Ça Plane Pour Moi. Plastic Bertrand. 1978. Sire.

 According to internet data, the Lollapalooza tour, 1995, reached Dallas, Texas, on August 10, a Thursday. Five of us rode in one car that I drove from Fort Worth to the Starplex Amphitheater; my fellow passengers were Jo, Pat, Trina, and that woman who lived in Azle, whose name I no longer remember, and who used to come into the record store often, along with her boyfriend. Her musical tastes tended toward the abrasive, commercial metal so popular with the white suburban kids of privilege: Nine Inch Nails, Iron Maiden, Alice In Chains. Her personal style was not that of a typical metal fan, more like Ally Sheedy after her character’s disastrous Breakfast Club makeover. I admired her bright and casual style, her propensity to good humor and cheer, and for not succumbing to conformity and becoming a metal clone like so many of our peers. She rolled joints during the entire car trip to Lollapalooza with the hurried precision of an efficient professional working against a deadline, and cheerfully talking the while and making us laugh. Months later Trina and I and Stacy would visit her at her home in Azle, her demeanor then something altogether different. On the drive there, Trina and Stacy conversed with genuine concern about the gravity of the Azalian’s increasing heroin use. Later, the Azalian wept openly as she told us of her current predicament; an arrest by police after it was discovered she’d taken advantage of an adolescent minor in her charge at the drug rehabilitation center where she worked, and giving him controlled substances. We all sat awkwardly in a bedroom of the house where she lived, the mid-day sun shining through a partially drawn curtain over a nearby window, the only light in the room giving it a cramped and suffocating quality. The self-pitying and egocentric tone of the Azalian’s discourse had become sickeningly irksome; its pathos was now overwhelmingly cloying, and my mounting misery quickly connected with the effects of the weed I’d been ingesting since the ride over, creating a sort of nausea of ill will. I was on the floor with a friend of hers, a self-identified artist who wouldn’t shut up about his admiration for Warhol. My only other memory of that day was how badly I wanted to cudgel the boy upon his head with how much more about Warhol I knew than he. I said two or three things to him about the artist, hoping he would respond with a factual error or some boringly obvious opinion of the work in question so that I could spring upon him, fangs bared, claws out, but he only responded by saying things like, “Oh, I just love him!” or “My dream is to ultimately work at his museum.” We were all stoned but drugs had reduced the boy to idiocy. Back at Lollapalooza I split from the group of friends I rode with after meeting Rob just outside the amphitheater grounds. Rob held my comp ticket to the event, and he was excited about meeting his friend Carrie, who worked the IT help desk at Blockbuster Music. A smart and attractive woman, Carrie spoke loudly and aggressively, typically about work subjects that I wasn’t in any way interested in discussing during off hours. But she was holding hits of blotter acid that Rob talked me into taking despite my reservations. Still lucid when Beck took the stage minutes later, I remember him having the most memorable and spontaneous highlight of the day. Midset, Beck paused between songs to address audience members, asking if there were anyone near the stage who was human beatbox proficient. There was a volunteer almost immediately, a young Hispanic man who clambered onstage quickly, taking instruction from Beck on the desired accompanying rhythm. Beck then began to rap the by now legendary opening line, “In the time of chimpanzees I was a monkey…” to an approving roar of applause. Where the generation before ours had practiced an activism of idealism, slackers were grossly ambivalent about participating in historical gestures, instead flirting with withdrawal in the same way that we flirted with morality, finding imperatives in neither one. We were pop nihilists, our belief in nothing tempered by an insatiable hunger to buy records. Early exposure to capitalist marketing bombardment had isolated us from our better instincts, and the intensely sadistic military complex whispered into our dreams at night its extremist fantasies of the violent struggle for power, with which our libidos lovingly conspired. Knowing that reality was only a handful of calendar pages away, we could now see that our relative youth was fast becoming a devalued, shadowy currency. The events of September 11, 2001, forced a new, unprecedented perspective upon every cognizant person around the globe, and suddenly world engagement became the least of all imperatives that we could commit ourselves to. I was delivering mail that day in a neighborhood in east Fort Worth, the radio in my shirt pocket tuned to NPR, king of the divan no more.