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It is my totally idiotic belief that most people are born with the basic tools to become rock stars. Britney Spears for instance has an offensive voice and the ability to suspend large reptiles from her boots. The making or rendering of popular songs is more a matter of determination than aptitude. The central allure of American Idol a show I have not actually seen Thank you resides in the powerful fantasy that a divine voice lurks within all of us ready to obliterate all our liabilities and doubts and transform us into the rock stars we know ourselves to be. The reason we are not all rock stars is because most of us are unprepared to do this sort of sustained and lonely work that would allow us to learn an instrument that alone has the broader language of music let alone how to suspend a large reptile from our boobs. It is harder than it looks. And then further unprepared to compose our own songs and to perform them in front of other people and to do so with enough gusto that we might compel someone many someones actually to pay for a recording of our

songs. It's a lot of labor when you break it down a lot of potential humiliation. So this book though will feature plenty of rock stars and include many opinions related to rock stars is centrally about what it's like to be a drooling fanatic which is disappointing now but most of human history the vast underside is about people not getting to do what they truly want to do. Prehistoric Man for instance wanted to eat and fuck and sleep in peace and he almost never got to do that. The inhabitants of the early republic dreamed of liberty but most spent their lives in the yoke. Those of us with the Dumb luck to be born in what we call the modern developed world can pretty much eat and fuck to our heart's content. We've got ours for dreaming too. Though a lot of that work has been outsourced to Hollywood. Consumption gets to be the real star these days because consumption pays the bills. But here's a little secret between you me and the rest of the mall buying shit isn't enough. What we wish

for in our secret hearts is self-expression. The chance to reveal ourselves and to be loved for this revelation devoured by love and thus most of us go about our duties of Commerce and leisure in a state of perpetual longing with nocturnal excursions into the province of despair. I know it gets even funnier. It's like this is supposed to be rock and roll. Man this book is for those of us who have converted such unrequited desires into noble obsessions that happens to be about music as opposed to icecream or Picasso or the Boston Red Sox because music came before anything else before language and large scale war and liquid soap. And because music is the one giant thing America has done right amid all it has done wrong. I agree. Music that ancient and incorruptible blessing. I guess you're not really going to sing along you're going to be one of those fucking crowds alright. I know none of you know the

words It's an obscure song. You've been warned. It's important that they think you're a dipshit because you're much more likely to worship them in this case than to adopt their musical taste which is better than yours as a kind of gospel. We need look no further than 1978 the year Styx was named America's favorite band by one of us. You were there to buy one of the many gold plated awards shows that slithered to prominence in the seventies. I remember this vividly because I raced to my older brother Dave's room with the news. He was the one who turned me on to the mind blowing brilliance of sticks and who I expected would share in my personal. My sense of personal vindication sticks just one. Best band I yelled.

Styx sucks he said quietly get out. I was dumbfounded. Sticks sucks but sticks so much didn't suck. Sticks rule sticks were geniuses. They were like Mozart. Like 5 Mozart's each with diaphanous hair and shiny space age jumpsuits and they were all pulsating anthems about renegade men and blue collar men and epic ballads about love and loss and excessive cocaine use. None of which mattered because inexplicably Dave said they sucked. A few days later I stole into his room and unearth the culprit an album called out Lindows to more by the police. What a disturbing artifact. Rock bands after all had mystical names like Led Zeppelin and Blue

Oyster colt but the police I was a 12 year old whose hobbies were shoplifting and Pyromania. Why would I listen to a band called the police. Nor did the songs make sense they were jerky and tense with minor key melodies and Gengel bursts of guitar. No solos dude no solos what. Enough like univers and the lyrics weren't about the reaper or invisible airwaves crackling with light. They were about loneliness and rejection subjects on which I needed no additional briefing thank you very much. I listened to outlanders to more straight through trembling with disgust. Why then did I keep sneaking into Dave's room and listening to the thing. If this were the sort of book written by a professional music critic I'd now be compelled to identify outlandishness a watershed album marking a shift from the bombastic escapism of prog rock to the edgy emotionalism of New Wave. That's how they all talk. I'd note the

deployment of punk and reggae elements in a pop context and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. But I'm a drooling fanatic. All I know is how I felt listening to the music. Anxious and excited and weirdly relieved there was this one song that was basically a long rant against an ex-girlfriend. But. You. Tell me. When. We are. I know we could go all night when my dad heard these lines he laughed. This was a funny song about being jilted then committing suicide. Suicide could be funny. Equally shocking rock music could be funny. This is the big thing about having an older sibling they're always pushing the budding fanatic to venture beyond the safe margins of his or her taste. Without meaning to. Because honestly do they just watch their fuckin in.

