second round
(11) Timbuk 3, “The Future’s So Bright (I Gotta Wear Shades)”
fought off
(3) Georgia Satellites, “Keep Your Hands to Yourself”
251-232
AND WILL PLAY IN THE SWEET 16
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/14/23.
Situation: Comedy: sebastian stockman on “the future’s so bright (i gotta wear shades”)
“Did you see ‘Wonder Years’ last night?”
Fifth grade. This passed for a pickup line.
“No,” said my crush. “… Why’d they kiss or something?”
“Uhhhhh …. ” I said, voice skipping up several octaves. “No, just wondering!”
I played it cool. But of course Kevin Arnold and Winnie Cooper had kissed. Fortunately, back there in the late 80s, my denial was plausible. There was no easy way to find out for sure; it would be summertime before that one played again.
But Kevin and Winnie had kissed, and it gave me, briefly, bravado enough to broach the subject with the girl who’d kissed me behind the piano in Mrs. Maclean’s class the year before.
It was the afternoon they found out Winnie’s brother died in Vietnam. Kevin (Fred Savage) walks out to “the big climbing tree in Harper’s Woods,” where he somehow knew he’d find Winnie (Danica McKellar). He sits next to her on the tree’s low-slung trunk, and wraps her in his New York Jets letter jacket. They embrace, then kiss chastely.
As the camera pulls back Daniel Stern, in voiceover as grown-up Kevin, tells us he thinks “about the events of that day again and again—and somehow I know Winnie does, too—whenever some blowhard starts talking about the anonymity of the suburbs, the mindlessness of the TV generation, because we know that inside each one of those identical boxes … were families bound together in the pain and struggle of love.”
Unadulterated Baby Boomer Apologetics, and I drank it straight. Growing up in rural Lafayette County, Missouri, on a gravel road about five miles out of Alma, our farming community of 400, I didn’t know from identical boxes or anonymous suburbs. What I did know about the world outside I learned from half-hour comedies, in reruns and primetime.
I learned that a hickey was a scandal and that by looking into someone’s eyes you could discern whether or not they’d gotten lucky the night before. I learned about diet pills and that the worst thing you can say to a significant other is “I told you so.” There was, apparently, a world where people talked about their problems and their feelings instead of simmering with barely-suppressed passive-aggressive rage.
We didn’t have Nick at Nite. We turned on Channel 62 or 41 until it was time for the new network shows at 7. My kids binge, I vegged: “Growing Pains,” “Family Ties,” “Kate and Allie,” “Dear John,” “Andy Griffith,” “Dick Van Dyke,” “The Cosby Show,” “Mary Tyler Moore,” “The Beverly Hillbillies,” “Who’s The Boss,” “Cheers.” Everything ran together into my head where, with my warped critical faculties, I pieced together an idea of how the world worked, inferring social norms via their violation on sitcoms: Plato’s Cave with a laugh track.
Fillmore High
“Head of the Class” was a classroom sitcom in the “Welcome Back, Kotter” mode—a charismatic teacher enters the lives of an at-first unresponsive but quickly loyal group of students. The late-80s twist was that, instead of “Kotter”’s Gabe Kaplan confronting his delinquent Sweathogs, “Head of the Class”’s Howard Hessemann shows up as the substitute history teacher for a bunch of MENSA members in the Individualized Honors Program at Manhattan’s fictional Millard Fillmore High. Could the former Dr. Johnny Fever teach these geeks there was more to life than books? You had to tune in—on, I wanna say, Wednesdays 8:30/7:30 Central—to find out.
The IHP had one of each kind of nerd—the poet, the math geek, the computer guy, the first-generation immigrant, the speech-and-debate specialist, the conservative, the 11-year-old cello-playing super genius, the leather-vested bad boy who didn’t want to be there, and so on.
The gang is alternately coddled and berated by Dr. Samuels, Fillmore High’s principal, who usually wants them left alone to prepare for their next academic bowl against Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science, or—in a very special 1988 two-parter actually filmed in Moscow—a team of Russian high school students (first line of The New York Times review (!) of the episode(!?): “The new Soviet openness creeps into prime-time entertainment… “)
I loved the show for what I took to be its knowing banter (I was eight) and even more for its acceptance and acknowledgment of a world outside the frame. I first encountered the Broadway musical on “Head of the Class” via the school’s productions of “Little Shop of Horrors” and “Hair.” From “Head of the Class” I learned, sorta, about the Cuban Missile Crisis. More on that later.
And “Head of the Class” is how I, outside of town in a farmhouse where cable couldn’t go, encountered Timbuk 3’s “The Future’s So Bright (I Gotta Wear Shades),” for all I knew at first, the IHP gang had written it. Was there anything they couldn’t do?
The Song
Is “The Future’s So Bright (I Gotta Wear Shades)” a wry satire of the late-80s’ rampant greed-is-good attitude, with the song’s clueless speaker in gormless pursuit of that “50 thou a year” which “will buy a lot of beer” regardless of the consequences for the planet or its future?
Or, as presented in the lip-synched music video by this history class at the end of history, is it a full-throated rallying cry for the ascendant technocracy? (Cue Michael Buffer: “Let’s get rrrrrready to do neoliberrrrralism!”)
Depends who you ask.
The band’s members insist it’s the former, and have been doing so since the song came out.
