2
GALOSHES
NOT MANY OF the musicians I know can tell you exactly when they decided to become a musician. This fact has led me to some fairly untenable theories about whether it’s something you can actually decide. At one point I used to say it’s kind of like having straight or curly hair. You don’t really choose which you’re born with, you just decide how you’re going to deal with it. That analogy falls apart pretty fast when I factor in the ready availability of home-perm kits, curling irons, and relaxing agents. It’s really just an even more obnoxious way of saying musicians aren’t made, they’re born. Blech. I don’t have a clue. So I’ll speak for myself: I don’t remember deciding anything.
You could make an argument that my path to musicianhood likely began when I received my first guitar. This would, however, be incorrect.
My mom bought me a guitar when I was six years old because I had begged for it. I was eager to be a guitarist. I was already motivated to rock. Okay, now, let me just say, I know good carpenters aren’t supposed to blame their tools, but I would argue carpenters also aren’t often handed cheese graters when reaching for hammers. What I’m trying to say is, this guitar, ordered by my dear mother, from a JCPenney Christmas catalog, was, in fact, a colossal piece of shit. Also, going back to my carpenter analogy, I hadn’t even learned the trade yet, so this was closer to handing a carpenter’s apprentice a guitar. Anyway . . . it was a real setback.
I think about this a lot: How often is the beginning and end of musical ambition a shiny new sadistic dog turd like my first guitar? I suppose it can be a rite of passage to wrestle a shoddy instrument into submission, and maybe some degree of challenge can create some steely resolve in heartier souls, but for me it was doom. I just could not overcome the finger-mangling pain of strings more suited to slicing eggs than a lilting “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” Oh, and I did give it an honest effort. I even took lessons. From a guy who taught in a studio space over a storefront in downtown Belleville, heated year-round by blistering-heat-radiating steam pipes.
Every week for an hour I’d sit in a balmy room with peeling paint, listening to a teacher with a gray ponytail lead me through basic guitar chords straight from a Mel Bay book. I’d clumsily attempt to re-create his fingerings while ignoring the moat of ass sweat pooling in the seat of my corduroy pants. After five lessons I was begging my mom to let me quit. She begrudgingly said yes, I put the guitar in my closet, and forgot all about it.
The first actual real hint that I might have a future in music was a little more auspicious. It happened in 1975 when I was eight years old. I walked into my third-grade class with a portable cassette player—one of those handheld Panasonic things, small enough to carry in a backpack—and a single cassette on which I’d recorded a radio broadcast of Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run album in its entirety. During recess, I played it for some classmates and told them that the voice they were hearing on that tiny, tinny speaker belonged to me.
“Wait, you made this?” one of them asked as a husky and clearly adult voice started pleading about screen doors slamming and Mary’s dress swaying.
“Yep,” I said. I explained to them that I’d written every song, played every instrument, and recorded all the vocals. It was all me, every last note on that TDK cassette with Born to Run and Jeff Tweedy written in blue pen on the front.
“I think I’ve heard this on the radio,” a kid protested.
“Probably,” I said. “It is pretty popular.”
“Are you sure this is you?” another kid asked. “It doesn’t sound anything like you.”
I just shrugged. “Don’t know what to tell you.”
I had no interest in trying to convince them. My lie wasn’t contingent on their believing me. I didn’t care if they did or didn’t, because I believed it. I wasn’t embarrassed when they pointed out the abundant evidence that I was full of shit. It was probably an error in judgment to take credit for literally the most popular mainstream rock in the world at that moment. Why couldn’t I have gone for something a little more obscure? For example, if I’d recorded a Byrds B-side from my sister’s 45s on a cassette, I’d at least have had a fighting chance. Still, they couldn’t penetrate my fantasy. I was immune to it. I know that sounds like the unhinged ramblings of an insane person, but I wasn’t completely disconnected from reality. It was just playacting. I didn’t go home later and demand that my mom start calling me “The Boss.” I was just trying on a new identity, wearing somebody else’s skin to see how it felt.
That moment was just as important as the day I finally pulled the neglected guitar out of the closet and forced myself to figure out how chords worked, or found the courage to walk onstage and sing in front of a basement full of strangers, or put words and notes together to make a song that hadn’t existed before. For any of that to happen, I had to envision what it would feel like to be that person, to be somebody who had accomplished all of these things already.
There was something else happening, too, something just as important as musical self-actualizing. It wasn’t that I wished I’d written a song like “Thunder Road.” I just liked the idea of being a guy singing a melodramatic ballad about leaving a town full of losers to an audience made up of the very town full of losers he’s pulling out of there to get the hell away from. So he can “win.” I didn’t want to be Bruce Springsteen. I wanted to be me, punishing the popular kids with music. I wanted to publicly shame them, to shout at them in a song, “How did you not realize when you looked down on me in school that I would become this famous and celebrated, singing songs about how this small town couldn’t appreciate me and that’s why I left? Don’t you feel stupid now?”
