Lou Reed, Sonic Contrarian
In Memoriam Torch Ballads & Jukebox Music
Matt Hanson November 4, 2013 | 7 books mentioned 22 9 min read
The first time I ever heard "Walk on the Wild Side" it freaked me out. It was on one of those dark cold New England winter mornings that makes the universe come to a standstill. I must have been about twelve or thirteen. I remember frost chalked across the windows. I was up before sunrise for some odd reason, and the routine blare of the classic rock on my radio had ominously stopped for a few moments and there was this silence in the air. I was already sitting up in my bed before Herbie Flowers's immortal bass melody suddenly dropped, cooler than cool, and out of nowhere came a voice that held my complete attention without apparently being bothered to try.
Lou's nonchalant, matter-of-fact vocals, in that melodic mumble he'd always managed to pull off when he wasn't shouting or trying to croon, emerged over the guitar and suddenly there was an emcee in the room, drawing back the curtain onto a hidden, seemingly black and white noir world of hustlers, hitchhiking transvestites, the A-poll-o with the go-go-go and someone named Holly in the back room giving head but keeping hers…The really peculiar part of this, at least for me, was that none of it was offered with any kind of comment or explanation. What would be sensationalistic or pushed into the realm of the surreal in other songwriter's hands was offered without comment, explanation or big conclusion. Here's the wild side, kid, the poker face of the voice and the music seemed to say, take or leave it.
It wasn't until high school that I heard about the Velvet Underground and this mysterious fellow who wore black sunglasses all the time and hung out with Andy Warhol. I remember asking about this apparently infamous band at my local independent record store and having the clerk explain that I really couldn't just get one record by these guys, you really had to get them all. I ended up buying the box set for about twenty bucks in one of those ridiculous Columbia House deals they used to have and took it home, unwrapping it like a lost scroll.
It might have been "Heroin" that hooked me. Or it could have been the part where they drag the chair across the floor and drop a clattering stack of dinner plates in the middle of "European Son" or the neon-lights-under-glass vibe of "Femme Fatale" that won my heart, I couldn't decide either then or now. And that's before I delved into White Light/ White Heat or the spiritual anguish and throbbing eroticism of the eponymous third record, or the sparkling charisma of "Loaded," which would have gone platinum were there any justice in the world. I remember realizing that I was probably the only person in my small town who had spent his entire afternoon listening to "All Tomorrow's Parties." Before I knew it, I was the proud owner of the t-shirt – black, of course – with the first record's cover emblazoned on the front. Mercifully, it was a long time until I found out that people called me banana boy.
There's just no question that the Velvets, and Lou's decades of solo work, changed the game for anybody who met them even halfway on their own terms. It wasn't just an aesthetic choice, either. Most of the personal tributes I've seen don't just talk about how great a musician Lou Reed was but how his fine, fine music literally changed their lives. It's not only because he stayed true to his vision, no question about that, but because, well, between thought and expression lies a lifetime. His tastes were varied enough to incorporate pretty much everything – literature, film, garage rock, the classical avant-garde, doo-wop, love, drugs, sex, death, and wearing sunglasses at night while sporting a rather undeniable mullet. Somehow, in the way that only truly great artists can manage, Lou Reed managed to tell the world exactly how and where to go fuck itself while assimilating as many aspects of it as he possibly could.
Lou loomed large, he contained multitudes. His songs could be as expansive and lyrically obscure as they were blunt and almost minimalist. He was a legendarily hostile interview subject who had the sincerity to name one of his less-remembered solo records "Growing Up in Public," a lover of free jazz and Dion and the Belmonts, a connoisseur of epic orgiastic rave-ups who could also remix an entire set of already painfully naked and honest songs down to the point where his vocals dominated the mix and still sounded like a quivering whisper coming from a locked room. The same guy wrote "I'm Waiting For the Man" and "Pale Blue Eyes" and "Sweet Jane" and "Perfect Day" and "Walk On the Wild Side." By his own admission, he did Lou Reed better than anybody. It might be the New York thing coming out, but I've always noticed that everybody, fans and enemies alike, always called him Lou. Of how many other certifiable rock stars could this be said?
He had a knack for finding mentors, too. As an undergraduate at Syracuse, he became one of the student acolytes of Delmore Schwartz, a now-overlooked poet whose appetite for conversation and booze was matched only by his obsessive passion for the life of the mind. He wrote the introductory short story for the Partisan Review in 1937, at the ripe old age of twenty-three, an absolute line-by-line masterpiece entitled "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities." Read it today and see exactly how every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Saul Bellow wrote his Pulitzer-winning "Humbolt's Gift" about him and his maniacal mentorship and called him "a Mozart of conversation." John Berryman lamented the loss of the days when they would walk through Harvard "warm with gossip" and dedicated poems to his "sacred memory."