“A lot of people thought it was some kind of real optimistic song about how Reaganomics is going to save us all,” songwriter and lead singer Pat MacDonald told The Orlando Sentinel in 1987, under the headline “TIMBUK 3’S ANTI-NUKE ‘SHADES’ TURNS INTO MISUNDERSTOOD HIT.”
MacDonald met Barbara Kooyman in the late-70s in Madison, Wisconsin, where they played in separate bands. It wasn’t until after they married and moved to Austin that they formed Timbuk 3. “The Future’s So Bright (I Gotta Wear Shades)” was the first single off their debut album “Greetings from Timbuk 3.”
“I was surprised,” MacDonald told the Sentinel. “But then I should’ve known it would happen that way because I know people listen to lyrics real peripherally.”
The reporter, Gary Graff, at first seems to accept MacDonald’s framing. He calls the song’s title chorus line a “deadpanned anti-nuclear witticism.” But “Shades” has no lyric as clear as “born down in a dead-man’s town,” or anything close, really. And Graff admits that “it’s easy for a casual listener to be misled—or at the very least, confused—by MacDonald’s intent. You can only get the satire … if you fixate on his delivery.”
Even then, “satire” seems a stretch. And MacDonald’s best defense is to point to lyrics that aren’t in the song as recorded: “Well I’m well aware/of the world out there/Getting blown to bits/But what do I care?”
MacDonald “thought they were were too heavy-handed. The idea is already expressed in the song without having to spell it out like that.” [Ed. note: False] “So it wouldn’t have been as good a song.” [Ed. note: Probably?] “And it definitely wouldn’t have been played on the radio.” [Ed. Note: True].
Nor would it have made a perfect backdrop to the IHP kids’ video. In it, the author is dead and whatever wisps of ironic distance the singer might be trying to stake out from its career-oriented speaker are obliterated by this network television interpretation.
You can find the video on Youtube. The version I’m watching was posted by an account called “cringevision,” and it is certainly chockablock with a chonky 80s’ corniness.
The class is presenting the video to Dr. Samuels, who seems skeptical—they’ve spent too much time on this contribution to the Fillmore High 80s time capsule—this seems like just another of Mr. Moore’s distractions. (In a joke slipped in by some writer’s-room subversive, just before pushing play Dennis assures Dr. Samuels “You’re going to love it.” Dr. Samuels: “That’s what they said about Pink Flamingoes.” There’s a dissertation to be done on the distance between John Waters and ABC’s 1987 sitcom slate, but … not here.)
The audience watches the enthusiastic class watch the skeptical Samuels watch the video. It begins with Mr. Moore walking into the classroom, opening something that looks like a glowing laptop, then recoiling as a 3D image of Samuels pops up, the top of his head opens and the members of the class fly out.
The harmonica riff kicks into high gear as Mr. Moore mugs a “what the hell?” face for the camera, bites his lip and peers back in. Eric, the bad boy, is dressed in different outfits, performing as all the members of the band—harmonica/lead lip-syncher, drummer, keyboardist, guitar, and bass.
After the 20-second musical intro and establishing shots, we see Dennis Blunden—computer whiz, slob, and target of so dozens of fat jokes—crack his knuckles and taps at the keys on his computer. This generates floating televisions that feature shoulders-up shots of one of the eight other IHP kids, wearing sunglasses and “grooving” to the music against backdrops of static.
There is no real narrative to this thing, and it would be tedious to try to describe all of its scenes (I tried). Jawarhalal and Janice work in a chemistry lab; Alan is sworn in as president by Sarah; Arvid slides down the rings of Saturn. The point of the video is to illustrate the text—not the subtext—of the song.
And, as a statement of what it was like to be in a gifted and talented program in the late 80s, it’s almost perfect—a celebration of pure potential, an assertion of absolute faith in a system that will duly reward its most talented.
“I study nuclear science.”
Almost every day growing up, I rode on a patch of rural-Missouri blacktop called "NN," past a square of chain-link fence in the middle of a cornfield, not three miles from where I watched all that TV. Inside the fence was gravel, a number of poles and antennae-type structures jutted up out of the ground. Hanging from the fence and facing the road was a square blue sign with "A-8" in white lettering. For a long time, I assumed it was some sort of water-pumping station. I was 9 or 10, which means it was 1987 or ’88, by the time it occurred to me to actually ask what "A-8" might be.
“That's a nuclear missile,” Dad said. Specifically, a Minuteman II, one of thousands sprinkled across the rural U.S.
Helpfully, Dad went on to explain that if, “God forbid,” I should ever see it go off, it wouldn't head east over St. Louis —> Indianapolis —> Philadelphia to Russia, but north, over the Pole, to shorten its distance to Moscow. I don't know for sure that this was true, nor do I know why, true or not, he thought this might be a helpful piece of information. Add to this the headquartering of the Stealth Bomber at nearby Whiteman Air Force Base, the Steve Gutenberg/John Lithgow/Jason Robards movie “The Day After" in which a warhead airbursts over Kansas City (a mere 60 miles away), plus the CIA spy Aldrich Ames and you have the receipt for dozens of late-night anxiety attacks in my pre-adolescence.
In a fumbling attempt to comfort me, the old man offered that if there was a nuclear exchange, we'd “never know it,” because so many of our missiles were pointed at their missiles and vice versa.
This didn't help.
