Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life Read online

  The mistakes are easy enough to see in retrospect. If one were writing a manual entitled “How to Ensure That Your Troubled Teen Will Fall into the Clutches of Heavy Metal,” Erin’s folks provide a useful model. But their sense of betrayal is honest and not without sympathy. Heavy metal is telling them everything they don’t want to know about their daughter: that she is angry, that she is a sexual being, and (most painfully) that she dreams of escape. What parent wants to be told such things?

  In ninth grade, Erin transitions into public high school. She hangs out with the bad kids, her brother’s friends especially. Having grown up amid the obsessive sexual prohibitions of the Church, she now saunters the neighborhood in stretch jeans for the sheer pleasure of hearing men in cars honk at her. Her parents are convinced she has become a fallen woman, though she is in fact that far more common breed among metal chicks: a virgin seeking the power of a slut.

  It is amid this feuding that Erin finds “Fade to Black.” Most metal songs are aspirational, wishful odes to hedonism. “Fade to Black” is a dirge about a guy so alienated he savors the prospect of his own suicide. The song strikes Erin as an epic transcription of her life. She, too, feels hopelessly misunderstood, trapped with no way out. For months, she’s been scouring the want ads for rented rooms. But she has no money and no way to get a job.

  She listens to “Fade to Black” over and over: the somber opening notes, the chords ringing out above the martial thump. She learns it on the guitar because she wants to be noticed by the older boys, and because she figures maybe she’d become a rock star and that will be her ticket out. She likes the ending best, after James Hetfield growls “Death greets me warm, now I will just say goodbye” and Kirk Hammett rips into his solo and the whole band starts to gallop, triumphant, unstoppable, a violent blur. She knows it’s fucked up that “Fade to Black” makes suicide heroic, but that’s how it feels, like she’ll be seizing control of her life once and for all, meting out the ultimate punishment to her parents.

  Things get worse. They always do in this kind of story. Rob moves out of the house and the disputes between Erin and her folks escalate into physical altercations. One afternoon, she is pulled out of class by her parents and driven to a psychiatric hospital. Their goal is naïve, if not quite unkind. They want professionals to take away the wild mascaraed creature that dwells upstairs and return to them the docile, straight-A student they can safely love. They are genuinely shocked when the doctors suggest family counseling. Soon after, Erin arrives at school with an injured finger. The school nurse asks her what happened; she bursts into tears. This is when the social workers get involved.

  At sixteen, Erin moves into a friend’s basement. She hangs out with the metal chicks at school and cuts classes. She forms a band (The Virgin Saints) and finds a boy happy to relieve her of her virginity. Late at night, in her basement room, she writes poetry. She doesn’t want for ambition. It’s guidance she needs.

  Sometimes, Erin still wonders how her life might have been different if she’d had some amazing teacher who put the right book in her hands. It’s an understandable wish. But she didn’t have that kind of fortune. What she had was “Fade to Black,” which, for all its bombast, offered the essential lesson: that it was her job to document the unbearable feelings, to convert the bruisings of her heart into beauty.

  Am I now suggesting that I find “Fade to Black” beautiful? Yes, I suppose I am. Or maybe I’m suggesting, more plausibly, that I love my wife and all she’s struggled against to become who she is and that “Fade to Black” is an indispensable part of that.

  And let me add, as a crucial coda, that what makes “Fade to Black” so easy to tease is, upon further examination, what makes it so affecting. The lyrics sound exactly like the poems Erin was scrawling in her basement lair. The nature of adolescence, after all, forces upon us two conflicting desires: to confess everything, every mutilated impulse and bloated woe, while, at the same time, suppressing all incriminating evidence. The solution (as recorded in every teenage journal ever written, as affirmed at every heavy metal concert ever staged) is to encode these feelings and their explicit causes in abstract and overwrought couplets. It is this same impulse that drives the bravest among us from language into the cleansing howl of rock and roll.