As legend has it, if you spent any time at all with Schwartz, you would hear him give spellbinding readings of Joyce and Yeats and Shakespeare and whatever else struck his fancy until he burned himself out, as he eventually did. Lou was understandably quite devoted to him and would refer to him years after he died as "the first great man I ever met." One thing Schwartz told Lou was that whatever he did, he needed to write truly and honestly and never betray himself. If he didn't, he would haunt him from beyond the grave. And haunt him he did, if the tender "My House" from 1982's deeply confessional The Blue Mask is any indication.
And then there's Andy Warhol, who evidently asked for little else out of life but to listen and watch. Lou himself also said that Delmore Schwartz was the smartest man he'd ever met, until he met Andy. They called him Drella, a mix of Cinderella and Dracula, the monosyllabic son of Pittsburgh and Tiffany's who made soup cans and atomic bombs and Elizabeth Taylor equally glamorous. Andy saw them as a nothing bar band in the Village and realized he needed a house band for his factory of beautiful freaks. This was beyond spectacle. Don't forget that the people mentioned in those songs, the Chelsea girls and smack heads and lonely debutants, were based on real people. Think about it, how many other groups essentially started playing as the rhythm section of an entire improvisational art project, literally providing the soundtrack to the glowing, pulsating film above their heads? Then you've got the whip dancers and Nico the singing Teutonic goth statue and the strobe lights and the cellophane balloons and speed. And why not flip it around and imagine if, say, Jackson Pollock had a house band? They made a point of touring in places where they were hated. Seriously, who does that?
Conflict of all kinds – internal and external, alone in the dark night of the soul and in the bright lights of NYC, as cosmopolitan a place as you could ask for and whose avatar he was for a time – wasn't just his theme, it was his muse. It takes a certain kind of genius to make a classic like "Transformer," revive a sluggish solo career in the process, bask in the glow of due appreciation from the likes of David Bowie and Iggy Pop, and then unleash forty five minutes of incomprehensible noise entitled Metal Machine Music and admit that, yes, no sentient being has actually been able to listen to it all the way through (much less its maker) while closing his label-demanded liner notes with the boast that "my week beats your year." He was probably right, too. Less than a year later, he shape-shifted into a 50s radio deejay of the mind playing at the prom and makes Coney Island Baby, as accessible and sentimental a record as he ever made.
Only he could have brought out the burnished despair in the almost melodramatically desolate Berlin and turned off more or less his entire fan base while he was at it, only to revive it thirty years later in a triumphant live show and concert film and see it listed among the greatest records of its time. For my money, his greatest solo accomplishment is the eleven minute 1978 epic "Street Hassle" precisely because it does so many things at once and yet remains sui generis, a Lou Reed joint if there ever was one. Surging cellos accompany a three movement structure that fuses pretty much everything between ecstasy and agony while maintaining some indefinable, yearning balance between hopefulness and fatalism, degradation and exaltation, bad luck and Bruce Springsteen.
For better or worse, Lou made a career out of being a sonic contrarian. He challenged you as a listener because he challenged himself as a performer. If you got it, you got it, and if you let it get under your skin it stayed for a lifetime. Andy Warhol told him that however many songs he did, he needed to write more, because the most important thing in life was work. Some of his best records, in different phases of his career, were with the great John Cale and apparently each man repeatedly swore they'd never deal with the bastard ever again. Warhol himself once called him a "rat." Lester Bangs did some of his best interviews while insistently provoking and antagonizing him, and wrote some of the most gloriously obsessive music criticism of all time about what his music did to his imagination. As Thurston Moore put it, Lou Reed's music provided you access to fantasies you never even knew existed. And not just the dirty ones, either. I strongly doubt that Jonathan Richman had so much as smoked a cigarette when he listened to "Sister Ray" and found his life was saved by rock 'n' roll.
And if sexual fluidity was your bag, then Lou was your, er, man. He wrote openly about sadomasochism and gender bending before anybody else in rock 'n' roll had the nerve to, and did indeed seem to practice what he preached. It has been suggested that Lou either coined or at least popularized the term "coming out of the closet" in Transformer's bouncy little ditty "Make Up." He was perfectly happy to squire his transperson companion Rachel around for several years. At the end of Coney Island Baby he dedicates one of his most poignant and romantic songs to her, in a voice that gets me every single time. For what it's worth, I don't think the fact that he married different women and lived happily ever after with Laurie Anderson invalidates or undermines this at all. The disturbing fact that he underwent electroshock treatment for "homosexual inclinations" as a teenager and wrote the harrowing "Kill Your Sons" about the experience is proof enough that the rock 'n' roll animal was no dilettante or poseur when it came to what used to be called alternative lifestyles.
I met him once. I understand it's a little presumptuous (not to mention name-droppy) to use this term given the nature of the interaction we had, but there it is. I think I was a sophomore in college, which would make it late 2000. He gave a reading at a Barnes & Noble in Union Square because, as we all know, you never know what you're gonna find there. Pretty big crowd, mostly middle aged suburban guys. I came late and missed the reading but I lined up with everyone else to get the new edition of his collected lyrics signed. I came prepared – I had a copy of his book and a copy of Delmore Schwartz's selected poems for him to sign. I had some ridiculous idea that this would impress him or something. One was for me, the other was for my best friend. The booksellers handed out large post-it notes so you could write what you wanted your dedication to be. They stuck out of the side of the book, under the cover. I saw one older guy ahead of me with a sticky note that said "Hey Bob! Take a walk on the wild side!" I looked away and tried not to kill myself.
