Roxy Music

I came to deeply love the first side of Flesh + Blood (not surprisingly) and, even though it’s all smooth and of a piece, I particularly like the second track, Oh Yeah. It’s got a beautiful melody and a wondrous arrangement, and I love the soaring, wanting arc of the chorus and the tasteful, delicate guitar figures. It’s a classic love song and I suddenly understood love songs in a whole new way. All that schmaltzy sentimentality that was so unbearable most of the time became profoundly personal and moving to a young man in love.

A curious feature of Oh Yeah is that it is about itself. It isn’t the first or the last self-referential song (Elton John’s weary chestnut Your Song (beat to death in Moulin Rouge) comes to mind, as does the Yacht’s Suffice to Say and Carly Simon’s irritatingly hooky You’re So Vain (sung, rumor has it, to Warren Beatty)), but it is one of the better ones. Bryan Ferry sings about a song called Oh Yeah, a love song that he falls in love with while he falls in love with his girl, making it “their song”, and he heartbreak of hearing it again after they broke up. It couldn’t have been more personal if I wrote it myself.

Things got a little strained between Tina an I as graduation approached. I was tiring of her black moods and her irritating friend Robin who stoked them, she was no doubt tiring of me. In spite of an evening indiscretion with somebody else’s lips (“it’s all I can do to keep waiting for you”), I still loved her deeply and faithfully, and we were both sad that soon I’d graduate and she’d go back home and we would, in all likelihood, be forced to abandon our relationship after trying to keep it on long-distance life-support for a couple of months.

Which is precisely what happened.

I saw her a couple of times over the summer. She stayed for a few days after graduation and my mom, mindful of our need for privacy, set up a tent in the backyard for us to camp in. It was a great few days without the pressures of school. We could pretend we were in the promised land of the Beach Boys’ Wouldn’t It Be Nice. We drove to the movies, we went to dinner, we wrestled in our sleeping bags, but eventually she had to go back home. She spent much of the time at a summer home in a small community on a lake in Ohio, and I drove down to visit her for a few days. She was staying there with her father, who did his best to be imposing and to forbid inappropriate intimacy, but I was unimpressed and would sneak into her room at night. Tina redoubled her efforts with me those last couple of days, being more passionate than ever before, but it was to no avail, I could not respond. This made me completely crazy and I stormed around the last day, all the unshed passion boiling inside of me, dark clouds roiling in my head. Right before I left, she found a flirty postcard from another woman that I had foolishly been using as a bookmark, and that was pretty much the end of us. We tried to keep it going a bit while I was at the U of C, but eventually she stopped writing and so did I and we drifted apart and disappeared, like smoke in the night sky.

All told, it was a bad summer. I hated my job, I desperately missed my friends, and I felt entirely unwelcome in my own home. For all the wailing and gnashing of teeth my mom did before I moved into the dorm, she sure adjusted quickly, and was none too pleased to see me take up residency again. And I was entirely too used to taking care of myself to be able to meld seamlessly back into the house. She and Frank, my step-father-to-be (my QD, or Quasi-Dad) were having a great time getting to know Nick and Mary-Kay, two neighbors, and conspicuously doing things as a foursome, pointedly leaving me out of plans and games. My old neighborhood friends were two years removed from day-to-day intimacy, so I couldn’t really deal with them any more. I was utterly, profoundly lonely.

One day, the tension became unbearable. We were sitting in the back yard having brunch with our neighbors and I must’ve said something snide because my mom kicked me under the table. Using the oldest, snottiest trick in the book, I barked back at her “Ow! What’d you kick me for?” That, predictably, brought on the icy stare of death, which my mom used to use as her ultimate weapon to silence me. Unfortunately for her, it no longer had any power over me, but I got the message and peevishly got up and went inside. I could hear them chuckling and sighing through the open window, clucking their tongues patronizingly at the trial and tribulations of having a teenager around, so I walked over to the piano, picked up the set of keys that were sitting on it (that was the primary function of our piano), walked outside, got in the new car, slammed the door, and drove off.

I didn’t know where I was going, I just knew I had to get the fuck out of there. I turned the car towards Traverse City, our local metropolis, cranked the tunes, and sped off down the twisty, twenty-mile road. My first stop was the bank, where one of the tellers recognized me and asked how my dancing was going. I mumbled fine, knowing I had just put it behind me for good, irritated that I couldn’t escape it, and walked to Midnight Records to find some solace among the racks of records. The new (and, as it would turn out, last) Roxy Music album had just been released. Called Avalon, it capped off their career gloriously. Filled with songs of love and loss, the album is so beautifully written and so captivatingly produced and so tastefully played all the way through that it quickly became one of my all-time favorites. Or it would, anyway, as soon as I could get it home and put it on the stereo. But I wasn’t about to do that, not yet. Being in Traverse City wasn’t helping, there were far too many reminders of what I had just lost and who I was no more, so I bought Avalon, got back into the car and drove north. I drove until I didn’t know where I was and nobody knew who I was. I spent the day sitting in a park, trying to verbalize my feelings into a letter, throwing out page after page of meaningless scrawl. Eventually, the weight of the inevitable crashed down, and I reluctantly got in the car and drove back home to face the music.

Towards the end of that summer, right before I went off to spend my soul-crushing year at the University of Chicago, I went to the movies by myself. It had been a difficult summer and I was nervous about the upcoming academic year. I was uncomfortable in our house, haunting it like a ghost that doesn’t know he’s dead yet, and I was lonely, missing all my good friends that were now irretrievably scattered all over the globe. And I missed Tina. Even though we were still trying, I knew in my heart of hearts that it was over. I don’t remember what the film was, but when it was over, I got back into my car, put a tape in the player, and drove home. Halfway home (I swear this is true), Oh Yeah came on. Even though I knew the song by heart, I really heard the lyrics for the first time. I was astonished. During the guitar solo, I felt tears prickling my eyes, and when Bryan Ferry launched into the final heartbreaking verse, I had to pull the car over because I was crying so hard that I couldn’t see the road. They say it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, but sitting there alone on the side of the road, cars whizzing by into the impenetrable night, I wasn’t so sure.