They implant the vital notion that there is music out there that you don't know about yet and that you'd better get hip to. Unless you want to remain an immature twerp who worships sticks that she can never catch up. That's the thing. Because your interest in a band is to the older sibling the essential indicator that that band is over. You're the Casey Kasem of their existence. I chase Dave from the police all the way out to the margins of punk and he did finally managed to shake me off his trail but he had to go over to the dark side to do it. He became a Deadhead. I need a miracle. I didn't just like music. I needed music. There wasn't much else on my dance card. Pinball TV masturbation. Eventually like none of you have ever messed with her.

I think you spent a lot of time alone on the carpet in the living room listening to Abbey Road or mind games or through the past darkly and studying these records poring over the lyrics and album art. The back cover of goat's head soup with the actual goat's head in a cauldron of soup I puzzled over that image for the entirety of 1975. Could one actually make soup out of a goat's head. Would it taste like. Well what happened to the horns and the fur and the teeth and the eyes. Did one eat the eyes or were they there just for flavor. Music was also a way of reaching out to friends other boys. Mostly it is in the nature of pre and adolescent males to isolate and brood to interact as indirectly as possible with aggressive ritual as mediation. These days it's done with video games about car jacking. But back then it was a devotion to particular albums. Scott suture and I spent most of seventh grade locked in his room listening to Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap.

Yeah. There was a protocol he lay on the bed. I sat with my back against the box springs. We slammed Hostess products foraged from the pantry. There was almost no talking. A few words to fill the scratchy silence between songs. You poo. You did. Dick wad wad. Then it was back to the joyous malevolence of AC-DC it's perverted and fuzzy Rore the gravelly alliteration of the title track. All those croak D's to which we chanted along so softly and the leering innuendo of big balls in which Bon Scott observes. Now you know the words to this. Scott delivered these lines with a smirking pomposity that struck us as

unbearably sophisticated. The man was Byron in the media's passages of particular songs. We closed our eyes and let the cord surge through us. It was a kind of trance. We were alone but not alone. We were embarrassed. Everything embarrassed us in seventh grade but flushed with angry hopes. When people bitch about the death of the vinyl LP is a medium and lord knows a bitch. What they're mostly lamenting is the death of this kind of listening music as a concerted sonic experience rather than the backing track to a flashing screen. What I'm suggesting here is that drooling fanaticism boils down to undivided attention which is not only our most endangered human resource but the first and final act of love. At the tender age of 19 I became a music critic I was

dispatched to review a Bob Dylan show despite having no training as a musician and not actually knowing who Bob Dylan was. Please stop laughing. Had I been quizzed on the meaning of the word glissando I would have answered with some confidence. I'm afraid a type of fancy Ice-Cream not to be confused with vibrato which was a gynaecological instrument. And yet as far as my readers were concerned I was a professional critic. If this sounds absurd consider the proposition that greeted me when I arrived at the El Paso Times. Two years later fresh from college. Would I like to be the paper's full time music critic. Well of course I would. So I was lazy and frankly suck ass reviewer in El Paso but I was also in my own frankly suck ass way up against an ontological dilemma. How does one describe music using words. Talented critics can of course describe music with sonic precision. The real problem is emotional. The pro's

