November 12, 2024
Heartbreak is the National Anthem, by Rob Sheffield
“The Eras Tour is a journey through her past, starring all the Taylors she’s ever been, which means all the Taylors you’ve ever been.” —Rob Sheffield
The first time I heard Taylor Swift, it was 2009 and I was driving a rental van to The Junction to pick up a secondhand (recalled) drop-side crib I’d bought off Craigslist for my six-week-old baby, and “Love Story” came on the radio, and I just loved it (that bridge! That key change! How it recalls Katie and Tommy on the old porch watching the chickens peck the ground!).
Although Swift would remain otherwise peripheral to my experience for a while longer, until my daughter (by then 6) arrived home one day from daycamp reporting a song called “Bad Blood” that she’d overheard kids singing, and wanted to hear more of, and there was no going back after that (which was fine, because who doesn’t need a little music in our minds saying “It’s gonna be alright”?).
We’ve been a crew of Swifties ever since, mishearing the lyrics to “Blank Space,” going back to turning “Red,” being unsure about “Reputation” but eventually won over, leaning into the cringe on “Lover,” being rescued from pandemic doldrums by the magic of “Folklore” and “Evermore,” wondering about the auto-tune on “Midnights” and belting out the killer tracks on “TPD.”
And while we did not win the ticket lottery for her Eras Tour in Toronto, I am leaning into the shimmer of #Tayronto this month in lieu of more dreadful things I could be paying attention to, and part of that project was anticipating Rob Sheffield’s HEARTBREAK IS THE NATIONAL ANTHEM, a fun and engaging journey through the weird, wonderful, over-dramatic and TRUE world of Swift’s music and her remarkable career.
“Champagne Problems” was playing in the donut shop when I took this photo. Taylor Swift is omnipresent, and neither she nor I would have it any other way.
October 16, 2024
Love is a Mixtape
At the turn of the century, almost all of the romantic love I had to give was unrequited, and the only problem with that (in retrospect) was that I never got to realize my dream of having a boyfriend come along to digitize my vast collection of mixed tapes, and then burn them onto CDs. And I suppose I could have done like Dalloway and digitized the mixtapes myself, but I didn’t have my own internet connection back then, let alone a CD burner, and besides, it used to take entire afternoons to download half a song, and burning a CD could take even longer, and the only people with patience for such projects were the kinds of emotionally stunted, technically-inclined dorks that I tended to have crushes on, and none of them ever cared about me enough to do so.
So my trove of mixtapes was lost to time, from “Britt’s Mix 93” to the ska tape our friend Laura made in 1997, that very random tape I made in Grade 10 that went from April Wine’s “I Wouldn’t Want to Lose Your Love” to Alannah Myles’ “Lover of Mine,” and that most iconic Summer of ‘99 tape whose Side B began with Sophie B. Hawkins’ “As I Lay Me Down” to Mariah Carey’s “Always Be My Baby” (and “Angels” by Robbie Williams in there somewhere).
And yes, it’s true that if any of those CD burner-owning boys I’d fancied had ever managed to love me back, the attraction might have petered out around the time they discovered the extent of my affinity for soft rock. The one guy I did go out with during this period didn’t have a CD burner either, but when I gave him a tape that included Heather Nova’s “London Rain (Nothing Heals Me Like You Do),” he was really mean about it, which should have been a red flag—nobody puts a track from the Dawson’s Creek soundtrack in the corner. (Full disclosure: his mixtape for me was really cool, introducing me to music I love to this day, but he was not very nice in the end.)
Mixtapes, for me, in the 1990s, were almost like a scrapbook, compiled in real time. My Sony Sports Walkman was always nearby, and I’d be listening to the tape-in-progress, removing the tape from my deck only to add to it, taping something off a friend’s CD, recording a song off the radio, or from somebody’s parents’ record collection. And then once the tape was complete, it would be titled and dated, a record of time, much of the music not actually contemporary, assembled by chance, but that would become my soundtrack as I made my way through the world, foam headphones ever-present on my ears (at least until I stepped on the headset and broke it, which happened all the time).
My husband never made me a mixtape. We met in 2002, and he’d already embraced the future, a never-to-be-obsolete technology called the minidisc (ha ha) and he brought me on board, for which he still regularly apologizes. He must have made me a mix-minidisc, but I don’t remember what was on it, mostly because there was so much else going on at the time, our separate lives converging, the beginning of forever. In 2005, under the impression of an iconic ad, we each purchased an ipod shuffle (catchphrase: “Life is random”), which was the start of the end of our relationship with physical media (although we still own an entire shelf unit of CDs).
But the ipod shuffle would not be the the end of us sharing music together, on road trips, in the kitchen doing dishes. My husband has a Spotify playlist called “The Kerry List” that is 2 hours and 26 minutes long, specially curated at the intersection of our tastes, and while there’s no Mariah Carey, every single track is one that makes me exclaim, “Tune!” at the opening strains, and to me there is nothing more generous.
Including “London Rain (Nothing Heals Me Like You Do).”
Love is a mixtape, indeed.
February 7, 2024
She’s So High
The podcast I love more than any other is 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s, hosted by Rob Harvilla, author of my all-time favourite piece of music journalism, “How “Summer Girls” Explains a Bunch of Hits—and the Music of 1999.” (I wrote about my ongoing obsession with “Summer Girls” last year. It continues to be ongoing.) I started listening to the podcast—which is now into more than 100 songs that explain the ’90s, but let’s not be pedantic about it—with the Natalie Imbruglia “Torn” episode, featuring Sophie B. Hawkins as a special guest, and it continues to delight and make me reminisce and also make me think.
