9
Hey, what’s this? What’s going on, man?”
Even though the punk moment is still warm in the memory, I continue to use “man” to my closest friends, the ones who antedate punk and go all the way back to childhood. It’s a sign of affection—and of a shared past in provincial freak juvenilia.
Danny is saying nothing. He is hunched against the toilet door, half turned away, his face thrust into the door frame at an unnatural angle. He is beating without rhythm against the wood with the heel of his hefty left fist, and without apparent sense. The door is shut, and he is on the outside but he is perfectly capable of opening it—it is not locked. There is no one on the inside. Danny is not actually trying to smash the door down. He is trying to speak. But he appears to be unable to utter a word, so he hammers on the door instead.
“C’mon, Danzig, speak to me. Say something. Anything. What’s upsetting you, man? This is crazy . . .”
Danny turns back to face me, puts his right hand up to his mouth and makes spastic yanking motions with it away from his face, as if trying to pull words out. But they won’t come. They may be in there, but they will not come. He is dumb. All that is escaping from his mouth are noises shaped around the palate and in his nasal cavities, sounds without vowels that do not require a column of air for support. Nnnnnn-nnn sounds. He is neither inhaling nor exhaling. His tongue is also not functioning, and Danny is beating his fist in frustration.
“Danny,” I say, now starting to panic. “You need to start breathing properly. You’re not breathing. Come on now—breathe!” His face is flushed. “Come on, man. You can do it. Stop trying to talk and just breathe . . .”
And then all of a sudden, presumably because he is now freed from the obligation to explain himself, Danny starts to respire again in a great explosion of breath. HWWWAAARFF! His shoulders go right up to his ears and then down again. He sucks in air like a man who has just come up from the bottom of a canal, his feet still tangled in shopping trolleys and bike wheels; he’s still in the canal, and held there fast, but his head is clear of the water at least. He breathes. He breathes again. His chest rises and falls in great juddering spasms. His fist has stopped beating now, too. But his face is wet, as any man’s face would be if he’d spent minutes alone trying to disentangle himself from rubbish at the bottom of a filthy canal. His face is wet and dissolving with distress. He cannot meet my eyes.
“Hey,” I say. “That’s better. That’s much better.” Danny is back in the room, but he is in pieces. And as the word “better” crumbles in my mouth I realize that I am weeping, too. I am weeping because I am not sure what has just happened and because I am frightened.
* * *
It is just after Christmas 1980, and I have come home to East Anglia from Manchester, where I have been studying at the university. I suppose you could call it studying. I am certainly a very contented fellow. Things are going well. The course is enjoyable. Extracurricular activities are even more enjoyable. I am in love. And I am in love with Manchester, which in 1980 is a decaying ex-industrial incubator of strenuous post-punk creativity. Rubble-strewn waste ground and long gray macs are everywhere, especially if you view Manchester through the prism of the NME, as I do.
I have arranged to meet a couple of friends for a drink in a pub to use up some of the long gray time after Christmas. Derek and Danny work in different parts of a local chain of record shops; I worked there, too, during my “year off” before heading north. Derek and I became friends then, but I have known Danny since I was twelve and have sometimes wondered how it must feel for him to watch old associates leave town to pursue new interests.
We have had a few drinks, but nothing excessive, and we have repaired to the tiny house Derek rents in a back street. It has been raining, and when it rains, this part of town has a hunched, resistant feel to it, as if shouldering off the weather: small terraced houses in blackened yellow-gray brick built for brick-workers, railwaymen, and laboring folk a hundred years ago, crammed together in narrow streets on the edge of the town center. I like it a lot.
We have settled in Derek’s front room to warm up in front of his gas fire, and he has shoved the recent Joy Division album Closer on the stereo, probably because I have declared an ambivalent attitude toward it in the pub. Everyone hip I know thinks it’s great. I think it’s interesting but intractable. Perhaps Derek is going to make me explain myself, with examples.
I don’t remember now, thirty-six years on, how much of it we’d got through that evening, or which side of the album we’d started with—the torturous, over-mixed, alloy-twisting first side or the rather more sepulchral second. But I do remember that we sat in front of it not saying a word; and I have vivid recall of the moment it dawned that Danny was no longer with us in the room and had in fact been gone for some time—and then being visited by the sensation that something was wrong.
“Where’s Danny, Derek?” I said, as Joy Division slammed across another deserted monochrome cityscape. The first words uttered by any of us for some time. “He’s been gone for ages.”
