(Today marks the 25th Anniversary of Live Aid. A recollection from a Queen fan’s perspective)

I discovered the rock band Queen when I was nine years-old. I came to them younger than most, but at the same time, later than those who knew better. Freddie Mercury, Brian May, Roger Taylor and John Deacon came to me through the airways of WNEW on a summer afternoon in 1980, while hanging out with my sister Mary in my brother Nick’s room. I say I came to them late because in 1980, Queen had just released their album, The Game. “Another One Bites the Dust” was the single that I heard on the radio, and it was my first introduction to the band. While the song remains one of their biggest and most recognizable hits, anyone who knew anything about rock music at the time knew that the band’s work on 1975’s A Night at the Opera, or ’74’s Sheer Heart Attack or even 1978’s Jazz was far superior. By the time I discovered them, they had already released a live record, 1979’s Live Killers, a sure sign that a band had been around awhile.

When I heard “Another One Bites the Dust,” I jumped up on my brother’s bed and started dancing.

“Who is that?” I shouted over the funky bass line to my sister.

“It’s Queen,” she coolly replied.

“I LOVE IT,” I shouted back.

“Nicky has their album,” she said and pulled the eight-track from my brother’s shelf.

And that was it. The combination of Mercury’s soaring vocals and May’s guitar solos were unlike anything I had ever heard before. I was a Queen fan. I lived and breathed the band from that point on, and had plenty of work to do. Once I absorbed The Game, down to knowing exactly when the eight-track would cut off mid-song, I had to track down everything else they had ever recorded.

There was a record store in the same mall in Jersey City where my Dad managed a men’s clothing store and did tailoring work. So on the days I’d go to the store to help him out, I’d take my breaks at WOW Records in search of Queen music. Right off the bat, I discovered 1974’s Queen II, a drastically different sounding record than The Game. While on The Game, the band looked tough and cool in black leather framed by a blue-silver border, Queen II had their four faces on the cover. Their hair was longer and it looked like they were wearing make-up. The inside picture had them sitting together, very close to one another, dressed all in white. Was this the same band? The music offered further complications, as the songs were full of massive choral harmonies and epic song-structures, with lyrics that referenced ogres and white queens and the seven seas of Rhye. What the hell were the seven seas of Rhye? Had the liner notes not stated the names of the band members, there was no way you could have convinced me this was the same band.

Despite the confusion, I loved the songs on Queen II just as much as The Game. More discovery came soon after. I bought A Night at the Opera on cassette, Sheer Heart Attack and News of the World on vinyl. For Christmas I asked for Queen’s Jazz record, and freaked my family out by blasting the hymn “Mustapha” throughout the house. If that wasn’t enough to disturb my parents, Jazz came with a poster featuring hundreds of naked women riding bicycles. At the same time that I was trying to make sense of the progression of this band that I had just become the biggest fan of, my mom and dad were surely trying to make sense of what was happening to their son. It was quite clear, though. Their son had discovered rock n roll.

It wasn’t easy being a Queen fan in the early 80’s, especially in the Jersey City Heights neighborhood where I grew up. I quickly learned that among my friends who were also devouring rock n roll, Queen didn’t demand much respect.

“Whadda’ya a fag?” my friend Jamie asked me once.

“No,” I replied. “Why?”

“Freddie’s a fuckin’ flamer”

“No, he’s not.”

“Whadda’ya kiddin’ me? Look at him. He’s a fuckin’ fag.”

“So what?! He’s da best singer in da world. Who’s betta’?”

“David Lee Roth’s a dousan’ times betta’ den Queen. AC/DC…Black Sabbath…the Stones…why don’t ya’ listen ta some real music ya’ fuckin’ fag?”

It’s true, of course, that Freddie Mercury was gay. I knew it and everyone else knew it. But I didn’t care. If my friends couldn’t get past it, that was their problem. They were MY band. And while they weren’t as cool of a band as AC/DC or Van Halen or The Who in those peoples’ eyes, I was certain they were better than all those bands combined.

But the hardest thing about being a Queen fan in the early 80’s wasn’t even the criticism from my friends, it was the lack of memorabilia with which to outwardly express my allegiance. There were no Queen T-shirts, or posters or hats to wear and tell the world I was z Queen fan. At the local bazaar at St. Nicholas Church, there was a booth where you could win T-shirts, and there were plenty of Iron Maiden, or Van Halen or Rolling Stone shirts, but nothing with Queen on it. I had to resort to getting a T-shirt made at an airbrush painting booth on the Jersey Shore. Call it homemade fan appreciation. I was sad.

1982 and the release of Queen’s Hot Space album seems to have been one of the big reasons for the lack of readily available merchandise. The album was the band’s foray into music that was more disco or dance oriented, and America categorically rejected it. While it delivered the hit single “Body Language,” clearly the worst song the band ever recorded, its mix of sexual innuendo and genre-busting songs only added to the public’s already mixed feelings. To make matters worse, a video for the song “I Want to Break Free” featured the guys in drag. My friend Jamie had a field day with that one. It turned out that the band was mocking a British sitcom. America didn’t get it.

I had what would turn out to be my only chance to see the band live that same year, when they visited the Brendan Byrne Arena in East Rutherford, New Jersey on the Hot Space tour. My friend John, who lived down the block, was older than I was and did occasional work for ticket scalpers. He told me he had a ticket to the show if I wanted to go. I begged my mother to let me go with him.

“No,” she said definitively. “You’re too young. They do drugs and drink at those concerts, it’s not safe.”

