second round
(14) Talk Talk, “It’s My Life”
BURIED
(6) Grateful Dead, “Touch of Grey”
321-150
AND WILL PLAY IN THE SWEET 16
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/14/23.
EVERY SILVER LINING: STEVEN CHURCH ON “TOUCH OF GREY”
CLOUD
SHORELINE AMPHITHEATER
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA
5/23–5/25, 1992
It’s just before dusk on the western edge of the continent and, as the sun slowly sinks, I am rising. One-hundred-and-fifty feet in the air above the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, California. To my west spreads one stage out wide, the Pacific Ocean, and not far from my perch, the other where the Grateful Dead are doing a soundcheck for their first of a three-show residency. And perhaps there is a thin veil of clouds, something poetic and perfect, a landscape tinged with purple and orange, the kind of setting that looks like an album cover, so perfect it must be fake or at least imagined or enhanced by other substances. And beneath me in every other direction spreads an undulating sea of Dead Heads swathed in tie-dye and Guatemalan print, all of them gathered and settled and swaying for the night before they and the band pack up like a traveling circus and head to Las Vegas for another round of shows.
I am rising now, lifting high above the masses, floating in a metal basket suspended from a large red construction crane. Beneath me, growing smaller by the second, is an oversized bean-bag laid out on the asphalt parking lot. This is my landing pad. I am strapped into something like a climbing harness with an enormous elastic bungee cord tied to my feet.
I am rising still, even if one week ago, my younger brother was killed in a car accident at the age of eighteen. I am rising even if three days ago, I attended his funeral in Kansas. Because right now, in this moment, I’m only thinking about the ground beneath me and the way everyone seems so small from this distance. Somewhere down there, my girlfriend waits for me to leap. Somewhere else, my parents wait for me to come home. Somewhere in the near future we will wait for the Grateful Dead to perform because we have tickets to the show. Everyone has a ticket to the show. Everyone is searching and waiting for something.
One-hundred-fifty feet is roughly the height of a fifteen-story building and, when the crane reaches the top, the guy in the basket with me, my guide for this experience, opens the waist-high metal door and points to a small metal step barely big enough for my feet. He smiles and gestures for me to move. Behind him, the ocean stretches out endlessly.
I ease out onto the step and he shuts the gate behind me, giving me a hearty two thumbs up sign. The basket sways a bit from my weight. Beneath me, the sea of Dead undulates. The bean bag has all but disappeared into the crowd and the parking lot. And the countdown begins. No warning. No pep-talk or other preparation. He just starts counting from ten. And when he reaches zero, I do the only thing I know to do.
I jump.
I am, in this suspended moment—though it will not last—what was called a “Touch Head.” That is, I am a fan of the band, the Grateful Dead, who began listening to them and obsessing over their music AFTER their only top-ten hit, the 1987 release of, “Touch of Grey.”
Though the band was a pretty big part of my life for a few years, it’s safe to say that I merely dipped my toe into the vast ocean that is Grateful Dead fandom. I’ve been to maybe a dozen shows, most of them during that summer of 1992 when my brother was killed in a car accident. But for a true Dead Head, a dozen shows are not even worth talking about. The true Old Head has been to hundreds of shows, has lived their life around the band not just for a few convenient months between semesters of college but for years on the road, living out of cars or vans or buses.
They’ve carved their identity out and found their community with the merry tribe of misfits who follow the Dead like they are prophets. These people saw themselves as part of a community that valued freedom, peace, and transcendence through music, a community that understood how enlightenment can emerge from the mess of life much like a song could emerge from an extended improvisational jam, or how an essay can eventually emerge from a lot of noodling around on the page.
In the middle of May, 1992, my girlfriend and I had set off to follow the Grateful Dead for the Western leg of their Summer tour. We wanted to be part of this community, even if only for a couple of months in between our regular lives. We were visiting my old friend from junior high, Ben in Utah when I got the call from my father. My younger brother, Matt had been killed when he lost control of his car and slammed into a tree in Indianapolis. He died of massive head trauma on the side of a road.
We left the next morning from Salt Lake City and flew back to my hometown in Kansas. The funeral was held on May 20 at two-o-clock in the afternoon. There was a balloon arch that, when released, lifted up into the sky and folded into a heart shape. Or at least that’s what I remember. That and the line of people queued up to pay their respects to my parents and the weary look on my mother’s face as she received them all.
I don’t really remember much else of that day, though I’m pretty sure my Dad had somehow managed to get Matt’s bikes, our Kawasaki Jet-Ski, and a motorcycle into the Church lobby. I don’t remember the church service or the graveside service or much else from that day, honestly. Everything is a blur of fragments like a slide-show on fast forward. I just know that the next day, I packed up my stuff again and we flew back out to Utah, where we picked up my car and just kept moving, running west, running far away from home and all the loss and grief.
