Putting the I in Music

It’s happening again. It’s happening again! Hallelujah amen, it’s happening again.

I can hear music all the way. Not 67%, like I can when I’m doing the dishes. Not 86%, like I can right before I go to sleep. Not 94%, like I can when I’m having a dance party with my fantastic kid. Not even 99.9%, like I used to on vodka, Vicodin, and headphones. But 113%, like I can when a giant wave of terrible feeling has stormed through my body and left me ragged and raw, kneeling at the feet of the human condition. This is what I do for you, music!

Two weeks ago—on Election Day, just before voting—I signed the final papers on a grueling divorce that took 20 months to complete. I’ve tried four different times to write a pithy, emotionally-true-but-appropriately-surface-skimming paragraph about this experience and have officially given up. Right now, my divorce is more like a 600-page novel in which the author slowly goes mad than it is like a blog post. But I can say two things about it: 1. It’s over; 2. I can hear music all the way. Hell yeah.

Since I signed the papers, I’ve been thrown to the floor again and again by a song I’d never heard in my life—“Where Were You?” by the Mekons. For me, the Mekons are the perfect representative of a certain mental category: bands that other people with promising music taste like, but that I for some reason have always brattily refused to give a chance to. You know, like, by actually “listening” to them, with my ears. I got an anti-Mekons idea in my brain, and I can’t remember why. Maybe there was one song on a mix someone made that I didn’t like, or maybe I somehow got the idea that they might be a tiny bit jazzy (I am allergic to jazziness in rock and refuse to hear any lectures about this), which seems pretty stupid now that I’m reading about them and discovering that they get thrown into every genre there is except jazz—it’s the single and only musical influence I haven’t heard mentioned once. I had never made any effort to find out what they did in fact sound like, at any time during their multiple decades of making records, and I only had this song in my iTunes because it’s on a punk compilation a music friend gave me, and it only came on due to the loving forgiveness of the forces that guide the random. I did nothing to earn the Mekons, but “Where Were You?” had the good graces to come to me anyway.

The basic facts I’ve gathered about this song are as follows: it was released as a single in 1978, before the Mekons’ debut album came out; the Mekons talk about it as one of the songs they wrote when they couldn’t play their instruments yet; Jon Langford, who goes on to sing and play guitar at the heart of the Mekons from the beginning until now (they’re still going strong) and also play in 14,000 other bands and projects and generally become a revered king of weird punk and alt-country, is not singing or playing guitar on this song—he’s playing drums; the guy singing is Mitch, who also stays with the band forever but is apparently their roadie and not a band member; the single sold very well at the time and got the Mekons onto Virgin, who later dropped them; this is probably the least obscure Mekons song you could ever write about, as everyone is crazy about it; it stands up to obsessive repetition like a goddamn champ.

In order to explain the amazingness of “Where Were You?” I need to talk first about the long, slow builder. This is my personal term for a certain kind of song, for which I am a perennial sucker. The long, slow builder starts out gentle, simple, and beautiful, builds gradually to a crescendo, and ends up rocking its knockers off. When this is done right, I find it irresistible. “Where Were You?” is a terrible example—how long and slow of a build can you have when the whole song lasts less than three minutes?—but its greatness is inextricable from the greatness of this kind of song.

The long, slow builder has three distinct phases. First, there’s the spare and lovely opening, knocking on the door of actual feeling. The beauty makes cracks in the shell around my heart; it starts to find its way in, like water. At the same time, the simplicity makes me a little bit vulnerable—here is a regular human like me who is strumming a chord, hitting a drum—and the slowness opens up a space between my ears where the rest of the song can fit.

Then, just when I’m starting to get nervous about all this nakedness, there’s the building wave, coming up behind. Something restless, hard, and driving, with a little speed and a little more backbone. It’s not that this second flavor allows me to fortress my heart again; it’s the opposite. I love that open and vulnerable state, and I want to stay there and trust it, but if I’m going to do that, it’s going to have to be real. I will need to bring in the other part of me, the battle-scarred, hypercritical, heartbroken part that’s been leaning outside the door looking extremely skeptical the whole time I’ve been opening to the slow beauty. If that raw and jaded wildcat doesn’t get attention soon, she’s going to start causing trouble, getting drunk and angry and starting fights, and as soon as that happens the beauty will start to sound fake and my heart will slam shut. So when the restless discontent comes up in the song and joins in with the slow beauty, I experience a great relief, not because I get to retreat from what I’m feeling but because I get to stay in it. And as it builds, louder and faster and darker, the relief becomes excitement, because the beauty and the restlessness and the softest and hardest parts of me are all about to be let loose.

