The day Lou Reed died shouldn’t have been particularly relevant, but I remember it. I remember the way the afternoon sun made shadows on my daughter’s fingers. Graceful and elegant.
Just a twinkling ago, my baby girl first discovered her hands. For me, her besotted mother, it was a magical milestone in her development. She was surely the first child to ever make such a discovery, her little fingers in constant motion.
Her father and I called it “hand ballet.”
Transfixed, as though under a spell, she paid rapt attention, staring intently, unblinking, at the dancing fingers that would soon cooperate to clap hands, tie laces, make music, whisk eggs, and wipe away tears. To fly, fly away . . .
Her dad’s favorite Lou Reed song.
I don’t know why Lou Reed was always relevant in my life. I first heard him on Radio One when I was just a little girl making daisy chains on the field in front of our house. The characters in “Walk on the Wild Side,” were on another planet. There was Holly, from Miami, FLA, and she hitch-hiked her way across the USA; Little Joe who never gave it away, whatever it was; and, Jackie who thought she was James Dean for a day. Just a child, I couldn’t possibly have known what the “hustle here and the hustle there” was all about. Had I known, I wouldn’t have been singing it within earshot of my parents. This was provincial Northern Ireland in the early 1970s.
Recalling this, I’m reminded of author, Neil Gaiman’s story of how he braced himself for almost twenty years for the inevitable conversation with his daughter about the story behind her name. Holly. When the day arrived, here’s how it went:
You named me from this song, didn’t you?” said Holly as the first bass notes sang. “Yup,” I said. Reed started singing. Holly listened to the first verse, and for the first time, actually heard the words. “Shaved her legs and then he was a she …? He?
That’s right,” I said, and bit the bullet. We were having The Conversation.”You were named after a drag queen in a Lou Reed song.” She grinned like a light going on. “Oh dad. I do love you,” she said. Then she picked up an envelope and wrote what I’d just said down on the back, in case she forgot it.
I’m not sure that I’d ever expected The Conversation to go quite like that.
If I’m honest, I have always been a tiny bit afraid of whatever truths awaited me on the wild side , but I still took that walk. And, I have never once regretted it, because there was always a book of magic in the garbage can to take me away. To take me back.
The first time my daughter clapped her hands, it was for her dad on his birthday, on this day twenty six years ago. It was perfect.
Suspended in the one thought this morning are my daughter and the late Lou Reed, their elegant hands in motion. Laurie Anderson writes that her husband, Lou Reed, spent much of his last days on earth:
. . . being happy and dazzled by the beauty and power and softness of nature. He died on Sunday morning looking at the trees and doing the famous 21 form of tai chi with just his musician hands moving through the air.
My baby girl saying hello to her hands. Lou Reed saying goodbye. Discovering and rediscovering that we cannot have the magic without the loss.
Far away from Belfast, Stuart Bailie and I find ourselves in the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains in Los Gatos, California. A perfect place to ponder politics, protest, and punk rock, it’s where John Steinbeck penned his angriest book, the soundtrack of America’s Great Depression and Tom Joad’s California. By any other name, The Grapes of Wrath is a punk anthem fulfilling the writer’s goal “to rip a reader’s nerves to rags.” It is a call to outrage, to make “good trouble” – the kind that might redeem the very soul of a country, resonant and recognizable in the soundtrack of Northern Ireland since 1968. That soundtrack is Trouble Songs – Music and Conflict in Northern Ireland, a potent compilation of moments where music was “inspired, agitated, or brutalized” by the times. For young people like me who spent their Saturday afternoons seeking refuge in Terri Hooley’s record shop, there is no better man to deliver Northern Ireland’s soundtrack, than Stuart Bailie, self-proclaimed “wizened old geezer” – a middle-aged punk rocker.
