Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life Read Online Free Page B

favorite songs: the jaunty fretwork that drove “Oblivious” by Aztec Camera, the sweet stuttered hook of They Might Be Giants’ “Don’t Let’s Start,” the ubiquitous fascist cabaret of Depeche Mode’s “Master and Servant.” Everyone was listening to the Smiths and the Cure. They were so romantically depressed, which seemed the thing to be, though I was more drawn to the horny angst of the Violent Femmes, whose debut was the lone cool album I already owned.
    One day Davey played me a copy of Run-D.M.C.’s “Rock Box.” It was the first rap song I’d ever heard and not at all representative of the genre, in that it was built around a guitar riff of Zeppelinesque enormity. Every time someone played the song in our dork kingdom I raced up and down the hall howling “Calvin Klein’s no friend of mine, don’t want nobody’s name on my behind.”
    Sophomore year I moved with Davey to an off-campus apartment overlooking a Dunkin Donuts. The place smelled like fried dough until it began to smell like garbage, thanks to Davey, and I fled to Israel where I endeavored to give a shit about Judaism and stuffed falafel in my piehole and panted after a woman who turned me on to Suzanne Vega. Her debut album was just out and we listened to those dark delicate fairy tales constantly, talking late into the night about God and love and whether we were ever going to do it.
    I climbed Masada that spring and floated in the Dead Sea andstowed away on a Greek ship. I walked past a Jerusalem pizza parlor half an hour before a bomb exploded inside. I humped poorly in various exotic locales. But the moment I remember as the most thrilling of that era was opening a package from my pal Evan and finding inside a bootleg of the Violent Femmes’ third album,
The Blind Leading the Naked
.
The DJ Gene
    It is my belief that human beings have something in their DNA that makes them crave control of their sonic environment such that long ago, in the valley of Neander, cavemen would invite each other over for a party and the host caveman would start beating out his favorite rhythm on, say, a stalactite, hoping to attract the attentions of the assembled caveladies, until one of his guests came up to him and suggested a different beat. The host, trying to appear casual, would say, “Yeah, that sounds cool. Maybe we can do that beat later,” then resume drumming, at which point the other cavedude would press the matter—“Everyone’s getting kind of, you know,
tired
of that beat”—at which point things turned ugly.
    I have found nothing in the evolutionary literature to support this notion, though admittedly I have not yet inspected any of the evolutionary literature. Regardless, by junior year, my DJ Gene was pulsating violently. I had managed to insinuate myself into the WESU hierarchy by becoming a sports broadcaster, which led to my own predawn music show, and access to the thousands of LPs crammed onto the station’s splintery shelves.
    I was hopelessly intoxicated by the idea that I controlled the world’s stereo system, along with a giant catalogue of music, much of it advance material that
no one had heard yet
. I showed up hours early for my show to browse the new releases. That’s how I found
All Fools Day
, an album of swaggering Celtic soul by an Australian quartetcalled the Saints. That’s also how I found
Folksinger
, by Phranc, a lesbian folksinger with a flattop who crooned about celebrity coroners and female mud wrestling. After my show, I took these records into the auxiliary studio and listened to them over and over until one of the techies, in a moment of uncharacteristic pity, showed me how to copy records onto cassette. It was like hunting for treasure, particularly if I went trolling in the massive, unkempt archives where, one lucky morning, I stumbled across an old Fleshtones record that included the track “Hexbreaker,” a rousing anthem that sounded like the MC5 crashing headlong into Otis Rush. 1 I played