Is That All There Is? ~ Attending the Peggy Lee School of Heartbreak Repair & Having a Ball

I know what you must be saying to yourselves.
If that’s the way she feels about it why doesn’t she just end it all?
Oh, no. Not me. I’m in no hurry for that final disappointment
                            – Is That All There Is?, Jerry Leiber & Mike Stoller

I heard the PJ Harvey version of Is That All There Is? in 1996.  It’s toward the end of her first collaboration album with John Parish, Dance Hall at Louse Point, and I listened to the whole album, honestly, hundreds and hundreds of times during my second semester back in college – on a Discman(!) while walking to and from campus every day.  The whole album transported me and I was obsessed with it for at least two months. To say that album is moody is like saying Tom Waits has a kind-of scratchy voice.  I even used that album as a model for the multi-media/creative final project for the literature class that made me decide to take my first real creative writing class.

It never even occurred to me that any of the songs on that album could be covers.  I’m sure that I thought it was sufficiently dark and moody enough to be a PJ/Parish original.  But also, as a young woman, that it was too dark and melancholy to be a standard.  I mean, what old songstress could carry that song off, big band and all? Those ladies of old might have been heartbroken or sexy or sassy – but so melancholy and morbid? Call it my child-of-the-late-20th-century naiveté, but sometimes I forget that people, for all of time, have been vulgar and promiscuous and dark.

At some point earlier this year when I was revisiting the PJ Harvey version, I realized it was a cover.  And then, as I was unpacking my long-awaited boxed-up vinyl collection this summer, I discovered that I owned Peggy Lee’s Is That All There Is?.  I looked at the sketched out face on the bare white cover and had one of those I didn’t even know I had this moments.  But I had a lot of those after having lived nearly a year with a good portion of my belongings packed up and in storage (nevermind that I hadn’t owned a functioning record player in nearly a decade so I had barely touched my albums in all of that time).  I shuffled it away, tucked it in with the rest of my albums, until I could connect my record player. And then I forgot all about it, again.  But just last week, I was in my dining room working on a project and needed sound, needed music.  I was avoiding my iPod like it was biologically contaminated because it seemed to be filled with emotional landmines, so I dug around in my record collection.

I put on an old Prince album.  I put on the Blues for Strippers album I had bought years ago and hadn’t listened to yet.  I put on The Motels.  And then I put on Peggy Lee’s Is That All There Is?.  I wasn’t even thinking of that song so much as playing some standards – something to sing along with that wasn’t those overtly heartbroken women I love . . . like Aretha and Billie and Etta.  I just wanted something to keep me from crying that at the same time could provide enough background noise to keep my mind from obsessing on all the sadness and missing, on all the thoughts I was trying not to have.  I gently dropped the needle down in that wide smooth space at the outside of the album.  The first song on the first side is the title song. She starts speaking before you even hear the music.

And there I was.  Lost in Peggy’s voice.  Right from the get-go.  Wrapped up.  By the time she had finished the first verse, I was singing and dancing, slowly making a sort-of-waltz around my dining and living rooms.  Whisked away in the slow circus sound of the band, in the odd crashing sound of the cymbals, in the horns that sound both too fast and too slow all at once.  In the words coming out of Peggy’s mouth in a talk-sing.  All night and the next day and on into the week – I couldn’t get the song out of my head (or keep it from coming out of my mouth).

Then one day, he went away. And I thought I’d die — but I didn’t.
And when I didn’t I said to myself, “Is that all there is to love?”

Is that all there is, is that all there is
If that’s all there is my friends, then let’s keep dancing
Let’s break out the booze and have a ball
If that’s all there is

I’m guessing I had heard Peggy’s version before, probably more than once.  But that didn’t change how mesmerized I was from the very first note.  Peggy’s voice and cadence carried me away. I pictured her in a dark West Berlin bar singing to people who may not even understand her words.  A few weary faces staring up at her standing behind a mic stand on a tiny stage.  Her diction so proper in certain words and the music so drippy and laden with the kind of late-night energy you find as everyone leaves a high school dance – the lights still low, the band dismantling and packing up the instruments, a few torn streamers flailing in the air, swayed by the still active ventilation system, all the expectations of the night strewn all over the floor like dislodged body glitter.