As I approached the great man's table, he was in the process of calmly flipping someone off. His back was turned and he was smirking bemusedly at someone on the staff who'd made some kind of comment or dropped something. I plunked the books down in front of him with an idiotic flourish and asked him if he'd do a dedication. He noticed the books, changed his smirk to a scowl, and fumbled through them, as his scowl turned into a scrawl. For the collected lyrics, he flipped to the title page and wrote above the title in big black letters HELLO and, beneath it, LU. I have always treasured the compliment. After the crowd thinned out I went into the corner and tore out the two pages he'd signed, stuffed them in my pocket and put the books back on the shelf. To this day I'm not exactly sure if I was channeling Tony Soprano or Dead Poet's Society but I throw myself to the tender mercies of booksellers everywhere when I say that it was my walk on the wild side, and it was all right.
Bonus Lou Reed YouTube Playlist:
"Caroline Says II"
"Coney Island Baby"
"Street Hassle"
"Dirty Boulevard"
"Magic and Loss"
"Set the Twilight Reeling"
"Sweet Jane" (Live)
Matt Hanson is an editor at The Arts Fuse whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Baffler, The Millions, The New Yorker, The Smart Set, and other places. A longtime resident of Boston, he has recently moved to New Orleans.
Torch Ballads & Jukebox Music
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Going over 80 with Le Guin is wondrous. Reincarnation would be a fine belief to have, but short of that, thank goodness Le Guin's books are immortal.
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Sidney Lumet Dies at 86
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I Found a Way to Enter: Diving Into Writing
Magdalena Edwards November 26, 2013 | 7 books mentioned 3 5 min read
It's like a heartbeat, the opening bars of Arcade Fire's "Reflektor" – the first song in the Canadian band's new project, the one that sets the tone and the refrain: "It's a reflection." It's the thirteenth song if you count backwards, the bridge between the two halves of the double album. It's the mirror. My pulse quickens. I am alive. "We fell in love, alone on a stage / In the reflective age." I am not alone here. I wait for it, the rhyme in the second stanza between the French and the English. This is the sublime: "Entre la nuit, la nuit et l'aurore. / Entre les royaumes, des vivants et des morts. / If this is heaven / I don't know what it's for / If I can't find you there / I don't care" (Between the night, the night and the dawn. / Between the realms, of the living and the dead). I drink the pairing of "morts" and "for" – I am giddily outside myself and deep in the beauty of the bond, if for a moment, between the two languages, the dead ("morts") and the preposition of the future ("for") – which in the fifth stanza transforms into the exquisite almost overlap of "morts" and "more." I am free of the anxiety of not writing.
I love that this song is about trying to find "a way to enter" – to find a portal, a connector – which one can read as the passage to the Underworld that Orpheus seeks in order to attempt his rescue of Eurydice (there are two tracks in Reflektor that make this theme clear, one named for each ancient Greek figure). I also read the song as seeking the throughway for creativity, for getting on with the act of making something. But "Reflektor" does not promise safe passage: "I thought, I found a way to enter/…I thought, I found the connector." But I didn't. Even the false promise is assuring. I want to look for my entry onto the page, into a line, an image, a something. I am afraid. I am in the middle of a rough descent, choppy in the air and in need of a pocket of smooth, a glide. The seven-plus-minute "Reflektor" has become a ritual these days. Blast it louder and maybe the portal will appear. Will I dive in?
I am dancing in the backyard under the Brazilian pepper tree, the almost full moon keeping me company. But my movements are small, so I go inside, into the room where I work at my computer, and I dance around the desk – I turn up the music and it pulses through the wires into my ears – I am still too timid to blast the notes into the nakedness of night, or morning, the way I did when I was a teenager in my attic bedroom, or in college away from family and anything familiar. My new roommates knew what the Bjork loop meant. A litany of song to lift another day. Then I moved onto Radiohead. Then the Chilean hip hop band Tiro de Gracia and their first album Ser Humano (human being/to be human).
Many writers, those attempting to write, like to talk about what helps them get in the mood, the zone. The organization of the objects on the desk, a particular pen or writing machine, the ritual reading of a specific text, a stack of books at the ready, music playing in the background. Maybe it's not working and everything must be reversed: no music, no books, no wireless connection, no flesh and blood people nearby, no. I am pulled in by pairings, duets, correspondences. Elizabeth Bishop's letters to Robert Lowell and his replies, Virginia Woolf's Orlando doubled as male and female, Maria Bethânia's covers of Vinicius de Moraes's songs in the album Que falta você me faz (how I miss you, or, more literally, what an absence you do to me).