I still feel guilty for that run. I still feel like I should’ve stayed and that it was fundamentally selfish for me to be chasing the Dead in search of solace. I know my parents told me to go, wanted me to go, but sometimes I imagine the fear they must have felt knowing that I would be living on the road, out of my car, and driving hundreds of miles to follow a band called the Grateful Dead when their only other son had just been buried.
As I stepped out from the cage with that bungee cord tied to my ankles and gazed down at the scene below me, I was thankful the magic mushrooms I’d eaten hadn’t really started to kick in yet because when they did, eventually, they would render me nearly catatonic and lost in my own mind, unable to comprehend much of anything that was happening around me, including the performance by this weird band of guys older than my parents who just seemed to be fucking around on stage for three hours.
But in that moment, as I jumped from the crane and plunged through the California air at the end of a bungee cord, bouncing once and twice and three times, nothing else mattered except the unmitigated rush of joy that shot through my body. Nothing mattered as I screamed as loud as I possibly could, “FUCK YES!,” and believed I was affirming something more than the moment, something about life itself in the face of immeasurable loss. Dangling at the end of my rope, I still believed then in the possibility of happiness, even if only in such fleeting moments.
SILVER LINING
THE SAM BOYD SILVER BOWL
LAS VEGAS, NV
5/29–5/31, 1992
We didn’t expect the water cannons. But we did expect to meet up with Ben again. He’d told us that he and a couple of friends were driving down for the Vegas shows. We didn’t know when and we weren’t sure how we’d find him, but somehow, we found them. Like magic. This was, of course, in the days before smart phones and gps and text messages. We just ran into them in the parking lot amidst the thousands of others. Things like that just happened at Dead shows. Ben and I both wore Guatemalan print shorts, the kind that were so popular in those days. We were both already impossibly stoned and just beginning to roll on LSD. We were both also just incredibly happy to see each other. It had been years it seemed since he’d handed the phone to me in Utah, my father waiting on the other end.
The Grateful Dead never really cared about being rock stars—and certainly never looked the part—nor did they even care much about recording studio albums. And for a long time, it seemed they didn’t care about money or the material trappings of success. They thought of themselves as freaks living on the fringes of society and American values. They just wanted to make music, man. They were, at least initially, kinda punk rock—fiercely independent with a DIY spirit that extended to their fans. They were, in fact, one of the first bands to fight Ticketmaster’s inevitable ascension; and they considered their loyal fans to be like family. The Dead were counter-culture icons, flag bearers for the freaks and misfits.
So, it was with some understandable consternation and existential ennui for everyone close to the band when upon its release in 1987, “Touch of Grey” shot up the charts and suddenly everything changed. Suddenly they were rich and famous rock stars. They were mainstream. Lead guitarist and vocalist, Jerry Garcia is reported to have called the success of the song “appalling.”
The truth remains, however, that if the average music listener has heard anything from the band besides, “Truckin’” or “Casey Jones,” it is most definitely, “Touch of Grey.” For many die-hard Dead Heads, this song was known, when it was (rarely) performed live, as the “commercial break.” It is, after all, the only song for which the band produced a music video (that was not just live concert footage) intended for wide-release on MTV.
The “Touch of Grey” video is not a good music video but it was, in large part, responsible for a whole new era of the band, the era into which I was introduced. Sure, I could talk about the symbolism in the video of the skeleton puppets and the obvious strings and how it’s a critique of capitalism and the corrupting influence of the big record labels; but we also have to admit that the band released this song and this video and it became a massive money-making machine for them. It was also a fulcrum for the band, a tipping point, a welcome mat for a new generation and new kind of Grateful Dead fan who would pay a lot of money to sit in a massive stadium and watch fuzzy grey dots on stage playing their songs in front of 50,000 other people, hoping and praying that they would play THAT song, the MTV song, the hit song, the song that would allow them to really let loose and belt out the lyrics along with the band, all 50,000 of you screaming triumphantly together, “I WILL SURVIVE.”
If you look up “Touch of Grey,” on YouTube, you’ll find that the vast majority of the comments are actually stories about the commenter’s own loss or trauma or just hard times and how the song was inspirational to them, how they, too, found the strength to just survive even if that silver lining still has a touch of grey.
It's just all so sentimental—especially for a song that may or may not have been written about coming down from a massive cocaine binge. The story goes that Robert Hunter, a frequent collaborator with Jerry Garcia, had overindulged in the drug after a long bout of sobriety and had awakened in a state of regret and self-hatred. So, he wrote a song about it.
For me, at least, one of the most interesting things about the song, and the band itself, is the cognitive dissonance at the heart of it all. What I like about “Touch of Grey” is what it doesn’t sound like. Though it sounds happy and optimistic, like an anthem for survival, the song is, fundamentally, a weirdly dystopian, sort of sad song that you can’t help but sing along to.
