It's been a while, I know. It's been difficult lately to carve out the time or to muster the energy to write - February is dark and wicked, and it lays traps to keep us from doing what we'd like to do - but I do have things to say. Of course I do. And I hope to say some of them soon, maybe this weekend, maybe next week. In the meantime, I give you this, which my mother just sent to me. It doesn't require any comment from me, except to point out that I've never been to Montana, and Joey hadn't, either - largely because there are no professional baseball teams in Montana, and wherever we went on summer vacations with our parents, we had to go see a baseball game. So we went to Denver and LA and San Francisco and St Louis and Kansas City and Philadelphia and Chicago, but never Montana.
We both expected that we would, eventually, go there - and I always assumed that when I did, it'd be with him.
Driving Montana, Alone by Katie Phillips
I smile at the stack of Bob Dylan CDs
you are not holding in the passenger seat.
Storm clouds have gathered. My "Wow" rises
over the harmonica for your benefit,
but you cannot see that one sunlit peak
in the midst of threatening sky. The road turns
wet at the "Welcome to Anaconda" sign,
and I pat my raincoat, loosely folded
where your lap should be. "Anaconda was almost
the state capital," I say, but that's all I know,
and you don't ask for more. You wouldn't mind
my singing and swerving onto the shoulder
for more snapshots over the car door.
And it's only when I get just south of Philipsburg
that your not being here feels like absence.
I want you to see these dark rotting barns,
roadkill of Highway One. It seems only you
could know why my eyes fill the road
with tears again when a flock of swallows
swoops through an open barn door
and rushes out the gaping roof.
Kate and I recently watched The Last Picture Show, which is not an easy movie to love, but I do so nonetheless. So did Joey. It's not easy because it's a rather downbeat film, filled with characters who are either petty or cruel or heartbreaking, and the story, such as it is, wanders and lurches like an old dog on a hot porch. It is a coming-of-age movie set in a time and place in which the horizons are simultaneously limitless, landscape-wise, and as narrow as the sights on a gun, lifestyle-wise, and it's because of the way it captures this place at this time that it's become such an important film for us.
The setting is West Texas in the 1950s. The movie, which came out in 1971, is based on Larry McMurtry's book of the same name, and it was filmed in his hometown of Archer City, Texas, about which I've written already. I can't remember if I saw the movie before I first visited Archer City, or if it happened the other way around, but I know that when I first saw it I felt very strongly that it had captured the place exactly. For Archer City is about an hour and a half south of Elgin, Oklahoma, where my father grew up and where Joey and I spent a substantial portion of our childhoods visiting grandparents and other relatives. Although they're in different states, the two towns are part of the same small world of oil fields, greasy cafes, and dusty, deserted main streets, and I remember feeling two things that first time: a) surprise, and a little pride, that someone had made a movie about this very small and otherwise unknown patch of country that I knew so well, and b) a thrill upon realizing that this was very nearly the exact place at the exact time of my father's childhood, and, although he would have been a little younger than the movie's main characters, I felt that it added a bit of color (even though the movie itself is black and white) to an era that I only knew from overheard stories and my own conjectures. (My father has since confirmed that the movie captures the place pretty exactly, right down to the car and uniform of the state trooper who pulls over two of the characters after they run away to Oklahoma to get married - I didn't ask how my father came to know so much about the vehicles and attire of the local constabulary.) Although we never talked about it in these terms, I'm pretty certain Joey's feelings about the movie were the same as my own: it is a movie about a place to which we both have strong, primordial connections, and it displays the soul of that place in a true and deeply moving way.
The opening shot establishes the mood of arid desolation, and I can confidently report that Archer City looks (and sounds) much the same today:
It is not a flattering portrait. The story centers on three teenage characters - Sonny (Timothy Bottoms), Duane (Jeff Bridges), and Jacy (Cybill Shepherd, in her debut) - and their relationships with one another and with the people of the town. It's a small place without much going on - the eponymous picture show is just about the only source of entertainment, apart from the pool hall and the usual small-town diversions of alcohol and weird, unsatisfying sex, and toward the end of the movie the theater does, indeed, shut its doors. The townspeople are, on the whole, cynical and small-minded. The one major exception is Sam, known as The Lion and played by Ben Johnson, who runs the movie theater and the pool hall, and who, with his wisdom and quiet integrity, reminds me of my grandfather. Like Sam, Jack Doyle was a local fixture in his town, a former oil field roughneck (Jeff Bridges' character is also a roughneck) who ran the local filling station and was well known to the old timers who congregated each morning at the post office and the cafe. Also like Sam, Jack Doyle was tough, and he expected other people to be as hard-working, responsible, and uncomplaining as he was. I often try to hold people to the same standards to which Grandpa would have held them, and I am often disappointed.