But beware! The guide to the portal of creativity could be unreliable, even dangerous. When I started to read the work of Clarice Lispector, I took in one book after another, after another – I became immersed in the modes of her tragic heroines, their epiphanies seismic, but rarely conduits to change. I needed an epiphany in my own life. Lispector, and Bishop, hurled me to Brazil – that was the portal, for a time. Then a Brazilian scholar of Fernando Pessoa warned me that those who study the Portuguese poet put themselves at risk of uncanny episodes, darkness that cannot be returned, not least of all in The Book of Disquiet. Home again, Wallace Stevens hypnotized me out of writing. James Merrill and his Ouija board made me nervous.
I mishear lyrics and when I realize that I am wrong, I keep singing them that way, an incantation gone slant, a twist that might do the trick. "Reflektor" begins: "Trapped in a prism, in a prism of light." Over and over I sing: "Trapped in a prison, in a prison of love." Is there a difference? My favorite misunderstanding lies in the middle of the song, the repeated refrain: "Just a reflection, of a reflection / Of a reflection, of a reflection, of a reflection / Will I see you on the other side? (Just a Reflektor) / We all got things to hide (Just a Reflektor)." And always, always, I sing in the spirit of how the phrase sounds when its iterations are layered on top of one another: "Just a reflection of of affection / of of affection / of of affection." I am consistent, at least, in the theme of my misreading.
What kind of love is this? Who is the "you" sung to? "If this is heaven / I need something more / Just a place to be alone / 'Cause you're my home." If it is Orpheus, then Eurydice is the recipient of song; or, vice versa. If I am the one to sing, then it's the person or the thing, the book or the phrase, that will help me find the portal, dare me to dive in, to begin. In "Then Ends Where Now Begins" – an essay in the stunning collection Eros the Bittersweet – Anne Carson writes: "For Sokrates, the moment when eros begins is a glimpse of the immortal 'beginning' that is a soul."
I am still here, now sitting at my desk, earbuds pressed into my ears. I have listened to the song too many times to say. Nothing yet. Let's play again. I stand up to dance. I remember my Chinese teacher who made us do jumping jacks while counting to eight in unison. That's what I remember, always eight, infinity: 一 二 三 四 五 六 七 八 She also told us that we had to be friends with our Chinese characters, spend time with them, talk to them, love them. Only then would they love us back, be there for us when we might need them instead of hiding in the silence. I begin a series of jumping jacks and they morph quickly, by number three, into something else all together. I shake my fists, I stretch my arms, I pull at the air above me. It seems that I am here now, I have fallen, I have entered. "Will I see you on the other side?"
Magdalena Edwards | 7 books mentioned 3 5 min read
Evelyn Walsh says:
Inspired title. Look forward to reading this
The Winter Twilight, Glowing Black says:
"I wanna be black, have natural rhythm
Shoot twenty foot of jism too
and fuck up the jews
I wanna be black, I wanna be a panther
Have a girlfriend named Samantha
and have a stable of foxy whores
Oh, oh, I wanna be black
I don't wanna be a fucked up
middle class college student anymore
I just wanna have a stable of
foxy little whores
Yeah, yeah, I wanna be black
I wanna be black, wanna be like Martin Luther King
And get myself shot in the spring
And lead a whole generation, too
I wanna be black, I wanna be like Malcolm X
And cast a hex
over President Kennedy's tomb
and have a big prick, too
Oh, I don't wanna be a fucked up
middle class college student no more
Yeah, I just wanna have a
stable of foxy little whores
I wanna be black
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I wanna be black
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
(Yeah, yeah, I wanna be black, oh, oh)
– Lou Reed
Forked Tongue says:
It's "My House." "Our House" was a song made horribly ubiquitous by a group of rather differently oriented musicians (and I don't mean Madness).
C. Max Magee says:
Thanks Forked – we've fixed.
Very well done, Matt. And no large bears.
Rachel Schein says:
What an excellent tribute. Really looking forward to reading more from Mr. Hanson.
Thanks to those who have/had been keeping it real: Delmore Schwartz, Lou Reed and Matt Hanson. I liked the "take it or leave it" honesty here, and the comprehensive insights into the music. Of the ten or so obits I've read, this is by far the best.
This is Boston Strong, Fuck the Others..
This is one of my closest comrades from Boston…Mr. Matt Hanson. Fellow politico, deadbeat, wordsmith, drunkard and Hitchensite. He writes for this website the Millions and has had many a strong piece, but this one takes the prize.
I'm literally 15 blocks from the Apollo and it makes me want to score some brownstone
enjoy all!
No pomp. No glitter. Just a listener's open ear and rugged sensibility. This is writing that calls us to attention. To attend to a voice and what it might do to us.
Joseph Torra says:
Excellent article! Better than some of the RIP writing from "big" names.
DBo says:
"Lou loomed large, he contained multitudes."
What a great sentence, one of many. I wish I could tell you all everything I loved about this piece, but I don't have all night.
An obituary for an artist, particularly a musician is challenging. because we all take our music so personally. It is as though our lives were set to music. And because of that, tributes, memorial pieces, obituaries are replete with the passions of the author as he or she glides from subject to autobiography and back again. There is something almost Proustian about the description of young Matthew Hanson's pre-adolescent ears listening to "Walk on the Wild Side." Glimmers of recognition, but not quite of comprehension — exquisite.