“C’mon Ma,” I pleaded. “You know John. He said he’ll take me and take me home. Pleeeeeaaaaaase?”

It was useless. I wasn’t going. The Hot Space tour was the last time Queen ever toured the United States. They continued to release records throughout the 80’s, but were never able to break into the American market again. America didn’t want a flamboyant lead singer fronting a genre-bending band prone to sexual ambiguity, with a penchant for operatic epics, Elvis-inspired country songs and fleeting forays into funk. It didn’t matter that they were the greatest rock n roll band in the world.

My relationship to Queen had always been a personal one since I had discovered them in 1980, and after 1982, it became more so. It was as if I had to go underground with my passion and nurture it in solitude. But what was so interesting was the continuing coverage of the band in magazines like Hit Parader and Creem, which I read voraciously. There were pictures and stories about the band in Japan, the UK, and all over Europe. It looked like the band was huge everywhere else in the world but America, never mind Jersey City, New Jersey.

One of the earliest books on the event, a slim 64-pages published in 1985 by Modern Publishing. Cover price $2.25.

I continued to build my Queen music collection in my early teens, now taking the PATH train over to It’s Only Rock n Roll and Revolver Records on 8th Street in Greenwich Village, New York to purchase import copies of their records and pieces of memorabilia. I longed to share this passion with others, to be in communion with other Queen fans, wherever they were. But most importantly, I longed to see them live in concert. I came close to achieving those goals one day in the summer of 1985. July 13, 1985, to be exact. The Day the Music Changed the World.

Live Aid was the most ambitious live benefit concert event in history. Broadcast live to millions of homes throughout the world, the concert took place simultaneously at Wembley Stadium in London and JFK Stadium in Philadelphia. It brought together dozens of the world’s greatest bands and artists on two stages to raise money for famine relief for the poor, starving and sick in Ethiopia. Organized by Bob Geldof, who had already done the impossible with his organizing and production of the super group Band-Aid and the single “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”, the concert event featured The Who, Mick Jagger, Tina Turner, Bob Dylan, Black Sabbath, a young Madonna, Run DMC, Phil Collins, Paul Young, Judas Priest, George Thorogood, Elton John and more. Most importantly, it featured Queen.

On the morning of Live Aid, I woke up early to prepare myself in the living room. I set up a radio with a cassette deck in order to listen to the concert simulcast on WNEW and record performances I wanted to keep. I flipped on the TV, glued myself to the recliner, and sat there for the remainder of the day, waiting for Queen’s performance. There was no clear schedule as to when certain bands would be on, so I couldn’t risk moving unless I was starving or in desperate need of a bathroom break. At approximately 3:44 pm New York time, Queen hit the stage at Wembley Stadium, forever changing my life and my relationship to the band.

The band opened up with a bizarre move, by playing one of their biggest hits, “Bohemian Rhapsody,” first. Holy shit!. What kind of strange set list is this? Where can they possibly go from here? It was like they were playing their encore first! They set the bar high, and never set it down. From “Bohemian Rhapsody,” they blew right into “Radio Ga Ga,” inciting a sea of hands and handclaps through Wembley Stadium instantly. Here was Freddie in complete command, reaching every single person in the stadium to sing along to a song most of America could care less about. It was the most amazing testament to the power of music to move people I had ever seen, and have seen, to this day. Next came “Hammer to Fall,” an album cut of their 1984 album The Works, driven by Brian May’s crunchy and melodic guitar-riff. “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” had Freddie vamping it up rockabilly-style. “We Will Rock You” and “We Are the Champions” closed the set and had an entire stadium swaying back and forth. I sat there dumbfounded. What did I just see? What just happened? It was like an apparition. The entire set couldn’t have lasted more than 20 minutes. Had a band ever packed that much power and energy into that small amount of time? I don’t think so.

I saw the power of music and performance that afternoon, and what it means to give to an audience. Freddie and the boys seemed utterly ego-less that day. They had twenty minutes, and rather than start off cool and build from there, they decided to pack that time with their hits, in an almost medley-like fashion, that was unrelenting. I wondered then if they also knew they had twenty minutes of prime airtime on televisions in America, and this was their chance to show them what they were missing. The band was in their prime, and for a moment I had my wish. I was watching the same thing the world was watching, at the same time. I was finally in communion with Queen fans everywhere, who no doubt were wondering if critics and naysayers were finally catching on to what we’d known all along, that Queen were indeed the greatest rock n roll band in the world.

The day after Live Aid, I went around the corner to hang with the rest of the neighborhood kids on the corner of Reservoir Ave. and Lienau Place where we’d play bottle caps, handball, or stick ball.

“Whe’da fuck wha’ you yesterday?” Jamie asked.

“I was home watchin’ Live Aid,” I replied.

“You spent da whole day watchin’ a fuckin’ conce’t on TV?”

“Yeah. Queen wha’ on. Dey wha’ incredible.”

“Yer a fuckin’ nerd. C’mon, ya in fa’ stick ball?”

“Yeah. D’you pick sides yet?”

