I've finally started listening to podcasts. As I've been doing my little exercise routines down in the basement, where it's warmer near the wood stove, instead of being in silence (well, besides the constant ringing my ears - oh, tinnitus - how I loath you), I download what I want to hear on my phone, and lay the phone on the floor and listen to it while I work out. It's a great way to multi-task. Most podcasts are over an hour long, so it's not like you can just sit and listen without doing something else, too. I highly recommend checking some out - there are thousands to choose from.
Today, I've gotten halfway through a podcast called How The Hell Did That Happen? It's hosted by two musicians, Maryanne Window and Mary Lou Lord. I don't know anything about Maryanne, yet (I'll google her later), but I've been following Mary Lou on Facebook for a while now. I've technically never met Mary Lou, but she is from Salem, Ma, and did a lot of music in the Cambridge area. After some time at Berklee College of Music, she got her music career going at the iconic Club Passim in Harvard Square, but is mostly known for her tireless busking in the Boston subways and Harvard Square. I'm sure I walked by her as she sang and played guitar for tips a few times while roaming around the square back in the day. I'm pretty sure she was at T.T The Bears rock club in Central Square, Cambridge the night I saw the excellent rockabilly band The Raging Teens (I think she was dating or married to the lead singer.) She is super cool and smart and passionate about music, and I really admire her from afar. She's released a few recordings and toured and been on national television. I appreciate the You Tube videos of music she loves that she shares on her timeline, often with commentary about the song or artist. She's a songwriter's songwriter, and is good friends with songwriting and performance genius Shawn Colvin, and also hung out with another brilliant songwriter Elliot Smith. Sadly, Elliot Smith committed suicide in 2003.
The podcast I was listening to today was about the music era from the late 80's and early 90's. It also goes into depth about Mary Lou's famous friendship with Kurt Cobain. It's a really interesting story - how she had been driving with a friend and heard a song on the radio that blew her mind, but didn't know the name of the band, so she had to call the station later to find out who it was. That band ended up being Nirvana. A week or so later, a friend of hers, who was a DJ, ended up giving her a pre-release cassette tape of Nirvana's new album, and she listened to that on her Sony Walkman non-stop all summer, madly in love with the songs. That fall, by chance - or fate, she ends up meeting Cobain at The Rat, and they talked all night long about music and life. They dated and kept in touch in the months just before Nirvana blew up and Kurt met Courtney Love. There is a whole sordid story about what a bitch Love was to Lord that I've read a little bit about, but the podcast hasn't gone into any of that as of yet.
The two women in the podcast are discussing how Cobain was in the early days of "grunge" music (it was the turning point from the popular "hair metal" bands of the late eighties), and about how Lord had found a deep connection with Cobain because, though his songs tended to be loud, distorted fuzzy rock, he was really inspired by and loved the folky, "lo-fi" musicians, as did she. Lord sites bands such as Teenage Fanclub, Sebadoh and Daniel Johnston as huge loves and inspirations for her at that time. As the discussion goes on, Lord talks about how at the start of the grunge era, Cobain was spending a lot of time making friends and music in the college town Olympia, Washington - home of a small, progressive liberal arts school called Evergreen State College. This is where I paused the podcast, because I was reminded of my own sorry story about Evergreen.
I'm not sure if I've ever written about it before. I know I've told a few bits and pieces of it to friends over the years. There's not a lot to it, to be honest, but remembering back about it now, well, it really defines the essence of the feelings about my life that I've been having lately. Call it middle age regret? I don't know - but, this is me, and this part of what I carry around with me all the time. It's pretty pathetic.
It was the late 1980's, and I had dropped out of UMass Amherst, and was sharing one half of a duplex in Northampton, Ma with four or five guy friends. The other side of the duplex was five women. I had been living with them, but kept getting in to bitch fests with some of the women, so when a room opened up with the guys next door, I moved in with them. It was all very transient back then - people moving in and moving out, month by month.
I was working at Bonducci's Cafe in downtown Northampton, and I had a wide circle of very cool friends. The town was teeming with artists, writers, poets, musicians, actors, and students. A diverse mix of colors and sexual preferences and economic backgrounds - a smaller version of New York City, in a way, except in the beautiful setting of the "Happy Valley" of Western Massachusetts. I was in and out of therapy, and learning guitar on my Yamaha acoustic, and painting a little, and writing a lot - mostly journal writing. We all smoked a lot of weed and drank and dabbled in cocaine, and there was a great bar scene. Ironically, Eric Gaffney, who went on to form the band Sebadoh with Lou Barlow, used to hang out in the cafe and we were sort of friends for a little while. I remember once I asked him how to change the strings on my guitar, and he kind of laughed at me, and said, "uh - you just change them?" - but eventually, he explained how to do it. J Mascis was in and out of the cafe a lot, too, and I did see Dinosaur Jr. a couple of times before they got really big. I was entangled in a romantic relationship with a handsome dude who painted and played guitar and a little bit older then me. I liked him way more then he liked me. It was a relationship of convenience for him, mostly. He frustrated me with his indifference towards me, but I was really attracted to him, and looking back now, I did learn a few things from him. Nearly every evening, there was a drunken sloppy jam session gathering in the living room of our shared home, with pot luck suppers and friends dropping in.
