The Adoration of the Music of Pavement

April 13, 2022December 31, 2024 RilalyLeave a comment

Some people remember their first kiss, some remember the first dollar they earned, others remember when they first met their wife, the birth of their child. I remember the first time I heard Pavement’s new song Stereo. My irrational exuberance, after spending two years listening to Wowee Zowee, was such that Pavement could’ve released a three-minute single of Stephen Malkmus clearing his throat, and I would’ve been singing that for the next month, in anticipation of the release of an album they decided to title Brighten the Corners. My passion for them was silly, inexplicable, and embarrassing, but who can explain love?

Before Apple Music, Amazon Prime, and Spotify, consumers had to take a shot in the dark on musical artists. In the early 90’s, there were no college radio stations in my area, and the radio stations we did have, played the songs their advertisers demanded. We could choose between Billboard top 40 and classic rock stations. The only outlet lovers of relatively obscure music was corporate music magazine music reviews, and most of them only reviewed top-tier artists. Every once in a while, however, the corporate chieftains would allow a reviewer to review some obscure album that didn’t help the sales of the magazine. I never cared about the names of album reviewers. I just read the review, and some of them clicked, 99% of them didn’t. When I read a review for an album called Slanted and Enchanted from a group of nondescript fellas I’d never heard of before, I liked it so much I bought the album. I don’t know why I bought the album, but the reviewer said something along the lines of “Slanted and Enchanted is an undiscovered gem from a band who will be making some noise in coming years”. Did this guy know what he was talking about? I didn’t know, and I really didn’t care, but for whatever reason, I decided to give these guys in a band called cement, concrete, or something like that, a shot.

Whoever that guy was, he knew his music. I listened to Slanted and Enchanted as often as I did the Seattle bands of 1992. I wasn’t around the Cali scene, when Pavement were paying their dues, but I was one of the first person I knew to own a Pavement cassette tape. It was not love them at first listen however. Slanted and Enchanted was so different and so complicated that it took a number of spins to click. To my mind, the raw Westing (by Musket and Sextant) only reinforced the idea that these guys could piece together some of the most original music I ever heard. I’ve heard some suggest that Pavement, like all artists, were a culmination, or a compilation, of their influences. If that’s the case, these cats grew up listening to music I never heard before. They weren’t punk (by my narrow and uninformed definition), hard rock, or any genre I heard. They were something different, and to my mind that’s the greatest compliment we can give any artist in the crowded field of music.

“A genius is the one most like himself.” –Thelonius Monk.

In 1994, Pavement doubled down on something different, when they released an album called Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. I could go through this album and four-star and five-star the singles, but I won’t bore you with my narcissistic analysis. I will just say that I played this disc so often that almost all of the singles were playing during a seminal moment of my life between ‘94-’95. Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain cemented Pavement in the upper echelon of my favorite bands.

As brilliant as these two albums were, top to bottom, they did not prepare me for the “Holy ‘it, these guys are it” effect Wowee Zowee would have on my psyche. As lead singer Stephen sang somewhere, “Song is sacred.” The brilliance on this disc floored me. After hearing it the first 100 times, I decided that everything Stephen Malkmus and Scott Kannberg wrote to that point culminated in Wowee Zowee. Slanted was the seed, Crooked Rain was the fertilizer, and Wowee Zowee was the flower. This analogy might be oversimplifying the evolution, and it might unintentionally denigrate the brilliance that can be found on the other two discs, but what Stephen Malkmus and Scott Kannberg (Spiral Stairs) put together on Wowee Zowee reached me on levels those other albums couldn’t.

When I write that Pavement were different that should not be confused with weird or strange. Compared to the other cassette tapes housed in my wall fixtures, Pavement were mainstream pop. When I would play their albums in my home, in my car, and in other people’s homes and cars, they were confused by what they were hearing. “I can’t believe you like this,” they would say. They were so accustomed to hearing obnoxiously complicated, noisy and difficult music coming out of my car speakers that they couldn’t believe I considered Range Life an absolute classic. The more they listened, the more confused they grew as each lyrical and musical stroke of paint Pavement put on their audio canvases had their own accessible inaccessibility.