Perhaps it was just having seen the extraordinary documentary “The Horse Boy,” about a parents’ search for a cure for their son’s autism, that made me particularly empathetic to the plight of the narrator Christopher Boone in Mark Haddon’s 2003 novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. There’s a subject interviewed in the film who says that there is nothing wrong with people with autism. They’re just different kinds of human beings. That comment stuck with me as I read the book. Christopher has Asperger’s Syndome. His parents are separated. A dog has been murdered in his neighborhood and he must find out who did it. He counts cars on the way to school, their colors dictating what kind of day he’s going to have. He does math in his head to relax himself. By taking us inside Christopher’s mind, Haddon has created the most memorable character, in a book that I’ve read, since Owen Meany in John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany. Like everyone around Christopher, we need to have patience with him. He’s our narrator after all, and the only way we’re going to get the story. But he never asks for it. He knows his limitations and what he must do, and that’s why we empathize with him. Even when we start to sense where his detective work will lead him, we still understand his needs and support him. What’s most wonderful about the book is how, in empathizing with Christopher, we empathize with those around him as well: the father who is trying his best, the mother who had to be honest with herself, and the neighbors saying and doing the things they think are best for Christopher. The novel is an absolute joy to read. I loved it.

If you’ve fantasized about living in Italy (and who hasn’t?), you’ve certainly read Frances Mayes’ Under the Tuscan Sun, or Ferenc Máté’s The Hills of Tuscany, or one of my favorites, Robert Hutchinson’s When in Rome. If you’ve read James Hamilton-Paterson’s hilarious 2005 novel Cooking with Fernet Branca, though, it’s not all villas and helpful villagers and handsome guys named Marcello. Sometimes it’s shady realtors, annoying neighbors, eccentric Italian film directors, late night helicopter visits and too much of the medicinal digestivo of the title. That’s fine by me.

Hamilton-Paterson gives us the story through alternating narrators. First is the culinary adventurous, borderline-sinister Gerard Samper, a celebrity sports figure ghost writer about to embark on an autobiography of a boy-band-star wanting legitimacy. Marta is his neighbor, an emigre from Central Europe working on a film score for a famous Italian filmmaker. While Gerry is busy being appalled and irritated by just about everyone, whipping up the most ridiculous recipes — one of his early ones a Garlic and Fernet  Branca ice cream meant to scare his neighbor away — Marta is stealthily taking advantage of Gerry’s unique vocal stylings to inform her new score. We get both sides of the story. It’s Gerry that truly makes the book click and gives it its snap, while Marta provides the saner counterpoint, especially when observing Gerry.

I read the book on the beach, where I think it’s meant to be read. It’s light, laugh-out-loud funny and hits the spot. You’ll still want to live in Italy after it, perhaps even moreso. In a moment of synchronicity after, I was in a local liquor store looking to replenish my stash of the Italian digestivo Amaro — it’s hard to come by in Nashville — when the salesman and I started talking about other herbal Italian after-dinner drinks. He said, “there’s another one, like Amaro, that Italians drink. What is it? I can’t think of it.” He was racking his brain when I responded, “Fernet?” “Yes! That’s it. Fernet Branca!” I had never heard of Fernet Branca until the book

It’s been almost twenty years since Douglas Coupland published Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture and popularized a name for those post-boomers among us born between 1961 and 1981. We were cynical and sarcastic. Disaffected. We watched too much television when we were kids. Consumed too much music, gave the world MTV, Madonna and Nirvana and would be the first generation to make less than our parents. We liked The Replacements and wondered why they weren’t bigger. We were artists, by default.  So what has become of us, other than our hoping to come across a Hot Tub Time Machine? According to Jeff Gordinier in the enjoyable X Saves the World: How Generation X Got the Shaft but Can Still Keep Everything from Suckin,’ we did OK, sorta. He reminds us that much of the golden age of the internet was created by Xers. Many great world-changing non-profits are helmed by Xers, as is our nation. President Obama was born at beginning of the generation, in 1961.

If we look to Sam Lipsyte’s novel, The Ask, we’re still cynical and sarcastic, and making less than our parents. In fact, we’re assholes. And Miles, the narrator of the book, is our living embodiment. An artist who never really succeeded — he doesn’t paint anymore, anyway — he now helps young artists reach their dreams by working in the development department of a small liberal arts college. The title of the novel refers to the all-important pitch that development folks, at universities, non-profits, cultural institutions, hospitals, etc., make to potential donors. It’s “the ask,” and the donor is “the ask.” Miles isn’t so good at it. After saying something inappropriate to the student daughter of a major donor, Miles is fired, only to be asked back when Purdy, a potential major donor and former classmate of Miles from college, personally requests him. After that, it’s all a bit convoluted. Purdy’s got a son whose legs have been blown off in the Iraq war and is blackmailing him. Miles marriage is falling apart. There’s a guy who builds decks and has an idea for a reality show. Purdy’s son crashes a cocktail party and yells, “Daddy.” It’s all too much really, and should sound the death knell for any attempt at art about the generation. We may not be that interesting. Miles knows this too, and in chapter twenty-five, Lipsyte delivers a zinger of dialogue. In a conversation with his supervisor Vargina (pronounced just like you think it is), Miles asks:

“No. I mean, if I were the protagonist of a book or a movie, it would be hard to like me , to identify with me, right?”

“I would never read a book like that, Milo. I can’t think of anyone who would. There’s no reason for it.”

Bonus “Thought on What I’ve Been Reading.”

I don’t read many business books, but every now and then, one piques my interest. Seth Godin has legions of fans, and I check in on his blog fairly often, but Linchpin is the first of his books that I’ve read. Like most other business books, there’s much that applies and much that doesn’t. While early chapters didn’t speak to me, the remainder of the book is an inspiring gem that will get you working on new projects (”projects are the new resumes,” Godin tells us) and approaching your current job with renewed vigor. We’re all artists in Godin’s view, and once we accept that,  we’ll be better prepared to work in the new economy.

