round 1

(3) The Clash, “I Fought the Law”
fought past
(14) The Boo Radleys, “There She Goes”
235-88
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 3/8/22.

jamie a. lee on the clash’s “i fought the law”

1975.

It might have been earlier or later, but this feels right. I think it was my Aunt Theresa who taught me how to carefully open the small suitcase to take out Mom’s and Dad’s record player. It folded into the suitcase and could be carried to different rooms in our home. I cannot recall what it looked like, just its portability. However, I do remember the second case that carried the small 45 vinyl records. It was red and white with a design of flecks or small leaves as I remember. When I unlatched it and lifted the lid, the inside, too, was red. Inside the records formed a wave that my parents rode in on. That sounds funny and a bit cliché, but a phrasing reflects what I can actually picture. And feel. Music was meaningful to them.
They were high school lovers and then there was me.
I fought the law and the law won.
Their record collection of 45s consisted of the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” and “Hey Jude.” I adored the labels on these records and imagined myself a designer. Then there was Roger Miller’s “My Uncle Used to Love Me, But She Died.” So queer in a way. The baby queer that I was back then loved the play with language. I like it still. The Monkees’ “Daydream Believer” was one that we all sang out loud. I developed a crush on Davy Jones. LOL. Bobby Fuller’s “I Fought the Law” (1966) was in this mix of the songs I remember loving and singing along to when I was 6, maybe 7.  I love this opportunity to return to it now in my 50s.

I remember these songs so clearly. We lived in the first house my dad built, a modest ranch-style house with a large garage where he worked on cars. Before that we lived in the old house at the back of the property where my great grandmother lived for a long time. I have a vague memory of that house; I think it was bright with windows and yet dingy with light blue walls and peeling wallpaper. Not a lot of walls, though. Old. No running water. Of course, I was too little to remember these details of this old house that speak to the working-class context that framed our lives. Mom tells stories of corralling me in the living room with chairs or in my crib so that she could go outside to pump water for my bath. I was all over the place. Naughty, she described.

Dad had a job at the local gas station; he pumped gas and fixed cars at the station and in our front lawn; later our garage. I remember the gas station sold pop in tall glass bottles and we always got 7-UP to share. Mom didn’t have an out-of-the-house job at first. She stayed home and took care of me and then my brother when he came along two years after I was born.
The laws and social norms pushed Mom out of high school once she was showing her pregnancy. She could not set a bad example for the others in the school. She was considered dirty and hypersexualized. She was pushed out. There were different rules for women and men. Dad, however, got to graduate from high school. Eventually Mom took night classes to get her GED. Then she worked as a cleaner at an office and then as a waitress. Today, I wear her class ring everyday as a reminder of the time, the laws that foreclose dreams, and the fight I have in me.
I fought the law 