It was a comforting fantasy as a preteen, but I’ve been disabused of the notion countless times over the years that music is in any way an effective means of revenge. The people in the crosshairs of my scorn, which I expected to respond with full-on biblical weeping and gnashing of teeth, didn’t care. Not only did they not feel punished by the song’s awesome and unforgiving power, they refused to recognize that my musical chastisement had been directed at them. They didn’t care in my third-grade class, and they didn’t care forty years later when we were all grown-ups and I had maybe accomplished enough to deserve a reaction beyond “Oh, you were that guy in French class that I never talked to.”
Back in 2005, Susie and I and the boys took a weekend trip to Belleville to visit my parents. We all went out to eat at a local restaurant, and right in the middle of dinner, I noticed two middle-aged blond women staring at us from across the room. It was hard to miss them; they gestured and pointed with all the subtlety of vaudeville actors. I kept looking over my shoulder to see if the people in the booth behind us were paying attention. After several minutes of this strange sideshow, they slid out of their chairs and walked straight toward us with scary determination.
I remember thinking, “Who are these people? What do they want from us? Are we about to get murdered?” My hand drifted toward a fork, in case I’d have to use it as a makeshift weapon to protect my family. But when they reached our table, they were all smiles, touching shoulders and laughing like we were old friends, and wasn’t it just hilarious that we’d all come to the same restaurant and hadn’t even texted one another beforehand, I mean what are the odds?
“Are you here for the reunion?” one of them chirped. “Of course you are. It’s crazy, everyone looks so old.”
“The what?” I asked.
“I can’t even,” the second one said, laughing. “Weren’t we all just kids, like, five seconds ago?”
In an instant, the years disappeared from their faces, and I realized they weren’t my mom’s friends, which up until that moment would have been my best guess. I wasn’t 100 percent sure of their names, but I knew them from high school. We didn’t run in the same social circles. They were rich kids to me. I was socially adjacent to them, though. That’s where I most often found myself during high school. I was never an outright enemy of any clique, nor was I ever fully absorbed and identified as a part of any distinct group. I was a misfit, but I was aware I had it better than the true outcasts. That didn’t stop me from feeling alienated and irrationally repulsed by most of my classmates.
By sheer coincidence, I had come to town over the exact weekend of my twentieth high school reunion.
“No, I’m not . . . I can’t make it,” I told them. “We’re heading home tonight.”
They pretend-pouted. “That’s so sad,” one of them complained. “It would’ve been so great to catch up.”
“Oh yeah,” I said with a straight face, even though the very idea was hilarious. I needed to “catch up” with her like I needed to sit down with Madonna and reminisce about all the times I watched the “Lucky Star” video on MTV as a teen.
“Are you still in that thing?” the other one asked.
I waited for clarification that never came. “What thing?” I finally asked.
“That little band you were in,” she said. “Weren’t you in a band or something?”
I just blinked, waiting to see where they were going with this.
“Are you still in that little band? Are you still together?”
It was sublime poetry, the way they danced between foggy memory and under-the-radar insult. They didn’t remember much about my band, other than that it was definitely “little.”
“Yep,” I said. “Still in a band.”
They smiled and nodded, but like you do when somebody tells you they’ve been living in their parents’ basement and sleeping on a beanbag chair.
My son Spencer, who was ten at the time, was old enough to be indignant about this drive-by dismissal of his dad’s work. The rest of us were content just to remain motionless and quiet like we were hiding from predators. Spencer wasn’t having it. “Wilco just won a Grammy,” he blurted out.
The women turned to him, beaming. “A Grammy?” one of them exclaimed. “Well, good for you!”
“Now, isn’t that neat.”
Midwestern sarcasm, when it’s done correctly, can be a thing of rare beauty. It’s like performance art. Everywhere else in the world, you can identify sarcasm if you’re paying attention. Even if the hostility isn’t overt, you can read the signs. There’ll be slightly elongated syllables or a pitch that’s just a little off. It’s like a trombone player with a plunger head. There’s that slight “wah-wah” tone-bending to let you know not to take this too seriously. Midwestern sarcasm plays it straight and makes you listen more closely. You have to treat every conversation like a safecracker. Unless your ears have been trained to recognize it, you’ll miss the hint of a minor key. Sometimes you don’t realize what’s happened until hours later, when it’s 3:00 a.m. and you’re half-asleep, and it suddenly hits you. “Aw, crap, they didn’t mean any of that, did they?”
Midwestern sarcasm becomes even more deadly when it’s combined with small-town isolationism. These women had been cheerleaders at our high school, they weren’t indie rock aficionados, and Wilco isn’t exactly a household name. So on the one hand, it wasn’t surprising that they hadn’t followed every turn in my career. It’s shocking that they even remembered I played music at all.