Those missiles never did go off—they were decommissioned and hauled away in the early years of this century. But this is all to say that the phrase “nuclear science” hit different in 1987. We weren’t even a decade removed from Three-Mile Island, and it had been less than a year since Chernobyl.
So, score one for MacDonald: that first line is ominous.
But it’s just one phrase and the party starts now.
“I love my classes.”
MacDonald says his school-loving protagonist is a willing future cog in a machine bent on self-devouring itself. But MacDonald relies here on a rock trope that was getting less sturdy by the year: giving the finger to the establishment.
The song’s hero is not smoking in the boys room, nor is he hot for teacher. He loves his classes. He needn’t fight for his right to party, because he’s “got a job waitin’/for my graduation” and “fifty thou a year will buy a lot of beer.” (NB: 50,000 1986 dollars is $136, 482.66 today, so we’re still pretty good on the beer front).
Read in earnest, as they mostly were, these lyrics don’t just give us a celebration of Reaganomics. We also get a fitting soundtrack for Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History?”
In the summer of 1989—before the Berlin Wall fell but after the IHP gang made its trip to Moscow—Fukuyama, then a deputy director at the State Department, achieved the essayist’s dream: he published an argument whose thesis was so bad he would dine out on it for 35 years. Much-cited, much-derided, and incessantly-revisited, “The End of History?” declared “an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism.”
Fukuyama didn’t argue that events would stop happening, but that the Hegelian dialectic had completed its work and brought us to “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”
In other words we (capitalism, the U.S., democracy) had won. The only thing to do now—as individuals in this society of victors—was lean hard into the realm of individual achievement.
“I’ve got a crazy teacher. He wears dark glasses.”
In the first episode, Mr. Moore, an out-of-work actor and long-term substitute encounters this group of sullen smarties uninterested in engaging him. He quizzes them on the Cuban Missile Crisis. They know the signal dates and events (at least from the American perspective). But Mr. Moore says they’ve omitted “the single most important factor … a little item called a baseball.” He tosses it in the air and catches it.
Hessemann/Fever/Moore gives the apocryphal account of Castro’s having tried out for the New York Giants, who decided he was “just not big league material … But if Fidel Castro had had the strength to throw a baseball past Duke Snider or Mickey Mantle there might not have been a missile crisis and today Castro’d be on TV doing beer commercials.”
“That is really dumb,” says Alan, the conservative. “That’s like saying if Ronald Reagan had been a better actor, we’d have a left-wing Supreme Court.”
There’s a beat, a bell, and that’s a sitcom.
The historiography here is … shaky at best. But Moore’s point—which he’ll make roughly once an episode—is that, more than facts and figures, dates and names, history is sliding doors and contingencies. Individual relationships matter (Mr. Moore is a former hippie and current liberal, but he is not a Marxist), and sometimes, nerds, you should get your noses out of your books and into the real world.
“Touch grass,” he might say today.
Dr. Johnny Fever, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
“I’m doing all right, gettin’ good grades.”
When this episode and its video first aired, Mark Zuckerberg was not quite three years old. Bill Gates had appeared on the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans for the first time just a few months before.
In 1987’s burgeoning meritocracy on the cusp of a credentialism explosion, getting good grades is a prerequisite for “doing all right.” The line reads less like irony and—against the backdrop of the video—more like the final full acceptance, and even endorsement, of the only remaining path for upward mobility in this country. By the late 90s, it would be a commonplace that the jocks could have high school; the nerds would make out better in the long run.
The IHP kids are at some sort of midpoint on a smaller-scale Hegelian dialectic of Jocks vs. Nerds. Long having dispensed with the gentleman’s C and the idea of legacy admissions (not the practice, mind you, but the acknowledgment of it), “Head of the Class” has moved us on the continuum from nerds as gross outcasts or grinds—as seen in, say, “Weird Science” or “Revenge of the Nerds”—to this midway point where they’re featured on television and starring in “cool” music videos. In 1987, it’s still a ways off, but we’re on the irrevocable road toward the world-bestriding colossi of Jobs and Bezos and Gates and Zuck.
The nerds could have declared victory over the jocks—declared their own end of history—at pretty much any point over the last 15 or 20 years. But why don’t we go ahead and call it officially. Let’s plant the flag on a fleeting moment during Super Bowl LVII. As the broadcast returns from commercial sometime in the second half, Fox cameras find Rupert Murdoch and Elon Musk sitting next to each other in a box. Needlessly glossing the shot, announcer Kevin Burkhardt observes, “Some brilliant minds in that photo.”
OK, so it wasn’t, strictly speaking, a photograph. But in that offhand and inaccurate aside, Burkhardt—spokesman for the jocks!—neatly synthesizes the culture’s current and long-time attitude toward nerds, wealth, and power. That 90s assumption about nerds making out better in the long run has become nerds=money and, because money=power, power must … equal nerds?
The idea that anyone who has money is smart—they’re doing something right!—is so ingrained that we find it hard to imagine things otherwise.
“I’m heavenly blessed, and worldly-wise. I’m a peeping-tom techie with x-ray eyes.”
Which is our current hellscape.
Zuckerberg, in diapers when this video dropped, got his start with a “hot or not?” website where he invited people to rate their female classmates and has parlayed that into a business whose model is to collect petabytes of data on your online social interactions. Surveillance capitalism: there are many examples, but this one is mine.
