Kid, Rock

if music doesn't get you through, nothing will

Aerosmith Early Aerosmith--Dream On, Toys in the Attic, Walk This Way. Definitely not the Love in an Elevator and Janie's Got a Gun type of power balladry that today's youngsters are familiar with. (Is it just me or is there some correlation between the rise of Liv Tyler and the decline of Steven Tyler?) My best friend at the time, who lived down the block, was into REO Shitwagon. When I went to his house, he insisted on playing Hi Infidelity. His father was an audiophile, which meant we were forbidden to touch the bass or treble dials on the stereo and were occasionally subjected to dinnertime lectures on the superiority of reel-to-reel tapes over cassettes. My friend's devotion to the Shitwagon most likely came from his older sister, since sisters tend to have girly taste in music. I, however, was fortunate to have an older brother, which is much more important (musicwise, not beatingwise) when you're that age. Once we started getting interested in girls, a few years later, the balance shifted. It was then much more impressive to have a sister, preferably one who invited her friends along on family beach vacations.

This is embarrassing, but I'll admit it: I tried to replicate the cover art of Get Your Wings on my school spiral notebooks. I used tracing paper, matched the precise shades of yellow and black with Magic Markers. I thought my rendering was pretty faithful until I showed it to my brother (the same one who had turned me into an Aerosmith fan in the first place) and he ridiculed me. Either he had already moved on or he was jealous.

Minor Threat

In my high school, you were into punk rock or you listened to the Grateful Dead. It was easy to figure out who was who: The Deadheads grew their hair past their shoulders and wore Birkenstocks or no shoes at all. There was patchouli involved, bandannas and incense and dreadlocks, and their cars were stickered with those silly dancing bears. We punks gelled our hair into spikes and stenciled our leather jackets with the names of our favorite bands. When we wanted to pick a fight, we graffitied the hippie hangouts with a line from a Teen Idles song: "The only good Deadhead is one that's dead.'' (They rarely took the bait, owing to their peace-and-love ethos.) We combed the singles bins of record stores for vinyl limited-edition seven-inchers under the glares of the bitter staff. They were too old to be working behind the counter at a record store, and too old to be making fun of us. But we didn't realize that yet. We clipped dog collars around our necks and rolled up our tapered black jeans to show off our combat boots. The music was raw and hostile, often political, and it could drive our parents from the room within seconds of the stylus biting vinyl. I wonder which was more alarming to parents: the Deadheads and their aversion to soap or our fiery, affected snarls and steel-toed Doc Martens.

We were all the sons and daughters of doctors and lawyers, academics and scientists, and part of the appeal of the music must have been its working-class roots. Maybe we had fantasies of upending our privileged lives and joining the proletariat, because then the fury we felt--the fury that bubbles in all adolescents, rich or poor, British or American--could be blamed on a sociopolitical situation rather than on our universal teenage angst and thirst for rebellion. After all, what, truly, did we have to be angry about? Our loving, attentive parents? Our spacious homes? Our lenient, progressive schools?

The who

I rarely listened to song lyrics, and I still don't. It was always melody, guitar riffs and bass lines that drew me in, the poetry of instruments rather than the poetry of words. This isn't because I made some judgment that most lyrics are hackneyed and superficial. I just don't really hear them. I'm much more attuned to the fuel of melody, the tap of rhythm. I remember listening to the lyrics of Behind Blue Eyes. Roger Daltrey understood all my teenage loneliness, and we even have the same eye color. Once you've decided on an idol, it's not hard to start identifying with him.

It was also the song I was playing on my stereo when my father came into my room, sat on the edge of my bed and told me he was cheating on my mother. He didn't use the word cheating, or even affair. He stared at the clothes-strewn floor and said, "I've been seeing another woman. I think I might be in love with her.''

The second-best Who song was Baba O'Riley, with its long, slow buildup, its crashing climax. As a rule, I hated anything with keyboards--I was a purist and thought rock music should be limited to guitar, bass and drums--but I didn't mind them in this song. They were redundant and hypnotic, surprisingly unwimpy. Pinball Wizard and Substitute are also great Who songs, though I recognized the excellence of Substitute only after I heard Richard Thompson cover it during a free summer concert in Central Park. Sometimes it takes someone else's version to realize how great the original is.