And so this beautifully balanced piece unfolds. The critic and the fan within the writer work together. In my own reading experience, this is the best kind of writing about music. Without it, without a show of love that brings one's inner fan into sharp relief, the writing that results just ain't worth a damn.
So anyway, I so enjoyed the balance there — Hanson's experience with Reed's music and its influence on him on one hand and then an account of his influence on contemporary culture and in turn, an account of who influenced Reed and how. The author just does this so well and is never self-indulgent, always a risk with this sort of writing.
Oh, but I can be. Ask me about my early adolescent musical influences, what they were (way back in the day — the Old Testament of rock and roll) and I instantly start raving about their effects on my hormones and what my favorite makeout songs were.
But I digress. Anyway, thanks for a great piece, Mr. Hanson. You gave us Lou Reed and you gave us your Lou Reed. With irony and awe.
Got to sign off with another quote — "They made a point of touring in places where they were hated. Seriously, who does that?"
I believe that you answered that question: "Conflict was his muse."
P.S. Thanks for the links. About an hour ago I read a piece, quite different from this one but also great. It is by Laurie Anderson and very touching.
Avinash Raman says:
Mr. Hanson's obit was the best of many that i have read. It spoke to not just why Lou Reed is respected but conveyed why he is BELOVED. In the narrative of his young self discovering Lou Reed's music and eventually meeting Lou Reed for a fleeting moment, we get a great mirror to the story of Lou Reed's own awakening via Delmore Schwartz and Andy Warhol towards his own authenticity. There is much talk always about THE AMERICAN SPIRIT. But if and when it exists it exists in individuals not in the land, and for 70 years it seems to have existed in Lou. Mr. Hanson's obit makes you remind yourself that however bright your American spirit blazes it helps to know how much brighter it can burn when measured by what Lou said and did. Great man. Great obit.
Milligan says:
Fantastic tribute Mr. Hanson. I've read more than once since his death. This is the first to discuss more than just the surface. I knew he was friends with Warhol. Every one touches on the haunting simplicity of Wild Side. But this was the first one I've read that seemed to come close to describing the artistic spirit of the man. Kudos to you Matt for having the courage to touch on his "undeniable mullet" and the things like Metal Machine that most fans would like to forget.. I wish I'd taken the time to learn a bit about the man prior to his death., it puts the music into a perspective I'd never considered. Thank you Matt .
C.V. says:
This playlist is boss. Good on you for not including all Velvets stuff or the songs that get more attention. I never knew that version of Sweet Jane even existed. Hilarious.
Mala Debnath says:
@ Matt Hanson: This is a great article. Such a personal,moving tribute- straight from the heart & that playlist is indeed a bonus- saved it.
Addendum to Author and Other Reedheads
Apologies for failing to list source of the tribute from Laurie Anderson. I found it on line in Rolling Stone.
Damn good write up, Matty. Dig the ending.
Seabourne Jackson says:
It's always a reader's treat when they are exposed to a piece written by someone who has had a lifetime to be affected by the subject matter in the way Hanson has here. Mr Hanson's versatile prose is captivating from start to finish, winding in and out of deeply personal revelations, sophisticated analysis, and a couple choice biographical nuggets to culminate in an impressively moving tribute. The breadth of Lou's life and work are offered up in an impressionistic image here–a very appropriate one, at that. The praise Hanson has for Lou is evident, but is not overbearing, allowing the reader to receive for a few moments the wonder of a unique life, one of God's own prototypes. Sincerity in motion. And not without one or two memorable and original lines. I hope The Millions knows what a talent they have in Mr Hanson. Looking forward to more.
Lauralee says:
I can now take my dream-like-state of thoughts on Lou and have all the rays reach one point now that this piece has been written and read. Thank you.
eric d says:
I always thought of "Metal Machine Music" as the bastard offspring of John Cage's 4'33", an ear canal hemorrhaging exercise in sonic mindfulness, all the while imagining Uncle Lou in his idiosyncratic talk/sing telling us, "Serenity now, c*cksuckers."
Kevin Sinclair says:
Mr. Hanson really hit home with this one. A fitting tribute to a man that all we rockers- at-heart idolized. Very thorough in touching upon the many phases of his career but also very personalized. He interweaves the man's lyrics appropriately and never feels contrived in doing so. This is the kind of completely sincere eulogy that Lou so deserves.
This was a real tribute to the man. Great obit.
