Posted on by Matt Thomas

On Childhood Abuse

Epigraph I:

Well it’s always been my nature/ to take chances/ my left hand drawn back/ while my left hand advances.

Bob Dylan, Angelina

Epigraph II:

I’m glad I did it all then you know that I didn’t listen/ glad I went and got it all outta my system.

My Morning Jacket, Outta My System

Epigraph III:

It’s never been a fair fight.

Craig Finn. It’s Never Been a Fair Fight

Note: What follows is a direct and somewhat graphic account of my experience of being badly abused as a child. The abuse happened at the hands of my aunt’s (father’s side) first husband when I was six and seven years old in the very early 1980s. As I will recount, the abuse had deep and lasting impacts on me and it took me years, decades, to process and understand what it did to me.

I make absolutely no claim to be an expert on childhood abuse or to speak to anyone else’s experience of this all too common problem. My experience is my own, and that’s all I can really speak to. In addition, although he conducted what I consider to be vicious abuse of my brother, I understand that anyone impacted by abuse may categorize events in different ways. Therefore, I will allude only glancingly to these aspects, and only through the lens of how this impacted me personally. I will, inevitably, make reference to the role of my parents and my aunt in the events, and as I mention below when I began to fully process the abuse I directed a certain degree of anger at these adults. As time has passed, however, I have come to understand that although they were not able, for whatever reason, to stop the abuse, and although it was conducted, at least in my case, in their direct view, the primary responsibility lies with the abuser himself.

In early 2024 I did seek out legal advice from a firm that specializes in childhood sexual abuse, and they gave me a professional and compassionate hearing, however in the end declined to take up my case and directed me instead to the Washington State public system. I will detail those events below. I am not currently pursuing legal avenues, and instead am hoping that by making this public I can finally fully exorcise the lasting damage that was done to me. I take full responsibility for the content of this piece.

I was born in South Bend, Indiana in June of 1974. My father was pursuing a master’s degree at the University of Notre Dame at the time, however when I was around six months old my parents moved back to Santa Clara, California, where my mother’s parents were living. My father did not finish his master’s at Notre Dame because of some issue with the faculty there, however I believe that he did later finish at Santa Cruz University in California. In an interesting side note I also pursued a master’s degree, in History at the University of Northern Arizona in the late 1990s, and did not finish because of a conflict, or disagreement, with my thesis advisor. Life has a funny way of repeating itself.

We lived in Santa Clara until I was, I believe, two years old, and then my parents moved us to Gig Harbor, Washington. My understanding is that my father wanted to move to Washington State to be closer to his sister, Nancy (Nan) Thomas. Nancy is my father’s younger sister and it was she, I believe, that introduced my father to my mother, who was Nancy’s friend when they all attended Santa Clara University.

It just so happened that Nancy was then married to a man who would become my abuser. My first memory of this guy, just some fucking guy as far as I’m concerned, is also my first real memory in life (Note: This has since been revised to happier memories when I was two in California. I will detail these at a later date). It goes like this:

When I was very small, two going on three, (I know I was three in Gig Harbor because my brother Mike was born there in June of 1977), we lived in a small house right next to the Pacific Ocean. What I recall about this time was, we had a dog. My father was working at a nearby lumberyard which I occasionally visited, and, I think, was sort of seeking what would be the next stage of his life. My parents had no money, but I didn’t understand this at the time.

My first vivid memory is of playing a game called “Shovelman” on the beach of the Pacific Ocean right by our house. I don’t remember the rules of Shovelman, but it involved a frisbee. However I do recall, with absolute precision, that one time the frisbee was thrown out into the ocean, which, in western Washington, was very cold. This guy ordered me to swim for the frisbee, and when, predictably, I struggled mightily to reach the frisbee in the freezing water and came out gasping for breath, he laughed and laughed, like a total sadist. Of course I didn’t know what a sadist was at the time, but I recognized his essential nature even then. I knew for sure at that moment that he was a bad guy. Now I don’t fully know if my father and mother liked this guy or considered him a friend. All I know is, he was around some. I later learned that my uncle Kim did not like him. Hated him in fact. Kim has had an interesting and varied life, and is my godfather. I love Kim, and salute him here for his instincts.

While my first memory is a negative one, presaging as we will see later events, I also have positive memories from this time. I recall right around this time the days after my brother was born that some of my mother’s family visited us including her mother Barbara and her youngest sister Leslie. My mother has nine siblings, all, fortunately, still alive and all wonderful people. Leslie was quite young at the time and is only a few years older than myself I believe. Anyway, I looked up to Leslie and thought she was cool, so when we all went to a restaurant I sneaked under the table and pulled on her leg, like little children do. I wanted her attention, but I’m not sure if I got it. As I mentioned above, I also recall visiting my father at the lumberyard and thinking he also was cool and had a cool job. I don’t know if he would remember that line of work the same way or not.

In any case, my family did not stay in Gig Harbor very long, and pretty soon we were back in California, this time in Palo Alto, which is a town adjacent to Santa Clara. These days, Palo Alto, Santa Clara, and the nearby San Jose are well known for being sort of the heart of Silicon Valley, but back then they were not really on the map in that way. My mother was working as a swim coach at Stanford University and my father was working at a school in town. This was a wonderful period of my life as I spent time at Stanford hanging around the pool while my mother was coaching which was a total blast. I may recount this time in more detail at a later date. Suffice it to say I was an outgoing, curious, and happy child, eager to see what the world had in store for me. As I will detail below, I believe I was at this time essentially an extravert, and the primary, from my perspective, impact of the later abuse would be to turn me into a somewhat serious introvert. Over and above all other impacts of the abuse, this is the one I resent the most. It is my belief that my natural extraversion, my interest in and ability to trust and like people, was deeply damaged by the actions of my abuser. I will never fully get over this aspect of the situation, and have had to work very, very hard to overcome what I see as a kind of inversion of my essential nature.

In the year 1980 my family moved once again, this time to Spokane, Washington. And again, this was, as I understand it, for my father to be closer to his sister who was by that time working as a young lawyer in the same city. My abuser was also, I believe, a lawyer. It is certainly true that, although younger, Nancy was on the upswing of her career much more quickly than my father. Other than that I don’t know the exact reasons for this following of his sister, however my father found a teaching job at St. George’s school in Spokane WA. I would attend St. George’s from grade 1 through 12, and have written rather extensively about my time there. Interested readers can find these pieces on this blog.

St. George’s was great, and overall, although my parents were still broke, I had a good childhood. However, there was one dark aspect, which was we would regularly visit Nancy and this guy at their home on the South Hill in Spokane. On occasion, but much less regularly, this couple would visit us at our house on the outskirts of the city. I believe that all of the incidents recounted below occurred in 1980 and 1981. I know this for a couple of reasons, first of all because the volcano Mount Saint Helens erupted in 1980 and at Nancy’s house in the backyard there was a big craggly rock which had pockets of ash residue from the eruption and this event was a big topic at the time. Secondly, I know that I was enrolled in first grade at St. George’s so I must have been six. My brother Mike then would have been three going on four. I wrote about my wonderful brother Mike before here.

The action at the Thomas household there was not all bad–there was the ash and a nearby park called Cannon Hill Park which was pretty cool. The house on the South Hill was pretty large, certainly larger than our own, and I got to know my cousins, both of whom were even younger than myself. I would say we visited dozens of times over the course of a year or two, and I remember the house and its environs well. In any case, ash and parks aside, the main event at the Thomas house turned out to be regular and vicious abuse from this guy which was conducted in full view of everyone in the living room of the house. After a little dinner or whatever, he would “tickle” myself, my brother, for extended periods of time, 20-30 minutes at a time or so or more. This “tickling” was not in any form playing; it was, instead, a totally vicious fully body attack.

It was absolutely excruciating and horrible, and he would touch every single part of my body and dig his fingers in as deep as possible and screw them around. At first I didn’t know what to make of this or what to do, but overtime I came to hate this so much that I began to fight back. My bother Mike, at three, was obviously in no position to do so, and so he, in my recollection, absolutely got the worst of this. The amazing thing, amazing to me to this day, is that the three other adults, my mother and father and this guy’s wife, would just stand there and watch. There is something deeply sad about adults that cannot, for whatever reason, stand up to a bully.

Later, much later, I would confront my mother about all this, and she has since said that her inability to intervene is one of her deepest regrets.

What I think happened was, when I began to fight back he gave up on abusing me. Also, I suspect, from my understanding of abuser psychology, that I had, essentially, “aged out” of whatever his mindframe was. My sense is that he preferred his victims to be as helpless and defenseless as possible, and I was no longer fitting the bill.

Now I should note that I don’t know what his problem was or what he thought he was getting out of this abuse. And, I don’t wish to research it really, because I would prefer to spend as little time as possible engaging with people of this sort. What I know for certain is that in the early 1980s he was a brutal man. That’s a flat fact.

I will detail what I understand to be the effects on myself and some of the later repercussions of his abuse a little later, but first of all I will recount my attempts to engage with the legal system over this issue, as well as indicate, in a compressed form, how I came to process and understand the abuse. Now I wish to tread carefully here because I do not want to get sucked into a discussion of, or really even take a position on, what is known as repressed memory. I understand that this topic is highly controversial, with strong opinions on all sides. Although I have read a lot, I am not an expert on psychology, much less a topic as fraught as this. What I will say is that I never repressed the memory of the abuse; if you had asked me at any given time in my life if I was brutally attacked by this guy, in full view of other adults, I would have said absolutely yes, that happened. However, what took time was to fully work out how deeply and negatively it impacted me, and in what ways. I think I always intuited it, however it took a some very difficult life experiences to get to the bottom of it.

