The Annotated Mixtape

“I could never leave you, Massachusetts,” Joe Pernice sings over a few slow bass notes, a softly strummed acoustic guitar, and a lap steel’s lonesome sigh: this apostrophe to my—our—native state is a thought I’ve often seconded, though his voice itself—a near-whisper, a hushed breath about to crack, a mumble too sweet to suggest exhaustion, and so it registers for me as regret—conveys a certain amount of ambivalence toward the words it proclaims, and maybe it’s this ambivalence that draws me into the song.

Joe Pernice is one of the few rock vocalists who can imbue even the phrase “your pretty white ass” with a boundless and convincing melancholy. Imagine, then, what he might do with the sibilant syllables of “Massachusetts.” Is his vision the one I want to consult for sentiment regarding my native soil when my own sentiments about that soil are so conflicted? Pernice’s songwriting—whether in the Scud Mountain Boys or his later band, the Pernice Brothers—allows such words as “ruinous,” “eclipsed,” “trauma,” and “indentured.” (Pernice earned an M.F.A. in creative writing.) He can take a line such as “this fascination with the moribund,” deliver it in a wistful croon, and marry it to both swelling violins and the sort of sunny, chiming guitar chords that filled the AM radio airwaves of my early childhood.

Such covert duplicity is the marrow of Massachusetts. I have followed a country road through apple-orchard hills to its sudden end in a sooty brick ghost town where the storefront windows contain only the faint circular swipes of dried soap and illegible scraps of newsprint blow along weedy sidewalks to catch in chain-link fences. My neighbors in upstate NewYork chuckled forlornly about the timing of an April Fool’s Day storm that offered us an inch or two of snow a few years back, but I can recall from my Massachusetts boyhood an afternoon in the midst of a glorious May when skies sunny an hour before began to swirl down clots of snow, crushing lilac and apple blossoms in my backyard. Over a foot fell in my hometown that day.

Massachusetts herself, despite her welter of intellectual improvement, remained curiously provincial.

During the years I lived in upstate New York and rural Pennsylvania—years to which I referred only half-jokingly as “exile,” though New England remained no more than a few hours’ drive away—a fellow Massachusetts native once told me I was romanticizing our home state: “What about all those kids you couldn’t stand in your high school?” he asked, by way of example. “What about the drivers?”

He didn’t understand, or I failed to make clear, that by the word Massachusetts I really meant the familiar. I wanted to gather within this single word the countless evocative fragments of the place it indicated—fragments profound to me yet ultimately meaningless to anyone else. In this sense, “Massachusetts” means a collapsing stone wall deep in leaf-littered woods; it means Routes 9 and 122 and 31; it means the signs throughout my home city showing a red heart hollowed out and pierced by a pointing arrow, and, in small block lettering below this, the word DOWNTOWN; it means the sound of rain on the roof mingled with the early morning rush of water through the pipes in my bedroom wall as my father showered before work; it means the spray-painted graffiti I inadvertently memorized—NUCLEAR POWER MEANS CANCER FOR OUR CHILDREN—from an overpass on I-290; it means the smell of woodsmoke on an evening not long after the end of Daylight Savings time, when the sun has set but a band of its yellow light along the horizon still specifies exactly the bare branches of trees against the sky. Or perhaps it is the strange possessiveness I feel toward these banal and homely things that I mean when I say “Massachusetts.”

But my Massachusetts is a selective fiction: to me, Massachusetts has nothing to do with clam chowder and lobster, with parking a car in Harvard Yard, with Kennedys or Puritans, with bus riots and racism.

In my exile, I sometimes called the state where I lived Pennsylslovakia, after the liner notes on the Swirlies’ EP Brokedick Car—a shorthand way to underscore for myself the foreignness of even small-town streets laid out in a grid and named by numbers; of a town with more churches than bars; of a cuisine in which waffles are topped with chicken and gravy, and “scrapple” is eaten for breakfast. And even though my friend misunderstood me, I would have taken every one of those kids with whom I coexisted uneasily in high school—their expansive anger, their narrow imaginations—over the peaceful Mennonites who, bonnets and handmade dresses flapping, pedaled their bicycles along the roads outside of my Pennsylvania town.