This should perhaps come as no surprise since the band itself, like many bluegrass or folk artists, fundamentally, is a sad cynical and darkly dystopian band that often SOUNDS happy and optimistic. Take a song like “Dire Wolf,” a deeply dark story about a giant wolf gobbling up humans that is punctuated by a plaintive sing-along and harmonized chorus, “Don’t murder me. Ple-ease don’t murder me.” This is a band that, like many others, has made a living off the peculiar slight-of-hand that music allows, where before you realize it, you are singing along with murder and mayhem, you’re harmonizing over trauma.
But this isn’t the whole story. As a friend who knows much more about music theory explained to me, Jerry Garcia plays most often in what is known as the mixolydian mode, a way of playing the guitar influenced by folk and traditional music that is often described as having a bittersweet or melancholic sound.
Meanwhile, Bob Weir, the rhythm guitarist plays a style of guitar heavily influenced by jazz and, in particular, the improvisational playing of McCoy Tyner, the piano player for John Coltrane’s band. This, my friend tells me, accounts for the inherent tension in the Dead’s music. Jerry and Bob are always, intentionally and artistically, somewhat at odds with each other. They’re always sort of pushing against, bouncing off of one another.
We didn’t expect the water cannons when we dropped the acid. But we didn’t necessarily mind them. I’d purchased some liquid LSD in the parking lot of our campground at Andrew Molera State Park on the coast of California the day after the last Shoreline show. Dropped into two sugar cubes that I squirreled away in a zip-loc baggie, it was probably the purest acid I’d ever had. We’d popped the sugar cubes in our mouths in the parking lot in Vegas and, by the time we’d found Ben and were seated beneath the desert sun, the water cannons raining down on us, we were all rolling hard and deep in the waves of trip. The heat baked down on us and the Steve Miller Band was just cranking up on stage and none of it really mattered because everything radiated the energy of the moment, vacillating between extremes of hot and cold.
We didn’t expect the water cannons. And we didn’t expect The Steve Miller Band to suck so bad. Or maybe we did we expect it but hoped our expectations would be dashed and proven wrong by the virtuosity of the music. They were not. But it didn’t really matter. There was a dude in yellow spandex pants just shredding the guitar. There were all the hits. And Steve Miller . . . who was, well, Steve Miller and about as exciting as his name. So much of it didn’t make sense. So much of it was still somehow fun.
We especially didn’t expect the way the water cannons would soak our unwashed Guatemalan print shorts until the fabric dye leaked down onto our legs, turning them various shades of purple, or how this would seem to us, in the moment, somehow miraculous and wonderous in ways that escaped the capabilities of language. Or how we’d look at each other, point down and say, “Dude, your legs are purple,” and, “Dude, yours, too!” and how this would seem exceptionally funny and strange and also undeniably fucking magical.
You never expect silver linings. They arrive in moments, darting in and out of your vision like the colorful beach balls that bounced lazily around the crowd that day, until you realize something close to happiness has inhabited your body in way you can feel but not describe with language, a way that can perhaps only be expressed physically, through the body and the way it moves to the music beneath the cycle of showers, the waves of cold and heat that settle over you in the land of sand and grief. It arrives late that night after the Dead played a lot of songs I don’t remember, after we’d gotten past our purple legs, and we return to the KOA campground where we’ve reserved a spot for the night, a campground in the middle of the city, it seemed, but still far removed from the noise and light. It arrives when—still rolling on acid—I dipped my body into the heated swimming pool at the KOA and felt myself floating finally and thought maybe I can survive after all.
TOUCH OF GREY
DEER CREEK, INDIANA
JUNE 28 AND 29, 1992
On our way to Deer Creek Amphitheater to see the Grateful Dead, we stopped in West Lafayette, Indiana home of Purdue, University and site for the first and only Matt Church Memorial Jam. Matt was a sophomore at Purdue studying mechanical engineering when he was killed. His dream was to build cars. Or to design robots that build cars. It had been just a little over a month since he died in his car in Indianapolis, and here we were attending a concert in his honor. Life is weird, especially after death. We were here because one of his friends, a girl whose name is lost to me, a girl who was not his girlfriend, but who clearly cared for him, had decided to put together the show and somehow she pulled it off in a matter of weeks. She was different than a lot of Matt’s friends and I think I loved her immediately. She was like me, a Dead Head, a hippy who wore tie-dyed clothes and Birkenstock sandals and could probably hold her own in a wicked sesh of hackey-sack. She was not an English major or a sorority girl. She was a freak like me.