I had a picture of Pete Townshend on my wall that I'd cut out of Rolling Stone. He gazes glumly at the camera, with his right hand against his face and his fingers streaked with blood. It was supposed to symbolize--to me, at least--his commitment to rock and roll, that he'd play guitar until his hand bled. He'd strum through the pain and only notice the wounds long after the song had ended. Hurt could wait, the music couldn't.

To say I didn't know how to respond to what my father had told me doesn't encompass what I felt. I didn't know what to say, I didn't know where to look, I didn't know how to move--I didn't even know if I should move. I didn't know anything. He might have said something more; I can't recall anything other than the heft of those brief sentences. They're the kinds of words that have the weight of a historical event; they stop time. I remember thinking, The music is still playing, the record's still turning, the lights on the equalizer are still dancing. That's the difference between human beings and machines: Machines don't hear the fireworks wrapped in a few words. Computers will do our math and build our skyscrapers and launch our space shuttles, but they'll never save us.

Waylon Jennings

"Your father's a lawyer, you're Jewish, you're from Boston. How the hell is it that you're listening to Waylon Jennings instead of chamber music?'' My friend Sherry, who grew up in smalltown eastern North Carolina, said this to me. We were jealous of each other; we both wanted to be from somewhere else. I met her in Virginia, when we were in graduate school, and she was amazed that I had the same taste in music as her family did. "I can't wait to tell my daddy, Hal,'' she said. "I'll tell him there's a guy in the program from Boston. That'll make him suspicious, but then I'll tell him, 'Don't worry, he's country at heart.' Then he'll invite you to watch a car race with him.'' For a time Sherry was my tutor in all things Southern: barbecue, fatback, sweet tea.

She thought I was gutsy for hanging out in the redneck bars of Roanoke. I went only because the whiskey tasted better anywhere they were blasting Charlie Rich. Once, when we were drinking in one such dive, she asked me about Judaism. When I told her we read only the Old Testament, not the New, she said, "Y'all only get half the book?''

My love of country music had begun several years before, in college, under the influence of another friend. He argued that it was a natural progression from the punk and indie rock we were so enamored with. These guys were the original punks, he said, explaining the bridge from Black Flag and the Angry Samoans to Hank Williams. And indeed the country music we treasured was the work of the outlaws--Hank, Waylon, David Allan Coe. We found one of the few country bars in New York City, a narrow grimy place in the middle of the East Village, and we impressed the cute bartenders with our jukebox sets. Crazy and Ring of Fire are for tourists; we played Rainy Day Woman and Willie, Waylon and Me. The bartenders wore cowboy hats and called us baby (continued on page 151)Kid, Rock(continued from page 110) and made us want to move to Texas to find more of them. Fuck college--we'd brand and raise cattle. We scored free drinks, joined them in shots that made us happy. They lit our cigarettes, and we read miles of intent into their kindness. We read so much into so little.

The Chills

The band in this story that you are least likely to have heard of. Which is a shame. They're from New Zealand, a land where sheep outnumber people and the government doles out grants to rock bands (paradise, in other words). I saw them play their first show in America, at a bar in Cambridge. I had to borrow my brother's ID to get in, and for months afterward he extorted favors from me by threatening to tell our parents. Martin Phillipps, the singer and songwriter at the heart of the band, is a genius on the level of Bob Dylan, Faulkner, Gram Parsons. This is not the delusion of a rabid fan, though I will gladly cop to being one. I honestly believe it, and someday, whether it's next week or 100 years from now, so will everyone else in the world. All the records will be reissued and millions of people will have the joy of hearing Pink Frost and I Love My Leather Jacket for the first time. I sent my professor friend a CD recently, and he told me he walks the hallways of his English department singing Oncoming Day. "My students and colleagues look at me like I'm crazy,'' he wrote on a postcard. "Ask me if I give a fuck.''

My definition of genius is the ability to turn loss--terrible, wrenching, inevitable, ineffable loss--into something holy and beautiful. Something transcendent. In the end, really, do we have the right to demand anything more?