This clip of Sam - the only good one I could find - conveys a little of that attitude, but there are other scenes in the movie that are better at that:
When Joey and I were children we normally spent about a week each summer and a few days before Christmas with our Elgin grandparents. Grandma died in 1988 - when I was ten and Joey was six - but Grandpa lived a lot longer, until we were both adults, or just about. My principal memory of Grandma is her standing at the end of the kitchen counter, with her back to the kitchen and the lights off, looking out the small window in the back door, smoking cigarettes. She'd just stand there, one arm crossed in front of her and the other sticking up off the counter, flicking ashes into her billowy yellow ashtray, silent and (I assume) thinking. I think she was a person for whom solitude was important, or so it seems to me now that I know she was something of an intellectual, a reader and a well-loved English teacher, in a town that probably didn't have too much of that sort of thing. Grandpa lived until 1999, and so I knew him better and in many different contexts beyond Elgin, but my main memory from those days is of going into town with him (they lived just a few streets away from the main street, but driving over there was still called "going into town") to check the post office and hang out either there or at the filling station (which now belonged to a younger guy, about our dad's age, named Philip) while Grandpa visited with his friends. I don't remember what they visited about - I probably wasn't paying much attention - but I think, apart from the usual gossip and breeze-shooting, there were actually lots of long silences spent smoking, spitting tobacco (Philip always smelled of sweet chewing tobacco), and staring at the walls and the floor.* Everywhere we went with Grandpa people made some variation on the same comment: "Looks like you got a little help today, Jack." Which was something I never understood, until I realized that it was meant as a joke (I was a very earnest child), and then I still didn't fully understand. They would also ask if we'd come down from "the city," which I think was a way of explaining to themselves and to us why we didn't look or act like the other kids in town. For instance, we didn't have the slightest idea what we were supposed to do in a filling station.
Every one of these memories is - was - a shared memory. Joey is always just a few feet away from me in these scenes, at the post office or the filling station or wherever, and these moments shaped him just as much as they've shaped me.
Other memories:
Clambering over the rocks atop Mt Scott, the tallest mountain in the Wichita Mountains, the top of which you could drive to along a long, spiraling road. Grandma waiting in the car and smoking a cigarette, Grandpa slouching somewhere outside with his cigar, silently watching to make sure neither of us fell and cracked our skulls.
Bouncing around the back of our grandparents' gigantic Mercury, the hot sun making our backs and legs and foreheads sweat, smelling the dirty sweetness of Grandpa's cigar as we drove along the bottom of the mountains looking for buffalo (we went to the Wichitas, the nation's oldest wildlife refuge, at least once on every visit to Elgin - usually searching for buffalo or longhorns or prairie dogs, occasionally driving to the top of Mt Scott, sometimes stopping for a gigantic burger at the restaurant/town of Meers, sometimes fishing, sometimes walking across a dam. It was always, always the highlight of our visits.).
Staring, uncomprehending, at the missiles and tanks of the Ft Sill Military Museum, another regular stop on our Elgin itineraries. My favorite part was getting to see Geronimo's cell. I don't know if Joey had a favorite part.
Traveling back roads while Grandpa, in order to make conversation as much as anything, explained to us the history and ownership of each piece of property we passed. We never really knew what to say besides, "Huh."
Driving, much too rapidly, back to Elgin from the tiny Catholic church in the tiny (non-Catholic) town of Apache after a Lent mass, excitedly catching glimpses of Christmas lights on faraway farmhouses and anticipating the cookies and fudge we'd be eating once we got back to the house.
The opening song of M*A*S*H*, which came on after the news on Channel 5. We didn't watch Channel 5 at home - we watched Channel 4 - and so we never saw M*A*S*H* unless we were with our grandparents. Even today, when I hear that song, I remember sitting cross-legged with Joey on our grandparents' couch, wearing matching feet-pajamas, watching Channel 5.
