Being an internet refuge for Graeme McMillan
I don’t know: you can write scripts, and they always end up going… [pause]… well, one thing I’ve learned, and I’m sure you’re exactly the same, is that everything I think I’ve got totally sorted out, and I know exactly what’s going to happen – it never works out that way…
– Damon Albarn, talking to the Guardian.
“Inbox Zero” – that is, the mythical state where there’s nothing demanding your immediate attention in your email inbox – has finally been achieved, thanks to my deciding that I was just going to archive everything and move on no matter what. It’s been a weird, cluttered sort of a week, with my brain moving too slowly through things that really shouldn’t have taken that long, so I figured that this kind of extreme action was required. Time for a new start, right…?
Of course, now I’m convinced that I may need to de-archive a couple of things. I mean, there are a couple of action items that I really need to take care of sooner rather than later, right…?
Firstly: I don’t think Elvis has ever been better than he is with these two songs. Sorry, everyone who disagrees; you’re just wrong.
Secondly: This song for me is staying with friends in London on, I suspect, a rainy New Year’s Day, killing time and lazily talking while this is playing in the background. I was never – and this hasn’t changed, really – a big Elvis fan, but there’s something about this song that made me pay attention, and it’s everything that isn’t Elvis about it; there’s a really great post-Beatles, post-R&B arrangement happening here, and everytime I listen to it, I wonder what could’ve been done if that kind of thing was something that the King had been more interested in pursuing. Ah, Schroedinger’s Pop Career…
Considering the lyrical nature of the song (Spoiler: It’s about drugs), it sounds somewhat unexpected and maybe just a little contrary to say that this song really reminds me of my honeymoon in Boston with Kate, a decade ago to this very day – Seriously, Kate and I were married ten years ago last Friday – but it’s true. The two of us first found this song on the David Holmes mix CD “Come Get it, I Got It,” which we bought at some store in Boston on the trip, and we fell in love with its psychedelic folk/soul on very first listen. For years afterwards, we tried to find out more about Sixto Rodriguez, but this was before Cold Fact had been reissued or Holmes’ sponsorship of the artist had really taken any effect, so all we knew of him for the longest time was this piece of awesomeness. Despite what he’s singing about, this makes me think of warm, sunny days, the future feeling wide open and waiting for us as we wandered the streets.
I first heard Big Star’s Third/Sister Lovers years before I could understand it, I think. I was still in high school and putting together my personal cosmology of music and sounds, and had pretty much just gotten to the idea that “Big Star = Power Pop with harmonies and chiming guitars” and wasn’t at all ready for the musical and nervous breakdown that Third had in store for me (Years later, not even that many, I revisited it afresh and found it to be one of the most beautiful, upsetting and vital things I’d heard. In those years, mind you, I’d had relationships gone wrong and had to deal with the real world a little more, so things felt more relatable than they had originally). But “Nature Boy,” Alex Chilton’s cover of the Nat King Cole song, was one of the maybe two songs that stood out for me, and I played it over and over, not really understanding why. There was something about the almost off-hand way Chilton sings it, the sparse arrangement and the final line, so naked and then underlined by the piano that follows; I had no idea what magic the song had, but I knew that it had some, so I just kept playing it all the time, convinced that there was a truth in there that I needed inside my head.
All these years later, now, I still get the same feeling when I hear it. This idea that there’s more to the song than meets the eye (or ear) and that “The greatest thing/You’ll ever learn/Is just to love/And be loved, in return” is the greatest lyric ever written or sung.
In my defense, I’ve always had a thing for cellos, so I was always going to be a sucker for this song. But R.E.M.’s “At My Most Beautiful” came into my life (via the Up album, I guess) at a time when I was that sad boy whose girlfriend was overseas studying and receiving homemade tapes filled with overly emotional music all of which had deep emotional meaning that wasn’t exactly hidden to anyone with ears, and so, of course it went on one of those tapes, probably between something from Big Star’s Third album and, God knows, an Oasis b-side or whatever else I was listening to at the time.
That’s not the reason I’m bringing this song to light, however. No, for that, you have to jump forward a few months and the girlfriend is back in town and we’ve split up, and “At My Most Beautiful” is about to be released as a single. I’m lying on my bed, reading the NME or the Melody Maker review of the single and it’s as cutting and cruel as the song deserves (Really, this is a horribly sentimental, rather dull song at heart, lovely cello moment aside) and in the review, there’s a line along the lines of “This song is so bad, the only people who’ll find any value in it are sad boys lying in their bedrooms making up mix tapes for girlfriends who are overseas” or the like. Something that literally described me.
I read that line and blushed, embarrassed at being so predictable, so obvious, and thought to myself, “I can never tell anyone about this. Ever.”
Apparently, more than a decade later, I’m a little bit better at laughing at myself.
