Deep Cuts, page 19
“She’s huggy tonight,” Carlos said, chuckling. He hadn’t stopped dancing.
I extricated myself from the hug. “Hey Carlos, have you heard anything new about Caroline?” It had been over a year since Carlos had told me, at Joanna Newsom, the album was nearly finished.
He looked confused. “Who?”
“Caroline!”
“Caroline Harmon? She’s in jail, dude!”
Zoe gasped, and then they were shouting at each other about some cheerleader from their high school whose life had taken a dramatic turn. Carlos’s girlfriend and I were left to dance together, except I wasn’t really dancing, I was sort of just bobbing my upper half and thinking about the music, some obscure track that sounded like it had been recorded through sweat-drenched microphones. The girl was grooving hard and grinning at me like we’d just had sex.
“Are you on something?” I finally asked.
“E!” she shouted through her grin. “Twenty a pop if you want some!”
Instinctively I shook my head. Then I looked at Zoe, who had clearly overheard.
“Sidebar!” Zoe announced, holding up her finger like a director pausing a scene. We stood cheek to cheek, speaking directly into each other’s ears.
“I’ve never done it,” I said.
“It’s fun,” she said, her breath hot in my ear. “We wouldn’t have to wait for drinks. You feel terrible afterward, though.”
“I heard it wrecks your immune system.”
“It does. I can’t believe you’re considering it. Is it because you’re looking for something to write about?”
“Yes. I can’t believe you’re considering it either. Is it because you’re trying to support my writing so I’ll quit my job?”
“Yes.”
We pulled back, smiling.
The girl gave us two small pills and a half-empty bottle of water, and we handed her two twenties. I swallowed mine quickly before I had time to think.
“Dude!” Carlos bolted out of a dance move and grabbed my arm. “You meant Caroline the band! Sorry! All I know is it’s coming out very soon—and that they booked a freakin’ late-night talk show!”
“Oh my god.” A vision of Joe on a slick navy stage dropped into my brain like a premonition: skinny tie, professionally tousled curls, a sexy half smile as he opened his mouth to the microphone. “Which show?”
He didn’t answer. The DJ had dropped the original “Tainted Love,” and Carlos and the girl had levitated to a higher plane of consciousness.
I turned to Zoe, feeling uncertain about the drugs in my body. “Is Joe going to be famous?”
She shrugged in an earnest, hopeful way, excited for her old friend, and led me deeper into the dance floor, where the music was clear and loud and incredibly physical. Movement was the point: the swing of the drums and the messy hand claps and the smooth horn shots and what they all did to the body. After a few songs my body began shedding the baggage of my mind, becoming only the physical manifestation of happiness: warm and loose and shot through with perfect energy. Zoe’s enormous smile bobbed in front of me, such a pleasing sight.
“I love your face,” I shouted, hugging her.
“I love your body,” she shouted into my hair.
“I was just thinking how I love my body!”
She laughed. “That’s high-person talk.”
“Definitely,” I said: my mind was clear. “But make me remember this later, okay? Because my body is amazing. It’s healthy and it understands music and I’m lucky to be inside of it.”
“I promise!”
They played Pickett’s cover of Solomon Burke’s “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love,” which we’d heard earlier in our kitchen, and we danced so hard to it, so closely, that a bead of sweat flew off her nose and into my mouth. They played “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” and the crowd thickened instantly, impossibly, but the mood was so joyful I didn’t mind, and anyway I had Zoe. Carlos appeared at some point with the kindest two bottles of water I’d ever seen, and then we needed to pee.
In the bathroom line we stood face-to-face, petting each other’s forearms. “Even a twelve-thirty talk show would be a big deal,” I said to her.
She gave me a look. “You haven’t mentioned him lately,” she said. “I’ve been wondering if maybe you’re, you know, over it.”
I considered this. “I do go days without thinking of him now. Or a day, anyway.”
