round 1
(1) alice in chains, “would?”
muzzled
(16) paw, “jessie”
401-93
and will play on in the second round
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on March 4.
The Invisible Yoke: Lucinda Bliss on “would?”
There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. —Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror
Alice in Chains came into my world through my friend Phil, as did the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Mudhoney, Faith No More, and many other bands in the 1980s. When I met Phil, I was settling back into college, having returned after a year of playing music with the Brood and the Gorehounds in Portland, Maine. I was waitressing to pay the bills, and Phil and I overlapped through the restaurant and as DJs for WSPN. We shared a passion for garage rock and punk, and since he was a more disciplined audiophile, Phil was constantly turning me on to new music. We saw some incredible live shows in those days, including catching the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ 1987 gig at QE2 in Albany. Hillel Slovak was still playing guitar, and they came out with the notorious socks-on-cocks for the encore. There was hardly anyone in the club that night, but the Peppers played hard, and we were glued to the stage. A year later, they returned to a jam-packed club. By then Slovak had died of a heroin overdose, and John Frusciante had stepped in for the band’s steep ascent to fame, before retreating into his own battle with heroin. The band has since gotten clean, but not before addiction took its heavy toll. The tragic impact of drug dependence is part of music history, and for grunge, it’s part of the musical DNA.
When Phil turned me on to Alice in Chains he said, “It’s dark stuff, but I think you’ll dig it.” I remember popping the cassette into the car radio with trepidation. Some musical discoveries require contortions of the inner critic. The sexualization of women and girls was a pretty blunt exercise in the 70s and 80s, and though the fashion and attitudes of punk (Siouxsie Sioux, Exene, Nina Hagen, the Slits…), then grunge (Courtney Love, Kim Gordon, Donita Sparks…) gave women a chance to own their sexuality and their own pleasure, there were plenty of bands that continued to press play on the old stereotypes. I love the Stranglers, for example, but I remember listening to Sometimes, thinking: Damn, that’s not really open to interpretation. I mean it’s a cheating revenge song, but still, he really does want to beat the crap out of her. Not that this lyrical approach was new; the early Beatles tune Run for Your Life follows the same plot line; news flash, misogyny is a thing. Does Five Minutes, the Stranglers song about wanting to seek revenge on a rapist by beating the crap out of him balance the scale? The point is that you can’t tie it up in a neat bundle.
Back in my car, popping in the cassette, I braced my inner critic, but Alice in Chains, in spite of their name, wasn’t challenging in that way; their rage was interior and self-flagellating.
The sweaty pus orange that permeates their visual world (Dirt, Jar of Flies) evokes the lust for needles, the ooze and goo of bodies, the hazy desire to be lost, and the fury ignited by that predicament. No small part of the band’s catalogue is given to regret, loss, and to honoring the dead. Jerry Cantrell, Alice in Chains’ founder and lead guitarist, wrote songs about the loss of his tribe to addiction and overdose, along with songs about religion, war, and politics. Would was the former--a song about his friend Andy Wood, the singer from Mother Love Bone who overdosed from heroin in 1990, twelve years before Alice in Chains’ lead singer, Layne Staley, would die from a speedball overdose. Cantrell got sober a year after Staley died and in the years since has worked to support other musicians in recovery. Would might have been inspired by a specific event, but to listen to Staley and Cantrell’s gut-twisting harmonies is to feel the unique ways each of us feels trapped by the trench we’ve uniquely built for ourselves.
