1
THE WORLD’S LONGEST MAIN STREET
I GREW UP IN a place called Belleville, a town of about forty thousand in Southern Illinois, a half-hour drive outside of St. Louis. It’s the “stove capital of the world,” or at least it was at the turn of the century. That’s what we were told, anyway. It’s also the home of Jimmy Connors and Buddy Ebsen (Uncle Jed from The Beverly Hillbillies), and when I was growing up they made Stag Beer there. So as you can imagine, my childhood was pretty magical.
In reality it was pretty depressing. Depressing and depressed in all of the familiar ways common to dying midwestern manufacturing hubs: a lot of old empty buildings and a lot of occupied barstools. The things that made our town unique and special were hard to get super excited about. Belleville has (purportedly) the longest Main Street in the U.S., spanning 9.2 miles and ending somewhere around East St. Louis. One stretch of road and so many opportunities to get loaded and almost zero chance of getting lost. I don’t know how many bars were on Main Street, but there must’ve been a lot, because Belleville’s other claim to fame was having the most taverns per capita. I found out later that wasn’t true, which was kind of a relief, because it never felt like something worth bragging about. As if day drinking was a commodity we could have exported and sold to the rest of the world.
I lived just a half block off the Main Street with too many bars, on a tree-lined street with a name like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting: Fortieth. Our small single-family wood-framed house with a porch and a swing ended up being the last home my folks would ever own after my mother impulsively paid $16,000 for it at an auction in the early spring of 1967. Apparently she knew she was pregnant with me but hadn’t told my dad. I was the card up her proverbial sleeve to ease his expected top-blowing at her fiscal irresponsibility. The previous owner had died in that house, which creeped me out as a kid, and as it turned out, both of my parents ended up dying there as well. So everyone who ever owned the house I grew up in died there.
Which is, I think, the main reason my siblings and I weren’t overly sentimental about hanging on to it after we buried my dad in 2017. Aside from all of that backstory, the place was fairly nondescript. The one word I think would be most useful in setting the scene of my childhood? Mauve. There was a lot of mauve. Mauve carpets, mauve wallpaper, mauve furniture. Everything was mauve. Think of a smaller me, and then picture the color mauve, and you’ve conjured my childhood in a nutshell.
I’m not sure if my parents intended to have me. I’ve heard different accounts. The popular story is that I was an accident. Regardless, I was late to the family party. My older sister, Debbie, who’s fifteen years my senior, was born when my dad was just eighteen. They had two more kids, Steve and Greg, and by the time I showed up, my dad was in his midthirties, an age that most men of his generation considered well past prime baby-making years. My dad changed his story over time. He once told me, “I remember your mother called me at work and said, ‘I want another one,’ and I was home before she hung up the phone.” I don’t know if that’s true. He always told that version with at least a six-pack under his belt, so I can’t vouch for its veracity. It’s possible he was trying to spare my feelings. Who wants to be an accident? That’s a hard way to come into the world, created just because the responsible parties weren’t paying attention. On the other hand, aren’t we all accidents? Sorry, moving on . . .
My dad—his name was Bob, but for the purposes of this narrative, let’s stick with Dad—worked on the railroad (yes, all the livelong day). He dropped out of high school after he got my mom pregnant when she was fifteen and got a job as a diesel mechanic for the Alton and Southern Railway. In the early 1960s, some higher-up figured out that Dad was way smarter than his lack of a high school diploma would indicate, so they sent him to Arizona to study computers and learn how to program with punch cards, and eventually he got promoted to superintendent of the switching yard. That’s almost the extent of what I know about what my dad did all day. I only went down to the railroad to see him once, as far as I can remember. I never had much curiosity about his job. For his part, he didn’t seem that curious about me, either, and I never felt much pressure from him to care about trains. Which is odd, because what kid doesn’t like trains?
However, my dad did have a record I was fascinated by, Sounds of Steam Locomotives. It was a collection of recordings of train engines. That’s all it was, the rhythmic clanging of steel wheels on steel tracks, the heavy chuff of heated steam being pushed through a locomotive’s smokestack, a train’s moaning whistle that always sounded to me like voices. It was a weird record, even more so because it was owned by my dad, who spent the vast majority of his waking hours around trains. Wouldn’t that be the last thing he’d want to hear after coming home? Was there a time before I was born when, after work, he would sit with a beer next to the hi-fi, listening to tracks like “2–8–2 No. 2599, Chicago Northwestern” and “4–8–4 No. 801, Union Pacific” and nodding along like they were pop songs?
I guess when I think back on it, it makes total sense how I developed a fondness for almost any recorded sound. Maybe indirectly (because my dad and I never openly discussed it), I learned from him how you could find music in just about anything.
I WASN’T AN ONLY child, but I grew up like one. Since my sister and brothers were so much older, most of the time it was just my parents and me. My dad was on call at the railroad twenty-four hours a day, so he’d always be gone or in bed early. It got pretty lonely in my house growing up.