Finally, there’s the crescendo, the full rockout. In this third phase, it’s crucial that the beauty not be eclipsed; it has to keep on keeping on, holding its own, swelling and rising with the rock at every turn. It has to get a little stronger, grow some backbone of its own. And the restlessness can’t stay in that adolescent rebellion thing, either; it has to deepen and stretch and bend in order to meet the beauty around the back. It has to get a little more articulate, grow some reluctant tenderness of its own. The restlessness has to get colored in, and the beauty has to get outlined in black. They both have to learn to take themselves a little less seriously and have a little more fun. And they have to figure out how to reunite into the whole thing they once were, way back in the beginning, before they were split apart in the first place. All of which is a marvelous lesson for the two parts of me, if they can shut up and pay attention for a second.

The best example of a band that writes nothing but long, slow builders is Explosions in the Sky. A friend of mine says that Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon sounds like the inside of her head; the inside of my head sounds like Explosions in the Sky. They are amazing, and they are masters of the long, slow builder. But I absolutely can’t start talking about them here, or all will be lost. I just had to give you one proper example, because I’m nervous about calling “Where Were You?” a long, slow builder. I don’t know if it can be, considering its length, and you’re not supposed to use the exception to prove the rule. I just don’t know what else to call it, because it accomplishes everything a long, slow builder does—that entire emotional roller coaster, resolving into glorious triumph. Songs of this type usually need six to eight minutes to make it happen; this song does it in two minutes and forty-three seconds. Phase one, the slow beauty, lasts seventeen seconds. Phase two, in which the restlessness appears and builds, only lasts until second forty-nine. The next minute and forty-one seconds is all crescendo, until the thirteen-second outro at the end. It’s the most compact, efficient version of the long, slow builder I can imagine. And there is no trade-off, no loss of emotion for the sake of speed, as you would expect there to be. Just more and more and more. It’s kind of incredible.

But that is not all; oh no, that is not all. The truly amazing thing is that the song is able to accomplish all of that using a ridiculously simple structure. It’s one of those songs without a chorus, where there’s just one verse that repeats and repeats from beginning to end. I have just learned that this is called the strophic form (or, a little more obviously, the AAA song), and that it started with court composers setting poems to music. (The opposite kind of song, where the music keeps changing the whole time and never repeats, ABCD, is called through-composed.) In this AAA song, the guitar plays the same two-punk-chord thing forty times from the beginning to the end. For the first half of the song, there’s nothing else but drums. Halfway through, when the bass, fiddle, and vocals come in, the guitar starts staying on its second chord a little longer after every fourth time (possibly there is a third chord in there, but I don’t think there is) so the bass and fiddle can go to two more notes between verses before everybody returns to the main thing, and at that same point the drums settle into their verse beat, but otherwise nothing changes. The lyrics are just one long, shouted verse repeated twice, with one word changed the second time through, when “like” becomes “love.” Then there’s the little outro thing, where the fiddle drops out and the guitar takes over the two alternating notes it’s been playing for the whole song. And that’s all there is. So, uh… how, exactly? How do they manage to get me on that roller coaster and bring it all the way home in under three minutes, every single time I hear this song, without ever going to a chorus or a bridge? Without ever doing anything but what they’re already pretty much doing at the beginning?

Imagine that you’ve just read a knock-out short story, one of your all-time favorites. Let’s say it’s by John Updike, so every sentence is magnificently crafted. It’s eight pages long, which is as short as it could possibly be—so much has to happen first in order for you to feel what you feel every time you read it, when that luminous last line socks you in the gut. Now you read a short story by a young writer you’re not familiar with, written in simple language without any apparent technical virtuosity, and it absolutely floors you in just the way the Updike story does. Only it’s three pages long, and that luminous last line occupies the entire second and third pages. In fact, the whole thing is just one long paragraph, in which the same basic phrase is repeated over and over, with small variations, somehow getting better and accumulating meaning the whole time. This is what I’m trying to get at.

