I got the texts Wednesday night, during my weekly sanctioned grocery outing. I was looking for elbow pasta when I felt my phone go off in a trio of bursts.
It was one of those moments that your memory preserves instantly in amber. I pulled my phone out my pocket and read the notifications: all variants of “I’m sorry” or “Call if you need me.” I knew immediately, but I plugged in a panicked Google search, hands shaking violently, and scrolled through the headlines while my heart cracked into pieces.
I could have been a character in a Fountains of Wayne song. There was something indisputably Adam Schlesinger about the scene, or at least elements to it that he could have elaborated upon with his devastatingly clever and often tragicomic songcraft.
A woman weeps and sniffles in a suburban grocery aisle, motionless for several minutes as the carts creak around her. The dampness of tears on a face mask is a new sensation, something she’s never felt before. At the same time, an old song plays in her head. There is the juxtaposition of old and new, of crushing loss with the mundane realities of daily life. Cry though she might, she still needs to lug a few boxes of elbow pasta to checkout.
There is so much to say about Schlesinger that has already been said, and said better, than I could ever hope to express. Much of it is very recent. The outpouring of appreciation has been gratifying in the wake of his death, but it is also maddeningly belated. To Schlesinger, songwriting was not a means to an end for stardom; songwriting was the end in itself, self-evidently necessary, an expression of obsessive love and devotion and respect. He was a performer and musician, but his brilliance was as an author and collaborator outside the spotlight. Schlesinger understood that the end product was only as good as its foundation, and whatever he built or had a hand in building was jarringly, outrageously, consistently rock solid. A mind-boggling variety of entire creative projects hinged on that foundation. You’re familiar with at least one case in point.
He was a pop musical polymath of staggering genius. I do not use that term lightly, but it is applicable without question. A talent like Schlesinger comes once in a generation, and we should have been shouting his praises from the rooftops while he was still alive to hear them. We knew, and everyone in the industry knew, but like the man himself, we were at the side of the stage or behind the scenes, whispering to one another our admiration.
He had so much left to give us, undoubtedly. He gave so much already. Dayenu.
Some things are so important they bear repeating, over and over again. As Pesach approaches, I am thinking about the role of ritualized storytelling, of what we gain from going over and going back. I am thinking about how we revisit the songs of our childhood, an especially feverish impulse for yours truly in the weeks since the lockdown. It is more complicated than nostalgia for happier, easier times. I am digging for a steering mechanism, a magnetic north. When you are lost, how do you find the way forward? You ground yourself in the indelible. You re-establish the fundamentals. It’s understanding who you are, and how you got here.
Schlesinger was a versatile writer, one whose compositions swelled with a rare depth and sincerity that could adapt to almost any mold, and often ballooned beyond them. He churned them out prolifically, from bands to film to television to Broadway; he wrote in service of function, and he made it work and made it believable. That he could conjure such a variety of art on demand, and that the demand itself never shortchanged the quality of his art, is nothing short of miraculous. If I had ever cried at a toothpaste commercial, I would have known immediately that Adam Schlesinger was behind the jingle.
But he also told the same stories over and over again, iterating within the same basic structure, and that was what I fell in love with him for. He wrote what he knew. He wrote what I knew, which was what made his work so special to me, and my adoration for him so inevitable. I don’t just mean the offbeat cast of tristate slackers, lovelorn Amtrak commuters, and existentially frustrated office drones who might have become caricatures in less capable hands. Schlesinger’s angle was of celebratory reverence for the three-minute pop-rock guitar song, even as its kingdom faded in the rearview mirror. He embraced its intrinsic limitations and infinite possibilities and didn’t give a shit whether it was cool to anybody else but himself. He knew when the old rules were good rules, and that if you were smart enough you could reinvent dusty old tradition into something fresh and exciting and… indelible. A familiar story, to be sure, but it’s so good you just want to keep it in your car stereo for months on end.
A perfect pop-rock guitar song is sorcery. Listening to them is my greatest, most inexhaustible source of happiness, an experience with which no other worldly pleasure can compete. And they are all just rearranged sets of the same component parts, new and sometimes exceedingly lucky permutations shaken from an ancient bag of tricks. You can call me a simpleton, and I’m sure I am, but the simplest formulas can also be the most elegant. E = mc2, and she loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah. Schlesinger was on my wavelength. He was an astonishingly good sorcerer.
My route to his work might be similar to yours. It’s a well-tread path, carved by a universally recognized and beloved song, a so-called “one hit wonder.” There’s an irony and injustice to that association, given the incomparable legacy of meta-hits he has bestowed us in so many imaginary universes.
The year was 2003, my freshman year of high school. I wish that my first exposure to “Stacy’s Mom” were as crystalline in my recollection as I am certain the evening of Wednesday, April 1st, 2020 will prove to be. I don’t know if I heard it on the radio, or saw the music video on MTV. I know that I must have recognized it instantly for what it was, because I do remember listening to it, and Welcome Interstate Managers, over and over. It was perfect. It was far from the only such specimen.
There would have been more. But today, as I am grappling still with the waves of grief as they ebb and flow, I will be grateful for what he left us with.
He gave us so much already, and it would have been enough.
-Bux