This Side of the Blue
This Side of the Blue
Zoe was obsessed with Joanna Newsom. So was I, so was everyone in San Francisco in 2005, but Zoe brought a real gay energy to the whole thing.
“You can’t post pictures of this,” she warned when I snapped a photo of Joanna’s harp, gorgeously lit on an otherwise empty stage.
“What? Why not?”
She shot me a preemptive look and ran a hand over her new buzz cut. “Because I didn’t tell Melissa I was coming.”
I gave her the response she had expected, which was ridicule. “You know Joanna Newsom is straight, right?”
“I don’t believe it,” she said. “She plays a harp .”
We’d been sharing a carpeted two-bedroom in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco for the past year. Zoe had reentered her first relationship when we’d arrived, but it ended soon after; for weeks I’d held her sobbing head on my shoulder. Then one night I dragged her out to a lesbian bar in the Mission and watched her acquire a new girlfriend with the ease of ordering a drink. I’d been dismissive of the new girl, Melissa, until I realized how much I liked her; she was perfect for Zoe, a community organizer with a Dolores Huerta tattoo and an ability to recognize a good thing when she found it. These were the kinds of charming problems they had as a couple: Zoe not inviting Melissa to a show in order to drool freely over a categorically unattainable woman.
The venue was too humble, a music hall above a club, booked before Newsom’s recent shoot to stardom. A few rows of chairs had been set up near the front, all of them claimed by people who seemed to actually know Newsom: friends, family, former teachers visiting from her Northern California hometown to witness the return of their prodigal daughter. Zoe started chatting them up like she had a shot in hell at the after-party.
I waited at the bar for a drink, mulling the angle I might take on the show on my blog, Walgreens Songs, where my twelve to fourteen readers would be eager for a report. The press was calling her music “freak folk,” so I could use that as a starting point, how inadequately it captured what Newsom was doing—how the ren-faire affectations and squawking voice were actually the least interesting part of her music.
I appreciated this about my blog, how it gave my thoughts about music another destination beyond live conversation. The initial concept was to write about the uncool music my generation ignored, the songs you never think about until you find yourself in a Walgreens aisle fighting tears—but when that became limiting, I relegated “Walgreens Songs” to a tag, an occasional category of post. I kept the title because it provided a hook: I would be the proud dork of the music blogosphere, if anyone ever noticed me.
The girl ahead of me in line was wearing vintage Levi’s and an eye-catching crushed velvet blazer. She was drinking a Hamm’s, which was the new Pbr, and tossed her wavy hair with an ease that made me want to buy her shampoo. I wasn’t supposed to be working tonight, but I got out of line and found Zoe. “Do you have a pen and paper?”
“Did you score one of your undercover agents for capitalism?” Zoe fished through her tote bag and produced a small notebook and a pen. “Show me.” I pointed to the blazer girl. Zoe nodded begrudging approval. “See if she knows Joanna.”
When I got to San Francisco I’d worked as a waitress and then, as the six-month grace period on my student loans gave way to desperation, landed a temporary job as a writer at a trend agency that specialized in providing “intelligence” for brands (mostly alcohol, some clothing). They loved me at the agency. “You’re so much more than a writer,” they said. They gave me a raise and a new role: intelligence specialist. My job was to recruit “trendsetters” in four coastal cities—SF, LA, New York, and Miami—which I did through a combination of Myspace stalking and approaching people in bars and clubs. Once I’d collected their contact information and loaded them into our database, I sent them monthly online surveys mining their “intelligence” (“intelligence” basically meaning what song should play in a vodka commercial; I could never say it without air quotes). With this well of knowledge I would then write articles for our clients, real meaty pieces with titles like “The Next Old-Man Drink” or “Nu-Rave Is Dead, Long Live Nu-Rave.”
I can’t lie: it was fun. Zoe disapproved, but she didn’t understand the bleakness of the post-MFA job hunt. Nomi was logging long hours at Nylon magazine for a salary that worked out to well under minimum wage; others were teaching ESL part-time, still eating oatmeal for dinner. And I rationalized that my job challengedme—Ihad to learn to be a slightly different person, to split myself into two Percies and be able to jump into the new one at a moment’s notice, the more brazen one with the capacity to approach strangers in bars. It helped to remember that I would be, almost always, the highlight of their night. That flash in their eyes: Finally, I’ve been discovered!
Clutching Zoe’s pen, I took a deep breath and repeated my mantra in my head: People love this shit. People love this shit. Then I tapped the blazer girl on her shoulder and gave my standard speech—“couldn’t help noticing your style,” “fifty dollars per survey,” “are you between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-nine?” I got the eye-flash right away. Very interested. Maybe too interested. Easy tiger. I asked her about music, where she shopped, trends she’d noticed in drinks and clothes: B-minus answers across the board. I skipped the contact page, just wrote down her Myspace so I could check out her network.
“Meh,” I told Zoe, slipping the notepad back into her tote. “Weirdly obsessed with the Strokes.”
“What’s wrong with the Strokes? The Strokes are generation-defining!”
“The Strokes are 2002-defining. I said, ‘Anything else?’ and she said, ‘Any bands that sound like the Strokes,’ and I said, ‘So, like, the entire British Invasion?’ She didn’t get it. She’s only here on a date.”
Zoe looked at me with awe, shaking her head. “You found a way to judge people for a living. It’s amazing, really.”
“I know.”