There’s a way she sings that song that feels so very different from the PJ Harvey version – it rings in my bones differently.  Barely into that first listen, I discovered that I can’t hear her version of the song without wanting to take wide sweeping steps while swinging my arms out and twirling around as she sings to me, as she tells me over and over to bust out the booze and have a ball.  I imagine I am holding a dark green, mostly empty champagne bottle in one hand and that I have a flask peeking out of the bustline of my dress.  I can instantly transport myself into the middle of some generic wartime movie image lodged in my brain and I am twirling in a mostly empty dance hall during WWII and the band is still playing even though there’s almost no one left on the dance floor because who in their right mind chooses this song as the one to get you up and out of the chair to finally move?  There is a tangible, carbon-based mix of sadness and joy and resignation and acceptance in the song – such a whiskey-burned sound to Peggy’s voice at the same time that she can drawl out the chorus like it’s made of honey and then carry you away on the words before you even notice that your toes have lost touch with the ground.

When I looked up the song in order to find out who had written it and who else had covered it, I discovered that it is based on Thomas Mann’s short story Disillusionment.  According to Wikipedia, in fact, the lyrics are lifted nearly word for word. But, not shockingly, Wikipedia is wrong on the latter point. The song is clearly built out of that story.  No doubt.  And some of the lines are almost word for word out of his story. But the song veers from it, makes its own scenes and then makes its own meaning.

Where the narrator in Mann’s story tells his tale of total disillusionment to a stranger via a long list of tragedies and woes and then uses those to illustrate how disappointing life is, why he expects so little – Leiber and Stoller’s song takes that disillusionment and lays it out on the floor, sizes it up and then dances all over it.  Nowhere in Mann’s story does the narrator advise us to bust out the booze.  Or to have a ball.  Or to keep on dancing. Reading the original story made me see the song more like a response to the story as opposed to a musical retelling of it.  As though the songwriters were engaging Mann in a creative call and response.  They were offering up another way to see life’s disappointments.  Singing the answer that Mann’s narrator never gives to the stranger, one that literally commands you to dance in response to the destruction.

The heart of the song, for me, is in the chorus. That’s actually the darkest and most amazing and poignant part of it all.  It’s what turns the devastation of disillusionment into the worm-ridden apple pie with the flaky crust and the slightly melted ice cream and then invites us in to eat, this, what we have.  To feed ourselves with it.  To say – is this what you’ve got world, because I can take this and I still want to dance.  To say – is this all there is to heartbreak, to burning down my house, to the spectacle of a woman suspended by an almost invisible wire two stories above my head?  Because I’m going to pour myself a drink and listen to this band and watch the draped fabric of my gown spin out and out and around and around as I make my way across the floor, my feet gliding, barely lifting from the floor as I move all of the air around me, as I clear the invisible space around me and move.  Because, if it is, then I’m going to throw a motherfucking ball and we are all going to motherfucking dance.  Yeah.  We’re going to dance.

We’re not going to keep crying and complaining.  We’re not going to expect more out of life than it can give.  But we’re not settling either.  The question – is that all there is? – is not a defeatist one in the context of the song.  It is a celebration of still standing.  It is a slow, defiant head shake to the fucked-up things of life, a big giant middle finger wearing a sparkly ring and a painted nail. Yes, life, you are a tricky bitch.  And I still love you enough to let the band play while I do my best Bette Davis, as I try to carry myself in my most statuesque Joan Crawford pose, while I imagine myself a more dishevelled and tattooed Peggy Lee, as I drop the needle down one more time onto the smooth spot right before the first groove of this song.

As I dance.  Really, I dance.  Not figuratively, not as a metaphor, not yet.  First, I just really dance.  And I feel good.  I feel my skin and my limbs and the pattern I can make around my furniture.  The path that can be made without clearing the room.  Because who has time for that?  The song is short and I have to make it back to the record player to drop the needle again before song two begins and ruins this momentum.  So I can keep dancing.