The Song I Could Not Stop Singing: On "Maxwell's Silver Hammer"
John Hobart May 3, 2013 | 7 books mentioned 2 11 min read
When I was 10 years old, there was a song I could not stop singing, and that I very much wished that I could. It was "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" by The Beatles, the third track on the first side of their 1969 album, Abbey Road. Though the melody of the song has a catchiness that made it attractive to me, the lyric has a darkness that made it dreadful. The melody wears short trousers and the lyric wears long. And that lyric, about a murderer, messed me up. There came upon me, not rationally but massively, the conviction that if I continued to sing this song then my parents would die. And yet I could not stop singing it. There I would be, walking blithely through the house, or walking blithely across the garden, and then realize that for the last few seconds, I had, yet again, been singing of Maxwell Edison and his homicidal hammer, and a great dread would invade me, because it meant, this singing, the removal of my parents from the world. This was a laughable idea, of course. But that an idea is laughable isn't much of a bar to its presence in the human mind, is only patchily the occasion of laughter. I, certainly, wasn't doing any laughing. The song became, for me, a thing of unmanning malignity, a breach through which the worst of all facts could have at me, through which the thoughts I most wanted kept out crashed in. I knew it, this song, as an ambush. It was a thing by which, at any time of day, I could be undone.
It is not amongst the most loved of The Beatles' songs, "Maxwell's Silver Hammer." Ian MacDonald, in Revolution in the Head, his celebrated disquisition on The Beatles' discography, describes this McCartney composition as a "ghastly miscalculation" and as "sniggering nonsense" and claims it was a song that Lennon despised. The tale of a murderous medical student, it has a jarringly jaunty tune — a Trojan tune that smuggled the horrific into my head. The song I discovered when investigating my parents' record collection, a discovery as unfortunate as that of some cursed amulet that brings woe to its owner, but of which the owner can never be rid. But Abbey Road is, despite "Maxwell," the Beatles album that means the most to me, perhaps, in part, because I knew it when I was young, and it has the additional import, therefore, of a lost thing found, or of a thing delivered from afar. Whatever makes a rock from the Moon matter more than a rock from your garden — that ingredient is present, I find, in the things first known. But the album, of course, requires no biographical happenstance on the part of the listener to have meaning. Good things are to be found therein. Including the moment, during the second side's long medley, when the briskness of "Polythene Pam" gives way to the lengthier phrasing of "She Came in Through the Bathroom Window," and the moment of changed pace feels like the moment a glider is freed from the plane that pulls it, the brutish motoring left behind in a rapturous banishing of racket and rush. Yet for all that is good on the album, it is what is bad that remains, for me, most potent. There was a long period of my life when even the sight of the third track's title on the back of the sleeve was a cause of disquiet. And though I know that I will have to listen to the track again for the writing of this essay, I am now at the end of the second paragraph and have yet to get the listening done.
It was not the only piece of music, this, that snared me with its melody and disturbed me with its words. There was also Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf, which, I think, was the first record I ever owned. The five- or six-year-old me sent away a certain number of labels from bottles of Ribena, and received, in return, a copy of Peter and the Wolf on flexi-disc. I found it magically pretty, this piece of music. It seemed to me extraordinary that something so pretty could exist, and be in my possession. Here was gorgeousness caught, as baffling a capture as a snatched sunbeam or a phantom filmed. And yet I found listening to it an ordeal. Because the narration was about a cat, a bird, and a duck being hunted by a wolf, and, in the case of the duck, eaten. Which I did not like. The chasing of the cat made me afraid, I remember, for my own cat, who seemed to me very meaningful, and, as I listened to the narration, very vulnerable. The narration, as it happens, has a cushioned conclusion, pulls back, at the last, from an adult frankness about death — Peter persuades the hunters not to kill the wolf but to take it to the zoo, and as the wolf is led away we hear the duck it has eaten quacking from inside its stomach. This is mortality fashioned with a child in mind, mortality tailored to the tender. Nevertheless, the tale bothered me, and quite soon the mortality proved more worrying than the melody was alluring, and I put the record safely to one side. But with "Maxwell's Silver Hammer," the record could not be put safely to one side. Because I couldn't stop singing it.
They are hardly strangers to each other, music and compulsion. The phenomenon of the earworm, of the tune that refuses to leave you be, has been much remarked. Oliver Sacks, in Musicophilia, his book on neurological oddities relating to music, describes people prey for long periods to the irresistible mental repetition of a tune, and quotes a correspondent who suggests that the cause lies in our hunter-gatherer past, when learning the sounds of wildlife through repetition would have been of assistance to survival. With me, the repetition was not mental but vocal. I was given to unbidden singing, sometimes to the annoyance and amusement of those around me, and can remember the day, in my early 20s, when I managed to leave such singing behind, my work colleagues giggling as I repeatedly started to sing and then, on each occasion, immediately stopped and apologized, and, over a couple of hours, brought the automatism finally to a halt. It's no accident that music, which can so unevictably inhabit us, is often depicted as magic. In the fairy tale, "Roland," the title character rids himself of a witch by playing her a magic tune on his fiddle. The witch cannot stop dancing and eventually dances herself to death. In "The Wonderful Musician," a lonely fiddler seeks to attract a companion with his playing, and a woodcutter, hearing this playing, leaves his work in spite of himself and stands and listens to the fiddler as if enchanted. Sometimes what music means is that our will is neither here nor there, and my will, when I was 10, was exactly that. I was in the grip of a ghastly enchantment, and did not have what was necessary to get myself free of that grip.
