From time to time nowadays you can find me in a small crowd, in a small club, usually somewhere in east London, watching my son’s band playing a gig. If any of you have kids who perform, you’ll understand the mix of feelings this induces. Anxiety, of course, a clenched feeling of tension, willing everything to go well. I watch the band, and I watch the crowd, silently urging them to pay attention, to be excited, to respond. I feel pride too, and genuine enjoyment, as the songs are good, and the band play well.
But I must admit that above all I get a flicker of envy, however small the audience, however dingy the venue. I know that this is a difficult time to be in music, and there is less certainty than ever about being able to make a living. I know that these kind of gigs bring discomforts and disappointments and hardships. It’s tough at the bottom. Yet with all that in mind, I still envy them being at this stage when everything is fresh and new, suffused with an aura of innocence, and the excitement of the unknown.
I stand in a little pub back room in Dalston and I remember myself playing at a Hatfield youth club in 1980, or the Moonlight Club in London in 1981, or Desolation Row in Hull a couple of years later. As our career progressed the gigs got bigger and bigger, but nothing was ever quite as exciting as those beginnings.
I don’t know if that’s what you’d call nostalgia, exactly. It isn’t a rose-tinted look back at a past in which things were better; it’s more a longing for the period when things were new.
I’ve just been reading Rachel Kushner’s essay “The Hard Crowd”, in which she quotes Bob Dylan’s lyric, “He not busy being born is busy dying”. The way she reads the line is this:
You are busy being born the whole first long ascent of life, and then, after some apex, you’re busy dying: that’s the logic of the line, its syntax, as I interpret. “Being born” here is an open and existential category: the gaining of experience, a living intensely in the present, after which comes the long period of life when a person is finished with the new.
Kushner goes on to talk about how during this second half of life you reflect a lot on the first half, everything exists as memory. And then she delves into her own memories of life in San Francisco as a teen in the 1980s. There is no sugar-coating of any of these recollections, instead they form a litany of the damaged, and lost, and dead.
She describes working at KFC or Baskin-Robbins for $2.85 an hour and passing rent boys outside a hotel that later burned down; rough sleepers on the streets, and posters in the bus station with a phone number and the words: “Runaways, call for help”; tattoo artists with diamonds in their teeth and bad dope habits; two upstairs neighbours who got hooked, and both died; a friend who is imprisoned after stabbing a stranger; her own casual shoplifting which leads to her arrest; a bartender who drinks 40 bottles of beer a day and sleeps in his clothes; a friendship with a beautiful, blank-faced boy who ends up murdered, his head left in a dumpster.
She isn’t sure what to make of these memories. She is aware that they risk glamourising horrors, or identifying damaged people as the most exciting people, perhaps overlooking the damage. She is also aware of herself as the one who was always a survivor, always set slightly apart, always perhaps the less-wild one.
I am so struck by the whole essay I read it three times. It resonates strongly with me, and I love how Kushner picks apart the way in which we exist in relation to our memories; the way they underpin and colour the later parts of our life. “I’m talking about my own life,” she writes. “Which not only can’t matter to you, it might bore you.” Oh no, not at all, I think. It matters. I’m not bored.
[See also: We can’t all be geniuses]
