soul and fire

The first time I heard Lou Barlow's voice, my stomach caught like I'd been punched. I filled with sweet ache. It was the Sebadoh album, Bubble and Scrape, played obsessively in the rooms of freshman year boys -- the ones with dirty corderoys and copies of Respectable Novels stuffed in their back pockets. They smoked pipes of vanilla tobacco and drank bourbon and talked about themselves at length. And they listened to brilliant music. Sebadoh was the token band of the young suburbanite turned loose in the big city at age 18; smart, awkward boys grappling gracelessly with smart, sassy girls. This disconnect was bridged with a six-string. His inspiration sat beside him on the twin dorm bed, but he couldn't touch her. All he could find the courage to do was write heart-wrenching songs about her rejection. And Lou Barlow was their hero: Princess Confusion, come to me again -- saying goodbye was so much fun.

Heath, eternally in a navy blue rollneck sweater, frayed at the cuffs, chainsmoking Camels, slumped in the corner of his room with an acoustic on one knee and a bottle of Jim Beam on the other. Kevin was always sprawling, Beat boy to the n'th degree, moppy hair slipping over basset hound eyes, scrawling left-handed poetry in a composition notebook. He read at our weekly open mic. The frist time I saw him read, waking up beside you and the bend of light on your arm… my toes curled in my suede Vans. Kevin was obsessed with the guy who stole his girl ("Robb with two b's -- the second b for bastard!") and Heath was obsessed with finding his angel savior. After open mic, they'd sneak Nattie Light and whiskey up to the fourth floor of the regal Shelton Hall, puff their vanilla pipe tobacco, talk about dead white men, and strategically ignore the sparkling jewels of femininity in the room so they'd have fodder for poetry at the end of the night.

I went to my first Boston show in October with Heath, Kevin and Jenn to see Sunny Day Real Estate and Shudder to Think play at the Middle East. My head was ripped open and the music broke in and assaulted me. If you have ever stood at the feet of Jeremy Enigk while he is singing, you have seen God. He reaches up and tears him from the sky, throwing in some devil for good measure, and screams it all out through his terrorized blue eyes.

After the show we sat on the front lawn of the dorm and smoked cloves. The boys talked about bands and ignored the girls. It was the same story every time. I spent many years in the same room with Kevin and I honestly can't recall a single sentence he ever addressed directly to me. Jenn terrified and enfuriated him, and the only way he could communicate with her was by bickering. They made me nervous snapping at each other, but I was assured there was a convoluted history involving alcohol that fueled their love/hate relationship. Then poor Heath -- the year before college, he wrote a novel about an angel that would save him, and he decided early in September that she was Jenn.

Nobody knew what to do about it, so they formed a band called Corderoy Boy and recorded songs about each other.

I was still grappling with Lou Barlow. I tried to wrap my head around how these boys functioned -- because Lou was one of them, their King Persuader -- and for every gorgeous finger-picked, blood-stained ballad there was four minutes of violent feedback and a song about masturbation. You could almost hear him -- "Nuh uh! I take it back! I don't really like you!" There was something disturbingly fifth grade about the whole scene.

So after spending bright winter evenings running around the city with the Corderoy Boys (by now, half a dozen strong), I would sit at my desk drinking beaujolais from the bottle, listening to Bubble and Scrape, trying to make sense of the night.

The following year, Sebadoh played at Paradise on my birthday. Watching Lou Barlow play, sing, sweat, and cry at the mic broke my heart. I was seriously hit. Back then love and pain were so intermingled that they felt the same. I couldn't tell if I was aching because I was in love with Lou or because he had broken my heart. I went back the following night to see if another show would give me the answer.

I grew into Sebadoh and the albums became so entrenched in my life that they still recall exact moments in time. Sitting on my bed sophomore year, facing the enormous wood-paned window strung with fireflies and amber wine bottles, my black hoodie covering my cold hands, Jenn sitting across from me on her bed, feet tucked up under her like an exotic bird. She was motivating me to go break up with my boyfriend. It was a big break up -- a year-long relationship, which at 19 is practically common law. Jenn pulled out a Sebadoh album and put on "Soul and Fire", followed by "Happily Divided". I smiled despite myself. If you decide you need me, I'll be wondering if I care... not there to soothe your soul, friend to tender friend, I think our love is coming to an end.

A year later, "Think" off the same album paralyzed me. It's excruciatingly tender. I think I love you, but I don't know what that means -- the girl of my dreams or a friend that one day leaves… I had one wall of my room covered in paper and we would paint all sorts of brilliant, drunken epiphanies. In giant blue letters it said:

I think I love you, but I don't know what that means. (Lou Barlow)

I miss you, but I haven't met you yet. (Bjork)

I have nothing to offer the world but my own confusion. (Jack Kerouac)

"Think" nursed me through some tough times. I started to lose my mind a little bit, and I remember so vividly my window above Kenmore Square, snow, pink and green Christmas lights, me convinced I absolutely needed to read Walt Whitman that evening and so running five blocks to the bookstore on Newbury St., through cold white drifts in my Birkenstocks, headphones warming my ears.

So when Lou Barlow was winding down his set at the Sunset in Ballard of all places, I secretly hoped he'd play a song from Bubble and Scrape -- that he'd play "Think". But how could he? Those songs were over a decade old, pre-Folk Implosion, before side projects and solo albums -- a random track stuck at the end of a chaotic, adolescent album.

Then in the silence between songs, someone yelled out, "Think! Let Tomorrow Bee!" He scratched his head for a second and said, "Really? Wow. Okay." Digging back in his head he pulled out the chords and when he started playing the song, my knees went weak. I was suddenly 20 years old again, sneaking into Paradise to see Sebadoh play, cradling my melodramatic heart in a snowy window above Beacon Street, convinced that music and night air would give me all the answers I would ever need.

He stumbled his way through the first verse and then tripped over the climax, totally forgetting the words. He said, "Aw, fuck it," and strummed sloppily through the bridge. He couldn't finish the song.

I was instantly orphaned.

I pinned all this wisdom and emotion on this musician, made him the answer man, my King Persuader, I hung on his every note, I was his Princess Confusion. He translated the world for me, made everything clear and honest and right. And he couldn't remember the words that performed that magic. The words that brought us together for life or longer. It was like he forgot how to say "I do."

Oh, Lou.

Had he simply been the watered-down version of his passionate youth, tamed, jaded, and 20 pounds heavier, I could have forgiven him. But he just divorced himself from that period, from the people he and I were when he sang, Let me feel good now and though this may have to end, I hope I'm always with you honestly your friend…

We were not happily divided.