round 2

(1) Sinead O'Connor, “Nothing Compares 2 U”
sunburned
(9) The Ataris, “Boys of Summer”
233-82
and will play on 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 closed @ 9am Arizona time on 3/12/22.

Katherine Atlee Robb on Sinéad o’connor’s “nothing compares 2 u”

And it is from that platform I continue to write. After all, there is no point setting out on a healing journey if you’re not going to find yourself healed. —Sinéad O’Connor, Rememberings

I think Prince, who wrote and sang the original version of “Nothing Compares 2 U” with his band The Family, offers the listener a story about something he wanted, but lost. He is sad about the situation. He longed for more, hoped for something different. I hear this in the crashing of drums, the instrumentation demonstrating his anger at not getting what he so desired. Listen to the saxophone wailing in orchestrated lament. Dude is bummed. I’m not saying the loss of one’s desires isn’t painful. I’m just saying, try losing oneself.
I’ll admit the idea I’m introducing is dense with cheesiness and the only rebuttal I have is that for the last few years I’ve been trying to hold my wounds with tenderness instead of distain. Maybe these days, after years of endless pandemic, of massive fracturing on both a global and deeply individualistic level, everyone could use a little gentleness upon their wounds. When this concept first emerged from the mouth of Peloton’s kind-hearted surfer-bro, when he said, and I’m paraphrasing, maybe a person becomes enraptured with a certain love song not because the song reminds them of their lover, but because the song reminds them of themself, I rolled my eyes. I didn’t think his words would stick but, like all statements speaking to the heart in a way the mind is unwilling to accept, they kept filtering back over time.
Sinéad O’Connor’s version of “Nothing Compares 2 U” is a song that’s been circling back to me for just over thirty years. I loved it since it was originally released in January of 1990. In her hands, the words sound like a dirge sung for herself, for the loss not of a lover, but of an identity. When it came out, I was nine years old and lived in Oregon, which means everything arrived late, so the song probably wasn’t popular on the radio until the fall of 1990. By that time, I’d turned ten and departed from the felt sense of my body. At least I think it was gone by then although that’s the thing about disassociation, it digests time without ever processing it, meaning all the memories disappear or, more precisely, no memories were fully formed in the first place.
When the song was released, critics noted how much pain came through in Sinéad’s voice. In her memoir, Rememberings, Sinéad wrote, “Every time I perform it, I feel it’s the only time I get to spend with my mother and that I’m talking with her again.” Her mother, as is revealed in the memoir, severely verbally and physically abused her when she was a child. It’s further explained in Rememberings that the photo of the Pope she tore up live on SNL was hanging in her mother’s bedroom when she died and when Sinéad took it off the wall, she always knew she would destroy it somehow. Sinéad was angry the Catholic Church was covering up the abuse of children. I’d wager she was also angry her own abuse was never rectified.
Covering sorrow with anger is an ancient trick. A wound left unattended grows a hard shell of preparedness. It trains in survival and in survival there are only three choices: fight, flight, or freeze. I lived bouncing around those three spaces for thirty years. In these recent COVID times I’ve watched friends and family members come to make a home in this trifecta as well. It’s destroying their lives, same as it did to me. We are shadows of our former selves, a cover version of our own truths. Nearly every spiritual practice in the world says to heal such a wound requires one thing: Love. Ugh, how cheesy. How small and foolish. Unless, maybe, Sinéad is singing the word.

It’s been—————since you took your love away.