I don’t really remember much at all about that night. “Mustang Sally,” is pretty much the only song I remember, perhaps because my mother’s name is “Sally,” or because the band that played it seemed to really be trying hard and I appreciated earnest effort. There is a photo somewhere of me and my girlfriend and a few of Matt’s friends on the grand lobby staircase of the old theater where the concert was being held, but I don’t know where to find that photo today. I’m pretty sure I’m wearing overalls in it. I do know, though, that at the back of my t-shirt drawer, rolled up loosely, is the Matt Church Memorial Jam shirt I got that day. I don’t wear it. But it has stayed with me all these years.
I think Matt would’ve appreciated the music in his honor. For him, music had for a long time been something he performed and perfected. I don’t know how much he enjoyed it, though. Matt played the baritone horn in the high school band and won first in the state a couple of years in a row. He practiced music but I wasn’t sure he ever really listened to and loved it. He’d only just started becoming a fan of music, a consumer of sounds, in the years before he died. He was even, reluctantly, drifting into appreciation for some of the same bands I liked. I don’t know that he would’ve ever become a fan of the Dead. But I could imagine us, sometime in the future we never had, enjoying a concert together, watching someone like the Red Hot Chili Peppers on stage and feeling like maybe we were finally growing closer after all that time.
“Touch of Grey” is a song that gets darker, weirder, and more dystopian as it goes, so much so that near the end, things are worse they appear, our protagonist is struggling, the rent is in arrears, the dog has not been fed in years, and to top it off, his cows are giving kerosene instead of milk and his son can’t even read at seventeen. And when the boy does talk, the words he knows are all obscene. It’s an unpleasant picture to say the least, a family drama that would, in my estimation, not be easy to survive. It’s hard to look around you and think that we will get by. This is the late 80’s in America.
By the time we reached Deer Creek, something had shifted inside me. Something cracked and a darkness began to seep out. I was having trouble feeling happy, even in small moments. We rolled up to the venue the day before the show but the parking lot was closed, so we kept driving down the road. The venue was outside of Noblesville, Indiana, what I gathered was a suburb of Indianapolis. At the time it was surrounded by farm fields, cows, and a whole lot of nothing else. Though my brother had died in Indianapolis, his car wrapped around a tree, I did not visit the city or the site, preferring to remain in the suburbs of grief.
About a mile or so from Deer Creek we passed a junkyard with a sign out front that read, “Camping $10. Water. Ice. Toilets,” so we pulled into the lot. We had no other place to stay. The venue lot was closed to campers and we didn’t budget for a hotel. We’d planned to sleep in the car if necessary. At the back of the lot, a man in a tow truck was dragging wrecked cars around, clearing campsites. A row of port-a-potties were lined up on one side of the yard. We paid our money and parked. The ground was littered with those small jagged fragments of broken safety glass, but we managed to clear a site for our tent. When we drifted off to sleep that night, there were maybe a few dozen other Dead Heads camping with us and you could hear their voices mixing with music and the crackling of campfires, and it seemed kind of nice, even oddly quaint like something you’d tell a funny story about later. Remember that one time we camped in a junkyard?
That was crazy, huh?
Yeah, totally.
When we woke up the next morning and emerged from our tent it wasn’t so quaint any longer. There were now hundreds of people packed into the junkyard, campers crammed into every space possible, pressed up against the perimeter of stacked cars. Dead Heads milled around, cooking over open fires, strumming instruments or kicking a hackey-sack. Later that afternoon, we walked the mile or so down the road to the concert venue, planning to spend a few hours in the parking lot scene before heading into the show.
It all looked different now, though. I’d been home for a few weeks between the Vegas shows and our trip to Indiana, and I think part of me understood the shift in my mental health while another part of me thought the problem was home and that I needed to be back out here on the road, following the Dead. But as we strolled into the vast carnival of Heads and humanity at Deer Creek, I knew I’d made a mistake.
These weren’t my people. Everywhere I looked it seemed someone was selling something or trying to scam me out of something. All around me were dreadlocked white kids driving Range Rovers and wearing Guatemalan print pants and tie-dyed t-shirts. Half of them selling veggie burritos. The other half selling grilled cheese sandwiches. Frat boys and rich kids kicking hackey-sacks or tossing frisbees outnumbered the old heads, the wharf rats, and the spinners wearing white. And I suddenly, viscerally, hated all of them—even as I understood that I was one of them. While I might have been driving a 1981 Subaru wagon, I was no less white and no less privileged, no less foolish. I guess I was just starting to confront that part of myself.
Just three years from this moment, in 1995, Deer Creek would be the site of perhaps the worst Grateful Dead concert in history, when thousands of drunken fans stormed the gates, tore down the fences and rushed the stage. Death threats had been made against the band, specifically Jerry Garcia, by a father whose daughter had left home to follow the Dead. The 2nd show was cancelled, a first in the history of the band, and everyone seemed to agree that things had crossed a line. There was no going back to the past, to life before “Touch of Grey.”