Beautiful Then (Paradiso)

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If all of the kisses I’ve had in my life
Were dropped out, left on the cutting room floor
It’d be yours I remember much more

If somebody found them and spliced them together
On to a reel so I could remember I’d be
Alone in the theatre to see
You and me

Oh, wasn’t it beautiful then?

There’d be no premiere on the red carpet
Just me all alone with my ticket in pocket in line
Waiting to go back in time

To that kiss in the rain under umbrellas
Completely unscripted like nothing else mattered but when
We’d be together again
Beautiful then

Oh, wasn’t it beautiful then?

I should have pulled you close
And held you in my arms
Directed another kiss
To turn the camera on

Now I can only dream of a scene
Of when it was beautiful then
It was beautiful then

As we arrive at final embraces
The camera close up on both of our faces we stay
The camera cuts away
Cutaway

Oh, wasn’t it beautiful then?

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By Joe Pagetta
Copyright © 2010

Watch it here:

or watch it directly on YouTube.

I think what’s so masterful about the novel, and what moves me the most, is that each character, like the funambulist based on Petit, steps out on to their own tightrope. Whether it’s the Irish immigrant Corrigan, a monk of the order of the Franciscans who ministers to prostitutes in the Bronx, or his brother who can’t help but be inspired by Corrigan’s selflessness and what seems at times like blind faith, or the group of mothers from different backgrounds who gather to mourn the sons they’ve lost in Vietnam. The characters in Let the Great World Spin are creating a kind of performance art of their own. Fittingly, it’s an artist who feels responsible for the death of Corrigan and a young prostitute that takes a risk by going back, and finds redemption in both herself and Corrigan’s brother.

With each move these characters make — the simple offering of ride to an unfamiliar neighborhood; the major leap of adopting orphaned children; the dragging of a young girl into a life of prostitution by a mother who knows no other option — is a step on the tightrope, a bounce on the wire,  a dance with destiny. But unlike Petit, sometimes the walker don’t make it back from the wire to the ledge. That is the risk they take, and that, I think, is what the tightrope walk that shadows everyone in the novel represents, the risks we all take, every day, to love, to live and to connect, and make art out of our lives.

The woman of Kathryn Stockett’s The Help are risking everything in Jim Crow-era Mississippi. Young, idealistic and gutsy Skeeter Phelan, and the maids (”the help”) she encourages to share their stories of working for white families in the segregated south, could be killed for what they’re doing, and they know it. If Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk between the Towers is the backdrop to the character develop in Let The Great World Spin, it’s the murder of Medgar Evers that looms heavily in the lives of the characters in the The Help. It’s a high wire act of the tallest order, and it’s nerve-wracking, oft-times riveting and extremely entertaining. Work of fiction? Psuedo-memoir? Anthropological study? You be the judge.

I learned about The Help after a conversation with John Seigenthaler, journalist, former administrative assistant to Senator Robert Kennedy, founder of the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center and long time host of A Word on Words on Nashville Public Television. We were talking about the Southern Festival of Books last year, and I asked him if there was anyone he was excited about, and someone I really shouldn’t miss. He said “Kathryn Stockett” without hesitation, and added that The Help was a wonderful book. When a man who risked his own life on the Freedom Rides in the 60s recommends a book dealing with segregation in the south, you listen.  Stockett was great at the Festival, and I quickly picked up a copy, then already in its 30-something printing. Oddly though, for a book that popular, I not only hadn’t heard of it, I didn’t know anyone who read it or was reading it.  Until, that is, I’d mentioned it, especially to women. They either read it, were reading it, were planning on reading it or knew someone who was reading it, like the book was a secret being passed around. Reading it, especially since it seems to be a book being read mostly by women, feels like being granted entrance into an exclusive club, with millions of members.

Being an English major is like being in a secret club without the handshakes and fancy rings. We’re a strange bunch, with strange sensibilities and fixations.  I wonder though, if all these years I’ve been part of the club, I carried some mark of exclusion. How does one be an English Major, and not get around to reading Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita,  one of the greatest English language novels of all time?  Well, be gone, mark of exclusion!

Like Joyce’s Ulysses, Lolita is a doozy — a big, heavy, monstrous (Humbert Humbert is a monster, after all) work of genius. A single read, just to grasp the narrative, is not enough, so I hope to return to it someday. When I read Ulysses in college, I needed an entire other book to help me get through it. It’s a shame, though, that I don’t read books with that kind of attentiveness anymore. There are too many other books to read, and too much life to live and work to do — and no tests to take. But I imagine this book would become more and more enthralling with deeper study and subsequent readings.

Without that additional attention, though, it’s still unquestionably a masterpiece. Talk about taking risks. The book is fearless. There’s no need for me to mention plot points in a classic, but if all you know of Lolita are watered-down pop-culture references, you’re doing your senses a great disservice. It’s really a road trip novel, through America, through the English language, through storytelling, through wit and humor; through our own fears, wants and desires. Then imagine that road trip turns into a crash course for your sensibilities, testing the limits of what you believe is possible in a work of fiction, and what you’re willing to let the (admittedly unreliable) narrator get away with. I can’t imagine any artist, even a funambulist for that matter, approaching their work the same after reading Lolita.

On one particular night, my depression had a rare side-effect: a call to action. A way out. I would write a letter to a local music reporter and tell her about my band. It was a rash decision, done without much thought. I figured if I could tell someone about me, and about my band, I could break free. Of what, exactly, I wasn’t sure. Maybe my bedroom. Maybe myself.