And yes, Pat MacDonald, I know: “peeping-tom” signals the speaker’s position as probable creep and the “x-ray eyes” are probably the result of radiation exposure. But it comes too late in the song, and the chorus is too insistent.
To hear “the future’s so bright /(I gotta wear shades)” as either the ironic boast of a speaker who has no clue or as the rueful declaration of a speaker who does have a clue but doesn’t care, you have to read very closely—and it would help to know the songwriter personaly.
Timbuk 3 laughs last
In compromising for radio play, MacDonald removed the explicit condemnation from his lyrics. He expected the culture to share his assumptions, about careerism, about nukes. It did not.
But, more than 35 years on, and seen in the context of its cultural uptake, “The Future’s So Bright (I Gotta Wear Shades)” is a ruined monument to late-80s hubris. Ozymandias in board shorts.
We assumed, like Fukuyama, that things were only looking up from there. And now we have these two trunkless legs of stone—“The End of History” and the “Head of the Class” video—to remind us in retrospect that in addition to that still-unsecured total victory of liberal democracy the bright futures on that night in 1987 included catastrophes on the personal, professional and societal scales: from the violent dissolution of Robin Givens’ marriage to Mike Tyson, to Dan Schneider’s (he was Dennis) downfall as the Harvey Weinstein of Nickelodeon, to the tech world’s remorseless drive for automatization, higher profits and constant growth, exacerbated by a general failure by anyone involved to have taken a single goddamn humanities class.
And the future is still bright for all of us, in just the way MacDonald intended. We all could still use some shades, whether they’re for the mushroom cloud, the glare reflecting off a sun-scorched earth, or the light at the end of the tunnel.
Sebastian Stockman is a Teaching Professor in English at Northeastern University. Among other places, his essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. His work has been noted in Best American Essays and Best American Sportswriting. He lives in Cambridge, Mass., and writes an (occasional, free) newsletter at https://sebastianstockman.substack.com/
SATELLITE: JONATHAN WALSH ON “KEEP YOUR HANDS TO YOURSELF”
Oh baby, hold me close
So I cannot breathe.
Hold me close to this sweet earth
So I cannot leave it.—The Georgia Satellites
Onstage at Hank’s it’s like I never quit. Certainly not like I quit two or three times.
Hank’s is a dive bar. You can tell from the paint job a mile away: hotrod flames on a squat black square down by Atlantic Center in Brooklyn. It has more an alcove than a stage, the PA always feels like it’s threatening to electrocute you, and sometimes does. The regulars look like they’ve been coming there to play pool and drink together since the bar first opened as the Doray Tavern a century ago.
Tonight I’m playing guitar with Night Moves. In a few months, we’ll learn another, younger band has laid claim to the name. We’ll be glad to let them have it, we don’t mind. We’re a cover band. The stakes are usually pretty low.
But this show feels important. It’s an end and a beginning. For now, halfway through the night, it’s more sweet than bitter.
*
When Dan Baird sings the opening lines of “Keep Your Hands to Yourself” by the Georgia Satellites, it’s hard to tell if he is actually drunk or merely trying to sound that way.
Got a little change in my pocket goin' jing-a-ling-a-ling
Wants to call you on the telephone baby, a-give you a ring
The cheapest of pickup lines. The kind that comes lurching at you from across the bar not far from closing time, knocking into people and spilling Miller Lite along the way. The kind of line that seems certain to fail, but doesn’t.
Rather than sending him away, the reply is: “no hug-ee, no kiss-ee until I get a weddin’ ring.” It’s a pretty surprising response—marriage. To the jing-a-ling guy. But till then he’s got to keep his hands off her body, put up with the rest of her.
You get the sense they’ve gone through this before, that this is an old dynamic. This pickup line is a tired trick, maybe a joke between them by now, our narrator and his target. There’s affection there, and they play this out two more times before the song is done. You imagine it gets played out like this every weekend at their local spot, that maybe this has been going on since high school. He, content to chase someone he doesn’t really want; she, content to chase someone who doesn’t really want her.
*
I wanted to be in a band for as long as I can remember. My first guitar lessons were in grade school. I recollect being in a small back room of the local music shop in LaGrange, Georgia, learning chords from the long-haired guy who taught guitar on the side.
I quit after only a few lessons. The strings on my mom’s old classical dug into my tiny fingers, despite being made of nylon. It was at those lessons I saw the first guitar I’d ever covet: an electric, hanging there in the shop. I don’t remember the brand, but if I had to guess it was an old Dean ML, the kind Dimebag Darrell of Pantera used to play before switching to another brand, years before he’d be shot to death onstage at the Alrosa Villa nightclub in Columbus, Ohio, the city where I live with some reluctance today.
That guitar, in my recollection, was black and angular, set off by lightning bolts airbrushed across its shiny body.
Yes, lightning bolts. Airbrushed ones.
My tastes are more sophisticated now, but only just.
For years after I’d given up lessons, I’d fantasize about ripping some incredible guitar solo before my entire middle school, all gathered together in the auditorium. In some of the fantasies I’m pretty sure I actually descend from the ceiling while shredding on that guitar. The crowd, in my imaginings, went wild.