The first of these was in 2010, when I was already 36 years old. It was at that time that I began spiraling into my memories and trying to uncover some kind of nugget that would unlock a range of issues that I was encountering at the time. In this year, and on a few other occasions after, I would, somewhat obsessively, go over events from my sixth and seventh year, always centering around my aunt Nancy, her house, and what I perceived to be my essential ambidexterity. More on this point later. At some point I intuited, in some way, that Nancy may have had a miscarriage before the birth of her first child. My mother, when I asked her, confirmed that this had taken place, and asked how I knew it. I didn’t, but somehow worked it out, just because I was spending so much time thinking this constellation of issues. It was also during this times that I was also trying to get to the bottom of my sexuality, my introversion, and my inability to learn to play the piano because of seriously weak left hand. I will detail these, and other aspects of the situation, later.

In any case, it was in 2022 that I fully worked out the effects that the abuse had had on me over time, and began, for the first time, to identify as a sexual abuse survivor. This was not something that I wanted to have to incorporate into my personal narrative, however it became inevitable. I looked into the law in Washington State, and as I recall, as I understood it at the time, the statute of limitations was three years which began at the moment that the victim became fully aware of their injury. From my point of view, I became fully aware of my injury in 2022, and therefore, after thinking about it, I contacted a law firm in Washington State in early 2024. This firm specialized in sexual abuse cases, however they were pretty high-powered and I got the impression from their website that they specialized in suing institution, schools, churches, and the like. On this basis I felt that it was somewhat unlikely they would take up my case–there was probably just not enough percentage in it. Nonetheless, their website indicated that they meant business, so I contacted them and a little while later had a call with an associate from the firm. He told me that all the lawyers were all in court, but gave me a full and proper hearing and said that he believed my story. He also asked me an interesting question, which was, did the abuse happen more or less than 20 times? I said my recollection was that yes, it was over 20 times, and he took a note of this. My impression was that for a case like mine, 20 times was some kind of legal threshold.

A few weeks later the associate got back to me via email. As mentioned above, he said that the firm would decline to take my case, and recommended I pursue the public legal system. He also said that he hoped that I got justice. I thanked him in response, and was not overly disappointed because it was clear that their focus was on institutions and I had done my best.

Now I should mention that before I contacted the law firm, I did Google this fucking guy to see what came up. It is true that I didn’t want to, and still don’t really want to, research this guy, however I wanted to see at a minimum what internet footprint he had. It turned out that he had a website where he described himself as some kind of elite international mediator and the site had a picture of him climbing a mountain.

So I guess he leveraged his legal background into some kind of mediation role, which is guess is all related. And I have no idea, he may have had success as a mediator. In actual fact, it is not even my intention to comment at any length on who or what he is today (I do believe he is still alive). Is it possible that he cleaned himself up in some respect? Maybe. But actually I doubt it. It is my opinion that someone as twisted as he was in his early adulthood doesn’t really get over that. I can forgive a lot of things–for example taking a life when drunk driving or something of that nature. Mistakes are made, and mistakes of that sort are basically unintentional. However, this guy, with his Shovelman action and his subsequent brutality, in my estimation, doesn’t really ever get better. Am I being unfair? Perhaps. It’s really hard to say.

In any case, although the firm turned me down, reaching out to them was one of the best decisions I have ever made. By attempting to work through the legal system I had engaged, fairly and properly, with the available channels, and I felt immeasurably better about the whole thing. I did not at that time decide to pursue the public option, because I am not located in Washington State, and I didn’t feel that taking this route any further would be feasible. Instead, I thought about using the only real platform I have, my blog, to discuss my thoughts on the matter. Aside from the legal system, this seemed to me to be the next best thing. And so here we are.

In what follows I wish to enumerate what I understand to be the long-term effects of my abuse. I will, in the interest of my own privacy and that of others, somewhat undersell these, and it is not my intention to burden the reader with my own issues over time. In addition, I would like to make clear that my encounter with the legal system as well as my somewhat long-gestating decision to go public with my story and my conversations with a few trusted friends, has ameliorated, to a significant degree, the effects of my personal abuse. In any case, here is what I feel:

From my earliest memories I wanted to play the piano. When I was in first or second grade I asked my mother to enroll me in piano lessons, and she declined, saying that she had no money. A few years later my brother Mike was allowed to take cello lessons, and he became very good very fast. I would wait in the car while my brother and my mother attended cello lessons there on the South Hill in Spokane. Naturally, I never held this against my brother, who was an awesome musician and I was proud of him, however I did resent, for a very long time, being denied the opportunity to pursue music. It is my understanding that although people can learn music at different times in life, the earlier the better. I have subsequently tried to learn the keyboard by myself, and somehow was able to play “Ocean Rain” by Echo and the Bunnymen and “Someone I Care About” by the Modern Lovers. I didn’t dominate Ocean Rain, but it was least passable. But I still can’t really read or play music. I wish, beyond almost anything, that I would have had the chance to learn music at an early age.

However, my strong feeling, underlined by years of reflection and memory spiraling, is that the abuse from this guy essentially crippled my left hand. I don’t know exactly how I know this, but I have always known it. So I probably wouldn’t have been that great at piano anyway, because the left hand is pretty important. And, the destruction of my left hand is intimately and directly connected to my crippled ambidexterity, the inversion of my extraversion, as well as my somewhat ambiguous sexuality. I will take up these issues in turn.

First, as mentioned above, there was as a result of the abuse, a long-term impact on my left hand. When I was very young, maybe four, I learned to swim in the pool at Stanford, and my strong memory is that I was developing a certain ambidexterity. Ambidexterity is related in some respects to dyslexia, which I also have a very mild case of, however it also has some salubrious aspects, for example in sports and music. I understand this intuitively and experientially, that I could have been a good piano player if I had been able to take lessons and if I had not been, essentially, crippled from the repeated abuse. Thus, the epigraph from Dylan at the top. It’s been forty-five years since I was first abused by this guy, and only now is my left hand, so to speak, advancing.

Second, as mentioned above, I was an extravert until I was six years old when I suddenly turned into a pretty serious introvert. Now, I absolutely don’t wish to imply at all that one orientation is better than another–both have great strengths. However, the issue here is that I was one thing, and then became another. And this corresponded to, and was directly triggered by, the abuse that I suffered. Somehow, the repeated and protracted abuse turned me inward. I no longer trusted people, essentially, and although I still liked, and still do, many people, something went off track. This is the reality.

Third, I know for an absolute fact that my sexuality was deeply damaged by this guy. I can’t speak to any other form of abuse, however my case of male on male abuse, which I experienced (and yes I absolutely categorize my experience as sexual abuse because he violated every part of my body including my genitals) led to a situation where it became for me, once I hit puberty, somewhat difficult to work out what my sexuality was and in what direction it ran. I was, without doubt, attracted to girls, however in the back of my mind there was some kind of lingering, and for me uncomfortable, ambiguity, as well as a distinct inability to approach women. Now, I fully understand that the inability to approach women is a pretty normal aspect of heterosexual teenagers, who are awkward at the best of times, but I always sort of knew that there was something else going on. And what was going on was, my genitalia was first touched, without my consent obviously, for lack of a better term, by an adult male when I was six years old. And that damaged me.

In essence, and again I know instinctively this to be the case, the abuse was so brutal and so protracted that it in essence re-wired my brain. As with repressed memory, I don’t wish to take a strong position on the issue of the left-brain and the right-brain, although I have read and deeply integrated the book The Master and His Emissary, by Iain McGilchrist, which goes into this matter in far greater detail, and with far greater insight, than I will ever achieve. What I know is the connections within my brain were compromised, indeed fractured, by the abuse. Although it took years for me to fully work this out, I have absolutely no doubt that this is the case. It was, in my belief, something about the pure digging of his fingers that did the damage. Some light tickling would not, I think, have had this effect, however the intensity and depth of his action were, I know, of a completely different level.

Basically, I have been dealing with long-term PTSD from his attacks, dealing with it for 45 years in one way or another, and 15 years more intensely. And you might say “hey there Matty baby, how do you know that your supposed ambidexterity, for example, was so compromised by this guy’s actions?” In answer to that I wish to make an analogy to the trans issue. Now I understand that the trans issue is highly political, and, I guess, pretty complex. However my basic stance is as follows: I do not believe that people who experience feelings of transsexuality or gender dysphoria, basically, are “making it up.” A few may be for various reasons, however I believe that, generally speaking, the set of feelings they experience are real, and also because I have never had them, I cannot speak to them with any authority. Such it is with sexual abuse. The feelings and understandings of sexual abuse victims are, I believe, valid and need to be understood in the context of they know best what the effects of the abuse were. While I cannot perhaps fully explain how I know what I know, I know.

I have a few final thoughts. The first is, as mentioned above and now underlined, my bother also received similar treatment from this guy. I mention this only because I have, ever since, suffered from a great degree of guilt for my inability to protect my brother at that time. Indeed, it was primarily this aspect of the situation, more so than the damage to myself alone, that caused me to direct my anger at my abuse to my mother, and by extension my father and Nancy. I still carry this guilt, and don’t suppose I will ever really get over it. Once again, there is a good deal more to the story, but that’s all I really wish to say at this point.

The second refers to what I described above as the re-wiring of my entire mind and body. Perhaps there is a more clinical term for this, and I think that psychologically alert readers will be able add understanding around this, however this is the best description I can offer. As the second quote at the top of this piece alludes to, the life we have led has been what it has been. I strongly wish I had never suffered the abuse that I did, and have had as a consequence, some of the most painful imaginable situations, however the mere fact that I cannot turn back the clock means that the life I have lived will have to stand, in all of its glory and messiness. This is true, I think, for everyone.

Finally, and I am in no way being facetious, I want to express my deep indebtedness to the great Craig Finn. Craig Finn is the lead singer and songwriter from the bands Lifter Puller and The Hold Steady, and has also had a substantial solo career. One of my very favorite songs of all time is “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight,” by Finn, which I have written about at some length here, and from which the third epigraph for this piece comes from. I am not exaggerating when I say that Finn saved my life, probably more than once, and has, over time, helped me overcome the damage done by my abuse. Thank you Mr. Finn sir. I love you.