R.E.M.’s Monster came out on the day that I was moving from Greenock back to Aberdeen for the second year of my art school career; I was going to be living in a house in the middle of the countryside, and so I made a point of getting up early before I even packed up for the four hour drive between hometowns to buy the album, and spent the entire drive wishing that I could play the album in the car and hear all of those great songs that were almost definitely as good and catchy as the lead-off single “What’s The Frequency, Kenneth?”.
(Almost twenty years later, I still think that “What’s The Frequency, Kenneth?” is a great single; it’s ridiculously catchy and sounds just off enough that you can’t help but pay attention when you hear it. I remember hearing it for the first time, back when I was a massive R.E.M. fan and couldn’t quite believe that they were really doing a “rock” record again after Out of Time and Automatic For The People, and thinking “That wasn’t what I was expecting, but I definitely want to hear a lot more!”)
When I arrived and unpacked the car in Aberdeen, the first thing I did was plug in my CD player and eagerly put the new album on, excited to listen to the whole thing as I tried to make this new house into somewhere I could imagine spending the next nine months. With each successive track, I got more and more worried about the… saminess, I guess, the aural sludge that felt like it bogged down the album, the lack of focus and even more worrying, the lack of tunes. This wasn’t what I had wanted, and felt like it was a bad omen for how the year ahead and the new place were going to turn out (Spoiler: It may have been, considering). But when “Star 69” came on, I stopped what I was doing and just listened, and then hit repeat, and listened to it again, and again.
I’m not sure what it was about this song that stood out so much: The riff? The echoed vocals? The way that the song seems to almost take a breath before the guitar solo? Maybe all of that, and more, but this wasn’t like the rest of the album, and gave me an idea that, okay, maybe my musical heroes of the time had let me down, but they weren’t entirely out of ideas just yet. The myth of the musical comeback was born in me with this song, I think.
Like many white people of a particular generation, Out of Time by R.E.M. was a particularly important album for me, and I can remember the mix of disappointment and frustration that accompanied the release of “Drive,” the first single from the follow-up album, Automatic For The People. Almost willfully downbeat and anti-radioplay-friendly, “Drive” wasn’t the comeback song that the eighteen year old me I was at the time hoping for, and I remember forcing myself to listen to it over and over again, convinced that it would have hidden charms that I was too dumb to fully comprehend immediately, and I just had to find them. I’d sit there with the song on repeat, the first CD I’d ever bought for myself (I’d just received my first CD player for my birthday, as I remember), listening to it over and over and thinking “Come on, song, make sense for me, please,” with the most enjoyment I could wring out of it being the three-note coda at the very end of the song that always made me sing along in my head “Arr, Eee, Emmm….”
(Somewhat ironically, I like it a lot more now than I did then, in part because it makes me think of the album as a whole now, and it works much better in that context. So maybe that was all I needed; the rest of Automatic For The People. Belated thanks, R.E.M.!)
Another song that was playing during a particularly surreal split with a girlfriend. Cut to – what, 1997, maybe 1998? Whatever year that the second album by Ben Folds Five (Whatever And Ever Amen) came out – and I’m in bed with my girlfriend as we watched The Chart Show, the Saturday morning chart show that soundtracked so many beginnings of weekends back then. Somehow, this song (which both of us liked, and found ourselves looking forward to, I remember) brought up the fact that we weren’t really going anywhere as a couple, and that maybe we should call it a day. Sticking with the apathetic tone of the song’s lyrics, the split at that point was surprisingly amiable and agreeable, some kind of “Hey, so this is what we’re doing, I guess? Okay, I suppose that’s okay” from both of us that, hours later, we were telling friends with a tone of “Did we actually have that conversation?” somewhere mixed in.
Within a week, everything had become drama and tears and shouting, of course. Maybe the calming qualities of Ben Folds should’ve been deployed in all of our conversations for some time afterwards, as a matter of safety and sanity-preservation.
Another Ruby-related memory: In Barcelona in… what, 1996, I guess? A school trip, and through some unlikely magic, we’re there at the same time as Ruby doing a European tour. One of our number was related to Ruby’s management, and a couple of phone calls later, we’re on the guest-list and we wander across town, no idea where we’re going to try and find the venue in time. The show was short but wonderful, as crunchy and grumpy as this song might suggest, and we triumphantly march backstage when it’s done, only to find that the band are already on the bus and on their way to wherever they’re staying that night. Not knowing what else to do, complimentary champagne was stolen and we wandered back through the city, lost and not caring if we’d find the hotel we were staying at that night, feeling young and invincible.
(“Tiny Meat” was another single where the remix was better than the original version. I actually really like the original still – That’s it up there – but much prefer this remix by Mark Walk, the band’s regular producer, just because it sounds as if he did it just to mess with the levels of whatever you were using to play it back. Dig the distortion!)