for all its technical fidelity conveys almost nothing about what music feels like. Consider the famous chord progression that Angus Young plays at the beginning of back in black. A good writer could tell us about those grindings seismic chords the distinct rhythm of their deployment even that sly arpeggiated little five note lick that acts as a segue from one valley to the next. But those are just pale approximations of what it feels like to hear that intro the squirt of sinister glee that makes most people even decent religious folks reach for their air guitar. Now consider the rest of the song the rhythmic structures. Brian Johnson's howling vocal harmonic and tonal relationships. But OK let's say you've taken your rock critics steroids and you're able to describe all these elements. How then do you convey the simultaneity of all that noise. The blissful riot of sound we experience as a

singular thing. The song. But OK OK let's say you've taken your rock critic steroids for years. You're the Barry Bonds of rock criticism and so you managed to get this to you'd still be left with a basic and insoluble crisis of melody. Words cannot be made into notes and even if you somehow magically solve that crisis which you couldn't you'd still be missing what it feels like for a particular fan to hear a particular song let alone songs let alone in concert because this involves a collaboration between the music and the fans own needs his or her own lust for joy sorrow power rage sex and oh what the hell. The closest I came to grappling with the rock critic paradox was that an MC Hammer concert. I think we all saw this coming. I stood beneath the stage watching hammer twitch and his weird Sindbad pants while a battalion of dancers in identical Sindbad pants replicated his every twitch Hamre

barked lyrics about jewelry and torture. The melodies sampled from bubblegum hits affix themselves to the artillery of drum machines lights popped and scrolled sparks vomited from some invisible portal. It was like watching an ad for a delicious soda that makes people want to commit murder. But then I looked at the people around me they're in the fifth row of the Pan Am Center in Las Cruces New Mexico. They were all dancing wildly hooting at the sweaty boob Fly Girls in barking along with hammer and without even realizing it mimicking Little Hammer ish flourishes the frenetic Egyptian jazz hands and the mincing Buckel step. We talked about it every rehearsal and he just won't stop doing as he does he just feels it. These these people were plugged into a powerful communal experience. They didn't look

upon MC Hammer as a musical Huxter but an entertainer of the first rank and maybe even in a sense a prophet of self-assertion. Proof that any man endowed with sufficient determination no matter how meagerly endowed with talent might gain trespass into the kingdom of Fame. Yes I was stoned but my larger point is that there's no angle and hating on a particular song or band or genre. Our species is adaptable. That's our evolutionary trump card. If the human ear is given a chance not cowed into snobbery it can find rewards in almost any form of music. I think I hear of a line by Robert Christgau who for many years represented the gold standard of rock critics snark. Assessing the work of Emerson Lake and Palmer is Brain Salad Surgery. He wrote quote The sound is so crystalline you can hear the jism as it drips off the microphone. Yummy.

The line is funny an appropriate epitaph for a trio that was spinal tap in its pretence. But when I think about that album what I remember is sitting around with my pal Dale McChord listening to the endless onanistic with Sondos and howled couplets of Carnaval nine. I assume we'll all get to the end here and we can stop listening to this awesome song. So. Rock n Roll. As a as a broad working definition

art awakens feeling. Every form has its merits and demerits paintings for instance work fast and require no moving parts yet are hard to steal. Films are easy to watch and enveloping but they carry the risk that you will see Philip Seymour Hoffman naked. The only thing wrong with music as far as I'm concerned is that you cannot eat it from a purely emotional standpoint it remains far more potent than any other artistic medium. And I remember the exact moment this dawned on me I was watching Late Night With David Letterman. Willie Nelson was the guest. This was the watered down Willie of the 80s the stoner cow poke and dusty pig tails and Dave was giving him a hard time. I'll just sing something for us. Dave said almost tauntingly. Willie sat there for a few seconds and then he opened his mouth and began to sing and the sound of his voice that glorious battered baritone sucked every bit of

irony out of that room. I had no idea that Willie Nelson was such an unbelievably beautiful fucking artist. It's a joyous thing to discover that kind of ignorance. This is what songs do. They remind us that our motion emotions are not an inconvenient and vaguely embarrassing aspect of the human enterprise but its central purpose. They make us feel specific things we might never have felt otherwise. Every time I listen to Sunday Bloody Sunday for instance I feel a pug nation righteousness about the fate of the Irish people. I hear that flacking military drum beat and Bono starts wailing about the news we heard today. I'm basically ready to enlist in the IRA and stop some British imperialist

