Weights & Pulleys: Michael A. Van Kerckhove on Cry Cry Cry

Well, I could keep it above
But then it wouldn't be sky anymore
So if I send it to you, you've got to promise to keep it whole.
—R.E.M.

Life is a series of cover songs! There, a grand statement to get us started.  
Or okay, a little more thoughtful: A song often starts as something else. A different riff, a different intention, its past still at least a little bit palpable. Kinda like life. And sometimes, someone comes along and covers it, pulling that past even further along, however drastic or straightforward an interpretation. Sometimes the cover is the first version we know. But often the set sets us off into lists and fits and diagrams and rants until we’re—okay I’m—like, my life is a cover song! With that quite familiar push and pull of hope and terror.
Let’s start this particular life in the woods. In October 1998, in the magical land of Vermont (where in my mind it’s always October). And I’m lost. I don’t mean for it to happen. But it does. I’m five months into my first move, from Michigan, to Chicago, where I’d set out to achieve greatness as a contemporary playwright and find a boyfriend—both with varying degrees of success. I am a year and a half out of college, about to turn twenty-four.
I am resetting after my first big boy big city summer, with its sometimes-oppressive heat and noise and smells. The scorch and screech of standing under crowded downtown El train tracks after work. The anguish of my near full body sunburn post my first liberating Chicago Pride Parade. The cat pee floating up from my garden apartment carpet every time it rains. All I’ve wanted to do is breathe and eat pancakes with real maple syrup. It’s my last day at my Bennington hostel, and a walk around the grounds before hitting the road for Boston sounds nice.
But somehow, I get all turned and twisted around, treading trails I’m not meant to tread before I find myself on no trail at all, trekking through the thickness of trees and weeds and mud and tripping into a stream. From annoyed to nervous to laughing it off to fear. I stop, listen for the traffic on Route 7, and follow the sounds back to civilization. A sort of reset within my reset. I end up about a half mile down the road from where I should be and can only imagine how I appear to passersby as I emerge worse for wear from the woods.
This same week of both the planned and unplanned parts of my adventure, a contemporary folk supergroup releases their one lone album, a covers album. They open it with a song from a rock group who is, indeed, super. The supergroup is Cry Cry Cry, featuring Dar Williams, Lucy Kaplansky, and Richard Shindell, and named in part for the Johnny Cash song as well as the overall melancholy of the project. A melancholy born not only from the songs themselves, but as Richard has said, “it’s also the sound of the voice, the way a singing voice can sound like it’s crying in the simplest of times.” I love that because puberty may have killed my singing voice, but not my ability to cry.
The song is R.E.M.’s “Fall On Me” from their 1986 album Lifes Rich Pageant.