And that, right there, the moment when you can be lost in a few minutes of sound and movement and an understanding that happens outside of real thought . . . that’s where the secret of this song lives.  It’s not really a secret, though, of course.  It’s not a new story.  It’s been said before.  So many times.  In all kinds of ways.  The common truth of it makes it no less sacred, steals none of the glory of that song, of that line, of what it does.  If that’s all there is, then let’s keep dancing.  Our lives, the daily act of living, is in that mid-sized, comma-sliced sentence.  In those steps.  In the sound of the music moving you, one foot over the other and then around and around and around before you make a backward step to spin and turn yourself and replay it all again.

Verse after verse after verse, you come out the back-end of something you’ve been dreading and there you are, looking at it.  Right there on the floor, in the air all around you.  It hurts, physically.  It really does.  But not so bad that you can’t walk.  Not so bad that you can’t dance.  Not so bad.

And so you live your life.  Your real life.  Not some sad, couch-sacked, bed-ridden, teary-eyed version of it.  You fucking live.  Not just breath, not just food, not just water or vodka or coffee.  You paint and write and cook and sew.  You take classes.  You sign up to volunteer.  You do everything you were going to do anyway.  You do more. You learn a new hair style with this abundance of time suddenly on your hands.  You paint a wall and hang some shelves.  You go new places.  You go to the old ones.  Even the ones that seem haunted now.  You re-envision places you don’t want to give up, you make new memories there.

You make new friends. You make room for that. You drag out the old ones, literally, tugging their arms to go out one more night, just one more band, just one more, promise. You stay home and read and listen to the quiet where the noise used to be.  Then you make noise, everywhere. You have a fucking ball.  Even if the music is sad – because it is so thick and lovely and booming that you’d be a real asshole to just ignore it.  Even if you’re not sure that music will ever sound the same again.  Even if the Bee Gees (for fuck’s sake) almost make you cry.  Even if the silence of your phone, your very own doing, hums loudly in your ear.

Even if you aren’t quite yourself.  Your friends know.  Your family can certainly tell.  Your laugh is a little slower, less quick to the draw and also full of syllables not quite as clipped.  Your answers are shorter, your words fewer, parceled out and protected.  You are slightly muted, a watercolor version of yourself.  That you can’t help.  All you can do is do.  So you do.  You break out the booze and gather your friends. You hang invisible streamers and fill the punch bowls and stack up the records and plan a goddammed ball. You keep dancing.

You climb out of your head and your heart and the intangible parts of yourself to make your muscles move.  To sweep your arm, to swing your leg, to shake your hip to the beat-beat-beat of the drum.  To make a fist and then open your palm and raise your hand up and up before snapping it back to rest again on your hip.

In those moments, in the middle of that song, in the middle of not thinking – you know what Peggy knows.  What Thomas Mann’s character didn’t: it’s the music that matters most, it’s what you do with that music as you take a sweeping glance at the ash of the house you were in, that you wanted to live forever in, that you wished you hadn’t had to carry yourself out of.  Look.  And listen.  To the music of your own body moving.  Of your own hands making.  Of your muscles un-unmaking, recreating, touching the fleshy part of your fingertips to the stuff that is matter.  The music of your skin against the air, in motion, past emotion.  Hold off that final disappointment.  Choose to push it away with your swinging arms and sweeping legs.  Keep on dancing.  Until the music sounds better.  Until your feet don’t hurt.  And then dance some more.

[Watch Peggy sing Is That All There Is? here]

I Didn’t Know Appolonia Even Knew Glenn Frey: who is that woman in that song?

 

All alone at the end of the evening
and the bright lights have faded to blue
I was thinking ’bout a woman who might have
loved me but I never knew
You know I’ve always been a dreamer
(spent my life runnin’ around)
And it’s so hard to change
(Can’t seem to settle down)
But the dreams I’ve seen lately
Keep on turning out and burning out
And turning out the same.
                                    – from Take it to the Limit by The Eagles

This summer, I had a last minute opportunity to see Prince live – one of those bucket list artists that I somehow made it through my childhood without seeing.  How can that be?  Oh, right.  I was a kid.  I didn’t have money and I couldn’t drive.  And I lived in Fresno.