When we weren't watching TV in them, we would scoot across the carpet in those pajamas, letting the static electricity of the dry southwest Oklahoma air build up for a long, long time, until one of us touched the other and gave both of us a brief, painful shock (the more painful the better).
The thing about these visits, and the reason TheLast Picture Show evokes them so clearly, is that there really was very, very little going on in Elgin most of the time, and the movie captures very well what it must be to grow up in a town like that: to be young and energetic but with nowhere to put all of your energy; to know everybody in town and for everyone to know your business; to want more than you can see but to lack the ability to articulate what it is that you want. I wouldn't say we were bored on those visits - we were very good at entertaining ourselves, taking over our grandparents' basement and filling it with stuffed animals (we loved the basement, frequently sleeping down there with only a very loud and probably very dangerous space heater to keep us warm in the winter), playing in the creaky little park at the end of the street, flipping through the green-and-white set of World Books from the 1960s, playing with the same red cast-iron pickup and teddy bears that our father and his siblings had played with - but there was definitely, always, a sense that this world was very different from our suburban home, where we had video games and cable television and friends, and that we needed to work much harder there to make our own fun.
This is not an indictment, either of our grandparents (who were loving and kind and strove, sweetly, to keep us amused) or of the world they inhabited. Indeed, The Last Picture Show has been so important to us precisely because it manages to preserve that world and to deepen our understanding of it. And yet the message of the movie is, in part, this: You are glad you didn't grow up here. Look how petty and frustrated the people are. Look how all the hope and sweetness in them gets blown away in the relentless winds.
The scene that establishes this most clearly happens toward the end, when Billy, a mute younger boy whom Sam cares for and Sonny treats like a brother, gets hit by a truck. I won't embed the video here (it's hits a little close to home), but you can find it easily enough on YouTube. Billy is simple - we never quite know what's wrong with him, but it's clear that something is - but he is good-natured and innocent, and he frequently stands in the middle of the street with a broom, sweeping away while the dust and tumbleweeds blow around him. After he gets hit, several townsmen men stand around, callously discussing Billy's idiocy and assuring the driver that it wasn't his fault. The driver says, "I'd still like to know what he was doin' luggin' that broom around this time of day," and Sonny, the movie's central character who's had a hell of a time over the last few months, rushes at them and says, "He was sweeping, you sons of bitches!" and carries Billy's body off the street. That's the moment you know Sonny has had it with this place - with its cruelty and intolerance, its lack of imagination - and you can see that he will eventually turn his back on it all, or try to rise above it, or try, somehow, to escape.
In my limited experience of this world - mediated as it was by a kind and loving family - I know that there are other stories to be told about this place, and I understand that the film is essentially a reflection of (and payback for) the alienation McMurtry felt, as a sensitive and bookish kid, from the people amongst whom he grew up. And yet the stories it tells are convincing ones, and I wonder, if I had grown up there myself, if I would have ended up feeling like Sonny (and McMurtry) about the place. I suppose the thing to do is to ask my father about it.
Watching The Last Picture Show this last time, what I was most interested in was the relationship between Sonny and Billy, who are not actually brothers but act as if they are (the actors, in fact, are brothers). Sonny looks after Billy, he flips his hat around on his head (so that the bill is backward) to make him smile, he protects him (not always successfully) from the teasing of the other kids, and he gets angry and sad when Billy dies, carrying him out of the road and weeping over him on a porch. And before all this, of course, Billy's face just lights up whenever Sonny enters the room. What Sonny has found - what they have both found - is something gentle and warm in a place that is hard and cold and windy. But Sonny has also absorbed some of Sam's integrity, some of his dignity, and so, in the end, you know he'll be okay without Billy, because he has found something noble in this barren place, and it has made him noble himself.
That's something that Joey and I also found in that place, and it is something that I am still looking for in other, similar, places.
---
*This is country reticence, and the old men in the movie who play checkers in the pool hall and silently watch (and, it appears, silently judge) the antics of the young folks capture that attitude perfectly.
Okay, one last discussion of music, and then I'll move on to other things. In a way, I feel like I should have quit with that last post about Belle and Sebastian, insofar as it completes an arc from sorrow (The National) to regret (The Tallest Man on Earth) to redemption (B&S), but life rarely organizes itself that tidily, and neither, it turns out, do blogs.