“What a terrible use of your God-given talent for being a total asshole.”
“I know. I’ll quit soon.”
“Promise?”
I shrugged. “We can’t all be social workers for at-risk youth.”
“You could totally be a social worker!” she said, and, when I looked at her incredulously, laughed. “Okay maybe not.”
The crowd grew noisy; Joanna had arrived.
We stood with our mouths ajar for the next hour, too ensorcelled to speak. She kept a full band in that harp, plucking syncopated beats and lead-guitar melodies while simultaneously strumming rhythm chords. And the songs . This was before she got weirder, when she was still molding her radically unique sound into perfect pop structures. The lyrics, sharp and literary and existential, fit their melodies like hands in gloves.
The friends-and-family rows were beaming up at her; Joanna occasionally reciprocated with a knowing smile aimed down at them.
Oh hello, jealousy. I’m trying to enjoy this show; could you leave? No? Well then. Please try to stay quiet. (A lesson from some mindfulness podcast I had overheard from Zoe’s bedroom: “Label your thoughts, talk to them.” If nothing else, it brought me mild amusement.) Yes, Joanna probably did have an encouraging, supportive mother. Yes, her waist is Barbie-degree tiny—Christ, what does that have to do with anything? We’re standing here witnessing actual genius, and I’m supposed to focus on the cinch of her belt?
During a relatively up-tempo song, I heard a hoarse whisper: “Zoe Gutierrez! Holy shit!”
Carlos, apparently. Eyes bugged and mouth gaping, hand crushing a plastic Crystal Geyser bottle. Zoe hugged him and then explained to me that we’d known him at Berkeley, where he’d lived with Caroline’s bassist. I made a show of remembering him even though I didn’t. Zoe was always running into acquaintances like this, the special club of the Bay Area born.
Joanna was having an issue with her strings onstage, so Carlos got chatty with us. “Literally every hipster in the city is here,” he said, eyes darting around. I realized dimly I did recognize him—not from college, but from the bars where I recruited: one of those people who never stayed home. “Hey,” he said. “You guys have any updates on the album?”
“What album?” Zoe said.
He staggered backward in mock shock. “Dude! Caroline’s! Does this mean you aren’t tight with Joey anymore?”
Zoe said some stuff—email sometimes, you know how it is.
“Why?” I asked him. “What have you heard? Is it finished?”
“It was, ” he said, taking a swig of water and then wiping his brow. “But they decided it needed a single, you know, a big single. The suits weren’t satisfied, or whatever. So now they’re taking some time, trying to come up with one more song. The album is called—ugh, I forget—Jeremy told me…”
I took a step forward.
Carlos squinted. “Something and something, I think?”
“Something and Something?” I said, aghast.
Carlos laughed. “No, no, like—” He started laughing again, could barely talk through the laughter. “Like, two words I can’t remember, with an ‘and’ in the middle.”
“Oh.”
“Your face,” he said, wiping his eyes. “Hey, you guys want some coke?”
“That’s Joanna Newsom up there,” Zoe hissed. “Show some respect.”
I faced the stage again, where Newsom was resuming her plucking, but had a hard time paying attention. “Something and Something” was a tantalizing puzzle that made me think mostly of lofty abstractions: Love and Mercy, “Ebony and Ivory.” That wasn’t Joe. Maybe it was two proper nouns, like Belle and Sebastian or Teaser and the Firecat . I felt another stab of jealousy, this one sharper than the ache I’d felt for Newsom. How fun it would be to name an album.
When I was late to applaud at the end of a song, Zoe elbowed me. “Stop thinking about Joey,” she whispered.
I did, but only because Newsom began strumming my favorite of hers, “This Side of the Blue.” It was a series of scenes about people just doing their best over here on this side of…the San Francisco Bay? The Pacific Ocean? The sky? The bottomless pit of misfortune hovering just one wrong step away from all of us? It’s a miracle just to be here, the song seemed to say, on this side of the blue. Don’t torture yourself trying to understand why. Know what you know. Do what you have to do.
That’s what Joe is doing, I told my jealousy, as the lights dimmed and the last chord gave way to applause. He’s struggling to nail his single, doing his best on this side of the blue. It’s what my mom is doing. It’s what I’m doing too, with my evil job and my useless degrees.
My jealousy did not, at least this time, argue back. Instead it propelled me to walk straight home after the show, over to Haight Street and up its hill—alone, as usual; Zoe had admitted after-party defeat and walked south to Melissa’s—composing in my head an ode to “This Side of the Blue” and then unloading it onto my keyboard once I got home.
I had put some effort into my room this time: installed a Raj-inspired dimmer attachment on a floor lamp, inserted a desk with a green banker’s lamp into the squared-off window. I liked looking out at the street as I wrote, at our neighborhood mix of tourists and panhandlers and vintage clothing enthusiasts, or, on a Friday night like this, swarms of buzzed twentysomethings hunting down cheap drinks.
I structured my “This Side of the Blue” post as a thank-you to Newsom. I wrote about how its existentialism made me feel liberated from my expectations, my stupid hunger to be capable of a greatness like hers. I couldn’t quite squash that ambition, I wrote, but maybe there was a way to braid it with self-acceptance, with peace.
When I pressed publish and reread the post, I felt, as always, a light dissatisfaction. Just black marks on a screen, floating in an unwelcoming void. I kept waiting for my words to land somewhere real, to mean something more.