I’m in Oregon as I’m writing this—it’s early morning on a Monday and I’m out in this little cabin in the mountains working on the record. And on early morning August I see summer’s Swan Song coming and I feel the need to tell the rest of the story of what happened with Marie and I while I was in England a few months back. I saw her two other times—the next being a brief stay in Manchester where there was nothing but booze in bed, a bit of heavy petting, and some Woody Allen films while we hid from the world and that monstrous, industrious city with big factories that just looms over you in the pale, English evening. The last of the three encounters on that trip, which is what I’ll really get into here, was in Nottingham at what I believe was the last show on that tour—can’t remember now as too many liquor bottles have been emptied and too many sad nights have been lived since.
My manager and I arrive in the grim fog on some morning before the show. I know still that it was the last of the three Dot to Dot festival shows I’d been on, as there were familiar faces everywhere and bands still giving each other the ol’ ‘up-down’ as if sizing each other up for a boxing match instead of performing music on the English stage. (Art is a competition after all—isn’t it?—ha). As always when I’m in England, I’m thirsting for a pint even though it’s only ten in the morning or so—and I need it anyway because I haven’t seen Marie in about a week and I’m nervous as all hell and don’t want to go chasing her away now with all my insane, nervous talk—ah. So my manager gets all things sorted—confident, 30-something Brit that he is—and I run off to the nearest pub and grab myself a pint of some Lager that escapes me at the moment. The pub is warm in comparison to the damp air out there, and already the English are yipping and yelping at each other about football (the real football) and this that and the other. I never feel more at home than I do in an English pub because all bars in America oughta follow suit and burn down our unholy dance clubs and ugly, corporate sports bars filled with unhappy servers with unwanted children, sad eyes and bad tattoos from their youth. I can sit in an English pub for hours and just listen to the people—not talking to anyone necessarily—but just listening to the dry humor and self-deprecating attitudes the English hold of themselves and everybody. It’s because the sky in England is not vast like in America, but an enclosing ceiling bearing down on their bent heads! In America, the sky says all is possible—even if it isn’t true! But what is true is that home sky of mine gives hints of the infinite and the finite—the coexisting of the holy and the wretched—mortal and immortality! Even in New York City, when you’re standing on a rooftop somewhere in Harlem, you can see the forever sky of America stretching out into the holy oceans of the blessed earth fallen from grace like its inhabitants. Can’t you not see the Void, O’ Brooklyn hipsters? O’ steel mill workers of my hometown? O’ white-collar business men from your high skyscraper offices? The English must return to the ocean to catch a glimpse of eternity, for it can’t be found in their sky! Poor bastards—what good people they are.
Anyway, I’m having my first pint of the day when I get the call from Marie that she’s here. So I have to slam down my beer and hit the streets to find her and get her to the small tent where they hand out guest passes and artist passes and other gypsy trinkets that get you in anywhere you wish to roam. I find her only a block down from the pub I was at and she’s wearing another one of her rompers (blue this time), and I’m going mad for her because she’s gorgeous in the English sunlight that barely breaks through the fog and the clouds. What a woman she is!
We say hello to each other and kiss—not wasting any time because we both know this is the last time we’ll see each other until I’m in England again (and God knows what’ll happen by then, if she or I will move on to something or someone more realistic). I ask her about her train ride and she asks me how I’m doing this morning—yada, yada, yada—we decide to head back to the pub I was at for a couple more pints after we get her the wristband she needs and all that. We tuck ourselves into a table in the corner and talk about what bands she wants to see and what we can actually catch before I have to play at this little pub across town. We’re having a couple pints of Blue Moon of all things (a beer my parents often consume back home when we’re out at one of the old haunts in my hometown that’s been there ever since the day I was born into this world), and I’m well aware that my eyes are getting sadder with each passing pint because I’m thinking too much about how much I like this girl and haven’t had this much fun with anyone in so long (years and years, people!). In her eyes I see ambiguous emotions but can tell she’s getting a kick out of me going on about the Whitney album I’m really digging and how “more albums oughta be like that” and so on. Showing such passion! Bitching about how the world is not living up to its potential by not giving proper attention to this or that thing! What garble—ah, I’m drunk and enjoying myself the more our conversation diverts from the mundane and digs into our opinions about Brexit or this Irish folk singer she wants to see before I play. I find a sense of comfort through passionate opinions being shared across a pub table that don’t always align but sometimes do—I thirst for original thoughts and sentences, you people of the 21st century! Enough with your “such and such got me like _________”, your emojis, your “Throwback Thursdays”, your seflies, your Saul Alinsky demonizing, your celebrity worship, your continuous tweets about how this party you’re at is “lit”, your surface level leftist rants with your secret Fascist censorship—tribalizing your fellow man down to select details that only make up the surface level aspects of their being—stripping away their individuality for the sake of politics! Your nationalism, your romanticism of the American past, your hedonistic attitudes and relativist worldview, your regurgitated right-wing commentator dribble, your apathy towards your temporality, your Disney-warped minds, and your unwillingness to confront the trauma and emotional depravity you suffer from! Come find me at the nearest bar or pub and sit across this table from me to discuss great Nietzsche and how everything he predicted of us came true!