I will choose to close this narrative here. As alluded to above, there is a lot more to the story, however in the interest of the privacy of a range of people, not the least of which myself, I will desist. What I would like to say at the end of the day is, abusing a child is never a fair fight. And so I am deploying the only real tool that I have at my disposal, my pen. Thank you for reading.

Dedication:

For all my friends and family who have taken such good care of me over the years. I wouldn’t be here without you. And for Spencer Krug, the greatest piano player I am aware of.

Note: It you enjoyed this piece, you may also enjoy the other pieces below which take up somewhat similar themes.

On the Sarah Lawrence Kids: My Take
On the Song “Encounter at 3 AM”

Posted on by

Scenes from St. George’s VIII: On the Passing of Dyche Alsaker

Say hello to Mr. Midnight
tell him he’s still got that same old shine
Tall, dark, walking wounded
heart as lonesome as mine

Paul Westerberg, refracted

Note: I thought I was done with the Scenes from St. Georges series, however circumstances have arisen such that I am compelled to write one final entry. I recently learned that my high school classmate and friend, Dyche Alsaker, passed away in September of this year. This is a tremendously sad circumstance, and my heart goes out to Dyche’s family and all of those, and there were many, who loved him. In addition, I wish here to write a kind of second coda to my last piece in the St. George’s series, which can be found here. In that piece I wrote about my friendship with Dyche, mostly during senior year and the summer after, as well as a regrettable conflict that arose between our respective fathers several years after we graduated. I won’t reprise all of that here, however suffice it to say that, in a set of events that had really nothing to do with Dyche and myself, Dyche’s father was part of the board of directors of the school when my father left after challenging the then principal, and I guess by extension the board. Here is the second coda.

I wrote seven pieces in my series from St. George’s over a few years, and the first six were easy. These were mostly cheerful and sometimes humorous reminiscences about my time there and some of the characters, students and teachers, that populated the school. The seventh piece, on the other hand, took a while. This was because of its somewhat difficult content and because the structure and tone needed to be a little different, however mostly this was because I wanted Dyche’s permission, essentially, to publish it. Readers of that piece may recall that it dealt with the end of my father’s time at St. George’s, which stretched over two decades. The way that time ended was, I believe, deeply painful to both my father and my mother, and as a result, I guess, they have never really talked to me about it in any detail. As I wrote in the prior piece, I had to sort of piece things together from bits and pieces I heard over time. Because Dyche’s father was also a central player in that drama, and because I hadn’t talked to Dyche since that time when I was working on the series, I didn’t know how he felt about that whole time, and what he might think about the piece which would end up being dedicated to him.

The St. George’s series had a number of readers, mostly I suppose because over time people become increasingly nostalgic and some folks probably re-lived their own years at the school though my memories, which was really gratifying. Dyche was one of my best readers, and he commented on a number of the pieces, and helped shape one of them as well. Therefore, when it came to the last piece, I actually wanted to talk to him and get him to vet what I was working on, so to speak. So I contacted him through Facebook and told him what I was planning and that I wanted to connect. At first he said that he had to think about it, and then he got back to me and said he would like to talk. I called him, sometime in late 2022 as I recall, from the street here in Kyoto, and we talked for about an hour. He told me some of the things that were going on in his life, mentioned how much he enjoyed the series, talked about The Replacements, and then we talked about the conflict that led to my father leaving St. George’s. Dyche mentioned that his own father, much like mine, seemed to avoid the whole topic, and that what he himself knew of the events were also pieced together from reports of other of our classmates. We discussed how odd it was that the topic was essentially verboten in both of our households, and he gave me his blessing to write the piece. We parted on good terms, and I was very grateful to him for his time and his kindness. Then, I sat on the piece for more than a year because I just couldn’t find the tone.

Finally, in early 2024, I re-engaged with the piece and was able to get my head around a structure. The first half of the piece was an easy-going and upbeat account of my memories of hanging out with Dyche for a few months between high school and college in 1992, and the second half was a kind of reconstruction of what I understood to have occurred between our fathers and the school board in the early part of this century. I was happy with what I came up with, but still felt the need to run it by Dyche before I hit publish. So I sent him a draft by email, and he said he had a lot going on but he’d get back to me soon. About a week later he wrote back saying he thought I had written fairly and congratulated me on the whole series. He also said something kind of funny, which was that he was thinking of asking me for an update on the piece but didn’t want to seem egotistical. I was once again moved and grateful to him; I made some edits and published the piece. Maybe because of its content, or perhaps because it had been a while since I had updated the series, the piece got somewhat less feedback than the earlier ones, however a number of people read and reacted to the piece. I was done with St. George’s and moved on to writing about the songwriter Craig Finn.

I am not sure about this, and people who were closer to Dyche in his later years than I would know, but I wonder if he was already sick when he wrote to me in 2024. If he was, he didn’t mention it. When we communicated that year he alluded to some challenges in his life, but I’m not sure.

Before I close, I want to mention one memory I have of Dyche that I left out of the earlier piece. I recall him saying once that “if someone asks you to do something, do it really badly. That way they’ll never ask you again.” Now Dyche did many things very well, so I think he was just being sarcastic, but I always found this comment funny, and it stuck with me.

Overall, as I wrote prior, Dyche was a big influence on my life in terms of the depth of his music fandom. And, I really liked him. He was funny, generous, and had a huge heart. Everyone impacts someone I guess, but Dyche impacted so many people in a positive way. He will be greatly missed.

Dedication: As piece VII was already dedicated to Dyche, I guess this one will be for Spokane. The picture in the header is of the Spokane River, not the one that passed by the St. George’s campus, but the larger one. I never really loved Spokane to be honest, and haven’t been back since 2001, but I know a lot of people do. I understand this–it’s where we grew up after all.

Posted on by

On Good Talkers and Great Talkers (featuring my friends Kelly Rudd and Marc Campbell)

New Note: I am republishing this piece on the back of a recent exchange in our group chat with Kelly Rudd. As detailed below, Kelly is a great talker, and like many a great talkers he is also periodically full of it. We were reminiscing about a trip to the Selkirk Mountains in 1992 with Kelly, Mason Anderson, Richard Barkley, and myself. We were supposed to spend about a week up in the mountains, however a big storm came in. We had to shelter in place, and then left the next day. Kelly was responsible for the tent situation, and had only packed a tarp–no tent. So we struggled to put up the tarp in the rain and then I said I would sleep in the car rather than under the tarp. The whole area was already soaked, “pre-soaked” in Kelly’s questionable formulation, because at the end of the day, soaked is soaked.

In any case, after I said I would sleep in the car Kelly came up with the immortally absurd formulation: “Well you will actually get just as wet because of the condensation.” Uh huh. I slept in the car and was, predictably, bone dry and the boys were pre-soaked, regular soaked, and post-soaked. We drove on to Wyoming and had a great trip, but the condensation episode has stuck with me ever since.

This piece also features my friend from Hamilton College, Marc Campbell, as well as some fast talking by me. I hope you enjoy it.

I think I’m a pretty good talker. But I’m not a great talker. The reason I know this is because my friend Kelly is a great talker. And I can’t hold a candle to him.

In this piece I want to explore what makes a good talker good and a great talker great. Here, our conclusion can be partially stated upfront: a good talker will almost always also be a good BSer. Everyone knows what BS is, of course, and the term is usually used pejoratively, more or less, for example in phrases such as “oh that’s a bunch of BS,” or “come on dude, cut the BS.” However, BS is clearly also an essential element of the talker’s toolkit (from now on we will simply use the term “talker” unless specifically delineating between a good and a great talker). BS alone though does not a great talker make. There has to be something else involved. Let’s see if we can figure out what this might be.

We will start with an example from my professional life. I work in a high school in Japan, and it’s a fairly complex place. Although a Japanese school, it also features two different international courses and over time we have welcomed a wide variety of visitors from around the world for various reasons. A few years back, we hosted a group of educators from Abu Dhabi, including at least one representative of the Abu Dhabi Ministry of Education. My boss at the time was a Japanese gentlemen who spoke decent, but not phenomenal, English. He was set to give a welcome speech to this group, and my boss loved, absolutely loved, networking and hosting visitors at our school. It was his singular passion. The higher ranked or more “prestigious” they were the better. A visiting teacher from Elton College would be treated like the Pope, accorded all of the pomp and ceremony of a royal visit. Although an inveterate networker, my boss was not a natural public speaker, and he was uncomfortable making such an important speech in English, so he asked me to write something for him. Some people might have found this request to be annoying or even insulting, but I relished it. The role of the ghostwriter is one I greatly enjoy, because it gives me a chance to slip a few little things in there just for me. I have a bit of a weakness for inside jokes.

The Abu Dhabi visit was in early April, just in time for cherry blossom season in Japan. A few places around the world, including Washington D.C., celebrate cherry blossom season; however, in Japan it’s huge. People come from around the world to see the blossoms, and there’s even a special type of event called the hanami where folks from salarymen to universities students and everyone in between will set up tarps or blankets by the river or in a park under the cherry blossoms and get blasted. The Japanese refer to the cherry blossoms as sakura. So, I thought, what would be more natural than to open the speech with a reference to the sakura?

I don’t remember much about the speech, but I do remember the first few lines. They went like this:

It is my great pleasure to offer you a very warm welcome to Japan and (school name). We are deeply honored to receive such a prestigious group from the wonderful country of Abu Dhabi. And indeed, you have fortunately come at the perfect time to see the famous Japanese cherry blossoms, the sakura.

Now this might not sound too out of the ordinary, however for me the genius lay in the last comma. In my head I heard a deep and pregnant pause between “the famous Japanese cherry blossoms” and “the sakura.” As I like to say, it was funny to me. I sent the speech to my boss and we didn’t really have time to go over it, so I just hoped for the best. Now my boss wasn’t much of a writer, but he was, in his own way, a showman. He had clearly spent time practicing the speech, and when he spoke these first lines his delivery exceeded even my wildest expectations. Not only was the pregnant pause there, it was deeper and more profound than I had dreamed. He has perfectly grasped the import of the comma. This dude fucking nailed it.