I remember sitting in the crowd at Deer Creek, mostly sober—or at least not on LSD—and looking around me at all the people listening to this band of old hippies noodling around on their guitars and thinking, “What the fuck am I doing here?” Even then in the summer of 1992, there was an edge to everything. The air shimmered with bad vibes. And when we returned to the junkyard, we returned to tire fires burning amidst the wreckage, acrid black smoke curling into the sky. Two friends who’d parked just outside the gates of the junkyard had their car broken into, windows smashed in, and everything they owned stolen.
Inside the gates, the toilets were full, the ice was gone, and the workers were drunk and angry. The owners had gone home, leaving the inmates in charge. One of them stalked around the campground with a pistol strapped to his hip, yelling at people as if he was enforcing some invisible order. I watched him pick up a burning tire off a fire and toss it to the side, where it continued to smolder in the grass, and I thought that it was entirely possible that someone might get hurt that night.
As it turned out, after those shows at Deer Creek, I would never again attend another Grateful Dead concert, not out of some principled stance or concern for my safety but just because I lost that connection, that investment in the band. And I lost connection with that side of myself if I’m being honest. Some days I think I’m always trying to get back there, to find that Dead self again. But he’s been gone a long time.
*
When we meet them, five-year-old, Susan is in High Kindergarten and three-year-old, Michael is chewing on an electrical cord. He’s already started one fire. Susan is wearing white lipstick and reading a comic book. Her favorite member of the Grateful Dead is Bobby. The adults in Michael’s life aren’t paying attention because they’re trying to recover some really good hash from a crack in the floor. It’s morning in the late 60’s and Susan is already rolling on a tab of LSD and Michael seems doomed to injury and abandonment.
You may remember these children from the ending to Joan Didion’s seminal expose on the ugly and absurd side of the 60’s counter-culture in San Francisco, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” The two tableaus are rendered in Didion’s trademark oblique and razor-sharp voice. Poor simple Susan, the situation, and doomed Michael, the inevitable emblems of all that is wrong. The children become vessels, urns in which Didion can burn the whole drug-fueled and misguided scene to the ground.
I felt sorry for Susan and Michael. They were me. Or close to my generation. Or that’s what I see in that essay. Growing up in this fucked up country. Just a child chewing on extension cords. And while my parents never dosed me with LSD, I was dosed daily during the 70’s and 80’s with the American myth of superiority, prosperity and conformity, arguably a much heavier, more corrosive drug than acid. And it was this drug that many in my generation rejected in favor of the ideals the Dead have always represented—peace, love, acceptance and personal freedom, a life lived on the fringes of the status quo. It was the drug of conformity and capitalism we believed we were saying no to and instead choosing the counter-culture represented by the Grateful Dead.
Susan and Michael were born at the end of the Baby Boomer generation and the beginning of another, Generation X, and like the rest of us, they didn’t end in the suspended animation of that room in that house in San Francisco. They lived on in a generation’s rebellion against the strait-laced life of conformity, authority, judgment and elitism. The very things that Didion critiques in the essay are many of the things Generation X actively sought after—peace and kindness, acceptance of individuality and the multiplicity of identity, or simply unencumbered ignorant fun. We were born and raised and swaddled in the American absurd. We thought High Kindergarten sounded like a grand idea because, honestly, why the fuck not?
Nothing else mattered. Nothing our country had built since then was worth a shit. None of our institutions could be trusted. We would never do better than our parents. Most of us grew up believing we would all be immolated in a global nuclear war before we even reached adulthood. That does something to your brain. That does something to your sense of hope or of what is right or wrong in the world.
And twenty-five years later, after I dropped from that crane and bounced above the parking lot, I like to imagine that Susan, a little older and wiser, might have been standing next to me at that Shoreline show, swaying in a long dress, watching a band that never stopped playing, still hopelessly in love with Bobby and everything the Dead promised.
Steven Church is the author of several books of nonfiction and a founding editor for The Normal School. His essays are forthcoming this spring from Under the Sun and Fourth Genre. He teaches in the MFA Program at Fresno State.
Mark Wallace on “It's My Life”
It’s my life, it never ends
I’m a teenager when Talk Talk’s “It’s My Life” is released, and I am all potential. It’s everywhere in my life, this potential, and has been for some time. Like all the other fuck-ups in the world, my report cards often read, not working up to potential, or some variation of the same idea. This potential has chased me to high school—to try to outpace it, I’ve managed to graduate at the end of my junior year. My seventeenth birthday falls halfway through my first semester at college, and already things aren’t going very well, but I know I can get them back on track. I have potential, after all. There are still so many doors to choose from in the game show of life.
