virality, but suddenly felt very silly. I slipped the phone back into my pocket and sat down. “Well, it’s a whole thing, but people really do love it.”

“I guess that’s what Virgil’s been trying to tell me. That folks for some reason love this movie now.”

“Um, they love that scene, at least.”

“Huh.” She seemed to consider. “I guess you can see I don’t fool too much with the internet.”

“Why’s that?”

She leaned back in her chair until the front legs lifted. She stretched and spoke through a giant yawn: “People are real sometimey. They didn’t have anything good to say about me when it came out.” The chair plopped back down to the ground. “Wouldn’t buy my records and then called me a sellout when I took this role, when I tried to get paid.”

We were both quiet awhile, listening to the crickets sing. She picked up a joint perched in the teeth of an ashtray, lit it, and pulled, watching me with extreme focus, waiting for me to say something else.

“As an Opal Jewel fan,” I said, “those were difficult days to stomach.”

“I’m well aware,” she said, exhaling and breaking her stare. “But were you aware that BS little movie helped keep me out of the hole? Besides my other debts, my mama was sick. She’d just had a stroke, and a bad one at that. Needed round-the-clock care. The music y’all loved wasn’t cutting the checks anymore.”

“For what it’s worth? I actually think Temper is very underrated. Stew too.”

“Huh,” she said. “You and the fifteen other people who think that should start a club. Had to cancel that Stew tour halfway through, you know. Had to cut my losses.”

I couldn’t help but think of Nev then, and his wins through the eighties—the gold and platinum pop records; the awards-show performances; the massive stadium tours; the lucrative songwriting credits for other artists, when he wasn’t promoting a new solo project himself.

“Did Nev ever offer to help you out?” I asked Opal that evening. “Seems he could have easily invited you on a couple of his tours, if he’d wanted.”

“Why, so I could drag him down too?” She laughed. “Nah. And if he had offered I would’ve turned him down. All I ever wanted for Opal & Nev, at the time we broke up, was for what we used to do together to live on its own as a meaningful thing, and as a true collaboration—not one of us giving some kind of charity to the other. So for me, when I was going through tough times, broke times, I didn’t want to taint that good work. If the moment wasn’t right for my solo stuff to fly, if I miscalculated, then it was just better to leave music alone and go on and do something totally different. Something forgettable and quick, like that movie. Take the money and run. Move on.”

“And wow—now people are revisiting and loving these moments you say are forgettable.”

“Like I said, I don’t get it, but that’s life. Real funny how a bunch of somebodies seem to love me again. Want me running my mouth on their talk shows and panels and stuff. Want me to get back on their stage.” Her eyes lit up. “Guess that’s just time working like the thing on your phone. What’s that you called it?”

“You mean the GIF?”

“A GIF, yeah. Looping around and around…” She took another drag off the joint. “You see this orange idiot whipping up so much ugly at these rallies of his? You see all these brothers and sisters shot down like dogs and nobody pays? That sure ain’t brand-new. That’s nothing but a throwback to the bad old days—and folks was on my TV the last election, talking about ‘post-racial.’ ” She exhaled and shook her head. “But there’s a flip side to that record—you’ll see. The kind of feedback that makes your face screw up.” She pretended to hear something, cocking her head like a bird. “Hey, wait a minute, what’s this loop? What’s this noise?” She rocked her torso back and forth, shoulders dipping up and down, as if poising herself to jump into a double-dutch. Suddenly she pounded her feet on the grass, dropped her head back, and raised both fists in triumph, the joint sticking up between the knuckles of one like a smoking middle finger. “That’s that Opal & Nev speed, baby, coming around again!”

I. On June 27, 2015, days after nine Black Americans were massacred inside Charleston, South Carolina’s Emanuel AME Church by a white supremacist they had invited to worship with them, activist Newsome scaled a thirty-foot pole outside the South Carolina State House and removed the Confederate flag that still flew there. Her arrest spawned press coverage and reopened the debate over Confederate symbols, which the murderer, Dylann Roof, had proudly displayed in photographs. Many news stories mentioned previous controversies involving the flag—including Opal Jewel’s riot-sparking destruction of one at Rivington Showcase.