What does this have to do with BS? Well, when I wrote the lines above, in my own way I was BSing. I knew my boss’s taste for VIPs ran deep and so made sure to lay it on pretty thick (“great pleasure,” “very warm welcome,” “wonderful country,” etc.). Also, the comma, in its own way, was total BS. And the fact that my boss killed his delivery meant that he not only understood BS on an elemental level, he relished it too.

Later on during that same meeting with the Abu Dhabi folks my boss presented about some English vocabulary system our school was using as part of the English curriculum. This was a software program designed by my boss’ buddy that the school had paid an absurd amount of money to lease. It was, predictably, a piece of trash. However, my boss built it up as the greatest piece of educational tech since whatever, and showed a little of it on an overhead screen. The visitors were no dummies though, and one of them asked a sensible question: “why did you decide to go with this essentially handmade program where there are a lot of well-known and tested commercial programs available?” My boss wasn’t going to touch that one, so he turned it over to me. Now, I knew this thing was complete garbage; however, I also recognized, in addition to the need to save face, the opportunity to lay on a little BS. So I said something like:

“Well, that’s a really good question (always start with this when BSing an answer because it gives you time to think)

we chose this program after looking carefully at the alternatives (not true—we had looked at no alternatives)

and we felt in the end that this program best met the very specific needs of Japanese learners (also total nonsense—there is nothing so specific about Japanese learners that a software program needs to be so tailored).

In all our experience working with Japanese students, we felt like we needed something bespoke and fit-for-purpose, and we are really happy with our choice… (when BSing it is advised to throw around words like “bespoke” and “fit-for-purpose” in the hopes of throwing your listener(s) off the scent).

I probably went on some more, but you get the idea. The questioner thanked me and we moved on, however I knew that I had not in fact thrown him off the scent. He knew that I was BSing; I knew that he knew that I was BSing; and I like to think that maybe he knew that I knew that he knew that I was BSing. If so, he played his part in our little production to a T as well.

How did I feel about packing so much BS into one afternoon? I felt great about it. In the long history of bullshit corporate communications, the exaggerations and white lies I told that day rank pretty low down the list in terms of negative externalities if you will, and our visitors went away feeling welcomed and catered to, BS vocabulary programs aside. I guess in this instance I was a “pretty good talker.” However a great talker needs to do more than smooth over an awkward question in an education meeting. A great talker needs to prove it when there is substantially more on the line. To explicate this point, let’s take a look at an incident where my friend Kelly talked some dude out of murdering us.

My friend Kelly is a great talker. Ever since I’ve known him, he’s been a serial exaggerator, however, far from being a limitation to his conversational ability, it’s a huge asset. This is because, unlike another type of exaggerator who exaggerates their own role or place in a story (let’s call this the “narcissistic exaggerator,”) Kelly instead downplays his own role while simultaneously boosting usually one other player into comic, even mythic heights (let’s call this the “comic exaggerator”). Kelly is a lawyer, and if he’s telling a story about a country lawyer he’s run across, for instance, this fellow gets built up and built up, his every mannerism and turn of phrase turned up to 11, until we have not just a comic figure, but a heroic one. As for Kelly’s own role in whatever drama he is recounting, that gets dismissed with an “aw shucks, I was just kind of there” wave of his metaphorical hand. Kelly has had this ability forever, and has honed it to an art form. I have good reason to think that his abilities as a talker are instinctual, rather than learned, however, because of an instance where he had to draw on skills far different than his normal style.

One time my friend Kelly and I decided (well he decided and I went along) to walk from suburban Spokane where he lived all the way up to a kind of resort/ lodge place high up on Mount Spokane. The walk was about 20 miles, and would take all day. Now, a 20 mile hike is one thing—that’s pretty long—however hikes can be quite pleasant for those so inclined. This was not a hike though, as the whole thing was on public roads, most of them out in the middle of nowhere. All in all, this was not the best plan Kelly ever came up with, however we set out and were about 10 or 12 miles into the trek, outside of town, when a reddish car came flying down the hill in front of us. The driver saw us and swerved right at us. This, unfortunately, is something that sometimes happens in the U.S. for reasons passing understanding. This dude though didn’t just swerve toward us a bit, he full on tried to take us out. So much so in fact that his car went perpendicular to the road and halfway into the ditch and got stuck.

This seemed bad, and my instinct was to run with Kelly into the nearby field. Kelly, however, had other ideas. The guy got out of the car and started yelling at us: “you fucking kids…, fuck you…, etc.” Not very creative, but still pretty worrying. Kelly though had the situation in hand from the get-go. He walked right over to the guy (who was at least 10 or 15 years older than us) and started talking to him:

Hey buddy, what’s going on? You having a bad day man? Anything I can do? Looks like your car get a bit stuck there—that’s OK, my friend and I will help dig you out.

Now I knew Kelly pretty well and knew he was a good talker from way back as mentioned. But this was another level. And the effect on the irate driver was incredible. In no time at all the guy was apologizing to Kelly, telling him his woes, and asking how we could get his car out together. Sure enough a few minutes later we were all three pushing and pulling his car out of the ditch and he went on his way.

What was going on here? Kelly must have realized somehow that the driver didn’t bear any specific ill-will toward us and was just engaging in a little road-rage because he was an angry about something or other. Also, the guy’s car was truly stuck, and neither Kelly nor I are small dudes, so he might not have liked his odds if it came to a fight. But there was just something about the way Kelly approached and disarmed him so quickly that I couldn’t really wrap my mind around. I realized then that my friend Kelly was not just a good talker, he was a great talker.

Although I’ve never seen anyone else pull off what Kelly did on that day, the general form of what he did I have seen before. In fact, a very similar, but slightly lower-stakes, incident happened when I was in university and attended a fraternity party. I was not in a fraternity and didn’t want to be. I did go to some fraternity parties just because that was what people did. Occasionally these parties could be creative, but mostly usually they were every bit as cliched as you might imagine—bros broing out and trying to get laid, women doing whatever the female equivalent of broing out might be, drunk billiards in the basement, people passing out on jungle juice, etc. Not only do these sound like terrible parties now, they were pretty terrible even back then. Nonetheless, I was at one, along with some friends from my dorm including Marc Campbell. Marc is maybe not the purest form of great talker that Kelly is, but he’s pretty darn good. While Kelly’s style is often oratorical (and BS laden—more on that in a moment), Marc’s style is smoother and has more of a cool jazz feel. Where Kelly goes for the comedically dramatic exaggeration, Marc stays more in the realm of gentle patter. Both talkers though achieve a sort of hypnotic effect through their respective styles, and Marc’s patter came in handy at this particular party.

We were a group of about five, and had barely entered the door when some guy I didn’t know came up and started getting in our face for no apparent reason. He was directing his attention to another member of our group—maybe they had run into each other before? It wasn’t clear, but what was clear is that this guy was itching for a fight right out of the gate. Now I have been in plenty of situations where I have had to try to defuse something or someone from kicking off, and have some skills in this arena. However, most people’s instincts, my own included, still tend to be a little defensive. Most people, even if committed to defusal, might say something like: “hey dude, settle down. There’s no need to be so aggro man. Just chill.” This kind of approach can work, however there is no guarantee that it will. Sometimes people who are looking to pick a fight will fall back on a kind of bizarre and unwarranted self-righteousness, coming back with something like “I’m not gonna fucking chill man—don’t tell me what to do. You wanna see aggro, I’ll give you aggro.” So the “dude settle down” approach is a bit hit or miss. Marc Campbell could do better.

Instead of telling the guy to chill, Marc Campbell pulled out a Kelly-like move. Although he was not the direct object of the guy’s ire, he went right over to the guy and stuck his hand out. “Hi I’m Marc,” he said “nice to meet you. What’s your name?” Just like that. Marc didn’t even reference the fact that this guy was acting like a total ass-clown for no reason at all—in fact he acted like he didn’t even notice it. The effect on this guy was exactly the same as with the angry driver. The guy calmed down immediately and he and Marc started rapping. In no time at all the situation was completely defused and everyone was friends.

Read more
Posted on by

Craig Finn on Nightlife and Adult Relationships II: Killer Parties

Killer Parties (Live) — Nights That Almost Killed Us, Nights That Made Us

Note: This is the second part of our series on songs of The Hold Steady that take up the intertwined themes of nightlife and the complexities of adult relationships. Part I is available. This piece will deal with “Killer Parties,” specifically the live version from A Positive Rage.

“Killer Parties,” written by Craig Finn, closes Almost Killed Me (2003) and provides its title line. But the 2008 live version is the definitive one for me — a 10-minute slow burn that opens not with guitars but with an invocation. Finn’s spoken intro sets the terms for who this band is, who the audience is, and why these communal nights matter.

I. The Invocation

Before a single lyric, Finn does what Finn does: greets the tribe.

He jokes, he rambles, he self-deprecates, he misdirects — and then he lands it:

There’s so much joy in what we do up here. Thank you for sharing that joy with us.

That’s the thesis of The Hold Steady.
Everything else is commentary.

The band isn’t just a band; Finn isn’t just a frontman. The Hold Steady is a community, a lineage, a shared memory palace built out of long nights, near-misses, inside jokes, loud guitars, and people who actually want to be there.

When I saw them twice at the Brooklyn Bowl in 2018, I wrote:

Hold Steady fans are pretty much fanatics… They were super possessive of their space, they all seemed to know each other. One guy sized me up and said, “I want to not like you, but there’s some kind of aura around you, man.”

That’s the thing: the fans are a little cliquey, but the band itself is radically welcoming. Finn means it when he thanks people. He means it when he says he’s met half the room. He means it when he collapses the distinction between performer and audience:

“We are, and you are, The Hold Steady.”

That’s what the spoken intro really says.