Then again, we’re all from Belleville, which has never been a hotbed of cultural activity. This is a town where everybody knows who’s cheating on who, and who’s been out of work, and whose kids have DUIs. Anybody from a small town knows what this is like. Your business is everybody else’s business. If you leave for a while and come back even for a short visit, the never-left locals will ask you, “What have you been up to?” But, of course, they already know. It’s been discussed and debated from the moment you first crossed the river. Not being around to defend yourself means you’re fair game for gossip. It’s how small-town bonding works. Having a third party on which to focus judgment and scorn is the number one survival strategy. The only question is whether your departure was a bad idea or the worst idea. Still, the question gets asked, just so you have to scramble to come up with a satisfying answer, and they can weigh in, underwhelmed. “Oh . . . good for you!” Which is midwestern sarcasm for “Your dreams remain unattainable, but how adorable, you keep trying.”
I WAS IN FRESHMAN English class at Belleville West High School when something incredibly important happened, although I didn’t realize the significance at the time. We had an assignment where we were paired up with another student and interviewed them to find out about their life. I don’t know what we were supposed to be learning from this, other than confirming that high school kids in rural midwestern towns rarely have personal identities that hold up to journalistic scrutiny. I tried, I honestly did. But I couldn’t tell you a single thing about the person I interviewed. I don’t remember anything we learned about any of the kids in that class. Other than one.
We all stood up and read aloud from the dossiers we’d created. The kid who interviewed me went through the bullet points of my personality, announcing to the class that my favorite band was the Ramones. Crickets. Not even a murmured, “Who?” Um . . . okay. More kids stood up, rattling off the likes and dislikes of their peers, and it all started to blend into a big goulash of sports and obviousness. Then a girl on the other side of the classroom introduced a kid named Jay—he was easy not to notice, with his hair always covering his face and his gaze always directed at the floor—and she said, “Jay’s favorite band is the Sex Pistols.”
I feel like we might’ve made eye contact at that moment, but it probably wasn’t that cinematically perfect. At the very least, I perked up and made a mental note to introduce myself.
After class, I walked over to him and said, “Hey, man, that’s cool that you like the Sex Pistols.” And he said, “Yeah.” Then we just stood there for a minute—very likely an entire minute—not saying anything. And then I was like, “You want to hang out sometime?” And he said, “Yeah.” That was it.
I’m sure anybody watching was probably thinking, “Those two are going to start a band that plays a punk-country hybrid that a smattering of critics and punk-country-hybrid loyalists will blow way out of proportion.”
From the very beginning, Jay had a tough time reciprocating warmth. I slowly but surely learned the rules, that you don’t express too much excitement or emotion around him. You’re calmly bemused at best, and if you must communicate any feelings of earnest enthusiasm with “words” or “outward expressions of your internal life,” it’s safest to provide a disclaimer or caveat. Like “The new Adam and the Ants album is awesome . . . I love . . . I mean it’s okay. They look so stupid.” Nothing about that was natural to me. But I wanted to be friends with Jay, if only because I was so amazed that somebody else existed—someone my age, who lived in Belleville and went to my school—who felt the same way about this music that I did. The odds against that happening seemed astronomical, like finding a message in a bottle.
Our entire relationship, in the beginning, revolved around listening to music. We were the guys who would take records to parties and then inevitably end up in a room by ourselves listening to those records. The musical tastes of our classmates were predominantly classic rock—although I guess at the time it was just called “rock.” If Styx played in St. Louis, at least two hundred of my classmates would be wearing Styx T-shirts the next day. (If you wore a Stray Cats T-shirt, you’d get pizza thrown at you, and you’d be called a faggot.) There was a jukebox in our cafeteria, and if you played anything other than the 1978 Trooper song “Raise a Little Hell,” somebody would walk over and kick the jukebox repeatedly until it stopped. And then they’d call you (and probably the jukebox) a faggot.
Because of Jay, I was drawn into a social circle that didn’t care about popular culture, but was so passionate about music that it bordered on cultish. The entire Farrar family was intimidating in their musicality. Jay was in a band called the Plebes with his older brothers, Wade and Dade. Everybody in his family played an instrument. They would have bona fide hootenannies. I think even their dogs were proficient on the banjo. My family, by contrast, was not in any way musical. I had a cousin once removed who had become a country music performer—Herb Henson, or “Cousin Herb”—but he died before I was born.
My cousins—my dad’s brother’s children—all played instruments, and they would bring acoustic guitars to family gatherings. Songs were played, and the guitars were passed around, but it wasn’t anything like the Carter Family sing-alongs I assumed were happening at the Farrar house. My first exposure to Woody Guthrie and Bachman-Turner Overdrive all happened on the same guitar. It wasn’t until my late teens that I realized “Takin’ Care of Business” wasn’t a Lead Belly song.