In terms of my own musical cultivation, around the age I was picturing myself sliding on my knees in front of my classmates a la Marty McFly (in the moments before, in the film, it’s intimated a white suburbanite invented rock and roll), my entire music collection consisted of one of my dad’s Blondie tapes and a cassette of spooky haunted house sounds that I kept in my Walkman, ostensibly for the versions of Monster Mash and the Munsters theme on the B-side. This was eventually discovered by an enterprising classmate and I was mocked mercilessly for it.
Despite that, music, and the idea of performing it in a band, held me from then on.
*
The narrator in “Keep Your Hands to Yourself” is not monastic in his devotion to bachelordom. At one point he considers paying in love the price of his lust: “see I wanted her real bad,” he says, “and I was about to give in.” Later he admits, “honey, I'll live with you for the rest of my life”—no small offer. It’s not clear to me if this is another cheap line or if maybe he’s not as averse to commitment as he seems. Like most guys in bars, like most people in general, he doesn’t seem to know what it is he really wants.
He’s not unlike the object of his affections in that way. She seems deadset on matrimony, but we glimpse that maybe it’s more than just the tokens of commitment that matter to her. She starts “talking about true love” and “talking about sin,” and I wonder if she’s tired of sex, tired of waiting for a love that will never come, or simply tired of being alone. Maybe she doesn’t know, either.
It’s a familiar kind of ambivalence to anyone imbued with a soul. The human heart is more like a blindfolded kid playing Marco Polo, adrift in the water, than a bloodhound. It’s not always clear what it’s chasing after.
*
Dan Baird has a gap in his teeth. It is either because of this or in spite of it his smile is so rakish you feel he could sell your own car back to you and you’d thank him for it. You can hear that smile when he sings; it’s part of the reason “Keep Your Hands to Yourself” is such a good song. You’re not grossed out by the jing-a-ling guy, you’re rooting for him.
The Georgia Satellites’ sound was, as Baird once put it to Rolling Stone, “Carl Perkins, with Joe Perry on guitar … and AC/DC on drums.” It’s a good description of the Satellites’ rock and roll heart with a hillbilly soul: Baird’s no hug-ee, no kiss-ee yodel is echoed later on in songs by Garth Brooks and Brooks & Dunn, the guitar lick is pure Chuck Berry, and the rhythm section would be at home on a track by, well, AC/DC.
In old photographs, the Georgia Satellites seem like a group of guys who’d be fun to hang out with but maybe you wouldn’t let housesit for you. You imagine they might smell a little bit. Body odor, probably; cigarettes and stale beer, definitely. In those photos they wear tight jeans and leather jackets, beat-up Converse and torn t-shirts, chains, aviators, a punk-rock officer’s cap. They look more Guns N’ Roses than Waylon & Willie.
Complicating that barroom image is that Baird is smarter than most folks, and funnier too. The simplicity of songs like “Keep Your Hands to Yourself” is by design, and like most good art it looks easier to make than it actually is. “Simplicity is something I still chase down over and over,” Baird said to Rolling Stone. “It is the hardest thing to do. Elegant simplicity is just so rare and you know it when you hear it, when you read it, when you see it in a movie.”
The unofficial motto at the foot of Baird’s website is “Rock and Roll doesn't have to be dumb to be good, but it definitely helps!” It captures his sense of humor nicely: self-deprecating and a little raunchy, but not so blue you’d blush. “Teenage pregnancy and teenage runaways are hysterical,” Baird once said. “It’s so funny.”
That combination of wit, wisdom, and humor brings to mind another group of eighties misfits: indie-rock legends the Replacements. Just as they could put a track like “Gary’s Got a Boner” alongside transcendent numbers like “Androgynous” and “Unsatisfied,” the Georgia Satellites had “Keep Your Hands to Yourself” on the same record as songs like “Nights of Mystery” and “Golden Light,” where Baird sings:
Let go, this ribbon of darkness, now,
And like a drunk I'll go, fall, laughing down …
They tell you truth is a moment, it shines…
Like a bit of whisky in your coffee, a little salt in your sweet, Baird’s intelligence and empathy take the universal appeal of the Georgia Satellites’ barn-burning mission and tilts it. Suddenly the jing-a-ling guy gets a bit more depth. Maybe he’s a catch after all.
*
I don’t know if David hated me at the end of 2005, but I suspect he did.
I’d met him in Boston. He had played drums in the band I’d helped start for a hot second in our last year of college, which we’d eventually name the Nightlights. Our best gig, in my recollection, was a basement show David nearly had to miss due to some nasty tubercular flu. He allowed us to ferry him over in a taxi, heroically, just long enough to run the set. In my memory he collapses, final chord still ringing, and we throw a blanket over him, James-Brown-style. By then I’d moved over to bass, the instrument that would remain closest to my heart thereafter. I can remember the instrument I played that night: a 1973 Fender Precision bass I’d gotten for a song, one I’d trade looking for something else a few weeks later.
A year after we’d graduated, David invited me to join him in Atlanta for a project he he’d started with another musician from Boston named Mike. I was feeling stagnant in the Nightlights and was ready to seek out something a little more serious and so, without too much thought, I quit my band and headed south.
My summer back in Georgia was a fever dream. David, Mike, and I formed a mercurial kind of power trio: David and Mike would switch off on drums and guitar while I played bass as loudly as my amp would allow. We practiced every night we weren’t performing at shows David or Mike had booked for us at the EARL, the Drunken Unicorn, 10 High.