My Grandma, Dad’s mom, helped Mom by watching us at her house. I got in trouble a lot because I messed up Grandma’s houseplants. She regularly sent me outside to play with my Aunt Theresa who was nearly two years older than me. It was this same Grandma who also filled Mom’s head with soap opera storylines of deceit and of cheating husbands. Mom was naïve and gullible; what this means to me is that she trusted people and that they betrayed her trust. Mom recounts these stories she was told. She was a teen-age mother stuck with two kids, no high-school education, in an old home with no running water, and in a family and community where she was never given a fighting chance. I learned to fight first for her, later for myself, and then for others.
I fought the law.
Dad had his buddies. He had fun. He tells stories of an ice storm when he and his friends tied a long rope to the back of his old Ford hot rod car. They took turns skiing behind the car on Interstate 94. On their sneakers. Nearly got killed. And he was a smoker. I remember the smell. It burrowed into my clothes and stuck to my hair and, seemingly permanently, in my nostrils. I think I can still smell it. His mom smoked too. She sat in her living room chair smoking, sipped coffee and then bottles of Coke, and watched soaps. These were the days of our lives. Dad stopped smoking when he threw his cigarette out the car window as he was driving and it blew back inside and burned up his backseat. Glad we kids weren’t in there.
Dad is the oldest of seven kids. Two brothers were his “real” brothers who are dead now from various cancers and disease. The younger four siblings were born later with the only Grandpa I remember. One big family with different histories but shared cycles. The law of the land and the law of the father structured who might change these cycles of dis-ease, poverty, and trauma. It was not Grandma’s generation. It was not Mom’s and Dad’s generation. I look back and understand that Mom was caged in ways; Dad, too, was caught up in a cage. Only a bit bigger than hers. Social norms functioned to squish dreams and hurt each of my parents. They were given impossible choices. They didn’t know what they were doing. To each other. To us.
I fought the law.
Still the music played. Throughout the 1970s, Mom and Dad listened to music. The car radio always had something playing. They sang out loud sometimes. Country Western songs mostly. I remember when that stopped. Mom was jealous. Remember those soap-opera stories that Grandma fed her for years? Well, real or not, the storylines stuck. The storylines were ones that Mom and Dad thought about and fought about. They were ones that moved me into action to make peace and hold tight to my frightened brother. We both knew how the story would be played out and we each stepped into the roles that we thought could comfort us.
I remember riding in the backseat of our red Chevy Nova listening to the country station. The song played “Your nobody called today. She hung up when she I asked her name.” Sylvia’s “Nobody” was a song about cheating. It became the background music of the storyline in which the husband is confronted by the wife about having an affair. Mom and Dad were the main characters. Then there was another fight. Mom jealous. Dad angry and violent. In the aftermath of such episodes, the radio was turned off and we drove in silence. The car was filled with a dark mood and no more music. I held my breath and my brother’s hand in the backseat as the car continued down the country road. Farm fields, barns, cows, trees, and a not-peaceful quiet. 

Aunt Theresa and I spent a lot of time in her room listening to music. Chicago was our favorite band (though we did love Seals & Croft, Bread, and the Jackson 5). She was my big “sister” and my best friend. She knew what cages I was trapped in because she was trapped in them too. She loved me and I loved her. Her room was that soft place to land. We listened to love songs. Love found. Love lost. We played games, Barbies, read, and just chilled with the sounds of the music that we came to love. There was that one Dan Fogelberg song about meeting his old lover in a grocery store. Love found again. The song unfolded in story. Aunt Theresa and I knew all the words. Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life” was another favorite that we sang in her room and in the way-way back of Grandma’s brown station wagon. Our way back seats folded up so that we looked backwards out the car’s back window. Always moving in a backwards direction or going nowhere. Fast. She and I were in our own little world of song and singing. Other days we hiked through the cow pastures and corn fields to the fence that separated Grandpa’s and Grandma’s farm property and Interstate 94. We sat on the fenceposts and sang songs to the passing cars. We performed the songs after watching Friday late night music videos and other music-centered TV shows like Solid Gold and American Bandstand. “Stop in the Name of Love” was one we sang and danced to, copying the arm movements we saw on TV. We performed but the cars never stopped. We stopped doing these things once my little family moved to another small Wisconsin town about an hour away. She and I would be separated until we got our driver’s licenses. We then faced our growing pains and challenges of relationships and being young women on our own. We tried to know ourselves and also keep knowing each other.
I fought the law and the law won.
Why did every verse end with the law winning? Would there be a chance to win? The Bobby Fuller Four’s song was a bouncy one. The band hailed from El Paso, TX. Considering the US politics in the 1960s, how can fighting the law and the law winning sound so—hmmm….—danceable?!
I fought the law and the law won.
In the early 1980s, I discovered The Clash singing this same song that framed much of my early childhood. Here British punk slams right into Bobby Fuller’s toe-tapping song to invite a much-needed fighting spirit. The difference was palpable. Alas, the law still won.
My friends and I were into music. We bought cassettes from record stores and made each other mixed tapes on our boom boxes. Once we could drive, we borrowed cars to drive the 40 minutes from rural Wisconsin to First Avenue in Minneapolis for the All-Age Danceteria nights. We were 16 and in a brand-new milieu of music, movement, love, loss, anger, and rage. We shouted! We sang! We danced it out!
The Clash lived up to its name. The punk sounds of this familiar song returned me to the quiet car rides when we were silenced and uncomfortable in the storylines of deceit and betrayal that were always followed by violent outbursts and a disempowering silence. The Clash filled me with power.
The music video is what really hooked me. Watching Night Tracks on late Friday nights to see music videos without having to have cable TV was a turning point for me to understand how musicians understood their own music in the context of world politics. The videos were not only documentations of bands performing, but the telling of stories. I fought the law and the law won. The Clash music video centered politics, international conflict, and ended with named wars and invasions. It centered the power of the media, too, in our changing landscape of TV news and entertainment. I was a part of this changing landscape. I wanted to be a part of this story, this storytelling. I wanted to change the stories. I wanted to fight the law. I wanted to win.
I fought the law and the law won.
I keep fighting.

