Scorn and Rockets

On not meeting a band. Plus, I'm teaching a workshop!

I was making a playlist for my paramour, considering the Love and Rockets song Love Me. I decided against it. I like I’m only interested in paradise and I’m only interested in pure white light - I am! - but the rest of the lyrics seems to detail a slightly grueling self-help regiment, and anyway, Love Me sounds lowkey desperate, no?

Anyways, thinking about Love and Rockets brought to mind when I waited outside the Orpheum Theater in Boston for some hours, hoping to meet the band as they arrived for their soundcheck. The Orpheum Theater was the med-sized venue where many favorite bands played in the 80s, bands that weren’t big enough to fill an arena but were too big for a club. It was located at the dead end of a short street in downtown Boston, a perfect place to waste a day in your best gothic finery, smoking cigarettes and waiting for a glimpse of your beloved icon. I spent a lot of time dawdling in front of the Orpheum in my youth, and a good amount of time hunting down the musicians I adored in other locations - dive clubs, hotels, tour buses. What did I want from these people? To quote Pillion (a tad overhyped, though I liked it, okay?) I have always had an aptitude for devotion, and in my teenaged years this manifested as my heart fully hanging out of my chest at the first note of a favorite song, and a deep projection of magic and magnificence onto whoever plucked the string or warbled the note that stirred me so. My consumption of music was: lie in bed and cry. Sleep out on the street to be first in line to buy tickets to the show / get to the general-admission venue six hours early to insure I spent the concert with my body pressed against the stage, my hands reaching to touch the singer’s boots, my upturned face hoping to catch a drop of the guitarist’s sweat as he noodled above me. This is might be mental illness, but also in a former life I was probably an intense Christian mystic, working myself up so hotly at the thought of the Virgin Mary that I bid her to materialize before my very eyes in some European grotto. There is a fine line between mental illness and mystical passion, one I continue to parse. But, anyway.

It Me

I stood outside to try to meet Love and Rockets before their show that night. There were some other fanatics there; I recall a boy who had painted a portrait of Daniel Ash, he held the canvas with a nervous desperation. I was jealous that he had something to offer, to give; I was there for an autograph, a photo, so selfish! Love and Rockets had given me so much, and there was, demanding more. Love me! I mean, that was the dream, was it not? One of fairytale proportions; Daniel Ash would take one look at me and see not another teenaged goth girl with more or less the exact same hair and dress as every other goth girl from LA to London, but his soulmate. With the preternatural powers I imagined musicians - artists! - had, he would glance at me and immediately see my soul, and it would resonate with his soul, and we would fall in love at first sight there in the alley outside the Orpheum and then, I don’t know, I guess I’d have to drop out of high school and move to London, which felt correct, I couold totally imagine myself having such a destiny!

In fact, a black car trundled up the alley and stopped abruptly, front wheels on the curb. Doors swung open. David J and Kevin Haskins and Daniel Ash bolted from the car with stern faces and deep focus. The focus was deliberate, cast away from us. The boy with the painting started towards them, hollering to them weakly, as if they hadn’t seen us, as if they didn’t encounter exactly this scene outside every venue they ever played at. They ignored us, and were through the glass doors of the theater, gone. I felt bad for the boy with the painting. I could see them ignoring a needy fan such as myself, but this kid had brought an offering; it seemed especially rude. Now he had to lug it back to Worcester or wherever he lived on a train, on buses, surely getting heckled and fucked with by townies as this was Boston in the 80s and the state was riddled with townies who’d clobber you if they detected even an inkling of independent thought within you, and this kid was goth, probably gay, and had painted a portrait of someone who looked even gother and gayer. If I were him I’d bring it down to the T and toss it on the third rail. How could he even look at it without remembering getting iced by his beloved? Painted in earnestness and love, it was ruined.

Because trying to meet bands was my lifestyle, bands ended up categorized in one of two camps - bands who were cool, meaning they humored our ardor, or maybe even enjoyed it, and bands who sucked, meaning they experienced us as the scourge we likely were. We still liked the bands who sucked in this way - we couldn’t not, our bodies, our hearts and souls responded to the music with powerful immediacy - but now we were jaded about them. The bands who took the moment to greet us swelled in our hearts and minds, absolutely heroic. They’d made our stupid crummy worlds - populated by daily bullies and spam dinners and parents who figured we deserved it when someone on the street spit at us because we did, after all, look like freaks - thick of sudden magic. The music, this invisible thing that filled us and moved us, was suddenly something real and physical we could touch and interact with. The world got bigger. A good interaction with a goth star, or even a mediocre, not-shitty one, would fuel my friends and I for days.

I want to keep writing about all these bands and who were cool and who sucked and who I tried to run away with and who tried to get me to go back to their hotel room, but I have to stop. Maybe later? Before I go I want to tell you I’m teaching a five-week memoir workshop on zoom next month. It happens on Wednesdays, March 11 - April 8, from 5pm - 8pm PST (except Wednesday, March 18th, when it will end at 7). We’ll talk about memoir, I’ll share work I love, we’ll write, you’ll read your work, I’ll assign homework so that you stay engaged with your writing during this period. My workshops always wind up being very special communities, the writers frequently stay in touch and continue writing together after we end, which I really love. It’s $650, $600 if you register before March 1st, and you can register by shooting me an email at michelle.bernadette.tea@gmail.com

Love, Michelle