I recently had the good fortune to hang out with two of my friends from graduate school. Like the middle-aged men that we are, we talked about the old times, and how much we miss them. I was broke in grad school, often stressed, and prone to depression, but those were the best days of my life up to that point. It was the only time in my stint in the academy where I was able to "live the life of the mind." The quest for knowledge consumed a plurality of my waking hours. That said, I spent plenty of time with my friends, from playing backyard bocce ball to going to concerts to just drinking and laughing until the wee hours.
We did all of this in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, one of the great overlooked places to be in this country. It was cheap, easy to get around, but always full of events and culture. It is a place that gave birth to and nurtured writers, scientists, and thinkers. It also gave us REO Speedwagon.
While I lived there I chuckled a bit when one of the streets in downtown Champaign was renamed REO Speedwagon Way. After all, weren't they sort of the standard bearers of a kind of forgotten, lowest common denominator arena rock? A couple of my friends in Chambana who had grown up in downstate Illinois managed to persuade me otherwise. Before REO was an arena rock behemoth in the early 1980s, they were a hard working hard driving hard rocking band that didn't have any hits but did have a devoted following in the midwest. It wasn't until their eighth album in 1978 (the tragically named You Can Tune A Piano But You Can't Tuna Fish) that they even had a long player in the top 40. It's kind of amazing that Epic, their label, hadn't dropped them by that point.
Perhaps they heard something that others hadn't. My friends certainly had, and with their help I heard it, too. I can't help thinking it's some kind of metaphor. People tell me I'm not supposed to like going to graduate school, listening to REO Speedwagon, and living in the corn belt, but I ended up loving all of those things. I guess I was extremely lucky to be around like-minded people for so many years. It's certainly a blessing to see them again.
That's a roundabout way of introducing my song for this week, "157 Riverside Avenue." It's off of REO's first album, but has been a staple of their live shows even after there were hits for the audience to expect. For that reason I chose the live version from their 1977 double-live You Get What You Play For. (They really have a thing for tragically named albums) It makes the most sense, since pre-fame REO played show after show after show searching for that big break while building a loyal audience.
The double-live album was obligatory for rock bands in the 1970s, and one even catapulted Peter Frampton to fame after a similarly long time in the woodshed as REO. The sound is pure early 70s boogie rock but by 1977 the once shaggy band had made itself a fine-tuned arena-rocking machine. The boogie bounce is still there but the solos are blistering, courtesy of the incomparable Gary Richrath, perhaps the most underrated rock guitarist of the classic rock era. Kevin Cronon still throws in a silly bit of banter and scat singing in the middle, but it sounds pretty tight.
Not only does this music remind me of my spiritual home of Champaign-Urbana circa 2000-2006, I try to take some hope from it. As far as my writing goes, I'm still striving and trying after many years to get a hit. I've managed to hone my skills, and even build up a (small) audience. I guess I can hope that something bigger and better is still possible.
In August of 2000 I moved from Chicago to Champaign-Urbana to start my doctoral program. While that was in this century, it feels like a million years ago. Back then radio still mattered, but it was in the midst of being strangled to death by ClearChannel in the wake of 1996 Telecommunications Act. The local radio in Champaign included a fine NPR station, but it was all talk (literally). At that time the college radio station was a godawful imitation of the "alternative" station in Chicago, complete with Limp Bizkit and shock jocks. (Thankfully that would change in a couple of years.) I ended up really digging the local oldies station, since their playlist still seemed formed by local whims, rather than a megacomputer in the Texas desert sending songs via satellite.
One song they played a lot was "These Eyes" by The Guess Who. This was a band I'd usually associated with their later, harder rocking incarnation with barn burners like "American Woman." I really took a shine to this song, which was also on the CD jukebox (remember those?) of my local bar, The Embassy. I had a friend who loved the song too, and every Friday happy hour our gang would get together at The Embassy and drink $6 pitchers of Leinenkugel and eat tasty sandwiches, my favorite being the grilled tuna steak.
The Embassy was a strange combination of bar types. There was occasional live music, but no stage. Undergrads never set foot in there, which was a big part of the attraction, but the beer selection was extremely basic. The walls had tasteful exposed brick, and it was a clean place while still maintaining a dive bar's soul. It did not countenance rowdiness; a friend of mine got cut off once after drunkenly knocking over his half-finished beer bottle. The aforementioned jukebox was heavy on good soul music and cheap to boot. Between my friend and I, "These Eyes" got a lot of spins.
