Posted on by Matt Thomas

On The Death of the Second Life

Subtitle: Why Nobody Can Disappear Anymore

There’s a one in a billion chance we’re in base reality.

—Elon Musk

You’re a quick study, aren’t you?

—Freddie Miles, The Talented Mr. Ripley

I fought the law and the law won.

—Sonny Curtis

On Disappearing

It used to be possible to disappear. Not easy, exactly, and rarely clean. You needed nerve, mobility, a little money, a plausible story, perhaps a talent for accents, and the good sense not to return to the same bar every Thursday. You needed to understand that most identity was local. A man was the person his neighbors recognized, his employer paid, his landlord tolerated and the woman across the street remembered seeing come home. If he crossed an ocean, a mountain range or sometimes merely a state line, he passed through an interval in which nobody knew him well enough to contradict him. That interval was the birthplace of the second life.

The interval has nearly closed. A person may still abandon a marriage, occupation, city or circle of friends. He may stop answering the telephone and go silent on social media. The difficulty begins when he wants an apartment, salary, bank account, prescription, airline ticket or hotel room. The machinery that enables ordinary existence is now the machinery that identifies us. Every convenience asks the same question in a different form: are you still the person you were yesterday? The modern fugitive may escape a room, but eventually he needs an ATM.

This is not merely a criminal fantasy for me. Years ago I invented the Thin Man, the central figure in The Thin Man and Andrea, as an alter ego and doppelgänger. He is Niko, although the first book withholds even that. He carries an ambiguous face and an American-seeming education acquired elsewhere. He moves through the world of corporate espionage, which is partly a MacGuffin and partly an excuse to put him aboard a cruise ship, in hotel bars, and within striking distance of Andrea, Jessica, Maya, Desiree and women who sense that his absence of a past is also a kind of invitation. The submarine in the earliest version became a cruise ship because a cruise ship can plausibly contain a temporary world: flags, ports, false intimacies, a cabin to abandon and another country waiting in the morning.

The Thin Man was never fundamentally an alien or a figure composed of negative space, although traces of those early ideas remain. The governing fantasy was simpler. He was me without social, professional or familial responsibility. He could love somebody without joining her calendar. He could enter a city without owing the city an explanation. The plot offered him passports, handlers and invented business, but his real superpower was exemption. He lived without the claims that make an ordinary person locatable.

I now possess fewer of those claims than I once did. My professional responsibilities have diminished. My marriage has ended. My son is grown. In some respects I am living the Thin Man dream, although with less espionage and considerably more concern about hotel credits. The discovery is predictable but still worth making: relief from responsibility does not make a man somebody else. It simply leaves him alone with a clearer version of the same man.

Daniel Defoe understood the mechanical version of the fantasy three centuries ago. When I was fifteen, several friends and I discussed burning or drowning Moll Flanders. We meant the physical book, naturally, not Moll herself. The novel seemed interminable. Moll acquired another name, husband, lover, crime, punishment, jurisdiction and source of money; then the process began again. At fifteen this felt less like structure than clerical error. At fifty-two I can see that the repetition is the structure. “Moll Flanders” announces that the name is not her own. Her identity consists of whatever biography can survive the next room.

Moll is born in Newgate Prison, passes through households and marriages, becomes a thief, evades execution through transportation, returns to Virginia and eventually obtains prosperity and something resembling repentance. She can repeatedly become another woman because identity in her world is portable. It is held in clothing, speech, manners, money and the testimony of the few people nearby. A past can be defeated by distance.

John McAfee tried to perform the same operation in a world that already made it ridiculous. Wanted for questioning in Belize after the 2012 murder of his neighbor Gregory Faull, McAfee hid, fled and simultaneously turned his flight into a media production. He claimed that he buried himself in sand for hours with a cardboard box over his head. He dyed his hair repeatedly and stuffed chewing gum beneath his upper lip as a disguise. The founder of an antivirus company attempted to defeat recognition by making his mouth slightly lumpier.

McAfee possessed money, technical knowledge, mobility, paranoia and an almost supernatural resistance to embarrassment. He nevertheless contacted journalists, issued updates and supplied the public with a running commentary on his disappearance. A photograph posted by the Vice reporters accompanying him contained location metadata pointing toward Guatemala. McAfee wanted to vanish and receive credit for vanishing. That contradiction will return. For now it is enough to say that Moll Flanders could escape because nobody in Virginia had read the London file. McAfee carried the file with him, broadcasting all the way.

The Portable Self

The literature of disappearance flourished before the administrative state completed its map. Luigi Pirandello’s The Late Mattia Pascal, published in 1904, supplies the cleanest philosophical version. Mattia, trapped in an unhappy life, discovers that a corpse has been mistaken for his own. The world has accidentally released him. He takes another name and attempts to enjoy the freedom of a man officially dead.

But a man without a past possesses no enforceable future. Mattia’s second identity cannot securely marry, own, complain to the police or participate in the institutions through which personality becomes social fact. He has escaped the first life without acquiring the legal substance required for a second. Pirandello arrives at the modern paradox before biometrics: identity is a burden until one needs its protection.

Jean Valjean and Edmond Dantès offer opposing French solutions. Valjean becomes Monsieur Madeleine through moral action. He builds an industry, employs a town, practices generosity and becomes mayor. He changes so completely that the humane judgment is to regard him as a different man. Javert refuses. For Javert, the file is the man, and goodness performed under an alias is merely a fugitive’s more sophisticated disguise. Les Misérables places grace in conflict with administrative continuity.

Dantès, in The Count of Monte Cristo, builds identity through theater and money. Wealth buys clothes, servants, property, introductions, silence and the assumption of prior importance. Nobody asks the Count for a childhood photograph because aristocratic confidence authenticates itself. Dantès does not erase his first life so much as return with a second one powerful enough to prosecute it.

James Gatz performs the American variation. He becomes Jay Gatsby not primarily to evade the law but to escape poverty, embarrassment and the intolerable smallness of his assigned place. Gatsby manufactures manner, history and spectacle. His tragedy is not that the new identity convinces nobody. It convinces almost everybody. Daisy remains dangerous because she knew him before the costume was complete. The person who remembers the original name possesses veto power over the second life.

These stories depend upon a portable self: an identity capable of crossing a boundary and being accepted on the strength of performance. Sometimes the transformation is moral, sometimes theatrical and sometimes criminal. Each assumes that a society contains blank spaces. The traveler enters one and begins supplying information before contradictory information arrives.

You’re a Quick Study, Aren’t You?

Tom Ripley is the great student of the portable self. In Patricia Highsmith’s novel and Anthony Minghella’s 1999 film, Tom begins as a watcher. He studies wealth before he attempts to inhabit it. He studies jazz, handwriting, clothes, gestures, voices and the particular freedom enjoyed by people whose money causes strangers to complete their stories for them. Dickie Greenleaf possesses everything Tom lacks: beauty, ease, inheritance and the right to become bored with other people.

Tom’s desire is not reducible to robbery. He wants proximity to Dickie, then recognition from Dickie, then the life of Dickie. When those desires become incompatible, murder provides the transition. Tom can imitate Dickie because he has watched with the concentration of the excluded. The peeping is apprenticeship.

Freddie Miles recognizes the dangerous speed of Tom’s education. Visiting Dickie’s Roman apartment, he notices that Tom suddenly understands the geography, furnishings and habits of a life in which he supposedly remains a guest. “You’re a quick study, aren’t you?” Freddie asks. It is a brilliant accusation because it identifies the one part of imitation that cannot be disguised: the curve of improvement. Yesterday Tom did not know where anything was. Today he gives directions.

Seconds later, Tom kills him with the stone head of Hadrian. A Roman emperor becomes the instrument by which the social climber removes a witness. The joke is almost too exact. Freddie does not possess fingerprints or facial-recognition software. He possesses memory, class instinct and contempt. He knows what Tom looked like before Tom learned the role.

Tom’s impersonation is fraudulent, but it is also emotionally sincere. Being Dickie feels more authentic to him than remaining Tom. That is why Ripley endures beyond the machinery of the thriller. He embodies the suspicion that our socially verified identity may be less true than the person we could convincingly perform if nobody interrupted us. He also demonstrates the price. Each new witness becomes a threat because the second life demands the permanent editing of the first.

