A reckoning
When I was 12 and just starting high school, whatever I had written the year before got me put into a "Talented Writers" group. I don’t remember what I wrote in junior high, and I don’t currently have the free time, patience, or neurotic stones to crack open my foot locker to fuck around and find out. I can tell you that the first poem I think I ever wrote went “Candle, candle, made of wax/your flame does flicker/never does it relax,” so I can also tell you that the bar was probably pretty low in the Nassau County Public School system to get one classified as “talented,” and therefore suitable for this proto-writers workshop that allowed some lucky English teacher to try and get kids from all four grades to act like we were in an MFA cohort.
Here’s who I remember from that first year:
An arty, towheaded junior who claimed that the kaffiyeh she wore was a gift from her NYC drug dealer
A football-playing sophomore who wrote poems about cars
Awkward, terrified, tiny me
A fellow freshman, an already-popular boy who would later drive an orange VW Bug with mismatched fenders and permanently rock a pukka shell necklace
A nerdy-cool senior girl named Ellie
A nerdy-cool senior boy named Chris
Chris wrote poems about rowing crew and imprinted upon me a certain swoony awe over raggedy wasps with chambray oxfords and high cheekbones. See: James Spader in Tuff Turf, Pretty in Pink, Less Than Zero, Sex Lies and Videotape. See also: the Jesuit school boys dancing at the teen club on Thursday nights, and, later, Stephen Malkmus of Pavement. But for now, in 1984 or 85, just see Chris, who I somehow must have impressed with some nascent music fanaticism — I had discovered the local alternative station the same year — because he gave me a tape of REM's Reckoning.
I had inherited my brother's 45 of “Radio Free Europe” and, together with that dubbed cassette, REM became a kind of ur college rock to me, the province of literate, mumbly boys with jangly guitars and all the time in the world for you to get their meanings. This impression would deepen when I myself went to college in the south and took my share of drives to Athens, GA for shows. By then, REM was a bit too big for my tastes. OK, to be specific so you know that’s not merely a moral stance: Michael Stipe started to enunciate, Mike Mills went overnight from looking like Encyclopedia Brown to looking like ginger Gram Parsons, and, like any REM fan who had cut their pretentious, overthinking teeth on “Letter Never Sent” and “Moral Kiosk,” "Shiny Happy People" was a plastic-wrapped hard candy travesty. I am not denying the sweet harmonic delight that is “Near Wild Heaven.” I am merely stating what set on edge the teeth of the late-teens-early-20s strip mall record store clerk/college radio DJ who I’d by that point become.
Anyway, I visited Athens, learned that the “schmutz trees” my dad would point out on the drives from NY to FL were actually live oaks and bald cypress covered in Spanish moss; I ate at Michael Stipe’s vegetarian cafe, saw Peter Buck's pastel-painted Victorian farmhouse and once even the man himself, long legs articulating out of the passenger side of a Volkswagen bug outside of the 40 Watt where I was comforting a friend of a friend who had smoked something weird. We eventually made it inside to see Buck and Mills join Robyn Hitchcock on that tiny stage.
At some point, back at school in Florida, a friend who’d lived in Athens soothed my anxiety after a long night by tucking me into bed with a story of a friend of his who had nearly had a three-way with Buck and Stipe, only to have it fall apart when the two men started arguing. Years later than that I would hear a delightful story about why Michael Stipe had a fire pole in his house. But I never got to see them. Like I said, by the time I was away for school, free to do what I pleased, they were playing stadiums. And I never stumbled upon that secret REM show, the one at someone’s house when we thought we were just going to crash for the night, or where they were playing a bar under a fake name and we just happened to be there. (I did once unknowingly sleep on Jeff Mangum’s couch, though.)
So, I am never going to get to see early REM, as I do not think our capitalist overlords are investing in that sort of technology. But this month I did get to do what turns out is the next best thing: see the actor Michael Shannon (who I’d just learned did all of his own singing as George Jones in George & Tammy) performing Reckoning with a full band that included his longtime musical collaborator Jason Narducy, Superchunk’s Jon Wurtser, and some other crackerjack indie rock dudes. They were playing at the Great American Music Hall – easily one of my favorite San Francisco venues, intimate and consistently, kaleidoscopically lit — as part of SF Sketchfest.
“Pretty Persuasion,” video by me.
Surprise number 1: That my punk rock partner wanted to go with me. The night before the band had performed Murmur. My partner would have preferred that one but, if Chris had dubbed Murmur for me, I might have been a different person. But he didn’t. He dubbed the one with “Don’t Go Back to Rockville” on it, which I didn’t record the other night because I was too busy dancing, my body back in a storm of adolescent emotions, the thrum of realization that small-town life is something to escape at any cost.
Surprise number 2: They opened up the balcony right when we arrived. It had been reserved for Sketchfest pass holders, but I guess there weren’t enough of those, so we got most of the house-left side of the upstairs to ourselves for most of the show. From there I could truly appreciate the wide range of dad dancing. (To paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, I’m not insulting y’all, I’m describing y’all.) I stand and press into the crowd at plenty of shows, and that kind of sweaty communion can be its own special thing. But it’s nice to not have to do that sometimes.
Surprise number 3: Michael Shannon basically performed as Michael Stipe. I’m not sure why that surprised me. He’s an actor, and a great one at that. From the beanie to the tee to the hunching, he largely skipped the stage patter and brought us what most of us probably really wanted to see, a picture of the past come slowly stealing (to paraphrase Hank Williams, not George Jones) and staying to entertain us through an encore of the Chronic Town EP (to which, it turns out, I also still know all the words, such as I understood them to be as a teen), some Murmur tracks (stirring my date from their seat at last), one from Life’s Rich Pageant, Pylon’s “Crazy,” and then a mandolin-less version of “Nightswimming” that stilled the crowd to quiet.
Surprise number 4: We left before the encore was done. I was all full up on feelings by then, we still had to drive home in the rain, and our old dog was there waiting for us. But I was saturated, bittersweetly spent, fully in this old body in a way that connected quite cleanly to tiny, terrified, 12-year-old me. I am no longer tiny and terrified. I am out of shape and occasionally, even purposely terrifying. But the music always clears out the circuits; even in 2024, the poetry prevails.
“Carnival of Sorts (Boxcars),” video by me.