  In Erin’s case, though, she headed in the other direction. Like me, she eventually recognized the limits of her talent. And though she was for a time, no doubt about it, the best female heavy metal guitar player in central Connecticut, it was her devotion to words that got her to community college, then on to college, and graduate school. She found that larger life, beyond the reach of her parents, whom she loves now with great patience, from a safe distance. Like me, they will never truly understand what “Fade to Black” means, or how many Erins it has saved from self-annihilation.

  6. It might be said that Willie was, in his own way, introducing Letterman to a better version of himself. Then again, one of the things I hope this book will not do is traffic in the seductive myth that music morally improves people. It certainly uncorks volatile feelings that would otherwise remain bottled up, which, I would argue, generally improves people’s lives. But there’s no way to establish whether this counts as a net positive for the species. If we’re going to give hymns credit for saving the sinner we’ll also have to blame Wagner for psyching up a bunch of Nazis, and we’ll have to take seriously the claims that heavy metal and hip-hop act as accessories in the commission of certain crimes, and we’ll have to think about what it means that so many young soldiers use music to whip themselves into a killing mood. No thanks.

  7. To those of you who will now accuse me of picking on Lionel Richie because of my brief and disastrous sexual relationship with his daughter, let me assure you that “Easy” remains one of my favorite songs on earth, a track that has made that mysterious journey from the Valley of Utter Cheese to the Kingdom of Total Coolness.

  8. I’m discounting an earlier episode, in which my mother sang “I Want to Hold Your Hand” to me and I reached out for her, because I was at the time eleven months old.

  Nil Lara Was Our Messiah

  There was a big bunch of us back then in Miami, all in our twenties, eager and horny and half-formed, if that. There were only three things we knew for sure. We knew South Beach was blowing up. We knew greatness awaited us. And we knew Nil Lara was going to be the most famous musician on earth.

  Every other week we gathered at a club called the Stephen Talkhouse on Washington Avenue, two blocks from the glittering neglected sea, to watch Nil and his band destroy pop music as we knew it, as something discrete and classifiable and safely secular. The place smelled of lemon rinds and Marlboro Lights and we drank the sweet drinks of our twenties and huddled close to flirt. Nil never started on time. If handbills said DOORS AT NINE, you were unwise to expect a note until eleven, though he did two sets, always. If you got out of there before three in the morning it was only because you were sick in spirit. Most of us worked at the Miami New Times, the alternative fishwrap, and you could always tell the morning after a weekday show, the smoke and beer stench rinsed but not ridden, the bluish dabs of missing sleep beneath our eyes, a dreamy ringing in our ears.

  “Nil?” someone would say.

  And we’d say, “Yeah, Nil.”

  We’d say it like we were speaking the name of a lover because we were in love with Nil, all of us, in love with his voice and the way he flicked at his guitar and the moony hopes that surged through us when he had his band at full pace. There was one night in particular (whenever it was) an hour into his second set and he was playing “Mama’s Chant,” howling an Afro-Cuban incantation while we twirled beneath him, and he reached the bridge and passed the valley of solos and led his band into that bright clearing where the song itself exploded into something larger, a mood of cheerful chaos, the tiny dance floor being ectoplasm at this point, with all the usual suspects sloshing away—Lenny the Large and Tilson and beautiful Paloma and Floodie and yours truly, known in t
hose days as The Spoon—and the old conguero, Baro, in a metronomic trance and Nil moving also, thumping his bare feet between the amp cables and, at some invisible cue, directing his keyboardist to play a familiar bubbling run of notes, at which point Nil burst out, “Very superstitious, writing’s on the wall,” so that for the next three minutes we were all Stevie Wonder, we were all blind black singers, exalted, swollen and nodding, even if Nil was the only one whose high sweet baritone could grant the notes their proper due, the only one who could gently bend the room back toward his song, which we figured would end the jam, would leave us all in a happy ruined heap of vodka fumes except that Nil began a high-kneed march and the bassist came in with a low drubbing and the drummer snapped at his kit and the guitarist (a towering shredder, a ferocious spider) nodded and came down hard on the chords instantly recognizable to anyone alive during the long slow death of prog rock….