So yes, what I thought, when I was 10, was this: that as a consequence of my singing "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" — my monstrously involuntary singing of "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" — my parents would die. But not immediately. In three years' time. When I would be 13 and they would be 42. There seemed to me a fatal conjunction in those numbers. Because both were inauspicious. Thirteen traditionally so. And 42 because that was the age at which Denis, the man who lived opposite, had died. Denis had two children who were much the same age as my sister and me. And yet, somehow, this hadn't stopped him dying. Denis's death, I now suspect, had much to do with my troubles. If he could die, I had realized, then my parents could too. I would have known this already, of course. But his death gave the knowledge heft. That those who were the land you lived in could be lost to you, that the ones where all the warmth was could be removed — Denis's death had flicked a switch and made this knowledge live. And my anxiety about it, I am speculating, infected my singing of the song. There was a reason, I think, why it was this particular song that was a problem, and not another. It was because my singing of this song seemed a transgression. It was about a murderer bringing a hammer down upon people's heads. It was not a song, I felt, that I should have been singing. Yet sing it I did. I was a 10-year-old much given to toeing the line, and yet there I was, guilty, unarrestably, of transgression. And bad things are born of transgression. Just as Adam and Eve, in their consumption of the forbidden fruit, had brought mortality upon the race, so was I, in my singing of a forbidden song, bringing mortality upon my mother and father. I was doing wrong and the horrible would follow. And yet I couldn't stop. I could not.
Here we are now, six paragraphs in, and still I haven't steeled myself to listen again to the song. I have, over the years, listened to it on several occasions, and without any significant psychological collapse. But I am finding the notion onerous now. Not because I fear a resumption of the compulsion. Or because I fear that to hear it will spell my parents' end. I am long rid of such thinking, and will walk under the unluckiest of ladders with wild abandon. Nevertheless, I was in the habit of hating it, and the habit has made a partial return, though I know that there is nothing there to hate. That a prejudice has been debunked can be of strangely little impediment to the persistence of that prejudice. I used to recoil, for example, at the thought of watching a western, and decided to watch half a dozen to confront my prejudice and make larger the likeable world. And I did, indeed, find that I liked them, and felt the prejudice depart. And then, as time passed and I went a while without watching another, I felt the prejudice grow back, in peculiar heedlessness of experience. "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" is not, I know, a thing of nasty magic, yet an odor of nasty magic remains. Yes, there that odor is. Some art we have to be feeling strong to consume, and some art we have to be feeling weak. But that there exists a piece of music that has a strange power over me — I do not entirely dislike this idea. I am apt to be grateful for the strange, for that to which my thinking might gainfully go. And that it's possible to create a piece of art that plays havoc with a human — this idea can do gingering things to a writer, as can all evidence that art is not a thing inert. That it might be possible to summon something of similar import, a sentence or a story that does not pass traceless through the soul — this makes one hasten to the waiting page far wider of pupil.
It is right, I think, to talk now of the Yorkshire Ripper. For the Yorkshire Ripper, I suspect, may be pertinent. I was, as a child, particularly given to nocturnal fears, and there was a period when I would spend large parts of each night leaning out of bed in stricken vigilance, monitoring the stairs for the Yorkshire Ripper's ascent. The face of this murderous inadequate I knew from the front page of my parents' paper, which meant that he was, by this time, safely in custody. And in his long and sanguinary career he had shown no interest whatsoever in butchering small boys. But my fear of him was a thing to which the facts had no access. And it wasn't only for myself that I feared. My parents' room stood between mine and the top of the stairs, and I would weigh in my mind whether this was a cause of comfort or concern, whether my parents provided a bulwark against the awful or would in fact be the first things the awful fell upon. I wasn't clear what powers my parents had. It was possible murderers had more. I once, when young, raised the question of my parents dying with my mother, and she laughed, and declared that that was a long, long time away and wasn't something I had to worry about. But when I was 10, I was worried. At the thought of being alone in the world, and with less strength than the world required. When I think, now, of "Maxwell's Silver Hammer," I think also of the Yorkshire Ripper. They overlap in my mind. Let me look up the dates. I have looked up the dates. They match. I was bedevilled by the one at the same time as I was bedevilled by the other. But my fears about both petered out. By the time I was 13 and my parents were 42 and the fatal conjunction of the numbers was in place, my compulsive singing of the song had ceased, along with my fear, and the year reached its end without the augured apocalypse coming to pass.
Now, I suppose, I must behave like an adult, and listen again to the song. That plaguing perkiness. That bright-eyed blight. I am not without hopes that this will induce in me some enormous meltdown so as to give the final paragraph some pizzazz. If the listening were to coincide with terrible news about my parents, what weight the final paragraph would have. The writing of that last sentence caused me some unease. I felt the errancy in it imperilling my parents. I felt the infraction in it doing something damning. It does not confine itself entirely to one's childhood, does it, the childish mind. But here we go then. Here we go.