This summer, along with The National, I spent a lot of time listening to the new Arcade Fire album The Suburbs. The Arcade Fire, in case you don't know, are a band from Montreal led by the husband-wife duo of Win Butler and Regine Cassagne. Win's brother Will is also in the band, making them, like The National, a band of brothers - in this case tremendously tall brothers who hail, originally, from Houston. Also likeThe National, they released what was widely praised as their best album last year, although where the former are understated and morose, these guys are bombastic. The Suburbs is a concept album about, well, the suburbs - growing up in them, leaving them, missing them, and coming back to them. It's a deeply nostalgic album, and, while I don't really think it's their best (I prefer the weird opacity of their first album, Funeral), that theme had special relevance for me this year.
One of the things that happened when Joey died was that suddenly my childhood became a private, rather than a collective, memory. My parents remember my childhood, of course, as do my other relatives and friends from that era, but Joey was the only person whose parents were also my parents, whose childhood home was also my childhood home. He stood in roughly the same position as I did to all of the events and things of my childhood - the trips to our grandparents, the imaginary world of our stuffed animals, the summer afternoons watching the Cubs or the Braves, the birthday parties (our birthdays are two weeks apart), the Christmases, and so forth. Suddenly I am the only one who knows what it was like to grow up in that family, in that place, at that time. And that's a very, very lonely feeling.
And so I listened to Win and Will Butler sing about their childhoods in suburban Houston - neighborhood wars, endless summer hours, aimless drives, malls stacked up like mountains beyond mountains - and I thought of our house at the end of a cul de sac on the edge of Oklahoma City, with the sunken living room and the treehouse fort, and I let myself feel what I'd lost. It's not just childhood itself that's gone - I've long accepted that - but now the only person who could fully corroborate my childhood is also gone. I'm left holding all these memories that have no independent existence outside of my own head, and if I drop them, they're gone for good. It's a bit like having all of your most precious data - your most important emails, your honeymoon photos, your favorite songs - on a single hard drive, with no way to back them up. One spilled drink, one short circuit, and you've lost it all.
I think the Arcade Fire song that most fully evokes that nostalgia for me is "Wasted Hours." It's one of the album's quieter songs, about long summer days in a place where "first they built the roads, then they built the town." It reminds me of the summer when I was 10 or 11 (Joey was 6 or 7) in which we spent entire days in Joey's bedroom (where the Nintendo was) trying to beat Super Mario Brothers 2 with his friend Chauncey, a kid who lived down the street. On those days we'd be fueled entirely by breakfast cereal and chips and salsa (though not simultaneously), getting painful thumb divets from the Nintendo controllers and becoming bleary-eyed as we sank and lurched on Joey's soft-springed bed. It was either that summer or another one that we also wasted many days, and probably weeks, working our way up the levels of Mike Tyson's Punch Out!, a game that requires infinite patience and determination to a) learn the pattern of each (increasingly difficult) opposing boxer, and b) put your knowledge of those patterns to use with your (increasingly aching) thumbs. We finally did it, though, and once you've done it, you don't have to do it again. Here's the song:
Last August, my friend Judith and her boyfriend Aidan came down to Nashville from Indiana to see the Arcade Fire play at the Ryman. Judith's niece is dating the band's drummer (honestly), so she was able to get us on the guest list, which meant free tickets and backstage passes. This was just about a month after Joey's accident, when I could hardly think of anything else, and I remember having to suppress the urge to text him from the show in order to make him jealous. It was a good concert, energetic and fun - one of the guys in the band (not the drummer) spent much of the time flailing around like a Muppet (as Kate observed) - but mostly I remember watching the two brothers on stage, doing their thing, being rock stars together.
Belle and Sebastian are the reason that there's a chapter of my dissertation (and, er, book) devoted to Glasgow. There are sound historiographical reasons for that chapter - which compares Belfast's tradition of violence with the relative tranquility of Glasgow - but the real reason is my longstanding infatuation with this Glaswegian pop band, and my conviction that any place that could spawn the likes of them must be a pretty fabulous place. So I spent a few days there back in 2004 doing research for that chapter, and, while I don't know that the word fabulous is the most accurate adjective to apply to Glasgow, I do remember being perfectly charmed by the place and wishing I had more time to dig through its (frequently grimy) layers.