“I hate to say this, Percy, like I really hate to say this,” she said. “But you may need a boyfriend.”
I grimaced. “The fervor with which I’m expected to pursue this boyfriend goal is so alien to me. Sure, it’d be nice to have what you have with Melissa, but I’d be totally okay if it doesn’t happen. Is there some gene I’m missing?”
“No,” she said, but her tone was unconvincing. “Whatever happened with that client guy?”
I sighed and leaned against the wall. I’d slept with three men since my night with Joe: a trendsetter from our panel, an activist friend of Zoe’s, and a brand manager for one of our clients. The trendsetter had lost interest in me halfway through our third date, abruptly and observably, when he realized I would not be a boon to any of his fledgling creative careers. The activist had hung around a bit longer, but was insanely busy with his job as a political staffer—he was my first encounter with a smartphone, with dinner-date pings and emails whooshing from bed—and liked prog rock to a degree that slowly revealed itself to be a deal-breaker for me. The client had been the most recent, handsome and insecure, and I wasn’t sure what had happened.
“I think I hurt his feelings,” I said. My last communication from him had been an emailed link to some expensive jacket he was thinking of buying online, with the message time sensitive q: cool hipster or burningman fixie? I had not responded. “My job does make dating weird.”
“Quit!” She said it like it had just occurred to her, like she hadn’t said it a hundred times. “You’re a music writer, not a—whatever you are!”
“Trendsetter intelligence specialist. A job I quite like. And freelance writers work long hours for peanuts, Zo—I have seventy thousand dollars in student loans.” I started shivering. I felt suddenly stiff and lifeless, as if the drug’s curtain had been pulled back. My jaw ached.
Zoe pulled me closer, rubbing my back for warmth. “I just want the world for you.”
I nodded against her neck. “I’m fine,” I whispered.
“Do you still—?” She pulled back to face me and wiggled her eyebrows. “With Joey?”
Joe’s hand materialized on my shoulder. “Sometimes.”
“Really?” She wrinkled her nose. “When you’re solo, or when you’re actually doing it?”
I ran my finger down the length of her nose, ironing out the wrinkles, admiring her face. Her new look was so spare: no hair, no makeup, just her long thin nose and straight dark eyebrows and skin so clean you could eat off it. “Both,” I admitted. “Is that terrible? But I make the fantasy very abstract. It still works if I chop Joe’s head off his body.”
She laughed and hugged me again. “We all have our tricks.”
It was our turn for the bathroom, and we spun our way in, still hugging, laughing. The curtain was dropping back down; my muscles were relaxing again to that perfect warmth. We enjoyed our hard-won allotment of time, chatting and checking ourselves out in a grease-streaked mirror.
Later, as we filed downstairs to enter the fierce competition of hailing a cab, I felt a rush of love for Zoe so strong it almost knocked me down the steps. Her fuzzy scalp bobbed just below me. What would I do without her? Was it okay to love someone this much who was not actually your partner? Was this why she wanted a boyfriend for me, because she couldn’t bear the burden alone?
The chill returned, but I willed it away. I felt a strange ability to control my thoughts, to push them around the room of my brain like furniture. I was grateful for Zoe: that was the feeling to focus on. No: I was grateful for the love I felt for Zoe.
* * *
—
At home Zoe went to bed and I dove straight for my laptop. I could feel the chill nearing again and I wanted my post to be infused with the ecstasy, not the comedown, and definitely not the day after. Zoe was picking up Melissa at the airport first thing in the morning.
But then I wasted the next fifteen minutes of my dwindling high googling “Caroline band” and “Caroline band new album” and “Joe Morrow new album.” No reviews or release date, but Myspace was teasing a drop in summer. There were professional photos of the band I’d never seen, staged and airbrushed, a new guy in Luke Skinner’s place. Joe with his fists balled in his jeans pockets, leaning against an industrial building.