Trouble Songs arrives at a seminal moment for Northern Ireland, the title of its first chapter an imperative from a Stiff Little Fingers song – “if these words hit you at the right moment, they would be life changing” – Take a Look at Where You’re Living. Forcing us to take a closer look, Bailie begins his tour of Northern Ireland in 1968, when they blocked the lower deck of the Craigavon Bridge, singing “We Shall Overcome.” Perhaps the first time it was sung in Northern Ireland, this was the song to sing, ringing out from America, from far away freedom rides and sit-ins, union halls and churches, in the face of snarling dogs and high-pressure fire hoses. With all its promise, this was the song that sustained Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Congressman John Lewis, the last surviving speaker of the march to Washington DC in 1968, also the occasion of the “I Have a Dream,” speech. Lewis says that “without music, the civil rights movement would have been like a bird without wings. We Shall Overcome are those wing.” It is the quintessential trouble song.
Bailie’s fresh perspective arrives fifty years since civil rights activists took to the streets in Northern Ireland and twenty years since the Good Friday agreement was signed, the anniversary of the latter a publishing deadline for Bailey, the promise of it indelible and on stage at a rock ‘n’ roll concert at the Waterfront Hall in Belfast, when from behind David Trimble and John Hume, the leaders of Northern Ireland’s largest political parties, Bono steps in to hold their arms up like prize fighters. It was their first public handshake, and it was momentous. Choreographed by U2’s front-man, it had also been done before. Bailie takes us back to a spring evening in 1978 at the National Stadium in Kingston, Jamaica. Without warning, during a rendition of “Jammin’,” reggae boss, Bob Marley, invites political opponents, Michael Manley and Edward Seaga, to join him on stage, to send out a positive gesture to a country in the grip of its most deadly period of political bloodshed and violence. They have no choice. It is an unscripted moment that will make the international headlines the next day, showing the world that if “we gonna make it right, we gots to unite!” The image is iconic – a singer holding the hands of two political leaders, a show of strength against forces that bring out the very worst in us.
This is good trouble. This is one love.
While the biggest band in the world may have helped save Northern Ireland from impending uncertainty, two decades later the country is without a functioning government. Circumstances in Belfast have changed significantly, summed up in the late Bap Kennedy’s song “Boomtown.” Kids in the city “don’t know how lucky they are, they never heard a bomb,” property prices are soaring, and there are career opportunities in the rebranded Northern Ireland Police Service. Progress? Like Kennedy, Stuart Bailie is not so sure, commenting on what he calls the Disney-fication of his city “Belfast has whored itself out a bit, which really depresses me. The Cathedral Quarter used to be all anarchy with exciting people trying to really change the fabric of the place, but now, it is all about theme pubs and stag weekends.” Brexit and its implications for the border still loom, and, shaken and saddened by the death of journalist, Lyra McKee, killed by a dissident bullet in Derry on Good Friday this year, the people of Northern Ireland brace themselves for taking two steps back. Again. The distance between politicians and the people expands daily as does the sense of disappointment and division. And while the rainbow flag will fly for the first time on Pride Day from Belfast City hall this summer – a small but mighty step forward – Bailie keeps it real:
this is the only place on our islands where we don’t have marriage equality, and the religious fundamentalists still have too much power.”
Across the Atlantic, the same might be said. Following the results of the 2018 mid-term elections the nation is still deeply divided, Dr. King’s legacy perhaps on the line. From cell-phone footage of an incident on the streets of Phoenix, Arizona where just this week several police officers yelled obscenities and threatened to shoot an African-American family after their four-year-old daughter accidentally took a Barbie doll from a store to the Netflix mini-series, When They See Us, which fictionalizes the very real and massive miscarriage of justice in the 1989 case of the Central Park 5, we are in crisis mode all across the globe.
What’s going on?
And, it leads Bailie to conclude that we are poised for another great era of trouble songs, adding Kendrick Lamar and Eminem to the soundtrack that began with Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, and Marvin Gaye, every song an opportunity to envision a better future.