“You’re livin’ in your own private Idaho,” Fred Schneider of the B-52’s declared in a 1980 song, and though “your own private Massachusetts” doesn’t fit the line’s meter, I’d nod my head to the substitution. My own private Massachusetts: perhaps this is all I’d ever want, these hills and woods and beaches, the only somewhat sullied acres of my youth, and no need to share.

But when an attempt is made to describe scenery, and that of so enchanting a spot as [western Massachusetts], the mind almost shrinks from the task. Accordingly, the only end of this effort will be a simple setting forth of the facts, and, very possibly, inciting in the mind of the reader a desire to visit the localities mentioned, so that these beauties of nature may be most fully appreciated.

I swear I’ve seen this spot, this road—telephone wires stretched so thin they seem to disappear against an inscrutable and overcast sky; the end-of-winter’s sand striping the asphalt’s edges; a wood-bumpered car parked on the grass, its rear window stickered with the names of forgotten local politicians—pictured on the back sleeve of the Scud Mountain Boys’ album Massachusetts. The road is probably one of those that crisscross the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts—perhaps Rt. 116 north of Amherst, or Rt. 63 in Montague—but what matters most about the photo to me is how its various components seem to capture so much of how I might characterize Massachusetts, so much of what Massachusetts means to me: the lovely poverty of the intimate, the impositions of weather, the reliance on self-reliance, the making-do, the resignation to circumstance, everything the slightest bit canted, off-kilter, not plumb. The album is a triumph, yet this photograph conveys an overwhelming sense of some very recent failure.

By contrast, the photograph on the front of the sleeve—single-story suburban homes beneath a faint arc of rainbow—may have been taken in Massachusetts, or it may have been taken anywhere else. The houses and rainbow and landscape do not signify anything so particular as an actual place, and for that reason have nothing to do, for me, with Massachusetts. But the idea that Massachusetts could contain such anonymity is also why Massachusetts, for me, no longer has much to do with itself.

Northampton, perhaps, will impress us with its beauty next, seeming so delightful for a home or a summer residence, its streets so beautifully shaded with grand elms, and the whole village environed with green meadows and forest trees. Then the carpet of nature’s own coloring, in the meadows of Northampton and Hadley… almost impress[es] us with the belief that we are fairies, ourselves, and inhabitants of an enchanted land.

The grandchildren of the old West consider the word “culture” a byword somehow synonymous with Boston. They still come back to Massachusetts in droves, either to study or to imbibe, as tourists, some faint relic of the enchantment with which Massachusetts culture held their grandsires spellbound.

—Howe, Massachusetts: There She Is—Behold Her

I lived in Northampton, Massachusetts, during 1994 and 1995, when a local—if not provincial—band suddenly rode a crest of enthusiasm toward a national recording deal and a brief moment of wider recognition. The Scud Mountain Boys. At the time, the name itself struck me as ridiculous, unpleasant to the ear, a faux-hillbilly retroism, reason enough to ignore the music. “Scud” too deliberately recalled the missiles flung from Iraq during the first Gulf War; the Scud Mountain Boys evolved from an earlier band, the Scuds—another name which suggested to me a suspect aesthetic. “Mountain” itself was fine; I’d just been living on one in Vermont. But “Boys”? I didn’t want to hear music made by boys or by men who called themselves boys. And I’ve always been distrustful of hyped bands—preferring to listen, if at all, only when that hype has quieted enough that I might hear the actual songs. So I didn’t show up at any of the Scud Mountain Boys’ many in-town shows; I didn’t imbibe what I’ve since come to see as the considerable enchantments of their music. Friends described their music as “country,” and I had no interest in acoustic country music in 1994 and 1995—especially, I felt certain, if it was “recorded live with one microphone in the kitchen at the Woodmont Hotel, Northampton, MA, when it was cold,” as the note on the back of their first LP attests.

