Chapter 5: Rock N Roll Psychosis
There is a soundtrack in your head, your
soundtrack, beyond that which you list on
your MySpace page, download onto your IPod,
or display within the sheath of an auto-visor.
This internal, opus-length album is stacked
behind memory and labeled with fear, lust,
bliss, humiliation, tragedy, and hate. It
lives, and will forever live, in your subconscious.
It is unbiased and nonobjective. It does
not adhere to the social, economical, or
ethnic boundaries on which you have come
to depend. It cannot distinguish the abomination
of David Hasselhoff from the genius of David
Bowie, the devil-hand pump of Hell’s
Bells from the tweak-scratching bass of
Hell’s Kitchen.
This sound of your life, your
musical psychosis, simply records, saves,
and replays when properly stimulated. It
is on this internal soundtrack where the
most ruthless, hardcore skinhead sings along
to Madonna’s “Lucky Star”
as it reminds him of his high school sweetheart,
where the tattooed metalhead with the flying-V
guitar recalls learning every dance step
in Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”
video, where the ringer-T Emo girl with
the black swoosh haircut remembers slipping
a cutout picture of ‘NSYNC under her
hope chest, or where a suburban widow sobs
uncontrollably as she hears The B52’s
“Love Shack” because, although
compositionally unrelated, it’s the
last song she heard before she got the call
about her husband’s accident.
If psychiatrists could establish
an overwrite function for our rock-n-roll
psychosis, what a trauma free world it could
be . . . “So tell me, Jane, what do
you think it is about “La Bamba”
that makes your boyfriend so violent?”
Nothing cements our individual
memories with greater assurance or longevity
than sound. I can’t tell you who attended
my 3rd birthday party or what type of cake
was served, but I can absolutely confirm
that Bert from Sesame Street sang “Doin’
the Pigeon” in the background. When
I was in 1st grade, a 4th grade bully named
Anthony Petruzzi (hell yes that’s
his real name, I hope the sadist bastard
is on Welfare in a trailer somewhere) used
to punch me in the stomach every morning
before school. I could not, with any significant
clarity, describe what Anthony looked like,
but the first time he hit me, out behind
our elementary school in the tire playground,
some kid was playing Van Halen’s “Ain’t
Talkin’ ‘Bout Love” on
a portable boom-box. As a writer, a memoirist,
a musician, and a margin-walking adult with
a hoard of less than joyous childhood memories,
I achieve a fair amount of therapeutic resolve
and morbid amusement from recalling my musically
stained past, and learning from these infamous
experiences via the dwelling concentration
necessary to story such events for publication.
The process goes like this:
think, rethink, rerethink, ask “how,”
ask “why,” pace back and forth
from home-office to bedroom, distract with
periodicals, music, guitar playing, and
video games, picture the memory as a photograph
and look in the background for lost or forgotten
verification, think in terms of character
development, and then write it out instead
of sniffing glue, slitting my wrists, or
acquiring multiple personalities. If the
random truisms of my life, told with sufficient
comprehension and candor, happen to yield
a curative literary career, then Karma,
the mother of redemption, is real.
The first playlist on my IPod
is titled “Developmental Nostalgia.”
Developmental Nostalgia is a 111 track,
chronologically arranged, musical autobiography.
(Apparently the 12,500+ days of my life
can be summarized in 111 points of interest.)
Track one is “O’ Tannenbaum”
by Vince Guaraldi from “A Charlie
Brown Christmas,” because my first
crawling memory of music is Schroeder on
piano. The playlist continues with Animal
and Dr. Teeth shredding through some Jazz
oriented Muppet tunes, then on to Men At
Work “Business as Usual” (my
favorite album in third grade), then a continuation
of elementary school which culminates in
a 4th grade spread of Quiet Riot, Bon Jovi,
and Van Halen. An unlikely trio consisting
of The Rolling Stones, Prince, and The Violent
Femmes dominate 5th and 6th grades before
unmercifully overthrown by various strains
of classic Punk Rock (see: Rock N Roll Addiction
Chapter 2). My high school years are represented
by more Punk Rock and many of its Alternative
and Hard Core variations, such as Fugazi,
All, The Cure, The Sugarcubes, Leeway, Sick
of it All, Gorilla Biscuits, Jane’s
Addiction, etc. When college began, so did
Euro-Pop, which fostered an awe for melodic
genius: Oasis, Supergrass, Cast, Blur, Kula
Shaker, as well as a long overdue appreciation
for its roots: The Beatles, The Who, The
Stone Roses. (Aside from a single, house-party
moment involving Nirvana, Grunge is a phenomenon
that missed me completely.)
After college there were many
jobs and cars and taxes and rent payments
and courtships and repressed childhood scenarios
that surfaced during seemingly blissful
moments of comfort with a hodgepodge of
old and new sounds to accompany them: The
Mars Volta, Weezer, Ani DiFranco, Dylan,
The Velvet Underground, Dexter Gordon. And
then there is now, track number 111: Kaki
King “Bari Improv” per my obsession
with the music from August Rush, a movie
whose premise well illustrates this musically
autobiographical thesis. There are songs
for every girlfriend, songs for every breakup,
songs for every address, songs for every
struggle, and songs for some of the most
arbitrary nothingness, memories embedded
with vigorous recollection simply because
they played out to a soundtrack.
Perhaps “nostalgia”
is not the correct choice of words, as it
suggests a fondness or yearning. I certainly
do not have a fondness for getting beat
up in my elementary school playground, but
I do yearn to learn from that which I have
already experienced. And I am fond of music.
To view your life through melodic eyes is
both illuminating and comforting. The music
dates each event, unites it with a time
period and by association the people and
society of this period. It makes your pain,
your embarrassment, and your misfortune
seem a little more human, a little more
inevitable, a little more adequate. The
music that beats through our memory in various
genres, spawned by different cultures, evocative
of separate emotions, is representative
of us as a whole, this vast race of human
animals whose adversity is so prevalent
as to require an endlessly changing medium
of expression and release. As I listen to
the 111 tracks of my life, the emotion behind
many of the songs helps curtail the trauma
of the events I have assigned to them. Maybe
this makes me feel less alone. Or maybe
it makes me realize that no matter how alone
I feel, I’ll always have the music
in my head.
Rock
N Roll Addiction, Chapter Four
Rock
N Roll Addiction, Chapter Three
Rock
N Roll Addiction, Chapter Two
Rock
N Roll Addiction, Chapter One
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ROCK N ROLL ADDICTION by Daniel McDermott
