Domestic Left #15: Bring your own lampshade
D was my first drinking buddy. Not the first person I drank with, but the first person with whom I had a one-to-one relationship that was defined primarily by alcohol.
It wasn’t that serious of a relationship. It was our senior year of high school, I was only 16 or 17, and neither of us had regular access to alcohol. We probably only hung out a handful of times. We would get ahold of a bottle of some kind of liquor (if you can’t legally buy or possess alcohol, hard liquor is a much better investment than beer or wine), find some deserted place to hang out, usually a playground in one of the more working-class parts of town, and talk about music and how shitty life is.
We had been friends for a while in junior high school — fellow nerds. Nerds in the 80s sense of “uncool kids,” not in the current sense of “people who are actually cool because they are passionate about some weird topic and don’t care about what cool kids think.” I wouldn’t say that we were bullied, exactly (though I can’t speak to how D experienced our public treatment in the halls, or what he may have experienced in private); it’s more that we were treated like pets by the cooler kids: a sort of mix of affection and condescension that contained just enough cruelty to hurt, not quite enough to put your finger on.
High school was a much more wide-open social space (at the time, Lawrence, Kansas’s three junior highs fed into one massive high school). The hierarchies were looser, and the hallways — scenes of so many awkward encounters in junior high — were full and fleeting and rushed and anonymous, like the crush of New York City streets. I don’t recall why D and I stopped hanging out in the first place, or how we discovered a shared fondness for drinking during our senior year. In the days before email and cell phones and social media, it might have been as simple as the fall of 1989 being the only time that the vagaries of scheduling in a big high school put us in a classroom together, and thus made it easy to make plans.
D loved punk rock, even though he wasn’t in any way part of the punk “scene” at LHS. He was the first person who made me listen to the Ramones and actually get it. Before hanging out with D, punk rock to me was defined more by the people I saw liking it than by the music itself. At the time, I thought of it as poorly-recorded and sloppily-written music, performed by people who couldn’t play their instruments very well, fiercely loved by a tight-knit group of people who were cooler than I was. I did not yet understand that they were probably just as much outsiders as D and I were (if not more so).
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I discovered the Replacements in fits and starts. Three moments stand out in my memory, though I couldn’t put them in the correct order if my life depended on it:
1. I read an interview with (Replacements lead singer and songwriter) Paul Westerberg in some music magazine — probably Musician, I was kind of a dork — around the time that Don’t Tell a Soul came out. I remember two things about that interview:
Westerberg talking about being 29 years old, the age that Hank Williams died.
His theory that you should never give 100 percent, because if you give 100 percent and people still don’t like your music (or you), then you know they really don’t like it. If you only give 64 percent, you can always tell yourself, “well, if I had given 100 percent...”
2. Just before my senior year in high school, I pulled a phone-number tab off a “musicians wanted for a band” flyer somewhere in town and ended up in a band with two 20-year-olds who had moved to Lawrence to attend KU (the singer was still attending college, the drummer had dropped out after a year). They were both Replacements fans, who taught me to refer to the band as “The Mats.” One night we were at the legendary KU student bar The Crossing watching some mediocre band, who started playing a full-band rock and roll arrangement of “Here Comes a Regular.” I fell immediately in love with the song, which I had never heard before. After yelling “Free Bob Stinson” a couple of times during the performance, my bandmates informed me that the full-band arrangement was a travesty, and later made me listen to the original. The following year, after I moved into an apartment with the drummer to start a new band, he would sing it while I played the guitar part, and my heart would feel full of a melancholic regret I hadn’t earned yet.
3. D had a tape of Hootenanny which he would put into the stereo of my car when we were driving around, looking for a place to hang out. Hootenanny is a sloppy grab-bag of styles, the Mats self-consciously breaking away from the hardcore scene. I remember the title track and “Treatment Bound,” especially, enveloping us in a warm sense of fellow-loser fellowship, and rocking out to the medical nihilism of “Take Me Down to the Hospital.” But what I remember most vividly is D singing along to “Run It,” a song about committing fully and vigorously to a disastrous course of action, because fuck it.
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Joan Didion was hardly the only writer to cop to writing in order to figure out what she thinks, but I particularly like Didion’s less well-known and more specific formulation, “Something about a situation will bother me, so I will write a piece to find out what it is that bothers me.”
According to Paul Westerberg, his first drink was when one of his older sisters dared him to down a glass of vodka (at some far too young age). At that moment his anxiety lifted, for the first time in his life.
I started writing this newsletter after listening to a podcast series about the Replacements by the excellent No Dogs in Space (the first episode is my source for the story about Westerberg’s first drink). Among other things I learned was that in 2019, Don’t Tell a Soul was remixed (not in the DJ sense, but in the sound-engineer sense) as Dead Man’s Pop. Like the hosts of No Dogs in Space, I think this makes the album sound about 500 percent better.