Most nights I’d stay close to my mother, who was born JoAnn Werkmeister, as she watched TV and smoked cigarettes on the couch. It was the best she could do. She’d been a mother for so much of her life that by the time I came around, she’d kind of given up on parenting. Well, maybe not given up, but she wasn’t interested in being an authority figure. I wasn’t given a lot of boundaries or rules. I didn’t have a bedtime. If I made it to bed at all, it was usually my decision.
She was a night owl—she took occasional naps throughout the day, like a house cat—so she always stayed up late, and she’d let me stay up with her. We’d watch Johnny Carson, and then later, on channel 4’s late-night Bijou Picture Show—the Turner Classic Movies of its day—old movies my mom would tell me she’d seen in theaters when they were brand-new. She adored Judy Garland, so I especially have memories of watching movies like Presenting Lily Mars, Meet Me in St. Louis, For Me and My Gal, Strike Up the Band, Babes in Arms with her. Sometimes I’d drift off—it’s hard to stay awake at 3:00 a.m. when you’re a little kid—and sometimes she’d fall asleep. With a lit cigarette still dangling in her mouth. I’d watch mesmerized as it slowly burned down to the filter and hold my breath in suspense as an ash the length of an entire cigarette would somehow balance itself against her breathing for whole minutes before plopping onto the lap of her robe. That might sound like really irresponsible and dangerous parenting, I know, but it’s a memory that evokes nothing but warm feelings for me. The smell of the cigarettes and the black-and-white TV flickering in the dark, the only sounds being Judy Garland’s familiar voice—“Psychologically, I’m very confused, but personally I feel just wonderful”—and my mom’s gentle breathing nearby. I never felt so content.
Almost every night we’d wake up my dad, who was trying to sleep in the next room. We had a small house, so the master bedroom was inconveniently located right next to the living room. There was just a wall—not even a particularly thick wall—separating him and whatever we were blaring on the TV.
He’d burst out of the bedroom in his saggy white briefs and start screaming, “Goddammit, shut this place down, JoAnn!”
“Go back to bed, Bob!” she’d scream right back at him.
“Do you know what time it is? It’s two o’clock in the goddamn morning! I have to be up before you even know what day it is!”
He’d slam the door shut and my mom would light another cigarette. “Mom,” I’d whisper, trying to be conciliatory. “Maybe the TV is a little bit loud.”
“Don’t let him tell you what to do,” she’d say.
I’d turn the volume down anyway, at least until we heard snoring coming from the next room and we knew he was asleep again, and then the volume would go right back up. It was a nightly battle of wills, and my mother always won.
I tried to be the arbitrator between my parents, the neutral voice of reason, but they both knew I was on her side. My mom was very permissive with me about a lot of things, because she was more interested in having me as a friend and an ally than being my parent. We were a unified front against an unfair and unreasonable world (i.e., my dad and his demands for a quiet home after midnight). She took great strides to keep me by her side. If I ever said, “I’m lonely,” she wouldn’t suggest something rational like “Why don’t you call that kid who lives down the block and go play with him?” She’d teach me how to play solitaire. That was her solution to my loneliness. “Here, I’ll get you some cards.” Because she wanted me there.
My parents did the best they could without a lot of role models in terms of making good boundaries and healthy decisions for their children. My mom’s dad, the cabbie/pimp and career alcoholic, left emotional scars she never outgrew. When she was nine years old, she got a pair of pink cowboy boots for her birthday. It was the only gift she’d asked for, and for a girl not accustomed to getting what she wanted, it was a glorious surprise. She couldn’t remember herself ever being that happy. But then she went outside to play, still wearing the boots, and she got hit by a car. It was pretty horrific. They took her to the hospital, and she was so severely injured that they had to cut her brand-new pink cowboy boots off her body. She ended up being in traction for more than a month. Her dad only came to visit her once that entire time, drunk and causing such an awful scene that he had to be forcibly removed by the police.
It’s hard for me to even imagine my mom at that age, feeling the world fall apart all around her. Barely nine years old, run over by a car, with her cherished pink cowboy boots destroyed, and then her dad finally shows up for a visit, weeks later, wasted, and has to be dragged from her room, kicking and screaming, “I’m here to see my little girl. Let go of me, you cocksuckers!” It’s just sadness piled on top of more sadness.
I felt bad for my mom and dad. Not at the time. At the time, I felt closer to my mom, I needed her more, and I loved that I was her confidant and best friend. I was the uncontested oedipal victor, a psychiatrist once told me. I really didn’t like the sound of that. It was only later, when I was old enough to think about their relationship, that I could recognize how my father could legitimately claim he was being treated unfairly. He was getting up at four o’clock in the morning, sometimes earlier, to drive down to the railroad and work a twelve-hour shift. On top of that, he was always on call. The phone could ring at any hour of the night or day and he would be expected to deliver himself to the railroad’s needs above all other concerns. It wasn’t easy for him to get eight hours of rest even without us almost intentionally ruining whatever sleep he could manage. There’s no reason we couldn’t have watched TV in the kitchen or even gone to bed ourselves. But Mom wasn’t interested.