I also have close to perfect recall of the spectacle that presented itself a few seconds later of my friend suffering some sort of psychological meltdown against the toilet door down the passage, and of calling Derek, who came and then said hurriedly but purposefully, as if this were only the first step in a procedure, but a crucial step: “It’s the music, it’s the music—I’ll turn it off . . .”
* * *
In all my twenty years I had never experienced anything like that before. The phrases “panic attack” and “extreme anxiety” were new to me then, conceptually. In fact I am certain that they were not part of my functioning vocabulary. Middle-class children raised in rural security in the 1960s and ’70s had no use for such language. “Depression” was an acknowledged part of everyday life, and the reality of it sometimes had terrible real-life consequences—a fellow sixth-form student had taken her own life only a couple of years before, and that had been “depression”—but the word was only ever deployed as a hushed account of other people’s behavior, a way of explaining stuff away efficiently, not as the beginning of a serious conversation about an observable psychiatric phenomenon that had parts and dimensions and variety. I had certainly never found the need at home to engage with the concept of depression, preferring to avoid the subject where my parents were concerned and ascribing my own experiences of low mood to “the blues” or physical malaise or external agency, such as the fact that my school was run by bastards for bastards. I knew what sad was. I even knew anguish. But mental disturbance was another game altogether, and it was someone else’s.
I was certainly aware that Danny was vulnerable to the blues, too, rather more so than me. But it was never discussed, never even alluded to. There was no need. We had music for that.
* * *
If you were our sort of age, born in the late 1950s or early 1960s, there was a fixed menu of places to go to acknowledge bad feeling. Places to go, things to see, books to read. Sounds to hear.
I am pretty sure that my first encounter with extreme feeling in pop music came a couple of years before I was capable of registering any kind of extreme feeling myself. Janis Joplin was the sound of approaching anguish for my generation of eleven year olds. Her sandpaper howls were for us, I suppose, what we thought of when we thought of the existential scream of nature (as we often did)—an auditory update of Edvard Munch for the post-hippie generation—and when she let rip, the world not only formed its mouth into an O and put its hands up to the sides of its face but also said “blimey!”
The Joplin song you heard emanating most often from the bedroom doors of your friends’ elder siblings, and very occasionally from the radio, was her version of Erma Franklin’s defiant minor soul hit “Piece of My Heart,” a not wholly unsubtle genre piece penned by jobbing writer/producer Jerry Ragovoy, who was also responsible for such diva-friendly heartscalders as Lorraine Ellison’s “Stay With Me.” Franklin’s original 1967 “Piece of My Heart” is a hymn to strong-willed, if slightly irritable, stoic self-possession in love; Joplin’s version, from the following year, takes another road. While her gang of accomplices, Big Brother and the Holding Company, slash psychedelic weeds out of her path in a far-from-deft rock pastiche of soul instrumental style, Joplin drives a bulldozer through the sentiments expressed by the song. She literally screams it into subordination, beginning the confrontation with the sergeant-majorish bawl to attention, “Co-o-ome on, come on, COME ON, co-o-o-ome on!” as if ordering reluctant listeners to assume the brace position.
What follows is a sort of musical description of bipolarity expressed in the form of extreme dynamic peaking and troughing: LOUD-soft-LOUD, it goes. LOUD-soft-LOUD-LOUDER-LOUDER STILL-soft again . . . SCREAM-whimper-SCREAM-whimper-SCREAM-SCREAM LOUDER-whimper . . . It was one of the features of the relatively uncompressed rock music of the late sixties that you could do this and get away with it provided you set about your work “with soul.” And as a demonstration of unbridled Texan lung power, “Piece of My Heart” could hardly be bettered. But to pull it off—and I use the expression advisedly: Joplin is circus-theatrical in her display, as if attempting some daredevil stunt—such a performance entails the pulverization of any kind of nuance in the song. It is as if, in Janis’s take on it, the song has no expressive value of its own and its sole function as a structure is to serve as a vehicle for the overpowering private anguish—and oomph—of the singer singing it. It’s a trapeze. A highwire. Joplin does not sing the song; the song sings Joplin, as if what’s inside the singer is all that counts, and never mind what’s inside the song.
* * *
But then rock always did anguish well because anguish is dramatic and so is rock. The precipitate plunge into low mood or worse is well served by the dynamic potentialities of the form, from Black Sabbath’s flat, surging minor-key dirges to the up-and-down histrionics of Nirvana. Rock tends to express itself in caps and italics. LOUD to soft and back again (ending in terminal silence) are the signature dynamics of one kind of extreme emotionalism and, just as a healthy spike on a heart monitor is the sign of a working ticker and a flat line means you’re dead, rock is all spike and to flatline is not a viable option. Viewed purely from the formal and textural perspectives, rock is better equipped than any other form to go to harsh extremes.
