Deep Cuts

Funny Strange

The rest of the semester passed slowly, but it was a good slow—it was the way I suspected time was always intended to pass. It feels like a calendar error, when I think about it now, that there were only a few weeks between that night in the suburbs and the end of that year. Most weeknights, Zoe and I met at one of a handful of local coffee shops named after Italian cities, studying and talking and eating stale muffins for dinner, while Joe did the grunt work of building a band: teaching his songs to Luke Skinner, posting flyers for drummers and bassists in Amoeba with his number on tear-away strips, auditioning all the randoms who called, securing a shared practice space in Oakland. Around ten or eleven he’d meet up with us and download on the latest: who was sounding good, who was sounding bad, when they might be ready for shows.

I waitressed on Friday nights and Sunday brunches, collecting my tips in an envelope I kept under my mattress; I usually had enough to cover rent by the middle of the month. Joe worked at a frozen yogurt shop for minimum wage until I got him a job at the diner by lying to my boss about his experience, then covering for his mistakes once he started. Zoe often came in for the last hour of our shifts, drinking coffee and studying at the counter while we balanced the register. And then we went out.

It’s hard to say where we went. My memories are vague on context, usually in transit or sitting on stoops, occasionally at shows or poetry slams or parties full of people we ignored. Sometimes eating fries and veggie burgers (I had eased into their vegetarianism without fanfare) at Irish bars. There were other people around—the Ring Finger girls, Joe’s roommates, Megan—but we had the most fun, the easiest time, as a threesome.

We each had our roles. Joe the engine, me the contrarian. Zoe the grounded one, actually well-rounded, though given to bursts of irritation with us both. She was eager to moderate when the conversation became too musical, probably to exert some control in an area where she had less to contribute, and liked to give us conversational assignments.

For example, one late weekend night while waiting in the bathroom line at a co-op party, Joe and I were talking about the title of the new Microphones album ( It Was Hot, We Stayed in the Water ) when Zoe barked, “Favorite album title.”

“Genocide and Juice,” Joe said soberly.

I went for humor to balance him out. “ CrazySexyCool, TLC,” I said. “Left Eye was crazy, T-something was sexy, Chilli was cool. Plus it was one word, you guys. But with capitals.”

Zoe laughed and gave Joe the point, poking her thumb in his direction. “Chilli was sexy. Worst album title.”

I clapped with excitement. “ Songs in the Key of Life, Stevie Wonder!”

“Oh my god,” Joe said. “I’ve never thought about how stupid that is.”

Zoe made a face. “That’s just because you guys are white. White people can’t handle things being obvious.”

“What are you talking about, we’re the most obvious,” I said. “We invented country music.”

“Did we, though?”

I paused. “Probably not.”

“Even if we did, it wasn’t white university students,” Zoe said, nodding down the hall at a circle of hacky sackers. “It was white people who were impoverished. It takes privilege to think something’s cheesy.”

“Here we go,” I said. “The millionaire who said imagine no possessions.”

Joe gave me a look that said he knew this was an Elvis Costello reference and we would discuss it later, but Zoe was pissed. “I’m not a millionaire!” she said.

“You’re the only one here whose bedroom has a door on it.”

“You guys will never stop punishing me for that door.”

“Shut up!” Joe said, pulling his hair. “How am I supposed to think when you’re charging everything with cultural context?”

“Speaking of TLC,” I said, pivoting to distraction tactics. “Did you know they got the idea for ‘Waterfalls’ from a Paul McCartney deep cut?”

“Yes,” Joe said. “I mean no, but stop talking. Okay. Okay. Thank you for that reference. Ringo Starr did a solo album called Time Takes Time .”

I had to cross my legs to stop from peeing myself.

I know it all sounds familiar: record-store nerds and their dumb games, one-upping each other to pass the time. But it felt different to me. The goal was stream-of-consciousness riffing; any evidence of posturing or preparing was a greater sin than losing. Losing was fine, actually. Lame references were fine. That we did not process music entirely through a lens of coolness felt radical to me at the time.

Here’s a better example: instead of patting each other on the back for hating “Let It Be,” as they did at Amoeba, we tried to understand how “Something” managed to sound so magical despite being one of the least melodic songs on Abbey Road . Zoe said it was the honesty of the lyrics (“How many love songs admit that they don’t know whether their love will grow, that they don’t even know what it is they love about the person? It’s fundamentally antiestablishment”); Joe said it was the major sevenths and ambiguous key, which matched the blurry experience of Harrison’s love.