“Turn that shit down!” he’d scream from behind the bedroom wall.
“Put a pillow over your head,” my mom would shout back, and we’d both giggle like preteen bullies.
I think my dad genuinely loved my mom. And she loved him, too, but maybe not as much. When I was a kid, I thought that she wasn’t getting what she needed emotionally from him. But in hindsight, it was probably the other way around. It was my dad who had no chance. She wasn’t going to trust a man with her happiness. Not after her father made it so abundantly clear what could happen when you trusted a man. She trusted me, but I was her perennial baby, fostered to be her bringer of happiness. But with her husband, they were roommates, at best. She wasn’t going to leave him, but she wasn’t going to let him get too close, either.
WHILE I WAS never groomed for the railroad, my brothers did end up going into the family business. Greg was in track maintenance, and Steve was a brakeman. I also had several uncles and cousins who worked on the railroad. Anytime I would express an openness to the idea of working around trains, my mother would say firmly, “You’re never going to go work on the goddamn railroad.” She was hell-bent against it. I don’t know if she just wanted better for me, or if she worried it was too dangerous. I never quite figured out why it was okay for my brothers but not for me. Maybe it wasn’t, but she knew she had already lost those battles and wasn’t focusing on their futures anymore. Just mine.
I suppose that’s why my mother wouldn’t even allow my dad’s railroad friends in the house. When they’d come over, they’d sit in the backyard and drink and smoke pipes and tell awful stories. They had amazing names, like Skip Pratt and Lee Goldschmidt and Jack Stufflebeam. I remember them being unbelievably filthy and foul-mouthed. Every story was the dirtiest thing you’d ever heard in your life. Skip Pratt had the lowest TPH (teeth per head) ratio of the bunch, was a section gang leader—he was in charge of the workers who maintained a certain section of track—and I could never understand a word he said, but I could tell he wasn’t talking about his job. He was my brother Greg’s boss. All I ever heard Greg say about him was that he pissed on people’s lunches if they left them unattended. That was it. If you brought a sandwich to work, you better hide it from Skip or he’d piss all over it. I knew that Jack S. seemed like the nice guy, but his wife, Sharon, was prone to drinking way too much at social gatherings and would end up grinding on strangers. I saw her with her boobs hanging out more often than I saw her fully dressed. At weddings it was strange not to see her boobs, which is confusing for a child. I was happy not to see her unsolicited tits, but still . . . Was she feeling okay?
Nothing about that world was appealing to me, so I was fine with keeping my distance. But I did appreciate that the railroad kept a roof over our heads and food in our refrigerator. The railroad was also how I got my first record player. Not because my dad used his salary to buy me a record player. He just came home with one. It was a little Fisher turntable and receiver, with a few dents and scratches in the faux wood chassis because it had “fallen off a train.” That was my dad’s code for “This is stolen merchandise.” If he brought home anything from work for our family, it had “fallen off the train.” We once ate Cheez-Its with our dinner for an entire year because a couple of cases of Cheez-Its had “fallen off a train.”
Before I got my own records and my own stereo, I would listen to whatever records my parents had in the cabinet underneath their hi-fi. It wasn’t all locomotive sounds. I can remember my parents’ record collection vividly, and not always for the music. There was a Marty Robbins record cover with a little bit of side boob on it. That was pretty amazing. Come for the rustic ballads and stay for the winking cowgirl slinging guns, naked from the waist up. If you’re ten years old and you see that image, it gets burned into your subconscious.
My dad had a monogamous relationship with music. By that I mean he consumed one song at a time. That was enough for him. There was a six- or seven-month period when the only song he played was Mac Davis’s “It’s Hard to Be Humble.” That’s a long time for one song. Maybe it’s from being born during the Depression, but anything more than one song felt like too much to him. Why did anybody need more than that? It was just greedy.
I have no idea where my dad would find these songs, because they weren’t exactly the hits of the day. It’s still a mystery. There was the summer when Leo Sayer’s “Long Tall Glasses (I Can Dance)” was nailed to the turntable. I must’ve heard it a few hundred times. And then the next summer, it was Glen Campbell’s “Southern Nights.” Every night and all day long on the weekends, it was “Free as a breeze / Not to mention the trees / Whistling tunes that you know and love so.” I spent most of the first half of my life thinking I hated “Southern Nights,” because it was inflicted on me. I didn’t choose it, it was chosen for me, and it was unrelenting. The thought of it made my skin crawl. At some point I figured out that the song was written by Allen Toussaint, and I adore him, so its stock shot up with that knowledge alone. His version is murky and mysterious, pretty incredible, but kind of demo-ish. Hearing it really made me appreciate the meticulous pop craft of Glen Campbell’s version, but I still felt a little queasy whenever I stumbled upon it.