My earliest live music memories involved my cousin David Tweedy, who had an electric guitar and just enough of those Tweedy clan demons—alcoholism, drug use—to self-sabotage any potential he might’ve had. He was truly virtuosic. During one of our visits to Uncle Bill’s house, I remember David forcing me and a few other neighborhood kids to sit on the front lawn while he pointed his giant stereo speakers out his bedroom window, cranked the volume all the way up, climbed atop his orange-and-pink-sunset-muraled custom van, undid his ponytail and shook his hair down to his ass, called out to his mom to drop the needle, and proceeded to shred along to every single acid-tinged note on Alice Cooper’s “Welcome to My Nightmare.” It was pretty fucking hot, I have to say. Majestic is the word. It was that delicious combination of terrifying and scintillating; one of the great recipes for rock and roll.
Becoming friends with Jay meant upping my game. It wasn’t enough just to find records that I’d never heard of. I needed to find records that Jay and his brothers didn’t know about yet. It was a healthy competition. We all wanted to be the guy to turn everybody on to the next thing that we all had to hear. Everybody wanted that feather in their cap, to be the one who found the next Flying Burrito Brothers that blew everybody’s mind. There were so many things working against us, like the fact that the next band to blow everybody’s mind would probably have a fucking stupid name like the Flying Burrito Brothers. Seriously, who picks up an album by a band called the Flying Burrito Brothers and thinks, “I bet this is good”? I sometimes wonder how many amazing records I ignored because I could never get past the band’s name. What if Black Sabbath had stuck with the Polka Tulk Blues Band?
But competition gets old, and you eventually figure out that it makes more sense to combine your resources and become a hive mind. That way you cover more ground and discover more music. We became so devoted to this hunting-and-gathering approach that we wouldn’t even buy the same records. It wasn’t just about what you were buying, but what the other guy was buying. “Okay, if you get the Green on Red record, I’ll get the Dream Syndicate record.” You still wanted to find that new band that would blow everybody away. There was a lot of fanzine reading and grilling of record store clerks—“What is this? Have you heard this?”—but only if it didn’t interfere with the greater good. We were a small group with the collective record-buying budget of a train hobo, so we had to be resourceful.
We made trips to St. Louis to buy records. Which never failed to confuse our parents. “We have record stores here!” they’d yell at us. Yes, we’d tell them, but they don’t have the records we want. St. Louis was like another planet, and getting there was about as practical as leaving the earth’s atmosphere. Driving to St. Louis took about thirty minutes—geographically, it was nothing. But to get to St. Louis proper from Belleville, you had to go through East St. Louis. This was the same place where John Carpenter shot Escape from New York because he was looking for something even more depressing and crime-ridden than the real New York City. This was during the early eighties, when New York was still a festering cesspool of homicide and police corruption and crack babies. But I guess Carpenter wasn’t impressed. He was like, “Nah, not bleak and dismal enough. Let’s go to East St. Louis.”
Those harrowing car trips were always worth it. We discovered record stores like Vintage Vinyl and Euclid Records, the latter of which I’d soon be working at as a clerk. My future manager Tony Margherita was already working there at the time, and he made an impression on us almost immediately. He was so much more together than what we were used to from a record store employee. He wasn’t hungry for the attention or admiration of teenage boys—he was seven years older than Jay and me, so he was like a cool older brother. He was a large and imposing figure, but not in a Dave Reeves “I’ve made some bad choices” sort of way. He had the wingspan of a basketball player and the calm confidence of somebody who couldn’t care less if you liked him. I remember once showing up to the store five minutes before it closed, and seeing Tony standing in the window and shaking his head, just wagging a finger at us. I’m sure he recognized us as the kids who’d come by the store a few times a month, but he didn’t care. We kept banging on the glass door. “Come on, man! Just let us look at the new releases. We’ll be quick!” But he wasn’t having any of it.
We were also regularly driving to St. Louis for shows. A lot of the bands we wanted to see would end up at Mississippi Nights, a club right off the river. Our parents weren’t as concerned as they probably should’ve been, I guess because the club was in the touristy Laclede’s Landing part of town, with its cobblestone streets and the Gateway Arch just a few blocks away. It seemed harmless enough from a distance, and that’s how we tried to keep it for them. When we had plans to be at Mississippi Nights, we always tried to keep it vague. We’d say, “Just going to the Landing tonight,” and not “Seeing Jodie Foster’s Army tonight, don’t wait up.”
My first concert, the one that counts (not the Sing Along with Mitch Miller show my mom made me go to once) was the Stray Cats at Mississippi Nights. I was fourteen, and Jay and I went with my brother. The band was pretty unknown at that point; they weren’t being played on MTV yet. Their U.S. record, Built for Speed, had just come out a month before, but I knew about them because of an import copy of their first record I’d managed to find. They were fantastic—I remember they put their guitars in trash cans instead of using stands, which was just ridiculous—but bragging to classmates that I’d seen a Long Island rockabilly band that was big in Britain didn’t do much to elevate my social status.
