Ryan Boudinot - Why I Like Rock

About Ryan Boudinot

Ryan Boudinot is the author of "The Littlest Hitler," a collection of short stories. His work has appeared in McSweeney's, Nerve, BlackBook, Monkeybicycle, Hobart, "Stumbling and Raging: More Politically Inspired Fiction" and "Best American Nonrequired Reading." He lives in Seattle.

Ryan wrote the following piece for "Telling Childhood" at Richard Hugo House on Oct. 14, 2006.

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Why I Like Rock
By Ryan Boudinot

When I was eight years old I had this horrible babysitter who tickled me to the point of not being able to breathe, locked me outside of the house in my pajamas in the snow, and pelted me with ice cubes. But I admired her taste in music. It was 1980, and Kay would bring over stacks of LPs-Cheap Trick, Sammy Hagar, Rick Springfield. She introduced me to one of the most formative albums of my life, Billy Joel's "Glass Houses." The cover depicts Joel, wearing a leather jacket, jeans, and boots, poised to toss a rock through the bay window of a house I'm guessing must have been somewhere on Long Island. Flip the cover over and there's a poofy-haired, sleepy-looking Joel framed by the jagged result of his vandalism.

Predictably, the album opens with the sound of shattering glass, then a confidently strummed chord and the snotty riff of "You May Be Right." The first line, "Friday night I crashed your party," seemed to explain the scene implied by the album art. Holy cow! He went to a party and threw a rock through the window! The song proceeded to suggest that Joel's party-crashing was acceptable-even admirable-behavior to the person to whom he was singing. I pored over the lyrics to this and all the other songs, thoughtfully scrawled on the inner sleeve. Joel's was a universe of electric chairs, dirty jokes, motorcycles, late night phone calls, and beguiling women who laughed at him. There was much I did not understand, and much that my parents refused to explain. But one thing I understood implicitly: I would henceforth turn up my nose at Kenny Rogers, Dolly Parton, and Willie Nelson. I was a rock and roll fan.

"Glass Houses" yielded several hits, of which "It's Still Rock and Roll to Me" and the languid "Don't Ask Me Why" are probably the most embedded in AM radio. "It's Still Rock and Roll to Me" is the more urbane cousin to Bob Seger's "Old Time Rock and Roll." It's one of the breed of rock songs about rock music itself, like the Velvet Underground's "Rock and Roll" or Led Zeppelin's "Rock and Roll." It simultaneously mocks passing fads and pulls them together into a unified understanding of the larger scheme of rock history: "Hot funk / cool punk / even if it's old junk / It's still rock 'n roll to me" The same year that Brian Johnson of AC/DC sang tautologically that "rock and roll is just... rock and roll," Joel embraced the fickle and trendy nature of 20th century pop music and declared its riven genres cut from the same cloth. Ironically, it was this song that asks us to let go of our musical prejudices that helped me cement mine.

Decades later, listening to MP3s of "Glass Houses" that I downloaded with Kazaa (note to the famously litigious Mr. Joel: I own it on vinyl already, and I just bought the remastered CD), it sounds like quintessential New York pop; I can place it within a frame of reference somewhere between Simon and Garfunkel and The Strokes. But when I was eight, growing up in the agricultural Skagit Valley in Washington state, the experiences of being horny, lonely and cool in Manhattan were foreign to me. Later I would understand at least two of those things. When Billy Joel's lyrics perplexed me, I made up meanings of my own. In "You May Be Right," there's this line about being so crazy he "walked through Bedford-Stuy alone." I didn't know that Bedford-Stuy was a dangerous neighborhood, or that it was even a neighborhood at all. A "sty" to me was the place behind our sheds where we housed four pigs. And everyone knew that pigs, appearances to the contrary, could be very dangerous and had been known to eat children. It must have been that this "Bedford" was a particularly mean pig, and that Billy Joel had walked through his sty alone. He was crazy!

I can trace the genealogy of my music taste back to sides A and B of that long player: From "Glass Houses" to Devo, Duran Duran, ZZ Top, Kiss, Van Halen, Metallica, the Sex Pistols, Camper Van Beethoven, Jane's Addiction, Nirvana, Fugazi, Pavement, Sonic Youth, Ween, The Flaming Lips, The White Stripes. "Closer to the Borderline," the heaviest song on the album, fluffed me for a later full-on metal assault. The snippet of televised national anthem that begins "Sleeping with the Television On" is on a distant point of a continuum that includes the looping samples in Public Enemy's "It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back." When I come upon We Are Scientists or The Killers in a magazine, I see the artfully disheveled band assembled on "Glass Houses'" inner sleeve. One of the guys' names was Vito, if memory serves. There was the mean-looking guy with the beard and loose tie, and then there was the dude who had the mind-blowingly whacked fashion sense to wear a wristwatch on his ankle. And if I got tired looking at the guys in the band, I'd flip the album over and look at Joel, who appeared identical to how I felt after taking my asthma medication.