Across her body of writing, the philosopher-critic Julia Kristeva offers a reading of literature that’s filtered through the deep, complicated core of human experience. She peers through an analytical lens, interpreting author and reader with equal intensity. In Powers of Horror, her essay on abjection, the author links the nature of being (who am I?) with the horrors that lingers in us—the fears (and oppressions) that prevent us from becoming. Theoretical writing can illuminate our darker, more contradictory selves. It can make us feel known and seen, to be understood underneath persona. Kristeva describes how shedding light on the darker passages of literature, and of ourselves, can result in these oppressive bits being cast off, and this casting off creating a profound freedom. This notion of personal freedom located in uncensored creative expression leads right back to Alice in Chains. In “Obscene, Abject, Traumatic,” Hal Foster uses Kristeva’s abject to categorize a group of 20th century visual artists who use grotesque imagery in an attempt to get at something real. Foster uses the progression of Cindy Sherman’s work, from the film stills to her later photographs, as an example. In the late work, Sherman uses the vocabulary of horror: images of rot and decay, demented clowns, and highly dramatized, mannequin-like figures reduced to pimpled butts. The work is disgusting and repellent, and in fueling our revulsion, Foster makes the case that it does its work. Though more stylized, the experience of listening to Alice in Chains (and punk and grunge in general) plays in this same field. Death and isolation lurk in the subconscious with all the piss, shit, cum, blood, mucus, and bacteria that we are host to, no matter how much we try to sanitize. Giving voice to transgressions of propriety, taste, and of our actual physical bodies is mesmerizing, and it has the potential to crack the shell of our fictions.
I remember sitting on a porch swing with my mother—I must have been in second grade. I was sobbing because I had just gotten death. My mother had acknowledged that I too would someday die, and I felt emptied out by the tragedy and expanse of it. I can still feel that realization in my heart--that there are things we can’t know. We carry death--the fact that our time is limited--like an invisible yoke. Sometimes we pretend it’s not there, sometimes it drives us to create, and sometimes the weight is more than we can handle. Music (creative work) can inspire us to feel what we can’t or won’t acknowledge in our conscious minds, and the result is catharsis. I am at risk of tying things up too neatly, and there is nothing neat and tidy about it. Perhaps it’s enough to express gratitude to Alice in Chains and all the complicated rockers and artists who make us feel beyond our (and their) knowing.
Lucinda Bliss is an artist and writer from New England. She is currently engaged in a project exploring history, genealogy, and narratives of privilege and oppression with the Stanley Whitman House in Farmington, CT. Bliss’s drawings, installations, and mixed media works have been exhibited at venues including the Boston Center for the Arts, Lamont Gallery at Phillips Exeter Academy, the Ogunquit Museum of Art, Whitney Art Works, Aucocisco, Bates College Museum of Art, and the Tucson Museum of Art, among others. Documentation of selected projects, along with her blog on art and running, can be found on her website. Bliss currently serves as Dean of Graduate Studies at MassArt. Instagram connect @blisspix.
Paw. Dog. Song.: Steven Church on “jessie”
The 1993 one-hit grunge wonder, “Jessie” by the Lawrence, Kansas band, Paw, drops us into a moment. Picture it like a poem asks of its reader. Here you are. The winter sky cold and dull-grey, the sun muffled beneath a thick-and-stinky wool blanket. Leafless trees scratch at the low ceiling of clouds as we eavesdrop on a heated conversation between a talking dog named Jessie and his gravel-voiced owner. The young man, as it will soon become clear, is something of a disappointment.
Jessie opens with some firm (but largely reasonable) expectations for their relationship.
PET THE DOG!
PET THE DOG!
PET THE DOG!YEAH SCRATCH MY EAR!
SCRATCH MY EAR!
SCRATCH MY EAR!PLEASE PLAY WITH ME!
PLAY WITH ME!
PLAY WITH ME!
Granted, Jessie is kind of intense, even for someone who considers himself a dog person.
He’s straight-up screaming and the drums are still pounding in your temples and Jessie is asking a lot from someone who spent the last few hours slamming his body into others at The Outhouse for the Sin City Disciples show, someone who now firmly believes you’re having an extended conversation with a dog as you contemplate your inevitable yet angst-ridden escape from a house that hasn’t felt like home for a long time.
You’re dragging your flannel shirt and a dirty backpack out the back door while the beloved family dog gives you that big, buck-eyed stare that cuts you to the bone. And then he starts talking to you out of the blue.
Now? you think. Of all days.
Now is when you decide to speak?
And it seems, at first, like it might be really cool to talk to your dog. I mean, think about it. It would have to feel kind of special. Except that Jessie is really demanding and kind of rude for a dog and he keeps referring to himself as “the dog,” which is just kind of creepy.