  We don’t need no education!

  We don’t need no thought control!

  And this was the holy shit of all holy shits, the moment when every single person in the Talkhouse (right down to the brooding bartender) felt the delicious howl of high school—the endless fascism of parents and teachers and The Man—come roaring out of our throats, like we were bricks, man, like we were the ones marching into the meat grinder and getting our soft hearts cranked into ground chuck; we didn’t even look around, we didn’t do anything but scream and scream and dance and scream and Nil got a frank look of pleasure on his face and shook his head because without meaning to he’d led us all back to the garage where fifteen years earlier he had played these exact notes and sung these exact words and dreamed of this exact moment, of a hundred souls ready to join his crusade and carry his banner into the world. These were the times when we knew Nil couldn’t miss, that it was only a matter of time until the world snatched him up and away from us, which made us a little sad but also chosen, which made us want to kneel before him, touch the hem of his garment, which sent us staggering out onto the damp sidewalks trembling with gratitude.

  Enter the Spoon

  It’s like this when you fall hard for a musician. It’s a crush with religious overtones. You listen to the songs and you memorize the words and the notes and this is a form of prayer. You attend the shows and this is the liturgy. You’re interested in relics—guitar picks, set lists, the sweaty napkin applied to His brow. You set up shrines in your room. It’s not just about the music. It’s about who you are when you listen to the music and who you wish to be and the way a particular song can bridge that gap, can make you feel the abrupt thrill of absolute faith.

  For which we were all searching back then, being young and subject to the Drooling Fanatical hopes of youth. We felt we were part of something larger. Why not? We were living in Miami Beach, watching the place transform before our eyes from a beachfront slum to a tattooed Riviera, the old Jews and the dope fiends and the deranged mumblers quietly nudged out to make room for Gianni Versace and Bobby De Niro and the parade of models who sunned themselves topless on the patch of beach around Fourteenth Street, watching the old palaces of the Art Deco district gutted, replenished, repainted in cake frosting colors, their nautical railings and porthole windows buffed to a gleam, made seaworthy again. The wood floors of my studio, at the corner of Meridian and Tenth, were forever dusted with sand.

  This was back in 1991 and it wasn’t much later that I heard Nil for the first time, in a club called the Spot. I don’t remember anything else about the occasion (who I was with for instance), only that Nil was flicking at a tiny Cuban guitar called a tres and singing. He was too talented for the Spot, which was the kind of place where people came to do eight balls in the bathroom and get their photos in the social pages of local rags like the one where I worked. His songs had a melodic purity that could have derived only from the Beatles—you hummed them, they hummed you—but delivered in a style that incorporated the crooked rhythms of Cuban son and the stately phrasing of the canción, that struck the ear as both savage and exquisitely controlled, and he did this (mind you) with a three-piece.

  I stood there screaming Who is this guy? and Dude, are you guys hearing this? and all the other things DFs scream, until my friends toddled off to the next bar and I was left standing about three feet from Nil, clapping too loud. I accosted him after his set and he handed me a vinyl copy of an album by his old band KRU, which I clutched to my chest like a teenybopper.

  It took another year for Nil to put his band together and move to the Talkhouse. The crowds were small at first, mostly folks me and Floodie dragged from work. A nervous energy permeated the room the moment Nil began. We knew what our bodies wanted and Nil certainly knew, but we were also frightened, being essentially suburban middle-class strivers who spent our days behaving in a manner meant to avoid embarrassment. This battle would rage inside each of us until someone worked up the nerve to start dancing, at which point everyone poured out of their seats.

