The Music Comes Round and Round

YOU WILL COME AWAY from this book with no doubt about Alex M. Stein’s love for his favored music. In fact, no matter how fervent a music-lover you may think yourself, the 40 essays contained herein may cause you to question your own depth of passion.

Stein’s talent has been realized and honed through years of professional writing and theater-making. He often performs his stories before an audience, and I’m guessing it’s this that gives his prose appealing contours of rhythm and an engaging mellifluousness. He uses judicious repetition of words and phrases which, along with such tools as assonance and alliteration, reveal the poetry lurking within these pieces.

There’s a commonality among those who obsess early on about music. At least those of, as we say, a certain age. Physical possession was important. If your obsession began in the LP days, you stockpiled records, both latest releases and elusive antiques. Your ears, ever-alert to nuance, treasured the differences a single song could display across a number of performances, even (or especially) by the same ensemble.

But most profound are the emotional associations created by the confluence of song and event. Stein’s musical universe, inadequately defined as “rock ‘n’ roll,” is far enough away from mine that I feared I’d have no commonality with his book. Until I read, in the Introduction, “If you’ve ever been dumped by someone and found you can no longer stand the music you associate with them, you’re definitely my people,” and realized that, no matter the music, we have grounds for bonding.

Nevertheless, this is a report from an outlier. Still, when he mentions Buddy Holly and Neil Young, I mentally substitute Jascha Heifetz and Duke Ellington, and it works. The challenges and rewards of caring that much about music cut across what after all are porous, music-industry inflicted boundaries. If you enjoy any manner of music fanaticism (and by “enjoy,” I mean “are happily punished and excited by”), this book will speak to you. 

The stories tend to fall into categories: recollection, contemporary life, fantasy, and fable, with two or more categories sometimes commingling. Something music-related appears in every story, from a Hitchcock-style cameo to (more often) full-fledged subject matter. At the heart (even if it’s towards the end) is a piece titled “The Only Truth Is Music,” which begins with a nod to Jack Kerouac. As an inspiration to Alex the fledgling writer, it never really took, although, writes Stein, “Jack Kerouac has always been the platonic ideal for ‘Fuck the man, no one will ever understand me, and I’m going to write stories filled with fictionalized versions of my friends.’ I can’t remember what he was on about, to be honest.”

By the time you get to this story, you should be prepared to realize that Stein’s only monkeying with you. His peripatetic impressions of the parts of the world where he’s put in time are always insightful, usually peopled by what I take to fictionalized versions of his friends. But in this story, he’s putting in more road time than usual, and for a good reason (that a non-fanatic might find hard to credit). Folk-punk artist Frank Turner toured the U.S. in the summer of 2022 in order to play concerts in 50 states over the course of 50 days, and Stein wanted to catch a piece of it. He ended up catching two. The sensible one was at the Wiltern in Los Angeles, Stein’s home city, and he got tickets for himself and his wife, Amy. But he hungered for another shot, and settled on the concert in Phoenix two nights before the L.A. gig. 

This is where so many elements of the book come together. We drive the six each-way hours with him, the kind of travel that needs the push of a passion. And travel fuels many of this book’s other stories as well.

He has two tickets for this Phoenix concert as well, but Amy declined the crazy trip and none of the L.A. friends he asked were interested. He spoke with a Boston-based college friend named Sue, noting his mixed feelings about this venture, and she emphatically encouraged him to go. “Sue reminds me about mutual friends who are no longer here. ‘Sometimes we should do things because they can’t anymore,’ she says. (This resonates with me, in part because ‘Long Live the Queen,’ one of my favorite Frank Turner songs, makes this exact point, albeit in 4/4 time.)” Better still, she realizes she can meet him at the concert by changing one leg of a business trip. This echoes another frequent theme: the connections forged with friends, sometimes satisfying, sometimes not.

He is reminded, while driving past an old church, of a family visit to a church craft sale when he was a kid. Uninterested in most of what was offered, young Alex is drawn to a box of 45s. They’re three for a dime, which is all his budget will allow. Worn when he bought them, he “played them a hundred times more.” He doesn’t name this as the start of his music obsession, but it exemplifies the theme of recollection that recurs throughout the book. All of it wrapped in a reassuring reminder: “Music is wholly magic and you don’t need Kerouac or the road to find my God. He’s there every time strangers gather, lift their hearts, and join together in song.”

Stein’s search for an Ideal Song informs the dreamlike fable “Demons Don’t Sing,” in which he happens upon a middle-of-the-forest church and a choir within that entrances him. That kind of magic sounds again in “The Piano,” although it’s a decidedly bittersweet lament from a dying instrument.

Obsessions often leak into one’s dreams, and so it is with Stein, who gets dating advice from Graham Parker in the story “Another Grey Area.” And another venture into entertaining fantasy is “The Veil Between Worlds,” which explores an alternate (but very similar) universe scenario, a story with a Jack Finney flavor. Except that in Stein’s view, “There are worlds where no Bushes were ever elected president, where four women in a row named Suzanne never broke my heart in college, and where that guy with three names I vowed never to speak shot Chuck Berry instead of John Lennon.”