When my dad died we put together a playlist of all of “his” songs to play at the funeral home before and after the service. My sons, Spencer and Sammy, fell in love with “Southern Nights” in particular, so after the funeral we drove back to Chicago listening to Glen Campbell in the car. It was beautiful to hear that song through their ears and feel it being liberated from its past, transforming into something with powerful personal meaning for all of us. We just opened the windows and let it blare. And then we got home and learned that Glen Campbell had died. I’m pretty sure we killed Glen Campbell.
My dad was the same about the music I made. He listened to everything by Uncle Tupelo and Wilco, but he enjoyed certain songs more than others, like his favorite, “Casino Queen.” But that may have only been because I wrote it for him. I’d taken him to one of those riverboat casinos on the Mississippi, and he said, “You should write a song about this.” So I did. I’m glad I wasn’t living at home when he played “Casino Queen” into the ground. I don’t think I would have ever recovered.
He also loved “Hummingbird.” He loved it so much that for years he’d ask me, “Why don’t you write more songs like ‘Hummingbird’?” I’d tell him, “I have no idea. I can’t. I’m not even sure how I wrote ‘Hummingbird.’” But I think he was onto something. I probably would have been more successful if I had carved out a niche for myself. People used to do that. You know how Chubby Checker had a hit with “The Twist” in 1960, and then he came out with “Let’s Twist Again” and then “Slow Twistin’” and “Twist It Up”? They were all huge hits. That’s how a lot of successful artists used to do it—find a formula that works and drive it into the ground on the way to the bank. After “Hummingbird,” I should have just continued that theme. “Mottled Duck.” “I’m the Man Who Loves Coots.” “Impossible Warblers (Unlikely Bananaquits).”
My dad was smart, but he wasn’t often right when it came to career advice. He might have been right about “Hummingbird,” though.
THE FIRST RECORDS I remember buying with my own money were 45s. It was 1974 or thereabout, so I was maybe eight at the time. My sister, Debbie, was home from college, and she took me to a Record Bar. I bought “Dream On” by Aerosmith and “Magic” by Pilot because I’d heard both songs on the radio and I couldn’t believe my ears. The radio was my only source of new music at the time, and I was still trying to piece together what I was hearing. Peter Frampton was on the radio so much that I thought he was the DJ. I honestly thought that was the name of a DJ. I had no idea he played music.
Debbie and my aunt Gail went to school together all the way through high school, and my sister was the older of the two. (My mother and maternal grandmother were pregnant at the same time with their first and last children, respectively. Make sense? That’s the way we do it in Southern Illinois. So Aunt Gail functions as a sort of utility relative in our family: extra sister, bonus mom, and of course straight-up aunt all in one package.) The two of them gave me a crate of 45s, which they’d collected as teenagers. They had singles by the Beatles, Herman’s Hermits, the Monkees, Sonny and Cher, lots of Motown stuff. It was a very pop-heavy record collection for the time, just not my time. I was about ten years late. Though it was very contemporary for the mid-sixties, when they were in high school.
Because I was still pretty unsophisticated about records, I didn’t know the difference between an A-side and a B-side on a 45, so sometimes I’d fall in love with the wrong song. My sister had a 45 of the Monkees’ “Daydream Believer” but I listened to the flip side first, “(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone,” so that’s the one I listened to over and over. Not a bad song but it took months before I finally heard “Daydream Believer,” which is probably the greatest thing the Monkees ever recorded.
My favorite was “Turn! Turn! Turn!” by the Byrds. I felt genuine love for that song. Maybe my first feelings of love toward a piece of music. It seemed to exist in its own sonic universe, unlike anything I’d heard before. It was one of the first times I thought about the shape of a song. Even to my untrained ears it felt like it followed its own set of rules, like it had an internal logic all its own. Most of the other pop songs in my inherited collection had an easily identifiable verse/chorus structure, but this was different. I guess technically “Turn! Turn! Turn!” has verses and a chorus, but it always hit me more like a living organism than the sturdily crafted repetition typical of hit singles. More like a tree than a table.
The first LP I ever bought was also with my own money—money I had managed to scrape together from a paper route and cash stuffed into birthday cards. My mother flew us out to visit Debbie in Tucson, Arizona, where she was living at the time. We took a day trip to Mexico, and my mother bought some Kahlúa and an onyx chess set and I bought a Spanish copy of Parallel Lines by Blondie. I’d heard “Heart of Glass” on the radio, and I’d seen them on Wolfman Jack’s Midnight Special. The songs were in English, but the sleeve was written in Spanish. And it was a very, very, very cheap pressing. Like flimsy, 50-gram vinyl. It was almost see-through. It was the same quality as those flexi discs that used to come in magazines. Now that I think about it, it might not have been entirely legit.