Jay and I and a few others tried to see the Ramones at Mississippi Nights, even though it was an over-twenty-one show. The record store guy who sold us the tickets told us not to worry about it. “Just show up, and they’ll figure it out when you get there,” he said. That didn’t work out so well. The door people took one look at us and turned us away. There was a whole group of us—maybe twenty kids or more—milling in the back parking lot, clinging to worthless tickets, but refusing to go home.
We chose that spot because it’s where the Ramones tour bus was parked, just a few yards from a staircase leading up to the stage. We waited until somebody emerged from the bus. The first to come out was Dee Dee, surrounded by a gaggle of radio promoters. Somebody in our group shouted at him, “Hey, Dee Dee, what’s going on?”
He turned to us. We had his attention! It was our chance to plead our case, make him understand why we belonged inside that club, maybe even sidestage.
“Why are you singing all these songs about teenage this and teenage that but we can’t get into your show?” somebody yelled. Yes, perfect. Appeal to his sense of artistic integrity.
He paused, considering our airing of grievances, and decided he was unmoved. “What, are you giving me shit?” he shouted back at us.
“Don’t let them give you shit, Dee Dee,” one of the radio promoters said, egging him on.
“You guys giving me shit?” Dee Dee shouted a little louder.
“No, we’re not giving you shit,” we shouted back. “But they won’t let us in!”
“You what?”
“We have tickets, but they won’t let us in!”
“That’s bullshit!”
“We just want to see the show!” we pleaded with him.
“We’re not fucking playing!” he told us. “That’s bullshit! I’ll get you in. We’re going to get you guys in.”
We cheered for him as he disappeared into the club. And then we waited. Because, obviously, he was coming back for us. Dee Dee Ramone had made a promise. He had given us his word. It would only be a matter of time before he kicked opened the doors and beckoned for us to join him inside. He would be our Moses parting the Red Sea—the Red Sea in this metaphor being the Mississippi Nights staff just trying to do their jobs—and leading us to the Promised Land (i.e., the front of the stage, with the perfect vantage of the band). He wasn’t just going to get us inside; he was going to parade us past the adults who had tried to keep us out. “Who’s responsible for this outrage? Look what you’ve done!” How could the band that wrote “Teenage Lobotomy” abide actual teenagers being turned away from their show? It was an abomination!
We waited. The minutes turned into hours, and then it started to rain. But we didn’t budge, because we knew justice was coming. Then the tour bus door opened and Joey Ramone burst out in all his gangly glory, like a praying mantis/human hybrid, walking carefully down the stairs. I pushed my way to the front of the crowd of kids and yelled out to him, “What’s going on, Joey?”
He wasn’t listening, so I shouted louder. “Are you guys still playing?! Are you still going to play the show?!”
He turned to me and said, “What, because it’s raining? Uh . . . No, kid, I forgot my galoshes.”
Then he walked into the club, and the door slammed hard behind him.
A few minutes later, we heard Dee Dee count in the first song. “One two three four!” And then the sound of muffled bedlam. We still didn’t leave, because even hearing the Ramones play behind concrete while getting soaked by a driving rain was better than driving back to Belleville and listening to their records in our bedrooms. Every once in a while, somebody would open the backstage door for a precious few seconds, and we’d catch a glimpse of the band onstage, silhouetted by smoke, green-and-purple-lit black leather jackets, guitar necks, and cymbals. The music would burst out like a sonic boom, catching us by surprise, sometimes literally knocking us backward. And then the door would slam shut again. But for at least a couple of seconds, we were part of it, enthralled just to be there, grateful for even a few stolen notes.
WE GOT INTO more shows at Mississippi Nights than we were barred from, and every one felt transformative. Some more than others. A lot of times we just left with ringing ears and big, exhausted smiles, and that was enough. But sometimes going to shows felt like gathering evidence. Here was proof, right in front of our own eyes, that a life where all you did was play music was possible.
I had a girlfriend in high school who dragged me to big arena rock shows. I went to see Bruce Springsteen and John Cougar and the Who’s first “farewell” tour in ’82 at the Ralston Purina Checkerdome in St. Louis. It all sounded so bad to me. I wasn’t just bored; I hated those shows. I felt sad afterward. Nothing about the experience was exciting to me. Something always seemed overly macho about how bands postured themselves on those enormous stages. It was just a giant muddy-sounding spectacle. I’m not sure why the macho-ness bothered me, I loved Black Flag, and there was nothing more macho than Henry Rollins at that time. Actually, that was my least favorite part of Black Flag, but it was a different type of macho, or at least it was to me. The Who were larger-than-life rock deities demonstrating a power that was monolithic, distant, and authoritative. Henry Rollins was just a guy yelling onstage a few feet away. You could run over and give him a head butt (if you were into that kind of thing). He’d kill you, but nobody would stop you. He was just a super-jacked guy who declined to wear a shirt. Springsteen, on the other hand, was going to save us all whether we wanted to be saved or not.