My relationship with R.E.M. began its begin in eighth grade, 1987, when frankly a lot of folks first heard them, when Document’s “The One I Love” hit popular radio stations across the country. In my case, Z95.5 in Detroit on our old Malibu station wagon’s radio, crossing the wooded bridge over the Rouge River into my first family home’s Northwest Detroit neighborhood. I (like frankly a lot of folks did) totally missed the song’s true dark nature, making the unobservant mental leap to more romantic fare like the Mamas and the Papas’ “Dedicated to the One I Love.” Still, I think I knew there was something exciting there, something combustible within my squeakier cleaner pop sensibilities. And though I was too young to experience their early college radio rise, I was the perfect age to embrace their part in the alternative explosion that hinged the last two decades of our twentieth century.
Moments of embrace that include listening to 1988’s Green album in my brand new all-my-own room, after my family moved a mile away to a much-needed larger house. I played the dubbed copy my high school friend responsible for my musical growth into all things not hair metal gave to me before I proudly bought my own. While lying on my half of the bunk bed once stacked above my little brother’s, thankful for this sanctuary. And sure, “Stand” was the hit single, but I’ll always be more of a “You Are the Everything” kind of guy with its opening crickets, mandolin strum, and contemplative yearning in moments like All you hear is time stand still in travel….
Another moment is taking an after-school photo, standing in the middle of my street in all black. Dress pants and button-down collared shirt and coat, rounded sunglasses, arms wide, palms out, the November sun shining from the golf course across the street from our house casting half my face in shadow. My homage to Out of Time Michael Stipe. Taken sometime soon after my brother and I explore their back catalogue like we’d been fans from the beginning. Like we were there in 1980 at their fabled first concert at that abandoned church in Athens, Georgia. Or like we’d snagged tickets to their Little America Tour stop at the Royal Oak Music Theatre in 1984 instead of going to Tigers games on their way to winning the World Series. (Seriously, that would’ve been so rad.)
It's a time when they “brought poetry back to rock and roll” as Dar writes in the Cry Cry Cry liner notes. A time when we first heard “Fall On Me” after the fact, loving it retroactively, by way of their singles collection Eponymous (also the first time I’d heard that beautiful word). Or on Lifes Rich Pageant itself. Feeling the weight of nostalgia pull us into a time and place beyond our grasp. Maybe it’s just recognition of a time and space we’d fit right into. But then if we were older, what of our actual lives would we miss? What tragedies would befall us instead?
And then, there’s buying 1992’s Automatic for the People at Discount Den, Kalamazoo Michigan—the just-off-campus stop for beer and Boone’s Farm, condoms and cassettes—freshman year, listening to it alone in my dorm room on repeat during a thunderstorm. “Try Not to Breathe” shaming every poem I ever scribbled in high school notebooks during class. “Nightswimming” inspiring ache for a past I still had time to grasp with its late-night small town skinny dips, last minute night drives up lone highways for lust fueled liaisons, and curls of conversation and clove cigarette smoke rising from front porches up toward the stars.  

I first heard Dar Williams when a lot, if not as many, folks did. Summer 1996 while home before my fifth and final year of college and working my first of several waiter jobs. Enduring basement sleeping in another new, now suburban, family home, this time with no bedroom of my own. My mattress directly below my Snoop Dog-blasting youngest twin brothers’ room. While driving between double shifts I’d hear Dar’s second album single “As Cool as I Am” in heavy rotation on Windsor-Detroit’s 93.1 The River, a softer alternative to the edgier 89X.
Then, a ride around town with my BFF, basically sister, we listened to the whole CD, and Dar’s tale of mixed-faith Christmas dinner, “The Christians & the Pagans,” completely hooked me with its candy canes all made with red dye number three. Dar, with her mix of quirk and breath, earth and twilight, became my new obsession. A more accessible diva descended from Sarah McLachlan and then Ann & Nancy Wilson, Madonna, Stevie Nicks, and Judy Garland before her. She launched my love of all things folkie Americana, but really I’d say those early R.E.M. days were my gateway.
I bought Dar’s next album End of the Summer at Discount Records in Ann Arbor that next summer after graduation. A sort of suspended reality between recent past and near future. Living back closer to home with friends yet feeling isolated and mourning the loss of five brilliantly explosive years of life—and looking ahead to my big move. Already nostalgic for the recent past of making art and writing at least better poetry; making a million new friends and coming out (most importantly to myself); high on life and other substances; making those “Nightswimming” memories I’d dreamt of when it all began. Excited yet a little fearful about Chicago—a city where I would make beautiful inroads and find writers and theatre and boys. But where also teen angst anxieties and hang-ups and mood swings would metastasize into their grown-up adult versions.
This album offered me moments of uplifting melancholy when Dar asks, Where does the arrow point to? Who invented roses? in “What Do You Hear in These Sounds?” And, Sometimes I see myself fine, sometimes I need a witness, and I like the whole truth, but there are nights I only need forgiveness… in “My Friends.” And, We have to get a move on. It's just that time of year when we push ourselves ahead, in the title track. And it would eventually inspire my romance with the road on my trip east.