We were a good band that worked hard. We practiced five nights a week, played a lot of local shows, and took ourselves more seriously than 18 year-olds ever should. We had a live demo that kicked ass and was surely better than anything coming out of Hudson County in those days. Better yet, at the beginning of the 1990’s, Horror Time was easily the best band in northeast New Jersey. We knew it. The only problem was that no one else did. Know one knew we even existed. That meant, of course, that no one knew I existed.

So, late on this night, I sat down and wrote Cathie Coleman at the East Coast Rocker a long drawn-out letter introducing myself and my band and explaining how we could really use some press. It was that simple. We weren’t getting anywhere and weren’t really sure where we were trying to go. We didn’t fit in with Bon Jovi or Skid Row or God forbid, any of the hair metal bands popular on the radio and in the area. We weren’t heavy enough to run with the hardcore bands selling out matinees in New York or speaking for the angst of the kids in the suburbs of New Jersey. But then again, we weren’t just a Jersey rock band like the E Street Band or the Asbury Jukes, either. We kind of thought of ourselves as a thing and style all our own. We were an attitude and a philosophy. Four 18-year-old kids (three Italian-Americans and one Eastern Indian-American) on a mission to take over the world with six-to-seven minute songs (at least!) and a heavy dose of influence from the likes of the Misfits, the Ramones, the Gorilla Biscuits, Supertouch, Vision, Metallica and early U2. A strange mix of bands you’ve heard of and some you haven’t. You were going to hear about us.

First, we had to get out of Jersey City.

I took our live demo, my letter, a bio a friend had written, and a grainy photo taken by that same friend, and put it in a golden padded envelope. The next morning, I walked the ten or so blocks up to the post office on Central Ave near Grand Street.

I didn’t know anything about follow-up calls, so I wouldn’t be sure if Cathie Coleman ever got the package. There was no e-mail to do a follow-up e-mail, and no internet, where I might have been able to check the magazine’s web site. I would just have to pick up the East Coast Rocker every Thursday and see if we were in there.

My hopes weren’t high, because as far as I knew, bands didn’t get written about because band members wrote letters to music writers. There was some mystery involved in the whole process, I was sure. I used to make frequent trips up to Garden State News on the corner of Bauer Street and Central Avenue, not far from the post office, to pick up copies of Creem and Hit Parader. All the bands; all the stories. The magazines must have just known about these people and sought them out for interviews and features. When you’re great, I figured, magazines knew who you were.

In the weeks that followed my gutsy mailing maneuver, it was back to the routine. School, work, late night band practice, and fighting depression in my bedroom on the appropriately named Booraem (pronounced bore-em) Avenue in Jersey City Heights.

It was a dark bedroom. Enclosed by dusty gray paneling and anchored by forest-green wall-to-wall carpeting, it had one window that faced the alleyway between our house and Angelo and Hazel’s house next door. No natural light filtered into the room. What did, however, enter the room, was the occasional smell of cat urine that wafted over from Angelo and Hazel’s, who shared their house with at least 17 cats. Exactly how many cats they had was hard to calculate. Your best shot was to keep track of which ones were sitting in their front window and make a mental note of which ones you hadn’t seen before.

The bedroom held an additional darkness as well. I moved into it about a year earlier, after my family had moved from the second floor apartment of the house to the first floor apartment. The first floor was most recently occupied by my grandmother, and before that, by both my grandmother and grandfather, and before that by my grandmother, grandfather, my mother, and her two brothers, Joe and Vinnie. There was a lot of history in that apartment. My grandmother had been living in the apartment by herself for the last nine years, after the death of my grandfather in December of 1980, ten days after John Lennon was shot and killed by an obsessed fan outside the Dakota in Manhattan, just across the Hudson River from where we lived. When my grandmother succumbed to brain cancer in 1989, it was after only a few days of her being placed in a nursing home. For the many months before that, she’d laid in a hospital bed that had been placed in her living room. My mother, with the occasional help from me and my sister Mary and brother Nick, cared for her, emptying her bed pan, rolling her over to prevent bed sores, and giving her sponge baths. After her death, my parents decided it was best for us to move down to the first floor and rent out the second. My parents took the master bedroom, Mary took my Uncle Vinnie’s old room closest to the kitchen, and I took my Uncle Joe’s old room off the living room, the same living room my grandmother had floated toward death in only months before. Nick took the basement as his room, which meant the rest of us lost unrestricted access to it. We now needed his approval to wash our clothes.

It took a little over a month of trips to the newsstand on Central Avenue before I finally found out if Cathie Coleman ever got my letter and package. She did. There in her “New Jersey Newsbeat” column was Horror Time, looking tougher and more rock ‘n’ roll then we’d ever looked. We were the second item. She wrote a few paragraphs about us, telling folks that we were a band to look out for. She even quoted a few lines from our bio, and made a point to mention how young we were, even referring to us as a “baby band” in line with early 90s hitmakers, and coincidentally Jersey-based, Trixter.

The band was ecstatic. We were on the map. People knew who Horror Time was. It seemed like everyone saw the article, and for those who didn’t, there was sure to be a copy in each band member’s back pocket if necessary. I realized quickly that press could breed more press. And now that I knew you could be directly responsible for getting your band in the papers, I jumped on the opportunity to get us more. I was able to garner listings mentions, reviews and show previews in some of the other local newspapers, like the Jersey Journal and The Hudson Current. When Horror Time put out its first proper demo, I sent Cathie Coleman a copy and she wrote about us in her column again, and this time, we were the lead item.

