Misguidance Counselors: Concert Meditations
by Marilyn Haines
Happy Tuesday, Campers!
We’re on the precipice of April somehow? It’s time to breathe some life into, well, our lives. You could finally launder your curtains or Kondo your closet, but why not take a beat for an emotional audit first? We prefer to start aurally to get the vibe right, which is why this issue focuses on some of Marilyn’s recent concert experiences. Nothing conjures up warm memories quite like sitting in a humid amphitheater clutching a $12 beer, after all. So go ahead and dance like nobody’s watching, sing like you know every word, and read, like, share, and subscribe like you’re sponsored by Ticketmaster and receiving every penny of their service fees ;)
And if you’re looking for a companion playlist for this piece, we made one for you last week.
LYLAS,
Ur Misguidance Counselors, Sam and Marilyn
“Well, let’s say he did leave. You would still have yourself, which is enough.”
“...I don’t think I can see how that could possibly be true.”
“This feels like a very young part of you that’s coming out.”
I am staring into my laptop screen at my therapist over Zoom. We are having a conversation we have often. The one where I describe some innocuous thing I have done, like snapping at my boyfriend for throwing his wet towel on the couch, and how it will absolutely prompt him to wake up and finally realize, “This woman is horrible! I’m getting out, and I am going to go be happy with someone simple. See ya!”
“Intellectually, I understand it’s just an attachment thing. But emotionally there is no discerning between what is a feeling versus what is reality.”
At this point, she will ask me to (*sigh*) think back to my younger self and “give her some compassion.”
Ok. Sure.
In both therapy sessions and TikToks from strangers called THERE ARE NO HACKS 2 HEALING I am implored to get in touch with my inner child. This is difficult for me. I can recall being younger, but I don’t really remember feeling like a child.
My half-brother is eight years older than me, and my mom was the kind who would let us watch, read, or listen to whatever we wanted. If we watched a movie with a sex scene, well, she would ask me to close my eyes. Violence was fair game, though. The only scene in Pulp Fiction, which we owned and watched often when I was seven, I had to close my eyes during was when they “bring in the gimp.” Once I was allowed to keep my eyes open, I struggled to understand its controversy. Was the leather mask supposed to be scary?
Ever since I figured out how to record mixtapes on my boombox as a kid, I have been a fervent playlist creator. Prior to that, I would call up my local radio station and make a request (a night in 1997 spent staying up past midnight waiting for the radio DJ to play “Barely Breathing” by Duncan Sheik comes to mind).
Throughout my adolescence, I have opted to stay up late. To sit around a boozy kitchen table with my mom and aunt as they look up my aunt’s old boyfriend to prank call. Giggling while flipping through the phone book to look up Evan Slick in Bennington, Kansas, while “Party Out of Bounds” by the B-52’s or “Delilah” by Tom Jones redlined the boombox speakers.
I have been watching college basketball games sandwiched between rounds of Rock and Roll Jeopardy! (RIP) right at the bar with my dad since the 90s.
When my brother was babysitting me, I saw it as hanging out with him and his alt-rock bandmates – we were eating Doritos, drinking Dr. Pepper, and watching MTV. To me, I was shooting the shit with friends of my own.
In the context of healing, accessing my younger self can often feel too daunting. Too pressurized. The act of even attempting it opens up the pit in my stomach and feels serpentine on my sternum. My therapist says I need to ground myself first. She wants me to meditate on it.
What is meditation to me might be seen as disassociating to someone else. The syrupy, disembodied voices in a guided meditation tend to only make me feel less tethered to myself. Music, on the other hand, has long been a balm and a transportive tool. A soothing aural Delorean. And, thanks to the advent of Spotify, I now have playlists for each season of my life since 2016. Quite literally, they are titled “autumn/winter 2017” or “early 2k20.” This allows for easy teleportation, an important tool for us pathological nostalgics.
Upon closer inspection, I can see how careful curation translates to control: playlists are merely a manifestation of my obsessive need to steer my emotional ship when I’m feeling rudderless and needing a specific track to right myself.
Is it possible for something to be truly healing when it’s rooted in an insatiable need for control?
Following a few years of the ongoing pandemic, it seemed like Every Band You Loved at the Peak of Their Popularity (Many Years Ago) began touring again. I jumped at the chance to experience collective effervescence and paid what I assume is probably a down payment for an apartment’s worth of Ticketmaster fees to see my playlists come to life live – experimenting with getting in touch with your inner child requires you have the money, or at least the credit line, of an adult.
Unlike my beloved playlists, I was not in charge of the setlists at these concerts. I was relinquishing power and making myself vulnerable, open to the possibility that I might be on a poorly run carnival ride’s emotional journey. Ready to be ever-so-slightly restrained by an oxidizing metal lap bar, I settled in for the jostling, jarring, and joyous experience where I couldn’t be at the helm. I was going to be there in the moment, grounded and levitating at once, in the liminal space between memory and reality. Transcendental and meditative! I even pictured myself dancing alongside little adolescent me. My therapist would be so proud.