Here is a jumble of theories about how “Where Were You?” manages to do what it does. 1. By luck or genius, these early Mekons stumbled on one of those irresistible riffs that not only doesn’t get old, but gets better every time you hear it—a top-shelf hook. It wouldn’t be the first time somebody pulled this off using just a couple of punk chords. Then, by further luck or genius, they realized that they should keep repeating it the whole time and not ruin it by adding another part. 2. This is exactly what a hook is: it grabs you right away, instantly, kablam. I am on the hook from the first time I hear it, and so I don’t really need much else. The hook is so good that the beauty and restlessness are already pre-united within it, one whole thing that cannot be split apart. The tension in the beginning that needs to be resolved sounds great, but it isn’t real; there was never any question about the two strains coming back together, as they have in fact been making out behind a curtain the whole time. That’s why the song needs less than a minute to get to the crescendo. 3. The drums are the secret key. They are the only instrument that actually does a few different things before the song is through, and as such they provide the entire roller coaster, which is of course built on the back of that killer hook. A drum roll that doesn’t go right into the verse beat, but drops into four on the floor first to make you feel like the verse beat is the be-all and end-all, since the verse is all there is? Kablam-bam! 4. The fiddle is the secret key. A two-chord punk song featuring a lovely and simple fiddle melody, pregnant with longing? Whut? 5. Magic.

While writing this, I’ve been noticing that the long, slow builder sounds a lot like the three-act drama: setup (of the two musical strains, one beautiful and one restless, which will be our main characters), confrontation between them (in which their mettle is tested), and resolution, complete with climax and denouement (in which both characters come out changed). And hey, this is like so weird, but do you know what else mirrors this three-act script? A marriage. And by marriage, I mean any partnership aiming for the long haul. There’s the beautiful part at the beginning, the confrontation where our two characters are tested—can they rise to it and grow?—culminating in the dramatic climax where it all comes to a head, and the resolution, where they either make it or they don’t. The couple who achieves a form of happiness together gets to be in a romantic comedy; the couple who divorces badly or stays together in misery gets to be in a tragedy. The long, slow builder either ends up in triumphant beauty when the two strains become more than the sum of their parts, or falls apart into separate pieces when the two strains fail to work it out.

All of which might suggest that “Where Were You?” is a love story, if it weren’t for the lyrics.

When I was waiting in a bar, where were you?
When I was buying you a drink, where were you?
When I was crying at home in bed, where were you?
When I watched you from a distance did you see me?
You were standing in a queue, did you see me?
You had yellow hair, did you see me?
I want to talk to you all night, do you like me?
I want to find out about your life, do you like me?
Could you ever be my wife, do you like me?
(Could you ever be my wife, do you love me?)

The voice is tight, half-yelling, and rangy. This guy sounds hurt, pissed, wide open, and entirely desperate. You start out thinking he’s singing to his girlfriend after she’s stood him up or cheated on him or left him, but by the end, you strongly suspect that this entire relationship exists only in his head. He’s singing to a woman he’s only seen across the bar. His longing is so naked that it has him angrily demanding love and marriage from a complete stranger, and already being surprised and hurt that he’s not going to get it. It’s sick and alarming, but so raw and honest that you have to admit it’s kind of beautiful.

Okay, so maybe this is what happens. Maybe the restlessness starts out on the drums, but when they’re about to settle into the verse beat, it jumps. Sensing the coming resolution in the music, and not yet satisfied, it takes a blind, flying leap and lands in the singer’s mouth. So that after that, even though the music has hit the triumphant crescendo where its two strains are reunited into one whole thing, there are still two unresolved strains, because the tension now exists between the voice and the music. You never start needing to hear a second part, because in this part, you get everything—a tense chemistry between the drums and the music, and then between the voice and the music, and the musical crescendo where the beauty and restlessness find a perfect balance—all at the same time. The consonance and the dissonance and the return to harmony, the setup and the conflict and the resolution, the beginning and the middle and the end. It’s all simultaneous. In a parallel universe close to ours, it is a six-minute song; you’re just hearing both halves at the same time. The simple structure is the only thing that could possibly have worked. This is how the one verse manages to carry you through the whole roller coaster, and you never wish for it to do anything else but start over at the end.