Bailie does not editorialize. Trouble Songs is about music and about how people related to it; it is about how someone like Stephen Travers, survivor of the Miami Showband massacre, can articulate the importance of music during the worst of times. Travers is quoted on the back cover of the book: “People often say that music was harmless fun. It wasn’t. It must have terrified the terrorists. When people came to see us, sectarianism was left outside the door of the dancehall. That’s the power of music and I think that every musician that ever stood on a stage, north of the border during those decades, every one of them was a hero.” On the front cover, Bailie knew what he did not want. Wary of “Troubles porn, it would not feature men with tanks or bombs and guns; there would be no children at play in a black and white wasteland with sectarian graffiti on the walls and no British Army patrolling the streets. When a friend shared a picture of the Bogside in 1969, Bailie knew he had found his cover. Taken by the late French photographer Gilles Caron, the photograph captures a then 18-year old Ann Kelly in the aftermath of a riot. “I thought she looked so composed – she was her own person.” With permission to use the picture from Caron’s estate, Bailie’s director for cover designer, Stu Bell, was simple – “make it feel like Dexy’s Midnight Runners first album with a wee bit of the first Clash LP.”
Score.
Aware of the weight of words in Northern Ireland, Bailie handles with circumspection the identity crisis that still defines his tiny country. He takes care to avoid words like “terrorism,” to ensure that Trouble Songs is not perceived as “a prod thing or a Republican thing,” but a thing that belongs to everyone in Northern Ireland, and anyone with an interest – personal or political – in the role music plays where they live and beyond. While Trouble Songs never patronizes the reader, it addresses music that sometimes patronized the people affected. Reflecting on political statements about Northern Ireland from the big stadium bands of the 1980s – Simple Minds, Sting, The Police, U2 – Bailie points out that some of us “got a wee bit fed up with what felt like tourism. We were the subject of virtue signaling before we even knew what it was.”
All over the world, bands were playing to sold-out stadiums with “something to say about Northern Ireland, recording grainy black and white videos depicting West Belfast as a cultural wasteland with slogans on the wall and children running in slow motion, but the band shots were actually filmed in Los Angeles.”
With a reality check, he verbalizes what’s in my head, “they didn’t have the fucking courtesy to shoot their video in Northern Ireland,” but he refrains from lecturing on this topic in his book, opting for empathy as the path to take towards redemption for the soul of Northern Ireland, digging in to recount the story that has to be told without wagging his finger. He looks right at me and asks “Was Christy Moore “more right” than Paul Brady?” The answer hovers.
From his back-seat, Bailie allows his readers to draw their own conclusions.
A fan of Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, and ‘the new journalism,” Bailie draws from the influence of England’s Dreaming by Jon Savage. Obsessed with music and the details that work to create a strong sense of place, Bailie is interested in what people were wearing or what the weather was like. He wants to know “What’s the yarn here? What’s the story? How did this guy arrive in the story and how did he end up writing these lyrics?” Thus, each chapter could stand alone, thematic and episodic, reminiscent of the notes on music and culture on his blog, an online space where he relates “big stories in context and the rich significance of little moments.” Regarding the title of his blog – “Dig with It,” from Heaney’s “Digging,” he explains he wanted “something a bit funky, a bit groovy, a wee bit literate.” With a nod to the Heaney poem, he figured “it’s bit jazz, a bit Irish literature – that’ll do.”
Of course the DIY ethic of bloggers appeals to Bailie – it’s very punk. Resentful of writing for pennies for local newspapers, having grown up in an era when writers were paid well for their words, he approached Trouble Songs the way most bloggers approach their writing – “you write for yourself on your own terms.” He knew there would be some fairly substantial spade work involved in the project and that while writing about music is perhaps a dying trade, it is also what he does best and that Trouble Songs was a story he could uniquely tell. He has been writing it in his head for decades. Back in 2007, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland approached him for an essay on popular music for their “Troubles Archive” series. Combing through the contents of plastic bags stuck under tables, boxes, newspaper cuttings that have yet to make it either of two filing cabinets, each bulging with random information and transcripts of 30 year old interviews from his time as musical journalist and Assistant Editor at NME. This was in the days before Wikipeida when knowledge was power. Unpacking the boxes, he was constantly delighted with his younger self – “a wee bit of a bad boy, a minor hooligan” who had been shown a new way by a London act, The Clash, who sang about urban desolation and riots in Notting Hill and the impact of Northern Ireland in England in a song called “Career Opportunities.” He credits the Clash with opening his mind, encouraging him to think carefully about his social context: “I hate the civil servant rules, I won’t open no letter bombs for you.” Simple and spare, there was a moral code in the musical statements of The Clash, and it paved the way for a band like Stiff Little Fingers to sing about an “Alternative Ulster.”