After "Glass Houses," I excitedly turned to Joel's back catalog and picked up "Turnstiles," but I was profoundly disappointed. Where "Glass Houses" had a certain downtown friction to it, "Turnstiles" struck me as too full of balladry and sophisticated urbanite bullshit. Who were those pretentious-looking people on the cover? "Say Goodbye to Hollywood" scandalized me as a sappy, traitorous act.

Disgustedly, I abandoned Billy Joel's music, and made for parts more Satanic, British or gay. I still occasionally glanced over my shoulder to see what Billy Joel was doing. "The Nylon Curtain" was sort of tolerable with "Pressure," and I liked that "Allentown" song quite a bit. There was that Russian-themed thing he did that didn't make much sense to me. I considered his doo-wop period, culminating in "Uptown Girl" and "Longest Time" outright aural rape. I discovered pre"Glass Houses" "Piano Man" and sort of liked it, sort of hated myself for liking it. Once in awhile I'd hear of a legal dispute he was involved in, and how could one miss his marriage to Christie Brinkley? In recent years I understand he went on tour with Elton John, checked himself into rehab, and complained about how hard it is to get a date in the Hamptons. Can an Oscar-nominated song to a Disney animated feature be far behind?

The intensity of my pleasure listening to "Glass Houses" was matched only by the disdain I heaped upon all bands that did not wear codpieces in years to come. Failing to heed the urgings of "It's Still Rock and Roll to Me," I entered the rock and roll subgenre battles with the same vehemence I reserved for my hatred of country music. You would never have caught me admitting to a piano man jones when I tacked to my wall a poster of Gene Simmons performing what can only be described as cunnilingus on a bass guitar in the shape of a battle-axe. My parents tolerated my music taste and let me listen to whatever I wanted to, even if it included references to drinking, pedophilia, driving above the speed limit and giving the dark lord of the underworld his due. Throughout adolescence, music was my most engaging and trusted source of information about sexuality. While the coy references to phone sex on "Glass Houses" went completely under my radar, I instinctively understood where to insert the word "fuck" in Quiet Riot's equation, "Girls, rock your boys."

It was during that brief period in history when Quiet Riot and Twisted Sister seemed twin pillars of musical relevance that I had a music teacher who changed my ideas about sexuality and music forever. I'll call him Mr. P. He taught music at my elementary school for no longer than a couple months, and convinced me to pick up the drums in fifth grade. I don't remember learning much music theory in his classes, but I did learn what bestiality meant.

Mr. P. asked that we bring in music that we liked, so that we could listen to it and analyze it together. One girl brought the Go-Go's "Vacation." Another girl brought Kenny Rogers' "The Gambler." According to Mr. P., "Vacation" was about having fun, and "The Gambler" was about gambling. I was first among the boys who brought in our music, and my selection was Def Leppard's "Rock of Ages." The song starts with a passage of mysteriously spoken gibberish. Mr. P. explained that he had done some research on the spoken word segment, and it appeared that the singer was speaking German that roughly translated to "Faith in the underworld around the globe." The class stiffened. Would we get in trouble for exposing the class to Satanic music? No, we would not. Mr. P explained that much popular music described things that were socially unacceptable to the mainstream, including the following terms he wrote on the blackboard:

Heterosexuality
Homosexuality
Bisexuality
Satanism
Incest
Bestiality
Necrophilia
Sadism/Masochism (SM)
Bondage/Domination (B&D)

Mr. P. spent the remainder of the class period explaining what each of these terms meant. Some of his explanations remain lodged in my memory. "Sadism is when you like to inflict pain on other people. Masochism is when you like to receive pain." Or, "You can see examples of bestiality on album covers, for instance when a naked woman is shown on horseback."

Of course after we all went home and told our parents what we'd learned in music class that day, it wasn't long before Mr. P. was fired. Since state law dictated that teachers' acts of moral turpitude had to be observed firsthand by school administration to be considered cause for termination, our principal, Mr. W., sat in on the following week's class. It was a creepy affair, with Mr. P. overenthusiastically discussing the difference between an eighth and a quarter note. No bondage. The following week, Mr. W. planted a tape recorder in a closet in the music room and recorded a class in which Mr. P. explained precisely what the Scorpions meant when they sang "Let me shoot my heat into your body." He was fired soon thereafter.