I'm still not quite sure what attracts me to this song. I do have a kind of inexplicable love for the baroque pop of the late 1960s, which also explains my love of the Bee Gees' music of the era. I'm also a sucker for melancholy pop songs, and there's not enough good ones nowadays. All pop music seems to be about partying and self-affirmation. The whole Top 40 sounds like Reagan-era propaganda these days, no matter if the music itself is more daring than it was twenty years ago. "These Eyes" is also helped by Burton Cummings' -aka the Canadian Jim Morrison- passionate vocals. Sure, it's schmaltzy as all get out, he makes me believe it just enough to get lost in the song.
Nowadays I mostly listen to it for the memories of beer, food, friends and fun, and of a comfy little bar that is sadly no more.
I was looking through the back pages of my old, and defunct blog, and found a memory worth sharing from 2005, ten long years ago. It comes from my last year in graduate school, right before I attended my first American Historical Association conference and slowly began to realize that my future was about to get really rocky. Something about the winter solstice really resonates with me, and instead of trying to write something new, I thought I'd share something old that better articulates the feelings that this time of year can give. These are feelings independent of Christmas, but of the elemental effect of the longest night of the year, the reason why the ancients decided we needed some times of good cheer to counteract it. Here it is below, complete with reference to a discman. Dolores the cat, I can gladly say, still lives:
****
December sunsets, I love them so. So today, after feeding my friends Rachel and Ed's wondrously lustrous feline Delores, I took a walk around in the late afternoon, listening to the Velvet Underground's first album on my discman. It's one I love, especially in December, it just sounds wintry to me for some reason, even though I first started listening to the album in the spring of 1994. Nico's voice (or Nordic foghorn, more accurately) is like a chilly north wind, and the sparks of feedback courtesy of Lou Reed's guitar shoot into my skull like the cold air knifes through my coat. When I listen to "Heroin" or "All Tomorrow's Parties" on that album, though, they seem to physically warm me somehow.
John Cale's background drone on "Heroin" replicates the hazy feeling of a December dawn. The setting sun today created that orange-grey dusk that somehow sets my heart affire in ways that I cannot comprehend. It is ethereal, as if I am on another planet further from the sun, where the sun is more of a star that provides light but no warmth, and a dim light at that. Perhaps it is in the shortest days of the year that we come closest to seeing universal death, and it just might be that brush with mortality that gets me every time.
Or maybe just memory. Growing up, my family would go to Mass on Christmas Eve at 5PM, the church's "children's Mass." Because my parents have a pathological fear of being late, we always arrived more than half an hour early, able to take any seat in the church, and right as the sun was setting. The church lay in a spot where the sun would strike the stained glass quite directly, flooding the church with a golden bath of color and warmth. It would set before the special Mass so full of ritual, and in a child's eyes, magic. (When a child is very young, that's what religion is to them.) The setting sun of Christmas Eve was probably the closest I came to religious ecstasy in my life, and I guess there's a piece of that exhilarating feeling in the sunset I saw today.
Now that I have passed the threshold of age 40, the distance between my present and my past is becoming ever-more apparent. For instance, I still love music, but no contemporary music can MATTER to me any more like it used to. Sure, I've been playing the new Kurt Vile record to death, but it hasn't become part of my greater consciousness, like say Radiohead's Kid A when I picked it up back all the way in 2000. Perhaps because I spent my 20s in grad school in a college town with multiple rock clubs, contemporary music mattered to me more then than it did when I was a teenager. And no band, not even Radiohead, mattered as much to me as Wilco.
From about 2002-2007, Wilco meant more to me than any other manifestation of popular culture. Wilco had been part of my life before, but in this time the band mattered in a way it didn't before and hasn't since. I had learned of Uncle Tupelo right before its demise, and loved the Anodyne album. For that reason I eagerly bought the first records by both Son Volt (Jay Farrar's band) and Wilco (Jeff Tweedy's), both coming out in 1995. That first Son Volt record is by far the better one, but Farrar could never best it, while the double that came next year from Wilco, Being There, was an exhilarating great step forward. The roots-rock elements remained, but songs like "Misunderstood" had something more experimental behind them. That experimentation really flowered on 1999's Summerteeth, an album I had a harder time relating to. The fact that the band's next album had been rejected by the record company intrigued me.