Punk rock might just have saved Stuart Bailie’s life. But Trouble Songs isn’t just about Stuart Bailie. It’s about everyone else in Northern Ireland too, and how music can transcend the differences that divide them. It’s a matter of life and death. Really. And, yes, you should be surprised that none of the big publishers were interested when Stu Bailie first approached them with the Trouble Songs idea and three chapters focusing on that unforgettable night in the Waterfront in 1998, the massacre of the Miami Showband , and The Clash in Belfast. A music industry insider, he had expected it to be easier, that he would just knock on doors like a new band with a demo tape. But Bailie was rejected repeatedly, agents and publishers alike telling him there was simply no market for the project. Then the British Council asked if there was any way he could get it done in time for the Peace and Beyond conference in Belfast to mark the 20th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement. Fired up, he pressed on, his punk rock ethos leading him to complete it as a solo project with help from the British Council, Bloomfield Press, and EastSide Arts, Belfast. He turned to crowdfunding with a Kickstarter campaign appeal, telling potential funders that this was “a call to my community to help carry a vital story,” which ultimately involved over 60 interviews and conversations with the likes of Bono, Christy Moore, the Undertones, Stiff Little Fingers, Orbital, Kevin Rowland, Terri Hooley, the Rubberbandits, Dolores O’Riordan and the survivors of the Miami Showband. His community responded and he sold almost 300 books before Trouble Songs was published – punk at its finest. Chuckling, he describes one of the greatest rewards, an unexpected phone call from Waterstones book store advising him that they needed 50 more books because of Father’s Day sales. A week later, he was hearing from fathers who wanted to buy the book for their kids. “Don’t read a history book about the Troubles, read what Stu has to say instead.” What of all those defeatist conversations with publishers who made him feel “a wee bit unloved” for such a long time? Any words for them?
“Up yours.” Naturally.
The son of working-class parents who pushed him to do well in school, Stuart Bailie attended the prestigious Royal Belfast Academical Institution. Simply Inst to the locals, it is one of the city’s oldest schools, the porticoed institution is a handsome example of late Georgian architecture, a posh school where the headmaster shows up to morning assembly in gown and mortar board. In 1970s Belfast, Bailie remembers it was also ‘semi-derelict,’ its windows criss-crossed with tape to catch the shrapnel from a bomb blast in the city center, its classrooms violent and ‘hard men’ beating up first year students in the quadrangle. Too, it was “rock and roll high school,” producing within a very short space of time, punk bands like The Zips, The Tinopers, Acme, Rudi, Victim, and Protex who got a record deal with Polydor around the same time as they were doing their A-level exams. Bailie’s English teacher, was Frank Ormsby, a guy with a fringe and a Fermanagh accent that was out of place in Belfast. Occasionally, Ormsby tossed the prescribed curriculum and instead shares with his pupils something from The Honest Ulsterman, a publication he had edited since 1969. While such detours did little for Bailie’s exam results, several years later, he realized what Ormsby had given him, “an abiding joy for words. That’s the gift of “a proper teacher – to love writing. Ormsby taught me not to pass an exam, but to love the words.”
Showing up to a school above his social league every day, 16 year old Bailie was in the company of aspiring lawyers and dentists. Meanwhile, he tells me, “I had no fucking clue what I was going to do. I wanted to be in a band.” Already a scholar of music, his weekly routine was to buy two albums for 50 pence from Dougie Knights record shop and go home and tape them. First, he loved Mott the Hoople, then Bowie, The Faces, Lou Reed. By the time punk arrived,Bailie had found his tribe.
Punk wasn’t that weird – I’d already experienced Lou Reed.
Somewhat bemused, his parents watched their son transition from model student to a “wee bit of a delinquent” – a punk. Every weekend, he would make new friends at Caroline Music or Terri Hooleys’s record shop, Good Vibrations, which his friend, Hooley, describes as “a real meeting place . . . it was like an oasis in the middle of this cultural wasteland. We hadn’t a clue what we were doing really; I was just this mad, ex hippy. But the energy of punk gave me the chance to relive my youth again. It was an exciting alternative for all of them.”