ass. Hell yes bring on the fucking bangers and mash Let's get this jihad started. I feel these things despite the fact that a I am not Irish I am Jewish which has only in common with the Irish ish. B The song actually advocates pacifism somewhat disappointingly. I must say it's always a disappointment and see I really actually hate you too. That's just me. The same thing happens with Sweet Home Alabama. Yeah. I don't exactly get psyched to join the Klan but I do get this powerful desire to drink beer and drive a pickup truck and maybe shoot off some guns and most of all not to be looked down upon by some fucking overeducated nigger loving Yankee such as myself. Intellectually I recognize that the song is shallow and racist in that it advances the notion that

former Alabama governor and avowed segregationist George Wallace is an American hero. I also get that if all the members of Leonard Skinner were still alive one or more of them would be members of the Republican congressional leadership team. I get that. But I can't help it. Sweet home Alabama. Makes me feel a deep yearning for my home and my kin in those swapper is down in Muscle Shoals and pick me up when I'm feeling blue. Even though these same Swampers would very possibly kick my jew ass sideways if I ever sidled into one of their taverns and ordered me a SHIBLEE Howdy boys are you the swampers. Songs take us deeper into ourselves by taking us away from ourselves. They expand our empathic imaginations when we listen to Jack and Diane. We all become teenagers. It's sucking on chili dogs and reveling in the future I guess. Yes sucking on them I guess. Especially Diane but also possibly Jack or maybe together

and reveling in the fleeting ecstasies of green love and when we listen to I will survive by Gloria Gaynor we all become empowered sisters shown our abusive exes the door know your dad. And when we listen to Rocket Man we all become astronauts blasted away from our loved ones into orbit orbits a lonely obligation and. God knows we're all homesick travelers when we hear homeward bound even when we're at home. I can be sitting at home with a fire going and my family around me and I'm still fucking homesick when that song comes on I gotta go to hell. I've cherry picked songs that most people know. But like any other fanatic I've got an endless list of obscure songs that induce the same kind of weirdly gratifying identity crisis when I was drinking by the band hem. Makes me want to be an

alcoholic. It makes me want to be an alcoholic involved with another alcoholic. It makes me pine for the perverse safety of all the self-defeating relationships I've ever been in. That's how beautiful that song is. I've always been drawn to songs that make me feel bad and that make feeling bad feel good. These songs depression songs allow us to slough the small emotions that compose our defense mechanisms for the large emotions that make us feel genuinely alive. They convert self-pity into sorrow anxiety indiv fear grievance into grief. To clarify depression songs don't make people depressed. They articulate a pre-existing depression and when they're really cooking they and noble that depression yes they do. Nearly all the songs I return to the ones that have come to represent entire

eras of my life are depression songs and everybody has his or her own setlist because the main ingredient in the construction of a depression song is you the depressed listener. If you play the song Nothing compares to you. By Sinead O'Connor for instance my wife is instantly transported back to 1990 managing the cosmetics section at CBS. How many people have wept to the song Hanse please. Thank you. She's a shy 15 year old mooning over one in a series of muleteers cad's to whom she has pledged her undying love. It's all there. The knot in her throat the heavy bands of blue eye shadow the mocking promises and the glass bottles of nail polish. It was her job to show my time equivalent depression song and I confessed this with little pride is never tear us

apart by an excess which you might remember is the one with the video where the lead singer Michael Hutchence wanders morosely around Prague and then right at the end accidentally hangs himself while masturbating. Do you remember that. Much. Did. You. Resist. It's an addictive soul song built around since a quartet of plucked guitar notes and various dramatic pauses. The vocals are overwrought in the best way. Hutchins tells his lover that they could live for 1000 years but if I hurt you I make wine from your tears. Rather than questioning how that would work or how such a wine might taste or what exactly it would mean that you wine to use the tears of your lover to make an alcoholic beverage. My intuitive reaction is to think that is just happy. This was certainly what I was thinking as I staggered across the soggy lands of my college campus