“Jessie, shut up! Just give me a break,” you say, but that’s not what you mean, not what you want to spill from your wounded heart. You wish you could sing him a song.
Ah but Jessie
It's cold outside, and I'm not coming home
I don't know where I'll be, oh when the morning comes
And Jessie you're a good dog, please don't follow me
Just go on home
*
The Outhouse was a windowless concrete bunker with no public bathrooms, located east of Lawrence, Kansas, just off a two-lane road, literally surrounded by a cornfield—as if it cut and pasted into a guidebook of Midwestern cliches. For a time in the late 80’s and early 90’s The Outhouse ascended to the status of “legendary” due to the astonishing number of big-time punk, metal, and hard-core bands who came through Lawrence and played there—bands like Fugazi, the Melvins, Rollins Band, Gwar, the Circle Jerks, Body Count, Social Distortion, Bad Brains, White Zombie, Descendents, Sonic Youth, Green Day, Fishbone, the Meat Puppets, Helmet, Nirvana, and Tool.
Bands on tour would stop in Kansas City, then at the Outhouse outside Lawrence, before heading on to Omaha, Austin, Denver, Boulder and beyond. The Outhouse was featured recently in a documentary that included interviews with people like Ian Mackaye from Fugazi, Ice T, and the guys from Fishbone, who admitted in a recent interview to “being afraid of the white people.”
Ice T said the only real downside to playing The Outhouse was that “you could possibly die.” Other than that, it was great. This place is, without a doubt, part of what gave Lawrence some of its hardcore credibility—that and other things like the fact that William S. Burroughs made his home there and Tool’s drummer, Danny Carey was born in Lawrence and grew up in nearby Paola. His band played The Outhouse in ’91, before their stadium-show days, to a sparse and predictably unruly audience. Carey recalled years later for an interview with a local news site, “We had a bunch of guns with us. Once we got done playing, we went out in the cornfield and started blowing the hell out of stuff with shotguns and pistols.”
*
I adopted my first dog during my first marriage. This was before we had our son and, five years later, a daughter. Practice baby, they say about a dog for a young couple. Which is stupid. You can’t put a baby in a crate or feed it from a bowl on the floor or leave it alone while you go to the bar, or take it with you to the bar—unless you’re just a terrible person. But it’s true that the dog came before the two children and we had to figure out how to care for her and feed her and clean up after her.
Most of the dogs at the shelter that day weren’t even a consideration—all loud and angry and aggressive. Until the end of the line. Until we reached the last cage in a row of bad barking dogs. And there, laying down with one paw extended, ears pulled back and those big doe eyes was our dog, Kate. The tag said she was a year-and-half old “Shepherd mix.”
We brought her outside into the yard and I sat down on a bench. She walked up and leaned against my leg, pressing all of her weight against me. That’s what did it. That small gesture, as if she was saying, “Please get me out of here.” It turned out that she’d been given up by her owners because she’d chewed through her lead and escaped to the neighbor’s yard where she’d killed and eaten a couple of their pet ducks. But we knew immediately that she was the dog for us. I remember still the piles of papers the previous owners had left attesting to Kate’s overall health, one of which was an electrocardiogram revealing a strong and vibrant heart. And her heart was huge and patient. Big enough to embrace the two real babies when they did eventually arrive, big enough to adapt and love, big enough to carry more weight than most dogs can bear.
*
“Jessie” begins with the hammering staccato drums of Peter Fitch before his brother, Grant, drops in low on guitar, all crunchy and grungy, as if he’s been cloned from the discarded DNA of Kim Thayhill and Jerry Cantrell; Charles “Chuck the Truck” Bryan (he left the band in 1994 to become a professional skydiver. At one point, held the skydiving speed record at 327 miles per hour) hammers on the bass guitar and Mark Hennessy rolls in like a Kansas thunderstorm, PET THE DOG, PET THE DOG and so forth. His voice, even at this young age, is HUGE and so prototypically grunge, so on brand, so Vedder-esque, so Staley-styled, that it’s as if his voice was created in a top-secret lab, engineered precisely for one job—fronting a grunge band.