It was also at the height of the conflict in Northern Ireland, and punk rock was fermenting all over the city. Asked about his impressions of Belfast in 1977, the late Joe Strummer of The Clash was emphatic, “When punk rock ruled over Ulster, nobody ever had more excitement and fun. Between the bombings and shootings, the religious hatred and the settling of old scores, punk gave everybody a chance to LIVE for one glorious burning moment. Let it provide inspiration.”
At the time, of course, the likes of Stuart Bailie and Terri Hooley had no idea that what they were doing was particularly noble or inspired or that it would thirty years later become the stuff of conferences on the role of music in peacemaking. During that period, it was just about the music. Every Saturday afternoon, Bailie would walk up and down between the two record shops, making five new friends along the way, each of them “lifted out of this sectarian thing around us. It was magic.” By 1978, he realized he was part of a tribe, a community committed to a more adventurous alternative. “You just knew if someone’s got an Outcast or Rudi badge on their coat, you could talk to them.” Punks stood out. They knew their rights and they didn’t wear flares or long hair. To cultivate his own style, Bailie had even learned how to use a sewing machine. His first order of business was to take in the legs of every pair of trousers. Next, a shopping trip to his dad’s wardrobe, where he repurposed old suits, accessorizing the lapels with punk band badges. Ready to take on the world, Bailie sauntered into his parent’s kitchen one morning, dressed in one of his father’s old jackets. “I got married in that!” the old man said, remembering, I suppose, who he used to be.
Like the rest of us, Bailie has experienced the realization that once upon a time his dad was cool, “a bit of a boy,” with an impressive record collection that included old 78s by Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, and Hank Williams. Bailie is full of similar surprises himself, and as our conversation draws to a close, he takes me back to summer drives with his parents around Millisle and Ballywalter, Clougy and Comber and a song that is indelible in his memory. He closes his eyes and starts to sing, “When I was young and went to school they taught me how to write/To take the chalk and make a mark and hope it turns out right.”
The journeys seemed endless and very often the windscreen wipers would keep time as they bleated out these fatalistic lyrics. Just play me a bit of Hank Thompson and I’m back there in the back seat, wondering just how many tears it took to clean that slate.
From an old Hank Thompson song, “Blackboard of my Heart” is a honky tonk tune about getting over the girl. “You gotta hear it,” he tells me. “It’s just gorgeous.”
He’s right of course, as he is about all the songs you gotta hear – the Trouble Songs. And, you gotta see it too. The book, celebrated as one of 2018’s best by Hot Press and Uncut magazine, is being brought to the big screen as a documentary and will include interviews with young artists like Touts, Susie Blue, and Wood Burning Savages who have something to say about the things that continue to divide and oppress us. In talking to them, Bailie has no doubt that “the era of Trouble Songs is far from over.”
¡Viva la Revolución!
A version of this post originally appeared in Reading Ireland
Laurie Anderson tells this story about the day she married her best friend, Lou Reed:
It was spring in 2008 when I was walking down a road in California feeling sorry for myself and talking on my cell with Lou. “There are so many things I’ve never done that I wanted to do,” I said.
“Like what?”
“You know, I never learned German, I never studied physics, I never got married.”
“Why don’t we get married?” he asked. “I’ll meet you halfway. I’ll come to Colorado. How about tomorrow?”
“Um – don’t you think tomorrow is too soon?”
“No, I don’t.”
And so the next day, we met in Boulder, Colorado, and got married in a friend’s backyard on a Saturday, wearing our old Saturday clothes, and when I had to do a show right after the ceremony, it was OK with Lou.”
Like many couples, we each constructed ways to be – strategies, and sometimes compromises, that would enable us to be part of a pair. Sometimes we lost a bit more than we were able to give, or gave up way too much, or felt abandoned. Sometimes we got really angry. But even when I was mad, I was never bored. We learned to forgive each other. And somehow, for 21 years, we tangled our minds and hearts together.
The day Ken married me was like any other. We were not really watching TV when I suggested it. “OK,” he said, and he put on his boots and waited for me to put on a dress I knew he liked.
