If I Had it All Again I’d Change it All: michael sheehan on Machinehead, Summer 1995
We are hurt, home sick from school, L laid out on the coarse upholstered couch with a cast to his hip; me on the floor cross-legged. We are watching The Crow, whose soundtrack I listened to obsessively all summer. I love “Lost Souls,” listen to “It Can’t Rain All the Time” while in the bath after football practice, trying to cry. It’s September 1994 and I’m out of school because it’s the one-year anniversary of a friend’s death and the counselor called my mom; my mom dropped me here, at my aunt’s, and went back to work. L is out of school with a football injury, out for the season, the only season I will play football, though we go to different schools and will never see each other on the field. We have always been close, cousins. We are close in age, though it’s more than that. We share both sides of our families: my mom’s sister, his mom, married my dad’s brother, his father. Our large Catholic families spend every after-church Sunday gathered around first the donut-laden table of one side and then, after dinner, the TV of the other. I am on the floor and vulnerable and I don’t know how to contain the feelings I feel, because of my friend’s death, and something else. I have been obsessed with Kurt Cobain since his suicide five months ago; the death of Brandon Lee is why I’m obsessed with The Crow. I don’t know that I don’t know how to process loss.
Gavin Rossdale said, “The idea of ‘Machinehead’ always was about freeing yourself, about losing your ego and just letting rip.” The song starts with ten repetitions of a simple power-chord scale, moving up the neck, a distorted revving of an engine. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,” Rossdale sings. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.”
Our first concert is at the Connecticut Street Armory in Buffalo on June 1st, 1995: Bush, with Wax and The Nixons. My uncle takes L and I, lets us go and waits somewhere unseen outside the whole time. The Armory, a castle-like brick structure, has just been named a historical landmark. It’s cramped inside. When the lead singer of The Nixons dives from the top of a Marshall stack onto the crowd, it feels like we are all pressed into one moment, blurring into each other. Each opener has their brief 90s hit: “California,” with its man-on-fire-running-down-the-street video by Spike Jonze, and “Sister.” Bush covers the Sex Pistols’s “Pretty Vacant,” plays almost every song on Sixteen Stone except “Machinehead.” We’re so pretty, we’re oh so pretty. And we don’t care. We get matching mechanics’ shirts at the merch table.
In church, I pay attention to Z, my age but shorter, an intense, angry fourteen year old: he looks like I feel, but he wears it so much better. His shoulder-length hair has lately been dyed black and is shorn on the sides so that only a lean stripe now rides the centerline of his bare scalp as he stares ahead, bored, at the altar of St. Michael’s, the mural of my namesaint letting the devil spill off a cloud into the nothing in the exact pose of Muhammad Ali looming over Sonny Liston; at least that’s how I remember it.
At middle school dances in the spring, K and I start our own mosh pits, the two of us in the darkened side of the gym hurling our bodies pointlessly against each other with all the fury we can birth. We listen to Bush, imagine a band, play guitar, stay up late watching Beavis and Butthead on MTV (he has cable because he lives in the village; I live at the school bus turnaround, on the edge between my tiny town and the tiny town where L and S and Z go to school). After football ends in the fall, I grow my hair to my shoulders. Inspired by Nirvana, I start to dress differently, from 7th grade Umbros to 8th grade oversized Dickies and torn thermals under my t-shirts. In spring, a new kid in my school asks if I skateboard; he says he asked because I look like the pictures in Thrasher magazine. I start skateboarding. Teachers treat me differently; my grades suffer. My social studies teacher takes me aside and tries delicately to tell me that how I look, this transformation, is making his colleagues see me as something I’m not. He tells a parable about when he grew a beard as a younger man and another teacher likewise took him aside and asked, “What are you trying to prove?”
Bush was called grunge or post-grunge, sometimes derisively. They were the first major post-Nirvana rock band (or as Matt Diehl wrote in 1996, “the most successful and shameless mimics of Nirvana's music”), replete with all that entailed: incomprehensible lyrics fit within a blend of raw distortion and melody. Bush is catchy, Sixteen Stone easier to mainstream than In Utero, the first CD I ever bought (L gave me the first CD I ever owned, Pablo Honey). “Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow,” Rossdale wrote for what became their first single, an international hit. “Dave’s on sale again.” But he also hit moments of pure zeitgeist, disaffection in his strained voice, “We’re so bored you’re to blame.”
That summer, we ride our bikes from L’s house up the gravel shoulder of Route 20A, stop at the dingy motel with its convenient store lobby, act aimless, wander, browse, and I clip a pack of cigarillos from the display. We smoke on the edge of the pond at our grandparents’ house, the second cigarillo makes me sick, my head swimming with nicotine buzz. We do this again and over again, at Bud’s Deli and Oatka Deli, where little plastic stands display packs of Marlboros in front of the cashier. I talk to them or L does, we ask questions, distract them, nick cigarettes, sometimes fumbling them for the other to retrieve. Mostly I stare into the face of the cashier while pocketing a pack, everything I say is insincere.