The first time I disassociated I was four, almost five years old. There was a violent accident in our backyard, and I was the only witness to what happened. My mother says afterward I looked like I wasn’t there. She said something about my eyes and face went wrong. I became a body severed from consciousness and it was visible. Back then, in 1984, the idea was kids were so resilient they probably didn’t remember traumatic situations. I suppose in some ways, that’s true. When police officers arrived and asked what happened, I told them the little girl who was attacked was staring down the dog. Then I changed my story. Nothing happened, I said repeatedly. Nothing happened at all.
Sometimes I wonder about the weight of making things disappear. History, after all, is not a magic trick. When I took the story of myself away from myself, its shadow was still there. It lived in the way I moved my body through the world or sometimes didn’t. When the pandemic first started, I read an article about how hardly anything was written about the 1918 flu once it ended. The thesis wasn’t that the flu was so destructive nobody wanted to talk about it, but rather afterward nobody could acknowledge how horrifically people treated each other while trying to survive.
Witnessing an act of accidental violence before I had the language to name, discuss, or process it sent me down a dangerous path of isolation and disappearance in response to trauma. When violence re-entered my life at the end of elementary school in a random attack, I once again swallowed the story. I told no one, leaving my assault to remain a truth held in my body, but never in my words. I kept it in my stomach, let it become a rock so slicked with moss I could not grip it with my own hands, and I would not dare let someone else get close enough to me to help lift it off.  
I can’t speak for Sinéad, but in her autobiography she writes about such a stone formed by her mother’s violence against her body: “I won the prize in kindergarten for being able to curl up into the smallest ball, but my teacher never knew why I could do it so well.” There are many horrific stories of physical abuse at the hands of her mother in Sinéad’s autobiography, but we almost don’t need them. Her voice told us long ago. The places it reaches, the clarity and control of its sorrow opens a portal to the listener’s own pain in a way music seems uniquely capable of doing.
According to Rememberings, Sinéad knew she wouldn’t “…have much say in mixes when it comes to vocal level,” so she made her voice “…into its own master fader.” She sang into a home-recording device while watching where the lights switched from green to yellow to red (if the lights hit red the vocals were so loud they’d create distortion on the tape). She did this over and over again until she, “…memorized where green finished and let it sink into my body the same way notes do, so the avoidance of yellow is now part of the songs.” Of course she did. That kind of focus, the discipline of training, that’s survivor language. It comes from having learned how to carry a great stone while making it look effortless. At this point, three years into COVID, we are all carrying a stone.

Since you—gone, I can do whatever—.

Some scientific theorists consider disassociation to be adaptive in periods of great stress, the idea being if there’s nothing one can do to stop serious injury to the body, take consciousness away. Not a bad trick by the Creator. Traditionally the causeway, the bridge that drops out between earth and sea, is brought on by physical threat, but I know several people who experienced disassociation during extremely stressful work situations. In fact, the first time I became aware of the phenomenon, years before I understood what it was or that I’d been experiencing shades of it for much of my life, I was arguing a housing case as a supervised law student. One moment I was aware I was speaking, then my consciousness disappeared for a period of time the length of which I do not know. All the while I continued to talk, apparently making lucent and valid points, until my consciousness returned. I was like Will Ferrell’s character in Old School as he delivered the winning debate speech, speaking with great precision and persuasion, but without awareness that he was, in fact, speaking at all. Afterward the administrative judge and my supervising attorney talked about what a great job I’d done, completely unaware there’d been a blip in my system.  
Perhaps disassociation itself isn’t a bad thing as a brief adaptation technique to deal with threat. But what happens when the threats keep coming like they did for Sinéad growing up in the home of her violent mother? Or what happens if a person, like me, comes to believe her own body is the threat and turns the whole thing off for decades? What happens when a world is put under threat of a deadly and easily transmissible virus and the colonizers respond as they’ve always done, with fear instead of love?
In these situations, a shadow self is born, a disassociated cover that allows the self to go on, often with greater bravery than ever before. I lived this way for decades. It allowed me great adventures. I traveled solo with a false distance between my mind, the part of me I considered to be my actual identity, and my body, that which was visible to the men who called me bella, bella, bella in Italy or the guy who pulled his Mercedes over to try to cajole me into coming to his house party in the hills or the art forgers I met in France or the guy in Hong Kong who took a seat across from me at the hostel on the hill overlooking the city’s sparkling lights and explained the intricacies of Zara’s business model and how he was going to bring the concept to Africa.
When I was a kid, I wanted to live an adventurous life. As I grew up, I discovered my body made me a target. My solution was to hide my body from my own self. And it worked. Kids are geniuses, except their solutions eventually fail because they’re personal systems of survival, never structural change. I’ve had thirty years of adventures. It’s too bad I can’t remember most of them, too bad I never fully felt any of them.

