Old Records Never Die (13 page)

My family's personal philosophy—its entire raison d'être—is about steeling themselves for inevitable tragedy.

After a few days of digging in her boxes, I uncovered some gems.

There was the Don McLean album with the big thumb on the front—the one with “American Pie” on it—that my mom's older
brother, Bob, had given to me as a Christmas present in 1982, and then told me exactly how “American Pie” was really about his drinking buddies down in Florida. He made a convincing case, especially considering that he drove a Chevy and did indeed enjoy drinking whiskey.

I gave it back to him as a Christmas present in 1992, and he seemed genuinely touched. “Did I ever tell you what this song was really about?” he asked.

Finding these records now, I realized how much of my music knowledge came from him, and how much of it was entirely factually inaccurate. Here was that Queen
Greatest Hits
album, which I held on to for too many years, despite not being an especially big fan of Queen, because Bob had told me that if you played “Another One Bites the Dust” backward, you'd hear Freddie Mercury sing “It's fun to smoke marijuana.” I tried—oh, how I tried—but I just couldn't make my turntable go in that direction.

I also pulled out
Let It Bleed
, the Rolling Stones album I'd owned no less than six times. Bob had given it to me in high school, when I'd already overplayed it and moved on to greener pastures. But he told me things that made the record seem more frightening, and therefore more appealing. The backup singer on “Gimme Shelter,” the one who sang about it being “just a shot away,” was pregnant when she walked into the studio. But while singing those lyrics, she'd had a miscarriage.

“A dead baby just plopped out of her, right on the studio floor,” Bob told me. “You could see it clear as day.”

The way he talked about it, it seemed like he must've been there, like he saw everything firsthand. Of course that was impossible. But you don't question these things when somebody older than you, ostensibly wiser than you, who's smoking unfiltered Winstons like somebody who has lived life in ways you can't imagine, is telling you something is true.

I can still remember listening to that record with him, sitting in my grandmother's kitchen. I'd watch him smoke, studying his technique. He'd pinch his cigarette at the tip and jerk it toward his face with every puff, like he was holding a gecko by the tail as it tried to slither away. He'd grimace when the backup singer hit the really high notes, like he was feeling things I was way too young to understand.

“That's it right there,” he said, punching at the air with a pudgy finger. “That was when it probably happened.”

I found his Bob Seger records. Those were entirely his. I had never owned a Bob Seger record in my life. But my uncle Bob, he owned them ferociously. Territorially. He owned Seger albums the way some people raised purebred puppies. He nurtured them, took care of them better than he took care of his own body. I've witnessed him eat sticks of butter like lollipops. I've seen his empty cigarette cartons stacked on tables, piled high like grim pyramids, a testament to his bad decisions. But his Bob Seger records he treated with respect, with reverence. He'd hold them by the edges, clean them with a carbon fiber brush. He's worn the same filthy pair of sweatpants, with likely the same salsa stain on the inner thigh, since the mideighties. But his Seger records get cleaned every day.

I remember Mark and I sitting in Bob's room, listening to Seger with him, and watching him cry during “Night Moves.” I did not see him cry at the funeral for his father, but I saw him weep openly no less than sixteen times while listening to “Night Moves.” It was the first time I saw a grown man cry, and for an eight-year-old boy, it was disconcerting. My brother and I didn't know what to say. Should we be comforting him? Giving him an awkward hug before finding an excuse to get the hell out of there?

He always turned the tables on us. When it got to the part in “Night Moves” about the song's hero “tryin' to make some front-page drive-in news,” Bob would look up at us and sneer.

“You don't even know what that is, do you?” he'd ask, incredulous. “You've never even heard of a drive-in.”

Mark and I shrugged. We knew exactly what a drive-in theater was. It was those abandoned parking lots where old people used to watch movies before they realized they could do that shit inside.

Bob sneered, contemptuous of our youth and all the pop culture references we were obviously missing. “No idea,” he said.

Digging deeper in the box, I pulled out a handful of records that made me gasp, like I'd stumbled upon actual bones from a dead relative. It was my father's country albums. Every goddamn one of them; classics by Waylon Jennings and Hank Williams Jr. and Merle Haggard and, his favorite, Willie Nelson. They were the records he kept in the closet of his study, stacked neatly next to his shoes, ready for some private commiserating. For him, listening to music was never a social activity. It was something you did alone, with the door shut, and it was the only thing standing between you and saying things you couldn't take back.

My dad didn't own a cowboy hat, he never used tobacco products, he was unabashedly liberal in his politics, and he'd never lived south of Chicago. I don't have a single memory of him wearing jeans. Not once. He must have owned them, but when I close my eyes, I can only picture him in slacks, ironed within an inch of their life. But he loved country music. Maybe he just appreciated the lack of irony. A country song says what it means. There's no sarcasm in a Hank Williams song. When he sings about being so lonesome he could cry, or how there's a tear in his beer, he's being entirely literal. His beer contains actual tears. Every lyric is 100 percent sincere. Merle Haggard's “I Think I'll Just Stay Here and Drink” is about exactly that. He's going to remain where he is and continue consuming alcoholic beverages. There's no subtext whatsoever.

Maybe that straightforwardness is what appealed to him.
Country music was sad without the air quotes. It wasn't sad in a Morrissey kind of way, where the bitterness was couched in cleverness. Country music wore its sadness on its sleeve.