Grunge was a catch-all so widely applied it’s hard to say it had a meaning. And what is post-grunge? Maybe it’s trying to be something you’re not, the falsity of that and also the liberation. Bush acknowledged the influence of Nirvana, but in later interviews tried to emphasize they had their own sound. Rossdale has also listed the Pixies as a more important inspiration of Future Primitive (the original name under which they released “Bomb”: “death of the future, goodbye to my friends / wish I could see you all again”). Their post-grunge identity felt true to them. Maybe it’s easier for others to see when someone is not acting as their authentic self; maybe when it’s you losing your ego, freeing yourself to let rip, trying to become the person you’d need to be to make the music you most love, the space between adopted and inherent identity is imperceptible. Of course, identity is messy, inconstant; if the terms are set by someone else, how do they know whether you’ve stolen or discovered your self? What are you trying to prove? To whom?
“Blood is like wine,” Rossdale sings, alluding to transubstantiation—or not. “Unconscious all the time.”
L is friends with S but like me, S’s family goes to church every Sunday, his policeman father, his younger brother, and his mom, whom we see as cool: she takes him to concerts and, in the summer, takes us. She goes with us when we see Weezer, L and S and I, and hangs out somewhere back beyond the throng but listening to the show. She takes us to the second Bush concert, at the Dome Arena in Henrietta on August 18. Before that show, she takes us all—me and L and S and Z—to church; first, we get high. When I go up during communion and extend my hands, left on right, forward to a woman my family has known all my life and she says “Body of Christ,” I say, “Uh, thanks” and later we laugh and laugh.
The music video for “Machinehead” is a frenetic, pulsing series of clips, quickly cutting from one to the next threaded together by images of a motorcyclist barreling through London and onstage shots of Bush playing one of the first shows of their European tour. There might be the thinnest suggestion of narrative cohesion; instead, the video is a tone poem filled with feeling, energy, letting rip, letting go, rushing forward and not really knowing why or where you are. The London it jump-cuts through goes from industrial, bleak outskirts to luminous nightlife. The show likewise is pulsing, multicolored, distant and close-up shots of the band are entwined. The speedometer on the motorcycle is maxed out. The motorcycle is shot from an onboard camera, sometimes showing the fisheye view of the rider, sometimes the engine in action. Day passes, night comes, British punks flail and spit at the camera. Then it is dawn and the rider arrives in Shepherd's Bush, the area of London that gave the band its name. The motorcyclist removes her helmet, shakes out her blond braids, and steps out of frame as Gavin sings the final lines, “I walk from my machine.”
We camp by the pond over and over, all summer. We steal cigarettes and smoke them under an open sky. We buy weed off a kid in town and I pass out in a borrowed sleeping bag. We find airline bottles of liquor upstairs in my grandparents’ house, souvenirs of someone’s trip. We drink the tequila; L swallows the worm. We howl and beat our bare chests as we leap out from the diving dock my grandfather built, the bloodrush of the sudden plunge into the cold dark of the pond as the water washes over us.
“Machinehead,” like “Everything Zen,” is inspired by Ginsberg’s “Howl,” as Rossdale has noted: “I like that sort of Ginsberg-y, stream-of-consciousness approach to words, rather than, say, country songwriting where there are narratives and stories and places and names and descriptions.” It is the clearer reference, as he mutters “the best minds of my generation” in the song’s bridge. Destroyed by madness. Who vanished into nowhere Zen. Who barreled down the highways of the past.
Z is smaller than me but in the mosh pit at the Arena, he is a force. I am being thrown from the bodies heaving against each other into the outer edges, knocked off balance once and then again into those standing near but not in the pit, until I am shoved into a woman who stands beside a man twice my age (which is to say, in his mid-to late twenties) who catches me violently by the hips, pulling the skin from my sides as he gets a grip and lifts me fully off the ground and throws me to the floor in the midst of the mass of moshing bodies.
“Deaf, dumb, and thirty,” Rossdale sings. And, that summer, he really was. Thirty.
The Toadies open for Bush in August and we have fallen fully for their album. “Possum Kingdom” is on the radio all day, with its creepy overtones: “I’m not going to lie, / I’ll not be a gentleman. / Behind the boathouse, / I’ll show you my dark secret.” It seems, and the video backs this up (maybe despite its ice-carving ending), that the song’s sung from the perspective of a serial killer. “Give it up to me, / give it up to me. / Do you want to be my angel?” The narrator of “Tyler,” another favorite, eventually finds himself outside the door of a woman who calls out in fear, “She pulls her covers tighter / I press against the door. / I will be with her tonight.” I am fourteen and my understanding of sex is limited to thinking about what I can get.