But the bulk of my early music education, and the albums and songs that changed and formed my musical perspective, mostly came from my brother Steve. Once, when he was home from college when I was very young, probably around eight or nine, he walked in on me in the kitchen, filling out a Columbia House record club mail-order form. I was just semi-randomly checking off records, picking names I remembered from the radio and album covers that looked cool. Kansas, Foreigner, Billy Joel . . . My brother sat there watching me, wincing. Eventually he couldn’t stand it anymore, and he snatched the form from my hands.
“What are you doing?” he asked me. “I can’t let you do this.”
“What?” I said. “They’re offering twelve records for a penny. A penny!”
“It’s a scam,” he told me.
“You don’t know that,” I insisted.
He was right, of course. The fine print was a Faustian bargain I’m sure some people my age are still working to get out from under. Basically, you were signing your life away to a record company, and all for the illusion of getting a Kiss record for a fraction of the price. I was too high on savings to be reasoned with. “Where else am I going to get twelve records for that kind of money?” I asked my brother. “Twelve records.”
“You want records?” he said. “You can have mine.”
He was true to his word. He gave me everything. And he didn’t have a casual collection. It wasn’t like my aunt’s and my sister’s 45s of sixties bubblegum pop hits. My brother had the musical taste and ambition of a somewhat pretentious yet serious 1970s college pseudointellectual. His records ran the gamut from Harry Chapin to Kraftwerk to Frank Zappa to Amon Düül. I went from not being entirely clear on the difference between the Beatles and the Monkees to spending entire weekends listening to the electronic space music of Isao Tomita and losing my grip on reality to Edgar Froese, Atomic Rooster, and Hawkwind. I would stay up all night listening to Aphrodite’s Child’s 666 (The Apocalypse of John, 13/18), a concept album about the Book of Revelation, and being terrified by it. It was so over the top and dramatic, and it made me want to crawl under my bed and hide, but I couldn’t stop listening. My brother also had a copy of Manfred Mann’s Earth Band’s The Good Earth record, which came with a coupon you could send in to claim ownership of one square foot of the Scottish countryside. On the cover, there was a picture of what you could theoretically own, an incredibly lush piece of sod with snails and mushrooms and wildflowers growing on it. We never sent in our coupon, so we never owned a tiny patch of the Scottish countryside. Still, we had the record, with its synthesized rooster sounds, and that ain’t nothing.
It was around this time that I started dreaming about songs. Not my own songs—I was still a long way away from creating anything resembling a song—but the songs I would read about in rock magazines and put together in my imagination. When I was nine or ten, my mother would bring me to the grocery store with her, and if I complained enough about how bored I was, she would let me hang out by the magazine stand and flip through copies of Rolling Stone and Creem while she shopped. I’d read them cover to cover, and I especially loved record reviews.
Ironic, right? Almost every musician I’ve ever met hates to be reviewed, but I try to take reviews with a grain of salt, because I feel so indebted to the practice. I will say that today, reviews aren’t quite the same as they were back in the early ages of rock journalism. Reviews back then devoted way more ink to trying to describe what music sounded like. That was their main purpose. It’s why people read them, because it was the only way to decide if you wanted to spend your money on a particular record. There were no streaming services where you could hear any song ever created practically for free. In the late seventies/early eighties, you judged an album by its cover art, word of mouth from your friends, or if you were a nine-year-old without a lot of musically adventurous peers, you based your record-buying decisions on what you read in rock magazines while your mother was buying groceries.
That’s how I learned about the Clash, months before I’d heard even a single note of any of their songs. At that time they didn’t play the Clash on any local radio stations. KSHE, the station that most kids my age listened to, stuck with mainstream stuff like Bob Seger, Journey, and REO Speedwagon. I’m pretty sure they used the same exact playlist for the entire time I lived in Belleville. So when I saw the Clash mentioned in Rolling Stone, there was no name recognition. The only thing that registered was how incredible they looked. As I stood there reading Tom Carson’s review of London Calling I was transported. It gave me chills. He was describing music that made you feel “exalted and triumphantly alive,” while the only danger imminent in my world was being bumped into by a cart pushed by a distracted shopper. It went on, saying that London Calling was “like a series of insistent messages sent to the scattered armies of the night, proffering warnings and comfort, good cheer and exhortations to keep moving.” I was sold. The Clash really gave romantics something to sink their teeth into, and however I feel about them today, I still don’t think any band ever generated better rock journalism.
Take for instance Lester Bangs’s essay about the Clash, “Six Days on the Road to the Promised Land,” which was published in New Musical Express the year I turned ten (although I didn’t read it until years later when I started loitering in record stores). It may be the single best piece of writing about rock music ever. Because it’s not just about the music, but how music itself can be a “scalding propulsion.” Watching the Clash perform, Bangs wrote, was like wishing for a night we can “pretend is the rest of [our] lives.” It’s about the power of personal liberation, and even if tomorrow you go back to your boring existence, at least you had that one night when “you were blasted outside of yourself and the monotony which defines most life anywhere at any time . . . when you supped on lightning and nothing else in the realms of the living or dead mattered at all.” That’s really powerful stuff. You should read the whole thing. No, seriously, read it now. I’ll wait. If you’re like me, it might make you cry in spite of yourself knowing better. At this point in my life I find it hard to suspend disbelief when it comes to test-marketed revolutionary rhetoric and slathered-on romantic hyperbole, but it still makes me cry every time I read it. I’ve read it out loud to my kids, and I’ve never been able to get through it without choking up. It means that much to me. Which is weird, because, like I said, it’s not really who I am, but when I read it as a kid, and even when I read it again as an adult, there’s something about it that feels like the keys to a cage for me. Every time I go back to Bangs’s text—and I return to it the way some people refer back to their favorite Bible passages—it feels liberating.
To some extent, even then I knew it didn’t have anything to do with me. I was a ten-year-old living in Southern Illinois. I was never going to get to see a band like the Clash. I’d be lucky to find one of their records. Punk rock was an exotic event happening somewhere else in the world. It was like reading about a civil war, or a revolution happening in some other country. Still, it resonated with me, maybe because it had nothing to do with my small and uneventful world. Maybe it was so foreign it allowed me to fantasize about a world I would want to be a part of. That’s what I assume happens when someone is radicalized and joins a militia or some cult. Your life feels empty and worthless and small, and then you find this thing that feels special, and it speaks to you in ways nothing else has, and it becomes a way forward. You feel like you have a purpose, and you’re part of a global community even if you never set foot outside of your tiny corner of the world. I read the Lester Bangs essay with the kind of focus I could never muster in school, and when I was finished, I was different. It changed me. I remember thinking, “It doesn’t have to be like this.” I didn’t have to pretend everything was okay. When David Bowie died, I read a lot of beautiful tributes to him with the consistent theme that his work acted as an affirmation of worth to so many people who felt like oddballs and misfits. Through him they gained the strength to be themselves and, not only that, to be proud of who they are. I’ve always related to that on a very inward level. I’m a pretty normal-looking straight white dude with all of the general societal acceptance that status entails, and yet I am still grateful to have found some encouragement to resist conformity in the way I look at and think about the world.
I mean, maybe. I wasn’t sure yet, having not technically heard the album. For the moment, it was enough just to daydream about the Clash’s epic grandeur. Who cares if it might not be true?
I eventually found the album, in a Target of all places. I was there with my mom—as with her grocery store outings, I was a constant companion—and I’d flip through records while she did her shopping. They had a copy of London Calling, with a big sticker on the front that read PARENTAL ADVISORY: EXPLICIT CONTENT, STRONG LANGUAGE, or something to that effect. This was before Tipper Gore and the PMRC, so I don’t know if it was the label or the store that put it on there. Either way, I had to get it off. In reality, my mom probably would have bought me a record with an EXPLICIT CONTENT warning on the front, but I wasn’t going to push my luck.
I tried scratching off the sticker with my fingernail. It didn’t go so well. I only got about a third of it off. And then we had to leave. So I hid the record in a different section and hoped it would be there the next time we came back.
We returned two weeks later, and London Calling was still there. I went to work on it, holding it under my arm and casually peeling off tiny pieces with my thumbnail while I flipped through records real casual-like. This time, I got another third of it off before we had to go. Those stickers were surprisingly resilient.
A month or two passed before we returned. I was convinced my copy of London Calling would be gone, but there it was where I had left it, behind the card divider for Z. This time I finally got all of the sticker off. I took the record up to my mom and asked her, as nonchalantly as I could manage, “Hey, can I please get this?”
She shrugged. “Sure, fine.” Without even a glance.
I threw it in the cart, amazed that I was somehow getting away with the perfect crime.
I still have that record. You can distinctly see my fingernail imprints on the jacket, from where I dug into the shrink-wrap, scratching at the EXPLICIT CONTENT sticker. I like that those gouges are still there. It’s evidence that this record didn’t come easy. I was like that clichéd prisoner, slowly digging his way to freedom with a spoon, slowly scraping away at a wall, and whistling like everything’s normal when the warden walks by.
As it turns out, London Calling is a pretty conventional rock album for the most part, and I hated it the first few times I listened to it. I felt obligated to honor my investment, though, and kept listening to it. I’m not sure if it was because of the feeling that I had sunk value into it already—like Vietnam—or if it was just one of those records that takes a while for you to wrap your head around, but I kept coming back to it. Eventually I learned to accept it on its own terms. London Calling wasn’t a dangerous attempt to burn everything down that had come before. If it was dangerous at all, it was because it dared to have ambition. It wasn’t nihilistic at all. In fact, it was daring in how sincerely and unabashedly it was begging everyone to care more, not less. If “punk” music was going to be “my” music, this was an important lesson. Labels are not to be trusted.
