SPIN MAGAZINE
FEBRUARY 27, 2011
A single spotlight on Sargent, center stage. She strokes her guitar; it purrs like a cat. When empty, the Riviera Theater is stately and historic and bursting with chandeliers and balustrades, painted in swaths of deep purple and bruise blue. When crammed with bodies, it becomes primal and perverse. The bodies roar and writhe and sweat and stink. Sargent wears olive-green coveralls. Her hair is side-parted, slick at the part and erupting in short black curls on either side, obscuring one eye. The visible eye is enclosed by a royal blue diamond, making her face an ace.
We had no idea what we were in for that night.
Sargent had emerged from the primordial ooze of obscurity in late 1992 with her proto-grunge anthem “Madame X.” The song was unavoidable. You started to wonder if you were ever not hearing it, since it would play on your clock radio when you woke, in the grocery store, out the neighbor’s window, in your head on a loop. She had other songs of course, and other albums no one had heard of, but at her shows, the crowd would moan and complain until she consented to play “Madame X,” after which they would turn on her, not even rebelling so much as pretending like she no longer existed. Like they weren’t at a rock show at all, but just hanging out at a friend’s dumb party with the music on too loud. They chatted and sat on the edge of the stage with their beers like it was patio furniture. It was insulting. It must have been infuriating. Sargent would shove them with the soles of her Doc Martens. She developed a reputation as, what else? A bitch.
The former singer Sargent was found dead in a hotel room in downtown Chicago yesterday, age 47. Her hotel room was cluttered with stacks of contracts, medical and legal documents, and call transcripts, none of which are available to the press. No one knows why she came back to the city, or when.
Sargent was a human who had a whole life outside of her hit song. Maybe even a whole other name or, at the very least, a first name. She will probably have other obits that explore that life and the mysteries in it, who she was, who she loved, what she fought for. But I am going to commit the delicious atrocity of not caring about these details and telescoping a whole life into a single night, the way Sargent’s career was telescoped into a single song.
It’s not just that she’s a slut/Or that she’s always raising hell/It’s that we know she likes it/It’s that she sluts so well.
It was Aug. 8, 1994. A sticky night among weeks of sticky nights. The kind of humidity where showers are pointless, and you can’t remember what it feels like not to sweat. The Riv’s air-conditioning was broken or else it was just completely pointless. I was standing at the railing to the right of the stage, my spot, with a plastic cup of some garbage beer and a cigarette, waiting for the opening band to shut the hell up so Sargent could do her schtick and I could go home. Her song was smeared all over the radio, every station. Nirvana covered it on “MTV Unplugged.” Even Casey fuckin’ Kasem was playing it. This was an XRT-sponsored show, the call letters plastered everywhere, a banner over the stage, the bar littered with bumper stickers and advertisements for other XRT shows. At that time, I was reporting for the Reader, doing what I always did, which was jot down a few “you had to be there” details, suffer through a couple of songs, and then go home and shower the fug and sweat off, smoke a joint, and go to bed, tossing off 1,000 words of fake enthusiasm for the show in the morning.
Madame X, her tits will cleanse/the grimy lust of so-called friends
Sargent’s humming guitar immediately plowed into the chords for “Madame X.” First song. A bold move, for sure. The cheering was so deafening, it drowned out the first verse, and suddenly my interest was piqued. Where the hell could she go from here? If she thought she could trick these assholes into paying attention to the rest of her oeuvre by giving them what they wanted, she was in for a rude surprise, even in her own hometown.
The reverb faded, the crowd hollered. I clamped my teeth on my beer cup and clapped politely. And then I swear to you, I locked eyes with Sargent. She looked right at me, and she winked.
And then, she started “Madame X” again. The roar of the crowd crashed in on itself; it was too good to be true. Who doesn’t want to hear their favorite song twice? Sargent growled her way through it, slow and seductive this time, grinding on her guitar, the deep thrum of the bass and the driving drums colliding with her honeyed alto.
Lavender skin in a cat-black dress/beg for her kiss, just try to repress
She let the last note linger through the cheers, she had their attention, what would she do next? They were actually listening. Dead quiet, smoke swirling like fog.
Sargent started “Madame X” again. Confused noises and bodily jerks rippled throughout the room. Beers stopped halfway to lips. Barked laughs. “What the fuck?” screamed in friends’ ears. We were suspended in time, swimming. Frozen inside a clock that looked like it was ticking, meanwhile the second hand just pulsed in place. Fly in a web before you sense the spider. The song ended abruptly, to near total silence.
“Madame X.” A fourth time. A smattering of boos. Someone tossed a beer and was tossed out. But everyone watched, no one spoke. They couldn’t. We were trapped.
By the fifth play of “Madame X,” the spell was broken. Mass exodus, yelling and booing. Seventh time: fights broke out, more people ejected.
By #10, there were twenty of us stragglers who had stayed on purpose. We gathered below her like she was an oracle and we needed to know why our crops had failed. We were scholars of “Madame X,” we could pick up the song and spin it on our fingers like a Harlem Globetrotter. It was our baby, and we knew the meaning of each cry.
The 12th time through, we cried.
The 13th time, Sargent cried and the rest of us sang.
The 15th time, Sargent and her band sat in complete silence for three minutes and 36 seconds, the length of the song, which echoed in our memories. We witnessed the holiness of our ears ringing and the noises of each other’s bodies and the building which was also a body, it creaked and whispered, and the cables shifted snakily onstage and no one would ever replicate these exact sounds in this exact combination, never again until the death of the universe, and even then.
The 17th time through, she lay flat on the stage and sang a cappella while we stomped our feet to the beat.
She laughed through the 20th time, and laughter is contagious, so we did too. Tears squeaked out and my stomach ached.
Someone ordered pizza, and it arrived in the middle of the 24th time. Sargent brought the pizza guy onstage, and he looked terrified, and we wanted him to feel like one of us, but what could we do?
The 27th time through, the union guys who did the sound and lighting left, and so the band played acoustically in the dark and we all hummed along.
Right before the 30th time, we got kicked out of the Riv, and everyone walked to Montrose Beach with Sargent leading us like the Pied Piper.
Someone passed around a joint on the beach and someone else built a bonfire and someone else had bought marshmallows at a convenience store on the way, and I lost count of how many times we sang “Madame X,” and we ran naked into Lake Michigan listening to the way sound traveled underwater.
I woke up the next morning in my own bed, but I don’t remember how I got there.
I never wrote my 1,000 words about the show. I’ll be the first to admit, I was afraid of looking stupid. One song? For what, 10 straight hours? Who would believe, and worse, who would want to read about it? But, weirdly, my editor never asked for it. No one wrote about that show. No reviews, no word of mouth. Sargent did not play her show the next night, and her name was removed from the marquee at the Riv. She was supposedly on tour, but she didn’t finish the tour. I swear I never heard “Madame X” on the radio ever again, but that can’t be true. I started to wonder if I had invented Sargent and “Madame X.”
I suppose, really, I’m writing this not to memorialize an artist but to prove my own sanity. I didn’t make her up—you can find used CDs on eBay—and I didn’t imagine that night. But I lied about telescoping a life into a single night. I want to know why she disappeared, why she left us at the height of her powers, and why she came back to Chicago buried in paperwork. Was she in legal trouble? Did she need our help?
Whatever Sargent’s secrets, they may have died with her. Only time will tell. And she may have preferred it that way, our own Madame X, who burned hot, too hot maybe, for a blessed moment and then faded away.