The criminal achievement eventually becomes less impressive than the psychological imprisonment. Tom escapes particular investigations, but he cannot stop monitoring the room. He must hear every hesitation in his adopted name and see every glance toward the piano, ring or signature. A successful second life is not freedom. It is a part one can never stop playing.

Dick Whitman and Don Draper

Dick Whitman performs the most durable modern transformation in American television. During the Korean War, an explosion kills Lieutenant Donald Draper beside him. Dick exchanges identification tags with the dead officer, survives under Draper’s name and returns to the United States inside a clerical conclusion. War supplies the confusion, body and paperwork. The dead man exits; the living man acquires his place.

Unlike Ripley, Don does not live permanently at the edge of exposure. The new identity accumulates institutional weight. Don works, pays taxes, marries, buys property, fathers children and builds a career. Time itself begins authenticating him. After enough years, the invented man possesses more documentary substance than the abandoned one.

Advertising is the ideal profession because Don’s labor reproduces his own transformation. He takes an ordinary product, suppresses its manufacturing history and gives it a story people prefer. He does the same with himself. The handsome executive, suburban husband and creative genius are not wholly false. They are real accomplishments attached to stolen paperwork.

Yet Mad Men understands that the administrative victory cannot settle the psychological case. Dick is not chiefly afraid that a camera will recognize him. He is afraid that intimacy will. Every person who approaches Don closely eventually reaches the locked room containing Dick Whitman: his poverty, family, desertion, shame and the knowledge that another man’s death financed his ascent.

The Thin Man fantasy and the Don Draper fantasy meet here. Remove the obligations, choose the wardrobe, enter the next room with a name nobody questions. What remains is the person who performed the removal. The Eagles’ old line is unavoidable: “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.” One may leave a home, spouse, profession and nation. The ghosts keep the original booking.

The Missing and the Dead

Ambrose Bierce entered Mexico in 1913 and disappeared. That is nearly everything we know about this paritcular case. He may have joined Pancho Villa’s forces, reached Chihuahua and died quickly. He may have been executed, killed himself, succumbed to illness or continued traveling. The absence of evidence has generated a century of endings because disappearance makes authors of the people left behind.

Bierce had already written one of literature’s cruelest imaginary escapes. In “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” Peyton Farquhar falls from a bridge with a rope around his neck, escapes into the water, runs home and approaches his wife—only for the narrative to reveal that the journey occurred inside the final instant before his broken body swings beneath the bridge. The mind creates a second life because the body has no exit. Bierce’s own disappearance feels uncannily like an extension of the story, although we should resist converting formal elegance into evidence. He probably did not begin again. He probably died where the map became uncertain.

John List demonstrates how recently a complete second life remained possible. After murdering his wife, mother and three children in New Jersey in 1971, he traveled west and became Robert Peter Clark. He found accounting work, joined a Lutheran church, remarried and lived within ordinary society for nearly eighteen years. List was not sleeping in a cave. He was commuting, filing returns and participating in carpools. The jurisdictions containing John List and Robert Clark did not effectively speak to one another.

Television finally forced the conversation. America’s Most Wantedaired the case in 1989 using an age-progressed sculpture whose resemblance to List was extraordinary. A former neighbor recognized him. Fingerprints from his military records completed the identification. List stands at the border between eras: he constructed the second life through disconnected paper systems and lost it when mass media connected a face to the buried name.

John Darwin attempted the comic British variation in 2002. He paddled into the North Sea, staged his death and allowed his wife to collect insurance and pension payments while he secretly lived nearby. The plan expanded toward Panama. It collapsed when an online photograph showed the supposedly dead man beside his wife. A basic image search linked John, Anne and Panama. The second life had appeared on the first page of the internet.

Robert Hoagland achieved something quieter. He vanished from Connecticut in 2013 and lived in New York as Richard King until his death in 2022. The new life appears to have been modest rather than operatic. That may be the surviving modern model: abandon grandeur, remain geographically ordinary, ask institutions for as little as possible and hope nobody searches the correct connection. His identity was established after death.

Ryan Borgwardt showed in 2024 how poorly the romantic disappearance now survives contact with the contemporary record. He staged a kayaking death in Wisconsin and left the country. Investigators found evidence of preparation, travel and financial activity, contacted him abroad and persuaded him to return. In 2025 a judge sentenced him to eighty-nine days in jail, matching the period during which he had actively misled authorities, and ordered restitution toward the costly search. The symmetry of the sentence was better than the plan.

These cases are morally different. Bierce may simply have died. Hoagland appears to have abandoned a family without committing the crimes of List or Darwin. List was a murderer. The point is not to place them in one ethical category. It is to watch the available space contract. List could build an ordinary life for eighteen years. Borgwardt’s itinerary began becoming evidence before his family had finished grieving.

You Could Call It the End of the World

Money is the most practical border. A person can sleep outdoors without identification. The moment he wants a hotel, apartment, salary, international ticket or functioning bank account, somebody asks for the name behind the money. A friend of mine treats $9,999 as the largest sum one may carry into the United States. The actual rule is subtler: more than $10,000 may be transported legally, but it must be declared. Japan similarly requires declaration above one million yen. The threshold is not a wall. It is a checkpoint at which money becomes narrative. Where did it come from? Why are you carrying it? Who are you?

The old fugitive relied on fragmentation. A birth certificate sat in one office, fingerprints in another, employment history in a filing cabinet, border entries in ledgers and newspaper photographs in local archives. None of these systems was necessarily weak. They simply did not consult one another quickly. The fugitive’s skill lay in remaining inside the delay.

The decisive modern development is linkage. Passports became machine-readable and biometric. Banking systems identify customers and flag patterns. Phones create location and relationship histories. Cameras no longer merely preserve images; increasingly, software compares faces. Search engines connect photographs with names and places. DNA can identify a person who never submitted a sample because a distant relative did. Public records, commercial databases and social media supply continuity from childhood to the present.

Every system contains errors. Facial recognition misidentifies people. Records conflict. Databases leak. Names are misspelled. The second life does not die because any single machine knows everything. It dies because machines ask one another. The old fugitive needed to prevent one sheriff from telephoning another. The modern fugitive must prevent every machine from recognizing every other machine.

Josef Rusnak’s largely forgotten 1999 science-fiction film The Thirteenth Floor supplies the finest image of this condition. Douglas Hall, a computer scientist in Los Angeles, discovers that the simulated version of 1937 Los Angeles created by his company contains conscious inhabitants. More disturbingly, he learns that his own Los Angeles is another simulation. Following instructions left by his murdered mentor, Hall drives toward Tucson, ignores the road signs and barricades, and eventually reaches the boundary of his universe. The desert stops. The mountains dissolve. Beyond them stands an unfinished green wireframe—the scaffolding of a world nobody expected its inhabitants to inspect. Hall has not merely failed to escape Los Angeles. He has reached the place where Los Angeles runs out.

“You could call it the end of the world,” he says. The line is quiet because terror has already done the shouting. Moll Flanders could leave one town and supply the next with another name. Valjean could cross into another jurisdiction. Dick Whitman could exchange identification tags with a dead officer. Hall cannot accomplish even the preliminary act of departure because the road, desert and destination belong to the same system.

There is no countryside beyond surveillance and no unindexed territory in which to begin again; there is only the end of the program. Our world has not yet become Hall’s wireframe desert, but it increasingly resembles it. Every road leads toward another camera, account, border record or machine asking the traveler to confirm that he remains the person who departed.

The inhabitants of the film’s simulated 1937 discover that their world was created for users elsewhere. Hall then discovers that his apparently real 1999 is also one among thousands of simulations. “You weren’t supposed to find out,” he is told. The sentence might serve as the motto of every identity system. The structure works best when the contained person mistakes its limitations for the natural shape of reality.

Elon Musk’s claim that there is only a one-in-billions chance of our inhabiting “base reality” is not a scientific calculation. It is a swaggering compression of the simulation argument: if advanced civilizations produce enormous numbers of conscious simulated worlds, a randomly situated observer is more likely to occupy one of those than the single original reality beneath them. Whether or not Musk is right, The Thirteenth Floor understands the emotional consequence. The final disappearance is not concealment within the map. It is the impossible search for a place outside it.