The question Pavement, more than any other band I listened to, asked was how does we explain appeal? Why does one listener enjoy weird and obnoxiously complicated music, while another prefers a smoother flow? Drilling down deeper, why do most Pavement fans prefer one of the first two albums and I prefer the third? “Because the other two albums are superior,” you might say, “and you choose to be different for all the mileage you think that gains you.” I can’t deny that provided some initial appeal, but I’m still chasing the dragon of those obnoxiously complicated, noisy and difficult musicians, and I still love Wowee Zowee more than the other two. I don’t search for weird for the sake of being weird, but when a group like Ween can create contextual oddities, I’m all over that. If Pavement were in any way weird, it was so contextual that the listener had to dig through the cracks to find it.

Back when the sole, mobile unit for playing music was the cassette, I think I went through three different copies of Wowee Zowee, as many will attest cassettes, and their players, weren’t built for hundreds of repeated plays. I also bought a CD version of the album later (you’re welcome fellas). After exhausting the albums, I bought all of Pavement’s cassingles (cassette singles), EP’s, and any and every musical production that had the group’s name attached to it. So, when it came time for a new Pavement album to come out, two long years later, I thought it would be the next logical step in Pavement’s evolution. (Spoiler alert: It wasn’t) I never stopped to think of artistic peaks at the time, and how Wowee Zowee just happened to dot all my personal I’s and cross my T’s in a way no album ever had. I thought if Slanted was great, Crooked Rain was even better, and Wowee Zowee had such personal appeal, then Brighten the Corners had to be an end product of whatever gap great, better, and ingenious left.

Some people prefer to only listen to music outside the mainframe, some only listen to music that charts in Billboard top 40. There is a conceit relative to both parties, as the Billboard guy brags about his rock star’s record sales and top hits, whereas the obscure guy condemns the rock star’s audience for not knowing how deep to dig for true, quality music. I don’t know where Pavement sits in this paradigm, as I know they’ve had some record sales, some appearances on Billboard charts, and some play on MTV. I can’t deny dining out on the obscure side, but Pavement were one of the few bands that if everyone loved them, or no one did, I would continue to worship their art.

This statement might shock those in other parts of the country, but I’ve yet to meet a tangible person who listened to Pavement at any point, and I’ve only met a few outside of my inner circle who actually heard of them. In my locale, Pavement was so obscure that people wondered how I heard of them, and other groups like Mr. Bungle and Captain Beefheart. Someone once asked me where I find such obscure music. I told her they could be found at a place called a record store.

My frustration that no one had ever heard of these relatively obscure artists abated long before Pavement’s Wowee Zowee came out, and I put the whole “You have to hear these guys. They’re incredible” personal promotion machine behind me years prior. Very, very few people listened to my recommendations anyway, and on those occasions when I would loan my CDs out to them, they never came back saying, “You were right, these guys are incredible.” Between roughly 1992 and 1996, some Pavement album was spinning in a CD player, or spooling in a cassette player, and no one cared, and I didn’t care that they didn’t.

The only problem for me then was that it was far more difficult to know when a relatively obscure band was coming out with a new disc in 1997. The internet has changed that dramatically. We can now subscribe to their site, check their Facebook page, or search the name of their band to learn about a new release. In 1997, we had a dry erase board at our local mom and pop record store with dates of releases and names written in fluorescent ink. “2/17,”, the whiteboard said one day, “Pavement: Brighten the Corners.”

As a 27-year-old man, I was that kid who found out Santa was coming. I actually formed my own personal countdown that I would say to friends, “You know what today is?” I would ask, tongue-in-cheek. “Day 11, until the release of Brighten the Corners.”

The people I knew and loved craved career advancement, money, romance, or some other form of concrete, identifiable advancement that defined them as a greater man. My identity was wrapped up in music. It’s almost embarrassing now to admit how much music has meant to me throughout my life. I had nothing to do with the music, or course, and I didn’t prosper in any way when one of “my artists” came out with a new disc, but I felt some kind of personal glory when they came out with a spectacular, spine-tingling release.

When Pavement released the single Stereo, I grabbed a copy of it in the aforementioned record store in a manner that suggested I thought a melee might break out if others knew it was sitting on the shelf. When I listened to it, I thought it was a harbinger of the greatest album ever made. As I mentioned earlier, the progressive, five-year build up to that disc let my imagination go wild. I not only loved every album that built up to it, but their B sides were some of my favorite songs, and I dove deep into their EPs, particularly the Give it a Day/Gangsters and Pranksters EP. When one of Pavement’s songs appeared on a soundtrack or compilation tape, I snapped it up quickly, even if I didn’t care for any other artist on it. (My favorite single among those released in this manner was an R.E.M. homage called Unseen Power of the Picket Fence. It appeared on a No Alternative compilation, and it now appears on the Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain: LA’s Desert Origins anniversary edition.) With all that, I looked forward to Pavement’s next release as I would Quentin Tarantino’s next release after Pulp Fiction and everything that contained Mike Patton or David Bowie’s.

The question I should’ve asked myself, in preparation for the release of Brighten the Corners, is how could Pavement possibly top Wowee Zowee? I didn’t ask that question, because they already established a track record of constantly topping themselves the next time out. I had such a nebulous understanding of artistic peaks that I didn’t even consider it. The artists themselves don’t understand them. If they did, they’d know how to duplicate it.

Some suggest that artistic peaks are a time and place phenomenon relative to the fan. The idea behind the time and place phenomenon suggests that a band such as Green Day wouldn’t have enjoyed the commercial success they did, if they released their first album ten years earlier or later, and if Nirvana’s Nevermind were released ten years earlier or later, it wouldn’t have had the enormous sales it did. While I find the idea thought-provoking and fascinating, it also suggests that if we somehow flipped the release dates of Brighten the Corners and Wowee Zowee around on another timeline, I might’ve consider Brighten the Corners the masterpiece and Wowee Zowee the comparative disappointment, because of the place I was in, in 1995. I don’t see it. Wowee Zowee just hit too many of my personal touchstones, and it crossed every one of my T’s and dotted my I’s so well that I considered it such an artistic peak that my anticipation for its follow-up was unprecedented, and I never looked forward to another artist’s future release so much before or since.

As such, Brighten the Corners proved to be the most disappointed I’ve ever been in an album. Was it bad? No, not even close, but I didn’t know that at the time. I listen to the album now, and it has a number of classic Pavement songs on it. Aside from Stereo, the next three songs on the disc were, and are, really good, and Embassy Row might be one of my favorite Pavement singles. There really isn’t a terrible song on Brighten the Corners, but it had the unenviable chore of trying to follow one of my favorite albums of all time.

The fact that I still remember the time and place I first heard Stereo shouldn’t suggest that the song was that great either. It wasn’t. It isn’t. It was good, really good, but it couldn’t possibly meet my expectations. It was the album before that, and the album before that, and the album before that.

Some Johnny-on-the-spot, 1995 reviewers stated that with Wowee Zowee, Pavement seemed to be “self-sabotaging, of being afraid of success”. Prior to Wowee, Pavement were critical darlings, but the critics considered the disc a gigantic leap down from what they considered their legendary first two discs. I had to read those words three times to try to make sense of them. These critics weren’t jumping off the Pavement ship, but they thought it was a gigantic step down from five-stars to four and a half. Go to just about any site that reviews albums now, Allmusic.com in particular, and you’ll read unending praise of the first two discs, coupled with five-star ratings. More often than not, you’ll read that Wowee Zowee has a four and a half star rating. It doesn’t sway my opinion in the least of course, but it does lead me to wonder if the critics didn’t fall prey to the time and place theory or if I did, but I still view Wowee Zowee as the absolute pinnacle of Pavement’s artistic peak.

It seems to me that critics penalize Wowee Zowee by half a star for following Pavement’s epic releases. I also wonder if, in the critics’ minds, Pavement lost their indie/alternative cred by that point, and they viewed them as more established artists, even if they never managed huge sales. If the former is the case, should we penalize Slanted and Crooked for not being as good as Wowee. No, I still give all three five stars. I don’t know when it started, but many critics and fans have attempted to retroactively whitewash their initial reactions to Wowee Zowee by now calling it Pavement’s masterpiece. I honestly didn’t care why the critics slammed it then, and I don’t care how they try to clean it up now. I was so artistically moved by the album that I thought their next artistic adventure would break through whatever stratosphere Wowee Zowee didn’t. I never sat down and tried to imagine how it could, as I wrote, but Pavement did so much in such a short span that they made me believe anything was possible. If I were an obnoxious critic, I might retroactively assign Brighten the Corners four and a half stars, to assuage my guilt for initially calling it the most disappointing album I’ve ever heard.

As Pavement puts a cap on their career with a now 23-year retrospective release of Terror Twilight, called Terror Twilight: Farewell Horizontal, those of us who loved them can say they released three incredible albums, one great one, and another that put a really good exclamation point on their career. Pick any artist who seeks artistic adventure, and you’re going to be able to pinpoint an artistic peak. “They’re not as good as they used to be,” is a phrase we love to say to build up an artist and tear them down, so we can identify with them better. We also think it gives us some form of critical panache to say such things, but in retrospect it makes us all look a little silly.

I Give You Permission to Read This

April 12, 2022January 30, 2025 RilalyLeave a comment

“We have two choices in our culture today,” the “theys” who appear on our devices tell us. “We can either feel guilty about doing what we do, or we can give ourselves permission to do them.” The only asterisk in this Faustian Dilemma is celebrital dispensation. Similar to Papal Dispensation, if a celebrity says, or more importantly wears, something on the red carpet, it gives us commoners the permission to be who we are, “who we really are.” To listen to the theys of celebrity adoration, celebrital dispensation is far more powerful than Papal Dispensation in that it doesn’t just offer a specific relaxation of rules in one particular case, it offers us a wholesale abrogation of rules of social decorum, social contracts, moral and ethical principles, and presumably constitutions and foundational documents. The theoretical extension of the rules and policies of celebrital dispensation are not clear, but from what the theys suggest, a song lyric, a line in a movie or show, and any dietary decision celebrities bestow upon us can lead us to the brink of a guilt-free life.

In order for the celebrital dispensation to have power, however, we have to violate a special tenet permission-oriented types have embedded in their personal constitution: Thou shalt not grant another power over one’s life. Aren’t we all supposed to be self-empowered? Aren’t we all supposed to say, “I’m not going to give you that power over me.” Isn’t it all about autonomy, independence and strength to achieve comfort? It depends, and it’s conditional. If the celebrity is hot, superficially and/or professionally, they don’t just wield power in Billboard or the box office, they can influence our daily lives.

Is this all a collective wink-and-a-nod joke, I missed, or does the woman I see twerking on stage in a corseted bodysuit draped with strands of silver fabric, over-the-knee fringe boots wield as much power over her congregation as the Pope does his? How many successful albums, movies, and TV shows does a person have to have before they can start granting us permission on how to live our lives, and what happens if her next album doesn’t fare as well? Does her sway over the culture ebb and flow with sales, and do we need to keep a ledger on how much power a celebrity wields, before giving them permission to give us permission? How beautiful, handsome, funny, or serious do they have to be before they’re allowed to grant us permission to put a little cheese on our broccoli before eating it? What happens when they eventually age out of their beauty and/or handsomeness, do they grant us permission to age, or do their powers diminish? It probably depends on how gracefully they age. Is there a bottom line qualifier they must continually meet before we continue to grant them ourselves permission to grant them permission to grant us permission to do what we want to do?