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, October 2001 and April 2002
I first heard ripped versions of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot in 2001 before buying an official copy in 2002. That album was a complete revelation. I listened to it over and over and over and over again. In that strange post-9/11 time amidst the increasing drumbeats for war, its songs seemed to make sense of the fear and emptiness at the heart of the national condition. The fact that the record company had dropped Wilco over this album made it all the more glorious to listen to, a validation that "they" were wrong-headed and stupid, and "we" were ultimately right. This album was like medicine for the soul. During my year studying abroad in Germany, when I was mostly alone day after day, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was a comfort, especially amidst the quiet dread of a German Sunday morning. It is difficult for me to even listen to this album again because the associations are so intense. That mostly has to do with "Heavy Metal Drummer," a song that would get played at grad school barbecues after my more musical friends had brought out their guitars. It's a song about not being able to recapture the heedless abandon of youth, and little did I know as I sang along with my friends, I was living in my own golden days.
"War on War," Late Show With David Letterman, April 2002
There was once a time when I made sure to tune into the late night talk shows if bands I liked were performing. Wilco obviously made the cut, and I remember seeing them perform "War on War," one of my favorite songs on the new record. My friend and roommate at the time took the piss out of it for me because he thought the song was too tepid and Tweedy too meek to be a rock frontman. I felt deflated, but held on to my obsession that much tighter.
October 27, 2002 (Foellinger Auditorium)
In the fall of 2002 I was ecstatic that Wilco would be playing a gig on campus in the same giant lecture hall where I was a TA during the week. I bought the tickets the day they came out, and ended up in the lower level maybe ten rows back. At this point Jay Bennett had been jettisoned from the band, Leroy Bach was still in it, and Pat Sansone and Nels Cline had yet to join. The anticipation before the show was palpable in the audience; everyone there had been absorbing the new album for months. I was not disappointed. This was perhaps the best rock show I've ever been to. I was hearing amazing material that was still fresh by a band at the height of their powers and giving it their all. Tweedy was still willing to play some of the older stuff, so I got to hear the rip-roaring "Casino Queen" live, a great thrill. I left that auditorium that night on a high, my expectations more than surpassed. I've been chasing that feeling at every other show I've been to since.
May 3, 2003 (Southern Illinois University)
My circle of friends in grad school was similarly Wilco-crazed, and when one of my friends announced that they would be playing an outdoor show over a hundred miles south in Carbondale, we road-tripped down for it. It was a beautiful spring day, sunny but not hot, with a gentle breeze. The show was a little loose, and a lot of the students there weren't hardcore fans. Tweedy was a little jokey, giving the proceedings a fun, tossed off vibe. They even played "New Madrid," a song from Tweedy's Uncle Tupelo days about predictions of earthquakes on the New Madrid fault, perhaps a nod to concert's location. This was the same line up as before, Kotche-Tweedy-Bach-Stirratt, but with Mikail Jourgensen and his laptop lurking in the background. I like remembering this trip, and the spontaneity of my 20s, so long ago.
A Ghost Is Born, July 2004
My aforementioned year abroad in Germany, where I was doing my doctoral research, ended in July of 2004. A Ghost Is Born was released right before I left, I remember reading a review of it in a Berlin culture magazine maybe two days before my flight home. I picked it up immediately after getting stateside. I listened to this one a lot alone, as I had been hired by my advisor as a house sitter that summer. The heavy Neil Young guitar on "Guess That's What You Said" kinda shocked me, but I grew to love a lot of the songs very quickly, including "Company in My Back," "Late Greats," "Handshake Drugs," "Spiders," and "Muzzle of Bees." If I strip away the layers of memory that these albums carry with them and try to evaluate them objectively, I think A Ghost Is Born just might edge out Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. I still have one very vivid memory of this album: as I was driving back to Illinois from a job interview in Michigan in May of 2006, "Company in My Back" came on somewhere south of Kankakee. As the impossibly flat prairies beneath the unending sky stretched out before me, it seemed like the most perfect song in the world at exactly that moment.