Oddly enough, even though I live near San Francisco now, I drove to Fresno to see him.  My dad has standing tickets at the ‘new’ arena in Fresno (read: built since I last moved away ten years ago) and called me the day before the show to say he had two tickets for me and a friend if we wanted to go.  Um, yeah.  Hell yeah.  I contacted my friend immediately and she threatened to pee her pants she was so excited.

This friend and I and a few other friends used to listen to Prince a lot when we lived in SF in the early to mid-90s.  We loved his music in earnest, but also loved it in a slightly ironic way for its cheesiness and often horribly fabulous lyrics. I mean, really – you can’t beat Gett Off or Scarlet Pussy for ridiculously ingenious, quotable lyrics:

 Lo and behold – the fantastical way in which their bodies groove 
My Scarlet Pussy’s furry magic alters any mood (Scarlet Pussy, hey) 
It’s cool (Scarlet Pussy, yeah) 
Ahh, pussycat, pussycat – wherefore art thou, puppy? (1)

1 2 3 – nah, little cutie, I aint drinkin (gett off)
Scope this, I was just thinkin
U + me, what a ride
If u was thinkin the same
We could continue outside (gett off)
Lay your pretty body against a parkin meter
Strip your dress down
Like I was strippin a peter pauls almond joy
Lemme show u baby Im a talented boy.   (2)

Before I digress too far off to the side of my point, though – the set-up above is just to set the stage for my drive to Fresno.  Only hours after getting off the phone with my dad, I loaded every Prince song I have onto my ipod.  Most came from the 1993 three-disc set that was on constant rotation in that flat in the Outer Richmond district in 1994 (we listened to that set so much that when it was stolen from my car in 1994, I saved my tips to replace it – a steep $49.99 at the time – because we couldn’t imagine living without it).  The rest of the music I loaded onto my ipod came from the first three or four Prince albums.  His true musical genius, in my humble opinion, happened in those early years – Paisley Park and before.


Twenty-four hours of listening to nothing but Prince took me back – to being nine, to being twelve, to being twenty-two.  I sang along, loudly, and remembered jokes we made about particular songs, certain refrains we sang over and over and over at home, dances and hand gestures that accompanied certain verses.  I remembered the way my friends and I would run around the house and make kissy faces and screeching sounds to Kiss, the way we would choreograph hilarious and intentionally awful moves for Sexy MF, the way we would make ironic ‘duck-face’ expressions to Irresistible Bitch before we even knew what that face was called.  I was amped up and reminiscing for the whole drive.

I guess I should’ve known by the way you parked your car sideways
That it wouldn’t last
See, U’re the kinda person that believes in making out once
Love ’em and leave ’em fast.   (3)

Somewhere between Modesto and Merced I was struck by the overall image of women that permeates Prince songs.  And I’m not talking objectification – of which there is plenty, of men and women, really – but more the prevalent female sexuality in his songs.  In songs like Little Red Corvette and Darling Nikki and Raspberry Beret, the woman is the aggressor, the one to be careful of, the one who will do the loving and leaving.  In a lot of his songs this is true.  He’s always up for the challenge, but he’s never really the one in control. I realized I thought of that as something that came much later in my life, musically.  As though it hadn’t been present in music I had listened to at such a young age.


This got me thinking about how that might have influenced a young me.  What of who I am can be traced back to the music I was drawn to in those years that I started to first really come into myself as a girl who wanted to kiss boys?  The MTV 80s were a colorful and synthesized and ‘phony’ time by a lot of standards.  But there were also a lot of female singers who seemed, at least to my pre-teen self, strong and in possession of their own bodies: Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, Joan Jett.  Nevermind that my earliest strong female musician role model, Pat Benatar, sold her hard-rocking tank-top wearing self down the river for some rag-tag dresses and awful shoulder dancing by the time MTV took over the world.  I still clung to Heartbreaker Pat and just added these other women to the mix.