having just enjoyed a one night stand that I assumed would last for a thousand years and produce oceans of chardonnay. My inamorata had a slightly different take. She cringed when she saw me the next day. We were not going to last a thousand years. We had barely lasted 1000 seconds. Know I Know You Love it man but you got to turn it down. I know it's tough. You can listen to it at home. All right. So this is this is number one 41 smoking more pot than Bob Marley and possibly the whalers before entering Graceland. Why did I do this. Because I was secretly dreading Graceland the

preening necrophilia of this scene that tawdry American knack for spiritual projection for we're worshipping the wrong savior for the wrong reason in the wrong way. I figured getting stoned might make the experience seem more profound and therefore less depressing. It's the same doomed theory I continually apply to Hollywood films and I needed Graceland to be profound at least a little because I had driven 700 miles to be there as a favor to my lovesick friend Tina who was unbeknownst to me a devout Elvis person was a bit like discovering someone is born again. You have to respect the purity but you don't really want to hear the rap so I smoke bowl after bowl until I could no longer locate my mouth to his eyes for a while smoking out of my ear. We boarded a bus full of more devout Elvis people Southern grandmas with big purses and sullen Midwestern goth kids in packs of camera Japanese as we entered the

estate. They fell into a collective and dreadful Hush. A female staffer. Blond hot kinked erotically nervous met us in the foyer with our audio kits. I kept forgetting I was wearing headphones and because I was so incredibly stoned and yelling at Tina Hey. You know what the Jungle Room looks like it's like Africa. They saw Africa on the home shopping network. Why are the walls covered in TWINE. How did Elvis's parents really sleep in these beds and gotten them bigger beds. That's fucked up. This was Graceland in a nutshell. It was supposed to be about the grand juror of the King but it kept being about his humiliation. Elvis sprawls on the white cue shit in his media room with a plate of bacon watching three TVs at once. Then he tries to beat back the fat with bennies and he can't sleep at night so he sits up composing his list of enemies. Then he shoots at his radar range. Then he visits Nixon than he does karate and pulls something then he can't get out of bed and they

cancelled the tour. Then he falls off his toilet and dies. It is said devout Elvis People were everywhere snapping photos of gold rock records. The reverence was suffocating. I retreated to the top of a carpeted staircase and found myself staring into a darkened room. Where was I. Where was Tina. Why was there a rope across the doorway with a sign reading No Trespassing wasn't trespassing more or less the business model at Graceland. A voice beckoned me from the bottom of the stairs sir. A young man stood frowning at me. The name tag on his oversized blazer red. Kevin. Where am I. I said. Those are private quarters sir. People still live here Kevin said. You need to come downstairs sir right now. Kevin was right. I needed to come downstairs. I needed to flee Graceland and take a hot shower but the pot wouldn't let me.

I kept telling me that I should leap over the rope and breach the private quarters and find the bathroom where Elvis breathed his last and drop a symbolic. Bad not bad. Are we going to have a problem. Kevin said he touched the tender spray of acne on his right cheek. I found Tiina outside and we proceeded from the shooting range to the nearby meditation garden. I want to read that sentence one more time because I think if you if you boiled America for like a millennium. This is what you would come up with. I found Tiina outside and we proceeded from the shooting range to the very nearby and possibly adjacent meditation garden. Elvis was actually buried in the meditation garden which I did not understand at all. Did Elvis consider death a form of extreme meditation. I wanted to ask Tina but she was weeping.

Nearly everyone around me was weeping. They were weeping and taking photos of each other and they knew that in a few weeks when they got their photos from Graceland back they gaze at these images of themselves weeping in front of Elvis's grave and start weeping again. And this thought made me sad for America. The great disconnect between our personal causes for grief and are actual tears and though I was not sad enough to start weeping myself I did flee to the gift shop where in a final spasm of defiance I shoplifted an official Elvis wristwatch. That stand Baringo find all this music. Ah ok. A certain Alise blank invited me to visit her upstate. We'd met two months earlier at a literary event and instantly sensed in the other the Avid temperament of the orgasmically Niti a series of quivering phone calls ensued. Elise had the dewy gaze of a Bollywood heroine and the relentless Peppe