——so lonely without you here,—————

To make a life inside the shadow is to live a lonely existence. The body is in fact our barometer. In turning off its sensations, I could no longer hear when it whispered this is the way to joy. My stories paint a false picture of a carefree person. Have I danced on bars in New York City? Sure, but I did that because of threat calculations running in the back of my mind. I wanted to go out in my twenties, but people would hit on me, brush against me, I couldn’t keep my eye on all of them. On the bar, however, I was safely out of reach. It’s been an adventure yes, but the loneliness has been brutal.
It’s funny the things we want to control when we don’t feel like we have control over our own bodies. It was easy to be brave when I couldn’t feel fear. But being blocked from my body meant I couldn’t hear when it tried to point me toward things I might care about, might find pleasure in, toward people whose interests might match my own. In disappearing my body, I created the darkest kind of loneliness, the kind that doesn’t remember what light feels like.
COVID has exacerbated this muting of emotions across the population. Some people have reacted by disappearing the virus itself. It’s enraging, but I understand the inclination. I disappeared the thing that hurt me the worst for three decades. Indeed, disappearing sexual assault is a global phenomenon. If we can say, she wore X and I would never wear X or she was out in that bad neighborhood late at night and I would never go there, then we can give ourselves the gift of safety. Such a thing will never happen to me, thank goodness, we can tell ourselves. But that sense of safety is false. It doesn’t address the real culprit. Most violence, including sexual assault, is about power. And those without power, or those whose power is being threatened, often respond to their own fear with anger.
Let’s be honest, Sinéad called out childhood sexual abuse by the Catholic Church in October 1992. It wasn’t until 2018, twenty-six years later, that Pope Francis acknowledged the abuse and the Church’s role in its hiding. Investigative reports revealing the extent of victimization at the hands of priests were still being published in 2021. But I’ve never seen an article thanking Sinéad for calling out truth. I’m not saying she’s a saint. I’m not saying she’s not possibly stuck in fight, flight, freeze patterns from her childhood. All I’m saying is, sometimes we should listen to the people who have been there before.
The unrelenting threat to life brought on by COVID switched on fight, flight, freeze survival mechanisms in people who’ve never experienced them before. The rates of depression and generalized anxiety disorder in youth appear to have doubled. From 2019 to 2020, emergency department visits for mental health issues for those ages 12-17 increased by 31% and, perhaps more staggering, over a month-long period in early 2021, emergency department visits for suspected suicide attempts in girls ages 12-17 increased by 50.6% from that same month-long period in 2020.
With the long-term presence of anxiety, depression, isolation, lack of skin touch, and drop in functional friendship, so many people have become a cover version of who they used to be, a walking shadow of self. My mother-in-law, who once adored large groups and constant conversation, now gets overwhelmed when she’s around small groups of people. She’s easily exhausted by talk. One day in the summer of 2020 she asked, “Is this what it’s always been like for you?” I didn’t have the heart to tell her yes, much less to explain it wasn’t always that way, it was only like that when I started trying to return to my body.

I went to the doctor—————?

The thing about a body is, it falls apart when left unattended. I lasted about two decades. Then, in my thirties, pieces collapsed. Severe bone density loss was discovered in my foot as I avoided bunion pain by walking, along with running ultra-marathon-long distances only on the outside of my foot. An unexplained cyst grew in my knee. Migraines appeared. My skin flared with rosacea. My legs twitched when I tried to sleep. My husband and I moved from San Francisco to New York City and my walking greatly increased, as did the blood in my shoes. Most people become aware of blisters before they turn bloody, but I couldn’t catch the pain until it turned crimson. More than once I pulled off a pair of shoes in a public bathroom and was shocked and confused to see blood coating the heel of my socks. How had I not noticed earlier that I was in pain? How could I have let it get this far without feeling anything?