I dug out the yellow pages and found a wedding chapel in an old west Phoenix neighborhood. The preacher reminded me of the old man at the bar in Field of Dreams, the one with the pale blue eyes who tells the story of Moonlight Graham and all the blue hats he never got around to giving his wife, Alicia. Like me, Alicia liked to wear blue.
In our everyday clothes and without a ring, we asked a stranger to officially witness our wedding ceremony. Then we vowed to each other that we would stay together in sickness and health, ’til death us do part. A second time around for both of us, we were unwilling to settle for anything less than the kind of love that makes you leave one life with nothing but whatever you’re wearing that day. It was easy to say and to mean to say that only death would tear us apart. Madly in love, we had no reason to suspect that cancer (mine) or aneurysms (his) would move in and turn things upside down more than once and make us resent our bodies and ourselves. Oblivious to any possibility of dark days ahead, we filled up an ordinary November morning with a time-honored stream of extraordinary promises. We couldn’t stop smiling, and we didn’t tell a soul. Young and wild, we may as well have eloped to Gretna Green, and with our secret, we even went to work afterwards, delighting in the fact that no one else knew what we had done. Like so many of the rituals we performed every day, the act of marrying was as casual as it was important. Without fanfare or hoopla, it was ours – completely ours. Private.
For a long time, we were answerable only to each other and did as we wished without having to worry much about anyone else. There were random road trips north and to the ocean, the first of which on a hot Friday afternoon when I was desperate to smell the sea. He just told me to get in the car, and off we went to California. No map. No GPS. No bottles of water. No phone. No specific destination other than “ocean.” By nightfall, we were inhaling the salty air somewhere around Los Angeles and the next evening, we were strolling along a pier in Pismo Beach. As though putting America’s never-ending road to the test, I asked him to keep driving until we stopped by a lighthouse, the kind of place I had always thought would make a great home for us. There, we balanced a camera on the hood of his car, set the self-timer, and took a picture of ourselves, windswept, laughing, and clinging to each other, completely unaware that a decade later, we would stand again on that very same spot on the road to Monterey, smiling for a picture that would be taken by the only child we would have together – our daughter. Then, for another decade, San Luis Obispo County – Morro Bay – would be our family’s vacation spot.
Between us, for over two decades, we created hundreds of rituals and routines – lovely and easy labors of love that came naturally, in large part because – as my mother still reminds me – I could set my watch by Ken. I always knew where he was, what he was doing, how much he loved me, how much I exasperated him, how proud he was of accomplishments in my professional life and how much he despised the bullshit I brought into our home from that same profession. He told me he loved me every single day and at the end of every single phone call (even on days and at the end of phone calls when I was anything but lovable). Always in my corner, he was my number one fan, my lover, and the wise and best friend who told the young me whose feelings were too easily hurt and who cared too much about what other people thought, that she needed to grow some “hard bark,” because she would need it one day.
Well, Ken, I need it today. I know you didn’t want me to harden; you just wanted me to toughen up. But where do we find the toughness to fully absorb the blow of your death, the finality of it? What should I say to our daughter when the grief – boundless and unforgiving – renders her as vulnerable as a new-born? What do I tell myself when I look up and find myself surprised – still – that you are not there with another mug of coffee or a glass of wine asking me what I’m blogging about, and wondering aloud – with a wry and worried smile – if the woman I once was would be coming back any time soon, and when she did, would she remember the man you used to be? In hindsight, I know we both had an inkling that maybe she would not. So maybe I should just tell the truth – if only to myself.
Each of us wrestled with the ways in which illness changed us, forcing us at the most inconvenient of times to confront our mortality, and turning us into very good liars and strangers who fought dirty. We lied, I suppose, for self-preservation and out of fear, out of indignation or anger about our respective lots, out of denial and blame, and all the other words that belong in all the self-help books we would never read, all the “psycho-babble.” Our marriage had not been perfect, but it had until then been honest. Always. Honesty was one of those non-negotiables that somehow – unbelievably – was blown asunder by illness and our fucked up responses to it. We found ourselves diminished, transformed into weaker versions of ourselves that were unacceptable to us in light of the boldness that defined us at the beginning and for so many years. Ashamed of ourselves, we didn’t know what to do, and we turned our backs on the people we used to be.