That probably seems counterintuitive. How does a guy go from insisting to his friends that Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run was all his doing to recoiling at the same guy singing “Born to Run” onstage? I don’t know. It would’ve been easier to imagine exacting revenge on the popular kids with Springsteen bombast, which was at least a form of idol worship they respected, than by creating a musical identity around the Replacements—a band that embraced fallibility as an aesthetic and meant next to nothing to most of my classmates—but that’s where my heart landed.
I got to see the Replacements at Mississippi Nights in 1982. They were opening for X, who were on their Under the Big Black Sun tour, and somehow, miraculously, it was an all-ages show. Which meant we got to watch from inside this time, but it wasn’t necessarily a better view. The underage kids at Mississippi Nights were confined to something called the “kiddie corral,” a small fenced-in section to the side of the stage. The back bar and the entire dance floor were open only to customers old enough to drink legally, the adults.
When the Replacements came out, the kiddie corral was packed. We were standing shoulder to shoulder, craning for a better view, elbows shoving to protect our slim cut of real estate. The dance floor, however, was empty. The older patrons had either not shown up yet or were drinking at the bar, completely ignoring the racket onstage. Some of them managed to sneer at the band or offer up a few boos, but for the most part, they treated the opening act like an intrusion into their conversations.
They opened up with “God Damn Job,” and Paul Westerberg immediately fell forward off the front of the stage, landing hard on the concrete floor, where he stayed to finish the song because nobody came over to help him stand back up. It was a beautiful moment, a guy playing guitar and singing facedown into a microphone, lying on an empty dance floor, while a corral filled with disaffected sweaty teenagers watched from a dark corner.
At some point, Exene Cervenka from X wandered out through the audience in a children’s Halloween devil costume and stood right at the front of the stage, enthusiastically nodding along. I remember Bob Stinson tearing off his pink housecoat and playing a nude guitar solo, or maybe it was a pink bathrobe; it’s a little hazy after all these years. Either way, it was a speculator mess, which only seemed to gain power the more it was ignored by the over-twenty-one set at the bar. Their indifference made it more momentous, it felt private, like a secret that belonged to us, not them. We eventually stomped our feet so hard in the kiddie corral, we broke a sizable hole in the floor.
I hesitate to be too over the top with rock show mythologizing, but this was a night that lived up to the fantasies of empowerment I would often indulge in when I listened to records. When I’d lie in my dark bedroom listening to the Clash, I could picture how terribly ashamed everybody would be if that were me onstage, and I was punishing them for something . . . For not being nicer to me? Or just for being “okay” with themselves? I was never sure exactly why I thought they deserved to be punished. Maybe it was just for liking stupid bullshit like Black Oak Arkansas. Anyway, this show perfectly manifested that fantasy for me. It was a living incarnation of how I expected rock and roll revenge to play out. It put all the jive assholes in their place. But these assholes were so dead they didn’t even notice.
The Replacements’ bassist, Tommy Stinson, was fifteen years old when I saw him play at Mississippi Nights. I was fourteen, just a month away from my fifteenth birthday. Could that be me up there? The only difference between us was that he had a big amp and a bass, and he learned how to plug it in and play, and he joined a band, and they booked this gig and somehow got here from Minneapolis; maybe they stole a car, I don’t know. Okay, there were a lot of mysteries still. But the line between Tommy Stinson and me was shorter than the one between me and Bruce Springsteen.
When X came out to play, and the “grown-ups” finally crowded onto the dance floor, Exene scolded them for not paying attention to “one of the best bands in the world.” Then, during “We’re Desperate,” she climbed over the adults and into the kiddie corral and sang it with us. We screamed along and held her up, halfway convinced that this meant we were de facto members of X now.
It was a big moment for me. This was more than just “I think I should give this a go.” It was “Oh, now I know I’m not crazy for wanting to be a part of this so badly.” It was like finding out Santa Claus is real. I felt validated. This thing that I thought I was imagining, in fact, exists. My dad always used to say, “If you know better, you can do better.” I don’t think I ever understood what he meant until that night.
I got so swept up in that moment I completely forgot we’d created a sizable and ominous hole in the floor, about a yard in either direction, where you could see down to the foundation and the dirt underneath the building. It wasn’t that deep, maybe a few feet, but in the dark of the theater, it might as well have been a black hole, sucking lost souls into an abyss.
I fell backward and almost tumbled into a darkness that, as far as I could tell, didn’t have a bottom, and that would be the end of me. Thankfully, I was caught and pulled back from oblivion by the anonymous arms of some conscientious thrashers.
