About a Song?

All night long we would sing that stupid song

In his book on the Beatles, writing about John Lennon’s performance on the band’s cover of Arthur Alexander’s version of Brill Building stalwart “Where Have You Been (All My Life)” at the Star Club in Hamburg in 1962, just before Beatlemania laid low the nations, Devin McKinney asks: “Is it possible to care this much? About a song?”

Well, that’s the question. I’ve been caring about songs since I was four years old. The first songs I remember wanting to hear again, having discovered them on my dad’s car radio, were Starland Vocal Band’s “Afternoon Delight” and Gordon Lightfoot’s “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” Not exactly the Beatles, but you can’t choose when you’re born. (I listened to “Afternoon Delight” during the pandemic for the first time in one hundred years, and it’s weirder than a song about fucking in the afternoon needs to be: “Started out this morning feeling so polite / I always thought a fish could not be caught who didn't bite / But you got some bait a-waitin' and I think I might / Like nibbling a little afternoon delight.”)

The Beatles would swim into my ken a few years later, Sgt. Pepper’s on glorious 8-track cassette. I’ve written elsewhere about how “A Day in the Life” introduced me to the mysteries of prosody: "Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall” made no sense, but the assonance was everything—ow oh ow an ol ih ay oo ill al er all. (Rubber Soul is, I insist pace Revolver, their best album, but “A Day in the Life” might be their best song.)

But the Beatles weren’t my Beatles. My Beatles were the Stones (D. Boon on punk: “Mr. Narrator, this is Bob Dylan to me”). Theirs was the first art to make me wonder about artistic intention, not that I put it that way, sitting on my grandmother’s sofa after she’d gone to bed, marveling at Exile on Main Street on my primitive Walkman: did they themselves understand the majesty of what they had created? They seemed like a bunch of bozos to me, and yet together they became something more than the sum of their parts, something capable of producing within me an almost religious awe.

My favorite Stones song, and thus my favorite song, is “Sway,” on Sticky Fingers, which as far as I know no one else holds in such regard. The opening chords crash like someone’s throwing a subway car down a flight of stairs, Mick Taylor is soloing in shameless filigree, Jagger’s flinging words out in that southern drawl that sounded affected when he first tried it on but now is a second skin, like he grew up in the bayou and might spend the night at a truck stop. After Taylor’s first solo comes one of those moments of pop glory when everything comes together, everything clicks into focus like the Knicks in the fourth quarter, the band is one mind, attuned to whatever woo-woo wavelength you believe in, and the song stutters then explodes. Charlie is the key, of course, the bones. He hits the skins like they just insulted his mother, then, somehow in sync with the guitars and drums but also outracing them, hovering above them, Jagger cries out, “Hey hey hey now!” The last two syllables drawled across the sky. “One day I woke up to find,” he sings when the band has resumed control—to find what? What could he possibly have found that would justify the ferocity of that unhinged build-up? The den of God himself, maybe? But no, just a girl in bed beside him, with a great smile. Of course. The enigma of rock and roll, so much grandeur and so much power summoned by the most ordinary tawdry emotion.

When I was in Rouen earlier this month, my friend and I decided to take a side street to avoid the entire population of the American Midwest crowding the putatively beautiful medieval main drag. Two teenage girls, following ancient teenage custom, were drinking outside an abandoned storefront. One of them pointed at me and said, in French, that she liked my shirt, from the Stones’ Some Girls tour (a replica, alas). I thanked her, and she asked if I actually listened to the Stones, which amused me. “Bien sûr.” She decided to test me: what, in my view, were their greatest albums? I rattled off the titles of that great, unfathomable run, ’68 to ’72: “Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main St.” She nodded sagely, satisfied. “Yes, good,” she said (she had switched to English in that infuriating way the French have of not wishing to hear you sully their language with your barbarous accent and half-grasped grammar). We chatted a bit more, denounced both Trump and Macron, she recommended a French punk band whose name I have forgotten, and we parted ways.

But I keep coming back to that conversation, because that girl doesn’t yet know what I know: that every song you loved when you were young eventually becomes “Tintern Abbey” (I’m quoting myself, so sue me). I can’t hear the Stones as I did when I was her age. I hear the Stones now through the nostalgia filter, the songs reminding me of themselves, of things that I once felt as I listened to them, other places where I once heard them. The songs were once experience itself. Listening to New Order on a midnight train through France when I was 23, or to Live Through This among Zapotec ruins at 22, was not simply “listening to music.” It was the same thing as being alive there on the train, life itself in the ruins. It was all one. The scope has narrowed now, in middle age, as of course it must.

When you’re young, popular music is possibility. You hear lives you want, lives you might live, big dreams and big feelings—bigger, surely, than anyone else has ever dreamed or felt. We’ll stretch out our arms farther, and then one fine morning—.

But it does elude us, duh, in the end. That feeling, what some call rock and roll. And we dream of driving down fire roads back when we didn’t know anything, Sticky Fingers on the tape deck, and that dream becomes rock and roll, too. It is possible, yes, to care so much about a song. And then, much later (“We were young for so long,” as Katie Crutchfield has it), to care about it in a different way. A sadder way. It’s just that demon life has got us in its sway.