After a year or so of working at the low-paying job and not going anywhere with anything in my life, I started thinking that I should try and go back to school again. At the cafe, there was a bookshelf of free books, and I happen to have picked one up called Writing Without Teachers, by Peter Elbow (1973). I don't remember much about it now, but as any good writing book should, it inspired the hell out of me, so much that I convinced myself that I really wanted to meet the author, and I wished that I could learn more from him. In the back of the book was his bio, where I learned that he taught at a little school in Olympia, Washington called Evergreen State College.
I don't remember exactly how this happened, but somehow, I ended up speaking on the phone with him. I might have written him a letter? This was before the internet, of course, so it wasn't that unusual to just pick up the rotary phone and dial someone. I'm not sure how it transpired, but I remember having a nice conversation with him on the phone one day. At that point I had decided to pursue applying to Evergreen and moving to the west coast. It was a small school, with small classes, and that really appealed to me. Mr. Elbow was very kind and generous with his time and encouraged me to come out to Washington and visit the campus and take the campus tour.
I called my Mom and was excited to discuss the idea with her, and it didn't take much to convince my parents I was serious, and so they offered to pay for the trip. I booked a flight, and feeling very anxious but hopeful, I flew out to Washington by myself, with a small bag of clothes, a notebook and the Peter Elbow book, in May of 1988. By the time I left, my "relationship" with the boyfriend was eroding and in my heart I knew he wasn't into me, but I was having a hard time letting him go. We were house mates at the boy pad, and shared all the same friends, and we saw each other a lot, so I knew that it would be good for me to be away from him for the week.
My memory of my week in Washington is fuzzy, and, inauspiciously, I didn't write a whole lot about my trip in my notebook either. I checked into a hotel in Olympia, and I settled into a room on the eighth floor. The view was vast and I could see the Pacific Ocean. I probably had a day or two before the campus tour, so I spent my days walking around Olympia, checking out coffee shops and getting take out Chinese food. Despite my many friendships back in Northampton, I was still pretty shy about meeting people. My self-worth was pretty fucking low, to be honest. I was loser, in my mind.
The morning of the tour, I took a taxi from the hotel to the campus. It dropped me off about 45 minutes early for the 9:00 a.m. tour. It was drizzling, as it does so often there, and I hadn't brought an umbrella. The campus was quite, only a few early risers were up - the lone whizz of bicycle, a couple of folks walking by with books and a coffee, on the way to something. The paved walking paths between the low school buildings were draped by the branches of ancient trees. I walked around timidly and found the meeting place for the tour, but nobody was there yet, so I left the building. I became a bit numb. As I lurked around, peering into windows and pretending to read notices on outdoor bulletin boards, I fell into a lonely sense of being very out of place. A dark surge of dread and doubt washed over my mind, and it got stronger with each minute that I waited. By the time the moment approached for me to meet in the building for the start of the tour, I lost my nerve. I can't explain it. My eyes welled up with tears, and every deep rooted insecurity I had about myself clocked me in the face. Instead of going to meet the tour guide, without an explanation, I walked away from the campus. Leaving the campus grounds, I couldn't hold it in anymore and broke down into a blubbering mess. Hating myself with every step I took further away from my goal, from my plan, I cried in the rain towards, who knows where. I don't remember anything else about those moments.
Eventually, I got back the hotel, and the next morning, I checked out. I still had another four or five days to kill before my scheduled flight back, so I took a taxi to an airport motor inn and checked in. It was noisy and no frills, but there was a television. With much remorse and regret, I spent the time watching a lot of movies and MTV music videos. I saw a White Riot video so many times on rotation that I actually began to like it. The airport was close to Seattle, and I considered at least taking a bus into the city to explore, but I was too shattered and insecure to even do that. I felt like such a failure. In between a few phone calls to my best friend and my parents, I killed the time by taking long walks up into a suburban neighborhood, hating myself, but enjoying the views. Finally, I got on the airplane and went back to Northampton and my sorry life. For a long time, I never told anyone the truth about what had really happened. I was too ashamed.
Had I had the confidence - the determination - the drive - to stay and take the tour - talk with the tour guides, meet some of the people, would I have ended up enrolling at Evergreen? Would I have completed a degree in something, maybe settled in Olympia? Had I done that, would I have made new friends, gone to shows in the clubs? Been there for the birth of the grunge music scene?
Would I have fucking seen Nirvana at a local club before they were mega-famous?
I guess I'll never know now.
Ugh.
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