of a Midwestern football mascot. I wanted to defile her. This was during my era of dismal blind dates and I saw no reason to behave responsibly. I was still living in Somerville and scraping by as an adjunct professor of bitterness so I flew out to a writer's conference near the college where she taught and crashed at her place for two days we knocked around town gobbling fried fish and trying to figure out how to jump start the defiling process. At night we lay in our respective rooms broiling and cowardice. The tension was idiotic and throbbing and on some on Morning three I woke up determined to act. I took a shower and slathered on deodorant and when I walked out of her bathroom the stereo was blaring the only way I can describe the music is to say that it was more friendly soft synthesized entirely devout in its stunted emotional ambitions. Who is this.

I said an air supply Ellies said. I searched her tender face for the slightest trace of irony. This is their greatest hits she said. To her. PA is such chickenshits. All right. I'm drunker than you that's fine. I close my eyes and nodded. It seemed important that I not say anything snide. My mind lunged about for possible air supply repartee. The only thing that came to mind was a high school soccer practice where John Carna I mentioned air supply and Davie Anderson and Donnie Lovato started chanting fag's supply and what they took to be Australian accents and how were air supply doing. After all these years why they were all out of love. If you are now thinking I rebuffed Elise because of her fondness for air supply. Think

again friend. After 72 hours spent marinating in lust you could not have stopped my dick with the taser. Good try. The problem arose as it so often does upon reflection. Elise was supposed to be everything I wanted. Brilliant delectable willing but as I returned to Boston as I furiously throttled myself to the memory of her haunches my mind kept fixing on air supply kept seeing Russell Hitchcock and his lacquered mullet fro worse. I kept hearing his voice. So. Did I honestly believe Elise lacked the emotional depth required to be involved with me. Was this even possible. Indeed wasn't my willingness to dismiss this one based solely on her earnest devotion to a soft rock duo proof of my own spiritual disfigurement. In a word possibly. In

fact my reaction neatly encapsulates the romantic inclinations of the drooling fanatic. I could see based on the air supply situation that Elise and I were susceptible to different myths. Hers were starry eyed an operatic full of blond people and members only jackets necking on tarmacs. Mine were shadowy and downbeat and involved horny communists engaged in light bondage. There was some chance our mis might overlap in the arena of depravity perhaps the Communists were Blon for instance perhaps the bondage could be staged on a tarmac but soon enough Elise would be sighing a lot and asking why listen to such sad music all the time. Did I have something against just being happy and I'd be gouging up her air supply records then blaming it on her dog. Yes OK.

It is fair to ask at this point however managed to get married. It is certainly a question my family has pondered. A proper librettist or perhaps air supply would have drawn it up perfectly. My wife Erin and I are locking eyes across a windswept Piazzi. Plenty of loud obstacles in the wings. Alas the truth is a bit lumpier. In fact a mere two weeks after meeting Erin I announced that we had to stop seeing each other. My super ego had decided I needed to find a wife and while my super ego had not bothered to inform my slobbering ID it had made a pretty convincing case against Erin who for all her charms was 27 and just a few years out of college so I bid her farewell convinced I'd behaved with noble restraint and returned to my alleged quest for a bride. I drove an hour through the snow to meet one woman we'd made sexy talk on the phone and swapped photos. It was going to be tremendous. It was always going to be tremendous. Then she

opened the door and her face was that of an ostrich pinched and belligerent and mine was that of a weasel B.T. and mean. And our hearts staggered through the rest of it. The hole punched out of us. I'm glad you enjoyed that because I sure didn't. On such nights. A little later than was appropriate. I would dial Aron's number. I've got something you need to hear I'd say which was deplorable but at least true because when I wasn't off turning dates into Bergman films all I did was hunt for new dope and so Aaron appeared and we retreated into my cave and did what was required. All the sweaty investigations though best of all was lying in the dark afterward and listening to the songs that were unbeknownst to either of us. I think slowly twining our fates. We ate french toast in great abundance and slept as if dead. After a few weeks I'd break up with her though sometimes she broke up with me coming to her senses with a soft reluctance. Well I nodded soberly