 A body like yours oughta be in jail
Cuz it’s on the verge of being obscene
Move over, baby, gimme the keys
I’m gonna try 2 tame your little red love machine.  (3)

I also started thinking about how Prince, in his songs, related to these women.  He knew the rules.  He wasn’t afraid and he didn’t expect more than what it was.  He was actually drawn to these women.  He didn’t write songs about coy girls who waited for him to make a move.  He didn’t write about taking these women to dinner and hoping they might kiss him goodnight.  This was what he wanted.  It’s what they wanted.  He really was, in a lot of stereotypical ways, the girl.  But even he was a bold, sex-crazed girl.


A composite woman started to form in my mind – this sort of fifty foot woman of 80s music – like Madonna and Cyndi and Pat and Prince’s Corvette got pressed together and then submerged in water until she outgrew the glass.  A giant sponge woman come to life.  An overarching prototype of what I was shown a woman could be.  Before I knew who Gloria Steinem was.  Before I knew who Susie Sprinkle was.  Before I had any inkling of the impending noise of Seven Year Bitch. Before I could even really incorporate all of this into my life – I was, after all, still twelve and only then just about to have my first, gasp, french kiss.  I wasn’t these women.  But they were in my head.  As a girl.  As a girl thinking about what it would mean to be a woman.


Not long after my Prince excursion, I started to nearly overdose on old Eagles albums.  I was feeling nostalgic for the music that I heard in my childhood home but I was also trying to learn some songs for a character I was working on.  She loves her some Eagles.  So I acquired some of the albums I remember my parents having and set about to listen enough to understand this character who was forming in my mind. 


What happened, though, is I couldn’t stop listening.  The early songs really resonated with me right then.  In ways I didn’t expect.  In all of their near-country and cheesy glory, I was loving me some Eagles.  I just couldn’t stop.  It was almost like I had starved myself for years and suddenly found my most favorite childhood food. Those songs became the soundtrack to a crazy four or five weeks of my life.

 You look in her eyes; the music begins to play
hopeless romantics, here we go again
But after a while, you’re lookin the other way
It’s those restless hearts that never mend.  (4)

I drove across the Bay Bridge late one night to have the kind of fight with someone I love that would devolve into hysterical crying at two in the morning and I was singing Heartache Tonight as I took the exit of of 280 to see him and listening to Victim of Love as I made my way back home, trying to remember to breathe.  I was listening to Take it to the Limit as I drove back across the bridge at 3am on my way to stand in his face and convince him I wasn’t going anywhere and listening to New Kid in Town as I drove back home at ten in the morning, swollen eyed and hopeful.

During that time, the songs followed me everywhere. I was driving to Fresno to visit family and I was belting out Desperado. I was driving in Oakland extolling the virtues of Witchy Woman to a disbeliever.  I was fighting falling apart listening to Tequila Sunrise on the 880 at eight in the morning.  I was driving back to the East Bay on the San Mateo bridge almost crying as I sang Lyin’ Eyes.  Embarrassing to admit.  But true.  I was unraveling to the songs of some of my earliest memories.

There are a lot of reasons these albums were hitting me this way.  Several had to do with being caught between two people I cared for – one I wished I loved more and one I wished I loved less. Worrying that I was becoming this thing I didn’t want to really be – a manipulator, a liar, a careless woman.  I didn’t want to leave a trail of Freys and Henleys behind me. I didn’t want to be the woman in the songs at the same time that I did. 

These songs were also so woven into my childhood that I could almost smell the ghost of my mother sitting in the backseat of my car.  I could hear the echo of her telling me that if I liked the Eagles, I should just give up and admit I would like most country music.  I could also hear me telling her, still and for always – no, Mom, not true, I will not admit that.  I could hear the traffic outside the living room window of my childhood home and the smell of Pledge as we cleaned the house on a Saturday while the self-titled album played.  These songs were my parents, were my chubby-cheeked blonde-haired baby brother, were seven year old me dancing around the room with a lemon-scented old cloth diaper in my hand, with my mom in the next room, doing the same.

In a summer of new ghosts and old ghosts and an imbalance in my own body that threatened at every turn to toss me over the edge – I craved these songs like a malnourished woman picking paint chips off the window sill and slipping them into my mouth.