I had no idea that I was missing some of the best music recorded during these years, that I was refusing the opportunity to see one of the era’s most interesting bands refine its talents in small venues a short walk from my own door. But any Massachusetts native knows all about spite, all about hasty judgment and absolute conviction, all about the willful denial of pleasure.

Who are you to tell me?

Who are you to try and lead me from a place you never even came?

So Joe Pernice, in the chorus of “Massachusetts,” wants to know. Who, indeed.

This music might have been the perfect soundtrack to my aimless drives through the Pioneer Valley and the Hilltowns—all the towns I’m even now unwilling to name, to keep their few remaining secrets my own—had I listened.

After fifteen years, my exile ended, and I returned to my home state. And yet this return has allowed me to see what I missed from further away. My Massachusetts has rapidly vanished into a state too much like every other: the same franchise restaurants and parking-lot-girdled megastores, the same overcrowded highways (the fact that so much of my own Massachusetts involves the automobile notwithstanding), the same suburban spec houses encroaching on the little land left. According to the Boston Globe, a 2003 report by the Massachusetts Audubon Society has found that “40 acres of Massachusetts forest, farmland, and open space are being developed every day, about 90 percent of which is being used to build new homes.” Further, “the report… paints a picture of increasing sprawl where Massachusetts residents live in large suburban houses and commute long distances to work, and a state where affordable housing remains in short supply.”

Each day, as I too join the commute to work in Massachusetts, the landscape reminds me of the bleak vision of America John Cheever depicted in his 1982 novel Oh What a Paradise It Seems:

Seven seventy-four was now a length in that highway of merchandising that reaches across the continent. It would be absurd to regret the obsolescence of the small dairy farm, but the ruined villages were for Sears a melancholy spectacle, as if a truly adventurous people had made a wrong turning and stumbled into a gypsy culture. Here were the most fleeting commitments and the most massive household gods. Beside a porn drive-in movie were two furniture stores whose items needed the strength of two or three men to be moved. He thought it a landscape, a people—and he counted himself among them—who had lost the sense of a harvest.

Cheever dubbed such a culture “nomadism,” and another of the novel’s characters feels about his transient world as I do about Massachusetts: “He seemed to be searching for the memory of some place, some evidence of the fact that he had once been able to put himself into a supremely creative touch with his world and his kind. He longed for this as if it were some country which he had been forced to leave.” Could a visitor from out of state now draw the same distinctions I once drew between Pennsylvania and Massachusetts? Can I?

I describe [Boston] in terms of the old because I want to show her as one would show a fine old canvas from which the smoke and oil-deposit and soilure of a viscous atmosphere have been removed.

The 1980s slogan “Make It in Massachusetts” was crafted by the administration of Governor Ed King to counteract the nickname “Taxachusetts,” and to attempt to lure business to the state—the same corporate dollars that helped taint my Massachusetts. I suppose the lovely ambiguity of that “it” is the only reason why any of us remember this phrase. I would pay good money, now, for a T-shirt with that slogan and its concurrent emblem: a fist with upraised thumb, a hand ready to hitchhike to this state of plenty.

The new state slogan suggests precisely everything wrong with Massachusetts, the primary reason why I sometimes feel my home state’s ruined: “Massachusetts… Make It Yours.” This slogan makes explicit an act of imagination that I have long believed only I was entitled to perform—only I was knowledgeable and discriminating enough to perform—and my vision of Massachusetts cannot suffer competitors. This slogan recognizes that Massachusetts is dynamic rather than static, that a process begun when the Abenaki and Wampanoag and Nipmuc burned parcels of forest to plant corn, when the pilgrims offered to this rugged coastline—safe haven, fearful wilderness, paradise—the English names they’d abandoned, is ongoing.

How wrong-headed is my Massachuscentrism, this Massachusetts of my mind? With any discovery—and I certainly discovered a previously unknown Massachusetts during the various years I’ve lived here—coexists the desire to tame, to define, to leave one’s stamp. The frustration of my own colonial desires vexes me, partly because I believe that others view as irrelevant those aspects of Massachusetts that I treasure, partly because of the visible and mutually exclusive ways others have marked my home state. Why have I thought for so long that this tiny crooked state and its one grasping arm contain some immeasurable secrets unobtainable elsewhere—or that one could indeed make it here?