Doctors told me to be soft instead of hard. Unclench the muscles I’ve held tight for decades. I’ve had fascia adjusted and it snapped, crackled, and popped in release. A heel lift now counteracts the small curves pressed into my spine. Frequently I remind myself not to hold my breath or the whole system will crash. The jaw doctor’s instructions are the worst: “Softer diet: choose softer food, cut into smaller pieces, and avoid thick foods such as bagels, apples, or baguettes.” It’s infuriating how once upon a time a boy held me by my neck and thirty years later, I can’t eat raw carrots. I’m still trying to hold that one gently.

The way back to a full and vital identity is excruciatingly difficult. It’s hard to re-enter the body. Parameters must be re-established. I had to learn how to answer so many questions about my physicality that I’d long ignored. Is this too tight (shoes)? Does this fit me properly (clothes)? Is this too much pressure (physical therapy)? Does this hurt (everyone)? But, as a friend once told me, “Personal growth is hard. That’s why most people don’t do it.”

———living with you———hard, —I’m willing———another try.”

I spent the second year of the pandemic taking selfies. It’s essentially the treatment for long-term disassociation. Instead of avoiding mirrors and photographs of the self, lean into them, study the body until it becomes re-integrated into one’s own story of identity, until it’s no longer a cover, but a song unto itself. In this way, I finally began to hear the story I’d been telling myself for three decades and, until I heard it, I could not dismantle it.
Light pierced shadow in unusual clarity when I wore shorts in September of 2021. My husband and I went to see Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s installations at the New York Botanical Garden. I almost never wear shorts. I don’t like revealing my body but, as I’ve said, I am trying to change. We walked into the Infinity Mirrored Room—Illusion Inside the Heart (2020), a small room entirely covered in mirrors, and I panicked. Ever since I was assaulted three decades ago, I’ve lived my life scanning, aware of all the angles from which I could be attacked again. But a room of mirrors creates more angles than any human can cover. I watched my mind as it switched, as it realized it couldn’t monitor all the angles of attack so it would monitor the thing to be attacked. My mind turned on my body, begin to criticize my exposed skin, the curves of my own angles. Bad body, I thought, bad, bad, bad, and there it was, heard in simple clarity, the story carried by those who have experienced interpersonal violence: I am bad, take the love away.
I grew up in an unusual household where there was an emphasis on complicated humanity over good versus bad. People, my parents preached, weren’t good or bad, they were merely beings who sometimes did things that brought pain and sometimes did things that brought pleasure. This outlook has been vital to my ability to understand compassion and, eventually, try to give it to myself. But I still exist in a culture that hates women and wants to control our bodies and our sexuality. As a queer woman, if I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard a man say I need a good deep-dicking to straighten up or that two women together is great, as long as a guy gets to watch, I’d buy all my ex-girlfriends fresh strap-ons.
Thus far in the history of the world violence has never made anything better for people overall. It produces power, certainly, but it doesn’t alleviate fear. We can turn against each other all we want, but it won’t defeat a virus that floats between our lungs. The only thing that might is trying to care for one another, and for me to care about you, I must first care about myself. I don’t believe in the idea of a singular truth. Rather, I think we live inside diaphanous layers of stories, the ones we tell ourselves, the ones our family tells us, the ones our society tells us. There are so many elements of the stories told in that last space I want to change, but I can’t shift anything there until I unwind the falsities in the narrative I’ve told myself.

Nothing compares—you.