The Last Fugitive

John McAfee deserves the title because he possessed nearly every advantage. He had money, international mobility, technical knowledge, familiarity with surveillance, political connections, access to boats and aircraft, and the willingness to behave in ways a normal investigator might not predict. He also possessed a cardboard box.

I have long suspected that McAfee knew more about Gregory Faull’s murder than he admitted, perhaps much more. That is an opinion, not a proven fact. Belizean authorities sought McAfee for questioning, but he was not convicted or charged in connection with the killing. Suspicion does not become evidence merely because its subject is spectacularly strange.

I nevertheless wanted McAfee to remain in circulation. I wanted him alive, ranting online, threatening to parachute into Fukuoka, appearing without warning at a Kyoto bar and ordering a strip steak while explaining that income tax was metaphysically invalid. This is not a defense of anything he may have done. It is an admission that fugitives provide a form of entertainment respectable citizens cannot. McAfee turned the ordinary police question—where is this man?—into theater.

His technical competence makes the comedy sharper. He knew that networks retain traces. He warned endlessly about surveillance. He promoted cryptocurrency and privacy as routes around state control. Yet his own need for audience continually defeated his wish for concealment. He contacted reporters while hiding, traveled with a film crew, cultivated disguises elaborate enough to become stories and generated the publicity through which strangers could follow him.

The Vice metadata incident is almost too perfect. A technology journalist accompanying the antivirus pioneer posted a photograph containing geographical information. The machine did not need to recognize McAfee’s altered face or chewing-gum lip. It merely reported where the photograph had been made. McAfee’s legend and location traveled inside the same file.

This is why he is the last fugitive rather than the greatest one. A true second life requires anonymity. McAfee could tolerate danger, accusation, ridicule and legal jeopardy. He could not tolerate being unknown. He wanted to disappear and narrate the disappearance, to escape the state while retaining the crowd. The modern fugitive may finally be defeated less by the camera than by his inability to live without looking into it.

That appetite is not confined to eccentrics. We announce departures, document privacy, turn reinvention into a new profile and carry our old audiences toward the new life. The desire to become somebody else competes with the desire to have everyone recognize the transformation. Moll Flanders supplies the next town with a story. McAfee supplies the whole planet with updates.

Coda

Is the death of the second life good or bad? Neither. It is a historical development with benefits, cruelties and unforeseen emotional costs. Connected systems catch murderers, fraudsters and people attempting to abandon obligations. They also make escape more difficult for abused spouses, political dissidents, debtors, refugees and ordinary human beings whose worst mistake has become permanently searchable. Accountability and mercy do not rise together automatically.

There remains an important distinction between disappearance and reinvention. An adult can legally change a name, move, choose another occupation, close public accounts and refuse contact. The state does not require everyone to preserve the social life into which he happened to arrive. But legal reinvention preserves continuity. Debts, convictions, parenthood and court orders belong to the person through the change. The first life is not erased. It is amended.

The Thin Man occupies the fantasy beyond amendment. He moves without the drag of continuity. He may enter Andrea’s life, Jessica’s cabin or another city under circumstances that do not require him to explain the previous scene. I invented him because I wanted the freedom of a man nobody could summon. Yet even he carries Niko beneath the working identity. Georgia remains inside him. Education, language, childhood, loss and desire cross every border without documentation.

That is the final limitation, older than passports and more reliable than facial recognition. You cannot outrun your ghosts. A person may defeat the file and still remain the person described by everything the file omitted. Tom Ripley acquires Dickie’s signatures but retains Tom’s hunger. Don Draper obtains Don’s career but brings Dick’s shame into every marriage. McAfee crosses borders with the cardboard box and John McAfee climbs out from beneath it.

At fifteen, I thought Moll Flanders was shapeless because Moll repeatedly acquired another husband, name, occupation, crime, punishment and jurisdiction. Now the repetition looks like the record of a vanished human possibility. Moll continually finds another exit. We inhabit a world of fewer exits, better records and longer memories.

Perhaps this is why stories of disappearance retain their force. They promise that one life need not be final. Somewhere beyond the jurisdiction, ocean, desert or wireframe mountain waits a place where nobody knows what we have done and no machine asks us to confirm it. We know better. The map follows us, and even if it did not, we would arrive carrying ourselves.

Moll Flanders could become another woman. We can only become ourselves somewhere else.

Sources

Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders (1722), and Encyclopedia Virginia’s account of the novel’s transportation plot.

Luigi Pirandello, The Late Mattia Pascal (1904).

Victor Hugo, Les Misérables; Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo; F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.

Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Anthony Minghella’s screenplay for the 1999 film.

AMC, Mad Men: the Dick Whitman/Don Draper identity narrative.

Project Gutenberg and the Ambrose Bierce Project, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and biographical materials.

FBI historical materials on John List and the America’s Most Wanted identification.

Contemporary reporting on John Darwin, Robert Hoagland and Ryan Borgwardt.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Japan Customs guidance on cross-border currency declarations.

U.S. Department of Homeland Security, biometric identification materials.

Josef Rusnak, The Thirteenth Floor (1999), adapted from Daniel F. Galouye’s Simulacron-3.

Code Conference 2016, Elon Musk’s discussion of simulation and “base reality.”

Contemporary Wired, Guardian and Vice reporting on John McAfee’s flight from Belize.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

On Three Musicians Who Walked Away from Great Bands

Epigraphs:

What’s the matter with the boy?
He don’t come around no more.

—The Rolling Stones

Maybe I should just change my style.

—Dean Wareham

Just another cigarette, staring at my shoes.

—Izzy Stradlin

Note: This is an essay about three musicians who walked away: Mick Taylor from the Rolling Stones, Dean Wareham from Galaxie 500, and Izzy Stradlin from Guns N’ Roses. Their circumstances were wildly different, as were their reasons for leaving. But all three walked away from something that was working, something valuable, and in two cases something potentially worth an almost unimaginable amount of money. I’m interested in why they did it, what it cost them, what they gained, and the strange calculation involved in deciding that success itself is no longer sufficient reason to stay put.

Mick Taylor left the Rolling Stones in December 1974. Dean Wareham left Galaxie 500 in the spring of 1991. Izzy Stradlin left Guns N’ Roses in November of the same year.

In the first and third cases, the bands were among the biggest in the world. In the second, Galaxie 500 was an up-and-coming indie band, critically acclaimed and preparing for a tour of Japan, with reason to believe that bigger things lay ahead.

All three men left for different reasons. Taylor was tired of the Rolling Stones and wanted to broaden his musical horizons. Wareham had become increasingly miserable inside Galaxie 500 and wanted to start his own band and chill. Stradlin had recently become sober and suddenly found the chaos surrounding Guns N’ Roses considerably less charming when he was looking at it with clear eyes.

There are differences between the three cases of course. But I see some essential similarities.

All three men walked away from something valuable. And I mean valuable in the most vulgar sense of the word too: money.

I am fascinated by the economics of the music business. Who owns what piece? Who gets paid when an old song is streamed? Who has the publishing rights? Who has songwriting credit? If a band breaks up, who continues receiving royalties? When a guitarist leaves a group in 1974, what exactly has he surrendered by 2026? When another leaves one of the biggest bands on earth in 1991, how many millions of dollars has he effectively decided he does not need?

These aren’t incidental questions. Money is one of the invisible forces inside bands, just as important sometimes as friendship, ego, drugs, sex, musical differences, or the question of who gets the spotlight.

And so I am interested in the leaver.

More particularly, I am interested in the person who looks at a successful institution from the inside and decides that its value is no longer sufficient reason to remain there.

There is something reckless about this.

There can be something rational about it as well.

I. Mick Taylor: Leaving the Biggest Band in the World

Mick Taylor was just twenty years old when he joined the Rolling Stones.

Think about that for a minute.

He had already played with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, replacing Peter Green, and was a staggeringly accomplished guitarist before most people his age had figured out what they wanted to do with their lives. When Brian Jones died in 1969, Taylor became the new Rolling Stone.