When I finally started writing I managed just two paragraphs before the chill took over. I blamed this on Joe, haunting me from across the country. I posted it with the MP3 and fell into a hard, headachy sleep.
Everybody Needs Somebody to Love
Everybody needs somebody to take dancing. Everybody needs somebody to hail a cab to Soul Night on a first Saturday in San Francisco. Everybody needs somebody to feel the bass in the walls with their palm, to let it shimmy through their limbs and into yours. Everybody needs somebody to tell a creeping bro to back off when you need some space, when music threatens to wield its power over our bodies too recklessly—to help you feel the beauty of what music can do, while protecting you from its danger.
Everybody needs somebody to take ecstasy with you, then allow you to pet their beautiful face in line for the bathroom while Wilson Pickett wails the simplest, truest truth: “everybody needs somebody to love.” Queen said it too: “find me somebody to love.” Who else? More have whined about being loved, but these dudes understood it’s the giving—the love you make—that matters more. Because where do you put the love you make, if you’re all alone? You don’t give it to yourself, in my experience. You take it out with the trash every day until it slowly stops regenerating inside you, and friends, let me tell you, that is no damn way to live.
The next day I woke with the sensation that all the moisture in my body had been vacuumed out, leaving my organs pressing up against each other, my skin shrink-wrapped on my bones, my brain crumpled into a dried-up ball, begging for serotonin. When I saw myself in the mirror looking relatively normal, it shocked me. I wasted the whole day in bed, chugging water, reading books and the internet on an alternating basis.
In the evening I got an interesting comment on my post from someone named Alma, in Germany: I like how this blog is about the way music inhabits and shapes every part of the life, not just emotional but physical too. This is not something that happens with other art forms, no? One does not typically read books or observe an abstract canvas while dancing or having sex—we can only think about them while doing these things, which is not the same because the art is not as present. You’re right it is a power both beautiful and scary but mostly beautiful.
I like you, Alma, I replied under her comment. I couldn’t find any more information about her, but I decided that from now on, I would think about Alma, not the scenesters, when I wrote.
Britpop Night
July 1, 2006
Caroline, Strong & Wrong: 6.9
That the belated sophomore effort by Caroline is plainly inferior to their debut, 2002’s Funny Strange, may hardly be remembered in the long run. Because to paraphrase Petty, the A&R man hears a single. “Britpop Night,” the album’s opener, is a rollicking anthem for today’s whiskey-swilling hipsters, bright and sincere and deceptively complex while also being just fun, so damn fun it made this author practically fume (“What’s wrong with music being fun?” I demanded of everyone in earshot through a giant, uncontrollable smile). It’s quite a feat this song is pulling off: retro-themed, yet arrestingly au courant; six minutes long, and still it zips by; packed with candy-floss hooks, but emotionally resonant at its core. “New Order on the rocks, two shots of Siouxsie / And I am an animal who’s found his family,” goes the chorus: a sweet expression of belonging, fueled, in the grand human tradition, by the seamless fusion of music and booze. Never have we needed this more. You heard it here first, nerds: “Britpop Night” will be indie’s song of the summer.
The rest of the album fails to reach the heights of its opener, though it’s not without some nice moments. “The Pond” is a long-distance love letter in which the ocean represents emotional distance: familiar but well executed, with an easygoing melody sailing over a sea of jangle-pop guitar. And “Bay Window,” a piano ballad about one man’s intensely personal experience of an event much bigger than him (9/11, presumably, but not too obnoxiously), hit me right in the gut.
A more polished production brings Joe Morrow’s elastic vocals forward in the mix, unlike the first album, which smothered them in reverb—a welcome change, but one that puts more burden on his lyrics, which are spottier this time around. “Soap Scum” appears to be a song about how nobody cleaned his house for a year in high school, with metal guitars attempting to fill the holes created by broad metaphors and vague storytelling. And the second-to-last track, a power-pop ditty called “You You You,” features a lyric so terrible as to be subtractive from the album as a whole: “I love you you you / I sure do / More and more and more / For and for and for / Ever”? It’s hard to imagine this coming out of the mouth of the man who made Funny Strange.