And extremes can go in a variety of directions, as well as up and down. For every protracted feel-bad ecstasy by The Doors (such as “The End”) there was, in the late sixties and early seventies, a Sunday-morning comedown courtesy of the Velvet Undergound. For every ivy-decked mausoleum visited in the company of Nico, there was an airless tunnel of language shaped by Leonard Cohen—or, much more obscurely, Nick Drake’s butterfly tunnel, in which uneasy feelings flittered delicately and the listener felt as if he were always one careless step away from treading on something fragile and beautiful. Rock and its associated forms, both loud and soft, have always offered a multiplicity of routes into the dark.
In fact it was assumed from rock’s earliest days in the middle sixties that if you didn’t account for bad feeling somewhere in your oeuvre, then your oeuvre was not of the requisite weight and density. You were not to be taken seriously, and you were a lightweight. Bad feeling was what made rock more serious than pop, and therefore it was good practice to feel bad in due proportion. After all, depression, anxiety, and low mood are as much a part of life as excitement, hedonism, high spirits, and shagging. They ought not to be excluded from the party.
But back then bad feeling was always only ever a part of what rock had to express and not the whole. Even the dank and dolorous Pink Floyd lightened their fenny gloom with arcing guitar solos and an easygoing pastoralist concession that sometimes it’s nice to just chill out, kick back, and feel the grass tickling the backs of your ears. While the Stooges explored self-loathing and self-abasement only partially, being otherwise quite happy to rock brutishly in celebration of the spirit of Puck—and nobody took much notice of them at the time anyway, until punk made it compulsory to do so. In the 1960s and throughout the first part of the following decade, rock was depressed only in parts.
It was punk that engendered the notion that, really, it was rock’s social duty to feel bad all of the time; and it was a punk idea that a proper band ought to have a fixed emotional temperature—angry, bitter, contemptuous, mordant, waggish: take your pick from an extensive menu of energetically dismal feelings—and that to deviate from that temperature was to compromise in the worst possible way. It was to give yourself over to hippie self-indulgence. Following Year Zero there was to be no room for shades of feeling. Hence the short life and narrow gauge of most punk bands: you formed the band, you decided what the band stood for temperamentally, you expressed that emotion . . . and then what? Better break up before you blanded out completely.
It was a good system to employ if the point was to stimulate instant activity and reaction, and it made for great excitement. It just had its limits creatively. There are only so many times you can express anger, bitterness, contempt, mordancy, or waggishness before the experience palls for all concerned. It did, however, clear a lot of space, emotionally speaking, for what followed: the glamorous artifice of pop postmodernism and its war with the eternal glumness of the indie mind.
* * *
What punk understood only too well is that extreme feeling makes for a compelling spectacle. It is very difficult for the onlooker to look away, once his attention has been drawn by exhibitions of heightened emotion. They lock you in, those exhibitions. In fact, faced with them, it seems less than human to avert one’s gaze, as it is almost impossible to drive past a car crash on the motorway and not have a quick empathetic dekko, to see what may be seen. It is profoundly human to do so.
And car crashes were one of the standard by-products of the musical culture of the twentieth century, long before rock stuck its nose in.
I know from my own frustrated experience that in the 1980s lots of people bought late-period Billie Holiday records in preference to her earlier work with Teddy Wilson and Count Basie, precisely because she sounded so utterly ravaged on them. Holiday’s crash was a slow, sad, sordid affair involving heavy drugs, heavy alcohol, and exploitative men, and toward the end you could hear it in her voice, a voice that was no longer the thinly searing instrument of the 1930s and ’40s but a Hogarthian caricature of dissipation and unhappiness. I spent many hours behind the counter of the record shop I worked in explaining with exemplary condescension to earnest would-be Billie-buyers that sounding sad, intoxicated, and fagged-out were not the same thing as “radical phraseology”—buy the earlier stuff! But they had to have the grim ones.
Likewise, it was always easier to sell Charlie Parker’s fucked-up “Lover Man” than the quicksilver Savoy recordings of his pomp. But then, to some ears, music is not truly gripping unless it involves spectacle—an accompanying mental image of the musician playing the music while either tripping or dying or pissed or going under psychiatrically. Indeed, an entire generation of post-MTV American rock fans in the 1980s and early ’90s took the view that music is a spectacle, primarily, and that it has nothing to say worth hearing unless it entails the auditory display of extreme and sometimes pathological feeling. Degradation and death were thought somehow to authenticate music as a consumer product.