He then participated in what many people consider the greatest period in the band’s history.

Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main St. from this period are, for me, the two greatest Stones records. Nothing before or afterward really comes close. Others can have “Paint It Black” or whatever else they want. I’ll take the Mick Taylor Stones.

Charlie Watts himself later called Taylor’s period a creative peak for the band, while Mick Jagger acknowledged that Taylor brought a fluent, melodic style of guitar playing that the Stones had not possessed before and did not possess afterward.

Taylor also complemented Keith Richards perfectly. This isn’t an argument against Keith, whom I also love. It is in fact the opposite. Richards and Taylor were sufficiently different guitarists that each gave the other room to be himself.

The result is all over those records. And then Taylor left.

He was twenty-five.

There are several explanations for the decision, and Taylor himself has told different parts of the story at different times. He had developed a serious drug problem. He had been touring and recording almost continuously since his days with John Mayall. He felt creatively constrained. And he believed he had contributed to the writing of songs for which Jagger and Richards received the official songwriting credit.

That last part particularly interests me.

Taylor has specifically mentioned “Sway” and “Moonlight Mile,” among other songs, and said that Jagger had promised him credits that never materialized. This wasn’t simply a matter of whether Mick Taylor’s name appeared nicely on an album sleeve. Songwriting credit means publishing. Publishing means money. And when the song in question remains part of the catalogue of the Rolling Stones for another fifty years, publishing potentially means an awful lot of money.

So Taylor quit.

This is where hindsight becomes dangerous.

It is easy now to look at the Rolling Stones as an eternal financial machine and calculate all the stadium tours Taylor did not play, all the merchandise he did not participate in, all the enormous guarantees he did not receive. But Taylor wasn’t sitting in 1974 with a spreadsheet showing the Stones’ revenues through 2026.

In fact, he has said that he wasn’t convinced the band would remain together. From inside, the Stones looked chaotic. Keith Richards’ heroin use was becoming catastrophic. Taylor had his own drug problems. The machinery was wobbling.

And Taylor was a musician. He wanted to play.

Later he put the question beautifully: some people are content to ride along on somebody else’s success. For him, that wasn’t enough.

This is the point.

Financially, leaving the Rolling Stones looks insane. Artistically and psychologically, remaining makes more sense.

Taylor has gone considerably further. Asked later whether he regretted leaving, he said that had he stayed he might well be dead.

What price do we put on that?

Taylor didn’t disappear. He worked with Jack Bruce, Bob Dylan and many others, recorded under his own name, returned occasionally to play with the Stones, and continued being exactly what he had always fundamentally been: an extraordinary blues guitarist. He just stopped being a Rolling Stone.

There is something almost shocking about the simplicity of that.

The institution had become bigger than the man. So the man left the institution.

II. Dean Wareham: Maybe I Should Just Change My Style

The Dean Wareham case is the one I know best.

I have written about Galaxie 500 elsewhere. I have written about Luna here and here. I have written about seeing Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang in Kyoto and having Damon come across the room to shush me while I was talking to a friend before, in my opinion, the fucking show had even started.

I have litigated that case sufficiently elsewhere. I remain innocent.

More importantly, I have read Wareham’s excellent memoir Black Postcards a number of times, and the Galaxie breakup has fascinated me for years.

Galaxie 500 consisted of Wareham, Krukowski and Yang. Damon and Naomi were a couple; Dean was the third person. All three were intelligent, arty people who attended Harvard. They began making music together without, by Wareham’s telling, having any particularly clear idea what they were doing.

Somehow they developed an extraordinary sound.

Galaxie 500 was spacious and slow, droning and melodic, fragile without being weak. Wareham’s guitar floated around inside songs while his thin, peculiar voice made the whole enterprise sound simultaneously sincere and slightly detached from itself.

They became successful enough to tour internationally and open for the Cocteau Twins. Rough Trade released their records. By 1991 they were supposed to go to Japan.

Instead, Dean Wareham quit. The immediate mechanics are almost comically mundane.

Their final show was at Bowdoin College on April 5, 1991. There were reportedly only forty or fifty people there. The opening band played too long. Everyone was irritated. Afterward, according to someone who attended the show, Wareham packed his things, walked out the door and drove away without much ceremony.

Then Damon called him about the tickets to Japan. Dean told him not to buy one. He was leaving.

The phone exploded for three days.

Naomi later recalled yelling at Dean, something apparently very unlike her, because she couldn’t understand how he could throw away what they had built without even bothering to discuss it.

From her perspective, this makes perfect sense. From Dean’s, I suspect the discussion had been going on internally for months.

That is one of the strange things about leaving. The person being left often experiences a sudden event. The person leaving may experience the final announcement as merely the last sentence of an argument he has been having silently with himself for years.

Wareham had been documenting his frustrations.

The most famous passage concerns touring. Damon was effectively tour manager, and to Dean it seemed that every hotel, rental car and airline seat became another source of stress. Wareham concludes simply that traveling together highlights your differences.

That’s just true.

Travel is an extraordinary accelerant. Two people can get along beautifully when they meet twice a week for dinner and discover within four days of sharing hotels, airports, taxis, bathrooms and luggage that they should never be permitted within fifty miles of each other again.

The members of Galaxie 500 had spent years in vans together. Now there was nowhere for their differences to hide.

Then there was the spotlight.

At a show in Los Angeles in 1991, Wareham moved forward to take a guitar solo and a lighting technician put a spotlight on him.

Damon apparently interpreted this as a calculated move. Los Angeles meant record-company people. Why, he wondered, had Dean suddenly acquired a spotlight there when there hadn’t been any spotlights in Columbus or Dallas?

Dean’s tour diary records Damon complaining that Wareham stepping in front of his drum kit threw him off. Wareham writes that he resisted telling Damon to go fuck himself.

Dean’s restraint did not save Galaxie 500.

I love this story because it is simultaneously trivial and enormous.

Bands are full of these things. Who stands where. Whose song goes on the record. Who talks to the journalist. Who gets the hotel room with the view. Who gets songwriting credit. Who decides the setlist. Who is allowed to play twenty guitar solos while everyone else goes for lunch.

Every argument is ostensibly about the thing being argued about. Very few arguments are actually about the thing being argued about.

And underneath all of this, I think Wareham simply wanted something different. You can hear it happening in real time.

“Fourth of July,” from Galaxie’s final album This Is Our Music, contains the line I have used as his epigraph here:

Maybe I should just change my style.

Well yes Dean. Maybe you should dude.

Wareham left Galaxie and almost immediately began assembling what would later became Luna.

The first Luna record, Lunapark, still has one foot in Galaxie territory. “Anesthesia” has the wooziness, the Velvet Underground haze, the fuzz, the slightly narcotized pace. “Slash Your Tires” points further forward.

Then Sean Eden arrived and Luna became Luna.

Eden is a brilliant guitarist and the ideal foil for Wareham, although apparently he makes music with roughly the degree of agony other people associate with emergency dental surgery.

There is a wonderful passage in Black Postcards about the Rendezvous sessions in which producer Bryce Goggin essentially tells Sean to come into the studio the following morning, record twenty guitar solos, choose whichever one he likes, and let someone else record him because Bryce does not need to be physically present for the ordeal.

That arrangement also strikes me as very Dean Wareham. Let Sean suffer over his twenty solos. Dean will come back later.

The interesting point is that Wareham could coexist with this sort of difference inside Luna in a way he could no longer coexist with the differences inside Galaxie.

Why?

Partly age. Partly experience. Partly the structure of the band. But I think something more fundamental had changed.

Luna Was Dean’s Band

Not in the sense that the other musicians didn’t matter. Sean Eden transformed Luna. Justin Harwood and later Britta Phillips mattered as well. Stanley Demeski and Lee Wall contributed. Luna’s chemistry is real.

But with Luna Wareham no longer had to negotiate the basic identity of the project every day.

He took a risk. And it worked out.

This is where I disagree from any interpretation of the story that treats Galaxie 500 as the glorious future Dean foolishly threw away.

Galaxie 500 later became quite influential. Their records have aged well. Maybe they would have become substantially bigger had they remained together.

Nobody knows.