There’s an inscription at the front of Sinéad’s autobiography: Qui cantat, bis orat. The translation is, essentially: whomever sings, prays twice. There’s a reason singing, humming, and chanting are found throughout history and often tied to the spiritual. Such activities stimulate the vagus nerve, the longest nerve in the body connecting the brain to vital organs including the lungs, heart, intestines, and stomach. The nerve is vital to the parasympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for the “rest and digest” process through its influences on breathing, heart rate, and digestion. The vagus nerve has a vagal tone, meaning activity level, and a high vagal tone is correlated with better physical and mental health. 
All my life I’ve done many of the things that create vagal tone. I exercise, breathe slowly, laugh. In returning to my body, I took up meditation and, for a while, massage. But the thing I’ve always avoided is singing, humming, or, frankly, using my voice at all. The vagus nerve connects to the vocal chords, which means the very act of sound-making is soothing. This was one of the hardest things for me to allow into my body. When people said “Om” in yoga class or when those in my Zen Buddhist group chanted, I recoiled. For a long time, I let my mind provide the answer for this behavior and, as minds tend to do, it came up with all sorts of logical answers, none of which were fully accurate. I didn’t believe the words being chanted. I thought the people chanting them were silly. I didn’t want to chant words I didn’t fully believe in or words the meaning of which I wasn’t sure. But this wasn’t the fundamental reason why I hated it, why I refused to engage. It was because when I chanted or sang, I couldn’t scan my surroundings for potential threats. Somehow the brain can’t do those two things at once.
I used to only sing in my car while driving alone. That was the only place I felt safe from attack. Now sometimes I sing around the house. I can even belt out a tune in the shower, the most dangerous of locations. As someone whose throat was held, as someone who once stood in the cold midnight fall air and searched her phone for the legal definition of strangulation then wept at the realization there was a technical word for what had been done to her as a child, there is a particularly sweet satisfaction in opening up the throat, in letting the beauty of sound pour from my own mouth, the one that stayed silent for so long.
As I write this essay, it becomes news that one of Sinéad O’Connor’s children has died by suicide. It becomes news that Sinéad posted on Twitter blaming herself for his death and now she’s thinking of closing out her life in the same way. As I write this essay, I am also loving a dear family member who is having the same thoughts. I have seen the way this person’s body flinches the same way mine does at loud noises. The violence in my history came from outside the home, while the violence in this person’s came from within. The words Sinéad wrote on Twitter are the same ones being uttered by my loved one. My fault. My bad. If only I could peel the false narrative from this person’s skin through the holding of a hand.
As I write this essay, Omicron is weaving its way into a million more lungs, and I am balancing how to keep traveling all the way across the country to keep holding the hand of this person I desperately want to survive. I hope the weight of my love can sink into this person’s own body, can make them fall out of the shadow of their mind and back into the light. Like all great battles, I do not know how this one will end. All I know is I will go down singing. Because unlike songs, the cover version of a human is never better than the original. After all, in the end, nothing compares to you.

Katherine Atlee Robb is a sensual badass living at and writing about the intersections between fear and love. More of her writing can be found at www.katherineatleerobb.com. She sings a mean "Kiss Me Deadly".

IN THEIR RUIN: JASON NAFZIGER ON THE ATARIS’ “THE BOYS OF SUMMER”

The story of any cover song is really the story of two songs, and that may be even more true for “The Boys of Summer.” Don Henley’s original has been covered over 60 times, by Roger Daltrey, Night Ranger, and KT Tunstall among others. But the only rendition to approach the original’s success is The Ataris’ pop-punk take from 2003, and for good reason.
But let’s start at the beginning.
By which I mean the end.

I: DON’T LOOK BACK

The Eagles, one of the most popular rock bands of the 1970s, broke up in 1980 after tempers raged at a benefit concert for Democratic senator Alan Cranston. They released Eagles Live three days after Ronald Reagan’s election and went their separate ways. The Reagan era would provide ample fodder for their solo output, with ex-drummer Henley in particular producing a string of hits that slyly criticized both the president and the culture his policies and actions enabled. Among these subtle protest anthems was “The Boys of Summer,” a song whose very existence is a domino trail of coincidences.
While writing material for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ Southern Accents album, guitarist Mike Campbell brought Petty a rough instrumental track he’d put together, but the singer didn’t think the heavy synthesizer sound was right for his vision of the album and turned it down. Discouraged but still convinced of the song’s potential, Campbell made a few tweaks and took it to Henley, who was working on his second solo album, Building a Perfect Beast.
Henley listened, and when the song ended, he nodded. “Maybe I can do something with that.”