August 2, 2004 (Eagles Ballroom)
Only a month after being back in the States, I trekked up to Milwaukee with a friend (and his parents) to see Wilco live at an old ballroom downtown. It was an interesting night, as I walked down one of Milwaukee's hills on our way to a place to get dinner, I passed right by Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters, who was chatting with someone on the sidewalk outside of a hotel. (I guess he must have been playing a show there, too.) This was also my first time seeing the current Wilco lineup, without Bach and with Cline and Sansone. The guitar pyrotechnics were certainly impressive in this show, and I do remember Tweedy doing a couple of power jumps with his guitar on "Spiders (Kidsmoke)." However, the old bash and sass I had witnessed before was gone, a relic of the 90s now put away.
February 8, 2005 (Foellinger Auditorium)
This concert was a tad disillusioning. I was back at Foellinger on a cold and dark night, but in the balcony instead of close to the stage. The show wasn't bad by any means, but not inspiring, either. That changed in the encores, which were amazing. Tellingly, the band revived "Kingpin" off of Being There, and really nailed it. They also played a bitchin' cover of "Don't Fear The Reaper."
Dinner With Jay Bennett (sometime in 2005-2006)
One of my friends was a close friend of the now departed Jay Bennett. I can't quite place the exact date, but I did in fact get to have dinner with Jay Bennett. He was in the area doing some production work at a new studio in a nearby town, and my friend and his spouse decided to have Jay and a few other folks over for dinner. Needless to say, I was a little more than starstruck. Turns out that he was a very friendly and gregarious guy, full of some funny stories a couple of which I still remember. I felt lucky just to have met the guy, but this made me especially sad at his passing, and at the impression you get of him from the I Am Trying To Break Your Heart Documentary.
Sky Blue Sky, May 2007
This album is the point at which my Wilco obsession began to simmer down into mere love and affection. This was fitting, since I had graduated with my PhD in 2006, and had trekked off to Michigan to work as a visiting assistant professor. Around that time my life had become much more difficult, having moved to a new place and working a job that was both demanding and unrewarding. This album did not make a huge impression on me when I first heard it. I didn't think it was bad, in fact it was good, but it was definitely not great. I probably like it more now than then, mostly because "Impossible Germany" has grown on me a great deal.
I've liked the other albums since then too, especially the self-titled one, but Wilco hasn't and can never mean what it did in that time roughly between 2002 and 2006. It's probably not coincidental that I reached age thirty at that point. Nevertheless, when I listen to a song like "Heavy Metal Drummer" I am transformed, sent back to a time in my life when I was young but poor, living the life of the mind with some amazing friends. While I am pretty damn happy nowadays, sometimes I wish I could go back to my Wilco days for just one of them.
Today I finally returned from my 16 day road trip with my wife and two daughters. It has been a long, strange, tiring trip. The sound of the Frozen soundtrack (played to placate my toddlers) is still ringing in my ears, and I feel like I have a bit of the white line fever. We took a meandering path on the way to and from my Nebraska homeland, stopping to see all kinds of friends and family along the way. On Friday we happened to pass through Champaign-Urbana, where I did my doctoral studies.
We had already taken an extended stop in Springfield to see various Lincoln sites and to have lunch with some friends from my grad school days who are living there. I was hoping to stop in Chambana and take my daughters out of the car and walk them around the quad while my spouse took a well-deserved rest. (I drove, she tried to keep them entertained. Not sure which was harder.) Toddlers being who they are, they had just fallen asleep in the back seat after a morning of being less than easy to deal with. (That was the exact point at which I think they hit the wall, poor kids.)
I was not going to mess with nap time, so instead I drove through downtown Champaign, campustown, and the campus itself. Earlier that morning I harbored ideas of going back into Gregory Hall and seeing if any of the profs were about. Once I gazed upon campus again, I knew that such actions would be totally out of the question, and not just because my daughters were sleeping.
Unlike a lot of other people, I had a very pleasant grad school experience. Until recent years, it was the happiest that I've ever been in my life. I was living the life of the mind, young, and surrounded by great people in a town that was affordable and had a lot going on. I knew that the job market was going to be difficult, but I had always put that in the back of my mind. After leaving the nest I ended up in a dead-end, temporary "visitor" job for two years, then three increasingly unhappy years on the tenure track. (I'll spare you the details, but my interpersonal relations at work were setting off panic attacks on a daily basis by the end.) I gave up on my grad school dream and left academia at that point. Gazing upon that golden campus, I felt an intense wave of sorrow.