What we do know is that Luna became a larger, longer-lived project with a substantial catalogue of its own, a major-label career, an international audience and, after reforming in 2014, an existence that continues today.

More importantly for me, Luna is simply the better band.

By Bewitched, they had become smoother, sharper and more assured. “Friendly Advice,” “Tiger Lily,” “California,” “Great Jones Street”: this is music I can live inside.

And eventually you get Penthouse, Pup Tent, The Days of Our Nights, Romantica, Rendezvous. You get “23 Minutes in Brussels.” You get “Chinatown.” You get Luna playing “Fourth of July” and Dean reclaiming his own Galaxie song inside the band he chose to create. That matters.

Wareham didn’t merely leave something. He left for something else. The distinction is critical.

III. Izzy Stradlin: Just Another Cigarette

And then we get to Izzy.

I have been rediscovering Izzy Stradlin lately, although “rediscovering” is slightly misleading because I knew the Ju Ju Hounds when the record came out in 1992.

I loved “Shuffle It All.”

Then life happened, decades passed, music piled on top of music, and recently I came back around to the song and immediately thought:

Jesus fucking christ, Izzy Stradlin fucking rocks.

Then I put on “Come On Now Inside.” Same reaction.

And suddenly I found myself wondering something I had never adequately wondered before.

Who exactly is this guy?

Stradlin grew up in Lafayette, Indiana, as did Axl Rose. They eventually migrated separately to Los Angeles, where the band that became Guns N’ Roses assembled out of several collapsing and recombining groups.

Izzy never looked entirely comfortable with the circus.

This is perhaps easier to see retrospectively because Guns N’ Roses became one of the most circus-like bands in rock history.

Appetite for Destruction was gigantic. By the time Use Your Illusion I and II arrived in September 1991, Guns were operating at a scale almost impossible to imagine for a group that had been playing clubs only a few years earlier.

And Izzy was not some replaceable rhythm guitarist standing behind Slash. He was fundamental to the songwriting.

He co-wrote “Don’t Cry” and “You Could Be Mine,” among others, and the Illusion records finally made his importance unusually visible: he sang lead on several tracks and had sole writing credit on songs including “Pretty Tied Up,” “Double Talkin’ Jive” and “You Ain’t the First.”

Then he up and quit in November 1991 at almost precisely the moment when an ordinary person might think: Now dude? You’re leaving NOW?

Yes my friend. Right now.

Izzy had recently gotten sober and sobriety changed the view about the band.

He later described looking around after quitting drugs and essentially wondering whether this was all there was. The delays, the chaos, Axl’s lateness, shows going off the rails, the Riverport riot, the endless machinery required to move Guns N’ Roses around the planet.

Slash later framed Izzy’s departure partly in terms of his unwillingness to endure the amount of work and stress required to keep the operation functioning.

Izzy rejected the idea that he simply hated touring. His version was funnier.

He had a bus. The others had a plane. He still beat them to the gig. That tells you a lot about Izzy Stradlin.

It also tells you something about institutions after they reach a certain size. More resources do not necessarily produce more freedom. Sometimes they produce more machinery.

The plane becomes slower than the bus. The rock star becomes less free than the guy driving down the highway staring at his shoes and smoking a cigarette.

And financially? This is where Izzy’s decision becomes astonishing.

Mick Taylor left a huge band in 1974. Izzy left an enormous band in 1991 just as its commercial machine was reaching maximum velocity.

The two Use Your Illusion albums debuted at numbers one and two in the United States. Guns N’ Roses had years of stadium touring ahead of them. The catalogue would continue selling forever.

Izzy had songwriting royalties, certainly. Leaving the touring band did not magically erase his authorship of the songs he had already written.

But he was nevertheless walking away from a gigantic stream of future income associated with actually remaining a member of Guns N’ Roses.

And apparently he could live with that.

Within a year, he released Izzy Stradlin and the Ju Ju Hounds. There is no mystery about the aesthetic.

It’s loose. It’s Stonesy. It’s unpretentious. It sounds like somebody who has escaped a meeting. Thank god. Meetings suck. Hard.

“Shuffle It All” is a masterpiece.

The song doesn’t sound like a man mourning the loss of Guns N’ Roses. It sounds like a man who has discovered that there are roads in the world and that he is permitted to drive on them.

That cigarette line compresses the whole Izzy Stradlin philosophy into a few words. No pyro. No grand piano. No two-hour delay. No riot. No fucking plane.

A bus. Another cigarette. Staring at his shoes.

And one great song.

IV. Three Gambles

So who took the biggest risk?

In purely financial terms, probably Izzy.

He walked away from the hottest band on earth at almost exactly the point at which the money hose was being turned all the way on.

Taylor’s decision may look even more expensive with fifty years of hindsight, because the Rolling Stones turned out to possess something approaching economic immortality. But Taylor couldn’t know that in 1974. He thought the band might collapse. In his twenties, with the Stones themselves in chaos, this was hardly an absurd prediction.

Wareham’s gamble was different.

Galaxie 500 had prestige and momentum, but not Stones or Guns money. His risk was therefore less about surrendering millions already within reach and more about destroying something difficult to reconstruct: a critically acclaimed band with a distinctive sound, a label, an audience and an international future.

And Wareham’s gamble paid off most clearly. He made Luna and they were, at least a moderated success.

That doesn’t mean Luna proves leaving Galaxie was objectively correct. Life doesn’t supply control groups. There is no parallel universe in which Dean stays and we get to compare the fourth, fifth and sixth Galaxie records with Bewitched and Penthouse.

There is only what happened. But that is enough. Three musicians looked at successful situations and independently arrived at versions of the same conclusion:

This is valuable. I am leaving anyway.

That’s what fascinates me.

Because a calculated risk isn’t the same thing as recklessness. Sometimes the calculation includes things that cannot be entered neatly into the financial column.

Creative control. Sobriety. Friendship. Mental health. Time. The simples pleasures of making music.

The ability to get on your own bus and arrive at the fucking concert before everybody else.

V. The Price of Staying

There is another reason I am interested in these stories. I am contemplating my own calculated exit.

After nearly thirty long career in teaching, I’m increasingly looking toward walking away and pursuing writing, along with whatever else I need to do to make the economics work.

My situation is obviously not remotely comparable in scale to Mick Taylor leaving the Rolling Stones or Izzy Stradlin leaving Guns N’ Roses.

Nobody is presently offering me a stadium tour.

Damn.

But the underlying calculation interests me because it is recognizable.

When you’ve invested years in something, the investment itself begins to make the decision for you. You’ve already spent twenty years here. You have seniority. You have security. You know how the machine works. Why would you leave?

This is the logic of staying. And sometimes it is excellent logic. But there is an opposing question that gets asked less often:

What does staying cost?

Mick Taylor could calculate the money he might lose by leaving the Stones. He couldn’t calculate precisely what staying would do to him.

Dean Wareham knew exactly what he was throwing away when he told Damon not to buy the ticket to Japan. He couldn’t know Luna would work.

Izzy Stradlin could see Guns N’ Roses becoming impossibly enormous. He got on the bus anyway.

I don’t think any of these men should be romanticized merely because they left. People quit good situations for stupid reasons every day. People also remain in difficult situations for excellent reasons. There is no universal moral law of walking away.

But there is a lesson here about sunk costs. Success answers only one question:

Is this working to not?

It does not answer the more important question: Do I still want it?

Taylor didn’t. Wareham didn’t. Izzy didn’t. And so they walked.

The Rolling Stones survived Mick Taylor and became the most durable touring institution in rock history.

Galaxie 500 did not survive Dean Wareham, but Luna emerged from the wreckage and became, for my money, one of the greatest bands ever.

Guns N’ Roses survived Izzy Stradlin, although I would argue they lost something fundamental when he left: the loose, Stonesy rhythmic center underneath all the Slash and Axl spectacularity.

And all three men survived too. That’s worth remembering.

A band can be bigger than you. A company can be bigger than you. A career can be bigger than you. The machine can keep going when you leave.

Fine. Fuck em.

There is a particular kind of freedom in discovering that you don’t actually need to remain inside the machine simply because the machine is successful.

Sometimes you change your style.

Sometimes you go play the blues.