In the Pernice Brothers’ song “She Heightened Everything”—the one in which Joe Pernice rhymes “mortal wound” to “moribund”—he sings, “It fills me with regret / I can’t believe in love, but I want to believe.” Can one be both pragmatic and romantic? Some part of me hopes to rekindle my love for Massachusetts while the rest of me knows this is impossible, as I drive its moribund strips of cinderblock malls, its glass-gleaming office parks rising from mortally wounded woodlands. We know each other too well by now, Massachusetts and I; there are so few secrets left, and too much history.

I was out for a walk with Mr. Fiddler the other night, when he turned to me and said, “This is the time of year when this region is at peace with itself.”

…searching for some sign of human residence here beneath the justifiably uncelebrated Massachusetts sky.

Sometime in my elementary school years—when I was old enough to know the meaning of the word “impregnable” and the power of poetic inversion, but still young enough to enjoy playing with toy guns, or bark-stripped sticks that served as toy guns—a friend and I found a spot near his house that we named “the fortress impregnable.” His house, like mine—and many others in my hometown—was built on the steep shoulder of a hill; his street dead-ended in a narrow band of woods. Here kids had worn tracks in the earth with their feet, and my friend and I dug pits and trenches we covered with elaborately woven branches heaped with dead leaves; we bent back young birches and lashed their tops to the ground; we tried to make tripwires. In the woods, time passed at a rate entirely unrelated to that of the outside world, and we might spend what seemed days in a stick swordfight beneath the leaf-sifted sun—tumbling over rocky dirt, splintering our weapons against each other’s, proclaiming our imagined injuries, choking out dying breaths and looking our last at this world of swaying shadow among maple trunks—to find that, when we returned to his house for Fritos or cookies, a mere hour had elapsed. I doubt anyone much passed through that narrow strip of woods—other kids and perhaps an occasional dog-walker—but we still considered them ours, and our traps were intended to discourage trespassers. Across the street from his house, another house was perched high on the slope, requiring a long set of nearly switchbacked concrete steps to reach its front door. At one of the bends in this stairway was a landing, surrounded on all sides by short concrete retaining walls and further reinforced by some low bushes: we named this spot the fortress impregnable, where we would hunker down, our fractured swords now rifles, waiting for the other kids we played with to cross the street below or emerge from the woods.

I had thought my Massachusetts impregnable, infinitely defensible from those forces that would make of it something other than what I believed it was, something other than what I wanted it to be. But the bulldozers have come for the trees, and from newly cleared circles in the woods rise house frames sheathed, at least temporarily, in Tyvek HomeWrap rather than weathered shingles or narrow clapboards. My Massachusetts is safe, intact, unblemished only in the sense that Daniel Webster once proclaimed it: “I shall enter on no encomium upon Massachusetts; she needs none. There she is. Behold her, and judge for yourselves. There is her history; the world knows it by heart. The past, at least, is secure.”

The past is secure as well in the deliberately old-fashioned songs of the Scud Mountain Boys, which today sound almost like hymns to a vanished era. Though Pernice eventually dissolved the band to form the Pernice Brothers, and though that band uses keyboards and programmed drums rather than mandolin and lap steel, his music and lyrics still traffic in nostalgia, if for a different era and of a different kind. Maybe this is why I like the Pernice Brothers’ records almost as much as those by the Scud Mountain Boys. Either way, I know that I am in the company of a vigorous and choosy memory—just as I am in my Massachusetts, though its memorials are being slowly, irrevocably effaced. My own tracks through and across this state remain as vivid in my recollections as the blue paint of the Freedom Trail as it winds through the Boston streets.

I cue Yours, Mine &Ours, the 2003 record by native son Joe Pernice, and hear him begin one song with the words “Sometimes, it’s better not to know / Holding onto something when you should just let go.” In the chorus of another song, he repeats these lines: “So familiar that it feels too strange / Give a name to this terrifying change.”