The Breathtaking Impermanence Of Things
Wednesday, April 9, 2014
With Your Feet On The Air And Your Head On The Ground
The
first time I heard The Pixies would have been sometime in 1994, a
year in which my life went very sideways. The song in question was
Wave Of Mutilation, a version
of which appeared on the soundtrack of the movie Pump Up
The Volume, a movie that turned
out to be oddly influential in my life.
In
case you're not familiar, Pump Up The Volume
is a cult-ish teen flick starring Christian Slater as Mark Hunter, an
Angry Young Man who rails against his high school, his parents, and
his vision of America by starring in his own pirate radio show as
Happy Harry Hard-On, a foul-mouthed, lecherous, and righteous
character the polar opposite of the mild-mannered Hunter. It's not a
great movie – there's some serious cringe on display, and like a
lot of films from the early nineties, it hasn't aged well – but
there are moments and scenes that transcend the packaging, and
watching it again now, it's obvious to me that my attraction to
outspoken outlaw figures like Bill Hicks and Hunter S. Thompson
started here, with a character that rents Lenny Bruce's How
To Talk Dirty And Influence People
from the library in a movie that features Henry Rollins on its
soundtrack.
And
oh, that soundtrack. I like to think that Rollins, Leonard Cohen, The
Descendents, and The Pixies would have found their way to my heart
sooner or later regardless, but we first met on a summer evening in
the mid-nineties, when – home and bored on a Friday night – I
decided that the film on Channel 4 looked interesting enough to
watch.
Four
TV channels, pirate radio, VHS... Nothing makes you feel old like
technology. Memories are trickier. I vividly recall going to Variety
Video on Deansbrook Road almost every night of what feels like one
endless summer but was actually two or three. My friend Nick had been
a movie nut before we met, and when he dragged me into his world of
straight-to-video horror and sci-fi, I came packaged with a desire to
see movies that spoke to me. We grew together that way, embracing
each other's taste, but understanding that each was an antidote to
the other. That combination is still everything I love about fiction.
We
usually spoke to the manager when we went to rent movies. Nick was
such a good customer that he got to rent everything at the lowest
possible rate. Every now and again we'd see somebody else, though,
and I remember walking into the store one afternoon and finding a guy
behind the counter I wasn't familiar with. The screens that usually
played some new release were blank, and instead of the dialogue we'd
gotten used to hearing as background while we browsed the shelves, he
was listening to music. I didn't recognize the upbeat tempo or the
wailing guitars, but as soon as I heard the vocal melody, I knew the song.
“This
is The Pixies,” I said.
They
loved us at Variety Video. A couple of kids with a seemingly
insatiable appetite for movies of dubious quality, how could they
not? But the thing I remember most about the place was how that guy's
face lit up when a lanky teenager – in the era of Take That and The
Spice Girls - recognized Wave Of Mutilation.
Taste
is a funny thing. When it comes to music, I can't think of a single
artist I have always liked. Even when it comes to my absolute
favorites, there are periods where I just couldn't relate to what
they were doing. I like very little of REM's output after New
Adventures In Hi-Fi, my love of
Radiohead has been in steady decline since The Bends,
and I've had an on-and-off relationship with punk since not too long
after my fateful collision with Pump Up The Volume.
But even with that in mind, my relationship with The Pixies is an odd
one. In 2014, I adore them. They may well be my favorite band. But
having discovered them in '94, I didn't actually buy any of
their records until a little over ten years ago, and that was only
because I stumbled over Death To The Pixies,
a greatest hits collection, on sale at a market stall. Prior to that,
they just seemed to show up to soundtrack my life at appropriate
times.
In
1999, I was working as a projectionist at a movie theater just
outside London. It was the summer of The Matrix
and The Phantom Menace.
It was also the summer of Fight Club,
a movie I fell in love with instantly and completely. If Pump
Up The Volume made perfect sense
to a boy who'd just lost his dad and was discovering new ways to be
pissed off at the world, Fight Club
played the same role for a man feeling he was dead-ending in life,
failing in all the important ways in large part because he couldn't
understand why they were important. In the background of both, the
dissonance of The Pixies. Fight Club
ends with the track Where Is My Mind?,
and – like the boy in Variety Video five years previously – I
knew who it was as soon as I heard Frank Black's distinctive vocals.
In
August of 2001, at the Leeds Festival, I got so out of my mind on
Saturday evening that I awoke on Sunday morning in front of the main
stage, laying on the grass in bright sunshine, both hungover and
coming down while And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead assaulted
the eardrums of the thirty or so people that were actually awake and
capable of behaving like a human audience after the carnage of the
night before. After a while, I hauled myself to my feet and trudged
back to the tent I was sharing with my friend Chris. He was nowhere
to be found, so I overdosed on painkillers, drank a bottle of mineral
water, and headed back to find a considerably larger
crowd watching a band I didn't know. I walked a little way up the
hill, and as I sat down to feel sorry for myself, internally debating
the wisdom of seeing if I could just carry on drinking, they began to
play a song I did know.
The
band was Frank Black And The Catholics. The song was Where
Is My Mind?
A
little later that day, Chris and I would adopt Rancid's Leicester
Square as an unofficial anthem
for a friendship that consisted mainly of car-wreck nights in London
that frequently ended in strange and violent ways. Lyrically, it made a lot more sense of who we were and what we were doing at the
time. But still, those haunting backing vocals and Frank Black's
nonsense lyrics about being chased by fish linger longer in the mind.
In
2011, I put my phone on my pregnant wife's belly and played a lullaby
version of Where Is My Mind? to Ryan when he was still in utero.
Nobody
wanted to go and see The Pixies with me when they came to Portland
earlier this year. They weren't interested, it was too expensive, it
wasn't The Pixies without Kim Deal... I thought it might be the last
opportunity I'd get to see them live, so I decided to go by myself.
I've been wanting to write this since then, because I didn't go into
that show thinking about moments in my life and what they meant. I
went into it excited about seeing a band I liked.
They
didn't talk. They didn't move around much. They just played. I was
disappointed when they threw away Wave Of Mutilation
by playing it second, I sang along with Monkey Gone To
Heaven and Debaser,
and I fell in love with Hey
in a way I never had listening to Doolittle. But when I heard the
first few chords of Where Is My Mind?,
I suddenly felt I was in all the places I've written about here at
once, looking at my life from a great height instead of being buried
in the minutiae of my day-to-day. It wasn't revelatory in the sense
of being shown new things, but in giving them a certain perspective,
in casting light on those incredibly fine threads I'm so fascinated
by, that string moments together to form scenes, to form chapters, to
form stories. It's just stuff. It's just living. But when Frank Black
opens his mouth to sing, it's all connected and it all makes sense.
posted at 3:31 PM
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