And sometimes you light another cigarette, stare at your shoes, and shuffle it all.

Motherfucker.

Dedication:

For Mick, Dean and Izzy. You guys are awesome and you totally rule. You’ve made my world a better place. Thank you fellas.

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On Subcultures and Scenes in Craig Finn’s “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight”

New Note: It has been a little while since I last posted this piece, and I’m glad to bring it back into view. It remains my very favorite essay on the Kyoto Kibbitzer, and has continued to circulate far beyond what I ever expected, with many hundreds of reads over time. In an entirely unscientific but pleasingly persistent corner of the internet, it still seems to rank #2 in search results for the term “Katie Park Bad Moves,” just behind Wikipedia, which is pretty cool. I have no idea what to make of that, but I’m not complaining.

The piece itself—on Craig Finn’s “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight”—has always felt to me like one of the most complete things I’ve written about music, scenes, and subcultures, and I’m grateful for the continued readership and responses it has received. Reposting here in full for anyone who missed it the first time around, or wants to revisit it.

Original Note: This piece is about an absolutely amazing song by Craig Finn called “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight” released in 2020 on All These Perfect Crosses from Partisan Records. We will also expand on the song’s theme, which is how subcultures (and “scenes”) operate. Finn is, in my opinion, the greatest lyricist working today (not the greatest living lyricist, that’s still Dylan). I’ve written about about Finn before here, and here.

Craig Finn himself has commented on this song and says that “It’s Never Been A Fair Fight”:

“Is about the extreme difficulty of staying true to the rigid rules of a subculture as you get older. The character in the song revisits an old peer and finds struggle and disappointment in the place he left behind.”

In this case, the narrator had been part of the punk/hardcore scene in the 1980’s and 1990’s, has left the scene, and reflects on his time there and what it meant as he meets his old friend—and we suppose former lover—Vanessa. I’m not sure I understand the entire chronology of the song, as it engages in some apparent time jumps that can be a little hard to follow. Overall however, it is pretty clear what the song is about.

The opening verse sees the narrator (let’s call him C., because while we will grant Finn the understanding as an artist that his characters are characters, in this case the song feels pretty autobiographical) checking in with Vanessa. The song opens in the present day.

Finn has C. meet her “right in front of her building,” Vanessa “vague in taste and drowning,” telling him she’s “got a new man…in a new band,” and “they’ve got a new sound.”

We get the impression that C. has been out of the scene for a while, while Vanessa is very much still in it: new man, new band, new sound, same old place. Vanessa’s man, we assume, is in a hardcore band, and I believe it is the case that Finn came up through the hardcore scene before forming his first band Lifter Puller. Lifter Puller is not a hardcore band, and I don’t know if Finn was actually in a hardcore band or just in the scene.

Then comes one of Finn’s perfect little deadpan truths. C. shrugs that “hardcore’s in the eye of the beholder,” a funny line for a number of reasons (it also reminds me of the classic David Berman line: “punk rock died when the first kid said / punk’s not dead.”) The humor hits because it’s both self-aware and scene-aware.

After C. recalls his “broken heart from 1989,” Finn pivots the timeline. The song shifts back—back to when C. was attending hardcore shows, hot and sweaty, elbows in his eyes. The chronology bends, but the emotional logic stays firm.

Vanessa says there are “threads that connect us,” and “flags and wars we should never accept.” Angelo’s off seeing “snakes in the smoke” from someone’s cigarette. And Ivan? He isn’t concerned at all — for him it’s mostly just about “what you wear to the show.” C. admits he “heard a song…on the radio” that he liked, which we can assume violates at least one of Vanessa’s unwritten rules.

Finn is an absolute master of sketching characters in just a line or two. Here, he uses a sort of pointillistic approach to introduce us to two additional members of the scene, Angelo and Ivan. With just a few short verses we already understand a great deal about “the scene.” Here is what we can deduce:

i) All four members of the scene have very differently valenced loyalties. Put another way, they want different things from it. Vanessa is a purist; for her being part of the scene is like being part of an tribe, an army, and we take her to be a fierce protector of the in-group/ out-group aspects that tend to arise in subcultures. Angelo, it seems, is a little out there; he’s seeing snakes in the cigarette smoke and probably not all that interested in the ultimate nature or meaning of the scene. Ivan likes the t-shirts and jeans, likes the look. He’s not a purist either. And C., well he likes a little pop music, an inclination we assume is strictly verboten for folks like Vanessa.

ii) Probably because of the differences in ideas and ideologies between the scene members, C. sees things coming to an end, both with the scene and between he and Vanessa. Here we are reminded of the difficulty of keeping any kind of group together, whether a scene, a band, or just a group of friends. Everyone knows the feeling of having a group of friends who tell each other they will be tight forever, however life doesn’t usually work that way. The best film about this dynamic is Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan, which depicts a young group of friends in Manhattan who come together and then slowly, but inevitably, come apart over the course of a winter. There is a great moment in Metropolitan where the main character, Tom, looks around and realizes the scene is dead. Where did it go? It was here one day, gone the next. Scenes are like that, and this is what Finn is writing about.

iii) The inherent differences between people which make keeping the scene together are also something that Finn celebrates to a certain extent I think. One of the most salient features of Finn’s writing is his compassion. Finn has compassion for Angelo and his snakes, Ivan and his jeans, and for Vanessa, in all of her rigidity. As of the time of the song we know for sure that Vanessa is still in the scene and C. is not. I guess that neither Angelo nor Ivan is still around, however if only one of them is my money’s on Angelo, if he’s still alive.

Through the course of my own life, I have been involved, for a shorter or longer time, with a variety of subcultures. One category of subculture that I have frequented is what we could broadly call “new age.” My explorations of this category have been reasonably extensive. Back in my early 20s, I was involved for about 4–5 months with a Tibetan Buddhist group back in Washington State. I would get up at 4 AM, drive an hour across town to a beautiful old house on the hill, and meditate with the folks there. This group also organized some outings, such as mountain hiking.

I enjoyed the group and the meditation. The group leader, a slightly older woman who was lovely, asked me to pay like 6 dollars for a little book with chants in it, which I did. There was a total cross-section of people in the group of different ages and backgrounds, and all in all I liked it there. However, I peeled off from the group after a time for reasons very similar to those discussed by Finn. There were two specific things that led to me leaving. The second I’ll discuss a little later. The first was one day I was chatting with one of the members on the street outside after meditation. He was telling me how his daughter used to play chess, however he would no longer allow her to do so because it was interfering with her studies of Tibetan Buddhism. “There’s just not enough time,” he told me.

I had talked with this guy before and he was a perfectly nice guy, but I didn’t agree with his approach. I felt, in fact, that it was bad action. Now, I understood that people joined the group for different reasons and had different levels of investment. I was not looking to become a Tibetan Buddhist or anything—I was just “checking it out.” To circle back to Finn, the valence gap between this fellow’s take on the subculture and my own was vast, and his entire approach turned me off. This was the first step in my deciding to leave.

The next three verses of “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight” see C. trying to keep the door open to Vanessa even as he edges out of the scene. He wants to meet her and if she agrees he will know that she like him feels that “punk is not a fair fight.” Finn doesn’t say, but I’m guessing Vanessa doesn’t show.

If things change quickly/ just remember I still love you/ and I’ll circle ’round the block tonight/ between 9 and 10 o’clock tonight

If you’re still standing here, I’ll take that as a sign/ that you agree it was a sucker punch/ punk is not a fair fight/ it’s never been a fair fight

We said there weren’t any rules/ but there were so many goddamn rules/ we said that they’d be cool/ but then there were so many goddamn rules

Verse VII is the hinge-point of the song and basically its thesis. Finn’s point is straightforward: the appeal of the scene is the potential for freedom, exploration, rebellion, however once inside the subculture C. finds himself increasingly hemmed in by the strictures of that culture and the requirements necessary to remain within it. The very thing that drew C. to the subculture (flight from an over-determined social reality) is that thing that ultimately drives him away. “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight,” appears in two versions on All These Perfect Crosses; the main version is horn driven and upbeat, and there is also an acoustic version. On the main version, Finn, realizing perhaps that the repeated line is a bit poetically unorthodox, spits out a laugh on the “then” in “but then there were so many goddamn rules,” and in the process underlines the centrality of the sentiment to the song as a whole. It’s a great verse, and one which tells us something fundamental about C.’s nature: he likes the action, and as such needs to be free to pursue it wherever it may be. Action is not limited to the Minneapolis hardcore scene, after all.