There were plenty of his Willie Nelson records here.
Phases and Stages
,
The Troublemaker
,
Stardust
,
The Electric Horseman
soundtrack,
Yesterday's Wine
,
Shotgun Willie
. But not
the one
.
Always on My Mind
was missing. The one with the portrait of Willie wearing what seemed to be a silver skiing jacket and disco headband. The one with covers of “Bridge over Troubled Water” and “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” and the epic “Always on My Mind.” I heard that song through the cracks of my dad's study on more nights than I could begin to tell you. Even now, when I hear that song, I instinctively think, oh yeah, my parents almost got divorced.

I'm still not sure exactly what happened. I just remember my parents arguing, thinking my brother and I were out of earshot. They lobbed threats at each other like grenades, and every so often we'd get hit with shrapnel. Words like
move out
and
divorce
came tumbling at us, scarier because of the lack of context. But they told us nothing. Dad kept his distance, and my mom would only say, “I don't want you to lose all respect for your father.”

He slept on the couch in the living room. And spent most of his time in his study, where he claimed to be “working late.” Whatever he was actually doing in there, it involved a lot of listening to Willie Nelson. There were very few places where we could go in our house and not hear “Always on My Mind” pleading somewhere in the distance.

And then one day, as abruptly as it began, the fighting stopped and my dad returned to their bedroom, and whatever they'd been fighting about was unceremoniously dropped.

I still don't know what almost caused them to get divorced. I never asked either of them about it. For a long time, my brother
thought I was being a masochist. “Just leave it alone,” he'd say. “What does it matter? It's in the past. Forget it.” But I'm still waiting for my window of opportunity. Maybe it's because my mom is getting older and life is fragile and you can't retrace the footsteps of your past if all the eyewitnesses are gone. I don't want to be the guy shaking the ninety-eight-year-old woman with dementia who thinks I'm Teddy Roosevelt and screaming, “I need answers, damn you! Answers!”

Not long after I moved out of my parents' house, I bought that Willie Nelson record on CD. At the time, my musical tastes were more aligned with the Jesus Lizard and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. Lots of punk screaming and penis exposure. Not exactly Willie Nelson territory. But I needed that record. It was like a security blanket. It was the album I could pull out whenever I was feeling rejected or misunderstood by a woman. Which, to be honest, was something that happened quite a bit in my early twenties. Willie Nelson helped soothe that anxiety. Which, well sure, you don't even have to dig that deep to see how it was connected to my dad. I saw him struggling with rejection and using Willie Nelson as an emotional force field, so obviously I started associating Willie Nelson songs with self-righteous self-pity. I could listen to “Always on My Mind” and automatically feel like my hurt feelings were justified. Which, of course, was almost always bullshit. Nothing about that song justifies a guy's hurt feelings. It mocks them.

“Always on My Mind” is a song that basically says, “Yes, I ignored you. I was disrespectful and unsupportive and absent, both physically and otherwise. But come on, baby, I was thinking about you. That's got to count for something, right?”

I didn't originally plan on attending the Replacements reunion show at Chicago's Riot Fest because I thought I might stumble upon one
of my records there. I was mostly driven by thoughts of “Holy shit, this is totally happening, holy shit, holy shit, holy shiiiit!”

My band—
my band
—was actually fucking reuniting. With only two of the four founding members, but that didn't matter. The songs would be the same. And two of the scruffy old men who created those songs would be up on a stage singing them together for the first time since I was barely old enough to drink. That was enough. That was everything.

As for whether records would be part of the deal, I'd been given false hope. A few online dealers, amused by my “Does it smell like weed?” questions regarding their copies of
Let It Be
, offered suggestions of where I might have better luck. The consensus was that I'd be a fool not to stake out Riot Fest.

“All the hard-core 'Mats guys will be there,” one helpful auctioneer insisted. “It's in Chicago, which is where you unloaded your 'Mats stash, right? If your record is still in the central time zone, somebody at that show is gonna have it.”

“Are you sure they sell records at these festivals?” I wrote back. I wasn't a newbie at rock festivals. I was accustomed to booths pushing T-shirts, oily-tasting beer, and overpriced fast food. But not used vinyl.

Unsurprisingly, grown men living in rural Ohio who sell used records out of their moms' basements don't have compelling evidence about what happens in urban punk-rock festivals. But I couldn't take any chances. What if they were right? I loaded my pockets with cash, and drove extra early to Humboldt Park, the sketchy Chicago neighborhood where the concert was happening.

For reasons that made sense at the time, I brought my
Let It Be
. The record. The one I'd purchased online, with the deep scratch and funky smell that had failed to be identified by a jury of my peers. I don't know what I was thinking. It had something to do with being
in the presence of so many devoted 'Mats fans, some of whom were sure to be record collectors and possibly scholars in vinyl migration patterns. Maybe they'd take one look at my
Let It Be
and go, “Oh yeah, man, I remember that catalog number. You sold it at the Record Swap in Homewood, right? Round about '98, '99? Scratch right across ‘Androgynous.' I'm here with some archeology friends who are big 'Matheads. I'm sure they'd be happy to run some carbon-fourteen dating tests on it.”

The last time I saw the Replacements live was in 1991, during their farewell concert at Grant Park, exactly 6.53 miles away from where I would be seeing them today, twenty-two years later. Back then, I came to the show with four other guys, all of us broke and young and thoroughly stoned, crammed into a Chevy Chevette like it was a clown car. For today's show, I went alone, because every guy I know my age couldn't find a babysitter, or just wasn't interested in seeing a show that would require several hours of standing.

I considered driving, but the parking situation in Humboldt was desperate at best, hopeless at worst. The other option, taking public transportation, wasn't much better, as the idea of waiting for a bus at midnight made me nervous. I decided to drive, because not caring about whether there's parking is totally punk rock.