            Victim of love, I see a broken heart

             You got your stories to tell

             Victim of love, it’s such an easy part

             and you know how to play it well.      (5)

Listening over and over and over, I started to absorb the lyrics instead of just hear them.  I started to notice ways in which I am like or unlike the women in these songs.  I started to see similarities in how the women were portrayed.  The ways that those Eagles boys had been burned, over and over, by women.  They seemed surprised by that at the same time that they were trying to understand and sympathize with the brazen women in their songs.

 Well I know you want a lover,
let me tell you brother, 
she’s been sleeping in the devill’s bed.And there’s some rumor going round
someone’s underground
she can rock you in the nighttime 
’til your skin turns red.   (6)

Those Eagles women are not sidekicks, they are not side-notes, they are not gentle and demure.  They are strong, driven and often heartless.  But they are do-ers, as a friend recently nicknamed me.  Someone who makes things happen.  Who sees what they want, who thinks it up and then sets out to make it a fact.  My friend is partly joking about this – I want way more than I make happen – but it has been a shorthand for me (both true and untrue, simultaneously good and bad).  I was recently introduced to a friend of hers as a do-er and now he calls me that.  I didn’t even realize for weeks that he knew my real name because he just shouts “Hey Do-er” when he sees me. I saw the women in these songs as the kind of women who don’t sit and wait for things to happen.  Who stand up and walk toward what it is they want.  Whether it’s a good idea or not.

These women, much like the women I would come to know in Prince songs years later, had desires and urges and the gumption to go for them.  And sometimes, often it seems in the Frey/Henley world, they aren’t so concerned about hurting men to get there. I was trying to make sense of this woman who kept breaking their hearts, kept trying to find where I was like them and where I was not at the same time that I was trying to do anything but think about that.  I was busy being unable to look too deep into any of that while the songs just kept reminding me that I needed to see it, needed to think about it.  My mind kept turning the lyrics around and over and side to side, building an image to work with, set up a sort of virtual sculpting lab in my brain forming the physical image of their woman.

 

Somebody’s gonna hurt someone 
before the night is throughSomebody’s gonna come udnone.
There’s nothing we can do.   (7)

There was one moment, driving south on Highway 99 toward Fresno in the oppressive summer heat that radiates in through your window even though the a/c is on – your left arm warming on the outer edge while that soft tender skin of your inner arm has small, almost imperceptible goosebumps – where I saw this composite woman from the Eagles’ songs as the very same woman from Prince’s music.  The giant sponge woman who eats men up had spent plenty of time in the Eagles tour bus.  The difference, though, was that where Prince knew exactly what he was in for – those poor Eagles boys just kept knocking on her bedroom door and convincing themselves that this time, finally, she would love them and settle down.

It was a hilarious image in my mind – this supersized, almost Kelly LeBrock-like woman traveling through all songs, entering all musical worlds and smirking at the number of songs, at the sheer difference in their tone and tenor, at the way that her hunger and need made different men fall apart differently.  

Come on, baby, don’t say maybe
I gotta know if you’re sweet love is gonna save me
We may lose and we may win
though we will never be here again.    (8)

I started to see it as being all about expectations.  Prince signed up for exactly what this sexy, bossy, love ’em and leave ’em lady was.  The Eagles kept meaning to date the girl next door.  Or at least expected that hot witchy woman to turn into one once she had a taste of their good lovin’. I thought, haven’t you dudes ever heard the most often shouted mantra for women in any self-help book or from any number of the thousands of talk shows teaching women how to respect themselves and expect better?  You can’t change him.  He’s not a project.  
 

So she tells him she must go out for the evening
to comfort an old friend who’s feeling down
But he knows where she’s going as she’s leavin’
She is headed for the cheatin’ side of town.    (9)

And I started to think that even before Prince, even before Pat Benatar (who, really, I have come to terms with the fact is most responsible for how tough I knew a broad could be by the age of nine), before Madonna and the riot grrls and the Ani Difrancos – before all of that, the Eagles had taught me that a woman could be in control, could want, could need, and could crush someone with those needs if she wasn’t careful.