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On Craig Finn’s “A Bathtub in the Kitchen”

I. Opening Notes

This is my third piece dealing with the songwriter Craig Finn. I wrote at length about his song “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight,” and a little more in my piece on Katie Park and The Bad Moves. Although my primary allegiance will always be to Dylan, if I am totally honest Finn is my favorite songwriter. Dylan is a transcendent force, world-historical, and therefore also sort of unapproachable. Finn is down-to-earth—I can imagine having a drink or three with Finn, whereas Dylan would probably have his hoodie up.

So, for the record: my favorite band is Luna, my favorite songwriter is Craig Finn, and the greatest is Dylan. My three favorite Finn songs are “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight,” “A Bathtub in the Kitchen,” and “Killer Parties.” This post takes a close look at “A Bathtub in the Kitchen,” with the aim of explicating both the song and Finn’s delivery.

II. Premise and Setup

“A Bathtub in the Kitchen” is track three on Craig Finn’s 2019 album I Need a New War, released by Partisan Records. For my money, it is not only the standout track on the record, but one of the three greatest songs of my all-time favorite songwriter. The song is ostensibly about an old friend of the narrator (I will refer to him as C.) called Francis, but it’s also about trying to make it in the big city, and about moving on from the past. Making it—or not making it—in the big city is a classic Finn theme.

III. Verse One — The Accident and the Past

The song opens with a report of an accident. The nature of the event is unspecified, but my best guess is an overdose.

The lightning clarity typical of Finn is all over these four lines. We learn that C. and Francis have a relationship shaded by deception, that they still move in overlapping circles, and that both originally came from somewhere else. The final line delivers one of those Finn-isms that cut both ways: city transplants trying to recreate a tiny town, while C. himself is still entangled in the very past he’s trying to escape.

IV. Verse Two — Money, Health, and Elegance

By the second part of the verse it seems Francis has recovered somewhat, and C. has met with him again.

Finn’s concision is astonishing. In eight lines we understand the dynamic completely: C. has money he could give, but knows it’s probably enabling; Francis is perhaps an addict, though neither man states it. We also glimpse Francis in better days—The Parkside, elegant companions, a life C. once aspired toward. And already C. is trying, gently, to pass responsibility to someone else.

This touches something universal: the friend who needs more than we can sustainably give. Or the times we’ve been that friend ourselves.

V. The Chorus — Youth, Longing, and New York

The chorus arrives, one of Finn’s most moving and beautiful. His voice rises on I was drinking, I was dancing, packed with emotion.

This is a flashback to young C. in New York—broke, naive, crashing on Francis’s couch. Finn underlines C.’s passivity three times: waiting, hoping, desperate for New York to ask me out. That phrasing is brilliant. It captures the essential vulnerability of arriving in New York with dreams, no plan, and a subway map.

The memory sends me to my own first visit to New York. Stepping out of the station at 42nd Street into the noise, I felt the shock of sensation—an energy I still feel every time I return. I’ve been to many great cities—Tokyo, London, Singapore, Amsterdam, Melbourne, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur—but there is nowhere like New York.

And in a city like that, it can be nearly impossible to get your footing. Everyone is already in motion. Finn evokes that perfectly.

VI. Verse Three — Present-Day Francis

Back to the present:

Francis has been in New York for twenty-three years, and C. nearly as long, since he knows the number by heart. The “bathtub in the kitchen” signals the classic New York starter apartment—a detail so iconic it becomes the song’s title. Francis still goes to the roof for better reception. Phones get disconnected. Life is fraying. C. registers all of this without overt judgment, but with distance. A sense of “there but for the grace of God go I.”

VII. Chorus Reprise — Guilt and Gratitude

The chorus returns with slight changes—“doing things I shouldn’t”—and doubled gratitude: Francis let me crash out on his couch. Repetition becomes confession.

My father read my “Fair Fight” draft and, not knowing anything about Craig Finn, immediately said he sensed a strong midwestern Catholic vibe. He was spot-on. Finn grew up Catholic in Minnesota; guilt, forgiveness, and redemption run through almost everything he writes.

There is also a phenomenal YouTube video of Finn performing this at the Murmrr Theatre, and during the post-chorus especially the performance takes on a spiritual intensity you can’t miss.

VIII. Post-Chorus — The Confession

The lines:

I can’t keep saying thank you, Francis…

These cut two ways. C. is saying:

  1. The couch surfing was long ago, and he has done what he can.
  2. And simultaneously: I’m not the person who can save you.

The confession is directed at Francis—but maybe just as much at himself.

IX. Verse Four — The Old Ropes and the New Distance

The final verse returns briefly to the past: Francis teaching C. how to navigate New York nightlife—befriend bartenders, tip big on the first round. These are the rules of the game. C. remembers them vividly.

Then we snap to the present: Francis’s job rumors, his terrible landlord, the $200 that will “help him breathe a bit easy.” And the repeated question: Francis, do you even have a plan? C. has given him money, but not much, and not with much faith. The trust between them has frayed into obligation.

X. Outro — The Spiritual Release

The outro repeats the confession. Again, it’s worth watching the Murmrr Theatre live version to feel how Finn leans into this. It becomes a kind of secular prayer, a release and a resignation all at once.

XI. Closing Thoughts

“A Bathtub in the Kitchen” is about youth and aging, about friendship and how it lasts and decays, about guilt and human selfishness in the face of real need. More than anything, it captures what it feels like to try to survive in New York.

I think this song, like “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight,” is more personal for Finn than some of his strictly narrative pieces. The narrator here has “made it.” Finn himself is an immigrant to New York, from Minnesota, and has sampled deeply from the nightlife he writes about. Few songwriters have chronicled nightlife with more range, consistency, or compassion.

Even if C. can’t keep saying thank you, I can. This song moves me in ways I’ve tried to describe here but still can’t fully encompass.

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On Kris Kristofferson’s “To Beat the Devil”

This piece takes a look at Kris Kristofferson’s “To Beat the Devil.” The song appears on Kristofferson’s self-titled debut album from 1970 on Monument, which is, by any standard, an astonishingly good record. The album features “Me and Bobby McGee,” “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” and “Just the Other Side of Nowhere,” along with the ol’ Devil. That’s four absolute classics right there for ya.

Sunday Morning features an opening quatrain that most other songwriters would trade their career for:

Well I woke up Sunday morning/ with no way to hold my head that didn’t hurt/ and the beer I had for breakfast wasn’t bad/ so I had one more for dessert

(I could play this game all day—Jason Isbell’s Southeastern features another couple life-work worthy couplets:

The first two lines of “Super 8”:

Don’t wanna die in a super 8 motel/ just because somebody’s evening didn’t go so well

And from “Different Days”:

Time went by and I left and I left again/ Jesus loves a sinner but the highway loves a sin.

If I’d written lines that great I’d call it a career and sip martinis on the house for the duration.)

Sunday Morning and Bobby are probably objectively better songs than To Beat the Devil, yet what I like about this one is that Kristofferson states very clearly a kind of founding intention for his life in song and art, right out of the gate. The only parallel I can think of is Craig Finn’s The Hold Steady, whose first album Almost Killed Me kicks off with “A Positive Jam.”

(Here’s Finn telling it like it is:

I got bored when I didn’t have a band/ so I started a band/ we’re gonna start it with a positive jam/ hold steady.

Rock on Craig baby.)

Anyway, let’s get to the focus of this piece. Kristofferson opens with a spoken intro.:

A couple of years back I come across a great and wasted friend of mine in the hallway of a recording studio. And while he was reciting some poetry to me that he had written, I saw that he was about a step away from dying, and I couldn’t help but wonder why. And the lines of this song occurred to me.