And we used to be bold. We started out with courage and a chemistry that we were convinced would more than make up for the little we lacked in compatibility. We argued about little things but rarely about the big stuff, and – this is important – we never lied. We fell into a rhythm that included laughing every day and sometimes at the same old stories including the one about the first argument we ever had. It went something like this:
What’s wrong?
Nothing.
Are you sure?
Yep.
So what are you thinking about?
Nothing.
Well, it must be something. I can tell. It’s something. Did I do something wrong? Is it about me? (I mean, isn’t it always about me?) Can you at least tell me what it begins with? Just the first letter? Does it begin with a “Y”?
No baby. Just private thoughts. Private thoughts, baby.
Private thoughts.
Ken knew this response would fall short of satisfying someone like me, someone hell-bent – hell-bent – on knowing the inner details, the finer points, the “but how are you really feeling?” liner notes, but he never told me, and growing up and older by his side, I figured out that we all have private thoughts, secrets never to be told, things that stay deep within us, desires, differences that will not be aired – private thoughts.
Maybe most people wouldn’t admit it aloud, but Ken did. I remember how he made that first argument in the same way he once told a cashier at Pep Boys – after paying in cash for new windshield wipers – that no, she could not have his address. Not that he was a conspiracy theorist, he just resented the notion of his name and address being placed on a list that would perhaps be sold to someone who would profit from it. When he detected her annoyance because he was not cooperating the way a good customer should, Ken looked at her, deadpan, and with a twinkle in his eye, he beckoned her closer so he could whisper to her: “I just can’t do it. I can’t tell you where I live, man. The cops are after me.” And, I had to put on my sunglasses and walk out of the store because I was laughing so hard.
That’s how it was, except when it wasn’t. There were times when he would insist I had lost my sense of humor, and I would argue that – au contraire – he had lost his ability to be funny. Like storms in the tiniest of teacups, these often passed, and as I sit here, three years after his death, I realize there were no boring days, no days that did not shimmer for at least a moment with what had connected us at the beginning. The wall we had built did its job for just as long as was required.
For as long as I can remember, I have known that Holly came from Miami, FLA and hitch-hiked her way across the USA; that little Joe never gave it away; and, that Jackie thought she was James Dean for a day. As young as I was when I first heard Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side,” I cannot possibly have known what the hustle here and the hustle there was all about. Had I known, I probably wouldn’t have been singing it within earshot of my parents – after all, this was the early 1970s in provincial Northern Ireland.
Remembering Lou Reed reminds me of a story Neil Gaiman tells about how he braced himself for almost twenty years for the inevitable conversation with his daughter about the story behind her name. Holly. When the day arrived, here’s how it went:
You named me from this song, didn’t you?” said Holly as the first bass notes sang. “Yup,” I said. Reed started singing. Holly listened to the first verse, and for the first time, actually heard the words. “Shaved her legs and then he was a she …? He?
That’s right,” I said, and bit the bullet. We were having The Conversation.”You were named after a drag queen in a Lou Reed song.” She grinned like a light going on. “Oh dad. I do love you,” she said. Then she picked up an envelope and wrote what I’d just said down on the back, in case she forgot it.
I’m not sure that I’d ever expected The Conversation to go quite like that.
If I’m honest, I have always been a tiny bit afraid of whatever truths awaited me on the wild side with Lou Reed, but I always took that walk with him anyway. And, I have never regretted it, because there was always a book of magic in the garbage can to take me away. And then came the loss . . . just to even things out.
Two years on, it feels odd to say out loud that Lou Reed is dead, that there have been no more new tales from the dirty boulevard. I remember Ken wouldn’t say it out loud either, and I sometimes wonder if it is because he had an inkling that just 18 days later, he would fly away too.
Lou Reed was right about lots of things. He was right about the magic and the loss. I understand that now, and I’m the better for it. So thank you Lou Reed. For all of it. For being combative and contrary and infinitely cool. For my black leather jacket. For my rock and roll heart. For the bit of magic.
My baby girl saying hello to her hands. Lou Reed saying goodbye. Discovering and rediscovering that we cannot have the magic without the loss.