Had I been spared an untimely demise for some higher purpose? Not at all. I was just a drunk teenager who almost fell in a hole, which would have been momentarily embarrassing and then quickly forgotten. But in my head, my brush with death had significance. You figure life out just at the precipice of it ending. How fucking typical! I could imagine people at my school talking about it. “Did you hear about the Tweedy kid? Yeah, the guy who told everyone he made Born to Run back in third grade. He had a moment of self-discovery at a punk show in St. Louis, and then he fell into an enormous hole in the floor and died. He just vanished.” I would’ve gotten their attention then. Not exactly the punishing attention I was hoping for, but whatever.
ALL OF THE ways I am exactly like Bob Dylan is, one time a biking accident changed my life.
Not a motorcycle accident, like in 1966 when Dylan crashed his Triumph Tiger on a mountain road in upstate New York, broke some bones, and went into seclusion. I was on a Schwinn Stingray, so I wasn’t “riding” in the classic sense; I was pedaling.
I was twelve when it happened. It was the last day of school before summer vacation. My best friend and I were killing time waiting for my mom to come pick me up by racing his and his little brother’s bikes down a steep hill in front of his parents’ house on a dead-end street.
It had been raining, and the freshly blacktopped roads were slick, but we were both young and brazen enough to think we were indestructible. We may have even been shouting taunts at each other as we hurled toward the cul-de-sac. Fear was just an adrenaline high, not an overt warning from our brains that we were doing something profoundly stupid and potentially fatal. The game was to hit the brakes just as we reached the bottom and skid to a stop without wiping out. On our last run of the day I mistimed my braking and sailed off the end of his street into a drainage ditch, where I landed on some concrete reinforcement rebar poking out of the crumbling edges of an old culvert. Three rusty rods went right into my leg, puncturing it like a carving fork in a roast. When I pulled myself off, a big chunk of my upper thigh was missing. It was surreal. I looked up and bloody globs of my flesh were dangling off the bent metal. As I lay there staring at the mangled wads of tissue that just a few seconds ago had been inside my body, I refused to process the scene as something actually happening. It was more like “Whoa. Leg stuff is gross.”
I didn’t lose the leg—which, as I was passing out in the ditch, hearing my friend’s laughing stop abruptly and seeing his face empty itself of blood as he got a clearer look at it, seemed like a very real possibility—but it was a serious injury. In the ER, they made my mom and dad sit down before they would allow them to see the wound. It was almost down to the bone and took hundreds of stitches to repair, but I was able to go home that night. By the end of the next day I had a high fever, which put me back in the hospital with an infection from the ditch water I had landed in. The stitches were removed and weren’t replaced until the wound had been left open and cleaned with hydrogen peroxide and alcohol three times a day for two weeks. After that, I’d have to spend the summer in bed to recover, they told me. No baseball or sunshine or friends or any of the sweet freedoms of summer. I was under house arrest, in a sweaty attic bedroom with no distractions other than my wandering mind. So obviously I thought, “Now might be a good time to dig that guitar out of the closet and see if I can figure it out.”
This was the same guitar my mother had bought me when I was six and I had made it through a few lessons before deciding it was a waste of time because I wasn’t immediately Segovia. I put it away and tried not to think about it, but, of course, insisted to everyone at school that I was probably the best guitar player they knew. I never actually played for anybody—because I was living a lie and couldn’t make an E minor chord if my life depended on it—but I would argue shamelessly with anybody who questioned me. The guitar was my version of the hot Canadian girlfriend who conveniently never visits.
With my bum leg immobilizing me and boredom setting in quick, I decided it was time to learn how to play the thing I’d told the world I’d been proficient at for six years. There wasn’t any doubt in my mind that I could do it. It was just a matter of finding the discipline to make any effort whatsoever. I looked at the chord book and fumbled my way through learning a few basic chords. Picking it up all these years later, my hands had grown enough not to be cut to shreds. I still couldn’t get anything to sound like a song, but it impressed my family to hear sounds echoing from the attic that sounded even remotely like music.
I made steady progress and showed enough sustained interest, so for that Christmas my parents bought me a white Peavey T-60 electric guitar, which weighed about seven hundred pounds. I’m hardly exaggerating. It’s seriously the heaviest guitar. If I’d stuck with that guitar and never played another one, it would have crippled me. Nobody wants them now, except maybe my friend Brian Henneman from the Bottle Rockets. He was into playing Peavey T-60s for a while, and there was a period when anybody who wanted to get rid of any Peavey would bring it to a Bottle Rockets show and just leave it backstage. It was like Henneman had started a wildlife refuge for these inexplicably heavy guitars.
Besides their gross tonnage, Peavey T-60s just weren’t cool. On top of that, they were hard to play. The excitement of finally having an electric instrument was literally being outweighed by this bummer of a guitar. Walking by the guitar store, shopping with my mom again in downtown Belleville, I saw a guitar hanging in the window that looked way cooler than the one I had. It was a red Kustom hollow body guitar that looked kind of like a Rickenbacker. I traded in the Peavey, along with a little money I’d saved up, and got it. I think it hurt my parents’ feelings, because they felt like I thought the guitar they’d given me wasn’t cool, which is true. I felt bad about it, but not bad enough to not get a cooler guitar.