It baffles me to contemplate how Mr. P. thought lesbian sex was an appropriate discussion topic for a class of kids who had failed to master the ukulele. His pedagogical approach strikes me now as undeniably creepy and felonious, and if I had been the parent of one of his students, I would have been tempted to drive to his house and throttle the guy. But at the time it was as though the Rosetta Stone of rock music had been revealed. I would be lying if I didn't acknowledge the transgressive thrill of being exposed to a sexual paradigm beyond moms-and-dads-make-babies-because-they-love-each-other. Here was an adult laying down the most guarded cards of the grown-up world, providing a key to the encrypted innuendoes of hair bands. The debauched world of '80s glam metal was not only foreign to me, but foreign to any adult I knew. Somewhere, presumably, there were people who listened to heavy metal as they engaged in group sex and drank Jack Daniel's by the bathtub full, but such places were distant from Skagit Valley. My experiences-reading science fiction novels, feeding the livestock, riding my bike-seemed as far from the milieu in which my musical heroes indulged and to which I aspired as one could get. It appeared the quickest way to cross the expanse between rock star fantasy and my reality was to start making music.

The only Christmas present I ever received that caused me to hyperventilate was a used drum set that had belonged to a woman whose son played in a Nuggets-era garage band. The band's name, "Fiji," was written on the kick drum head alongside a cartoon depiction of a cave man. I quickly decided that this was uncool, and turned the bass drum around so the mallet hit the caveman in the face. My drum teacher was this aged Scandinavian fusion of bebop and polka named George Janis. In addition to drums he taught accordion, guitar and bass in a room upstairs from a gymnastics studio. Whenever one of his students appeared in the newspaper he would clip the article and duct tape it to the wall, with a whole strip for each side. I could always tell if he was in his studio by whether the stairwell leading up to it smelled of his pomade. He sold Herbal Life products and would occasionally pause in the middle of a lesson to explain the benefits of a daily multivitamin. Drums were a side instrument for him; he was a squeezebox man, with which he accompanied me on numbers that all ended with either the word "Pop" or "Rock." There was "Sugar Plum Rock" "Soda Pop Pop," "Boogie Rock," and many other tunes courtesy of the Hal Leonard music publishing empire. They were sort of like alternate reality versions of songs you'd hear on a golden oldies station, classic songs stripped of individuality and boiled down to their common time essence.

Mr. Janis' big thing was counting. I was required to count aloud during every song, which was a problem because I tended to space out and get lost in the music. Whenever he caught me not counting he slammed a pair of black lacquered drum sticks into the music stand, screaming the virtues of keeping time in a jarring, exasperated argot that I later understood to be bastardized jazz-speak. "Damn it, man! You're never going to get down with the beat until you count, dig!"

After two years of playing grange halls and the occasional float parade, I decided to put an end to my drumming career and sold my kit to the first person who answered my ad. This remains my life's greatest regret. I also kick myself for not trading my drums for one of Mr. Janis's Les Paul's, which I had briefly considered until my father pointed out that Les Paul was a country musician. Years later in grad school I met a fellow student who played drums for a prominent rock band of the early '90s. After describing my old Ludwig kit to him, he visibly paled when I revealed I had parted with it for $100, which I had proceeded to spend on Kiss posters and the "Miami Vice" soundtrack. At the time, guitar-more specifically, a neon green BC Rich Warlock with Floyd Rose Tremolo-seemed the ideal instrument. Compelled by the lamest of reasons (Michael J. Fox's rousing performance of "Johnny B Goode" in "Back to the Future") I saved the money I earned as head archery instructor at YMCA day camp and invested in a Yamaha guitar and a wimpy "practice" amp that produced a psychological effect akin to having one's penis laughed at.

Around this time, 1988, my freshman year of high school, metal began to find itself outclassed by punk. Teased-hair posturing began to stink of inauthenticity, of calculatedness. Punk quickly rushed to fill the vacuum. Punk lacked pretense, or at least lacked the kind of pretense my friends and I had learned to identify and scorn. I peppered the two guys at my high school who had mohawks with questions and received appropriate musical syllabi. The Butthole Surfers occupied an exalted place in the canon, as did X, Dirty Rotten Imbeciles, Dead Milkmen, Black Flag and Suicidal Tendencies. I think more than a few reformed metal heads in the Pacific Northwest felt as though the music media had ripped us off as we discovered the great punk bands of the '70s, as if true, real and vital music had been purposely hidden from us under shit piles of glam metal and synth pop. Punk's entirely democratic philosophy that anyone can participate (even-and especially-if you suck) became embedded in our psyches and we formed bands of our own.

