Happy Labor Day and happy Virgo season (my time to shine!). I think one of my first posts on this blog was about my Daylight Savings ritual of listening to the New Radicals on the evening each year we barter an hour of sleep for an hour of sunlight. While I can’t definitively attribute my general disposition to astrological circumstance, I am stereotypically Virgo-fussy, and a creature of habit. Routine is a bulwark against the chaos, and orderliness a pleasure I curate for its own sake.
So it is that I also happen to listen to “The Boys of Summer” every September, right around Labor Day, as our surplus gift of daylight begins to wane and the song takes on its seasonal layer of added salience. I remain resentful that Don Henley, whose work I otherwise disdain, is responsible for attaching some of the most flawlessly conceived pop lyricism to some of the most flawlessly composed pop songwriting that has ever existed in the history of anything, but there’s no use arguing with perfection. I know it when I hear it, and I’m not too proud to admit it.
That perfection always hits me like a freight train, but this year there was a brand new and shattering force to the collision, hard enough to blow off a layer of dust I didn’t even realize had accumulated, as if revealing some astonishing and essential character to the song that I had overlooked in my many years of listening.
I’m not even talking about the obvious, eye-rolling literalism of a line like Nobody on the road, Nobody on the beach as heard while sheltering away from the very scenes the song invokes, or the uniquely pointed cruelty of watching the sun set on a summer season that was never within reach to begin with, all its promise of whimsy and respite preemptively broken by a virus. That’s a little too on-the-nose, even for me.
…I’ve had a negroni or two, so bear with my meandering.
“The Boys of Summer” is a song that narrates a love story – a love gone awry, as is the favored subject and source of inspiration for so many great pieces of art – but to say it is about love is kind of like saying Moby Dick is about a guy and a whale: technically correct; not a good summation of the reasons for its inclusion among the American literary canon and high school English courses. (Am I sincerely comparing the legacy of “The Boys of Summer” to Herman Melville? No comment.)
That love story is the microscopic lens which precedes an explosion into a breathtaking panorama-view, one that seems to encompass the whole intersecting territory of loss and longing and memory and hope and the strangeness of growing older. It is the framework for a back-and-forth perspective-shift that is as masterfully seamless, effortless in its transitions as our own human minds are at picking out and fixating on the little details of our lives, blowing them out of proportion into existential revelations and then back again: a smile, an argument, that song on the radio, a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac, all earth-shattering in their retrospective significance.
Really, it is a song about time, and specifically those moments in which you become suddenly and acutely aware of its passage and your own finitude. It is about the dreadful recognition of all the beautiful things you have allowed to slip away, or grow tarnished with age, or were foolish enough to take for granted.
As I listen to it now, in an effort to demarcate some kind of conscious temporality among the days bleeding into yet more identical days, I understand that it is about the overwhelming psychological survival impulse to cast an anchor. It is about the stubborn conviction which you have decided, in spite of all evidence and forces to the contrary, shall be unchanging and eternal. For example: a reckless love you swear will never fade, even as the sun goes down on the brief but precious circumstances that enabled it. Or, maybe, an unwaveringly persistent faith that you will miraculously gain back, through sheer force of will, that which entropy and its irreversible forward momentum has snatched away.
Ouch, I’ve said too much.
You might think I’m crazy for attributing this much borderline biblical weight to a Don Henley song, but that was kind of always the point. It’s why I initiated this project in the first place: music, rock ‘n’ roll music, is as close to religious ecstasy as I’ve ever gotten and am likely to get. By that, I mean an experience of spiritual purpose, fulfillment, and connection to the universe that will always be, despite my concerted efforts to intellectualize or rationalize them to others, an experience which I can acknowledge as basically insane and incommunicable.
I wanted to try, regardless, to make some sense of it, and if I could not successfully convey the inexplicable interiority of the thing, I thought it at least worth documenting the pilgrimage for my own records. As with the subject whose perspective we assume in “The Boys of Summer,” I am anxiously preoccupied with the fallibility of my own recollection, which I have always been irrationally convinced is somehow uniquely flawed. Infuriatingly, my most cherished memories can never be replayed and relived in perfect fidelity. They degrade with every passing minute and are polluted by random influence. Even before the advent of smartphones, back when I was a teenager and a college student in the mid-aughts, I carried around a bulky DSLR everywhere I went. I was constantly snapping candid pictures of friends and family, every social event from minor to momentous, in the hopes that doing so would shield me from the inevitability of forgetting.
One of the unexpected benefits of going to shows all the fucking time as an adult was that I learned a tolerance for the irreproducibility and ephemerality of them, features which are indeed intrinsic to their sanctity. These gigs were special because those same wonderful songs, however simple their chord progressions or straightforward their backbeats, could never be played and enjoyed the same way twice. It was my interpretation of these fleeting moments, and not the conceit of objective photographic capture, which could in fact be relied upon as representation, as the metaphorical backup copy for my faulty, fleshy brain. I could hoard terabytes of high definition photo and video storage on external hard drives, or I could pray that every show I ever attended be captured by a competent video and sound crew, but none of it would be a fraction as meaningful or even as accurate as going home and sitting down and writing about what I had actually felt.
That whole premise flew out the window in March, and this blog is now a much more sporadic and very different kind of document than the one I had originally set out to organize. But it might be valuable, anyway. I can’t say how or to what end except that I am trying to be honest about the role that music, particularly live music, has played in my life, and the cratering breadth of emptiness its absence has left.
I have shied away from expressing my own grief here, which feels both self-indulgent and utterly inappropriate given the gravity and scope of Things Going On. I will say that I would rather eat glass than watch another livestream like it isn’t poking at the edges of a gaping wound; I would rather spend a decade twiddling my thumbs than attend a “socially distanced show,” politely seated several feet from the stage and from everybody else in the crowd, pretending the concept isn’t as reflexively, biologically repulsive as the suggestion that I drink poison or, I don’t know, listen to the Ataris cover of “The Boys of Summer.”
Before I get carried away, may you enjoy the remnants of the remnants of your summer. Stay safe, keep on truckin’, and remember that you have labor unions to thank for every shred of valuable free time that you might have, theoretically, in some other vastly preferable timeline, spent going to shows.
Cheers, as always, and until next time, whenever that may be…
-Bux