Looking back, I was a completely different person in those days. A vast gulf of painful experience has estranged me from that person. While I am happy these days with my personal life and my job, my five years in the cauldron have made me distrustful, cynical, and even a little bitter. My sorrow was the sorrow for losing the hope, belief, and optimism that I once had that I know will never really come back. Of course, I am a whole lot wiser, pragmatic, and driven than I was back then, too.
I've come to see my decision to go to grad school to be, in the words of Elvis Costello, a "brilliant mistake." I had no clue what I was getting into back then, and from a financial standpoint, I fucked my life over pretty good. I also developed my mind and gained friends who I wouldn't trade for anything. I've met plenty of good people since I left the academic world, but none have shared the bonds of friendship that I wove back then. I was lucky enough to see many of these friends on this trip, and today I was hit with the realization that it is not Champaign-Urbana or my old campus that means something, but the people I met there. I'll continue to keep going great distances to see them, and will likely not bother to revisit my grad school campus anytime soon.
There is nothing quite like the random grace of hearing the right song at the right time come on the radio. I've had the pleasure of living in a few places with great radio stations where DJs are allowed to spin records rather obscure in nature. Here in Jersey my radio dial is almost permanently on WFMU, the great community radio station. The college town where I lived in my grad school days was also blessed with a community radio station, along with an alternative bluegrass/country/folk station in a local small town and the college radio station. When I first started as a grad student I didn't care much for the college station, mostly because it was aping corporate stations, both in style and playlist. In the early 2000s it was calling itself "alternative," but the playlist was wall to wall Sum 41 and Linkin Park.
Then, in a glorious change, it switched formats and became an old school, bonafide college radio station with lots of underground music and DJs driving the playlist. It seemed that each trip in my car held the possibility for hearing something I loved already or something new that became an immediate favorite. One of the latter songs was "Along For The Ride" by Mates of State, which seemed to get played every time I turned on the radio. Its synthesizer sound cut against the guitar rock grain and male-female vocal leads against the rock cult of the charismatic front man. I can still listen to it over and over again and not get tired of it.
I first heard it after getting back from Germany after my doctoral research. That year, when I was able to write my dissertation without the impending anxiety of the job market, was probably my happiest in grad school. I hear this song and I remember so many great people who now live so far away, and the dream of being a scholar before the harsh realities of academic life nearly broke me. I managed to find the All Day EP on vinyl a couple of years ago in the bargain bin, and whenever I want to relive memories of of a life that once was, I pop it on the turntable.
It's been almost three years since I have left academia, and my happiness with my current life is so total that I rarely, if ever, feel bad about being gone from it. However, there are strange, mundane events that have the capacity to trigger regret and bitterness in ways that I just can't seem to control. One such event happened yesterday, when my mail contained the quarterly newsletter/magazine (it's way too glossy to be a newsletter) from my old grad program. I was initially going to toss it aside, but for some reason started flipping through it, and I was powerless to stop the tide of ill-feeling washing over me.
I generally actually have very positive feelings about my time in grad school. I made an amazing group of friends, learned a lot, broadened my mind, and lived in a place with plenty to do which also happened to be livable on a TA's salary. There was even some sweetness to match the bitter taste in my mouth when I flipped the pages of the newsletter. It was good to see the familiar faces of the professors, and sad to read the obituary of a prof whose classes I never took but knew well because he was just an all-around good person.
All the same, I could not get over the fact that I was holding in my hands a clear erasure of reality and the lived experience of so many people so close to me. Turning newsletter's glossy pages you'd never guess that so many of the department's graduates are suffering so badly right now. I don't begrudge my old department their need to promote themselves, and of course they want to project an image of success. However, that newsletter was a vivd reminder that my grad program, like so many others, sent scores of its graduates straight into the maw of our Moloch-like academic job market, only to be quickly forgotten about if they ended up quitting the life or mired in contingent hell.
Everyone back there remembers the success stories, the students who have gone on to good jobs and impressive institutions. Nobody remembers the failure stories, despite their mounting number. One article focused on this year's crop of incoming graduate students, and as I looked at their faces, I wondered what they were being told about their chances, and whether my experience and those of so many other of my fellow graduates had simply been erased. I get the feeling that such willful forgetting is happening in a lot of graduate programs, which will no doubt reap another bitter harvest in the years to come.