Belle and Sebastian's songs are anything but grimy, but they are multi-layered - there are all sorts of complicated things going on underneath their shimmery (and, okay, sometimes a bit sugary) surfaces. Their best songs have a morsel of pain, regret, guilt, or simple sadness hiding just below the bouncy melodies and wispy, fragile vocals, and they grab me inside, just above the stomach, in a way that no other music ever has. They are my desert-island songs, my life-preserver songs, the songs among all other songs that I'd choose to save from destruction should some future Republican administration decree that all but a handful of the world's songs must be destroyed in a bonfire. Years ago, a beautiful barista in a Boston coffee shop told me - after I complained when she cut short the Belle and Sebastian album she'd been playing - that Belle and Sebastian were like chocolate cake to her, that she couldn't consume too much at one time without getting sick. That's when I knew that it would never work out between the two of us.
Joey liked Belle and Sebastian, though probably not as much as I did. I suspect that I was the one who introduced him to them, for I have been known to proselytize a little on this topic (see above), but I can't be sure about that. He did have a soft spot for that peculiarly British strand of cleverness and tweeness (look it up) that they represent: one of his favorite movies, for example, was Love, Actually, which is essentially the cinematic equivalent of a Belle and Sebastian album. So I'm pretty sure he would have liked their latest release, Write About Love, which came out in October. On the first listen I found it a little too syrupy, and there are a few songs that, after repeated listens, still get me thinking about that barista with her chocolate cake, but it gradually won me over. Many of the songs are about romantic relationships, many of them relationships that have soured or are in the process of souring, and so they don't evoke anything specific about Joey for me, but there's a general tone of wistfulness and longing that plucks at the usual heartstrings.
The opener, "I Didn't See It Coming," is about a failed relationship. It didn't really grab me at first, but I've come to love it - the lines "Make me dance, I want to surrender," repeated with varying degrees of urgency throughout the song, remind me of our wedding in September, when the joy of the celebration managed to overwhelm the pain of Joey's absence. And it did so largely on the dance floor, where I saw Tina dancing to the Snoopy Song and to Okkervil River, and where I saw my father dance for the first time in my life. The song also has these words:
Everybody's talking about you. Every word's a whisper without you.
Here it is (sorry, the video is a little lame):
The song that really fills me to overflowing shows up late in the album. It's called "Ghost of Rockschool," and it's about God. Or, more accurately, it conjures that attitude that William James (I think) once described as the essential characteristic of a religious sensibility: to stare in open-mouthed wonder at the things of this world. It starts like this:
I've seen God in the sun, I've seen God in the street God before bed and the promise of sleep God in my dreams and the free ride of grace But it all disappears and then I wake up.
Towards the end, when the song begins to lift off, those last two lines change to:
God in the puddles and the lane beside her Yes, I've seen God shining up from her reflection.
And this also makes me think of our wedding, and of my wife, and of how both things, together, have been my salvation. And it recalls how Joey approached life with a similar wide-eyed (if smirking) wonder, and of his quirky enthusiasms, and of how he loved and was loved, and all of this becomes a sort of levee that keeps the despair from overflowing its banks. There are days when the whole world seems gray and one-dimensional, when all the mystery seems to have drained away and left nothing but randomly colliding molecules, but this song offers another way of seeing things. It reminds me to be awestruck - by the world's wonderfulness, by the places I've gone and the things I've done, by Joey, by Kate - and it makes me feel like being awestruck is quite an okay way to be.
Sorry, there's no actual video for this one, but here's the song:
Okay, one last song: it's an older one, from the album Dear Catastrophe Waitress (2003), and I came across it while searching for these other videos. I hadn't seen the video in some time, but I now believe that if Joey had ever made a music video, it would have looked a lot like this. The song is called "Wrapped Up in Books."
Just a short post tonight, about a little guy with a big voice who goes by the name The Tallest Man on Earth.
I first heard about him via NPR's All Songs Considered podcast, which is where I discover quite a bit of the music I listen to. Joey didn't listen to podcasts - as with NPR itself, he had a hard time concentrating on spoken-word productions, preferring to listen only to music while driving, wandering, etc - so he didn't hear about The Tallest Man on Earth in the same way I did, but he was a big fan. A bigger fan, indeed, than I.
The Tallest Man on Earth is the stage name of Kristian Matsson, a Swedish guy who is not, in fact, very tall at all. He's about my height, 5' 8" or so. This makes his stage name doubly ironic, for not only is he not really the tallest man on earth, he's also probably the shortest guy in all of Sweden (I've been to Sweden - with Joey and Tina, a couple of years ago, for the better part of an afternoon - so I know what I'm talking about). I suspect this is partly why Joey liked him.