But of course life isn’t a game, I know that already, and by January 1984, when “It’s My Life” drops, the first of these doors is already closing: I’m on academic probation because I’ve been too busy to show up more than a few times for any of my classes (too busy getting drunk and doing speed), and I am in danger of being kicked out of school. Life may not be a game, but I am still gripped by my youthful immortality: From some perspectives (mine), it looks like I have all the time in the world to set things straight. I just haven’t yet figured out how. Keep trying. As the song says, “It’s my life, it never ends.”
Caught in the crowd, it never ends
Things are never as uncertain as when you’re starting out, and “It’s My Life,” Talk Talk’s single hit, is no exception. The track crashes into motion with an indistinct tangle of sound, as though all its notes and beats and melodies had been silently gathering, building pressure somewhere on the unhearable side of a potential energy barrier, and now, suddenly released, rush through helter-skelter in a little explosive spasm of noise before relaxing into the song, gradually unspooling themselves over the course of the next three minutes and fifty-two seconds in a wash of synth pads, electronic drums, Paul Webb’s great bass lines, and Mark Hollis’s liquid vocals.
The band’s early sound was caught between decades. Hollis’s baritone echoed no one so much as The Jam’s Paul Weller, though Talk Talk were never so bristly. The first two albums were flavored with a range of styles: You could glimpse the smoothed-out pop horizons of Duran Duran, and hear the dying echoes of Roxy Music, whose final album had dropped in 1982, the same year Talk Talk’s first album came out (and The Jam broke up). But Bryan Ferry’s awkward glam fantasticness belonged to last night’s dance floor. Duran Duran, on the other hand, with their era-defining objectification not just of girls on film but of themselves, looked resolutely to the future from the prow of a Scottish yacht, getting the party started for the bands who would sail in their wake.
Somehow stuck in the middle of all this was Talk Talk, whose vinyl debut had come a year after Duran Duran’s, and who opened for the Fab Five on several dates of their late-1981 tour. But while Talk Talk were unquestionably an 80s band, they certainly didn’t intend to follow where Duran Duran led. In the video for “It’s My Life,” Hollis stares straight into the camera without lip-synching, as though declaring that the industry machine would never put words in his mouth—not even if those words were his own. Talk Talk would walk their own road. They just hadn’t found their way to it yet.
Funny how I blind myself
“It’s My Life” is a song impossible not to misinterpret. It’s lyrical structure is so skeletal that it could be about any number of things. Because the video for it consisted mostly of wildlife footage, it is often understood as a protest song for animal rights. One of the most common takes is that it’s a song about a difficult or unrequited romantic relationship. It might also be a song about finding one’s way—about life. Put the emphasis on the possessive: It’s my life. Leave me alone.
As interesting, to me, is how the song does its job. “It’s My Life” makes its meaning not by stating it, but by dancing around that blind spot at the center of language, that place in which the inexpressible resides, at the center of that which is expressed. Its meaning seems to be missing, always hovering just outside the light, as though it would always remain potential, never quite fulfilled.
At the root of the word ”potential” is the idea of power, something potent. Potency. But it is power not yet unleashed, it is possibility unrealized. It’s about what could be, not what is. In that sense, potential also represents something missing: it is that which has not arrived yet, something that has not yet—and may never—come to pass.
I've asked myself, how much do you / Commit yourself?
As it turned out, I did not get things back on track in school. The only class I passed in my first year at college was piano. The administration, apparently, felt this was not a sound basis for a higher education, and I was asked to leave. Over the following years, more or less the same thing would happen at no less than four other schools. I’d enroll in classes, then stop going to most of them once I’d found the right excuse: alcoholism, depression, social anxiety, plain pretentious angst. I might stick it out for one class I was interested in—photography, for instance, or macroeconomics. But I felt no connection to school, nor to the people around me. Untethered as I was, perhaps it’s no wonder I always drifted away. What never occurred to me was the idea of school as an exercise in exploring what one might become, and how to get there. I just couldn’t stick around long enough to find out.
It seems clear, looking back, that alongside the alcoholism and depression and anxiety and angst, part of what was going on was a resolute digging in of heels, a desperate attempt to put off “real life” in whatever way I could. It was not responsibility I feared, though. It was becoming. It wasn’t settling down that put me off, it was narrowing down. It was the casting off of possibility, the shedding of potential, with all its beautiful multiplicity, in favor of certainty, which seemed so dull and unipolar.
Instead, I wanted to live in that inexpressible place in which I knew the most interesting meaning was made. I wanted everything to be possible always, to continue to be potential. Potential was power, and I was in love with the power of the unrealized, of the not yet real. Whatever lay beyond each of those open doors, if it was still just a dream, I could dream anything. It felt like there was great power in being able to choose which door to walk through. It felt like, once that choice was made, that power would be gone.