I am back and I am, of course, unharrowed. Nothing terrible was triggered. None of the odious potency remained. "When the fear yields," wrote Saul Bellow, in Henderson the Rain King, "a beauty is disclosed in its place." It would be pushing it, perhaps, to categorize "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" as a thing of beauty. But I did not dislike it. There was McCartney's light voice taking a pleasant melody over the oompah underpinnings, and the lyric that fell so foul on my infant self fell utterly fallow on my adult. There was nothing there to induce upheaval. The only element of the track that caught on me was to be found during the final verse, a very quiet organ line that I have never noticed before, a thing muted enough to be mysterious, lying there beneath the more obvious elements of the orchestration, and the hiddenness of which passed, to my ears, for profundity. I want to listen to that again.
Instead, however, I have just listened to a version of the song by Jessica Mitford, a larky version in which she pays but scant obeisance to the tune, her elderly voice plonking down on the notes with jolly imprecision, her ineptitude so blithe that one starts to think it admirable. The original, though far less slapdash, is larky too. There is a point, during the verse in which Maxwell dispatches his teacher, when McCartney has to conquer an inclination to laugh. And the bassline, in its amiability, would suit a humorous tuba. A tuba wasn't used. But it's a song — and I realize how grave a statement this is — that teeters on the brink of using a tuba. He has said, McCartney, that for him the song embodies the fact that bad things can happen out of the blue. That isn't a reading of the song I would ever have arrived at. Because it isn't about terrible things happening to one person. It's about one person doing terrible things. Nevertheless, when I was 10, the song did, for me, embody the worst blow a person could know, and I think perhaps I experienced the light treatment of dark matters not as an attempt to draw the sting of such matters ­­– or whatever it is one is doing when one deals depthlessly with death — but as a violation I would be punished for being privy to.
I am not so strange, I suspect, in having once thought a tune taboo, in having thought myself the font of the horrible, my trespasses the murderers of my parents. Magical thinking, I have just read, in a culpably tardy session with a search engine, is particularly common amongst children, especially with regard to death. They are apt to blame themselves for a death, to think that what's at the root of it is their wretchedness. In the film, MirrorMask, written by Neil Gaiman, which has just shown, with kindly timing, on TV, the young protagonist, while throwing an adolescent tantrum, wishes her mother dead, and then, when her mother falls ill soon after, thinks her wish the culprit. That the meaningful are mortal — a large part of human oddness is born of this fact. Wherever the meaningful are mortal, oddness will follow. As prevention or as explanation or as solace. Though guilt about the dead, of course, isn't always groundless. They die, the loved, and then there is guilt. Because we will not always have lived up to the fact that they mattered. But the situation, when I was 10, was this — I was a child faced with an adult fact, and childishness followed. Perhaps, buried somewhere within my thinking, was the notion that if my parents' dying was down to me, then I could, by being good, make them immortal. To think death the consequence of sin is to think death defeatable. Because we can stop being sinful. But I, for a long while, couldn't stop. My tongue would make the decision to sing, and there I would be, up to my neck in the terrible. I think about singing it now, the opening line of the song. But I only think about it. No, that won't do. I shall sing it. I have sung it. But quietly. I didn't exactly belt the thing out.
John Hobart | 7 books mentioned 2 11 min read
RIP Carol Shields
C. Max Magee July 18, 2003 | 7 books mentioned
Yesterday it was learned that Pulitzer Prize winning author Carol Shields passed away. She was best known for the book that won her the prize, The Stone Diaries. They broadcast an old interview with her on NPR yesterday, and Shields talked about how she squeezed in an hour of writing each day between teaching and taking care of her young children and after nine months she had written The Stone Diaries. Her last book, Unless, didn't recieve a huge amount of press, but it sold tremendously well at my bookstore and was much loved by the readers I spoke to about it. If you want to learn more about her, here is her obit in the New York Times.
Essays Torch Ballads & Jukebox Music
Years with Yoko
Rumaan Alam April 25, 2016 | 7 books mentioned 1 7 min read
Pandora Goes Classical
C. Max Magee November 13, 2007 | 7 books mentioned 1
I haven't bought music in years, my interest in seeing live music has waned as well, but I remain obsessed with Pandora, a site where you can create your own radio station and hone it to your precise tastes over time by rating the music you hear.On Pandora, I have a few stations that I curate for myself. Over the last year, I've been spending a lot of time with my jazz station. I've always enjoyed jazz but knew next to nothing about it. However, after several months listening to my jazz station on Pandora, I've become a jazz fan who is at least semi-literate in the genre, able to pick out the name of an artist when I overhear some jazz at a restaurant, for example.Noticing my newfound jazz knowledge, I hoped that a Pandora station might be able to help me with my other musical blind spot (or would that be deaf spot?): classical music. However, I was dismayed to find that Pandora didn't have classical music… That is, they didn't until today. So check back with me in a few months. By then my new classical station (named Soooo Classic, of course) will have made me something of an aficionado.Bonus Link: Alex Ross in The New Yorker: "The Internet may be killing the pop CD, but it's helping classical music."
C. Max Magee | 7 books mentioned 1