Smashing Pumpkins
My friend and her fiance ended up with a spare ticket to see The Smashing Pumpkins at Madison Square Garden, and I was the happy beneficiary. I’m not sure who gave the ticket up, but I hope my Venmo transaction relayed some of the deep gratitude I felt.
There is a certain magic in pleasantly finding yourself in a place you hadn’t planned on being. I am sure there is a single, elegant word for this feeling in a language other than English.
Upon hearing the opening notes of “Today,” I could feel the sun on my arm in my brother’s beige 1980 Mercury Lynx wagon.
We are on our way home from school in the spring of 1999 and Siamese Dream is in the tape deck. Using all of the adolescent strength I can muster to crank the powerless window down, we roll out of the school’s gravel parking lot. My brother’s best friend in the passenger seat yells obscenities to their classmate on the sidewalk of the traffic light-less Main Street before we turn the corner, and my brother shifts the car into third.
We cruise on Old Highway 81, the two-lane blacktop that connects the place we go to school to the town we live in. The windows still down and the volume inching ever up. The cassette tape gets flipped to the B-Side, and I drift further away from the edges of the day. The humiliation of not completing the mile in under nine minutes like so many of my peers did is losing its teeth.
It’s Tuesday, so I know when we get to town we will go to Taco John’s and get a dozen 50-cent tacos and a pound of potato olés (shimmering, over-seasoned, deep-fried potato coins) before we go home, where I will listen to my brother talk shit on whatever mainstream sell-out losers are on TRL. Then we’ll watch a rerun of The Simpsons at 5 o’clock, just before my mom and stepdad get home from work. I don’t have any homework because I already finished mine in the free time I had after quickly finishing my spelling test.
“Today is the greatest…”
The Chicks
It was a perfect summer night in Los Angeles at the Greek Amphitheatre in Griffith Park. I was bookended by two of my best girlfriends from college, seeing The Chicks.
“I wanna touch the earth, I wanna break it in my hands…”
As if on cue, my eyes welled up. All small-town girls must cry at any given country concert (I don’t make the rules). I try to blink away the tears, though one or two may have ended up on the edge of my sweating PBR tallboy. It’s the same beer I drank with my boyfriend seven years ago before he was my boyfriend.
I am transported to the time I spent in consuming, unrequited love with him, maintaining we were just “best friends.”
We are on a deserted river bridge, one mile down the road from my grandparents’ rural Kansas home, listening to the Allman Brothers and Van Morrison and dancing in the thick humidity. Drinking barely room-temperature beer punctuated with foolish sips of straight gin. It’s nighttime, but I am thinking of earlier that afternoon when we cruised on I-70 West more or less in silence. I was choking on my desire to kiss him in the broad midwestern sunlight, which rendered me speechless.
The urge was only waxing. He is not a cowboy. But I’ve spent a few years trying to date East Coast guys who still rely on their parents to do things like “pay” for their “lift ticket” on a “ski trip” (???), so the fact that he and I share a 500-person hometown makes me miss him in the same way I miss the way the sun hits the peeling backboard of the basketball hoop in my grandparents’ cracked driveway.
Thus, I believe on some spiritual level that he can rope and ride with the best of them even though I know he cannot. He’s named after Wyatt Earp, and to me, he is a heroic cowboy who has taken me away. Figuratively, of course. In reality, he lives in Colorado and I live in Brooklyn. The distance feels impossible, but for now, we are both back home.
We won’t call it a night until the sky shows signs of light, and we ask one another when we’ll see each other again. Thanksgiving? Christmas? We try our best to slow down time to no avail. We watch the sky shift from navy to the mingling shades of dawn.
The blood rushes to my knees when say goodbye and I feel like I have the energy to stay awake long enough to write an entire country album of my own.
Dead and Company
It’s a July night at Citi Field, and my partner and I are enjoying the sounds and sights of Dead and Company from the nosebleed section of the stadium. It’s my third Dead and Co show, and I actually prefer being on the upper deck. Usually, it’s a mix of carefree derelicts of all ages in varying stages of sobriety. It’s the section of the people.
It’s the first time we have attended a Dead and Co show just the two of us – the previous two times we had a crew of friends and family – and it feels a bit quieter even though DRUMS/SPACE is still reverberating at a level that makes me feel like my uterus is going to shake loose and plummet out of my body.