* * *
Back in Edward Street in 1980, with the drizzle slicking steamed-up windows and my friend Danny hunched on the sofa trying to drink tea out of a mug held unreliably in trembling hands, the silence contained very little drama. The silence was a guarantee against drama. I looked at him in his bewilderment and wondered whether this was as new a thing for him as it was for me, or whether Danny’s twenty-one years had been strewn with such incidents and that he was used to it, as we all get used in time to our own little peculiarities. But that did not appear to be the case. At least he looked calm now: calm and shattered. Nevertheless the atmosphere still clung to him of a man taken totally by surprise and left shocked beyond words. He was still saying nothing, apart from the occasional mumbled “sorry, guys” in between gulps of tea.
And I thought about Closer.
Joy Division’s lead singer Ian Curtis had killed himself in May of that year, shortly before the summer release of the album, and already by Christmas you could tell that here was a cult in the making. And if not a cult, then at least the provision of an imaginative spectacle in the minds of the music’s most ardent devotees, to accompany the sound of the music: a moving psychic picture in grainy monochrome of Joy Division’s ice-eyed singer, fresh from his contemplations of Iggy Pop’s The Idiot, going into the kitchen of his small house in Macclesfield to find the indoor washing line, the vault of his mind emptied of everything apart from the box of his intentions, which lay open at the center of his consciousness, the contents of which were now entirely practical and matter-of-fact.
And I thought: no, you can’t have that.
You can have the music and you can have the feelings the music gives you. You can even have the imaginative spectacle, if that’s what you need. If you must. But you don’t get access. Access is not available to you. Don’t kid yourself. Access is really not the point of all this—and if you think that it is, then you are wrong.
You may not be able to choose how you feel in life, but you can always choose not to listen.
I looked at Danny and Danny looked at the floor. I felt pretty sure that Closer was leaving his system now, at least for the time being. He could no longer hear in his head the clattering noise it made, nor touch with his mind the surface of Ian Curtis’s uninhabited voice, as it moved from word to word, note to note, syllable to breath to syllable, methodically, unemphatically, impermeable as a stone, like a man who knows where he is going and knows that he is taking not a soul with him.
GRACE NOTES
CHRIS BELL: “I AM THE COSMOS”/“YOU AND YOUR SISTER”
Car Records/Rykodisc, 1978
A lot of time was expended during my teenage years trying to locate the sound of my anguish.
My existential pain was neither great nor noble and it did not use up a lot of juice when resting in standby mode. I was not oppressed by it. I felt that it was contained safely enough within my person and did not constitute a risk to the wider public. Yes, of course my anguish retained the potential to be infinitely expandable depending on events, but it manifested itself only modestly in my day-to-day psyche, if left to mind its own business. It was companionable and ever-present, and not oppressive.
Nevertheless, I yearned to hear it described in sound and always felt that it must be a lost thing, rather than an undiscovered one; something I’d always known but had misplaced or forgotten, rather like Arthur Sullivan’s Lost Chord. And over the years I encountered lots of contenders for the role of The Sound of My Anguish, songs that I thought might have a claim on my darkest, most troubled emotions—including, briefly, one by Deep Purple, of all groups. But none of them ever quite fit the bill. “Close, but no banana,” I got used to thinking, as I reluctantly discarded another contender like a bad hand at whist.
Then, rather late in life, during my nineteenth year, I heard Chris Bell’s “I Am the Cosmos,” and for a while it fit the anguish-shaped recess in my heart and soul very suitably. Better at least than any of its predecessors. It was the right shape and weight and intensity, and the words of the song were about stuff I identified with keenly.
In early 1979 Bell was newly deceased, having driven his car into a telegraph pole in late December of the preceding year, and that probably added something, too. He had been, naturally enough, twenty-seven years old—another ripe sacrifice. He had also been for some years a persistent victim of depression and a practicing Christian, either of which may or may not have been the consequence of an acute shortage of luck in his music career. As co-founder and co-leader of the critically esteemed, zealously hyped but sales-free Memphis rock band Big Star, he had been far and away the biggest talent in the group, if not the most admired figure (that distinction went to the rather more charismatic Alex Chilton). But nothing seemed to stick. Big Star never caught on.
The truth of it was simple. At the time of their creative flowering in the early 1970s, the group’s bright amalgam of jangling Beatlesy Anglo-pop and faintly psychedelic R&B was wholly out of fashion, and would not come into fashion again for more than half a decade, and then only as a retrospective pleasure. Big Star were not just unlucky, but also had bad timing.