II. Charlemagne and the Unsaid

The song opens with a classic Finn move — an elliptical report of something that happened, but we’re not going to get the details:

If they ask about Charlemagne,
be polite and keep it vague —
another lover lost to the restaurant raids.

Charlemagne is the old recurring character, drug-dealer-adjacent, always on the edge of calamity. Did he OD? Get busted? Get swallowed by his own myth?
Finn doesn’t tell you. He protects the dignity of the fallen.

This is identical in spirit to the opening of “A Bathtub in a Kitchen.”

I’ve known people like this. You’ve known people like this. Someone falls off the map, and when they resurface, it’s a new person in the same body. The specifics get blurry; the compassion gets sharper.

III. Leaving, Loving, Running

The next verses broaden out:

We left because we were young and in love.
We left because we needed space.
We left because we heard about this mythical country called the United States.

When Finn sings that line, he’s not being literal — he’s describing the classic American story: the pilgrimage to the realbig city. The wide open possibility. The idea that somewhere else — New York, especially — is where the real life is.

I relate.
I left my hometown and moved halfway across the world.
Finn moved from Minneapolis to New York; I moved from Spokane to Asia.
And like him, I sometimes feel pangs for what I missed.

But I needed space. I needed something bigger.

IV. Killer Parties

Then we hit the geography of sin:

Virginia for lovers.
Philly for brotherhood.
Pensacola for pills.
Ybor City for the nights that go too far.

And then the line we can quote directly:

“Killer parties almost killed me.”

Finn doesn’t romanticize this. He’s looking back at the nights that were ecstatic and dangerous at the same time. Nights that reshaped his body chemistry. Nights that made him who he is.

I’ve had my run at nightlife — nothing like Finn’s, but enough to understand the way one night can rewrite your wiring, for better or worse.

V. The Blur and the Transcendence

The final verses repeat themselves, because that’s how memory works:

We partied (I think?).
We departed from our bodies.
We woke up in Ybor City.

The nights are a blur — Finn partied but gets the details secondhand. What he does remember is the transcendence, the weightless moment when the body gives out and the self floats somewhere above it. And then the long, punishing hangover that follows.

For me, Ybor City has always functioned like El Dorado — the mythical endpoint of the American night. Maybe Finn has been there; maybe he hasn’t. Maybe you can only reach it by running the gauntlet of long days and longer nights. Maybe you can only get there by losing yourself a little too fully.

I’m not sure Ybor City would be good for me.

VI. The Ex-Introvert Who Still Wants the Night

And here’s where my story threads into the song:

I am an ex-introvert reinvented as an extrovert — something I’ve talked about with several friends. I’m too old for some of the clubbing I once did, but I still love the nightlife, still love running around, talking to strangers, seeing where the night wants to take me.

And it takes you to strange places.

I think this is the real theme of “Killer Parties”:
the appeal of the night, the call of the road, and the deep human need to leave the known world and find out what’s waiting elsewhere.

I return to this song in all kinds of circumstances — when I miss the road, when I need a reminder that the self is porous, when I want to remember what it felt like to be new somewhere.

VII. The Circle Closes: Community

And yet — for all the mythology and all the escapism — Finn always brings it back to community.

The Hold Steady isn’t just Finn narrating the lives of misfits. It’s Finn saying:

We survived the killer nights.
We made it home.
We found each other.

The live intro becomes the retrospective moral:

There’s so much joy in what we do up here.
Thank you for sharing that joy with us.

And so the whole arc — the wandering, the leaving, the nightlife, the blurring of memory, the near-death nights — ends where it must:

With the people who showed up.
The people who stayed.
The people in front of the stage.
The people who are, themselves, The Hold Steady.

Posted on by

Craig Finn on Nightlife and Adult Relationships I: Most People are DJs

I. Setting the Frame — What the Song Is “About,” and What Finn Says It’s About

“Most People Are DJs” appears on Almost Killed Me (2003), track three if you don’t count the spoken prologue. If “Killer Parties” is the band’s thesis on community, “Most People Are DJs” is the thesis on the scene—why it’s fun, why it’s corrosive, and why it matters.

Finn himself once said:

“Just a reaction to life in NYC in the 2000s… The part I don’t get is when I get emails that start with ‘Come see me DJ’ and end with ‘Here is what I’m going to play…’ I think DJing, like rock criticism, tends to be a way for people to participate in the ‘scene’ without the risks to the ego that go along with producing art.”

His hedge—“Of course, I don’t apply this to all DJs”—isn’t convincing. And that’s okay. Artists don’t owe us diplomatic consensus statements. What he’s really saying is: there is a gap between creating and curating. Between risk and commentary. Between the ones who make things and the ones who play things.

Now: I don’t fully agree with him.
And that’s part of what makes this song fun to write about.

Because the truth is:
Finn is reacting to a very specific time and place—New York in the early 2000s—where the “scene” was swollen with people who wanted proximity to art more than they wanted the agony of making it.

But he also wrote a song so overflowing with confidence and adrenaline that, even if you disagree with the premise, the song still wins.

II. Alliteration, Lineage, and the New York Scene (Early 2000s)

One thing that hits immediately in “Most People Are DJs” is the density—the alliteration, the internal rhyme, the almost cartoonish velocity of the lines. Finn came out of Lifter Puller, a band whose songs were so tightly coiled with alliteration they were practically tongue-twisters set to guitars. That sonic fingerprint carries directly into Almost Killed Me.

“Jet skis into the jetty,”
“skipping off the good ship,”
“searching for the merchant”—
this is Finn still flexing the Lifter Puller muscle.

But something is different now.
A subtle pivot.

With The Hold Steady, the alliteration stops feeling like a hallucinatory fever dream and starts to feel like a narrator in full command of his mythmaking. LP was chaos; THS is authorship. LP was young-person disorientation; THS is a guy in his early thirties cataloguing his own survival.

And that survival intersects directly with Finn’s take on the early-millennium New York City “scene.”

If you didn’t live there then, it’s hard to reconstruct the vibe, but from the outside—I was never a New York resident, just a visitor—it felt like every bar and backroom was filled with:

  • people wanting to be seen
  • people curating themselves more than expressing themselves
  • self-mythologizing in real time
  • and a thousand micro-scenes stacked on top of each other

New York has always been a city where people come to reinvent themselves, but in the 2000s, with the rise of the internet, music blogs, Vice magazine, and the early social media era, there was suddenly an audience for every aesthetic micro-gesture. DJ nights proliferated not necessarily because people loved vinyl but because DJing let you participate in culture without risking the humiliation of failure that comes with creation.

Finn clearly bristled at this dynamic—at least enough to write this song about it.
But crucially: he’s not sneering. He’s needling.
He’s amused and annoyed in equal measure.

Because he had just spent years in a band (LP) that nearly no one outside Minneapolis cared about. He’d paid his dues in the purest sense—tiny clubs, no money, hardcore kids, bad drives, worse mornings—and so when he encountered the Manhattan version of a “scene,” it must have felt surreal. A party ecosystem where participation wasn’t dependent on talent or risk, just aesthetics.

And so the song becomes a little manifesto:

Some people create.
Most people curate.
I know which side I’m on.

But I don’t fully agree with Finn here. DJing, like criticism, can absolutely be an art. Plenty of DJs are actual geniuses of sequencing, mood, texture, and propulsion. And Finn’s own songs rely heavily on the idea that everyone constructs a soundtrack for their life. He lives inside the psychology of people who soundtrack their heartbreak, their addictions, their breakthroughs, their mistakes.

So his jab at DJs is both sincere and playful—an elbow thrown by someone who knows perfectly well that without DJs, nightlife wouldn’t exist.

Still, the tension is productive.
It pushes the song forward.
It gives it its bite.

This is where Finn’s shift from Lifter Puller to The Hold Steady becomes clear:
LP described nightlife as a labyrinth; THS describes it as a world he made it out of, barely, and will now narrate for the rest of us.

Almost Killed Me is a debut in name only—it’s actually a rebirth.

III. The Ice Machine, the Trash Bin, and the Myth of Mis-Spent Youth

If the early verses of “Most People Are DJs” sketch out the external landscape—Ybor City confetti, jet skis, five-second dealers, Phil Lynott doppelgängers—then the center of the song turns inward. The gaze shifts from the scene itself to the person who once tried to survive inside it.

And it starts with a line that sounds like a joke until it doesn’t:

“I was a teenage ice machine…”

It’s metaphorical, but also literal in the sideways way Finn always manages:
a kid who kept it cold, kept it contained, kept taking in whatever the night handed him. Drinking until he dreamed, and when he dreamed, dreaming only of the scene. It’s the way youth can feel like preparation for nightlife, not the other way around.

Then comes the image of the little lambs looking up at him—those younger kids just entering the arena. There’s no arrogance in it; it’s simply the moment you realize you’ve shifted from participant to veteran, from the kid on the floor to the older presence leaning against the bar. It’s an eerie, recognizable sensation for anyone who came up in tight little music worlds, whether Minneapolis hardcore or the DIY venues that orbit all cities.

And then the next admission hits harder:

“I was a Twin Cities trash bin…”

Here Finn stops ornamenting the story. He talks frankly about taking everything the scene gave him and jamming it into his system. He doesn’t romanticize those years—he frames them as messy, hungry, adrenaline-charged, and sometimes self-destructive. It’s the classic Hold Steady blend of humor, regret, and affection for the person he once was. Anyone who’s lived through their own version of that era understands the mixture of pride and embarrassment that comes with looking back.

Then the song shifts again, suddenly back in a room, back in a body:

“She got me cornered by the kitchen…”

It’s one of those instantly recognizable nightlife moments—some stranger with a lot on her mind talking too closely, too sincerely, in the wrong place at the wrong time. Finn’s response, “I’ll do anything but listen,” is both funny and revealing. It’s the impatience of a younger self who wants motion, wants noise, wants the next thing, not the emotional monologue of someone he’s just met.

But the real anchor of this section comes next:

“We’re hot soft spots on a hard rock planet.”