Morrow has my forgiveness for these missteps, though. Because with “Britpop Night,” he gave us the instant classic we deserve this year. Excuse me while I go back to my uncontrollable smile.
“No,” I said, my body rising from my chair.
“No to what?” said the designer who sat across from me.
I stared at her face without processing what I was seeing. I’d forgotten I was at the office. Finally I shook my head and walked to the office bathroom, where I locked the door and sat on the toilet.
“I am an animal who’s found his family” was from my “Mis-Shapes” post. “Bay Window” wasn’t one man’s experience; it was our experience. “You You You” didn’t seem like it came from the mouth of the man who made Funny Strange because Funny Strange had been my mouth too. None of it, suddenly, seemed okay. At the same time, I felt drunk with exhilaration.
I put my head in my hands, forced myself to untangle my thoughts. First: “I am an animal who’s found his family.” He was clearly reading my blog, which was thrilling at first, but the more I thought about my line in his song—my published line—the more confused I felt. Was this Joe’s way of reaching out, trying to tell me something? Or was my blog just a convenient resource for him, a public-access portal into the brain he sometimes borrowed?
And “You You You”: over my dead body would that monstrosity have made the album if I’d been involved. “For and for and for / Ever”?! I could hear the quarter-note melody with some stupid music-theory change thrown in somewhere: one of those songs he would dash out in five minutes back in Berkeley and decide was genius, until the next day when I would shit all over it, and nobody would ever know it existed. He really does need me, I thought meanly.
Then came a rush of pure, heart-stopping excitement for Joe. Oh, Joe. I lifted my head from my hands, a smile cracking open my face. This was a gushing rave, if not for the album then for its single, which I knew enough to know was huge. This would change everything. I saw him as that little boy waiting on the suburban curb and felt like I might choke on my joy.
I went back to my desk and began googling fiercely, breathlessly. Press was already trickling in even though the single wasn’t out yet, and the album release date was still two months away. There was even a feature article in a Bay Area lifestyle magazine—“East Bay Boy Eyes Indie Fame”—that read like a Rolling Stone cover story, with descriptions of how he held his fork (“lightly, like he might be asked to leave the restaurant at any minute”) and this revealing bit:
“I went through a period of writer’s block,” Morrow says by way of explanation for the four-year gap between albums. Pressed to identify the source of the blockage, he hesitates and says, “There was a girl,” before laughing at himself. “It’s not quite how it sounds, but let’s just leave it at ‘there was a girl.’ I don’t mind being a cliché.”
As pressure mounted from the label and his bandmates, Morrow found the best way out of his block was to “flip the fuck-it switch.” “We started giving ourselves more permission to mess up,” he says. “Me in particular. ‘Britpop Night’ is basically a pastiche of hooks. A Frankenstein’s monster, which never works, but this time it did. That’s why we called the album Strong & Wrong, which is something that musicians say when a player comes in real loud with the wrong notes—not a good thing at all, it’s sort of the ultimate embarrassment, actually. But we wanted to own that, because some of the best stuff on this album came from fuckups.” He laughs and rolls his eyes again, a dryness creeping into his voice. “It’s my fuckup album.”
And then, at three p.m. that day, the single dropped. There was a typo in the post—clearly the release was someone’s hasty decision, an attempt to ride the buzz from the review. Who was in charge of these things now? Did Joe himself push the button, or one of the suits Carlos had mentioned? I knew little about how the business worked; he was on another level now. I jammed my headphones into the laptop port.
“You okay?”
My boss was standing at my desk, her bob still swinging from a brisk stride.
I lifted out an earbud. “Hi! Need something?”
“Oui. The final for the Miami deep dive.”
“First thing tomorrow,” I said. “Sorry.”
She called me a millennial and clipped off.