Yet Bell’s own troubles seemed to cut deeper and more abstractly than that, and he left the band following the release of their brilliant first album to launch himself into the world as a solo artist. Except that he didn’t actually launch himself. Not really. He pottered about and did odd jobs and dwelt inside himself and worked in the studio and then dwelt inside himself some more. He was a guy beset with seriousness. Nothing was heard from him, and no one noticed.
And then in 1978 he put out a double-A-side single, “I Am The Cosmos”/“You and Your Sister” on the obscure Car label. It would prove to be the only solo work released during his lifetime. I bought it as an expensive import following a formal introduction by my new friend Derek, who had a look in his eye that said, “This is the real stuff.” He was bang on the money.
“You and Your Sister” is a gorgeous acoustic ballad of perceived failure in love, sung directly at (rather than to) the object of that love. It has a melody and arrangement worthy of McCartney at his most austere and Bell sings it with a crushed passion which suggests that too many hours have been spent alone in a room listening to his own voice circulating in his head. It is an account of a certain kind of addiction: the addiction to longing. You can hear Bell’s lowered gaze. His shame. It is anguish as self-effacement.
“I Am the Cosmos” is less self-effacing but even more troubled. Here the longing is not deprecated but squeezed up into a mountain range of agonized lamentation, buttressed by cliffs of slowly arpeggiating electric guitars which somehow between them maintain enough harmonic flow to support a sense of forward momentum at a nearly dead tempo. It is a brilliant example of how subtlety can still play a hand even when volume levels are high.
And in the middle of this cascade of noise Bell’s lightly distorted, feverish voice drills into the words protecting the sealed-up chambers of his emotions. He finds only contradiction: “My feelings always have been something I couldn’t hide / I can’t confide. Don’t know what’s going on inside,” he sings, palpably aware that something isn’t right when you can’t hide your feelings yet you have no idea what they are.
It is a literal description of the condition of unhappiness.
And then he cuts to the chase. “I really wanna see you again,” he pleads repeatedly, over and over again, as the guitars avalanche around him and he departs into silence pursued by the ghosts of his own delusion. Yes, he does tell himself every night that he is the cosmos and that he is the wind. But not only does it not bring her back again, it also reminds him that he is nothing. That everything is nothing.
But mostly it’s him.
AMY WINEHOUSE: “LOVE IS A LOSING GAME”
Island Records, 2006
The anguish that ruined Amy Winehouse was possibly as unknowable to her, at bottom, as it was to the rest of us. Depression is a dark cellar in which the victim has been restrained and blinded, and the worst of it is that you cannot choose to find a way out, not by making a decision or by exercising mere strength of will. That option is not available to you. The blinding and the restraint see to that.
But Winehouse managed to shine a torch, even as she languished. She switched the torch on and off again with no great reliability but, in those moments when it was on, you were gifted with fleeting suggestions of what her cellar might contain. Shadows, ambivalences, compulsions, more shadow . . . Her anguish may have been impermeable and complexly subdivided, and it may not have been subject to cure but, in her music at least, it was illuminated by brilliant flashes.
Of all her accounts of her own bad feeling, surely the most desperately moving is among the most cursory of a brief bunch on the Back to Black album. It is also among the least dramatic—in fact its dynamic contours are close to flat. The torch is switched on just long enough for the listener to take in the scene in all its detail—for roughly two and a half minutes—sufficient to register that it is a littered scene and its darkest corners are alive with subtle movement. “Love Is a Losing Game” is as vivid a description of irredeemable, ambivalent regret as can have ever been recorded, and its blacks are deep.
Mark Ronson’s production installs the Winehouse pipes in an uptown bower of the sort once inhabited from time to time by all early-sixties Motown artists, but most comfortably by Smokey Robinson, whose carnationed milieu this truly was. There’s a smoking jacket hanging alongside the designer dresses in the closet, and there are flowers everywhere. French windows give on to a balcony overlooking the downtown lights.
But all that ideated luxury is an obvious lie. Or at least it is treacherous, because there is no comfort in it to Amy’s heart. It has no value. The only feeling in this superficially elegant room is the filthy gut feeling she has that arises from the knowledge that what is most compelling to her is also the thing that is most toxic. This knowledge is chipped out in half-formed gaming metaphors which then twist in the light of her supra-detailed phrasing just sufficiently to reveal the delusory side of longing—“self-professed, profo-o-ound” is the beginning of a golden reflection snuffed out as soon as it has been sung—not to mention the terrible, bone-eating pain that is always the result of too much compulsion. Her impulse control may have been lousy, but her ability to represent its emotional consequences was peerlessly subtle and dignified. I think it is important to say that.
The awful truthfulness of “Love Is a Losing Game” is located in its austere refusal to make a spectacle of itself.