This is the line that echoes back to the earlier “tiny white specks” but deepens it. We may be insignificant on the grand scale, but we’re still soft, still human, still easily bruised. For all the bluster and late nights, there’s vulnerability baked into every corner of the scene. Finn recognizes it, even here, even in a song that pretends to be about DJs and parties.

And this middle section becomes the emotional axis for the entire track. The drug years, the clubs, the kitchens, the impatience, the kids, the tiny planets we all carried around–it’s Finn turning his own biography into something mythic and still somehow intimate. It’s the moment the song stops being an anecdote about nightlife and becomes a portrait of the person who lived it.

IV. “Teenage Ice Machine”: Finn’s Youth, My Youth, Everyone’s Youth

This is where the song really cracks open — the run of verses where Finn folds his own misspent youth into the larger portrait of nightlife. It’s the part where the memoirist in him steps forward.

“I was a teenage ice machine / I kept it cool in coolers and I drank until I dreamed…”

Finn describes his early years in Minneapolis with blunt clarity: he was taking whatever the night handed him, jamming it into his system, chasing scenes and dreams and any story worth telling. He’s frank about the drugs, the bravado, the hunger. And that image of “kids like little lambs looking up at me” shows the strange dynamic of growing older inside a scene — one day you realize the new kids think you know something. They think you’ve made it out of the maze.

And Finn knows these kids. He knows their impulsiveness, their devotion, their need to be part of something burning and bright. He knows it because he lived it.

“I was a Twin Cities trash bin / I did everything they’d give me…”

It’s funny, and a little raw — Finn admitting he was just shoveling it all in, whatever “it” was. And the lines about being cornered in the kitchen and doing “anything but listen” land perfectly. This is the social physics of nightlife: the way adrenaline and self-invention outrun patience or reflection. The kitchen confrontation is a tiny scene, but it captures the whole era — Finn always moving, always dodging, always hungry for the next thing, the next rush, the next room.

And then the knockout line:

“We’re hot soft spots on a hard rock planet.”

This connects back to the earlier perspective shift — from Minneapolis sidewalks to this tiny-blue-dot cosmic backdrop. It’s Finn’s version of existentialism: the world is hard, unforgiving, indifferent; we are temporary flashes of warmth against it. But the point isn’t despair. The point is urgency. You don’t get that many nights where it all lines up. You don’t get that many years where your body and your heart and your recklessness harmonize. You take the nights when they come.

This is where the song clicks for me. That line is the thesis.

V. “Everyone’s a Critic and Most People Are DJs”: The Thesis and the Tension

“Baby, take off your beret
Everyone’s a critic and most people are DJs
And everything gets played.”

This is the line that gives the song its name and its pulse. Finn has already sketched the landscape — Ybor City’s chaos, New York’s 2000s absurdities, his own Twin Cities coming-of-age — and now he turns outward, toward the observation that set this whole song off in the first place.

Finn has said himself that this was his early-2000s response to the particular New York ecosystem where everyone wanted to be adjacent to culture without the exposure of making anything. The emails that said “come see me DJ, here’s what I’m going to play,” the ubiquity of people who curated rather than created. And he delivers the line with this mixture of mockery and affection — like a guy who remembers how much he once needed subcultural scaffolding and who also knows how flimsy that scaffolding can be.

But I don’t totally agree with the dismissiveness, and that’s part of why the line hits so hard for me. I think critics can make art, and DJs — literal or metaphorical — can shape the emotional weather of a room. I DJ my own life, like anyone who uses music to modulate their mood or define a moment. Spotify is my deck. The commute is my booth. There’s a pleasure in that autonomy that isn’t fake or lesser, just different.

Still, I get Finn’s point. There’s a risk he’s insisting on: the risk of putting something authentic into the world, the risk of failing publicly, the risk of making something instead of just spinning something. And this is the part where he plants his flag:
he is a maker, not a curator.
And he’s calling out everyone else — kindly, but unmistakably.

The song is gentler than the critique. It’s not a scolding. It’s a reminder: life isn’t a playlist you assemble from the safety of the booth. You have to actually step into the room. You have to actually take the hit.

This is where the song becomes more than a snapshot of early-2000s New York. It’s a life instruction.

Get in the game.

Because eventually everything gets played — your choices, your nights out, the people you loved, the things you messed up, the mornings you woke up on the floor of a city you barely knew. And at the end of all that, you want to be able to say you did it, not that you watched someone else do it.

VI. The Night Rolls On

The final verse snaps everything into focus. Finn works backwards through the chain of a night out—doctor to drugs, packie to taxi, taxi to club—like retracing the evidence after the damage is done. It’s funny and a little grim, but honest: this is how people actually live when they’re young, restless, and trying to outrun something unnamed.

A thousand kids fall in love in these clubs; a thousand end up bleeding.
Two thousand don’t sleep; two thousand still feel pretty sweet.

That’s the gamble of the night. Always has been.

And this is where my own life sits closest to Finn’s. I’ve said before that I’m an ex-introvert reinvented as an extrovert, and the night has been part of that transformation. I’m long past the age where I should be closing clubs, but I still love the energy of being out in the world, meeting people, letting chance decide the direction. The night takes you to weird places, sometimes beautiful and sometimes sketchy, and if you’re wired like me—or like Finn—that current is hard to resist.

And then there’s Ybor City, which in the Finn cosmology feels half-real, half-mythic. A kind of El Dorado of the American night. Did he actually go there? Maybe. But in the logic of the song, it doesn’t matter. Ybor City is where you wake up when the night has taken you further than planned. A place that might kill you or crown you, or both. I’m not sure Ybor City would be good for me. I’m not sure it’s good for anyone.

But the truth is:
the pull of that world—the risk, the release, the possibility—is part of what makes these songs hit as hard as they do.

VII. Closing Thoughts

In the end, Most People Are DJs isn’t one of Finn’s masterpieces, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s a mission statement disguised as a party track. An early announcement that he wasn’t done writing about the night, about the kids who rush into it headlong, about the way music becomes a map for people who don’t quite know where they’re going but desperately want to get there fast.

The song is chaotic, generous, a little arrogant, and very alive—exactly what Almost Killed Me needed to be. It sketches the outlines of the universe Finn will later fill with addicts, romantics, bartenders, prophets, screwups, saints, and that long list of people who show up again and again in his songs because he sees them clearly. Because he was them once.

I keep returning to it not because it’s Finn at his deepest but because it’s Finn at his most open-throated:
young, wired, taking in the world at full volume.

It’s the sound of the door swinging open on everything that would follow—from the great epics (Separation Sunday, Stay Positive, Teeth Dreams) to the late-career short-story gems. You can hear the whole project of The Hold Steady rumbling under this song, even if Finn himself shrugs the song off as a joke at the expense of DJs and critics.

Maybe that’s the secret: sometimes the songs artists dismiss end up revealing more than the ones they cherish.

For me, this one captures something essential about the moment you step into the night—
when the lights go up, the bass starts running, and you feel, for just a second, like anything could happen.

It’s a snapshot of youth, of movement, of mischief and possibility.

And yeah—
I still feel pretty sweet.

Posted on by

I’m Reading Anais Nin’s Diaries

Note: This is a post from a few years ago. As I am now also writing my “memoirs” with the Hamilton series, I thought it would be a good time to bring back Anais. She is an amazing writer and truth-teller.

I’m reading Anais Nin’s 1947-1955 unexpurgated diaries called “Trapeze.”  That’s what I am doing.

Anais Nin is high level. Anais Nin is a dangerous writer. Anais Nin is fucking excellent.  Here is a little bit:

“One handles the truth like dynamite. Literature is one vast hypocrisy, a slant, deception, treachery. All the writers have concealed more than they have revealed.”

“My father died mad. He did not understand what happened to him. I want my suffering to be useful. I want the novel to teach life. I want the novel to accomplish what the analyst does.”

“Great lovers never trust each other.”

And…

“The diary cannot ever be published.”

So that’s it.  I’m reading Anais Nin.

Posted on by

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.

Posted on by · 1 Comment

On the Stage Banter of Matthew Houck and Dean Wareham

Introduction:

This post takes up the subject of stage banter with the hopes of gaining a window into what makes a great artist great. Before we get to stage banter, however, I want to look at Howe Gelb’s spoken introduction to Giant Sand’s cover of “The Pilgrim (Chapter 33).” Stage banter and spoken introductions are, clearly, related animals.

Gelb is the lead singer of the band Giant Sand, and the cover in question first appeared on Nothing Left to Lose, a Kris Kristofferson tribute album. The song was later collected on Giant Sand’s album Cover Magazine. You may know the song–it goes:

he’s a poet/ he’s a picker/ he’s a prophet/ he’s a pusher/ he’s a pilgrim and a preacher and a problem when he’s stoned/ he’s a walking contradiction/ partly fact and partly fiction/ taking every wrong direction on his lonely way back home.

It’s a good song, and Gelb turns in a sound version. But it’s his spoken introduction that really peaks my interest. On Kristofferson’s original he name-checks a number of folks who “had something to do with” the genesis of the song. Gelb repeats the original name-checks, slightly out of order, before listing a set of artists that he, Gelb, learned the song for:

Well, I guess when Kris wrote this song he wrote it for Chris Gantry-he started out doing it though by-ended up writing it for Dennis Hopper, Johnny Cash, Norman Norbert, Funky Donny Fritts, Billy Swan, Paul Seibel, Bobby Neuwirth, Jerry Jeff Walker. Ramblin’ Jack Eliot had a lot to do with it. Me I ended up learning this song for Vic Chesnutt, Jason Lytle, Evan Dando, Polly Jean, Paula Jean, Patsy Jean, Juliana, Victoria, Bobby Neuwirth, Bobby Plant. Curtis John Tucker had a lot to do with it.