The days had a different rhythm. David hooked me up with an hourly gig at a law firm where it was my job to help process foreclosures. I’d punch property coordinates into a database, a bright yellow Discman Sport feeding my ears constantly in those days, then spend hours checking that the listings were posted correctly in the newspaper. This would be punctuated by the occasional desperate phone call from people trying to keep their homes. Sometimes they’d be crying, sometimes they wouldn’t. I got to know the paralegals there a little bit, older women, mostly, who were smarter, nicer, and had their shit together far better than I did. One of them insisted that the best cure for a migraine was a Snickers bar until, one day, she went into a diabetic coma right there at her desk.
Thanks to some light postal malfeasance, my total lack of initiative, or some combination of the two, I wasn’t able to access the bank account in Atlanta where my checks were being deposited. As a result I was constantly broke, borrowing money and living off the kindness of my bandmates. I ate a lot of sandwich crackers from the office vending machine that summer, filled my coffee with powdered creamer for the sweet, tangy calories. By the time I left, I’d lost fifteen pounds and saved a couple thousand dollars.
Money was a specter in my mind back then. I had over $40,000 in student loans that had come due to the tune of $500 a month. Before my law office job, I had managed to turn my expensive college degree into various unskilled hourly gigs at some disappointment to myself and my family. I began to wonder if indie music might not be an entirely surefire pathway to financial security. In the meantime I checked and rechecked lot coordinates on foreclosed homes, wondering when eviction notices would post.
My imagination ran small in those days. Where David and Mike saw a future packed with tours and albums and memories, I began to trace the myriad pathways to failure. Back in Boston, I’d worked the box office at the legendary Middle East Club in Central Square. It was a part-time job, weekends and some evenings, hooked up by my friend Kieran from the Nightlights. I would sit behind the box office desk eating my complimentary plate of mujadara with spicy harissa, my nose buried in a Stephen King novel as some of the most gifted musicians alive came through to talk with the talented crew that worked up there.
More than those that made it, what stuck with me were the countless bands that didn’t. Groups of guys in their late thirties, forties—basically dead, to my eyes back then—coming in for their weekly or monthly gigs in the upstairs room. Guys—for they were mostly men—with soft beer bellies stuffed into blue jeans that had once looked tight and sexy, long hair thinning at the top, teeth going bad, drinking starting to catch up, playing music that had gone out of style a decade before and all chasing a ship that had long since sailed. Seeing them, I recalled something I’d read in Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life. “Rock music,” David Thomas of art-punk gods Pere Ubu says, “is about moving big black boxes from one side of town to the other in the back of your car.”
During those humid summer nights in Atlanta, after a show or wrapping up rehearsal, that image would come back to me. As we hoisted amps and drums into the back of David’s Honda Element [1], alone in empty, rain-drenched parking lots, ears ringing, half-awake, I saw in us the also-rans I’d seen at the Middle East. It never occurred to me that maybe those guys were having fun, that they were happy.
A few months after I’d arrived, I told Mike and David that I was moving back to Boston. They were gutted, confused; only later, I think, would they become angry. Mike almost borrowed money to pay off my student loans for me.
The three of us had clicked in a way that I realize now was exceedingly rare. We were writing music that excited us, even developing a little following down there. And we had formed a friendship that only working tirelessly toward some common end can forge. Just a month before I left we’d literally been in Shangri-la: a delightful analog studio across from a federal penitentiary where we cut an EP, the lone document of my time back home in Georgia. I’d believed in the dream of the band, if only for a minute, then left in search of another.
*
The lights are always dim at Hank’s Saloon, thanks to neon PBR and Budweiser signs and a few Christmas lights strung across any inch of space not already occupied by stickers and photos that are by turns ironic and earnest. In chalk, above the tap list, it always says “HANK’S FOR COMING!” Sometimes the regulars are into the band playing just a few feet away from the bar, other times they try to tune them out.
Onstage, David is gyrating his hips and nailing guitar licks with the deft hand of someone who practices nightly. To his left, Alex is laying down chunky rhythm on a bass he built himself during his time at a boutique guitar maker years before. Behind them, Charlie, our leader, is defending his title as the hardest-hitting drummer in Brooklyn, hammering fills note-for-note on songs he learned in a heartbeat.
I am also there.
It’s not my playing that has me feeling out of place. I know my way around a guitar well enough that you have to watch pretty close before you realize I’m so-so at best. Anyway, Night Moves is a labor of love; none of us is setting out to impress anyone. It’s an excuse to hang out as much as anything else, and at least sixty percent of our practices have historically consisted of talking about, acquiring, or eating food.
Our covers—songs by ZZ Top and Rod Stewart, Thin Lizzy and Dire Straits, BTO, Heart, Blondie, Procol Harem, Queen, Madonna, Foreigner, Wilson Phillips, Seals & Crofts, Fogerty, Petty, Bowie, Mellencamp, Springsteen, and Elton John—all are pretty rough around the edges. Some are a lot rough. We play them a little too fast, drive the guitars a little too much. But we have fun.
If endless rounds of Among Us taught us anything during the pandemic, though, it’s that the thing about imposter syndrome is that sometimes you’re not the imposter. But sometimes you are.
*
Only a couple of years after I’d left the band, I was back in it.