Surveying the crowd around us, I zero in on what appears to be a typical family: two parents with two young daughters between them. I tend to get misty-eyed any time I see kids at concerts with their parents, and this is no exception. I skip over the part where the kids might be bored, whining about their parents’ lame taste in music. Instead, I go for the emotional jugular and imagine the montage of concert moments I have had with my own parents. Singing “Hey, Jude” with my dad at a Paul McCartney show, or the time we stood in the pouring rain at a Paul Simon concert. My mom taking my brother and me to see Green Day in 1997 or the horror and hilarity of watching Wayne Newton lean in to try to kiss her while working the crowd at one of his Vegas spectacles in 2005.
Gratitude and sadness intermingle and wash over me. I don’t remember a time when I saw a concert with both my mom and my dad, because they haven’t been together since I was four. They each enabled me in my musical explorations without question or judgment, and I’m not sure they’re even aware of how united they were in that pursuit despite all of their contentious differences.
My focus shifts to my partner. His ability to enjoy the moment in stark relief to the proclivity I have for shifting from peacefully swimming in a moment to drowning in my own emotion in a snap.
My thoughts whip towards the future and imagine us taking our own children (who do not exist) to concerts in a single saccharine vision. I marvel at how incredible it is that it takes all of two seconds to flash through decades of memories and wonder if there’s a sneaky dose of DMT in my Modelo somehow. Either way, there are still five minutes and fifty-eight seconds left in the song the band’s been playing.
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
In October, I saw Yeah Yeah Yeahs for the third time. The first two times were both in high school. Once with my mom, the other time with my cousin and my uncle’s very cool girlfriend who was only ten years older than me.
The venue, the cramped Granada Theater, was two hours away from my hometown in Lawrence, KS. Lawrence would become my college town, but in high school, was the pinnacle of culture. It had an Urban Outfitters.
Physically, I am with two friends at Forest Hills Stadium on a rainy night, and I am 33 years old. In my mind, though, it is 2004 and my cousin, Ashley, and I are sitting in the Computer Room at my mom’s house. Ashley is 13 and I am 15, and we love the Computer Room. We have watched the music video for “Maps” by Yeah Yeah Yeahs at least five times in a row.
The band’s lead singer Karen O. is painfully beautiful to me, with her sweat-combed black side bangs, mascara-streaked eyes, and inexplicably perfect rosebud red lips. When I see a single tear fall down her left cheek I become so consumed with longing that it catches in my throat. She appears to be fixed on one person in the video, but I can’t see who it is.
This is so DEEP! This is exactly how I FEEL! I am obsessive about romantic obsession but there is no one to meet my gaze. I am a 15-year-old virgin in rural Kansas who is about to cut her bangs and box dye her hair and become a deep maelstrom of emotion. No one understands.
The video ends. I silently push play again.
“Should we update our Xangas?” I ask Ashley.
Mine is called “burningtheletters” for a Sylvia Plath poem and hers is called “nightswimming00” for a song by REM. We agree to draft separate entries on our respective pages that are littered with inside jokes. I paste the lyrics to “Maps” at the end.
Maybe someone cool will see it and leave a comment. Maybe I’ll have a real person to think of when I listen to the song.
LCD Soundsystem
Because I didn’t move to New York until 2013, I missed the peak of the chokehold LCD Soundsystem had on the downtown music scene. But as an insufferable young woman in her 20s who felt that living in New York City was going to drastically alter the course of her life, the music spoke to me in a way that felt timeless and timely.
Now firmly in adulthood, I felt the pull to see them live during the band’s residency at Brooklyn Steel. The ticket purchase made me feel like I had officially been knighted as an aging hipster in a very “I am Cringe but I am Free :~)” sort of way.
At the show, I danced with two of my closest friends, and in the midst of the song transitions, instead of feeling teleported, I found myself meditating on an idea: this is only temporary.
This is the same thing I told myself when I was new to the city and subsisted primarily on chips and salsa from Duane Reade. At that time, the phrase helped me to keep going when I felt like I so desperately had something to prove. But here I was in real-time at 33, on the other side of the five years I spent “trying to get with the plan,” and wanted so badly to put a halt to any further acceleration of my life beyond the current moment.
I was sweating through my 80s Super Tramp shirt with my drugstore eyeliner bleeding into my waterline as the show came to a close. Shuffling towards the exit, I felt myself coming up against the edge of the comfort and resistance I had in knowing I was going to take a cab home alone that night. In a separate direction from the two friends I had brought with me.
We get to go home to our partners, pets, and plants. We have to go home to the fast-decaying contents of our refrigerators, unread books, and piles of recycling.
I was an adult coexisting with parts of myself that felt young, but it wasn’t just two versions. It was more like Sylvia Plath’s fig tree in reverse – the tree on its head with roots shooting up out of the ground as if to sing out “look at all the places you’ve come from!”
Getting in the cab after the concert, I realized the driver had classical music on the radio. I relaxed into the backseat.
The soundtrack is always going to change, and I am always going to be the same.
“Concert Meditations” by Marilyn Haines (@marilynhayward)
If you don’t tear up reading the chicks section, you have no soul.