The alliterative Bobbys and the matching of Ramblin’ Jack Eliot and Curtis John Tucker make this speech into a mini-poem of sorts, and we know many of the protagonists. Hopper and Cash of course; Jerry Jeff Walker and Ramblin’ Jack Eliot are folk singers, older than Kristofferson; Bobby Neuwirth is a folk singer, multimedia artist, and Dylan confidant in Don’t Look Back. Funky Donny Fritts is a session keyboardist, and I believe Norman Norbert and Billy Swan were session musicians as well. Paul Seibel was also a folksinger-I don’t know him; maybe you do. Kris’ meaning is pretty clear-a song like The Pilgrim doesn’t come from nowhere, and the folksingers he learned from are portals back in time to an earlier tradition to which he generously pays tribute.

Not being myself a 70’s session musician completist I did have to look up a few of the names. The Gelb names are more familiar, expect one. Vic Chesnutt, Jason Lytle and Victoria (Williams) are folk singers (or were, as sadly Chesnutt has passed). Evan Dando, Juliana Hatfield, and P.J. Harvey are/were alt-rock superstars. Bobby Plant would be Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin fame, Bobby Neuwirth is Bobby Neuwirth.

But here’s the point, after listening to Kristofferson and Gelb name-check Funky Donny and Curtis John, I feel an affinity for them-were I to bump into Funky Donny in an airport bar or lounge his presence would resonate with an essential familiarity. Even if I didn’t know precisely that it was he, I would recognize immediately that he was indeed funky, not to mention a serious problem when he’s stoned. And Curtis John Tucker, well, his role is still opaque to me, but he clearly had a lot to do with it.

What both singers hint at in their evocation of the circumstances surrounding the creation of a song is the presence of community behind the music. Behind or beside every Kristofferson is a Norman Norbert, behind every an a Bobby Neuwirth, every Gelb a Curtis John Tucker.

The humanity and camaraderie inherent in the spoken introductions to The Pilgrim remind us that artistic communities are vital in the creation of lasting artistic production–Neuwirth may not have been essential to Dylan’s art in the mid-60’s, but he was instrumental to its vitality; Kristofferson wrote “The Pilgrim” but it wouldn’t have been as good without Paul Seibel. And as for Curtis John Tucker, well he had a lot to do with it.

On the Spoken Introduction of the Band Members of Phosphorescent by Matthew Houck on Live at the Music Hall

On side two of Phosphorescent’s majestic 2015 live album Live from the Music Hall, the band plays a song from their 2005 album Aw Come Aw Wry, called “Joe Tex, These Taming Blues.” Houck’s early Phosphorescent albums are interesting–they are more ambient and keening than his mature work and some of the songs are really long.  Joe Tex is one of the better early songs, and Houck puts a little something special into the first couple lines on the live version: 

Is it ever gonna not be so hard to see you around/ or am I really really really really gonna have to really gonna have to really have to leave town

Houck is a master at harnessing the power of repetition—here each “really” takes on its own character and valance.  The band gives an excellent performance, which goes for about 4 minutes. It is apparently the second last song of the night, because at the end of the song Houck moves to introduce the band. Here he goes, as the band chugs on behind him:

Brooklyn, that’s Scott Stapleton playing that piano right there…

The first “Brooklyn” is loaded with import–Houck is going to drop some wisdom on the folks tonight. Stapleton plays a few understatedly beautiful lilting keys and…

Brooklyn, that’s David Torch playing that percussion right there…

Torch gives a little maracas shake, right on time, as Houck establishes the rhythm and flow of the introductions. The basic elements include a “Brooklyn,” which shifts in valance a little each time, and the band member playing “that (instrument),” “right there.”

Brooklyn, this is Rustin Bragaw playing that bass guitar right there…

A slight shift in the pattern–probably Rustin is standing next to Houck. Bragaw drops a couple of notes on his funky bass and on we go–naturally, the bassist gets the lowest key introduction.

Brooklyn, Christopher Showtime Marine playing those drums right there…

Houck reaches for a higher register here, both on the slightly more breathless and rushed “Brooklyn” and an uptone delivery of Marine’s nickname. Another shift in the pattern–Marine has a moniker. Showtime delivers a healthy drum piece and…

Brooklyn, the trigger finger Ricky…Ray…Jackson playing that guitar and that pedal steel right there, come on…

We’re getting there. The crowd is excited for this one; the pedal steel player is clearly a star. Houck pauses a beat on each name, “Ricky…Ray…Jackson, come on,” and the come on is both an entreaty to the crowd and also a general “come on can you believe this guy!” from the lead singer. Pedal steel is no joke. Also, Ricky Ray’s nickname comes before the name–he is in fact the trigger finger here tonight, his birth name is just data.

The trigger finger plays a couple of high notes and…

Brooklyn, last but certainly not least, the best looking one in the group, Joe Help, playing those keyboards right there, come on.

No fuss around the two-syllable “Joe Help,” which Houck delivers as if it was one word. Joe Help and Joe Tex, good looking guys that’s all.

I can’t tell you what a pleasure this has been y’all. Thank you for being here. Hope you come back again.  We’re going to play one more song; thank you guys so much again.  This is a song called Los Angeles; this is how it goes.

And the band plays a stunning closer.

Read more

Posted on by

On the Between-Song Patter on the Bob Dylan Bootleg Record “Peco’s Blues”

Introduction

Behind any work of art, pretty much, there is some kind of “process.” The scope and complexity of this process differs across art forms, of course. The writer’s process is rather different than that of, let’s say, the magician David Copperfield. I find all artistic processes fascinating, and am drawn specifically to what happens “backstage.” Backstage is a world unto itself.

In the early 1970’s, the film director Sam Peckinpah was making a film called Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and he asked Bob Dylan to do the soundtrack. He also offered him a small role in the movie, a character called Alias. Dylan hadn’t really done a soundtrack before, nonetheless he headed down to Mexico to work on the film with Peckinpah. Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid the film is ok; it’s not my favorite Peckinpah by any means. (That is reserved for Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, with the one and only Warren Oates in the lead role. Oates around this time also starred in the film Cockfighter, which features the greatest rejected tagline of any film even “he came into town with his cock in his hands and what he did with it was illegal in 48 states.”) The Pat Garrett soundtrack in many ways transcends the film, mostly because this is where we are first introduced to “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” which would go on to become one of Dylan’s best known songs, and is a really good soundtrack overall, however I am more interested in an extended set of outtakes from the sessions which are collected on a bootleg record called Peco’s Blues. Peco’s Blues features a number of alternate versions of the best known songs on the soundtrack, including Heaven’s Door and “Billy,” however the most interesting part of Peco’s Blues for me is the black and forth patter between Dylan, his sound engineer Chuck, and his band. This patter, I suggest, opens a fascinating and unique window into Dylan’s working methods and general approach to art. In what follows we will look at each incident of patter or conversation in the order they occur. All of the instances occur within the first 20 minutes of the nearly 70 minute recording as Dylan, his band, and the engineer endeavor to get on the same musical page.

Patter at the End of “Billy 2,” around the 7:34 Mark:

Dylan (D) wraps up a lengthy take of Billy 2 and asks his engineer Chuck (C):

D: Was that any good?

C: Pretty good Bob. What happened was was you hit the mic twice when you were moving around out there and we had a couple of clunks on it.

D: That’s too bad (…) Shit, I wish Sam was here. He’d know what to do.

C: That mic’s just a little more sensitive than the Sennheiser’s and I’m getting a little…

D: That’s too, uh…that’s…

C: And I’m getting a little puff of wind sometimes when you get real close to it when you sing.

D: That’s too sensitive.

C: Let me move it back a little for you Bob.

D: I think we must have got it though Chuck.

C: (with what sounds like a pencil in his mouth) Oh I recorded it, darn tootin’. I had a little puff from your voice once and you knocked the mic twice.

D: Well that might have been alls that we need.

C: You wanna, you wanna hear a playback on it?

D: Yeah, I would.

Comment:

We see right away here that Dylan is the boss and that the engineer is walking on eggshells a little bit. This is made clear by Dylan’s reference to “Sam,” who he obviously thinks is a better engineer than Chuck. We have more than a little sympathy for Chuck, as it wasn’t he that knocked the mic and he is trying his best to give Dylan the relevant information.

I love how Dylan here, while implicitly criticizing Chuck, also picks up on Chuck’s framing of the microphone situation and agrees that “that’s too sensitive.” However, the relative sensitivity of the mic is not Dylan’s main concern. Dylan, famously, likes to work fast. For some of his records that has been a positive, on these the sound and performances come across as organic and coordinated, like all of the players grasped their roles and just ran with them. On other records, Dylan’s preference for speed let’s him down, and songs, and especially the production, can feel rushed, even a little sloppy. Dylan famously warred with Uber-producer Daniel Lanois, who had produced U2 and Peter Gabriel among others before Dylan asked him to produce 1989’s Oh Mercy. Oh Mercy sounds great and was Dylan’s “comeback” album after a mixed, to say the least, mid 80’s period, however Lanois’ sonic fingerprints are all over it. Too much so for Dylan, who wanted a faster, looser approach. Lanois is no pushover, and held his own with Dylan. We get the sense that Chuck is no Lanois.

So, despite the knocks on the mic and the puff of wind, Dylan is going to be fine with using this version on the record. Chuck, of course, is going to want Dylan to play it again. Chuck, or someone, would win this one because the extended take of Billy 2 here is not the one used on the final album. The little tussle between Dylan and Chuck ends in a draw as they agree to listen to the playback.

Patter at the Beginning of “Turkey,” around the 8:40 Mark:

D: Hey Roger, when I stop, when I stop, you stop. I’ll do something else and you figure it out. So it might go like this (Dylan starts playing and the band fills in a little hesitantly behind him).

D: Say Chuck, Chuck?

C: Yeah

D: Let’s take this down and mark it under, uh, Turkey…We got a buzz in the amp.

C: I’m not picking it up.

D: OK come on now.

The band plays on the instrumental Turkey for about a minute before Dylan stops.

D: OK, this is under Turkey.