It's my life, don't you forget
If Talk Talk were suspended between past and future, their trajectory was exactly opposite that of a band like Simple Minds, whose most interesting, exploratory work was arguably behind them by the time of their first chart success. That band’s “Promised You a Miracle” dropped in April 1982—the same week Talk Talk’s eponymous, pop-inflected single off its first album was released. If “Talk Talk” wouldn’t go on to be Talk Talk’s biggest hit, it was certainly their danciest tune, their most recognizably “pop” number.
But while bands like Duran Duran, Simple Minds, Pet Shop Boys, and others narrowed in on their sounds, opting for what seemed like increasing certainty, Hollis seemed to want to open things up. “It’s My Life,” from Talk Talk’s second album, already encompasses more, from the weird synth birdcalls of the opening bars to the plaintive vocal lines and the indirection of the lyrics. Even the song’s structure is more complex, building from a mid-tempo verse to a more urgent pre-chorus and then—with a rapid-fire flourish of Lee Harris’s hexagonal Simmons electronic drums—to a chorus that rings large with synth pads and Hollis’s cryptic yawp, at once sad and eternally hopeful: It’s my life, don’t you forget / Caught in the crowd, it never ends.
It’s My Life isn’t the greatest mid-80s New Wave synthpop album, though it did have its moments of brilliance. As an angsty teen, it was hard to argue with “Tomorrow Started,” for instance, which declared, With time you’ll endlessly arrive / Outside of use / With just tomorrow starting. (And with time, the words still occasionally ring true.) The album’s textures are sophisticated, its sounds standing out or even clashing, rather than smoothed over into a unified color field, like so much of the music of the era. The piano solo in “Call in the Night Boy” sidles up to David Bowie’s “Aladdin Sane,” but ultimately slinks away too soon. The intro to “Such a Shame” was tantalizing, even titillating, and could have led to anything at all—leaving one slightly let down when the song, solid as it is, finally arrived, as though this force that felt about to explode suddenly changed its mind and reeled itself in.
There’s a lot of tension in It’s My Life. Hollis is still finding his way, but he’s hampered by his own understanding that the music industry would prefer simple hooks and scantily clad models mud-wrestling. Something’s missing, but it’s only the emptiness of great potential: There’s something that hasn’t yet arrived for Talk Talk, some looming transformation you can hear in the music but which has not yet—and may never—come to pass. The songs are decent, some even great, but the album is more a compilation of interesting musical moves than a bare and honest vision that is somehow greater than the sum of its parts. That vision is clearly taking shape, though, and throughout the album, you can hear Hollis straining to reach some other music, unable to stay in New Wave’s increasingly guardrailed musical lane.
One half won’t do
It takes many people quite a long time to find their way. Some of us never really do. I tried, for many years, to fulfill my potential. I waited for that looming transformation to take place, and found myself, as I did, becoming many things.
One discovery: there is room for a lot of becoming in a life, whether in pursuit of one’s potential, or in flight from it.
Here are some things I became, or tried to become, or tried to avoid becoming, along the way, including, early on:
Paperboy, age eleven.
Raker of leaves and mower of lawns, and, later, Landscape Maintenance Engineer (i.e., gardener).
High school graduate.
College dropout.
Used bookstore clerk. I am a writer, after all.
Later, in this order:
Alcoholic.
Aspiring novelist.
Accidental financial journalist.
Globetrotting financial journalist.
Managing editor.
Sober alcoholic.
Globetrotting freelance magazine journalist, publishing in all the places I had always dreamed of publishing.
Unemployed magazine journalist, publishing nowhere.
Deliverer of paint.
Financial Services Marketing Engineer, a post that entailed standing behind a table all day in the hot sun at Coney Island, handing out brochures for a bank that was just opening its first branches in New York, where I was living at the time. Yes, the thing I dreaded happened: I tried to hand a brochure to a friend who happened to be passing. Achieved: The mortification of the flesh.
And at various times:
Blogger.
Columnist.
Co-author.
Talking head.
Husband.
Ex-husband.
Startup CEO.
Product guy.
Marketing guy.
Failed entrepreneur.
Husband again.
Stepfather.
Father.
Changer of diapers and singer of songs.
Business consultant. Whatever that means.
College graduate. I never did get that BA. But I managed to convince a top-shelf MFA program to admit me on the strength of my journalism experience, and, thirty-seven years after graduating from high school, I finally received a college degree.
Teacher of writing.
Nonprofit director.
Chicken farmer.
Essayist.
And other things besides.
Convince myself / It's my life
The thing about becoming is, it happens when you aren’t looking, and takes you places you never thought you’d go.
There’s a way in which Talk Talk started from the finish line and ran the race backward. If it took some time for Simple Minds to coalesce into the emo synthpop powerhouse they were destined to become, it took Talk Talk a few years to let go of their most polished sound and achieve a kind of reverse apotheosis, becoming not more focused but more diffuse.