Neil Young

It's a rare woman who appreciates Neil Young. Many like the softer stuff--Powderfinger, Pocahontas, Sugar Mountain. But play them the true rockers--Cinnamon Girl, Barstool Blues--and they'll lose interest and start scanning your record collection for Tori Amos (Sarah McLachlan if they're really trying to piss you off). They don't like all the warbling, the suddenly unpretty voice, the hostile guitar work. It's OK, it's not necessarily a character flaw.

Shelly, my father's mistress, was a Neil Young fan. I know this because I was listening to Live Rust one night, a week after he told me of his affair. Again he came into my room and sat on the bed. I'd had seven days to think about what to say to him, but I still didn't have a clue. I had this absurd fantasy that he would tell me he had been joking. It's a strange dream I had, he'd say, or, I wanted to know what those words sounded like. I would have gladly accepted a warped sense of humor instead of his cheating on my mother.

"This song sounds familiar,'' he said. I handed him the album jacket.

"Oh,'' he said, opening the gatefold and gazing at the concert photo blowup. "Shelly plays this record a lot, too.''

Great, I thought, you're sleeping with someone half Mom's age. I don't know why I assumed this, other than it being difficult to imagine anyone over the age of 25 sharing a 14-year-old's taste in music. Shelly. I didn't like the name; I didn't even want to know it. There was nothing special about it, nothing gorgeous. My mother's name is Sofia. I would have hated the name of anyone he was screwing.

He read the liner notes silently, waiting for me to say something. I wanted to leave the room, but it was my room and I didn't know where I'd go if I left. Downstairs to tell my mother? Out the door to hide in the backyard and punch the frozen ground until my knuckles split open? I could snap a self-portrait and hang it next to the picture of Pete Townshend. It was deep winter, the time of premature darkness, and the hard black sky outside the window was aching and accurate. No gesture I could make seemed right, no sentence perfect.

Snow was in the forecast, two or three inches, just enough to blanket the already quiet streets and spur the hope of school cancellations. Later the plows would come out, muscle all that innocent precipitation off the highways. Then the salt spreaders, to soften the ice and make the pavement safe. I remembered the blizzard of 1978, when we got three feet and skied down the middle of Beacon Street. We dove in and out of the tall snowbanks; we hoped it would never melt.

The Clash

After my father told me of his affair, he came to my room about once a week. It was always at the same time, during the hour after he arrived home from work and my mother announced from the kitchen that dinner was ready, her voice trilling up the stairs. He sat on the bed or leaned against the doorjamb, his natty three-piece suit looking out of place amid the mess of my room. He had those suits custom-made, and he was so fucking proud of them.

I stared at everything except him: my London Calling poster, my desk littered with magazines, the homework that I was avoiding. Sometimes he tried to steer the conversation away from the bomb he'd dropped, asking about my day or telling me about his. He recounted utterly forgettable anecdotes about partners at his law firm. He stabbed at current events, making references to newspaper articles or the radio newscast he had listened to on the way home from work. Or he would offer something about the music. "This is turning into quite a collection,'' he said one evening, fingering the spines of my records. I never wanted to hit him for cheating on my mother, but I wanted to punch him for saying that.

The Clash, The Clash--the album with the green cover--was the surface my friends and I used to roll joints on. I wasn't a major stoner, but we indulged on many a weekend. We would gather at someone's house where the parents were out for the night, and we'd spill our pot onto this record jacket, sift out the seeds and tuck the weed into papers or a pipe. I don't know why we always used that record, but I do know that rituals are important, and this was ours.

I'm not sure what my father expected me to say. Maybe he wanted forgiveness, my assurance that he wasn't ruining anyone's life. Maybe he simply needed to tell someone because the guilt was chewing him up. But why not one of his work colleagues or a friend outside the law firm? I resented that he chose me. I'm too young, I wanted to say. You have no right to make me shoulder this. What makes you think that I'm strong enough?