One of the things I remember most about that time were many of the band’s friends and contemporaries asking us, “How’d you get that?” when reading stories about us. My answer was always the same: “I sent them some stuff.”

I realized that most people thought getting press was as mysterious as I once did. But now I knew it wasn’t. You had to let the press know about you. In the years that followed, through Horror Time’s demise and the building of my own singer-songwriter career, I gathered a decent collection of press clippings about my music in both regional and national publications. I learned how to write a professional press release and bio, how to write cover letters, and how to get professional promo photos taken. I built press and contact lists, and learned about something I didn’t know existed when I was 18 and in my first band: the follow-up.

I never again wrote a late-night, depression-fueled plea to a music writer to tell him or her about my band, although I sometimes wish I was still innocent enough to think doing so is appropriate.

It wasn’t long after that first bit of press that my family moved from Booraem Ave., forced out by uncles who wouldn’t accept my parents’ offer to buy out their share of my grandmother’s estate. At the same time we were preparing to find another place to live, my mother decided she wanted a divorce from my father after 25-years of marriage. Dealing with the illness and death of my grandmother, and the realization that her two brothers would just as soon as put her out on the street, had taken its toll on her. My father’s gambling and bitterness — something my mother had ridden the wave of their entire marriage — became magnified by the circumstances and grew to an intensity impossible for her to handle. It would break the future like it was breaking her. If there was ever a time to start fresh, that was it.

I couldn’t afford to live on my own at the time, so I popped back and forth. I lived a few months with my mother, then after she got tired of me, a few months with my father. It was a vagabond, pack-light existence, where I frequently slept at my girlfriend’s house, and on one occasion when both of her parents were drunk and vicious, in my car, parked in the covered garage under my father’s apartment building. None of that mattered, though. I was out of that dark and depressing bedroom off the living room. And I was on my way. More shows. More press. More existence outside of myself.

One day, during one of the brief stints I lived with my father on Sherman Avenue in Jersey City, the Jersey Journal sent over a photographer to take a few photos of me. I had won a singer-songwriter competition at the Village Gate in Greenwich Village, and in addition to the fifty dollars I received, I was given a showcase of my own at the club. I tipped the Journal off about the competition and show, and it decided to do a little piece on me, with an accompanying photo. The photographer took a few shots, and the paper ran the one of me sitting with my guitar propped up in front of me — the standard “musician who plays guitar” shot.  But there was another photo taken, that the photographer gave me later, which I’ve always felt captured that time in my life quite accurately. It was me, holding a lit cigarette and standing by the window, looking outside myself and my father’s apartment, toward a world that was beginning to know I existed. I had the photo and the story in the paper to prove it.

(Book) The Song is You - Arthur Phillips: A book about music, passion, relationships and family that felt completely contemporary; completely now; without overtly being about now. A beautiful and unique novel.

(Film) (500) Days of Summer: A fresh, sharp and stylized take on romance that was above all else, fun. I’d watch it again, and again.

(Film/Concert) Anvil: The Story of Anvil / The Anvil Experience at the Belcourt: Easily one of the best documentaries, and maybe movies in general, about rock ‘n’ roll. But then add the band performing after it, and it was truly an amazing experience. My wife on her feet shouting “Metal on Metal” was alone worth the price of admission.

(Concert) Leonard Cohen at TPAC: A dream, really, to see and hear Cohen perform, in what may have been one of the best sounding-concerts I’ve ever been to in a large venue. It was everything I had hoped for, and so much more.

(Film) Prodigal Sons: This film will be rolled out nationally over several months in 2010. Yes, it’s about a transgendered woman going home to be part of her high-school reunion. Yes, it has something to do with Orson Welles.  That’s only the half of it. Ultimately, it’s about love and family, and the lengths we go to, to keep that family intact. Kimberly Reed’s heart is huge.

(Concert) The Non-Commissioned Officers at the Nashville Film Festival Closing Night Party at Mercy Lounge: Though not the official closing-night event (that belonged to the excellent Long Players performance of the “Easy Rider” soundtrack), the Non-Comms performance at Mercy Lounge was triumphant. Make-Out With Violence, the film for which the band composed the music, had won the top prize at the Festival. The soundtrack won the best music-in-a-film prize.  The guys in the band were in the movie. Someone’s mom got up to sing. It was a celebration. It was thrilling.

(Film) Adventureland: As far as major releases go, this one slipped under the radar.  A completely charming coming-of-age vignette worth a viewing, or multiple viewings, if you missed it. Excellent performances all around.

(DVD) The Hold Steady - A Positive Rage: A short documentary packaged with a live-record from a band that made me believe in rock ‘n’ roll again. It’ll make you smile, especially when the band and the audience start fast-clapping.

(Essay/Book) Eating Animals - Jonathan Safran Foer: The first chapter of this book was excerpted in the New York Times Magazine, which I where I first read it. The chapter stands alone as a beautifully-written essay about our relationship to food. The book itself alters that relationship.

(Television) Mad Men Season Three:  While season two moved slower in order to better develop the characters, season three was a roller-coaster ride. The final episode made it worth the trip. I’ve had a theory that the majority of us are either Don or Betty. This season moved me closer to a better understanding of my own theory.

(Television) Masterpiece Mystery / Wallander: A gorgeously-shot series based on the Henning Mankell novels that was so well done, you could easily get lost in the photography and forget anyone was killed. Kenneth Branagh was brilliant as the down-and-out lead character.