Somewhere around this time, there was a nightly news segment about the punk rock happenings in England and how it was coming to America. They talked about it with the same fearful, ominous tone a TV anchor would use when warning about killer bees or swine flu. It was that level of alarm. They showed footage of kids in London with Mohawks and safety pins through their cheeks, spitting in each other’s faces and looking disaffected and dangerous, while a stern adult voice explained the punk scene with Reefer Madness hyperbole like “Its hallmarks are violence and destruction.” I remember watching it with my parents and trying to appear disinterested while still registering the intensity of their disapproval.
My mom turned to me and said, “I don’t care what you listen to, as long as it’s not punk rock.”
I smiled at her and nodded. “Got it. I thought I wasn’t supposed to listen to acid rock?”
That got a slight chuckle, and with that I had successfully changed the subject.
A few weeks later, she overheard “Death or Glory” blaring from my bedroom and somehow managed to make out Joe Strummer singing, “He who fucks nuns will later join the church.” She called me downstairs. “Jeffrey Scot!” You know it’s never good when they use your middle name. Even serial killers get the middle name treatment. “Are you trying to kill me, Jeff?”
I had no idea how to respond, I had no idea what she was talking about. Eventually she was forced to repeat the lyric she had overheard. In an angry whisper she repeated the offending line. To which I replied, “Oh my god, I had no idea that’s what they were saying! What does that even mean?” And that was that. She waved me back to my room. I wasn’t lying, either, I still don’t know what it means.
THE CLASH TURNED out to be a gateway drug. Like weed leads to sniffing glue, the Clash led to the Sex Pistols and the Ramones and so on and so on.
By some stroke of luck, I found a radio station that played new wave and punk rock from midnight to 2:00 a.m. every Sunday. KWUR was out of Washington University in St. Louis, and it was nothing short of divine providence that an iffy college radio signal made it all the way to Belleville, twenty-five miles away. I was already a pretty intense listener—it’s not like I was taking notes, trying to build up a reference level to impress my friends—but it started to seep into my brain in ways I hadn’t expected. During one weekend, my brother Steve was visiting, and I was making him listen with me. About midway through a song, which I’d never heard before, I said to him, “This sounds like Gang of Four.” Then the song ended and the DJ came back on and announced, “That was Gang of Four.” My brother was genuinely perplexed. “How the hell did you know that?” I didn’t know. At that point, I had read enough rock magazines without paying for them and listened to enough college radio that I was able to make musical assumptions. The song seemed like it was about Marxism, and there was clanging metal drumming, which I’d read about in Creem reviews. I started to get pretty good at identifying music by artists I barely knew.
When I was twelve, I went to live with my sister in Arizona for a few months. The reasons are still unclear to me. I was told it was so I could play baseball during the winter, which I guess made sense. I had family in Arizona, I loved baseball, and my skills weren’t going to blossom in Southern Illinois, where they only play baseball one season per year. But I don’t remember baseball being so important to me that I was begging for an intensive year-round training schedule.
Part of the deal was that I had to enroll in junior high, which is where I met a kid named Boots McCormick. I swear I didn’t make that up. That was his actual, family-given name, Boots McCormick. And he was not, as far as I could tell, a Chicago gangster from the twenties. He was a big guy, with the body square-footage of a football player, but sweet and kind. I met him in art class, and we probably wouldn’t have talked to each other at all—I was the new kid, and everybody knew I wasn’t staying for long—but then he noticed me finishing an assignment where we were asked to illustrate a word and I had chosen, wait for it, the word . . . PUNK. And yes, I did incorporate safety pins in my design.
“You like punk?” he asked.
I eyed him suspiciously. At that time, it could’ve easily been a trick question, with an answer in the affirmative being more likely to invite ridicule and bodily harm than create a budding friendship. “Yeah, I guess,” I said noncommittally.
“You like the Sex Pistols?” he asked.
“Oh yeah,” I said, feeling weirdly optimistic.
“How about Dead Kennedys? Minor Threat? Circle Jerks?” He kept listing off names of bands, some of which I recognized and others I’d never heard of.
“Black Flag?” Boots said with a broad smile. “They’re my favorite.”
“Wow.” I felt like I was on another planet. All I could think was “How did I miss this? What the fuck is going on? I need to find some Black Flag records immediately.”
Back in Belleville, I was starting to get more adventurous not just with what I listened to but where I found it. The main record store in town was called Lame Duck Records. It was part of a regional chain, located in an old shopping plaza, and it’s where you went for all the new Top 40 releases. If you were looking for the new Bruce Springsteen or Fleetwood Mac, they would for sure have it. They might have one or two copies of a new Ramones or Clash release by chance, but asking for the latest Black Flag would get you a blank stare from any of the clerks. On the plus side, it was well lit and run by professionals, and you knew you could walk in and buy a copy of Styx’s Paradise Theatre and leave without ever feeling like you were in physical danger.