*******

“So, you don’t just do something or avoid doing it?” is a question I ask of those who seek and grant permission to themselves. “So, you don’t just do something or avoid doing it?” is a question I ask of those who seek and grant permission to themselves. “You add the extra step of asking yourself permission first before doing it?” If that’s the case, the logical conclusion is that there’s another part of us that grants permission. Is that other part of us ruling in a fair, objective, and unbiased manner? Are all of our rulings always reached with our best interests in mind? If you commit to a regular practice of asking yourself permission to do things, how often do you say no? Has your rejection ever surprised you? If so, how did you react? Did you disagree with the basis of your judgement so much that it frustrated you, because you thought you didn’t consider some of the mitigating factors in your request? Did you ever end up eating that piece of chocolate cake regardless of the judgment? We’ve all been subject to unfair, foul, and draconian rulings from the various authority figures in our lives, and we’ve all rebelled against them accordingly. Have you ever eaten that piece of chocolate cake regardless if permission was granted or not, and how did that affect your relationship with yourself going forward? Have you ever stopped asking yourself permission for a time and just did it, because you began to believe that you could be a bit of a tyrant at times, and do you adjust some of your behaviors in the hopes that you might notice a run of good behavior that deserved some reward? You know you’ve been good, but have you had this feeling that you didn’t notice it, and you feel that you should start rewarding yourself with some chocolate cake here and there, until you start acting up again?”

One definition of giving yourself permission involves the practice of allowing “You to disconnect WHO you are from your opinions, ideas and practices. Instead, placing that identity in your values. As long as you are acting in line with your core values, it opens up space to be wrong about decisions in the past, and how you will choose to translate your values in the future, without losing sight of your personal integrity or ability to be 100% whole and worthy.”

If I ever fall prey to this nonsense, I know my first series of layoffs will involve middle management, as I will know, without poring through the numbers, that I’m probably overstaffed.

*******

“I have so earned this,” we say as we lower onto a piece of soft and juicy chocolate cake, “and I deserve a reward.” Is a piece of chocolate cake ever that rewarding? How long does that sense of reward last? Do we go for another piece to reward ourselves more when we’ve been especially good? No, because that might prove punishing. The single piece of chocolate cake represents a reward at the end of the maze of good and healthy living, and we always announce our path to it? “I’ve been good.”

I guess I’m a stranger in a strange land, because I just eat the piece of chocolate cake, or I don’t. I make decisions without disconnecting WHO I am from my opinions, ideas and practices. There are no trumpets in my land, signaling a dietary path that has been a quality one up to this point, or one that is so bad that I don’t dare approach the bench.

We let our trumpets blare, because we want external validation and societal validation. Somewhere along the way, we glommed onto the complicated world of self-acceptance and self-actualization, and the rise of self-help literature, social media, and mental health awareness tangled and mangled this into people talking about their personal struggles and growth journeys, until we started seeking permission and granting it to ourselves based on past and present behaviors.

“I am refraining from eating that piece of soft and juicy chocolate, because I’m on a diet.” We say this even though no one brought it up, and some part of us knows that no one cares, one way or another, but we want someone else to validate our discipline. Even a lifted eyebrow will do. Eating that single piece of soft and juicy chocolate cake gives us a naughty violation to punctuate the streak of good and healthy living that no one cared about when it went live. These are all decisions and choices we make, and they’re all fine, but how many times have we gone a solid month without a slice of chocolate cake? “Yeah, I deserve a reward for that.” What’s the difference between deserve and earn? Who cares, let me have cake.

When we involve ourselves in the idea of granting permission to ourselves, I think there’s a super-secret part of us that kind of misses having a controlling authority in our lives. “I can’t wait until I’m an adult,” kids often say, “because I’ll then get to finally do everything I want to do.” We all know that there is a psychological push and pull to authority in our youth, as we push back on authoritative constraints, until they’re not there. When they’re not there, we feel the need for borders and guidance in a strange way that makes us feel uncomfortable. We didn’t miss it in our 20s, because we were all about luxuriating in the newfound powers of freedom of adulthood that can feel so fresh and liberating. When we hit our 30s, the idea of freedom became more established, routine, and a little boring, and if we lived to our 40s, we became the powers that be. No one notices when the idea of unadulterated freedom begins to wear off, but we eventually start to take it for granted, and we begin to miss the rewards and punishments that flowed from authoritarian control, so we began establishing our own.