Here the singer is looking up at his idol who is both “great and wasted.” I wasn’t around quite yet in 1970, yet I can easily imagine Ginsberg’s “best minds” line hanging over talented folks across a lot of zones. Klosterman wasn’t quite there either (June 5, 1972–a mid Gemini of course), but he was close, and to indulge not for the last time in a little Klostermania, the zeitgeist seemed to be making people thirsty.

The singer receives some scraps of poetry, shards of shattered inspiration, and a song “occurs” to him. He doesn’t state it directly, however we imagine the song arrives fully formed, like “Pancho and Lefty,” or “Kubla Khan.” Thus, To Beat the Devil is also both an answer and an offer of redemption to his idol, who here is John(ny) Cash.

I’m happy to say he’s no longer wasted, and he’s got him a good woman. And I’d like to dedicate this to John and June, who helped showed me how to beat the devil.

The singer takes up the mantle of the master, and in so doing opens a possibility window onto redemption for his senior. This is no exaggeration—Cash also recorded To Beat the Devil in 1970 and we are basically stipulating that Kristofferson’s genius, descended from Cash while also original to himself, helped rescue Cash from addiction and the whole deal there. We won’t be deep diving into the archive on this one—as we said we’re just keeping it local and breaking it down, so you’ll have to take my word on it or search it up your own self.

Here’s the first verse; the words speak for themselves:

It was wintertime in Nashville/ down on Music City Row/ and I was looking for a place/ and to get myself out of the cold/ to warm the frozen feeling that was eating at my soul/ keep the chilly wind off my guitar

A classic down and out in the big city piece of scene-setting. The singer is physiologically and psychologically frozen, a cold wind gusts across his art. The man needs a break.

My thirsty wanted whiskey/ my hungry needed beans/ but it had been a month of paydays/ since I’d heard that eagle scream/ so with a stomach full of empty/ and a pocket full of dreams/ I left my pride and stepped inside a bar

You might think that the operative nouns here would be “thirst” and “hunger,” but no. This is not a man with a thirst; this is a thirsty man. We also hear an echo of a now-ancient American past where a man with an empty stomach would go in search of, of all things, “beans.”

Anyway, he’s got no money, can’t really bring himself to care. So, a singer walks into a bar.

Actually I’d guess you’d call it a tavern/ cigarette smoke to the ceiling
and sawdust on the floor/ friendly shadows/ I saw that there was just one old man sitting at the bar/ and in the mirror I could see him checking me and my guitar/ and he turned and said/ come up here, boy, and show us what you are/ I said I’m dry, and he bought me a beer

The man in the mirror, the devil himself. The singer comes face to face with the man who checks him out and summons him over. Kristofferson then enters into a bargain–offers up the terms of an encounter: a beer on the old man’s tab. Score one for the thirsty man. The singer faces the old man; it’s to be a showdown. He doesn’t have much, but he’s got some “friendly shadows,” traces of an older map perhaps, an older memory.

I can’t help here but engage in a bit of presumption. When I play the song in my head, I want to hear “in the mirror I saw him casing me and my guitar,” (listen to the way he pronounces “guitar” on the track. Kristofferson was born in Brownsville, Texas in ‘36 and behind the laid back folksinger you can here some roots here baby).

If I could make one edit to the song, it would be to replace “checking me,” with “casing me.” What a great verb “to case” is.

Lexical Interlude: “To case the joint”

1. slang To observe a place in order to familiarize oneself with its workings in preparation for some criminal activity (often robbery). Judging from the security footage, those men cased the joint hours before robbing it.

2. slang By extension, to thoroughly examine a place. In this usage, no devious motive is implied. As soon as my kids walking into the hotel room, they started casing the joint, exclaiming about everything from the TV to the mini-fridge.

The seminal use of this verb phrase comes from Bill Callahan, formerly of Smog. Callahan is an odd duck—he is so artificial, so obviously self-created as an entertainer, that he has become almost post-authentic.  Callahan contains multitudes.

My favorite Smog album, well in the top two, is Red Apple Falls, which features “Ex-Con,” on which Callahan sings: 

Jean jacket and tie/ feel like such a lie/ when I go to your house/ I feel like I’m/ casing the joint

Devious motive implied.

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He nodded at my guitar and said/ it’s a tough life, ain’t it?/ I just looked at him/ he said “you ain’t making any money, are you?“/ I said, you been reading my mail/ he just smiled and said, let me see that guitar/ I got something you ought to hear/ and then he laid it on me

The devil has a bead on the singer, and he’s not far off.  Yes he’s broke.  Yes he’s down and out.  Whaddaya want?

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Filmic Interlude I: The Long Goodbye

In Robert Altman The Long Goodbye, written by Leigh Brackett, the main character Philip Marlowe gets out of jail somewhere in the first act and heads to a all-purpose pit stop restaurant who’s owner apparently collects Marlowe’s mail. The dialogue is exquisite.

Marlowe: You got any messages for me?

Owner: Believe we’ve got a few over there. As a matter of fact, you’ll find my phone bill in there too.

Marlowe: I wouldn’t worry about that.

When you ain’t got nothing you got nothing to lose. Kristofferson’s got nothing to hide in his mail. Those bills go straight to the wastebasket.

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If you waste your time a talkin’ / to the people who don’t listen/ to the things that you are saying/ who do you thinks gonna hear?/ and if you should die explaining how/ the things that they complain about/ are things they could be changing/ who do you thinks gonna care?

there were other lonely singers/ in a world turned deaf and blind/ who were crucified for what they tried to show/ and their voices have been scattered by the swirling winds of time/ ‘cause the truth remains that no one wants to know

The devil’s words speak for themselves. The path of the troubadour is a dead end. The world has not ears to hear nor eyes to see. Truth tellers meet a bad end. Whiners gonna whine. It’s a strong opening bet, made, we presume, with his red right hand.

Well the old man was a stranger/ but I’d heard his song before/ back when failure had me locked out/ on the wrong side of the door/ when no one stood behind me/ but my shadow on the floor/ and lonesome was more than a state of mind

The singer is on familiar territory; he’s has been tempted by this cynical incantation, he’s not immune to tuning out his calling when out in the cold. Who is?

You see, the devil haunts a hungry man/ if you don’t want to join him/ you gotta beat him/ I ain’t saying I beat the devil/ but I drank his beer for nothing/ then I stole his song

This is the key verse in our little tale. You see, when we tango with the devil the devil usually gets to lead. That’s just the way it goes. But the thing about the devil is, his game is a bit of a bluff. A couple of low pairs, maybe. You just gotta call.

and you still can hear me singing/ to the people who don’t listen/ to the things that I am saying/ praying someone’s gonna hear/ and I guess I’ll die explaining how/ the things that they complain about/ are things they could be changing/ hoping someone’s gonna care

I was born a lonely singer/ and I’m bound to die the same/ but I’ve gotta feed the hunger in my soul/ and if I never have a nickel/ I won’t ever die ashamed/ ‘cause I don’t believe that no one wants to know

Kristoffeson flips it right around. The devil’s got a point; the singer may die dead broke, that’s fine. Songs are borne on the wind in any case. The thing is to have faith in your audience. To believe someone is out there, heart in their hands and ear to the wind. And to hold this faith as a mantra. That’ll keep ‘em guessing, cause then you’re not playing their game, you’re playing your own.

Overall, To Beat the Devil is a young man’s song. It’s got a confidence, a swagger, even a hubris. So, after drafting most of this piece I wanted to find a recent live version, see how it’s aged. I stumbled on a version from a live set with Lou Reed released in 2017. The set is part of The Bottom Line Archive, and it finds Kristofferson in a Waitsian stage of life. The voice is richer than ever, but he’s not exactly singing. Then again, that’s what they said about Dylan and it’s B.S. The voice is the voice; singing is just a category.

The set is interspersed with short interviews of the two songwriters. Here is Kristofferson’s spoken introduction that precedes To Beat the Devil. It is instructive.

Interviewer: The devil figures in some of your songs, you know there’s that silver tongued devil and he pops up from time to time. Who’s the devil? What’s the devil for you? What are your demons?

K.K.: Well, I, I’ll do that song then. Ahhh…

Interviewer: Is that a metaphor or is that something real for you?

K.K.: Well here’s a song called To Beat the Devil. Maybe it’ll explain it. I can’t.