That was option A. Option B was Record Works, a hole-in-the-wall record store about the size of a walk-in closet located next to a dog-grooming place that was conveniently located just three blocks from my house. It was owned by a guy named Dave Reeves, whose parents owned a Tastee Freez in one of the nearby smaller towns. Legend has it that he had a comic book collection that he sold and parlayed into his own business, an independent record store that specialized in imported new wave and punk rock. He was also terrifying. Dave looked a little bit like Baby Huey—the cartoon duck in diapers, not Baby Huey the soul singer. He had a mullet, smoked Kool cigarettes, and had a body that was way too big for his head. It was disconcertingly out of proportion. Dave’s shirt never quite fit and was always unbuttoned or bursting at the seams. He was a strange mix of goofy and legitimately dangerous. He never threatened me, but I always had a sense of stranger danger with him, like it wouldn’t have been all that surprising if he stabbed somebody randomly just to see the look on their face.
Despite this compelling evidence to stay away, I would go to Record Works pretty much every day, because it was the only place that had the records I cared about, and it was close enough I could ride my bike there without having to tell my mom. The selection was small, but it was almost entirely imports or releases on smaller labels. It was the kind of store you visited if you wanted to discover, say, X’s Wild Gift. It was the opposite of Lame Duck. If you were looking for Bruce Springsteen’s The River, Dave had maybe one copy, but he didn’t know where he’d seen it last, so go ahead and look for it, if that’s what you’re into.
One of my friends from grade school and I would steal mason jars filled with quarters from his grandmother’s porch to buy records from Dave. I still don’t know why she had mason jars filled with quarters. Maybe she was filling them up to bury them in the backyard like some kind of proto–doomsday prepper counting on there being plenty of well-stocked vending machines after the apocalypse. We never asked. But we’d take a handful out of a few jars, just enough so it wouldn’t look like anything was missing, but enough to buy three or four records each. We did that over the span of a few months until we finally got caught. While it worked, we managed to buy a lot of great records. The only problem was, to get the best stuff, you had to talk to Dave Reeves. For a guy in his twenties who’d spent all of his life in Belleville and socialized almost entirely with bikers and prepubescents looking for cool records, he had amazing taste in music and somehow knew everything cool happening in the world. But to find out what he knew, to get the real gems he was hiding in that store, you had to spend time with a socially awkward man-mutant.
Dave liked to hold his hand over a candle, just to prove to you how long he could do it. Which is a creepy thing to do anyway, but especially when you’re an adult trying to show off to teenagers. His skin would start to smolder, and we’d watch him try not to seem alarmed, and we would wonder to ourselves, “What kind of reaction is he looking for here? What positive reinforcement can I give him so he’ll stop this?” But if you could get past those feelings of dread, eventually he’d say, “Hey, have you checked out this?” And he’d hand you a record that would change your life.
The one thing Dave hated more than anything in the world was Lame Duck Records. Never mind that they weren’t his competition at all. Nobody in Belleville was thinking, “I want the new Wire album. I better try Lame Duck first.” The only ones looking for Wire records were the people already at his store, and they just wanted him to stop burning his hand with candles long enough so they could buy it. But he still seethed at the idea that Lame Duck existed at all. He would send us over on our bikes to do reconnaissance for him. “Were there a lot of people in there?” he’d ask. He wanted reports that they were struggling, that record buyers were finally waking up and rejecting the mainstream mediocrity. Of course, none of that was true.
But we kept coming back to the store, kept vying for Dave’s attention. We never confused him with somebody we wanted to emulate. He was a cautionary tale more than a real mentor. But musically, he was important to us. He was the only adult who cared about the things we cared about, who innately understood our longing for music that made us feel special.
Everybody wants meaning in their life, and we all find it in different ways. For me it was buying records. There are some unhealthy aspects of forming an identity based on the things you buy, but I would argue that at least there is an artistic consciousness on the other end of the bargain you make with a record. I paid for it, but I stumbled on true inspiration that transcended commerce. I wasn’t collecting these records and singles and cassettes because I thought they made me cooler. In Belleville in the late seventies and early eighties, being a fan of the Rezillos or the Cramps didn’t make you cooler. The music didn’t make much of a difference to my exterior world.
The difference was when I was alone, in my attic bedroom, sweating in the summer heat—we didn’t have air-conditioning in our house, and in the attic we had slatted windows that provided not even the hint of a breeze—daydreaming in the dark about what it would feel like to be Joe Strummer or D. Boon or Paul Westerberg, that’s where I discovered a secret self. A better self than the one I was stuck with.