but then the new Chuck Prophet record came out. No other love. It was called and I knew Aaron would want to hear it. I know we're broken up I said but you are not going to believe this record. This was the summer of 2003 as I recall and we spent the next week doing nothing but listening in bed until we knew all the words and the tempos had been absorbed by our muscles and every song seemed to be trying to tell us something new about our dire arrangement. It was the perfect record for us. Gorgeous and doomed like a kiss that tastes of blood and the song we took is our anthem was summertime thing which we sang to each other and to ourselves dancing across the dirty floors of my apartment naked and bracing ourselves against the relevant countertops. Aaron knew she shouldn't have allowed herself to get sucked back into my orbit and I couldn't tell her otherwise. This is how it goes when a drooling fanatic is falling in love especially when he doesn't know

or won't admit he's falling in love. It's not the lightning bolt or the sunset embrace it's the way she infiltrates your most sacred LPs quietly erases the why from your collection. I continue to go on dates that winter I took out a doctors smart attractive Jewish even. We got back to her apartment and I began rooting around for her record collection. Where's the music. I said casually. Oh she said My schedule is pretty hectic right but right now I said we could listen to something right now. She smiled a little indulgently as if to say I don't know how it is with you writers but this is how it is with us doctors. But what she said was maybe worse. I think I've got a sure date disk in my car. And so I found myself at home again in the familiar rooms and though I knew it was a mistake I put on one of Arendt's favorites postcards from downtown by Dana Kurtz a collection of songs so full of romantic woe. It might as well have come with

a bottle of whiskey and I was doing okay really until the moment four and a half minutes into her rueful epic Patterson when the song seems to be drawing to an end and instead the time signature slows and we hear the trill of an accordion and violins and Dana begins singing in Italian of all things. Get all of her music immediately. And listening to this voice echo about my bedroom. It's an ending dejection made me realize that keeping Aaron at bay was no longer an option that my loneliness was not some precious artistic prerogative or exalted state but simply an ongoing regret. I needed her in close where we could where we could hear the music together.

Erin and I were lying in bed stoned when she started in again about her single days which is a special code phrase she uses when she wants to remind me about the time Kip Winger nearly propositioned her. This took place during Arendt's first year in grad school. She'd been invited by an old friend to a VH 1 sponsored event which combined the channel's parasitic passion for aging celebrities with its ongoing campaign to resuscitate the music of the 80s. It is OK. It is. That's a brave stance sir. It is fair to suppose Aaron was lonely. It is fair to suppose she had had a few drinks and that these drinks helped steer her into the seat next to Kip Winger at the table

where the musicians were signing merchandise for fans. Many of these fans were and I quote Aaron slutty girls with their tits hanging out. Whose sexual availability was understood but to hear Aaron tell it Kip Winger hadn't been interested in them to hear Aaron tell it. Kip had been interested in Aaron. It pleased Aaron a great deal to be the object of Kiplinger's lewd banter and it pleased her to be able to report to me the next day on the phone that she had been the object of Kiplinger's lewd banter and that he had discussed oral sex and implied his expertise and stopped just short of inviting her back to his hotel room. Or maybe he had invited her. It was impossible to know what happened and she enjoyed this ambiguity. Also. Turned it down. So this was her Kip Winger story and she was telling it to me once

again. Now that we were old married farts with the kids sacked out across the hall the pothead made her nostalgic. Then she started in with certain facts about Kip mentioned in previous tellings such as the fact that Kip had studied ballet and could kick his foot over his head while wearing leather trousers. And Kip had studied classical music in composition and TKIP was not a tall man but he had aged superbly. Then she got on line and showed me a YouTube video of Kip playing classical guitar and leather trousers. This was technically our date night. Now another sort of couple a couple who composed of at least one person who isn't a drooling fanatic would have probably dropped Kip Winger as a thematic element at this point and proceeded to the evening's intended highlight essentially comic sexual toil. But my wife's reverie demanded a response. I reminded her that I was the one in the marriage who had spoken to kipp way back in 1989 when he was at the