Potential is like a vacuum; it seems to be our nature to try to fill it in, to seek something to take up all that blank space, so we can move along knowing we fit comfortably into this box or that, our shape held snuggly by whatever uniform we’ve donned: clerk, writer, musician, exec, punk, teacher, rebel, dad. But Mark Hollis led Talk Talk on a different route. Instead of filling in the emptiness of Talk Talk’s potential, Hollis embraced it. Talk Talk’s fourth album, Spirit of Eden, rejects the very project of becoming. Largely improvised, and recorded in near darkness with instruments and equipment manufactured mostly in the early 60s, Spirit of Eden is like nothing the band had recorded before, and in fact resembles little that any rock band had recorded in the past. The songs are ethereal, nearly ambient, and loose to the point of being almost unstructured, like little through-composed masterpieces that nonetheless continue to reverberate somewhere deep within you, long after the album has ended. Hollis’s big, gentle voice has become a kind of keening croon—it’s still round and liquid, filled with midrange EQ, but it’s more haunting now, and you can hear the improvisation, as though Hollis is channeling the spirit of eden itself, never quite sure when the next lyric will emerge, or what its words might be. Talk Talk’s potential, fulfilled or unfulfilled, is no longer a question. This is music that sheds all expectation and judgement, and is merely and eternally itself, always now. The album didn’t stake out new ground for pop music as much as it vacated the territory altogether—so much so that it has come to be regarded as a foundational work in the still sadly marginal genre known as “post-rock.”
Because there was no potential Spirit of Eden was trying to live up to, no external yardstick it judged itself against, the album accomplished another remarkable trick: it recognized its listeners for who and what they were. Just as Spirit of Eden was no more or less than itself, you had the feeling, listening to it, that there was no need to be more or less than whatever you were at the moment—a shattering revelation, especially if you found it difficult to navigate the mid-1980s, an era of Reaganite rebukes, tension over “political correctness,” the War on Drugs, so-called “family values,” AIDS and the country’s reaction to it, and incipient accomplishment culture. Hell, it’s a shattering revelation today: that there is no potential to fulfill, nothing you need to become, no one you need to be who you aren’t yet. The doors might be open or they might be closed, it doesn’t matter. It’s your life.
If I could buy my reasoning, I'd pay to lose
Talk Talk were one of those rare bands that produced a body of work, and, seemingly satisfied, simply stopped. After Spirit of Eden, the band recorded 1991’s Laughing Stock, which sounded notes of an ethereal, almost otherworldly torch song jazz. The songs gestured suggestively, but never quite made contact, and some of the album’s effects felt self-conscious—it struggled to match Eden’s improvisational apotheosis. Hollis released an eponymous solo album in 1998—very personal, very wandering clarinet—after which, Talk Talk was never heard from again, almost literally: very few interviews with Hollis or his bandmates exist; journalists, biographers, and documentary filmmakers (as well as essayists) have had to content themselves for the most part with speculation. Many people now know Talk Talk primarily through the baffling and uninspired cover of “It’s My Life” that No Doubt recorded for their 2003 singles album. That’s a shame.
Hollis’s few comments about his retirement seem to point to the fact that family life and fatherhood were more important to him than being part of a music industry he never really fit into. He lived in London for two decades after his solo album came out, and then for a couple of years in a small town near England’s south coast, where he died of cancer in 2019, age 64.
One wonders about the path from Top 40 to art music to solitude. Did Hollis feel he’d fulfilled his potential, and simply wanted to be left alone? Or was he still seeking something, in the silence he once said was so important to him? Perhaps he managed to find his way back to that place where all the doors are open, that place in which all things are possible. I am much older now than I was when I was trying to figure out which door was the right one for me. Back then, potential shouted over every transom, a cacophony I could neither untangle nor navigate by, so loud it echoed in my ears always, haunting me. “It’s My Life” was the sound of that potential, the sound of limitless possibility, both thrilling and terrifying at once. It was a song that said anything was possible, but especially: leave me alone to figure it out. It’s my life, don’t you forget.
Things are quieter now. Past a certain age, the voices stop calling; a lot of doors look closed—a lot of doors are closed. Besides, one doesn’t look beyond those thresholds much, anymore. Now the limitlessness is much closer to home. A different kind of threshold starts to draw into view. In certain lights, the room you’re in contains no less than everything—just as Talk Talk’s music did. On some days, though, you become aware there’s something missing. All it is is that thing you were trying to escape: the sound of potential, of power, of life. The struggle now is to grasp it. It’s enough to just hang on, stay where you are.
It’s my life, it never ends
Mark Wallace lives and writes on the rural California coast south of San Francisco, surrounded by family, chickens, and goats. His essays and journalism have appeared in The Rumpus, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and many other places. He was the founding Executive Director of The Writers Grotto in San Francisco, where he teaches classes in writing and literature. Find him on Mastodon at zirk.us/@markwallace and Twittter at @MarkWallace