The logical response to those who deserve a reward is do they ever punish themselves for bad living? Have you ever tried canned beets? If not, then you don’t truly know the extent of quality punishments. WebMD.com suggests that beets “Don’t just reduce inflammation, they also improve heart health. The nitrates in beets have been shown to reduce high blood pressure. Beets are also naturally low in cholesterol and fat, which makes them a good option for people concerned about heart disease or stroke.” Are beets a quality punishment we sentence we pass down for falling off track regarding good and healthy living? Why else would someone eat a beet? If someone told me that they granted themselves permission to eat a piece of chocolate cake, because “I deserve it,” I would ignore them as much as I ignore anyone who publicly grants themselves permission to do anything. If however, they added, “I just ate a whole can of those wet, slimy vegetables,” I might consider my own form of a one-time dispensation.

“Did they have that purplish color that comes from betalain pigments?”

“Yes.”

“Today, I tell you,” I would say with a permissive wave of my hand, “that you shall enjoy paradise.”

I realize that granting ourselves permission to do what we want to do is not some kind of new-age novelty, as the research suggests this practice has gone through a long and winding road. As a young ‘un who received unprecedented freedoms, unprecedented among my peers, perhaps I went through the traditional push and pull relationship with authority prematurely, but I don’t understand the unnecessarily complicated, and very public, steps some people include in their decision-making process. I don’t understand the process of inventing an imaginary, controlling authority to adhere to, abide by, and rebel against. Perhaps, it has something to do with filling a void that nature forced me to fill so early on that I don’t understand others struggle with it.

I also don’t understand turning to celebrities to grant us permission to do things, unless it’s an admission on our part that we don’t have the confidence necessary to fill that void, because we fear our rulings, on consequential, pressing matters, are not as objective as we previously thought. To fill that void, we turn to the uncommonly attractive types who attract fame and fortune for some kind of authority on the way to live. Yet, if we were to hold them to the same standard we hold ourselves, we’d find they’re just making it up as they go along too. They do look beautiful doing it though, and we cannot deny that, but does that give us permission to look beautiful while we’re doing it too? If that ever happens to, or for me, I hope someone will come along and explain to me what just happened.

“For the First Time in my Life, I’m Glad I’m Handicapped.”

April 8, 2022November 8, 2023 RilalyLeave a comment

“I never thought I’d say this,” my uncle John whispered to his friend, “but for the first time in my life I’m glad I’m handicapped.” The joke was the conclusion of a “frustrating moment,” John’s experienced on his trip to Florida to see Simon & Garfunkel.

As funny as the conclusion to John’s story was, I had a hard time laughing. I knew too many sad details of his life to just turn it off and laugh at some insensitive joke John made about condition. Even though John was laughing harder than the three of us, and his lifelong friend Jim Rhodus had tears in his eyes from laughter, I couldn’t just turn it all off, because I knew how much he suffered in life.

With his guidance, I learned not to feel sorry for him, because he said that often did him more harm than good, but when he told me that the first signs of his muscular degenerative disease appeared in high school I couldn’t help but feel bad for him.

“It affected you in high school?” I asked.

“Kind of,” he said. “I fell a lot. When I ran, I fell. We thought I was just a big old klutz.”

“That was what we called him, a klutz,” his older brother told me later. “He’d fall for no reason at all. He was the star guard on an undefeated, champion high school football team, and some of the times he’d just fall, in the open field, with no one else was around. It was so embarrassing that we just laughed about it. We developed jokes, like kids do, to avoid wondering if there might be a greater explanation of it. You don’t search for an explanation when you’re a kid. You just laugh and joke about it. We had no idea that his eyes bounced when he ran, and we had no idea that his clumsiness was an early warning sign of a muscular degenerative disease. You have no idea about stuff like that when you’re young. We didn’t even think about greater things. We just thought he was a klutz.”

Over the course of the next forty years, this disease would gradually rob John of his muscular strength. He lost some of the functionality of his legs before he was thirty, and before he was forty, he began losing use of his arms and hands. Doctors guessed that if John hadn’t spent so much time in the gym, in high school and college, the degeneration could’ve been more rapid. The gradual degeneration was such that before he was sixty, he began to lose his throat muscles. It was difficult for him to speak, and even more difficult for us to hear him. When he inhaled and drew the full force of his lungs, he could muster something equivalent to a loud whisper.