Enough of the Henry Miller-esque listing—Marie and I have left the pub and are making our way to the venue where I’m playing later (as that’s where the Irish folk singer is also playing, but on the upstairs stage). The place is packed—takes us ten minutes just to get to the bar to order a round, and another ten just to squeeze our way to the back patio without spilling our drinks all over our drunk contemporaries. Millions of people talking! Music playing with no one paying attention—me praying that they don’t do the same when I play, otherwise I’ll lose all energy and just drink myself to death onstage. But even the back patio is packed, and we decide to bolt upstairs to see who’s playing before the Irish folk singer—the stage being empty—thus leading me to guzzle down my pint because I have nothing better to do than wait around at the bar another ten minutes or so to get a second pint at this venue. Guinness after Guinness! In England I can’t help myself but get drunk all the time (especially before shows) as it just lights the world afire and makes my eyes glimmer as everything becomes beautiful and everyone is my friend.
Marie nuzzles close to me as the Irish folk singer takes the stage (his name’s Isaiah, I think), and he looks like some surfer straight out of California with long, blonde hair wearing this wild shirt that I at one point compliment during the dead silence that exists between songs when a crowd really digs ya. He laughs when I do that—and I laugh, too because the fucker didn’t just shrug me off—acting like so many musicians and artists I know or have heard of that take themselves too seriously too the point where nothing in their work is sincere or matters anymore. Don’t you know we’re all insects!
Anyway—Isaiah-Irish-singer-extraordinaire finishes up and gets all the claps and whoops I’m hoping for when I play, and Marie and I head back downstairs to meet my manager to help unload the guitars and set up for my set. The main floor is still packed—people talking and shouting obscenities and stories to each other. Good looking guys scanning for pretty girls, and dirty old men reconvening with old flames to get someone else to get them to that brief vacation known as the orgasm—ah! And Marie is looking at me as the weird separation is about to take place where I go up on the stage and she sits down with the rest of the people in the pub to watch me dance and sing about ol’ death and sex and that forever loss of heartbreak caused by those adolescent loves I’d had so long ago (long ago to me—I’m twenty-three for fuck’s sake).
When I do take the stage, stumbling up there with a Guinness in my hand and another coming from my manager who knows I always need at least two beers onstage while I’m doing my thing, I see an older gentleman who’s also having a Guinness sitting in a booth all lonesome. I see myself in him! My future self! I raise my glass to him and grin, and he raises it to me with a real serious look like I better fucking play and play fucking good because he and everybody else needs it on this Sunday afternoon in Nottingham—with the fog dissipating under the pale, English sun.
And all shows, as they always do for me, go by in a blur—and all I remember is looking at Marie during a song a or two and smiling, and hopping off stage at the very end of my set, guitar in hand, and sitting down next to that old man with the Guinness and strumming that final chord for a whole Goddamn minute or two while everyone in the pub is whooping and hollering and not throwing the nearest glass at my head. My God, what a feeling! And after I do that, that old man shakes my hand and smiles at me—and we raise our glasses to each other again when I get back to the stage to take a drink and put my guitar away and get the hell out of there. And after all that, walking down the ever lonesome streets with Marie to take her back to the train station, I feel such a sadness in my stomach as I know I have to say goodbye to her and won’t see her again for another two or three months (we agreed to see each other again when I eventually do go back, which is in about a week or so)…and I can see that sadness in her, too—but isn’t showing it because she’s better at hiding her feelings than I am—but I can sense that this sadness is shared between us.
So eventually she grabs a cab, as she doesn’t want to miss her train (and I’d gotten us lost because I’m an idiot and don’t know how to get around anywhere without a Goddamn map or GPS). And I kiss her goodbye and watch her drive off into the distance—turning the corner eventually and leaving me to lean against the glass of a closed Chinese restaurant, head bent, waiting to get picked up by my manager to head back to open America.
Story by Trevor Sensor. You can follow him on Twitter @trevorsensor.