Dylan begins again, and this time the band fills in much better, the song sounding fuller and tighter in all ways.

Comment:

This is in my opinion the most illuminating of Dylan’s comments and gives us a window into his way of working throughout his career. As mentioned above, Dylan works fast and expects his musicians to do the same. Thus he instructs Roger that when he Dylan stops, Roger is to stop, Dylan will “do something else” and Roger needs to “figure it out.” Dylan’s instructions may not sound very fair to poor Roger, but I think they actually are. A musical team is in this case not unlike a sports team, say a basketball team, where even if an offense is running a designed play or “set,” players need to figure out what’s going on and adjust their own position and movements constantly and on the fly. There is no playbook, not set of absolute rules about how to accomplish this any more than there is a set of rules about how to follow Dylan musically. The musician, like the athlete, just has to work by feel, take in all the information around him or her, and figure it out. If they can, they will keep their job; if not, not.

Patter at the Beginning of “Billy Surrenders,” around the 18:10 Mark:

D: Let’s see now. You know, you know what we want when Billy starts (laughs) this guy Jerry Fielding’s gonna go nuts man when he hears this (laughs). You know what we want when like Pat Garrett comes down from the hills right, and all these guys come out like one by one. And Billy comes out, he’s almost standing in a circle you know, so like (indistinct) one by one and then there’s like a big pause and he stops and there’s silence. You know those big organ notes, those scary things (hums organ notes) (laughs). Can you get behind that? (Dylan and the band laughing.)

Comment:

The recording of the Pat Garrett soundtrack was pretty complicated, in large part because Jerry Fielding, Peckinpah’s usual composer, was relegated to a supporting role and apparently resented it. Accounts differ as to whether Fielding quit, walked off set (and maybe came back), actually did try to advise Dylan as requested, or some combination of the above, however the history of the film makes clear that there was friction. Dylan is clearly aware of the tension with Fielding, and makes a joke about it in a place where it doesn’t even seem relevant. Dylan seems to almost revel in the conflict, setting up Fielding to his band as a “suit” who is not in the field so to speak, and who Dylan enjoys winding up with his musical choices. Whatever the exact situation with Fielding was, the issue is clearly a live one at the time of recording.

My sense is that Dylan is mostly talking to his band here, as there are a number of people in the background laughing along with Dylan through this monologue. Despite his reputation for playing fast and loose most of the time, Dylan shows a pretty good grasp of particular scenes in the film and clearly knows what he wants. The “big organ notes” he mentions do indeed feature on the soundtrack, however maybe not to the extent Dylan wanted. I have to laugh at the very 1970’s question “can you get behind that?”

Conclusion

Overall, Peco’s Blues provides a fascinating window into Dylan’s working methods and expectations for his crew. Of course not every musician works this way; many will give much more precise instructions I am sure, and in the era of computer aided music Dylan’s approach on Pat Garrett is certainly a old-fashioned one. But I like it. It is absolutely worth listening to the entirety of Peco’s Blues to get a sense of Dylan’s working methods as well as how a band, here playing together live and recorded live, “figures itself out” and gets from sketch to finished product. I am myself not a musician but a writer, and the writing process, although never exactly easy, is perhaps a little less complex, mostly because most writers write by themselves, with an editor or editing team looking over the work at a later date. There is nothing in writing quite like “I’ll do something else and you figure it out,” and it is the shifting, quicksilver like nature of Dylan’s approach to music making here that continues to interest me and draw me in.

Posted on by · 2 Comments

On the Song “Dylan Thomas” and Comments on Ryhme

This post is about the song “Dylan Thomas” from the first Better Oblivion Community Center record. For the uninitiated (which is probably everyone reading this–recently a friend texted me a funny article from The Onion entitled “Study: No Two People Have Listened To Same Band Since 2003”), Better Oblivion Community Center is Conor Oberst and Phoebe Bridgers. “Dylan Thomas” is the single, if singles still existed. You still won’t know them.

I want to write about the song because it has a killer structure and is awesome. The structure is based around a neat rhyme scheme with fabulous use of “near rhymes” and also around a see-saw in the verses between fairly pointed political commentary and apolitical hedonism. As with all interpretation, I can’t be sure that what I hear was intended, but what the hell–communication is what the listener does after all.

Now, a lot of songs, most, rhyme. That’s obvious. But not too many songs really hold up on the page as well, as poetry. I think “Dylan Thomas” does and I’d like to explore why.

Verse I:

It was quite early one morning/ hit me without warning/ I went to hear the general speak/ I was standing for the anthem/ banners all around him/ confetti made it hard to see

So the first verse clearly alludes to our political moment–it appears politically engaged to some extent. The reference to “the general” is redolent of South American politics (I am reminded of the fabulous Drugstore song “El President”). The rhyme scheme is tricky–it’s AABCC(D), where (d) “see” almost rhymes with “speak” in the delivery although the words don’t actually rhyme, instead being only vaguely alliterative.

Verse II:

Put my footsteps on the pavement/ starved for entertainment/ four seasons of revolving doors/ so sick of being honest/ I’ll die like Dylan Thomas/ a seizure on the bathroom floor

Verse II sees a clear shift from the political to the personal, the hedonistic, the depraved. While Thomas is famous for his “rage against the dying of the light,” Better Oblivion taps the seedier side of Thomas’ legacy–the singers (most of the songs on the album including “Dylan Thomas” are duets) in verse II are seeking pleasure and there is no hint of the macro picture here. So, verse I=macro, verse II=micro.

The rhyme scheme shifts to AABCCB, with a definite rhyme between “doors” and “floor.” “Entertainment” and “pavement” I would consider near-rhymes, and the slightly off-kilter near-rhymes are for me what really make this song stand out as a piece of writing.

Chorus:

I’m getting greedy with this private hell/ I’ll go it alone, but that’s just as well

Hard to say exactly what “this private hell” refers to, however we get a sense of doubling down on the dissolute–in for a penny in for a pound as they say.

Verse III:

These cats are scared and feral/ the flag pins on their lapels/ the truth is anybody’s guess/ these talking heads are saying/ “The king is only playing/ a game of four dimensional chess”

Verse III is clearly political again, setting up a 1 for 1 see-saw (so far). “Cats” here cuts both ways–on the one hand “people” with flag pins in the era of truthiness, on the other, well real cats are feral. It’s a very clever, subtle move. Is the general from verse I the king from verse III? Probably. We live in an era where world leaders are not in the business of leading, but rather of playing elaborate, endless games.

The rhyme scheme here is a AABCCB where the second C and the second B are part of a single quote. Very nicely done.

Verse IV:

There’s flowers in the rubble/ the weeds are gonna tumble/ I’m lucid but I still can’t think/ I’m strapped into a corset/ climbed into your corvette/ I’m thirsty for another drink

This is where the song really comes into its own as a mini-masterpiece. On its own, this verse is nakedly apolitical and local–I am reminded of one of my favorite lines of all time from the final Replacements album. The song is “Someone Take the Wheel” and the line goes: “they’re fighting again in some fuckin’ land/ ah throw in another tape man.”

In 1990, Paul Westerberg didn’t give a shit about the Iraq War and wanted nothing more than to listen to music on the road. That’s an understandable point of view on the level of the human individual. What I love about what Oberst and Bridgers do with this song is how they alternate verses between the macro and the micro, the engaged and the depraved. The same conceit is used on the first song of the record, “Didn’t Know What I Was In For”:

I didn’t know what I was in for/ when they took my belt and strings/ they told me I’d gone crazy/ my arms are strapped in a straight jacket/ so I couldn’t save those TV refugees

I get this sentiment. Seriously I do. If we zoom out a bit on our world situation these days, we could easily say that every person with even a patina of ethical conscience ought to be on the front lines in one way or another. And then I look at myself and…well, I chose Medicine Sans Frontiers as the charity that gets some small percentage of my Amazon purchases. Will the future see me as a head in the sand hedonist? Probably, and with some justification.

The rhyme scheme in verse IV is again a clear AABCCB with near-rhymes (probably the first time in history “corset” has been rhymed with “corvette”), in fact the same scheme as limericks. I f***ing love AABCCB. God bless it. Also, the line “I’m lucid but I still can’t think” pretty much summarizes my entire life to date.

Verse V:

If advertised, we’ll try it/ and buy some peace and quiet/ and shut up at the silent retreat/ they say you’ve gotta fake it/ at least until you make it/ that ghost is just a kid in a sheet

AABCCB again, the scheme which carries the song with the striking exception on verse I. Verse V alludes to the theme of the record–Better Oblivion Community Center is some kind of partially defined wellness retreat–and kind of splits the difference between the political and the personal, the macro and the micro. It also serves as a commentary on the commercialization of “wellness” and is a cheeky meta-comment on the cover of Bridgers 2017 debut:

Is this a shot at some critics? A self-aware reference to a DIY cover? I don’t know, and I love the line.

Following the logic of this piece, we have a kind of scheme of the verses as well. Let’s call is ABABC where A=political, B=apolitical, and C splits the difference.

Verse VI/ Outro:

I’m getting used to these dizzy spells/ I’m taking a shower at the Bates Motel/ I’m getting greedy with this private hell/ I’ll go it alone, but that’s just as well

It’s a simple AABB with the outro calling back the chorus from mid-song. The see-saw between the personal the political sort of resolves itself in the killer couplet. “I’m getting used to these dizzy spells” suggests acclimatization to the altitude–metabolization of the fear. “I’m taking a shower at the Bates Motel” is an amazingly effective counterpoint line–we are living at the knife point of maniacs. Ah well, let’s hit the bar. I’m thirsty for another drink.

Seriously, check out “Dylan Thomas” and the whole record. I know no one listens to anything I listen to, but still.

Postscript: So Mr. Spotify seems to have decided that “Dylan Thomas” is my very favorite song, and cues it up time after time after I’ve finished listening to whatever I have selected. I do love this song, by Mr. Spotify there is almost making me tired of it. Change it up there Mr. Spotify please.