height of his powers graduate taking his way through 17 and scheduling his groupies in 15 minute intervals. And my wife had probably forgotten and I was now going to remind her I had been a professional music critic once who possessed Kiplinger's Personal phone number and who once more had covered the Grammys. Once this was on the table it hardly seemed fair not to provide a full account. My wife was lightly snoring. Now I should add that Kip Winger continues to be a source of marital tension because. My wife recently informed me in a manner simultaneously abashed and ragingly proud that she was actually the cause of Kip Winger getting an erection during their VH 1 sponsor terror attacks. Meaning that they had had the equivalent of I guess you could say terrestrial close range. Phone sex is what I'm getting at. Though she didn't want this vital elaboration printed in my book lest it

adversely affect her future chances with Kiev. And when pressed on this topic suggested the kid might one day in our future possible near future. Wait let me try to remember how she put this. Oh yes here it is. Come Pyrrha wedding into our bedroom in his leather pants and was therefore at this point in our story suggesting that she wanted Kip Winger in our sexual lives as a third in our threesome. And what's more with that establish she went on to mention with the sort of casualness that drives us doubt Cho Jews crazy that Kip's wife was supposedly smokin hot and a swinger to boot. Which it seemed to me as a doubt chough Jew was the moment when she was actually envisioning a threesome consisting of a kip winger be his smokin hot swinger wife and C not me. This conversation took place on the eve of this book's publication and therefore robbed me of the

honor of titling this interlude how my wife gave Kip Winger a boner or perhaps more poetically Kyp wingers boner. Well. Well well. That's all. Have a cigarette. A few years ago my pal Tom Finkel called me. You know what's great. He asked listening to Bob Dylan with your baby daughter. I'd never heard Tom speak with such contentment. I could hear Dylan in the background and I imagined Tom lying on the couch. The kid curled on his chest. I thought about that phone call a lot recently. It connotes a certain fantasy that drooling fanaticism and parenthood are not only reconcilable but ideal dance partners. Who better to indoctrinate into the pleasures of song than your children.

It hasn't worked out quite that way in our household though. Our three year old Josie does love music but she does not now nor has she ever wanted anything to do with my music. She's got her own music and woe unto thee who fucks with her play list. My wife learned this a few months ago when she walked into the child's room. I want no fibe. Josi shrieked the Dino 5 is a dinosaur themed children's hip hop album. It is exactly as charming as this description implies. Oh honey my wife said not the Dino 5 again. Joshi's face her entire being crumpled. She wasn't upset that I was saying no her. Aaron told me later it was that I didn't salt at her music it was like I'd just done the worst most hurtful thing in the world. Oh God.

Aaron was close to tears herself. Cry that let it honey. All this has reinforced my belief that drooling fanaticism is an innate tendency something that gets bred out of us as we get older. Like playing with our food it is certainly true that when I find a song I love my natural impulse is to play it 12 times in a row. The reason I don't is because I've learned that pop songs have limited durability. They can only surprise us so many times once we memorize all the moves the fills the solos the vocal turns. We stop listening in the same way the song no longer transports us. It's certainly possible to recapture that spark but it's never the same as the first time in love in music in anything. And so over the years drooling fanatics learned to conserve gratification. So Josie and her little brother will learn to conserve gratification. They'll

probably dream of being rock stars too. Why not. They'll grow up with two parents who dreamed of being rock stars in a house filled with instruments. Those parents could no longer play. And probably this must be said they won't be rockstars. How many of us get to be what they will have what we all get is the chance to be drooling fanatics and I hope that they feel as I do a bursting gratitude for those musicians brave enough to speak the first and final language of our hearts. If they're lucky someday they'll have children of their own and they'll realize that you don't have to be a rock star to feel like a rock star. All you need is a soft little human with a sweet smelling head who settles down at night with your bottle and says Papa sing. What song do you want. I say. And Josey says corn which means Jimmy Crack Corn. Ring which means hush little baby are most

often mountain which means should be coming around the mountain. Then she says it again Papa sing and I get to say. Sheesh I thought you'd never ask. Thank you