When I asked Hennessy about “Jessie” recently, he admitted, “Was I imitating some of the bands we loved at the time? Sure. Of course,” and he paused for a bit. “And it seemed like there was a lot of screaming. I wanted to sound like Chris Cornell and Cobain and those other guys.”
Hennessy’s voice was described in one review I read as sounding like he “gargled with glass,” but this isn’t quite right. His voice is not ragged and torn. It is, however, throaty and big like those oversized tail-pipes on a muscle car. It roars and thunders, nitro-powered with 90’s angst. He’s capable of those head-voice screams that made Cobain famous as well as the low, rumbling mumble-core Vedder stuff. Hennessy never quite reaches the operatic heights of Chris Cornell, but he doesn’t have to. He’s a small man with a huge raspy baritone that makes your guts tingle. And it’s possible that his voice has only gotten better with age. Hennessy calls his latest album with his band, Godzillionaire, “the best lyrical/singing work of his life,” and I would have to agree.
On their new album, Negative Balance, a concept album about the journey from the end of one relationship to the beginning of another, you can hear Hennessy wailing his trademark yawp, still hitting the notes and the volume like he did with Paw. But his voice has also matured, layered with age and weight and life experience. It’s kinda bluesy, kinda lazy, kinda funky and heavier, bigger and badder. He’s perhaps even better at capturing the harmonic subtleties and still capable of reaching for those extremes, for the tell-tale grunge howl; and in those moments, you understand at least part of the reason why Paw reached the heights they did in the early 90’s.
It’s that voice.
Hennessy’s voice is a Kansas prairie whiskered with wheat stalks. It’s bourbon, warm from a bottle in the summer on a front porch. His voice is a salt bath, a really good IPA—bittersweet in the way that makes your lips pucker and your head kind of fuzzy. Hennessy doesn’t think of himself as a musician. He is a lyricist and a singer and nothing more, nothing less. He told me he’s been thinking about writing and singing songs his whole life, “ever since I was a baby.”
For Hennessy, his voice is an instrument of improvisation and songs seem to sort of happen, arising from the music which suggests an emotion and, “The emotions suggest sounds that become words.”
I told him that it sounded like such an organic, somewhat arbitrary process of making art and asked how he goes from that to a fully fleshed out “concept album,” like Negative Balance, which has a whole narrative arc?
“Oh, yeah,” Hennessy said, “I’m an editor. I do all that shit in post. I’m always revising and changing songs.”
Mark Hennessy today is a man willing to answer my questions and indulge my nostalgic ramblings about the music scene in Lawrence, which he described as, “driving, beautiful, and vivid,” as he waxed nostalgic about the Monday Night Open Mic at The Bottleneck, the live music venue that eventually took over when The Outhouse shut down. “Every night there were great bands, stacked up one after another.”
Hennessy is a man with a MFA degree in poetry from NC State, “two or three books of poems, some of which only exist in my house,” and also a PhD in literature from the University of Kansas; he’s a father and a high school teacher—the cool teacher at his alma mater, the former runaway who still fronts a rock band on the weekends and recites poetry over Zoom.
Hennessy and I are roughly the same age and we bonded almost immediately over the phone, talking music, writing, teaching and parenting. He’s got three young kids, “So I can never sleep again,” he said. I told him I had two kids, one in college and a teenager who thinks everything I say is stupid.
“It’s funny,” he said. “When I was a teenager, I thought everything my Dad said was stupid. When I was twenty-one, I realized how much wisdom he had.”
*
We live now with two dogs. Neko and Gus, big and small. And they are very sweet and cute dogs, loving and silly, wonderful companions. Both are mutts, mixed-breeds of indeterminate origin. Gus looks like a miniature Golden Retriever but is some kind of Terrier/Pomeranian, possibly Chihuahua mix; and Neko looks like a Shepherd and Pit Bull mix, or like a Kelpie—though she apparently doesn’t have any Shepherd in her blood and is actually part Rhodesian Ridgeback, Pit Bull, Lab, and Blue Tick Hound. Also, Neko’s father is her brother. So, there’s that. They are the best dogs they can be. But they are not what I would call “good dogs.”
They bark at other dogs, old people, children, family, and delivery drivers . . . pretty much anyone who comes even remotely near our house and especially anyone who rings the fucking doorbell. They will run out the door if you let them. They will jump up on you and scratch your legs or get your pants dirty if you come to visit. They are terrible on a leash and, thus, a total pain in the ass to walk. She is, as I like to say euphemistically, “unpredictable,” and thus not really good with other dogs, cats, humans, or mammals. This is, in part, because she is food obsessed, overprotective, anxious, and a little bit scary. We joke that she’s part Billy Goat. She will eat ANYTHING that smells remotely like food or dead animal. She’s the kind of dog who would eat herself to death if you let her. She’ll steal food off the counter, out of the trash, or off the plate sitting on your lap.
Gus, the small hairy one, is jealous if ANYONE gets attention besides him and he likes to put his face right up in your face, sometimes with this creepy Billy Idol half-snarl and his stinky fish-breath. He’s also addicted to envelope glue and will eat discarded junk mail out of the trash along with any snot-soaked tissues he can find. As I said, they are sweet, lovable, and deeply flawed animals. But aren’t most of us? They are the best dogs they can be. But they are not good dogs.
*
Halfway through the song, Jessie is still following you. He won’t listen and keeps on barking:
PET THE DOG!
SCRATCH MY EAR!
PLAY WITH ME!!
And somehow you know this is it. This is when you’re leaving for good. As much as you love him, you’re not happy, not comfortable in your own home, so you went to The Outhouse and slammed all the anger out of your body, exchanging it for other pain. Then you came home to get your stuff and just get out, finally. Just leave.
But now, your talking dog keeps hassling you, keeps following you. He won’t let you go.
The sun will come up soon and your Dad will be awake and, if he sees you, he’ll be filled with bees again at the sight of you. You need to get your shit together and get out fast.
Jessie knows you’re leaving for good this time. That’s probably why he’s being so demanding right now. He doesn’t know another way to say goodbye so he nips at your heels, whines and begs. He knows you’re making a mistake, but he loves you anyway. That’s the difference between the dog and your Dad. He knows and he looks right through your soul to see the sludge of all your past mistakes. And he still loves you. He still wants to play. That’s how good dogs are. He keeps following you because he knows it’s you that needs salvation. Because he’s a good dog. He wants to bring you back home, back to your pack.
But this is when the song shifts. There’s a turn. The song gets really sad really fast.
Jessie doesn’t want to hear any equivocation. He yowls:
PLEASE PLAY WITH ME
STAY WITH ME!
He makes a last-ditch effort to convince you to stay.
But that’s not going to happen, Jessie. Not this time.
We think we know how this story goes, but we don’t know how it ends.
This is the early 90’s, the grungy middle of everything. You’re leaving the dog behind as you stumble off aimlessly toward the promise of uncertainty and the embrace of youth.
Please don’t follow me. Just go on home.
*
Lawrence, Kansas is my hometown. I graduated from Lawrence High School in 1990 and went on to the University of Kansas where I would eventually finish a BA in Philosophy some five years later. I left home for good in 1996 and haven’t been back for eight years.
When I told him I was writing this essay, my best friend, Rob, who’d also lived through the early 90’s in Lawrence, asked me, “Paw? Jessie, you’re a good dog? Weren’t they supposed to be the next Alice in Chains?”
Yes. Yes they were.
It's hard to explain to someone who didn’t live through it the buzz and frenzy that Nirvana and the “Seattle sound” created in the early 90’s, especially in Lawrence. My kids think grunge is boring old classic rock. Or just dumb and derivative. But they don’t understand. They don’t know the feel of it, the quiver in your guts, the ringing in your ears after a live punk show. First, it should be said that “grunge” wasn’t how anyone described the music we loved at the time. It was just rock or metal, punk or hardcore. “Grunge” was a marketing label. Paw was, according to Hennessy, “just a rock band,” or as he’s said elsewhere, “a southern rock band.” But to say that the overall craze for the “grunge” sound was magnetic and seductive would be an understatement. It was somehow exactly what we all needed at the time. Nirvana became the flagbearer, but they just cracked open the door for many of us to find bands like Soundgarden, Mudhoney, Alice in Chains, or Pearl Jam, and collectively they gave hope to hundreds of smaller local bands and hardcore music scenes around the country.
When Nirvana’s album Nevermind was released in 1992, I lived in a 2-bedroom basement apartment with Rob and another friend. One of us rotated through the living room, our bed located behind a tie-dyed sheet hanging from the drop ceiling. The neighbor’s tiger cat, Lloyd would sometimes get into the drop ceiling—we were never sure how—and once fell through a panel into our bathtub. Another time, before I could boot his ass out, he popped out in the kitchen and then sprayed my beloved Paradigm stereo speakers, the same speakers I used to blast Nevermind on my Denon 6-disk changer at full volume until the drop ceiling rattled, the very same album that caused my Grateful Dead-obsessed upstairs neighbors to bang on the door one day and ask, “What was that?”
How do you explain the feeling of grunge, the physicality of the music and especially of that characteristic tuned-down guitar? It reverberates in your rib-cage, echoing through your body, turning your diaphragm into an animate instrument. The human body, before it develops consciousness, becomes an amplifier in utero, a resonant drum, a body humming with sound, and there is something primal, something pre-consciousness, something a priori about the grunge sound, the way the guitar, bass and drums thunder in your abdomen, the way it settles into your belly.
For me, the best grunge songs exist in symbiosis with the live audience, with the movement of the pit. There is the build-up, the slow burn, the dance between mosh and sway. There is the slowly rise of tide, the slow melodic roll and the inevitable break of the wave, the drop when the pit cranks up to full speed and all the suspendered big-booted motherfuckers stomp and swing their elbows, slamming and bouncing, elbows to the skull. It’s a wave of sharp limbs. Rolling, rolling, the energy building, until it breaks and bodies submit to the flood, the angry rush crashing against the bulwark of bodies. The pit is pathos and ethos in violent harmony. There are rules. Nobody gets left behind. Lost items are returned. Lost souls are lifted.
That was grunge. It felt like the inevitable antidote to Poison and all the other hair metal bullshit excess of the 80’s. It wasn’t classic rock or jam band jazz. But grunge was exactly what I needed to survive, my gateway drug to other hardcore music, to the darker side of other music scenes and to more indie, alternative, metal and punk rock. Grunge was dirty, loud and aggressive but still melodic, still something you could try to sing along to. And Lawrence was quickly caught up in the excitement. Already boasting a vibrant established punk and hard rock scene, the town was primed (or so they thought) to be the “next Seattle” or the “next Austin.” It was a heady time to be alive in the Midwest.
Though I didn’t attend the show because I couldn’t get tickets, I remember when Nirvana came to Lawrence and played at the University of Kansas Student Union with Paw and Urge Overkill. This was just before the release of Nevermind, when they were still touring for their VERY different debut album, Bleach, an LP that featured two of my alt-college radio favorites, the angsty noisy stomps, “Negative Creep,” and “School.” Bleach and Nevermind are both great albums but also very different albums, seemingly from different bands, of them punk and one of them grunge.
The story I’d heard about Paw’s ascendence to relative fame was that Kurt Cobain was asked after the show in Lawrence about the opening act, Paw, and gave them his casual blessing, thereby anointing them as the next big thing and putting the band and, thereby, Lawrence on the national music map in a way that it had never been located before. That was all it took. Touched by greatness and BOOM, Paw was being courted by all the major record labels.
Hennessy told me the real story.
“Anointed?” he scoffed.
He and Grant Fitch met Cobain backstage before the show and, in addition to praising his music, they’d asked Cobain’s permission to perform a cover of their song, “School,” something Paw had become known for at their live shows.
“He just looked up and right through us,” Hennessy said. “Didn’t say a word and just went back to eating his sandwich.”
Peter Fitch shared his perspective on Paw’s sudden rise to relative fame in a Newsweek article titled, “Searching for Nirvana II”:
It's really asinine and out of control. We're just a bunch of scumbags from Kansas in ripped jeans, and we're sitting in the best restaurant in Austin, eating $35 entrees. That's not reality.
Oh, but it was reality, Peter, a reality that got your song onto Headbanger’s Ball and Beavis and Butthead. It was a reality where a song about a dog became a one hit grunge wonder with surprising staying power and, ultimately, became the unlikely subject of this essay. Hennessy told me the whole thing felt “real” and he understood something big was happening to the band when they were flying to Los Angeles to meet with record labels; but it was clear to me that, while he was happy to reminisce about the music scene in Lawrence and chat about his new band, he wasn’t that interested in talking about whatever relative fame that Paw had achieved. In fact, he told me he wasn’t terribly proud of any of the songs on Dragline.
*
There are a lot of songs about dogs. And poems about cats. I don’t know what that means except to say that the love of a good dog is a hard thing to find. And a hard thing to lose. A hard thing to say goodbye to. It’s maybe the kind of thing you just have to sing about. “Jessie,” is, in the end, the wailing lament of a flawed young man who made an impulsive decision to run away from home. When you fail a good dog, you’ve truly failed. They’ll forgive for almost anything. Except for leaving. They’ll never forgive you for leaving. Unless you come back. Then they’ll love you like you never left.
Kate was the best dog. Everyone says that about their own good dog. I know. But it was true. Kate was the best dog. When I was in graduate school in Colorado studying creative writing, I used to take Kate to the writer parties and she would just follow me around, off-leash, waiting by my side. People would ask me how I trained her to do that and I’d look at her and she’d look up at me and I’d say, “Oh, I didn’t. She trained me.”
I often walked Kate without a leash and she learned to wait at the street corners for me to catch up. Sometimes she’d wander off to explore but she’d always come to my side at the snap of my fingers. She wasn’t aggressive at all but looked kind of mean, like a dog you wouldn’t fuck with, and I also loved that about her. When we lived in Colorado, I’d take her out on the mountain bike trails with me sometimes and she’d run right behind my back wheel, darting off occasionally into the brush to chase something, before catching up to me, falling in line and following me wherever I roamed. She did the same thing when we snowshoed together, her belly carving a wake through the thick snow as her legs churned to keep up or, more often, to carve the path ahead for us. When our kids were babies, Kate would wait patiently while they ate and spread food around their high-chairs until I gave her the OK for clean-up duty. When they’d take their food-covered fingers and try to stick them in her eye, Kate would just close that one eye and wait until she could gently lick the food off.
When the kids’ mom and I split and I moved out nearly fifteen years after we brought Kate home, when I’d failed as a husband and a father in the face of unimaginable but perhaps predictable pain, I couldn’t take Kate with me. I lost her, too. I lost the best dog. Left her behind and told her she couldn’t follow me because I couldn’t have her in the house where I was living and trying to survive. It still breaks my heart to think about the last time I saw the best dog, a few years later, dying of cancer, her eyes cloudy with cataracts, her tail still wagging in her bed at the sound of my voice. In part because of where I was living and in part because of hard feelings, I’d been mostly denied time with Kate, not allowed to have her with me and the kids, and their mom had given me this chance for one last visit. It was too much. And not enough. And I don’t know how to hold that loss.
*
“Jessie,” as I’ve argued, is essentially a blues song, a lament or an ode to a dog. It is also, as Mark Hennessy told me, an autobiographical song. “We had this family dog, Jessie, and everyone loved him, like the whole family.” I knew the kind of dog he meant.
And one cold night in the early 90’s, when all the pressure became too much, when things were too hard, Hennessy ran away from home. The dog followed him. And no matter what he said, no matter how much he yelled at Jessie, the dog wouldn’t go home. Jessie was a German Shepherd, a working dog, a protective breed, the kind of dog whose job it is to keep the pack together.
But Mark left that night and Jessie couldn’t stop him.
And when I asked him some 30-plus years later to tell me about the dog behind the song, Hennessy paused for a second, “He never made it home that night, you know? They never saw him again.”
“No, I didn’t know that.”
“Yeah, he was a good dog,” he said, without any hint of irony, and it didn’t sound like a song lyric. It sounded like an apology.
Steven Church has written some things. At Fresno State, he Coordinates the MFA Program in Creative Writing and edits the literary magazine, The Normal School.