The Only Ones

Any guy who knows anything about music has at one time or another used his knowledge to flirt with girls. The mix tape is the most common manifestation of this phenomenon. If you look at the cassette collections of women of a certain age you will probably come across several homemade, occasionally elaborately decorated tapes filled with obscure songs meant to showcase both our record collections and the depth of our longing. Sometime after college we move on to more direct forms of seduction, and women are left to buy movie soundtracks, which are essentially mix tapes with slicker cover art and duds thrown in.

On the tapes I made, I always included an Only Ones song. The recipient of one such gift dubbed it "kill yourself music.'' I know what she meant. It's moody, frequently downtrodden stuff. And there is actually a song called Why Don't You Kill Yourself? (No, this was not the song I recorded to communicate my love.)

I kept wrestling with the question of whether to tell my mother. I didn't want to, didn't even know how I could, but I thought she should know. I didn't like that she was the only person in the house (my brother was away at college) who didn't know this huge secret. Keeping it from her made me feel I was in collusion with my father, that we were both making my mother into a fool and she had done nothing to deserve it. Those early evenings my father spent in my room seemed especially cruel. We could smell her lasagna, her lemon chicken, and it was like we were up there plotting. Our own war room. Then we'd sit through dinner and pretend it was a night like any other.

I was also afraid of the violence that might ensue if I told her. She had a temper, one she blamed on her Italian heritage, and far lesser offenses had induced slammed doors, profanity-laced tirades. Once while she was giving me a ride to school, another driver cut her off and she tailed his car for 10 minutes just to have the opportunity to pull up next to him and give him the finger. She didn't acknowledge that this was in any way strange or extreme behavior. I imagined the revelation of the affair might lead to smashed plates and wineglasses, my father's books and clothes hurled from second-story windows. I could hear her screaming, her threats, the names she would call him. I even pictured her taking my old aluminum Little League bat to the hood and windshield of his car, envisioned the newly spider-webbed glass. It would be one of those scenes in a movie: the neighbors parting their blinds to peek out at the commotion, the sad, inevitable police sirens zeroing in.

There's an Only Ones song called Another Girl, Another Planet. The line "I think I'm on another world with you'' makes me think it's an ode to love. Maybe Peter Perrett wrote it in the heady days of a new relationship, when the minutes and hours look most like magic. Before you have to start digging for the sexy moments.

New Order

Almost every person I know has gone through a period of self-destructiveness. I don't think it's because I know an inordinate number of troubled souls. I think it's just the way of the world. One friend liked to hang out in biker bars and slowly reveal that he was gay. Another friend was fond of drinking and driving, and more than once I'd been in the passenger seat of his car as it weaved across the yellow line on stark country roads. It felt almost like flying. Still another friend had a thing for stealing from her co-workers. Money, jewelry, even office papers--she hardly discriminated. Most of us have managed to soldier on and emerge from the darkness with our lives more or less intact. We just wanted a taste of what it's like to wreck ourselves.

My own bout lasted two years or so, 24 months during which I alternated whiskey and cocaine. Like most people on these jags, my nights were indistinguishable: I'd start around seven, with bourbon to relax me enough to do the coke--then a couple lines, then more bourbon to close the night out and ease the harsh comedown. Sometimes I went to a bar and sneaked bumps in the bathroom, and sometimes I just stayed in my apartment. At home I had control of the stereo.

I was listening to a lot of New Order at the time. I liked the longer songs, the ones you could turn up and get lost in for five, six, seven minutes. It seemed like cocaine music--the pulsing beats, the driving melodies. And it's music that's not grim in the least. This was important: If I were intent on poisoning myself, on sampling disaster, the least I could do was put on a record that promised morning would come.

Big Star

The band between the poppier Box Tops and Alex Chilton's depressive solo career. They recorded just three albums: #1 Record, Radio City and Third: Sister Lovers, three gems of heartbreak and shimmering harmonies.

Six months after my father confessed to me, he moved out and my mother tried to commit suicide. I was the one who found her, groggy, stumbling around her bedroom clutching an empty bottle of sleeping pills in one hand and a fifth of vodka in the other. I called 911 and they rushed her to St. Vincent's, where her stomach was pumped and she was sedated. The doctors hooked her up to an IV to rehydrate her. She shared a room with a cancer patient whose bedside table was bright with flowers and pastel-colored Hallmark cards. This made my mother's half of the room, with no bouquets and no cards, all the more sad.