Among the fables (at least as I term them) in this collection are “Ghost Cake (A Sea Shanty),” a sea-set ghost saga, in which the central song (or song idea, really) is a shanty, while the theme, rather hilariously, as it turns out, is food. “Song of the Moon” takes us on a walk in the woods, where the lesson is learning to listen. The beautifully written “The Flim-Flam Sound,” on the other hand, posits a broader scope: 

There’s a sound of the spheres. Soft and low. Primal. Almost undetectable. 
The sound of hearts beating. Wind blowing. 
    The sound of magnets seeking north. 
It’s not a sound you hear often. But when you do, it’s magical.

After hearing of a favored musician’s death, “I imagine songs attached to anchors or buoys that follow artists around for years. And now those songs are floating on open waters, sometimes shouting into the storms and other times washing up on the shores of my memories.” It’s part of the story “Pure and Easy,” which opens with a look back at working college radio, another point of confluence between Stein’s history and mine.

The correlation between music-enjoyment and romance has probably never been better articulated than in “Luge Music.” The title acknowledges the luge track-like structure of the groove track on a record, and the fact that each playing causes the stylus to gouge a little more away. “It happens so slowly that you don’t notice, but every time you listen, the sound gets worse. Pops and clicks intensify as the music retreats. The memory of your first kiss fades into the memory of your first heartache and you remember how you should have known that the girl with the leather jacket was too cool for you and maybe you did know or maybe the fact that she had multiple friends in prison should have tipped you off, but you didn’t want to believe that because she smelled so good and she really listened when you talked and that damn song made you think anything was possible because you hadn’t yet realized that songs, like girls in leather jackets, can lie. And often do. And by the time you realized that, it was too late because the song was stuck in your mind along with the girl who smelled of spring and possibilities and the leather jacket and all the sadness, playing over and over on repeat, louder and louder and louder, maybe forever.” His melancholy conclusion? “Eventually, there will be nothing but noise.”

Recollection informs many of these stories, and rightly so: those seeds of obsession are planted early. Although a debate over David Bowie albums is lost on me, I appreciate the deconstruction of an anecdote concerning Travis Bolder, who played bass with Bowie in the ‘70s, which eases into a high-school prom that may or may not have borrowed “White Punks on Dope” (by the Tubes) as its theme.

Another bonding moment for Alex and me is articulated at the start of his story “28 If”: “Radio and records were my respites from the nonstop alienation I felt as a kid. Decades later, I know I’m no longer that outcast twelve-year-old. But I still often feel that way; more often than I care to admit, especially when I don’t remind myself of how much has changed.” It’s a meditation that takes him to the famous Abbey Road zebra crossing and the discovery of the continuing commonality of that spot. 

A skillful interweaving of adolescent fantasy and the magic of “Good Vibrations” is another high point of the book, presented in “The Wobbly Persistence of Fifth-Grade Memory.” 

By Tuesday, the awareness of female legs manifested itself in my fifth-grade class. Suddenly, every boy was an expert on good legs versus bad legs. We debated the harsh ankle, the soft curve of the calf, the indentation of the knee, and the supple forbidden promise of the thigh. We claimed knowledge of ideal leg curve, size, softness, and density. We held an impromptu lunchtime symposium on the muscle strength of female runners. There were heated arguments about skirts and dresses. Our only common ground was the miniskirt, which we all recognized as the nuclear option of female clothing, something that instantly rendered all opposition futile.

Even I was well aware of Brian Wilson’s breathtaking achievement with this song, so the deep dive into its troubled birth was all the more compelling. Especially as it intertwined with and amplified the confusion of fifth-grade desire.

A compelling live performance is hardly constrained to the concert hall. Being together for two months, at age 21, seems pretty solid, so it made sense to Alex to impress his girlfriend by taking to a performance by her favorite band (which he despised) at a shitty club in Providence, R.I., very much a mob town back then. “Escape (Version 2)” tells of a mishap at this club, where a kid bumps into a mobster and all hell breaks loose, providing a fascinating insight into just how much strain a young relationship can endure, and how kind a severe fate eventually can seem.

I saw the title “Someday, Paul McCartney” and got worried. Come on, Alex: Don’t pick on Paul.
And he doesn’t, except insofar as he notes McCartney’s mortality

I cling to afternoons in my room after school. When my only friends were records. And the radio. And those bulky headphones better suited to an astronaut in space than a teenager listening to records. The songs that touched me then still touch me now, still bring me back.

“In the Shadow of the Dakota,” is a kind of companion piece, but with John Lennon at its center. It includes perceptive thoughts on the Beatles when they flourished and afterward, but especially looking at the creative firestorm that gave us their amazing work. The shock of Lennon’s murder hangs over the piece, and rightly so. None of us who were alive when it happened will ever be untroubled by it. 

So let’s have a more philosophical, even hopeful finish here, borrowed from Stein’s Paul McCartney piece. Looking at life itself (and this where his meditation on mortality comes in), “You and I pack our experiences and hopes and dreams and shame and love and triumphs into a car that seems too small to hold all of that and still have any room left for us.”

Rock ‘n’ Roll Manifesto and Other Stories
By Alex M. Stein
Coldfoot Books