When I first heard him I thought he sounded an awful lot like Bob Dylan - too much like Bob Dylan - and his first album, released in 2008, didn't really move me. It's called "Shallow Grave," and I listened to it quite a bit, waiting for the (numerous) lyrics to awaken something in me, but inevitably my mind would drift, and before I knew it the album would be over. It sounded, to me, like a watered-down Dylan without the latter's urgency or ability to paint pretty pictures, and his sound was too jagged and abrasive to make for pleasant background music, so I filed it away and didn't think too much more about it.
On the last road trip we took together, from Nashville to Oklahoma for Christmas last winter, Joey put the CD on, and I tried again. It was clear that this was one of Joey's new favorite discoveries, but it still didn't take me anywhere. I wasn't at all surprised that he liked it, though. It pushed all the right buttons for him: the sound is rustic and folksy, there are lots of lyrics that require close attention (and would repay repeated listens), there's a banjo, and, of course, there's the aforementioned irony (Joey was a great connoisseur of irony). So I figured this would just be something on which we'd agree to disagree.
Matsson's latest album came out in April, and I didn't buy it right away. Joey must have, though, because I remember him posting a video of one of the new songs on Facebook. It's called "The King of Spain," and it is the very definition of a Joey song. He was, of course, planning to go to Spain this past fall to study law, so his post said something to the effect that this song sums up what he'd be doing in a few months. It's a brash, forceful, slightly silly song, and I can easily picture him lip-syncing the bit that goes "I'll disappear in some flamenco" and fluttering his arms in a muted little cha-cha flourish. Here it is:
I remember listening to the song when it came out and thinking that I'd have to revise my attitude toward this guy: he's a lot more charismatic here than in the earlier stuff, and somehow he makes you care more about what's gonna come next. Now, of course, I can hardly listen to it without shedding a tear, but it's a half-happy tear, because the song sounds so much like Joey. The whole album, called "The Wild Hunt", which I bought sometime after July, is either a lot better than the earlier one or simply more emotionally resonant for me now. Or both. I listen to it often, whenever I feel like I can take it, and it makes me feel like I'm with my brother.
When Tina was in Istanbul some months back she sent me a text message saying that she was on the ferry to the Asian side, listening to The Tallest Man on Earth, and thinking about Joe (all of Joey's post-Oklahoma friends know him as Joe). He had planned to go to Istanbul but never did - he had, in fact, borrowed some Istanbul guide books from Kate and me after our own trip there a while back - and so Tina had gone there anyway, because he never got the chance. I got the message and thought: well, yes, there really is no better way to cross to the Asian side of Istanbul than to listen to some music by The Tallest Man on Earth.
End-of-year roundups were all the rage last month, as they are every December. All across the internet, as far as the eye could see, were piles and piles of lists - lists of the year's best books, best book jackets, best fake rumors, best companies to work for, best high schools, best Japanese phrases, least misogynistic rap lyrics, best movies, best tech products, best sports cars under $50,000, best adoption-friendly workplaces, and on and on and on. Many of these lists, of course, were about music - best albums, best songs, best releases within any number of genres and sub-genres - and this reminded me that sometimes I like to make up my own little list (in my head) of the best new albums I acquired over the past year. This year that's kind of difficult, though, partly because everything that happened before July happened in a previous life, and partly because everything that's happened since July has been filtered through what happened in July.
I did listen to lots of music in the second half of the year, however, probably for the same reason that I read lots of books: it enabled me to shut out the world and to burrow into someone else's feelings or ideas or moods for a while, and, through them, to burrow into my own. As I've mentioned, lots of the music I listen to is associated with Joey in some way - we had similar tastes and frequently discussed and shared music with one another - and so closely intertwined is my music with my brother that my iPod can barely shuffle through two or three of its (at the time of writing) 9,434 songs without prompting one Joey memory or another. Even music that has been released since July, music that he never had a chance to hear, can do this - either because it's something he would have liked, or it's from a band that he did like, or because the lyrics evoke him somehow, or something.
For the next few posts, I'd like to share a little of what I've been listening to over the past year, mostly the new stuff that I never had a chance to share with him but that nevertheless makes me think of him, and invite others to do the same in the comments section. This is not the music I play to escape - there's plenty of that, too - but the stuff I listen to when I want to reflect, cry, or sing very loudly, on my own, in my car.