For a time, the most notable band in my home town was Cranial Decomposition. They lived across the street from the high school in a dilapidated mansion. No joke, it even had a secret passageway. Cranial, as they were known, had defiled the place to a glorious state of decay, with bags of trash cluttering the kitchen, ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts, walls decorated with Hustler magazine pictorials and a basement practice space where countless candles had dripped wax all over the floor. These guys were scary. The lead singer, Alex DeBlasio, had graduated years before, and presided over the affairs of the Cranial house, enforcing a strict no-drinking/no-drugs policy. (In summary-porn and cigarettes: okay. Alcohol and pot: not okay.) The other guys in the band included Aaron Lamont, a self-proclaimed communist who later went on to front an actually not racist band called Aaron Nation. Bob and Dan Newman were twin brothers who played guitar and drums respectively and featured impressive mustaches for guys who were 16. On the pretense of writing an article about the band for the school paper, I visited them one night and sat in on their practice. I wanted to capture the sights, the sounds, the smells of a hard working rock band on the road. Barring their tendency toward scatological humor, they were actually really fucking good.

Mind blown by Cranial Decomposition, I formed my own band, lamely called 2AM, a name cribbed from a literary magazine that had rejected some of my shitty poetry. We were Matt Seward on drums, Mark Kemble singing, Tod Roe on bass and me on guitar. Every day after school we convened at either Matt's or Mark's house and played the songs I wrote. Our subject matter ranged from critiques of Bush 1's foreign policy to what little I understood about the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche ("God is dead"). Our songs were also about getting one's fork stuck in a toaster and drinking lots of coffee. Our signature song, our set closer, was about flag burning (we approved of it). 2AM never achieved a level of success beyond being able to brag about the bands we opened for-bands who themselves bragged about opening for bands that were signed by Sub Pop-but one time the cops shut down our practice, and that was pretty cool.

Mount Vernon, Washington was one of the small stops on the itinerary of the alternative music bands who toured the country relentlessly throughout the '80s and '90s, bands who managed to seed mainstream culture to the point of embracing grunge. Washington D.C. bands like Nation of Ulysses and Scream, drawn to Olympia's scene, stopped by on their way between Seattle and Vancouver and introduced the sons and daughters of farmers and refinery workers to the ethos of Dischord Records. Olympia bands filled the grange halls of Skagit Valley with avant weirdness and tribal, urgent minimalism. I gathered all my Kiss tapes in a box and presented them to a clerk at a hip music store in Anacortes who turned out to be a member of the seminal Beat Happening. "I want to trade these tapes for grunge rock," I literally said, and exited the store loaded with seven inches by bands like Dickless, Gas Huffer, Mudhoney and Skin Yard.

When you grow up in Washington state you form a sort of unshakable self-loathing that you will neither be as with-it as a New Yorker nor as attractive as a Los Angelino. But upon hearing Mudhoney's "Flat Out Fucked" I felt the pride of recognizing something of potential national significance welling up in my backyard. The music we were digging didn't come down to us through the NY/LA cultural umbilical cord. That these sounds coincided with my own adolescent awareness of the rank hypocrisies of the adult world struck me as fortuitous and rife with cosmic significance.

You know the official version. This brief thrill of creative control quickly gave way to national obsession, and not even 10 years later the same seven inches and fanzines I owned in 1992 were enshrined in the Frank Gehry-designed Experience Music Project museum for visitors to look at after they've come down from the Space Needle. Walking through the place listening to the audio tour narrated by Mudhoney's Mark Arm is like running into that guy with whom you used to jam in the dorms but now refers to the company he toils for as "we."

But in July 1990, grunge was still a seedling, a secret. Somehow around this time 2AM got invited to play at my hometown's centennial celebration. The organizers wanted to book bands that represented a cultural cross-section of the community, and we fit into the "teenagers" category. The weather cooperated perfectly, and a flatbed trailer decorated with plants, balloons and red, white and blue bunting served as the stage. First up was The Windjammers, a band of a dozen senior citizens from one of the local retirement communities who all played harmonicas. Next was a lively ragtime band called Earl Angevine and the Riverboat Ramblers. When we started loading our equipment onto the stage, the event's organizer-a woman whose name I can't remember, I'll call her Ms. Q.- seemed to understand the mistake she had made. When she asked if we could perhaps cut our set short owing to the fact it didn't seem that there were too many young people in attendance, I replied to her over the PA system, informing her that we had prepared a half-hour set and that's what we were going to play. In a quick huddle, we decided to play all our songs with no pauses in between. We opened with "Burn the Flag," whose first verse describes a fictional scenario about being captured and tortured by the FBI (at the time a ridiculous notion). The PA system was the best we had ever played with, and broadcast our opinions on matters of politics and food preparation to everyone who had convened to celebrate a hundred years of history. At one point we chanted "George Bush is raping you!" somewhere around 50 times. While our friends pumped their fists, the adults took several hundred steps back. I played a solo lying on my back. We destroyed the drum set. Later we learned that Ms. Q. had asked the mayor for permission to pull the plug, but he had apparently demurred, informing her (inaccurately) that we were of voting age.