There is a specific moment in “The Boys of Summer” that announces itself as the thematic center, the seed from which the rest of the lyrics grew:

Out on the road today
I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac

The incident was not invented. “I was driving down the San Diego Freeway,” Henley told NME in 1985, “and got passed by a $21,000 Cadillac Seville, the status symbol of the right-wing upper-middle-class American bourgeoisie—all the guys with the blue blazers with the crests and the grey pants—and there was this Grateful Dead ‘Deadhead’ bumper sticker on it!”
He saw the encounter as a microcosm of a wider cultural shift: ex-hippie Baby-Boomers frolicking in the capitalist playground of the Reagan ‘80s. His generation had abandoned the idealism that once bound them together as the planet’s potential saviors and traded it for leather-wrapped steering wheels and Bose sound systems.
Henley wove that image into a tale of missed opportunities in life and love, the depressing irretrievability of the past. He took the title from a 1972 Roger Kahn book about the rise of the Brooklyn Dodgers and their eventual departure for Los Angeles. It’s impossible to say what connection Henley made between his song and the book, but this line stuck out to me: “Is that the mind’s last, soundless, dying cry? Who will remember?”
Yes, “The Boys of Summer” cries out for remembrance. Not for some fictional bygone utopia invoked by Reagan’s Make America Great Again campaign slogan. But for a spirit of community, of prioritizing art and love and empathy over money and power and war. “I can see you,” Henley promises, ostensibly to some lost lover but maybe really to his fellow citizens, to himself. This isn’t who we are, he’s saying. Am I the only one who remembers?
Roger Kahn had also borrowed the title, from an early Dylan Thomas poem that begins: I see the boys of summer in their ruin. When asked what he meant, Thomas told a friend: “Well, you go down to the beach in Swansea on a summer evening... and the city man, the office worker and so on, they'd strip off there... and get into a pair of the old-fashioned bathing trunks and waddle down to the sea.” Despite the poem not being a direct influence on the song (as far as I know), it’s easy to envision a guy fitting this description driving Henley’s metaphorical Cadillac.
A few weeks after accepting the track, Henley called up Mike Campbell. “I just wrote the best song of my life to your music,” he gushed.

II: YOU CAN NEVER LOOK BACK

“The Boys of Summer” was a massive radio hit, and it struck a chord with young Kris Roe who, while visiting his grandparents in Florida, bought the album because of that song. “[It] captured totally the moment for me: traveling by myself for the first time, seeing these beautiful sunsets … I realized traveling was what I wanted to do with my life.”
Roe is from Anderson, a small city outside Indianapolis that benefitted from a late-nineteenth century natural gas boom. Its heyday mirrored larger Midwest cities, attracting dozens of businesses and earning nicknames like The Pittsburgh on White River and Queen City of the Gas Belt and Puncture Proof City—a reference to the prominent rubber industry as well as an unintentional bit of ironic foreshadowing.
It all started sputtering in 1912 when the gas ran out, due in large part to Anderson’s recklessness. City lights were left on around the clock, and a gas pocket in the river was frequently lit just because it looked cool. Some businesses remained and in 1950, the city was an unlikely home to one of the NBA’s first franchises. The Anderson Packers had a successful season, making it to the semifinals. A year later, the team folded.
The Anderson that Kris Roe was born into in early 1977 was already in long-term decline and didn’t get any better during the ‘80s, when much of the Midwest was financially devastated by deindustrialization and the savings and loan crisis (which would also end the political career of the same Senator Cranston who’d hosted that doomed Eagles performance back in 1980.)
In 1996, Roe did what a lot of frustrated Rust Belt kids did in the post-Nirvana alternative explosion era: he started a band. Their story unfolds like a Cameron Crowe script. Roe and guitarist Jasin Thomason recorded bedroom demos with a drum machine; Thomason slipped their tape to a roadie at a show in Cincinnati; the roadie gave it to bassist Joe Escalante of The Vandals, who owned Kung Fu Records. The Ataris had a record deal before they had a proper band.
Roe wasted no time swinging a lyrical wrecking ball at his hometown, recording a track called “Anderson” for the band’s debut album (titled …Anywhere But Here after this song’s chorus), calling out the “gun-totin’ losers [and] beer swillin’ hicks” in “this Anderson hell.” The song didn’t appear on the album’s initial release (possibly because Roe still lived there) but was added to a 2002 reissue.
In 1997, Roe moved to California and Thomason left the band to stay in Indiana. Over the course of two more albums with Kung Fu, The Ataris were getting noticed for their blue-collar approach to that ubiquitous brand of post-grunge pop-punk that would bridge Green Day to Fall Out Boy. They landed a spot on the 2001 Warped Tour, playing New York City one month before 9/11.