The album that I've probably come back to more than any other is "High Violet" by The National. The album came out in May, but I didn't get it until July, and I never discussed it with Joey. In fact, I don't remember ever discussing The National with him, although I've been a big fan for a long time. They do broody, moody songs about failed dreams, urban alienation, and the reckless or paranoid behavior of people crippled with one variety of angst or another. Not exactly glee club material, then, but it's really not as dark as it sounds, either - there's just enough irony and self-mockery, in both their lyrics and their pose, to keep you from taking it all too seriously. The singer, Matt Berninger, sings in a languid, almost reluctant baritone that is so sophisticated and detached that it's like the rest of the band (made up of two sets of brothers, Aaron and Bryce Dessner, and Scott and Bryan Devendorf) is having to drag the words out of him - except when he drops the baritone and begins, briefly, to scream. When that happens it's both shocking and amusing, and it reminds me of the first time I watched Joey play football, when I saw my normally languid, sophisticated brother - from whom you usually had to drag absolutely everything - explode with such force and speed that I wondered if it was really him out there.
There aren't any screamy moments on the new National album, but there are many Joey moments, moments that evoke both his life and his death. There's the song "Anyone's Ghost," the refrain of which is simply
Didn't want to be your ghost Didn't want to be anyone's ghost
and which contains the lines
Go out at night with your headphones on, again And walk through the Manhattan valleys of, the dead.
Joey was always walking through cities, including Manhattan, with his headphones on. Always. When I listen to this song I can picture him walking through, say, the East Village (through which an ex-girlfriend and I once spent the better part of an afternoon chasing him and his friend Ben, as they hopped from dive bar to dive bar [with the help of a NYC dive-bar guide I'd lent them] and repeatedly failed either to linger long enough for us to catch up or to keep us apprised of their next move), weaving his way through the crowds of NYU students, getting annoyed with the tourists, searching for some hot dog cart or a bakery he'd read about, and listening to this song on his iPod.
Here's a video:
Watching this, I notice that Berninger (the singer) not only acts and sounds like Joey, but he looks a little like him, too.
Mostly I've been listening to The National so much not because it has anything directly to do with Joey, but because their tone suits my own mood much of the time. Kate and I saw them when they came to Nashville in October. They were nattily dressed, they made snarky jokes to one another, Berninger was sloshing wine everywhere, and they made me cry with this song:
I'll leave you with this one, the standout track on the new album and one that most of you probably know. It makes me think of a) road trips and b) returning home to a place somewhere in the middle of the country that you left many years ago.
Joey and I drove many times across the eastern half of the United States. Even now, when I think about road trips, he is my default partner, the Smith to my Jones, the Pancho to my Lefty. As children and teenagers we rode and drove all over the place - up to Colorado, out to California, across the Midwest to Philadelphia and back home through Virginia and Tennessee. We first visited Charlottesville, VA, where he would end up attending college, on an early road trip together. We stopped there with our grandfather on our way back from a visit to the ancestral homeland of Doylesburg, PA, where we had gone for the dedication of a new headstone for an ancestor who had fought in the American Revolution. In Charlottesville, we stayed in a run-down Knight's Inn done up halfheartedly in Arthurian decor - wall sconces, exposed beams, pointed arches - where I vowed (falsely, as it would turn out) to one day spend my honeymoon. Later on that trip, at a Cracker Barrel somewhere in Tennessee, Grandpa caused a slight stir when he objected vociferously to the green beans that they tried to serve him. Grandpa did not like green beans.
When we were both living on the east coast - Joey in DC and Virginia, I in Boston and Philly and Western Mass. - we frequently arranged to drive home for Christmas together. We tried to vary our route each time. Once we headed due west across upstate New York and the tip-tops of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, in order to reach Iowa, where we had never been. It was on this trip that we both visited Michigan for the first time, scooting across the Indiana border to a little town called Sturgis, where we ate some atrocious Chinese buffet food before scooting back over to I-90. It remains my sole experience of Michigan. Later that day we were chased across the campus of the University of Notre Dame by a foul-tempered red squirrel, an event that began with some slightly perplexed trotting and ended with a full-bore sprint into the bookstore, where we remained until the coast was clear. We ended that day with burgers and beers in a quiet pub in Iowa City, a town full of Christmas cheer but utterly devoid of people, all of the university students having left town. We really liked Iowa City.