Jamie A. Lee is a queer archivist, activist, and Associate Professor in the School of Information at the University of Arizona. They are an award-winning filmmaker and founder/director of the Arizona Queer Archives and the Digital Storytelling & Oral History Lab. They also have an amazing NFL football card collection that they started in the mid-1970s. Visit www.thestorytellinglab.io for more about their business.

Nicole Sheets on The Boo Radleys’ “There She Goes”

In college in the mid-90s, I loved the movie So I Married an Axe Murderer (1993). My housemates and I would get it on VHS from the public library or Blockbuster and watch it in our living room, a room that was mostly empty except for the big pastel couch and the built-in shelves. I hadn’t seen the movie when it first came out. It was part of the blackout period of films I’d missed in middle and high school because I wasn’t allowed to watch anything rated PG-13 or R. College was in some ways about making up for lost time.
We watched So I Married an Axe Murderer in that house on Willey Street that had been carved into a duplex. Four of us—English and education majors—lived in the back unit. There was some plushy carpet on the wall in the stairwell, an attempt at soundproofing or insulation, and a couple that fought loudly in the apartment on the other side. One of my housemates brought her own chest freezer to store the venison from her dad and brother. Our dirty dishes piled up in the sink when it was my turn to clean, and Heidi, my “discipler” in our campus Christian group, would grab a sponge and soap and help me out when she dropped me off after Bible study.
I liked to watch So I Married an Axe Murderer with people I’d just met to see if they’d get it. Could we be friends? The movie is a romantic comedy, but a silly one. The happily-ever-after can’t really get going until we know who’s the serial killer. So I Married upholds the idea of love at first sight. It raises questions about the risks we accept when we get involved with someone. It reveals Mike Myers’ “very nude” backside. I liked laughing at love stories, even as I also wanted to live inside of one.
So I Married opens with The Boo Radleys’ cover of The La’s song “There She Goes.” The film also includes The La’s original at the end. This pairing echoes the film’s casting of Mike Myers, who plays both the main character, Charlie Mackenzie, and his father, Stuart. Stuart Mackenzie is the source of the film’s greatest cover when he sings Rod Stewart’s “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?” backed by a bagpiper. When Charlie visits his parents, his mom informs him about the Garth Brooks juice diet and other items of interest from the Weekly World News, and Stuart cracks jokes about Charlie’s masculinity. Part of what adds pressure to Charlie’s relationship with Harriet the butcher (Nancy Travis) is that he’s also planning his parents’ 30th anniversary party. Will Charlie find that kind of lasting love?
Where The La’s version of “There She Goes” starts with some finger picking, The Boo Radleys’ begins with quiet disorder, horns and jangling chords that snap to attention with insistent drums. I hear “there she goes” as the voice of judgment, an admission that people don’t really change that much. But in the song, “there she goes” sounds much more positive about the “she.” Or at least like the speaker is glad “she’s” around, even if she’s unpredictable and they’re not quite sure what to do with her. She’s “racing through my brain,” and “pulsing through my veins.” She creates a residual feeling that the speaker “can’t contain.” To sing “There she goes” sends your voice into an upper register. The next line “There she goes again” starts lower, moves from chest voice back up into head voice. The song is relentlessly happy, an upbeat howling after her.
Sixpence None the Richer covered “There She Goes” on their 1997 self-titled album. If the available categories for contemporary Christian music are “inspirational” and “alternative,” Sixpence would be more on the alternative end. In high school I listened to plenty of inspirational groups, like Point of Grace or 4Him. Groups that played in my high school’s auditorium or toured nearby colleges. Groups that wore matching denim shirts or complementary cardigans. Groups that released a lot of Christmas albums. Sixpence was both wholesome and a little edgy, and also one of few bands on my radar that were fronted by women.