The plans for our reunion were hatched at a festival in Toronto modeled on South by Southwest, predictably named North by Northeast. Along with a talented and supernaturally muscular drummer named Greg, Mike and David traveled from Georgia in a brick-red church van they’d bought while I boarded a nine-hour Greyhound from Boston. We rented a rehearsal space in Toronto to run through the set and performed it that night. I remember it being one of the best shows of my life.
Shortly thereafter, David and Mike found a permanent drummer, Alex—a musical prodigy who’d already found some success as a guitarist touring around the southeast—and needed a bass player to complete the picture. By then we’d gotten back in touch, emailing demos, album recommendations, and a slew of op-eds and hot takes on the Bush administration. The anger, by then, had faded.
The plan was for everyone to spin down their lives in Georgia and Massachusetts and reconvene in Brooklyn. From there, we’d take over New York, then the rest of the country. Mike and David were understandably nervous about having me back. I promised that there’d be no repeat of Atlanta, and they believed me.
With four songwriters, a dedicated rhythm section, two guitars, and songs slathered in harmonies—a style Alex would dub “team-o”—the band was transformed. We all started to get the feeling that something good could happen. In New York we found a practice space the size and shape of a doorstop across from the Acme Smoked Fish factory and began rehearsing nightly. After just a few months, we were tighter than we had ever been, writing songs and booking gigs around Brooklyn, New England, even a tour out west. We cut an EP, then recorded an album with plans to shop it around to labels. Designs for a second, larger tour were in the works.
Then, for the second time in the span of just a few years, I quit.
The reasons this time were the same, if fuzzier: I wanted to find stability, I was worried about money. Plans for my upcoming marriage added a new wrinkle, a fresh reason to pull away. The split opened up more gradually this time, a slow yawn as I backed further and further away from my friends. The anger, this time, was immediate.
After I quit, the band pressed on. Alex switched to bass and Charlie, a friend of David’s, joined on drums. The four of them became, to my ears, the best band in Brooklyn, for a time at least. Eventually they, too, stopped playing out and I’ve always felt, vainly, that the seeds to their demise were cast by my acts of sabotage over the years. That being abandoned at key moments cost them crucial momentum. But that would be to put myself at the center of something that reached its apotheosis without me.
I caught just one live show of theirs after I left. It was in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and they had become a pumping, vibrant noise machine. The songs were better than anything I’d helped to write. I remember the room being packed in a way it had never been when I was in the band, and in the front row people were singing along in a way I’d never experienced. I stood at the back, a stranger to the sound.
*
My friend Omer [2] calls it a tone quest: the hunt for some perfect noise and the instrument that holds it. You buy and sell, trade and barter, endlessly searching for that one magical guitar, or bass, or pedal. It is a chimera, of course: tone, as they say, is in the hands. It’s a uniquely capitalist form of displacement, pure and simple: the drive to buy what you cannot create. What follows is the meandering route of my tone quest, a path of pathological bass-trading you can trace rough-shod across a decade of my life like a drunk driver crossing the center line:
Squier Precision Bass Special, black
Fender Hot-Rodded Precision Bass, “Sunset Orange Transparent”
Ernie Ball Stingray, sunburst
Fender Precision Bass, sunburst
Fender Jazz Bass, black
Fender Precision Bass, sunburst
Ernie Ball Stingray, black
1973 Fender Precision Bass, natural
Fender ‘62 Reissue Jazz Bass, sunburst
Fender Precision bass, transparent white
Fender Jazz Bass, black
Ernie Ball Stingray, black
Fender Jazz Bass, “Charcoal Frost Metallic”
They were all great instruments, some a bit more special than others, maybe, yet none of them ever sounded like anything other than myself.
*
It started with a message from David, a year or so after my marriage detonated messily in my face. He had a side project and needed a new bass player, so I joined him for a few shows.
Then Alex reached out: another side project—a country band, this time—in need of a bass player. That lasted a little longer, and we played together more often.
Eventually I started my own band, Self Help, with a drummer I’d met in Alex’s project (also named Mike, also one of the most gifted and sweetest people I have met) and my partner, writer and rocker Melissa Faliveno. Because I lack the mental fortitude to sing and play bass at the same time, I played guitar. Then, in a bold reversal, I reached out to David to play bass. Much to my good fortune, he agreed.
That was a decade ago and, after more than five years spent performing around Brooklyn, we still play together today, despite the fact that we live in different states and that there are now about a dozen other bands named Self Help (though I can almost guarantee ours is the only one named after the Lorrie Moore book). As I write this, we’re putting a song together through the magic of email [3].
It turns out I never wanted to be a musician. At least not in the sense I once understood it. I couldn’t make those sacrifices, didn’t enjoy the rewards. In Self Help, making it big has never been the plan; hauling black boxes across town is the point. Not long after starting Self Help, Melissa and I joined a soul music project led by David’s partner, Angela. Over the years, our musical and personal lives became more and more incestuously intertwined, the sticky strands of friendship weaving us together tighter than we had been before. I started a monthly acoustic series at Pete’s Candy Store in Brooklyn; someone would always bring donuts. It felt like Sunday dinner with a big, talented family.