My father came to the hospital almost immediately and joined me in the waiting area after he had poked his head into her room and had seen her dozing. He was white with fear and kept dabbing at his eyes with a dirty, crumpled Kleenex. "I don't know what I'd do if she had died,'' he said.

"Me either,'' I told him.

"Thank God you got home when you did.''

I nodded.

There was a television on in the background, and we could hear the chatter at the nurses' station punctuated by announcements over the PA system. The pacing of everything seemed off; it felt too fast and too slow.

"I hate hospitals,'' my father said.

"Who doesn't?'' I said.

My brother showed up about four hours later. He was in college in New York and had jumped on a shuttle as soon as I'd called from the emergency room. Before he even went in to see her, he lunged at our dad. "You fucking asshole,'' he shouted. "This is completely your fault.'' His arm was headed for our father's throat, his other hand curled into a fist. I managed to step between them, and an orderly rushed over and gently but firmly guided my brother to a chair. Once seated, he buried his face in his hands and started weeping. I had never seen him cry before, and I was mesmerized and troubled by his convulsing shoulders; true sadness comes on without warning. My father retreated to a chair as well. He looked up at the TV, then at me. He wanted my help again, but my brother had just told him something I was too afraid to say.

Hole

I know, Courtney Love is a hard person to like. There's the egomania, the questionable mothering skills (at least early on), the legal wrangling over Nirvana recordings, the involvement with Smashing Pumpkins. Live Through This, though, is totally fucking brilliant. I don't even care if Kurt Cobain wrote most of the songs, as many people have charged. Whatever. There's a time to pay attention to the background story and a time not to. When I put the record on, I don't give a shit about any of it. The songs are explosive, the guitars sharp as cut glass. It's a masterwork of rage.

My mother never tried to kill herself again. She began seeing a shrink. At the beginning, when she got out of the hospital, she went twice a week. A year or so later, she tapered down to once a week. She saw him for four or five years. Beyond telling me when her appointments were, she never talked about it. I'm grateful to him, whoever he is.

Several months after the suicide tempt, she apologized to me. We were eating dinner, just the two of us, and she said, "I'm sorry to have put you through all that. And I'm sorry to have scared you.'' She reached across the table and sifted her hand through my hair. "We don't have to say anything more about it. I just wanted you to know that.'' I nearly cried at her gracefulness.

Kid Rock

You could argue that the first album is the great one. Cocky doesn't break a lot of new musical ground, but it contains one of my all-time favorite lines: "I can love you like that/I'd rather fuck to Foghat.''

It's been more than a decade since my father told me his secret. He and my mother divorced a year or so later, and he's remarried now, not to Shelly but to a woman named Susan. I don't know if Shelly was his only affair. One or 10--are you a better person if it happens fewer times?

My mother stayed in the house when they split up and my father moved into an apartment in the South End of Boston. I spent most of my time in my mom's house, though my dad made a big, ceremonious gesture of furnishing a spare bedroom for me in his apartment. He bought a desk, a crummy halogen lamp, pinned a calendar to the back of the door. He encouraged me to paint the walls whatever color I wanted, because he knew it looked like a hotel room. I rarely used the desk, and the calendar was always months behind. No matter how many nights I slept there, the bed always felt overly new and springy. I hung a few shirts I didn't like in the closet.

When I tell people I love Kid Rock, they don't believe me. They think I'm one more white boy who wants to be down with the homies. Or people think it's a feint, that I like the novelty, the kitsch and bragging and macho posturing, the tales of strippers and drugs. But I love Kid Rock for the same reason I love other music: the honesty. I don't think he's hiding anything; I think he means everything he says, and there's something ridiculously seductive about that. Plus he samples riffs from Lynyrd Skynyrd.

And this is why I never knew what to say to my father. I knew he was being cruel to my mother. I knew he was betraying her. I knew it was unforgivable. But how, finally, can you hate someone for telling the truth?

I remember listening to the lyrics of "Behind Blue Eyes.'' Daltrey understood my teenage loneliness.