III: THOSE DAYS ARE GONE FOREVER

Like Henley, Roe homed in on the Cadillac bumper sticker image when reworking “The Boys of Summer” for the band’s major label debut, So Long, Astoria. As much as the original was a product of the early 1980s, The Ataris’ reinvention was a product of the early 2000s. When every day’s anxiety is a color-coded homework assignment from the government and war coverage looks like a high-def bomb commercial directed by David Fincher, you’re probably not going to catch the attention of young listeners with a Grateful Dead reference. Recognizing this, Roe didn’t want to settle for a purely faithful cover, but he also knew a simple timeline nudge wouldn’t be enough. Any number of modern band names (Misfits, Pearl Jam, Green Day) could’ve worked rhythmically, but Henley had noticed the Deadhead sticker because it was a Deadhead sticker, and because the juxtaposition with the Cadillac said something dark and sad and poetic.
It’s tempting, with the benefit of a finished product, to say the choice was obvious, but that’s too reductive. Let me say instead that Roe gave the choice its due attention. Black Flag were not only musically influential, but spiritually influential to the punk scene that would follow, forging a work ethic and DIY attitude now emblematic of the genre.
This careful choice elevates the Ataris’ song over typical punk covers that remediate their subjects with art-thief efficiency and bike-thief attitude. Their version is not just a funhouse reflection of the original; it’s a companion piece. If Henley is telling us that everything pure is corruptible if we let our guard down, Roe’s corollary is that we will inevitably let our guard down. We can’t help ourselves.
There’s a direct path from the Grateful Dead fan in Henley’s song to the Black Flag fan in Roe’s song. They could easily be parent and child, each chipping away at the culture that had been built for them, each eventually succumbing to the necessities of consumerist existence, the bumper sticker an ironic souvenir from an alternate reality. Generation after generation, churning out revolution so slowly we can barely feel it.
The Ataris never intended to release “The Boys of Summer” as a single. In fact, they were already producing a video for “My Reply,” a deeply personal track written for a fan who was contemplating suicide and later credited the song—which Roe wrote and immediately sent to her—with saving her life.
Then, Entercom’s influential K-Rock stations in New York and L.A. started playing “The Boys of Summer” instead. It caught on and, as Roe later told MTV, “We just had to go with it.” The video concept for “Reply” was reworked for “Summer” instead. The song would become the biggest commercial success of the band’s career. Ironically, it is followed on the album by a song criticizing the inanity and influence of corporate radio.
Two weeks after So Long, Astoria hit shelves, the United States invaded Iraq. Within a year, the Ataris would break up, though Roe would continue to perform under the name with a variety of lineups. The Eagles reunited in 1994 and performed together for five years before another rift that eventually led to a lawsuit.

Jason Nafziger is a writer from Ohio, where he currently lives with his wife Heather and dogs Sloopy & Heidi. He currently has six separate playlists consisting entirely of cover songs. Follow him on Twitter @JasonNafziger for opinions he’ll just delete later, retweets you’ve already seen & Wordle scores (unless NYT has paywalled it by the time you read this.)