David, Alex, and Charlie kicked off Night Moves with a gig in Times Square. I joined later, on rhythm guitar. By then David, Alex, and Charlie were all married, each of us with careers and relationships that took up more time than music. We played together only a few times after I joined, but by then we were seeing a lot of each other in our various side projects, making plans for more. It is much to my own chagrin I admit that playing cover songs is about the happiest I’ve ever been as a musician.
Then life began to pull at the threads of our friendship. Charlie became a father, then David, then Alex. David and Angela moved to Nashville; not long after, Alex moved to Philadelphia. Along with Charlie, I stuck it out in Brooklyn a while longer before packing up and moving to Ohio, that great, flattened heart of the Rust Belt. After a brief stint in a new location, Hank’s Saloon closed in 2019.
As soon as I’d found these people again, it seemed, we were moving on.
Before that, though, we played one final show. David had just announced he was moving to Tennessee, which meant the end of Night Moves, the end of Self Help, the end of the soul band with Angela. The gig at Hank’s Saloon was Alex’s idea—our last hurrah. We’d pull out all the stops, play two sets. For some reason Alex thought it important we order a tremendous number of pizzas and have them all delivered to the bar. We’d do a song with Angela, Melissa, and Alex’s wife, also named Alex; old friends and former bandmates would open up the show. The strands of our incestuous little music scene would be all over the stage, holding us together for just a few more hours.
*
In “The Myth of Love,” Dan Baird shows us the notched underside of the shiny nickel that is “Keep Your Hands to Yourself.” If the narrator and his quarry in “Keep Your Hands” are engaged in an endless game of cat and mouse, in “The Myth of Love,” Baird reveals that game to be unwinnable:
Oh, the myth of love,
Like some new best friend;
The bright promise of tomorrow
And tomorrow without end.
Oh but I should know better,
Life is no wishing well …
It’s a hard truth to hear, even through Baird’s winking, charismatic drawl. True love, he tells us, is a sham. Trying to find it, the original tone quest.
There is no one person, no one thing that will shine a light on life’s filthy parking lot and turn it into a rolling prairie. There is no safe, warm place. Just those few people willing to stand in the rain, loading big black boxes out in the darkness with you, if you can find the wisdom to hang on to them.
*
One of the most useful lessons I learned from David was about gear. It was one he learned in a moment of shifting priorities when he’d somewhat hilariously traded a valuable Gibson Les Paul for a banjo and a djembe, both of which would go on to collect a fair amount of dust. “Never trade anything,” he said, commiserating over the wonderful instruments we’d both let go of over the years. “Just add to the collection.”
It’s old wisdom: what makes an instrument sound good is playing it as often as you possibly can.
*
The pizza arrives between sets, right on time. Glorious towers of steaming pies are stacked along pool tables; outside, smokers stub out their cigarettes to come in and eat, crisp December air rushing in. The jukebox cuts back on and some of the crowd starts to shift from loose to just slightly sloppy.
We grab a slice or two and get ready for the second set. Alex and David handle most of the vocal duties in Night Moves, but I sing lead on a couple of tunes and I’m nervous about this next one. “Keep Your Hands to Yourself” is not a hard song to play, but it’s a tough song to sell. It takes confidence. Somewhere beneath the heat, the noise, and the booze, I wonder if I’m still the weak link. I wonder if I’m going to be the one to bring this whole magical moment crashing back down to Earth. If, when I step up to the mic to sing, people will see that what I really am, deep down, is a quitter.
The sun drops low in the early evening and the jukebox is switched off as we make our way back onto the stage. Behind us, old amps lean on one another in great piles of speakers; the floor underneath is snaked with cables, littered with pedals. We launch into the set and it’s a hell of a ride. The crowd, fueled by pepperoni and pools of grease, is louder and more energetic than before. Even some of the regulars up at the bar seem to be bobbing their heads along. Alex sounds like Springsteen at his best as we pound through “Dancing in the Dark;” David tears through our rendition of Rod Stewart’s “Young Turks” like it’s a punk-rock psalm.
By the time we come to “Keep Your Hands to Yourself,” the crowd is warm and we are dripping with sweat under the twinkling fairy lights above the stage. David steps back to make room for me up front, and it no longer matters whether I can channel Dan Baird or not, whether I can sell this fantastic, timeless song about chasing. What matters is this room, this stage, these people all gathered together as snow starts to fall outside. What matters is the hours, the years it took to get here, the text chains and emails, the departures and returns, the threads of this friendship we’ll cast ahead across the years, across state lines. What matters is holding onto each of these people as tightly as I can. I want them to know that, how much they mean to me. I want them to know how much they’ve always meant. I step up to the mic and try to show them.
[1] PSA: the Honda Element is a terrible vehicle for a band. “But surely it’s the perfect cross between an SUV and a van,” you might say. Once I shared your folly. Its size is deceptive: through some warping of Newtonian physics it is significantly smaller on the inside than it is on the outside. It can barely fit a drum kit, let alone all the associated amps and guitars, and its peripheral visibility is somehow less than zero. Riding in a Honda Element is like riding in a discarded refrigerator but without the sex appeal.
[2] Omer Leibovitz, one of the finest musicians and producers I know. You can check out his music at www.omerleibovitz.com.
[3] As part of the SongWriter podcast: www.songwriterpodcast.com.
Jonathan Walsh is a writer, musician, and history teacher. He sings, plays guitar, and writes for his band, Self Help, and is currently at work on a novel about the absurdity of teaching high school.