One of the most difficult aspects of his handicap, he once told me, was kids. “Kids don’t understand. They’re scared, and when a kid sees me in the mall, or church, or somewhere they turn to their parents for an explanation. ‘What is wrong with him mommy?’ I’ve heard more than one kid whisper that to their mom. The parents don’t answer, not in front of me. They give me an apologetic look, and I want to scream ‘just tell them I’m handicapped’. Most adults don’t know this, or they don’t think about it at the time, but we handicapped people feel like more of a freak when you don’t answer. Refusing to answer in the moment only leads the child to being more confused, and that confusion can lead to greater confusion and fear. Whatever is going on inside the kid’s mind, the parents make it very difficult for me to talk to the child. It can be so frustrating that I some of the times I wonder if it’s all worth it.”

It wasn’t the first time I heard him talk about death in a round about way. He talked about it often enough that by the time he did finally pass on, I considered him a soul at peace, and I never saw it that way before no matter how many times I’ve heard it.

On another occasion, I told him of a family member who wished for death, so he could be with his wife again. “I told him that even if there is a heaven, my bet is we will all look down and think about how much life we wasted on Earth. We do not know if there’s an afterlife, but we know life has a beginning and an end, and that life is short.”

“It’s true,” John said, “It’s all true, but some of the times it seems to take forever.”

“What does?”

“Life.”

He did not say that in a profound manner, as if to wrap up his views on life as a handicapped person. He said it as he might the details of the St. Louis Cardinals game from the night before. He shut the game of solitaire game he was playing on the computer down after he said that, and we spoke of the plans we had for the evening. He didn’t intend that to be a room silencing, thought-provoking line, in other words, it was just something he said before saying something else.

It didn’t strike me how illustrative such a line was to him being a handicapped man, until he relayed the Simon & Garfunkel story to me.

John asked me to accompany him on this trip to see Simon & Garfunkel in concert, but I just couldn’t see traveling halfway across the country to see two men sing. For John, it was a matter of life and death. He spent a lifetime listening to those two old men sing, and he feared he might die before he could ever see them again, or they would, or they would simply stop touring as a duo.

“If you can’t find anyone else to take you, I’ll go, but I want you to drain the swamp of possibilities before asking me again. That’s how badly I don’t want to go.”

Most from John’s generation grew up loving either The Beatles or The Rolling Stones. Some loved Elvis Presley with equal levels of passion, and I’ve met more than a few who pledged allegiance to Johnny Cash, but for my uncle it was all about Simon & Garfunkel. He owned every single album they made together, and he owned most of their solo albums. He also traveled the country to see them sing in concert any time he could. He preferred to stay close to home, of course, but he always had that fatalistic belief that this particular tour might be his last opportunity to see them live, even though he already saw them perform live over a dozen times before. When he sorted through their list of tour dates of that year, he found that the closest they would appear on this particular tour was Florida, an eight-hour flight.

Why anyone would love the quiet, calm stylings of Simon & Garfunkel this much was beyond me. I have nothing against Simon & Garfunkel. They wrote meaningful songs that my high school administrators used to inspire us during high school spirituals, and I’ve also heard them at a number of weddings and funerals. That’s where I heard Simon & Garfunkel most often growing up, so my associations with them probably hindered my ability to appreciate their craftsmanship. I honestly didn’t care about them one way or another, but my uncle adored their music.

As we age, we learn that there’s no use trying to explain why one person loves a certain type of music over another. The one thing I did needed him to explain was why he needed to see these particular men sing calm, contemplative songs live. What’s the point of watching calm and quiet artists take the stage to play quiet, calm music? I’ve never seen them live, but I can’t imagine they put on much of a show. If they do something that is can’t-miss, how does one show differ from another, and what’s the difference between seeing them live and listening to them on the stereo, or watching their live show on TV? They probably walk onto the stage with little fanfare, carrying a guitar and a bottle of water.

