The Only True Currency
...or, crate digging in Troy, NY.
At the start of Almost Famous, William Miller stumbles into a record-lined room to meet Lester Bangs (RIP Philip Seymour Hoffman) in search of the answers to writing about music. Bangs is, like any good critic, skeptical. Rock music’s dead, he says with the vitriol of a scorned lover. But even he can’t stay away.
Miller’s starry-eyed youth leads him right into the fire and Bangs’ jaded wisdom keeps him on the outskirts. Neither is a particularly sustainable way to live. Yet both are circling around the same thing: that music is something worth losing your whole life to. It’s just about how you’re going to do it. Are you going to find yourself in the throes of the road or distant enough that the dust’s all you feel against your skin?
I’m dancing around the topic, which is that the story of becoming a critic, and ostensibly Almost Famous, was never really about the craft of writing, or mentorship, or wanting to write book reports well into middle age. It is, instead, about loving something so much you’ll hold it and hate it and let it go and then live it all over again through the ink of your pen, begging to hear those melodies just one more time.
Lost in the record crates, fingers staining the plastic packaging, you once again find an album that shows you the purpose of your whole life. You know the things you love are always just behind you. Might as well start digging.
It’s early December in Troy, New York, and I’m here on a trip to profile a performance artist who is in-residence at Rensselaer. The weekend coordinator picks me up in a minivan and we load my plum purple luggage into the trunk. She and I chat, a little hesitant — I am a journalist, after all! We discuss the weather and Rensselaer and Georgia and her kids and how I really like spending time in Troy even though I’m such a city slicker. She hands me a folder full of ideas for my weekend and points out a cool record store I should check out. “A lot of visitors like it there,” she assures me. “They have a good selection.” I nod and let her know I’ll go, though I remain uncertain of the potential of finding what I’m looking for on those shelves.
The day is packed with interviews and rehearsals and I don’t have a free moment until the evening. By that point, everything’s pretty much closed, including the record shop. Perfect, I think. I don’t have to think about music anymore. I can shut my brain off for the day. So I go to one of the local Irish pubs and get a turkey sandwich. Being a journalist is really easy if you like sandwiches because you can get one anywhere in the United States and it’s probably not the worst thing you’ve eaten in your life. It might even be delicious. The places in which you find sandwiches are also the places in which you’ll meet the most interesting locals (in Troy, that means grad students, professors, and random middle-aged couples, but I was on my loner vibe that night). Remember: The story is not what it seems. Is that what they told you in J School?
Anyway, I’m kidding myself about not thinking about music because the second I leave the pub I walk down to the Hudson River with my headphones pulled taut over my pale pink slouchy beanie. I put on Cindy Lee. I peer past the water and inhale, my exhale a cloud of white vapor disintegrating around me. The moonlight ripples against the water, dangerously slow, in rhythm with the pulse of jangling guitars.
Oh, right, I think to myself. It’s music knocking on my door again.
The most real people in Almost Famous are Bangs, who approaches his life’s work with the disdain only a true lover can have, and the Band-Aids, who play the opposite role by wearing their love unashamedly on their sleeve. Yes, the Band-Aids are groupies. Yes, they are sleeping with the band. Yes, they are objectified and used and underage and morals are extremely gray. Yes, the manic pixie dream girl trope is back in a huge way. What do you know: It’s a film about the ‘70s written in the early ‘00s.
What the Band-Aids really are is the engine.
Many people have written about the all-consuming nature of fandom, or being a fan. The story goes a bit like this: There are scores of people who will write the most unbelievable things you have read with your eyes in the name of the bands they love. (And some pure genius, like a commenter on r/popheads who said Addison Rae “just released the newer testament”). What can I say that hasn’t been said already? It all comes down to this: Virginia isn’t the only place for lovers.
The Band-Aids could be considered an early version of superfans, but I think, more importantly, they exist as an oppositional force to a Writer, who is portrayed as the antagonist sent to break some hearts. Get the story and tell it RIGHT, says the editor, but can you make me look good, and the artist I love? asks the Band-Aid.
The truest truth is this: to write about something, anything, you have to believe in it, have hope for it, want it to live forever on the page. When you love something you are also open to hating it, which, yes, is love gone sour. Music can be that frustrating! Know the things that are worthwhile always return.
My Friday’s empty and the sun’s out, so despite the seventeen Fahrenheit weather I go outside and get myself a hot tea and an almond croissant from two local spots recommended to me. My barista at the second has stunning red nails. She tells me she got them for the holidays, which I realize are just around the corner. That would explain why santas sit untouched in antique store windows and twinkling string lights flicker on eaves. She scribbles down the name of the gel polish so I can have it too. “But get them done when you’re back in the city,” she says with a laugh. Everyone in Troy assumes I want to be back in New York City because it’s so much better but I really only want to be back there so I can go to a show whenever I want.
Naturally, the next stop is the record shop: Sound House Records. I caved! There, I find a community of fellow experimental music lovers. They’re talking about how excited they are to see Charles Curtis play Éliane Radigue next weekend. The first record I find on the shelves is Terry Jennings’ Piece for Cello and Saxophone (coincidentally performed by Curtis). I hide my identity because I want to be a music lover, not a Writer. Instead, let me get lost with you in the sound of an unbroken wolf tone echoing from a centuries old cello. Let me laugh with you as you talk about setting up a stage and booking fees and how much you really love that drone music.
I find hit after hit there. Ten mint condition Alice Coltrane records. Free jazz albums I’d never heard of. Some blissed out noise. I wish I had room in my suitcase but thank god for my phone’s Notes App. I have to write it down somewhere. I don’t want to forget.
In the end, everyone in Almost Famous goes their own way, leaving the music life in the dust or at least attempting secure attachment this time around. I’d also like to believe love doesn’t have to be so fatalistic. Written in the stars but make it pleasant, sweet, golden, lasting.
It would be so nice.
But oh how amazing it feels to lose myself completely to a really good riff!
Love this essay (and 'Almost Famous'). There's a sense of homecoming in finding a shop like Sound House. The farther one is from 'the action,' the more precious a place like that is.