The cooler guitar turned out to be awful, too. In fact, it was even worse than the Peavey. The strings would pop off the bridge with the slightest strum. It was unplayable. So far, the moral of this book might be “Don’t get discouraged, get a good guitar.” Anyway, my progress had halted and things were looking pretty grim. Then my brother Greg got injured on the railroad, and my guitar problems were solved.
Greg worked for the same railroad as my father, Alton and Southern Railway. He did maintenance, which I guess meant making sure the tracks weren’t covered in trash and cows. I honestly don’t know. I loved my brother, but what he did at the railroad every day remains a mystery to me. I read in his obituary that his job before he got injured was “filling in holes with gravel to keep the ties stable,” which sounds important. He got pretty badly injured—I was never sure exactly what happened, but I think it involved him being accidentally buried in gravel, possibly while filling holes—and because my dad was a company man and my brother was a union guy, my dad talked him into taking a settlement without reporting it. He probably could have sued the railroad for a lot, but he ended up getting a couple hundred thousand dollars. Which for most people in Belleville at that time was huge. This isn’t money that someone who fills in train track holes with gravel is accustomed to earning. It was set-for-life money. And one of the things he did with his new fortune was buy me a guitar.
It was a brand-new black-and-white Fender Telecaster, right off the wall. I wanted a black-and-white Fender Telecaster ’cause that’s the guitar Joe Strummer played, and it’s obviously the best-looking guitar ever made. Surely anything that looked that magical would magically make me better. Both Joe and I were able to afford our guitars because of weirdly fortuitous circumstances. Joe Strummer paid for his Tele after marrying a South African woman looking to become a British citizen, and I paid for my Tele because my older brother almost died doing a job on the railroad that I didn’t fully understand.
Now that I was playing a real instrument, a guitar good enough for Joe Strummer, I stopped feeling like I needed to care about learning chords or scales. That has never been the way my brain works, anyway. I just don’t learn that way. I struggled and barely graduated from high school because I could never make myself learn on command. I had to find something specific that sparked my interest. Maybe I have a cognitive disability or something; I don’t know. I think I ended up well-rounded education-wise only because I’m a naturally curious person and I get restless not knowing things. I’ve spent entire summers reading about Stalingrad or Persian poetry for no real reason other than someone didn’t tell me to. It was the same with guitar. Playing scales always seemed pointless to me. It seems crazy to say, but I could never understand how they would help me write songs, and writing was the goal almost immediately. I wanted to swim in that end of the pool, the deep end. I couldn’t listen to the Beatles or Bob Dylan, sit back and think, “Well, maybe if I play an A-major scale enough times, I’ll get there someday.” It was more like “I want to write a song right the fuck now.”
By the end of my one-legged summer indoors, when I started being able to get my guitar to make sounds resembling what I was hearing on records, it wasn’t just a sense of accomplishment; it was bigger than that, a naive feeling that I was the first person in the world to do this. Maybe that’s a character flaw, but it was a huge part of it for me, elemental to why I wanted to do this at all. It would’ve been so much harder to keep at it without that feeling. It was the Born to Run cassette moment all over again, but now I had something more tangible and satisfying than pressing play on a tape recorder giving me that feeling. I remember when I figured out how to do the standard da-da-dada Chuck Berry riff, it was like I’d split the atom. It was that monumental. It was never just “Oh, a lot of people know how to do this, and now I do, too.” It was “Holy shit, I just invented rock and roll!”
I didn’t invent anything, of course, I just discovered it for myself, which is an incredibly empowering way to learn. Years later my wife and I spent a small fortune sending our kids to a Montessori grade school where they were taught how to learn, not what to learn, and I found myself envious. I would console myself with the notion that if I had been encouraged to embrace that style of learning when I was young, I might not have been driven into the arms of antisocial behavior and rockish redemption. Instead of teaching myself guitar, I might have learned a foreign language or become a scientist or a doctor and been able to really help people. Honestly, I feel guilty about it, like it was my fault. I guess I did somehow save myself, though, and that ain’t nothing.
Learning how to play guitar is the one thing I always look back on with wonderment. I’m reminded of “What ifs?” every time I pick up a guitar. Where would I be? I have sort of a survivor’s guilt about it that makes me want it for everyone. Not the “guitar” exactly, but something like it for everybody. Something that would love them back the more they love it. Something that would remind them of how far they’ve come and provide clear evidence that the future is always unfolding toward some small treasure worth waiting for. At the very least, I wish everyone had a way to kill time without hurting anyone, including themselves. That’s what I wish. That’s what the guitar became for me that summer and is to me still.