It’s Z’s weed and we sit, high in the Arena’s bleachers, joined by a trio of strangers, passing the joint, watching the still-lit floor and the pre-show filling-in of the crowd. There was tension at the gate: could we get away with it? We passed through with little attention, lifted our shirts, had hands on our pockets, but no one confiscated the joint tucked into the pack of stolen Marlboros. Now we look down from above at the places we will soon be.
The bass is so loud it is felt, it reaches deep into me, sinks my stomach like a sudden drop over a steep hill when driving country roads. I feel sick. In the crowd, looking up at Bush on stage, as close as I can get, I can barely stand it.
Later, much later, S’s father, the policeman, will accost L and tell him he knows our whole operation. He will describe, in detail, the supposed criminal program we’ve used to rob several small businesses in town. His version will be methodical, calculating, filled with the point-by-point patterning of football plays: each person runs his part. Later, L will tell this to me—I think he only heard it because he was being threatened with a misdemeanor—and though the subtext is S’s betrayal, we will laugh at the absurdity of it, seeing the elevation of our summer cigarette trips into something with malice aforethought. Really, we treated businesses, church, the depressed little towns we were from with the same mentality as we entered a mosh pit: flailing, releasing, uncaring. It was just a stream-of-consciousness approach to everything. Everything zen. I don’t think so.
It is possible that we will never be this free again, this lost again, that this summer we are confused and open, self-destructive and searching, rushing forward without needing to know why or where we’re going, throwing ourselves against everything heavy, testing the boundaries, feeling much more than we can say, leaping out into the dark and letting go over and over and over
Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in. The lyrics may mean nothing but they speak a feeling. A machine head is a tool for tuning a guitar; it’s possible, as one fan wrote online, that the lyrics come from Gavin sitting in the studio: tuning up, watching the lights on the amp go from green to red. Rossdale has said, though, that the song’s title is “more allegorical” than literal. Online, others see the song as a fast-car anthem. “Tied to the wheel, / my fingers got to feel.” Some see it as a drug song, about shooting heroin. One fan notes his appreciation for the polyvalent genius of the song: “I think that bush (sic) is awesome for making so many people think about so many different interpretations on the song.” I spin on a whim, I slide to the right / I felt you like electric light.
“Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!” Ginsbgerg wrote in “Howl.” “Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!”
We’re in the car just after the show, still radiant with it, when S’s mom says to me over her shoulder, “Mike, I didn’t know you smoked.” I am stunned, confused, but a talker, and so I tell her that yes, I tried a cigarette, working to understand what she’d seen, our quartet and the unknown others who huddled in the bleachers and passed a joint around. I imagine maybe her comment was because I was the most deceitful, the one who she could most clearly see in that moment was otherwise totally full of shit, lying in all he was. She could have addressed her own son first, or said Z I saw you inhaling something and will tell your father whom I know well from church. Maybe she saw that I was post-grunge—and knew that S was not even that. But she put me on the spot and I lied for all of us, lied as I was growing used to doing, lied and explained and rationalized and later she called my mother and I found myself likewise trying to explain who I was and what I was and how others should interpret me and my mother saw me one way and my father saw me another and I was grounded for maybe the only time I was ever really grounded and most of all my relationship with L was cut off.
In the Arena, in front of me, almost in contact, is a woman, a girl, who can’t be much older than me if at all in wide-wale corduroys and a crop top, basically just a bra. Over the course of what feels like years, I reach out and touch her bare skin, touch my hands against her hips, gradually reach to her soft, smooth stomach. I am invisible amidst these bodies in the dark; I am only thinking of what I can get. When my hands roam up toward her crop top or down to her corduroy waistline, she returns them. We stand and Bush plays “Glycerine,” “It must be your skin / that I’m sinking in.” I hold her and she lets me and we are pressed close together in a packed group beneath a ceiling that rises far above and away from us. When the encore ends and the lights go on, she turns and for a moment we see each other and I am giddy and ashamed and she smiles perhaps benignly or even in condescension and I am ready to tell everyone everything that I’ve just lived through as I move through the parting crowd to find L and Z and S.
We are together again at my grandparents’ house at Thanksgiving, L and I, and we slip away from the rest to the forgotten greenhouse, but we are changed, already grown apart. We will go on, Z to MIT and meth arrests; S will vanish into nowhere; L and I will never be as close again. Bush will release their sophomore effort, Razorblade Suitcase, one year from now, in November 1996, days before my 16th birthday; I’ve never listened to the album. But after our large family’s holiday meal, L and I stand beneath the grimy plastic panes of the greenhouse, moving sideways along the close rows of dried, dead seedlings, trying to do what we used to do but now my uncle will soon find us, sent to keep a vigilant eye.
I can’t say for sure that “Machinehead” is the first song of the encore, but that’s how I remember it. We can’t see from here, we’re barely grown, craning our necks to catch the players onstage, singing along, “For our love, for our fear, for our rise against the years and years and years.”
Michael Sheehan lives and writes in Western New York, where he teaches creative writing at SUNY Fredonia. His work has appeared recently in Electric Literature, Agni, Mississippi Review, Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere.