high or low

Did you ever have a moment like this?: I stood up, looked down in the toilet and thought, holy shit, I've got to start taking better care of myself. It was because of all the drink; we'd gone over to the neighbors' for dinner, and drank all manner of stuff. Way too much, so much that I can't remember if I said anything totally inappropriate. They're good people, the best I know, and their daughter is one of those you can see already has endless potential. The son is a hoot, but the daughter is so sharp - she's like a confident 24 year-old in a 10 year-old body, ready for anything, just waiting to take the reins... Here I am in a 42 year-old body, hung over, already feeling somewhat burned out, wondering if I ever had any potential, barely able to make it to 10pm on any given night.

Robert said: "What'll really be something is your 50s. That's when you're firing on all cylinders..." He was 65 when he said this. A week later he was gone. I was certain all his cylinders still had plenty of miles left in them, and told him as much, but he felt there was nothing left; no potential, no meaning, the reins in tatters, the narrative played out. There had been chaos and tumult for over two years, and he never breathed a word of it. We'd listen to Beethoven's 9th and talk for the bazillionth time about Taylor's Sympathy solo, and all the while little pieces of him secretly fell off into the darkness, and he turned onto a dead-end, reached the end of the road, and stopped there, obdurately refusing to turn around and look for something else. And I wake up at 5am, dogs already restless, lying in the dark, wondering why he couldn't just turn around. I tried to bring him back. Many of us did. I turn it over and over in my mind, hour after hour: why couldn't he turn around? And there's the awful kicker: I'll never know. I'm left with this terrible emptiness, this wound that may scab up in a few years, but may just remain open forever. And five days a week I drive to work, playing nice to the losers of the world, the dregs, the tirelessly bitter who offload their empty, meaningless rancor on perfect strangers, deflecting their vitriol while remembering a hike on Tsankawi, a lunch in Playa del Rey, a Redwood in the desert, an annoying prank call, an egg over easy, a turkey enchilada with red chile, a lesson in tone, a picture of Robert Johnson, a shelf of frogs, a handshake with Lily Tomlin, and 28 years of laughter, trying to make sense out of what's left, this impossible emptiness.

chalk faces smile

Sitting in bed tonight with the light turned out, the enormity of it washed over me like a tidal wave of concrete, like being buried alive: for the first time in 28 years, I can’t reach Robert. He is nowhere. There’s no cell number to call, no hotel that can put me through to his room, no flight landing in two hours carrying him safely back home. I can wait at The Shed all day and he won’t show up. 28 years. There should have been 20 more.

I wonder if he ever guessed that the same pain that drove him to do this would simply pull up stakes and move in with me?

3/18/12, 7pm

Death is in all faces; shape in one history
Rung bone and blade (the ventricles of Adam)
And manned by Midnight, my friend to the stars.
To the night, look up:
A new one shines there.

                        -Leonard Graves Phillips

From the Vaults (2007)


I had five beers tonight and listened to The Damned. What a glorious, glorious thing. How sublime life can be at times.

 I wish there was some way I could repay the service these men have done for me. I wish there was anything I could say to impress upon them how their music changed me, turned my brain around, made me think differently about music, then art, and then, logically, life itself. I wish I could tell each one of them, without sounding like some goddamned lunatic, how they helped saved me as a young man.

 I reckon it would sound really, really bad. Psychotic, probably.

There’s no way you can explain to people how the most profound art stirs your soul and acts, as Bukowski once said, like a vast bridge across the things that claw and tear. But The Damned have been that bridge for me, and they’ve stirred the deepest depths of my soul for over 23 years now. It was a revelation for me in the summer of ’84, innocently discovering punk rock with my friends, grabbing Burning Ambitions: A History of Punk on vinyl at a record store in Coronado Mall in Albuquerque that no longer exists. Amongst the abundance of gems on that double-LP (The Buzzcocks’ Boredom, The Stranglers’ [Get a] Grip On [Yourself], The Heartbreakers’ Chinese Rocks) was a song by The Damned called Love Song. I’d seen pictures of these guys – the singer who looked like Dracula, the guitarist who dressed in furry Okapi outfits, women's dresses, or nothing at all, and their red-headed drummer, eyes bugged out, looking like he was coked up.

 It sounded pretty damn good. 

Before having my jaw operated on, resulting in my jaw being wired shut for six weeks, my father caved in to my shameless begging and bought me The Best of The Damned. Shit friends, there’s no way to describe how sublime it was, hearing New Rose, Smash it Up, Wait for the Blackout, and Rabid for the first time. Explosive bar chords, absolutely soaring melodies and harmonies. Proof positive that you could be a drunken, insane punk band and still be bona fide musicians – these guys could PLAY. They were fucking GOOD.

 On a trip to San Francisco to visit my grandparents later that year I picked up Machine Gun Etiquette and The Damned Live at Shepperton. This was as good as life got. Etiquette is one of the greatest albums of all time; that I discovered it at a time on my life when my thoughts and feelings were so out of control and needed it so badly… Sometimes you just get lucky. I Just Can’t Be Happy Today, Liar, Anti-Pope, Melody Lee – holy shit. Dave Vanian's voice was like a balm for my psyche. Just hearing him improved life's odds. You could be down five runs in the bottom of the ninth with two outs and an 0-2 count. Then you put Smash it Up on the turntable, crank up the volume, and suddenly the bases were juiced and your clean-up hitter was digging in at the plate. What was boring was suddenly exciting. Where there was abyss there was suddenly gamble. The Damned became my soundtrack while learning about girls, getting through high school, dealing with the shit that we all deal with trying to escape that volatile time in our lives.

 

I remember once sitting in Chemistry class with Mrs. Najjar, a dumbass kid who simply COULD NOT FOCUS on school work because there were girls to pursue, and records to listen to. That’s ALL I wanted to do, ALL I was interested in – girls and rock’n’roll. I wanted to be anywhere but there. I always sat in the back, doing my best to get my Ds and Fs anonymously. I had a feeling this afternoon that she was going to call on me and try to humiliate me. I could feel it. She knew I was a loser and enjoyed calling me out in front of the GOOD students. She worked a problem on the board, and I knew it was coming. “Russell, can you walk us through this…?” I didn’t care. I was ready for anything. I had bought The Damned Live at Newcastle at Merlin’s Records in Albuquerque the weekend before, which contained an incendiary version of Ignite from The Damned’s Strawberries LP. It was this particular version of Ignite that blared through all the corridors of my brain at this moment, ricocheting hither and thither through my neurons and conciousness, electrifying me as I sat there. Captain Sensible's guitar solo was like a power cable charging me with a million watts of energy. I was 100 feet tall, I was a fuckin’ monster ready to tear the roof off the chemistry building. I was a one-man army with state-of-the-art incendiary devices, hell bent on obliterating anything stupid enough to get in my path. I had The Damned kicking almighty ass in my head, and I wasn't taking shit from anyone. Life couldn’t have been better. Nothing scared me right then, nothing mattered; bring it on, world. Give me your best. Sure enough, Najjar called on me 30 seconds later.



Damned Damned Damned, Machine Gun Etiquette, The Black Album, Friday the 13th EP, Strawberries, Live at Newcastle… Thank you, boys. God bless you. You’re the very best the species has to offer.

MAILBAG

                                                      Dear John from Conway, AR:

Thank you for your email of 2/29. Yes, we have read Dave Marsh’s Louie Louie book, and are also amazed that someone who gets paid to write about music can be so bottomlessly clueless, and not even employ a fact checker. In addition to writing, as you point out, that “the extremely rowdy and obnoxious” Henry Rollins sings Black Flag’s version of Louie Louie – despite the fact that singer Dez Cadena is on the cover of the single, and is credited on the inner label (one senses that Marsh isn’t even aware of the three Flag vocalists who preceded Rollins) – Marsh also writes that “Black Flag are the first and only band ever to scare the producers of ‘Saturday Night Live’ into using censorious tape delay, to preserve NBC’s federal license.” Although Black Flag was at one point booked to play on SNL, Marsh was undoubtedly referring to Fear’s infamous appearance on SNL, since Black Flag never appeared on the show. Which just goes to prove that even arrogant, pedantic blowhards like Dave Marsh are wrong sometimes.

Thank you for your query! We hope to hear from you again soon.