It actually is a love story! Goddamn those genius bastards! It is. But it’s not the lying version we are usually sold; it’s the story of what love is actually like. There is so much beauty and hope and harmony, so much gorgeous possibility and explosive joy, that it will drop you to your knees. But even then, even there on your knees, there will still be inside you a deep restlessness, a rumbling storm of all that feels wrong. In the face of this, some people will assign the wrongness to the deep flaws in their partner, some will cheat, and some will leave. Imagine their surprise when they get to the rumbling storm with the next person! We all get to it eventually, whether or not we’re in the right relationship. It’s there when we are yearning for love, it resurfaces when we get to the hard part of living in love, and it tears us apart when love ends. It’s always there, where everyone is—the single ones thinking it’s because they haven’t met the right person, the ones in relationships thinking there must be something wrong with themselves or their lives or their partners, the heartbroken ones thinking it’s because they’ve lost what they had. When in fact, that always-approaching storm is part of the deal. There is no love without it. When you try to shut it down, it’s just going to jump to another instrument or another part of the song. We’re not supposed to resolve it away. We’re supposed to build our songs around it. We have to let it in, in order to stay in the beauty for the long term. It’s the engine that keeps us going forward. If we can face that rumbling, restless darkness, if we can turn up the beauty and the harmony until they are strong enough to stand up to it, the two strains can come into balance with each other and explode in the sky. That’s the only resolution possible.

I’m at the dropoff after the end and he’s staring into the abyss before the beginning, but when I hear this guy shouting across the bar, his disheartened roar sounds completely familiar to me. I know that voice—it’s the sound of my own heartbreak, asking for an explanation. The circumstances are beside the point. For that matter, the mechanics of how this song manages to do what it does are even more beside the point. The song is the point, and all you have to do is listen to it. But I can’t help wanting to know the secret. I want to know how we keep going forward, being driven to greatness by that rumbling storm rather than being driven crazy by it. I want to know how we find the strength and backbone in our beauty, and I want to know how we tend the soft creature in our darkness. Most of all, I want to know how to find the resolution—between the beauty and the restlessness, between the hopeful and broken parts of me, between two people and their unique storms—not the kind of resolution where they agree to go their separate ways, but the kind where they find a way to make something together that’s never been seen on earth. I want maps and diagrams. I know my daughter had to exist just as she is, and I have no doubt she is the best song that’s ever been written. But I want someone to promise me that it was absolutely necessary for her to witness the total disintegration of the love between her parents before the age of three in order to become who she is supposed to be, and I want a guarantee that I will get another chance to show her what being in love looks like. In the meantime, I want to keep playing her all the songs in the world that know what real love sounds like, and I want to keep shouting across the kitchen, demanding answers from music that I’m not going to get, shouting my devotion and my betrayal and my longing and my darkness and my beauty and my storm and my hope.

Pony up 99 pennies to Touch and Go/Quarterstick Records for this song! (Click PURCHASE to see individual songs for sale.)

Better yet, buy this Mekons compilation, currently $7.99 on Insound.

Or get it on iTunes for $0.99 song/$9.99 album.

Scroll down to the tiny blue notes at the bottom of this post to leave a comment!

• • • ROCK NERD CORNER • • •

1. “Where Were You?” was released as a single on Fast Product (an independent British punk label). Gang of Four was on Fast Product too, and both bands were from Leeds. The compilation I had where this song was hiding is 1-2-3-4! Punk & New Wave 1976-1979 (Disc 2). It’s also on that No Thanks! one and bunch of others. It’s not on any proper Mekons albums, only two compilations. The one I linked to above is a singles-and-rarities collection, Where Were You? Hen’s Teeth and Other Fragments of Unpopular Culture Vol. 2 (Quarterstick Records, 1999). It’s also on a greatest hits, Heaven and Hell: The Very Best of the Mekons (Cooking Vinyl, 2004). Hen’s Teeth is only available for download, unless you want to pay $50 for the CD on eBay, and Heaven and Hell seems to only be available from the UK.

2. I was supposed to use the term “post-punk” to refer to the Mekons, Fast Product, etc. This seems to be the agreed-upon genre for this band, because they incorporate some country and folk into their punk. But that term makes me feel weird, and here’s why. I think punk is big and complicated enough to incorporate all the mutated, cross-genre forms of punk that happen as time goes on, just as rock is. Punk can take it all! It has not ended, or closed down its possibilities! Does anyone find the term “post-punk” to be meaningful to their ears, and if so can you tell me why?

3. Mekons fans! Where should I go next in my Mekons studies? Also, a question: the notes on Hen’s Teeth say that Sarah Corina is on bass and Susie Honeyman is on fiddle unless otherwise noted, which would seem to imply that they’re both playing on this song. But I read something else suggesting that one or both of them joined the band later. I can’t find a definitive answer. Were there in fact two women playing in this British punk band (or post-punk band, whatever makes you happy) in 1978? That would make me happy.

4. What’s your favorite long, slow builder? What are some other compact, efficient ones? What’s your favorite AAA song?

Please comment away, either answering or ignoring these dorky book-review questions.