End of the Summer was the obvious first choice of CDs to send me off on my autumnal Vermont adventures, my Discman adaptor plugged readily into my rental car’s cassette deck. Onward from the Burlington airport down the winding roads of the Green Mountain National Forest, painted slopes moving toward me. With stops along the way at roadside farmer’s markets and sugar shacks and old cemeteries. Onward to covered bridges and making momentary friends on local restaurant barstools and watching perfect yellow school busses pass by while eating the best goddamn pancakes I’d ever had.
Onward to reading poetry under an old maple tree, visiting Robert Frost’s grave and marveling at his epitaph, I had a lover’s quarrel with the world. Hoping for a life where I could say that in the end, if not steal it for my own headstone. Onward to holding a rock above a wooded stream and wishing for peace, love, and happiness stuff (so basically that boyfriend) before tossing it into the water and fearing none of it would come true as the rock ricocheted off a surrounding boulder before splashing to its destiny.
Onward to learning about the death of Matthew Shepard from the nightly news on my hostel’s common room TV set that I’d tried to avoid, because nature and peace. I am thankful I wasn’t left in the dark, though a darkness incomparable to the one Matthew had slipped into, left to die beneath that big Wyoming sky, his crying maybe sounding like singing to anything that could hear him.
Then onward to a lunch hour vigil for Matthew in Brattleboro mere hours after I emerged from the woods and changed out of my muddy jeans. Another unplanned part of the trip. One that didn’t have to happen. But it did, and in the end it gave us some positives that only tragedies can bring like awareness and legislation if not an end to the hate. And I admitted to being from out-of-town, but they welcomed me anyway and gave me a sign to hold: Yes, we are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers. Resist hate. And I said a prayer of sorts for Matthew and for all the boys in Chicago’s Boystown: friends and strangers and crushes and lovers. Thinking how not long ago I was a young gay man in a college town with plenty of surrounding emptiness.

“Fall On Me” is a song ultimately about a general oppression. But it’s a song that started as something else having first appeared live in shows supporting R.E.M.’s previous Fables of the Reconstruction album. With each performance’s ever-changing lyrics and bridge, “Fall On Me” was first about acid rain. But then oppression took over in the recording studio, sending the rain to the beautiful countermelody (which may be the best part of the song) led by bassist Mike Mills in the original and Lucy in the cover. The original intent lingers reminding itself and us where it came from no matter how much it’s evolved. Like how our own past lives remain with us, even implore us to keep whole what it gives us, tumbling through our own evolutions from tastes and interests and personal discoveries to circumstances both within and beyond our control.
It makes sense to me now—these twenty-some years later, back in Chicago after twice leaving and twice returning—that Cry Cry Cry released their album in the middle of all this. Sure, it makes sense in that 90s folk scene kind of way. But also, maybe there was something in the atmosphere—the sky if you will. They needed it, and somehow knew some of us did too.  Dar and R.E.M. may have been my hook, but oh how the arrangements and harmonies in the familiar “Fall On Me” gracefully tumble into stories and music that still hold power.
Like Richard’s lead on James Keelaghan’s appropriately elemental Young Men and Fire inspired “Cold Missouri Waters.” And Lucy’s lead on Julie Miller’s “By Way of Sorrow,” a song I’d nearly forgotten about as I listen to the album again in full after it’s been a while. Yet I still know every word and fiddle line and remember how much I’d clung to the song back then as I navigated through all life’s goop to discover the destiny meant to find me all these years. Where I eventually found my boyfriend, my husband.
But that life is over now. And this is where I fully return to the grand statement I started this with. This resulting third move to Chicago, now in its fourth year, has been a sort of cover version of that first. With its familiar push and pull of hope and terror building on the original, sometimes drastic and sometimes straightforward, informed and influenced by the years in between to make my older and in-theory wiser self’s version all its own. Reminding me how far I’ve come and how much I’m still the same in those messy ways we can’t always shake. Of our multitudes and foundations, our ridiculously beautiful dichotomies and orderly logical companions.

Michael A. Van Kerckhove has words in Belt, Eclectica, Entropy, FreezeRay Poetry, Midwestern Gothic, and Sledgehammer, among other publications. He is active in Chicago's vibrant live lit community and has told stories in shows across the city including Essay Fiesta, Is This a Thing?, Mortified, OUTSpoken, Pour One Out, Story Sessions, and You're Being Ridiculous, among others. Follow him on Twitter @mvankerckhove and all the other places at linktr.ee/mavankerckhove.