In the late 90s, in my little bedroom on Willey Street, I listened to Christian bands like Smalltown Poets and The Waiting. I wrote my papers for Victorian poetry. I listened to The Cranberries and The Wallflowers and this two-CD disco compilation. I barely acknowledged a crush on my housemate’s brooding brother, who also lived on Willey Street, just down the hill, in a house full to bursting with Christian boys.
I listened to Sixpence, and I went with Crystal, a friend from our campus Christian group, to see them in concert at a fairgrounds somewhere in Pennsylvania. Crystal listened to MxPx. She loved Tooth & Nail Records, a Christian music label of out of Seattle. She loved ska and wore baggy thrift store trousers with a ripped hem. Near the end of the Sixpence concert Crystal raised her cupped palms to heaven as Leigh Nash sang, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart / lean not on your own understanding/ in all your ways acknowledge Him/ and He will make your path straight.” I bought a white t-shirt where the Sixpence logo looked like a Bazooka bubble gum wrapper.
Wikipedia reminds me that the Sixpence cover of “There She Goes” was used in a mid-2000s TV commercial for the oral contraceptive Ortho Tri-Cyclen Lo. (https://www.adforum.com/creative-work/ad/player/39750/there-she-goes/ortho-tri-cyclen-lo) In the ad, there’s no instrumental introduction, just Leigh Nash’s breathy “There she goes” as women in leotards or slip dresses go off in search of some sex to have. Or as one source describes the ad: “various unpregnant ladies smile, spin.”
I had briefly taken an oral contraceptive in high school, several years before this ad and before I would need birth control for sex reasons. My dermatologist thought it might help my acne, and my mom reluctantly agreed to let me try it. Mircette came in a blister pack of 28 small pills in a green plastic rectangle. There are so many brand names for this kind of drug, and they sound like expensive wellness centers: Apri, Cyclessa, Enskyce, Reclipsen, Solia. Normally I expressed anger by breaking pencils alone in my room, but under the influence of Mircette I yelled at my brother and smacked the blue glass lamp in the hallway. And that was the end of my Mircette.
Recently I watched So I Married an Axe Murderer with my spouse who, like the main character, is also named Charlie. We watched it on our orange couch that has not fared so well in this pandemic, used as a trampoline by the offspring and a scratch post by the cats, and there’s a hole in the seat that leaks clouds of stuffing. We sipped whiskey in our living room full of pillows and blankets and Cheerios and raisins and Hot Wheels.
The pleasures of this movie are different now. As Charlie pointed out, it’s a delight to watch any movie that does not feature talking dogs. We weren’t laughing at the jokes, but we were smiling at them. Awww, the Thighmaster! Oh yeah, Phil Hartman is the prison guard! We observed our nostalgia for the days of crowded public spaces. For a time when there was not an iPhone in sight. The baggy men’s clothes, like an open button-down over a t-shirt, looked dated. I’m glad there’s another haircut, Charlie said. But the women’s clothes were more promising. The chokers and baby doll dresses, those sunflowers.
I wonder what the late 90s version of me, who rebelled against her childhood by watching a PG-13 movie with people from Bible study, would think of me now. When I think of her—skipping a late-night drive to Mount Washington so she could study for a linguistics quiz, caring so much more about purity than about justice—I try to do so with kindness.

Nicole Sheets’ work has appeared in DIAGRAM, Bellingham Review, Image, and elsewhere. She edits—in a very erratic way—an online anthology, How to Pack for Church Camp, about spiritual experiences in the out-of-doors. You can find her in Spokane, Washington, and on twitter @heynicolesheets