And I don’t mean in some power of the vagina kind of way or some kind of holding sex over a man’s head to get what you want way.  I mean in a fully self-possessed and self-aware kind of way, in the way that you hear your own wants and needs and don’t shy away from them, in the way that women don’t pretend that we are not bodies as well as hearts and minds.  I started to see the ways that this image – unformed, hazy, living just below the surface of my young mind’s conscious thoughts – had built a prototype of one way to live in the world, one way to love, one of the many ways we can turn out to be.  A possibility in the midst of many.  But a much more attractive one to me than the Patsy Clines (who I love, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t want to be that heartbroken all the time), more interesting to me than the Debbie Boones or Crystal Gayles or even Patty Smyths.

I wanted to be Joan Jett (ha- how much more like her I became than my twelve year old self would have ever imagined).  I wanted to be Madonna.  I wanted to walk in through the out door.  I wanted to open doors with just a smile.  I wanted to have raven hair and ruby lips. I wanted sparks to shoot out of my fingertips. I wanted to stand there, tall and imposing, and then walk in with flair, with a wink and a smile and be loud and clear and unafraid.  I didn’t want to break anyone.  But I wanted to be unbreakable.

Later, of course, by the time I was in my twenties, I knew, for sure, I was breakable.  And I knew music, by women and men, about women who were tough as fucking nails and broken in all kinds of ways – vulnerable and honest and unapologetic.  I adjusted who I wanted to be, who I was, who I had come to know myself to be – fit it in a more realistic image, one that has changed throughout my life, a more malleable image of bad-assedness.  I was nowhere near the superhero woman of any of these songs and didn’t actually want to be, really.  But some of that had trickled in – some of what my young brain filtered out of those songs gave me that possibility, made me aware of that particular strength and danger.

What kind of love have you got?

You should be home, but you’re not

A room full of noise and dangerous boys 

still makes you thirsty and hot

I heard about you and that man

There’s just one thing you must understand

You say he’s a liar and he put out your fire

How come you still got his gun in your hand?   (5)

Ultimately, any train of thought on this track ends up in the chicken or the egg trap.  Was I drawn to the Joan Jetts and Pat Benatars because I was already built to be this type of woman?  Did Prince or the Eagles really have any influence or am I seeing in those songs what I would have grown up to be whether I had hijacked my father’s Hotel California cassette or not?  Would I have wanted to be Corvette or the beret girl without being able to call them that if I had never listened to Prince?  Who knows.  I’m sure that having those images as a young girl made real a possibility that otherwise would have gone unnamed.  Did it actually change who I am?  Probably not.  But I can’t really know.  I can only keep seeing this giant song woman roaming through the albums of my childhood.

               Raven hair and ruby lips

               sparks fly from her fingertips

              echoed voices in the night

              she’s a restless spirit on an endless flight.  (6)

I am haunted, in the best of ways, by that porous, overgrown woman stepping out of one song and into another.  By the idea of Prince calling up Glenn Frey to say, hey dude, you shoulda known, I mean, look at her.  By the vision of her sneaking on and off of the tour bus, of Prince meeting her in a club and following her home.  I can get lost in the notion of Prince sneaking out midmorning, while she still sleeps, because he knows she probably didn’t even want him to spend the night.  By the picture I can paint in my mind of Don Henley and Glenn Frey sitting at the edge of a couch cushion, guitars on their knees, strumming experimental chord combinations as they each think of their time with her, as they wonder if she’ll call again, as they worry that she liked the other one of them better.  I want to say, you know, boys, she don’t mean you no harm, she never promised to marry you.  I want to say, take her for what she is. Mostly, I just want to watch as she sidesteps in and out of songs, tilting the world of each one – tall, brassy, unapologetic and make-believe.  A self-possessed Get Around Sue who doesn’t discriminate.   A real-life woman boiled down to a one-dimensional powerhouse of desire.  A part of what’s possible.  A beacon and a warning.  If only Prince had known in time to warn Glenn and Don.

Songs:
1.  Scarlet Pussy // Prince
2.  Gett Off // Prince
3.  Little Red Corvette // Prince
4.  New Kid in Town // Eagles
5.  Victim of Love // Eagles
6.  Witchy Woman // Eagles
7.  Heartache Tonight // Eagles
8.  Take it Easy // Eagles
9.  Lyin’ Eyes // Eagles