We both took great pride in knowing the principal routes to or from places on the east coast. On the phone, we would often debate the merits of taking I-64 through Kentucky instead of I-81 through Virginia (the consensus was that I-64 was just as pretty and not nearly as crowded) or I-70 rather than I-80/90 through the Midwest. We both agreed that I-40 - with its heavy truck traffic, frequent construction, and crumbling surfaces - was the worst road in the country (even if it was the one we most frequently traveled). Underutilized federal highways, such as US-72 through northern Mississippi and Alabama, were among the best. Whenever possible we tried to escape the interstates and take the scenic route, following the blue highways in order to see something other than guardrails and taillights. Our bibles were the Roadfoodbooks of Jane and Michael Stern and George Motz's hamburger book, although we gradually decided that the former were much more discerning than the latter. Joey, a great completer of lists, was especially determined to visit as many places in these books as he could, once spending a couple of weeks rambling through Texas and adjacent states with his friend Patrick eating barbecue, burgers, and anything else the guides pointed them towards.
We went many places on these trips. Elvis's birthplace in Tupelo, Mississippi. A barbecue festival in Huntsville, Alabama, which we stumbled upon by accident. Louisville, where we ate large pancakes. Kansas City, where again we ate barbecue. The Pie Shop in Devalls Bluff, Arkansas, where the proprietress insisted (despite our firm denials) that we must be twins - it was the first time someone had made that remark since we were little boys and really did look like twins. Milwaukee was butter burgers and frozen custard. Minneapolis was pie shakes and cheese-stuffed burgers. Madison was deep-fried cheese curds. We once had something called a pigsickle in Clinton, Oklahoma, which was essentially a McDonald's McRib Sandwich, but one that almost certainly came from an actual pig. This restaurant was called Jiggs, and it was full of pigs of a more metaphorical kind as well - that is, local law enforcement officers. Joey always made a snorting sound (like a pig) when he spotted a cop setting a speed trap on the highway (a practice that I've also adopted, much to the embarrassment of my wife), but he did not snort at the pigs we saw at Jiggs.
We had other road rituals besides snorting at law officers. When we crossed a state line we would raise our hands about halfway off our laps and give a small, high-pitched "woo-hoo" (neither of us being too demonstrative, this was about all the enthusiasm we could muster). This also is a practice that I continue, one in which Kate is a more willing participant. We also listened to music. Often we would buy or burn new CDs in anticipation of an upcoming trip, or we would use the long interstate hours to share with one another new albums that we particularly liked. We usually tried to match the music to our environment: in Minnesota we listened to the Replacements, in Wisconsin it was the Violent Femmes, south of Chicago it was Sufjan Stevens' "Come on Feel the Illinoise." Bob Dylan could be reliably deployed in just about any landscape, as, indeed, could any number of the country/alt.country/Americana artists we loved: Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Uncle Tupelo, Townes Van Zandt, Terry Allen.
Recently, Tina and Patrick discovered a band called Frontier Ruckus that would almost certainly have been a a Joey band. It has all the makings: a rustic sound (with banjo, saw, etc), vibrant and intelligent and evocative lyrics, and just enough left-of-centerness to distinguish them from a thousand other rootsy, folksy bands. Here's a song of theirs that's pretty good:
I listened to this album twice recently, once on my drive home for Christmas (leaving Fort Smith, Arkansas, alone on a foggy morning) and once on the drive back to Nashville (hurtling east out of OKC with Kate by my side). It was kind of like having Joey in the car. Kind of.
This summer, before the accident, Joey was planning to swing through Nashville on his way home, where he planned to spend a few weeks. I was going to join him for the drive, and we were contemplating a side trip up to Omaha, since we'd never been to Nebraska. He had been to 40 states (I'm still at 39) and intended to hit them all before too much longer - I'm not sure what his deadline was, but I am sure he had one. I've decided that it's up to me (and anybody else who wants to come along) to complete the list for him, and sometime in the next few years Kate and I are going to head out west (where most of his unvisited states are) and begin crossing them off. It may not happen all at once, but it might. We'll start with Nebraska, I think, and try to end up in Alaska. So that it rhymes. And we'll bring along his Snoopy doll, and a roadfood book or two, and a bunch of new music that we haven't ever heard before.