(Concert) Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band at the Sommet Center: What can I say? I’m certain the Boss and the Band are only getting better. This may have been the swan song for the E Street Band on tour. They played Born to Run in its entirety.  I wanted to come out of my skin. It was transcendent.

(Film) Food Inc.: If you eat food, or know someone who eats foods, or are responsible for the food that someone else eats, this is a must-see-film.

(Songs): “”Give Me Tomorrow,” Willie Nile; “Wilco (The Song),” Wilco; “Hysteric,” The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, “I and Love and You,” The Avett Brothers; “Queen of the Supermarket,” Bruce Springsteen, “The Fixer,” Pearl Jam; “Haven’t Met You Yet,” Michael Buble*.

*I feel I need to clarify this last one a little, because it seems a little not like the others. I was in Italy in the Fall on vacation, and this song was everywhere, so I think I associate it with a wonderful memory. But it’s also a perfect slice of pop songwriting and production, with pessimism giving way to optimism in the lyrics, the indiscriminate use of the word “kid,” and a trumphet solo — a friggin’ trumphet solo! — in the middle. How can that be bad?

Bonus - (Book) Let the Great World Spin - Colum McCann: Although, as of this posting, I haven’t finished Let the Great World Spin, I’m almost certain I’ll have it read by the end of the year. I’m also almost certain, based on what I HAVE read, that it will be one of my favorite things of the year, and maybe the decade.

Walk down your street

Write you a letter

Call out to you

Run to you

Send a song out to you

Put a dime, quarter or dollar in the jukebox (and then lean up against it)

Go to, or climb through, your window

More elaborate things we never really did when courting you, but still sometimes do in song:

Climb your mountain

Swim your sea

Put a spell on you, or fall under YOUR spell

Take you by the hand, and make you understand, Amanda.

Things we ultimately still want to do, but only certain people can actually do, and that’s why there is song:

Liberate you

Confiscate you

Be your man

After reading Eating Animals, I’m not sure that this position is agreeable anymore.

Foer gracefully points out, though, that eating isn’t simply about what you put in your mouth. Eating is about family and culture.  It’s about the smells of childhood, and memories of family dinners. While steak was a rarity in my house growing up, my mother’s meatballs were the best (and I see fellow Italian-American men nodding in agreement about their own mother’s meatballs).  I used to help my father roll small meatballs to toss into his escarole and bean soup. Now that I think about it, my mother’s meatloaf was ostensibly one very large brick-shaped meatball. And I remember once when my grandfather – perplexed that I wanted a hamburger – made a very large meatball and smashed it into a paddy. “THIS, is how you make a hamburger!” he said. He was right. It was the greatest hamburger I had ever eaten, and a favorite story I’ve told dozens of times. But we didn’t just eat variations of meatballs, of course. My mother would often bread chicken or pork cutlets, or throw some pork or sausage in with the sauce (or gravy if you’re from the Northeast).

As someone who now carries on the Italian-American cooking traditions I learned as a kid, I’m grateful that deciding to become a vegetarian would be easier than if I came from a different tradition. But it would still be difficult. Eggplant dishes, broccoli rabe, stuffed mushrooms, any number of pasta dishes, etc. are not a problem. Switching to vegetable broth for tortellini soup wouldn’t be a big change, but what to do about the pancetta, or bacon, in my beloved – and admittedly famous – pasta e fagiole? And if there’s any meat I do get a craving for, it’s the cold sliced kind that I spent my teen years piling up on sandwiches when I worked at the deli in my neighborhood. I love my prosciutto, and mortadella, and capicola and sopressata. As far as animal products go, my mozzarella, and ricotta and provolone. This stuff is more than meat or animal products; they are my connection to my father and grandfather; to my ancestry.

So is there a middle ground?  Does knowing the sopressata I’m eating comes from a pig that was not factory farmed make it less objectionable to me? I don’t know for sure, but maybe a little. What’s impossible to know is if it did indeed NOT come from a factory farm. Odds are, especially if you’re eating poultry, then pork, then beef, that it did. Are you a betting man?

What I do know, is that Eating Animals has raised the conversation to a new level for me. It’s a conversation that started almost 20 years ago, was put on the backburner, and in recent years, brought up again with the watching of “Food, Inc. and the reading of The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Foer is the first one to add to the discussion the aspects of culture and family, and in section 4 of the “Storytelling” chapter, turn that discussion into poetry.  The middle of the book is heavy, and that’s what makes it extraordinary.  He sets it up beautifully, tells you where he’s going to go with it, and then takes you out eloquently. The writing alone in the last section is worth the barrage of facts and horror that come at you through the middle.

I’ve written before in blog posts about the risks one takes when entering a movie theatre, going to a concert or opening up a book. There’s a chance you’ll see something, or experience something or read something that may alter you in small way, challenge your way of thinking, even change everything. I’ve always liked that. When opening Eating Animals, you know what you’re getting into it – none of what Foer writes should surprise you – but you’re not sure how it’s going to affect you. To put yourself in that vulnerable position is a good thing. Most people, I imagine, don’t want to, especially when it comes to the subject of eating meat. That alone says something.