My frame of reference for concerts is admittedly tainted. I was a teen in the 80’s when heavy metal acts put on shows that we now call arena acts. I’ve never been to a calm, quiet concert before, but I suspect that someone like Paul Simon doesn’t body surf over the audience while singing Bridge Over Troubled Water, and I suspect that their choreographers don’t employ KISS-style pyrotechnics during Here’s to You Mrs. Robinson. My guess is the two of them walk out from behind a curtain and sit in comfortable chairs to sing and play guitar for an hour or so. If they stand, is it more engaging? If they sit, is it more comforting? Do they engage in colorful banter between songs? They probably do, to give us our money’s worth. Garfunkel probably drops a humorous anecdote about Simon that everyone in the audience knows about, and Simon probably hits back with some comment about Garfunkel’s afro, and everyone laughs as they lead into The Boxer. If my Uncle John successfully convinced me to take him to this show, I’d probably miss that rapport, because I’d be asleep.

My guess is a Simon & Garfunkel tour is as low-cost as it gets. How many employees do they have to pay? Does their show require roadies? If they do, my guess is they could use a Volkswagen to transport their equipment from city to city.

John didn’t care about any of that. In fact, he enjoyed spending hundreds of dollars for the flight, the hotel nights, the ticket price, and everything in between, and traveling for about sixteen hours to and fro to watch a couple of gown men sing calm, quiet songs to him for a couple hours. Even though he said he didn’t consider it a hassle, the idea of what he went through to see that particular Simon & Garfunkel show was at the forefront of his mind when a feller in the audience, near him, began singing along with Simon & Garfunkel.

“That’s kind of the price you pay when you go to a live concert,” I told my uncle.

“This guy was singing every song, word for word, and he was singing them at the top of his lungs,” my uncle replied. “Those of us who were near him could barely hear Simon & Garfunkel over him.”

“It’s true. The guy was all but screaming the lyrics,” Jim Rhodus said. Jim was John’s lifelong friend, and the one who eventually accompanied John to Florida. He was also in the room, enjoying John’s retelling. “We could all understand the guy getting swept up in the excitement of the first few songs, but it started to get a little obnoxious after a while.”

“Yeah, when he continued doing this, what was it, four or five songs in? It was pretty obvious that this guy was going to continue to do it throughout the concert,” my uncle continued. “I just spent eight hours flying, ten total when you account for TSA and other delays, to see these two sing, and this guy was ruining everything for me and everyone around him. So, I finally just had it, and I yelled out, “Would you just shut up!” I was so frustrated that I think I dropped an ill-advised word in there somewhere.”

“And he heard you?” I asked without mentioning how surprising it was that anyone could hear my uncle, due to his condition, and the idea that he was so loud that anyone could hear him over the music was shocking, no matter how quiet and calm the music is.

“Oh, he heard him,” Jim Rhodus said, starting in on his laughter, as John passed the three-quarter mark of the story.

“I guess I was so frustrated that I mustered more strength than I ever have,” John said, “but yeah, everyone between me and him heard me. This guy bolts out of his seat, as if he received an electric jolt, and he begins scanning the crowd in my general direction. As he stood, he just kept going and going. He had to be, at least, six-foot-five, but in my nightmares, he’s a seven-footer, and he was broad too. I couldn’t see much in the limited light in the audience, but his shadow made him appear 250 pounds of lean muscle. It was like the scene from a 1980’s comedy. So, this Ndamukong Suh-looking fella stands up and looks around for who said that, and he’s ticked off.”

“Did he look at you?”

“Not at first,” John said, “but everyone could see his intentions when he stood, and everyone between us gave me up pretty quick. They all turned around and looked at me, and this guy spots me, and the lighting was such that he was mostly in shadow, but I swear I could see flared nostrils. He continues to look at me silently for about five seconds, and then he sits down without saying a word. After I calmed down, which took a little while, I turned to Jim and said, “What did I say exactly?”

“You said,” Jim said. “I never thought I’d say this, but for the first time in my life I’m glad I’m handicapped.”