Joe and I were always working on his music, though we never pulled another all-nighter; the songs were just always there between us, like a balloon we’d been tasked to keep afloat. On my way to work I would pass his house and leave lyric revisions taped to his door: Don’t switch tenses in the second verse, it’s distracting/serves no purpose . He attached MP3s to unrelated emails: My friend is working the door for the Aislers Set tomorrow so we can get in free. Hey am i ripping something off with this melody? He picked up every guitar he ever saw to play me something, at parties or thrift stores or (once, drunk) from the hands of a busker on Telegraph Avenue. If Zoe was around she would usually wander off, though sometimes I saw her watching us carefully.

I relished my role as his musical sidekick. It gave me great power without risk or accountability. I’d spout my opinions, which came easily to me, then bask in the glow of creative satisfaction.

But sometimes I took it too far. Maybe it went to my head. About a song itself, I could say anything—I could say it was derivative junk; he’d just toss it out and return days later with something new. (He was enormously prolific those first few months of our friendship; he must’ve written a song a week.) But sometimes my pushback slid outside of the song and onto his broader tendencies as an artist, and that was when things got sticky.

The worst was when he first showed me a song called “,” an up-tempo jam about the apocalypse that would eventually become the title track of his band’s album. We were in his house, leaning back on his futon, our feet on the coffee table between scattered beer cans and half-empty chip bags. Zoe had left early to finish a paper and he’d played the rough recording for me at max volume. It had an obvious, easy hook: “What was funny haha / Became funny stra-a-a-ange”—then he half spoke the final line with a maximum of mumblecore charm: “How long till we’re laughing in our graves?” That chorus worked brilliantly, and I told him so. But I also told him that the verses, a metered list of environmental horrors, reminded me of “We Didn’t Start the Fire”—a reference that, understandably, made him bristle.

And then I pushed it further:

“You always do this, when you have a great hook,” I said. “You phone the rest in.” I could feel the momentum of the idea forming in my head, barreling toward expression without my permission. “And if you have no hook, it’s the opposite—you labor over the thing, strangle it half to death. It’s always one or the other.”

He stared at me, his face slowly reddening until he spat out, “And what do you do, when you write a great hook?” Then he stood up and left his own house, slamming the door behind him.

It was a shiv stuck in the worst place, but of course I’d asked for it. “Fuck your feelings!” I shouted at the door.

I cleaned up the beer cans just for the feeling of doing something right. After throwing them in the garbage I lingered in the kitchen awhile, imagining what it would be like to be him, shuffling around this giant house of dudes. When did the hooks come to him—as he was making coffee, going about his morning routine? I lifted the glass coffeepot, stained brown in its lower half, imagining being struck by a bolt of inspiration. When a floorboard creaked upstairs I let myself out.

I slept zero hours that night, as always happened when we had these fights. But I never apologized. By the second day my regret was always tangled up with some weird responsibility, some sense that I was playing the role he wanted me to play. We would avoid each other for however long it took for him to complete the song—usually a couple of days; he would skip class, according to Zoe, heave all his attention on to the song. Then he’d deliver his revision, showing up on my doorstep with a guitar or, in the case of “,” leaving a disc in my mailbox. The new “” was infinitely, undeniably superior, the verses weirder and stumbling, more Dylan than Billy Joel. I responded with effusive praise, and our trio reunited.

But it would be a lie to say these incidents didn’t leave their mark. Each one seemed to deepen a dark, murky well that sat just below the surface of our friendship. Maybe that well was normal, though, I remember thinking. Maybe it was just the complexity of really, finally knowing someone.

One thing he never asked me about was the name of his band. He mentioned it in passing, a done deal: their newly assembled foursome, comprising all dudes, would be called Caroline. I recoiled, confused.

“ Caroline? What kind of a band name is that? Why can’t you be Joe Morrow? They’re just a backing band anyway.”

He shot me a look and I never mentioned it again. Of course, in this era of indie rock, it was zeitgeisty to hide behind a band; leading with yourself was for pop stars and rappers. And Zoe told me later what I probably should’ve figured out: Caroline was his mom’s name, and this was not a subject where anyone’s opinion meant anything, not even mine.