But if anything, just imagine, as Foer writes, “what kind of world would we create if three times a day we activated our compassion and reason as we sat down to eat…”

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]]> http://www.joepagetta.com/blogjoepagetta/?feed=rss2&p=293 http://www.joepagetta.com/blogjoepagetta/?p=256 http://www.joepagetta.com/blogjoepagetta/?p=256#comments Fri, 24 Jul 2009 20:41:40 +0000 Joe Pagetta http://www.joepagetta.com/blogjoepagetta/?p=256 Summer reading is a ritual for me, especially for that week in June or July every year that my wife and I vacation on the beach. I always have a “to-read” pile going, but in the weeks leading up to the vacation, a separate “to-read on the beach” pile emerges. These books are rarely what you’d call “beach reads,” but serious literary fiction I look forward to spending quality time with. I have a special relationship to these books, because the way they are read, intently and without the distraction of the day-to-day, burns them more deeply into my conscious. In previous years, those “beach reads” have included The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham, The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway and Keith Katchik’s work of Buddhist fiction, The Hungry Ghost. All had a profound affect on me when I read them.

This year, of the half dozen books I brought with me to the beach, I chose two to spend the week with: Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland and Arthur Phillips’ The Song is You. Let me say first that reading books that take place in New York City (even in the past, as Pete Hammill’s North River, which I also read last year, does) is bittersweet for me. I still love New York, where I spent so much of my life before moving to Nashville in 1998. Being taken back there in fiction, to walk the streets and see the sights and hear the sounds, is both sad and wonderful. But my life is in Nashville now, and I’ve accepted that.

Both Netherland and The Song is You take place in New York. September 11, 2001 looms heavily in Netherland (it’s been called a post-9/11 novel), but it’s there too in Phillips’ novel, just not as overtly. That they both take place in a post-9/11 New York is no big deal. Plenty of books do. Besides, as one critic pointed out, isn’t all fiction published after September 11, 2001 post 9/11? What’s weird is that I inadvertently chose to read two books with protagonists who are estranged from wives named Rachel. Coincidence?

The obvious similarities end there. To draw more parallels would be pushing it, but if pressed, I would say that they both have protagonists trying to recapture something they once had before they can ever reconcile with their respective Rachels. For Netherland’s Hans van de Brock, it’s his youthful days as a cricket player. For The Song is You’s Julian Donahue, it’s a hipper, younger, passionate version of himself. Both of them find their muse in people with big dreams.  For Hans, it’s Chuck Ramkissoon, a hustler whose lust for life is so engaging and insatiable, and whose dream of building a world class cricket stadium in New York City so inspiring, that our protagonist is blinded — as are we — to that fact that Chuck may only be a hustler and gangster.  Their relationship most closely resembles that of Nick Carraway’s enamoring of Jay Gatsby in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and O’Neill means for us to see it that way. In one poignant scene, Chuck carelessly stands in a cemetery on a gravestone engraved with the word “DAISY.” If you hadn’t figured out by then what the book was aspiring to,  it couldn’t have been made clearer.  I wasn’t sure what to make of it though. Was it merely an homage to Fitzgerald’s Great American Novel, like playing a Sinatra song if you’re gigging in Hoboken? If you dare to tread into that territory, must you give a nod to the greats that came before you? Or did it have some more prescient meaning regarding the American dream?

I love The Great Gatsby. It’s one of my favorite novels and one I reread every couple of years. It takes guts to tackle the Great American Novel, and even more guts to model it after Gatsby. Fitzgerald knew what he was doing, and so does O’Neill. The result is a beautifully written and exhilarating novel that paints New York in an entirely new, and very likely, more honest way. It’s New York through its new immigrants eyes; the price of the American Dream reconsidered. Post-9/11 or not, if Netherland is not The Great American Novel, it’s definitely a Great Novel about a new America.

For The Song is You’s Julian, his muse is a young Irish singer-songwriter named Cait O’Dwyer. An emerging artist who has just signed a major record deal, Julian catches Cait on the way up, at local club shows growing increasing crowded as her fame spreads. He’s immediately taken with her, both physically and spiritually. What ensues is a kind of cat-and-mouse love affair, where one moment you’re rooting for them, the next you’re worried that your own emotions have blinded you to the fact that Julian may be a crazed stalker. This is especially true when some signs Julian believes come from Cait — and I don’t think I’m spoiling anything here — actually come from his wife Rachel.

Where The Song is You truly shines is in its depiction of how we age in a modern world. What happens when we get older, and are no longer the hip, cool, with-it people we once were. What does the iPod library full of music that came out twenty years ago say about us? Do we, and should we, reinvent ourselves? Does music still matter? Or rather, does what matters to us about music, matter to anyone else?

Even though I’ve been in rock bands, and have played music for a good part of my life, I don’t like rock and roll fiction. Except for maybe Tom Perrotta’s The Wishbones, most of it tries too hard to be authentic. But Phillips has the ear for it, and never falls into the bad rock and roll fiction trap, delivering a heartfelt narrative on the power and pleasures of writing and playing rock and roll. In the process, he makes a pretty good case for listening to it as well, especially on an iPod.

So how to appreciate music, in a passionate way, and still age gracefully? That’s up to you, but putting some music from bands and artists younger than you on your iPod is a good start. Just don’t fall in love with them.

While leaving us guessing and often breathless chasing a love affair not meant to be, Phillips also gives us a lovely meditation on family, whether it’s his relationship with his father, his brother, or his estranged wife.  Clearly, it was Julian’s father’s love of Billie Holiday that instilled in his son a love for music.  And it’s a book such as Phillips’ that reminds me why I love reading and why it’s so rewarding. It’s a fantastic and very contemporary novel.

Special kudos also to Phillips, a real life former Jeopardy champion, for giving us in his brother the most shockingly hilarious scenario for a disgraced fictional Jeopardy champion. That part I’m definitely not spoiling. You just have to read it and come upon it yourself.

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