February has historically been a month of inaction and hibernation for me – this one has been no exception. Last year I did jump on a plane to Berlin on a whim just to see a movie, and ended up in a mild debate with someone about the Holocaust while I was having lunch in a Jewish restaurant. Hmm. Seriously. It was a cold but bright day, and I was glad I had broken out of my routine to do something completely different, unexpected and spontaneous.
I had no intention of doing anything similar this year, but today I happened to see that Belle & Sebastian is in Oslo, so I quickly bought a ticket, got a train ticket and head over to Oslo in the afternoon. It’s not quite the distance of Berlin or somewhere further afield, but it’s still something (a band) I’ve wanted to see forever, especially as I have Glasgow so much on my mind these days. Bonus: Jane Weaver opens! Brilliant. Two birds, you know…
Any other day I might have ignored this urge to go, but I had a dream last night in which I kept wanting to do things but kept putting them off, and I started writing a poem in the dream, which I never had a chance to finish before someone would interrupt and drag me off somewhere:
If I light a fire, I will stay warm. If I light a fire around myself, there will be no way back.
In dreams, never going where I want to go, but always with a fistful of melting popsicles.
How do you tell a musician you’ve admired for more than 30 years how much their music means to you, how much it means that you were finally able to see him perform after 30 years of waiting for and wanting to? Providing the soundtrack to my nomadic life, he (Robyn Hitchcock) too has wandered, touring a host of unusual places, often landing in places where I should have seen him (Seattle). But I was always somewhere else – wrong place, wrong time. Finally, finally, I was able to catch him last night in Oslo in a small venue called Cafe Mono. Against all logic or reason, standing there in a small crowd, I found myself getting choked up with the emotion of the moment, and thought, “Ah yes,” because I do tend to forget this, “This is why we go to concerts and participate in these kinds of experiences.”
After the show, I had my 15 seconds to say hello and thank him, but I found it difficult to be able to find the right words in that moment. How can you convey something meaningful without being a babbling idiot cliché? I am not a ‘lingering’ or manic/maniac fan type (and I needed to jump on the subway to get back to my car for the long drive back to the woods) who sticks around to talk to musicians, but this time I felt such a need to say thank you (and the place was so small and all the Norwegians swarmed out quickly when the show ended). But feeling a bit tongue-tied, I managed only the thank you I intended (maybe that was enough) and the mist (“whoever remembers only mist – what does he remember?“) of his mild incredulity that I came from Seattle (“Viva! Sea-Tac”) but had somehow never seen him in the 30 years I had wanted to. Of course, touring musicians are not the only ones who wander.
What I felt like saying was some combination of the impersonal and personal. I never would have because I’m not that person, encroaching on other people’s space and time. It was rough enough to say ‘thank you’.
More impersonally, that Hitchcock is woven into the fabric of influence (he has been influenced by and has had influence on). And yet, when one talks to people and mentions Robyn Hitchcock, the majority are at a loss. Access to the surrealist ache of Hitchcock’s music is open but still somehow limited. As J put it: “I wonder how it is that I’m not familiar with Robyn Hitchcock? I did some cursory googling at 2:30 AM… and I can see that he has more than left his mark on the contemporary music scene. And yet… I have somehow failed to make him part of my musical culture.” I feel as though I have for 30 years enjoyed a gift modestly few people have embraced as they should. At times I wish more people knew him, but then I suppose the vague intimacy of what he does would be lost.
More personally, I remember first hearing songs from Fegmania! when I was little more than a child, but then Robyn Hitchcock really registered with me (it’s all about timing, I guess) upon seeing the video for “Balloon Man” one evening, and a visiting cousin expressed that the music ‘scared’ her. Of course “Balloon Man” felt like a novelty – it endures still because it is catchy and somewhat accessible, but in a way served only as a gateway to the more potent, mysterious and absurd Hitchcock work I know and love. Globe of Frogs became a constant soundtrack (and always springs to mind when I am driving in rainy Swedish summer weather, and the roads are covered in frogs, alive and dead), and Queen Elvis was transformative. I shared it with my best friend at the time, and we delighted in singing “The Devil’s Coachman” loudly while wandering around our suburban neighborhood. (We were children; we imagined we were scaring our neighbors. I am sure we were noisy nuisances.) “Autumn Sea” remains one of my favorite songs.
None of these impersonal or personal accounts would make a difference; the musician certainly hears variations on these every day. I thought about that while attempting to find the right words, and ultimately, only sincere and basic gratitude seems as though it could offer any meaning or value.
Since then the music has been a constant presence, accompanying me through every stage of this nomadic life. As I have spent time hopping from one country to another and then another, this growing, glowing, gorgeous, amorphous musical catalog follows. Grounding it, even if only once in my whole life, in the same place, same time, space-time moment, in face-to-face reality (and all reality is only reaction and interaction, of course – “the universe is based on sullen entropy – It falls apart as it goes on” – “The Devil’s Coachman”), as I was at last able to do, was worth the wait.
It was 1990, and I was in the full throes of my short-lived but passionate anglophilia. I tried to remake my suburban American life in the shape and form of something entirely different, and what better way to make anything new and beautiful – and most importantly – different – than through music? What different sound could I find that could firmly establish this otherness without the freedom to go be a part of some otherness? These were slow times when overexcited teenage musical discoveries were like hard-fought battles with near-exclusivity the spoils.
Lucky for me, I had been obsessed with reaching out into the wider world through my penfriendships, and exchanged letters with Peter, a bricklayer from Durham, England. I will never be able to express the mania, madness, joy that washed over me when his parcels would arrive, filled with cassettes (!) of exactly this otherness I had desperately sought. The first tapes he sent: The Stone Roses’ first – and in fairness near-only – album (the second could never live up to that debut). It transformed everything. He continued to send me more tapes of everything that characterized the ‘Madchester’ scene and other music from the same period. I felt like I had stumbled into a goldmine into which only I had access (it was a while before America was fully on board, and even if enclaves of people embraced this music, it was not as though it made its mark on my community).
I distinctly remember a day, walking home from a PSAT or SAT practice test (or something like that – a Saturday morning sacrificed to standardized testing, in any case), with “Made of Stone” playing on my Walkman. Is it overstating it to say that everything seemed different to me after that time? In some way, it was. It was – even if other friends adopted the music and we shared it – an assertion of my own tastes and identity outside of that of my friends. The first step toward something different. Sure, that something different did not turn out to be moving to England, which, in my youth, I long believed I wanted to do. But it was a big stepping stone to figuring out tangibly that there was a much bigger world out there with a lot of different kinds of people in it. Some of them were working as bricklayers and writing letters to fawning American girls. Some of them were making music and going to raves in a depressed late-80s Manchester.
Today, returning from Manchester, where I spent a few days with my brother seeing The Stone Roses reunion, seeing the iconic Haçienda transformed into apartments and generally taking it all in, I am starkly reminded of how I felt, how it was, to feel such intense feelings about music, about the sense of place (the sense of wanting to be in a different place). It’s been 26 years since I walked through the streets of the town where I grew up, overcome by and elated at this new sound – these new possibilities.
Today I am wandering the streets of Oslo, bound by sun and a few clouds, wondering in some way how I got here. In life, that is. Scandinavia was nowhere on my radar back in 1990, and yet this is where I feel happiest and at home. And listening to the Roses as I walked around the sun-dappled Oslo train station and opera house, I create new and very different memories around these same songs that carried me through suburban American streets and experiences. The songs are the same but are no longer the ones that made me feel lonely but understood – and held the promise of different ‘othernesses’ – and now hold this bittersweet nostalgia in every note and word.
Of course with nostalgia there is also the past – whatever happened to the northern boy bricklayer Peter, who introduced me to all of this and spoke in an accent I could not begin to understand? My best friend from that period, too, where has she gone? I thought of her so much as I wandered Manchester and saw this concert we would have killed to see when we were 15. I know neither she nor I are the people we were then, but the heartstrings were pulled. Hard.
An acquaintance, a somewhat disgruntled worker, who was shown the door in her organization recently went on a tirade, listing off all the magnificent things she had supposedly brought to the company. All were fabrications or deluded personal perspectives on tasks she had ‘accomplished’. In a fit of fury, she insisted, “I have been misunderestimated.” This, erm, “word” perfectly encapsulates who and how she is. Trying too hard to be articulate and coming out sounding like a babbling moron in the process. Mis – under – estimated? If that were a word at all, how would it apply? That as a native English speaker, you don’t know how to use English (despite working in a communications department)? (For what it’s worth, “misunderestimate” is a classic Geo. W. Bushism.)
Thinking this morning about these vainglorious declarations of “misunderestimations”, I grant that I underestimated how glorious indeed seeing The Stone Roses live would be. I’m just returning home from the UK, where my brother and I have spent a few days seeing the Roses in Manchester. What could beat seeing them on their home turf and taking a look around the stomping grounds of some of our favorite musical artists? For nostalgia’s sake alone, it seemed like a good idea. In fact I counted on it being primarily nostalgic. I don’t think The Roses were ever known in the old days for being consistent and reliable, and I did not think that that 20 years between their breakup and today would have changed that.
But it did.
Now, I have never been the kind of person who enjoys standing in huge crowds of people enduring drunken idiots. I have never stood in an English crowd of idiots (their weird herd-hooligan mentality comes out even in this musical environment). I’m tempted to blame my advanced age, but then I remember with some displeasure that I felt this way when I was 20 as much as today. I simply hate crowds, especially stupid ones, and adding alcohol makes it 100 times worse. I also do not find the same things “fun” as other people. This would be an endurance exercise, not one of sheer pleasure.
We went to the venue very early – hours before it opened – to ensure that my brother could get the merchandise he wanted. Then we wandered off in the industrial estate area where the stadium is and found the most strangely placed, overly ornate Thai/Indian restaurant right in the middle of it (Vermilion). We went inside and were the only ones in the place, being showered with the dedicated attentions of an overeager French waiter who was so excited to interact and show us the revolving table in the adjacent room that he nearly knocked over some wine glasses in the process (“spin that wheel!”). It was surreal, making the whole thing memorable and laughable. Also, it was a good thing we ate a bunch of food because once we did actually get inside the stadium, we staked out our spot and didn’t really move again for seven hours. (Our feet have not thanked us since.)
The day started with The Buzzcocks, followed by The Coral, then Public Enemy and finally The Stone Roses. From the moment they went on, the crowd was rapt and all their previous shenanigans did not matter (e.g. throwing half-empty cups of beer and cider and shit into the air, which half soaked me at one point and really pissed me off). There is something truly uniting? Transformative? about sharing the same experience with a massive group of people who are all there, living and loving the same thing with equal intensity. No one was indifferent. Everyone knew all the words to every song and freaked out in unison. The intensity never abated. I have been to many concerts in my life but none with that sustained intensity and fervor and sheer engagement at every moment, particularly not at a concert of that size (smaller gigs in smaller venues for bands with a small but passionate following will seem a bit like that but on a much smaller scale). I guess scale is what I am talking about – I have never seen and experienced something like that, being right in the middle of it.
It was amazing and well worth all the hassles. And I guess my doubts about the Roses’ efficacy and staying power were misunderestimated. 🙂 Haha.