2AM didn't last much longer than that. I arrived at The Evergreen State College in Olympia and quickly immersed myself in the renaissance that had wrought Nirvana. One weekend I saw 14 local bands, the majority mind-blowing, none of them irredeemably bad. Finding other musicians to play with was never a problem, and within the first quarter I formed a band called Mugwump, named after the "Naked Lunch" jizz monsters. This time I attempted to sing, making the unfortunate choice to try to sing like Kurt Cobain. I was a wincingly pathetic singer, but remained convinced I made up for it with my calculatedly arty lyrics. What the band lacked in vocals we made up for in power. Our sound was somewhere between the first Smashing Pumpkins album and Slint's "Spiderland," with less talented guitarists. Eric Wohlford, our bassist, leveled accusations of pretentiousness at any riff that suggested corporate rock. Our drummer, Jesse Fox (real name), was so physically ripped and strong that he once put his fist through a plastic milk crate just because he could. Nate Manny and I both played guitar and our primary rule was no soloing whatsoever, justifying this stance on artistically democratic grounds, but actually covering up the fact that neither of us could solo. We practiced in a series of storage units and held it together for about three years before we parted ways for the usual artistic and girlfriend reasons. I enjoyed a brief stint as a drummer for a band that dressed as theme popes (i.e. Evil Pope, Jiffy Pope, Potpourri. I was Pimp Pope, with leopard print vestments). Then I retreated into a series of rooms to write an unpublishable novel and kill my rock star dreams forever.

If the music in hell is provided, as Gary Larson suggests, by banjo players, purgatory is populated by middle-aged men rocking out. You know the ones-they probably have goatees, they can afford the most baroque rack-mounted guitar effects systems, they wear untucked Hawaiian shirts and get together with other guys like themselves to argue the merits of King Crimson bootlegs. The ones who work in music stores stand behind glass cases filled with wah-wah pedals, nylon picks and guitar tuners, passing silent judgment on the teenage dudes who blow their parents' money on gear for their own bands. Right now, somewhere, there is a band of 50-somethings practicing "Owner of the Lonely Hearts" or "Rhiannon" or "Intergalactic Overdrive" in a garage smelling of motor oil and kitty litter. When I was still playing music regularly, I vowed never to become one of these guys, someone who unironically refers to his guitar as an "axe." The concept of a cover band with a standing gig at the neighborhood bar was repugnant to me. The only valid musical pursuits involved constant experimentation and growth, an omnivorous gathering and transformation of influences into something unmistakably one's own. That's why I always sort of discounted Elvis-he didn't write his own songs. Any music that smacked of commercial calculation, triteness, false sincerity, bandwagon riding or blatant mass appeal was to be shunned. It has taken me awhile to understand how big a dick I have been about music.

I have begun to dislike the term "guilty pleasure" when used in reference to music, or to any book, movie, TV show or other media product for that matter. Feeling guilty or embarrassed in the company of others about your taste in music is in effect a method of self-loathing, an emotion antithetical to the joyful, liberating, ass-moving MO of music. At some point I stopped being afraid to own up to particular songs or bands that make me happy. Why should anyone feel compelled to apologize for what they like to put on the stereo?

I resist ending this piece by saying, "It's still rock and roll to me," as it sends off alarms on my essay-writing cheese-o-meter, but that's really the sentiment I want to loop back around to. Which brings me in a somewhat contrived manner back to Billy Joel. Awhile back I opened the New York Times arts section to find a picture of him as an old guy, playing a piano in Times Square. He was unrecognizable from the poseur thug he portrayed on the cover of "Glass Houses." And yet there he was, the piano man, now stocky, shorn to disguise lost hair, surrounded by neon, his songs enshrined in Twyla Tharp's dance show "Movin' Out." Apparently he won a Tony for best orchestration. It made me happy to see an artist who provided me so much pleasure as a kid in a living room playing air guitar getting some recognition. Billy Joel is long past cool, but then so am I. Now whenever one of his songs pops up on my iPod, I let myself indulge in the adult emotion I used to regard with disdain-nostalgia-and vaguely wonder if I'm in danger of being sued.