  This was the era during which I came to be called The Spoon, the nickname deriving from a pair of boots I’d bought used on Washington Avenue, stupendously ugly boots by any measure, fashioned in the cowboy style but cut off just above the ankle, as if the cobbler had run short on black leather and panicked. On the plus side, the slick wooden heel made a loud clacking when stomped on the floor—like someone playing the spoons. It would be nice to suppose I was given this nickname as a tribute to my percussive sangfroid. I certainly felt nimble. I had moves: the stomp, the sudden controlled skid, the splayfooted pelvis hop, the booty bop, the shoulder juke. It was during this era that I broke a woman’s foot on the dance floor at a Polish wedding in Toledo, Ohio, which should serve as the best and most disturbing testament to the delusions of grace I suffered during Nil’s reign. But we all felt like that. We all danced like that. We all believed he had been sent to liberate our secret wishes.

  Into the Mystic

  If this sounds grandiose, consider the larger messianic context. Miami was being touted as America’s designated City of Destiny, its ultraglamorous melting pot. This was partly civic marketing crapola, but it was also true that you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting a new cultural enclave and everyone seemed to know someone who knew an actual Santeria priest or a curandera or a Haitian dude who did voodoo part-time. Nil was our polyglot poster boy. The guy had mastered all the standard rock idioms and immersed himself in the roots music of the Caribbean and South America. He played fifteen different instruments, half of his own invention. He dressed in billowing smocks and torn trousers—half crooner, half Caliban.

  Nil also cultivated that trait so essential to rock stars: mystery. We knew next to nothing about him and swapped rumors constantly. He lived alone with a monkey. Gloria Estefan had propositioned him. He had grown up in the Amazon jungle. No, he came from Cuba on a raft. He was a balsero. That he was born in Newark and later moved to Venezuela (facts we would eventually unearth) hardly mattered.

  Major label execs soon began turning up at the Talkhouse. David Byrne himself flew down from New York City to do his best geek schmooze. What a strange pleasure, to see those suits squeezed in at the edges of the bar. Nil could have moved to a bigger venue, but he enjoyed the heat of our packed bodies.

  Nil was our soundtrack, after all. His music expressed the hopes we felt as we churned reluctantly toward adulthood. I was growing into an intrepid journalist. Every six weeks, my name appeared on the cover of our paper and I strutted around like that meant something. Floodie and me became best friends. We’d get stoned and hit the grimy juice bar on Washington Avenue and head down to the beach and thrash out to the buoy and do pull-ups until our tits ached. Floodie taught me how to run, too, on the boardwalk that began at Seventeenth, dodging Hassids and leathery vagrants, Floodie moving like a gazelle while I staggered behind cursing. We were in love, though we wouldn’t have seen it that way. And just to make sure, I went goony for Paloma, the ad rat in the next cubicle. She was a Miami native, gorgeous, Cuban, with a clever violent family and com
plicated underwear. One night, after months of awkward courting, after tequila and Nil, she let me walk her to her car. I was a stuttering wreck.

  “Relax,” she said, “I’m coming back to your place.”

  Which she did and (by the way) bedded me with a nonchalance I found terrifying. I woke up a few hours later with the absolute conviction that my life had arrived. On weekends, we repaired to her house in Westchester and ate cheap Chinese and frozen yogurt and rented videos. Weeknights, I returned to my place on South Beach and worked on short stories. Nil was a part of all this. Watching him made me impatient for the change I could feel within myself. My imagination was puny and obvious, but I was reaching toward the feelings that would turn out to matter.

  For the sake of proper plotting, I managed to convince myself that Paloma and Nil were sneaking around behind my back. This was a fantasy mostly about Nil, I suspect. And there was of course that one night when I came upon the two of them huddled at the bar. I spent the rest of the weekend fuming. But I never confronted Paloma. And the next week I was back at the Talkhouse, dancing in my ugly boots.

  Shine, Even for a While

  The scene always falls apart, though never how you think it will. We kept expecting Nil to get whisked away on a magic carpet of fame. Instead, the Talkhouse shut down. South Beach had become the sort of terrain where foam parties9 drew more paying customers than Richard Thompson.

  Nil’s last gig there was April 16, 1995, a Sunday. I kept a flyer tucked away for years, though I don’t remember the show itself, only the ringing after-moments, our sore feet, our raw throats, the purple hint of dawn. The music was over. It didn’t take long for us to kill our own happiness.