Last week’s episode, on “Iris” by the Goo Goo Dolls, in particular. And not just because it talks about working in retail while the Goo Goo Dolls play, and I did once indeed have a job folding t-shirts while “Black Balloon” played and articulated all my longing. (There was so much longing. I was twenty years old.) But also because the episodes are never just about one song anyway, and this one delves back to the movie High Fidelity, and how podcast host Rob used to take it as a compliment when people would tell him that he was a lot like the Rob in the movie. He used to think that guy was cool, and so did I (he was played by John Cusack after all). But. “High Fidelity is a horror film disguised as a rom-com,” says Rob Harvilla, and so was my idea of romance, to be honest. Informed by many John Cusack films, but also pop music in general.
“She’s So High,” by Tal Bachman, is the song Harvilla uses to articulate the problem of how women as love objects are presented in popular music. The point of existing as a woman, as per that song, and so many others, is to be out of some sad guy’s league. “Songs Sung By Sad Boys Who Dug Themselves into Mopey Bottomless Pits Singing Up at Fantasy Girls Marooned On Impossibly High Pedestals,” Harvilla explains.
Indoctrination into this culture in the 1990s meant that I thought romantic love meant some sad sack guy with an acoustic guitar who seemed to worship me in the most solipsistic manner possible. It means that it never occurred to a lot of sad sack guys that women were actual humans with multi-dimensions and struggles of their own. It meant that it seemed very reasonable for me to have relationships with men who were distinctly not excellent, because it was part of my job description to be “high above him.” In fact, it was my job to fix him, to save him, to exalt him above his own mediocrity. And that he would somehow be more authentic than other people for not even bothering. Romance was Ethan Hawk as Troy in Reality Bites telling Lelaina Pierce, “I’m the only real thing you’ve got.” It would never occur to me that I might possibly meet someone who could add to my own life, who could make my own world bigger and better. That the standard could possibly be meeting someone as smart, as passionate, as wonderful as I am. What it could really mean to meet my match.
The bar was low in the 1990s. I love the song “Head Over Feet,” by Alanis Morisette, but what does it mean that some jerk got an entire ballad written about him on the basis of the fact that “You ask how my day was”?
I had no choice but to hear you
You stated your case, time and again…
April 24, 2023
There Was a Good Man Named Paul Revere
On Friday evening, a raccoon got into my kitchen. (Not for the first time; also this was not the only raccoon intruder in the neighbourhood this weekend!). And whenever I told anyone about it, they’d ask how the raccoon got in, and I would reply, “It came in the door…” And then I’d have to resist the impulse to finish off the sentence with, “I said it before/ I think I’m over you, but I’m really not sure.” Which is a problem much more rare than Toronto raccoons are, which is that I am absolutely obsessed with the song “Summer Girls,” by LFO.
And the weird thing about this is that everyone else isn’t. I don’t get it. A few years ago, back when Twitter was not a terrible place, I shared my shocking discovery that two out of the three members of LFO (aka, “The Lyte Funky Ones,” whose “Summer Girls” was pretty much a one-hit-wonder in 1999, though they tried hard to follow it up) had died of cancer. Because what kind of a statistic is that? Cancer, robbing the world of 66% of the ones who were lyte and funky, and now there is just one. The Lyte Funky ONE, and I partook in such banter with exactly TWO people, and it seemed like nobody else on Twitter cared about LFO, or even remembered the song at all.
But the lyrics to that song are wired to my brain in a way that I just can’t kick, and I don’t even want to. Which is kind of ridiculous, because the lyrics are so random and weird, but unbelievably catchy, and I just can’t help walking around the house muttering lines like, “Call you up, but what’s the use?/ I like Kevin Bacon, but I hate Footloose.”
Part of the problem is that I have two amazing daughters, and so it comes up a lot, a line like, “You’re the best girl that I ever did see.” Multiple times a day, I’m not even kidding, to which my children reply, without missing a beat, “The great Larry Bird, Jersey 33!” And HOW can I not follow that up with, “When you take a sip, you buzz like a hornet, Billy Shakespeare wrote a whole lot of sonnets”? Not a single one of which I can recite, by the way, and yet I know all the words to this bizarre and remarkably song in which “hornet” and “sonnet” rhyme!
When I do online yoga classes, I’m sometimes instructed to “shake and wiggle,” which puts “Summer Girls” back in my head yet again...as if it even needed planting: “In the summertime, girls got it goin’ on/ Shake and wiggle to a hip hop song.”
And I don’t know a better expression of love than telling somebody, “There was a good man named Paul Revere/ I feel much better, baby, when you’re near.”
Stayed all summer, then went back home
Macaulay Culkin wasn’t home alone
Fell deep in love, but now we ain’t speakin’
Michael J. Fox was Alex P. Keaton
I honestly don’t understand why any other song has to exist!
I am not the only person who has thought quite extensively about this song, and Rob Harvilla “How ‘Summer Girls’ Explains a Bunch of Hits—and the Music of 1999” was such a joy to encounter, explaining a lot about just how this song has been running through my brain for almost 25 years. (The summer of 1999 was one of the most vivid and insane periods of my life, and I remember every song that was ever on the radio, which was this one, and “I Want it That Way,” by the Backstreet Boys, and “Living’ La Vida Loca,” and “If You Had My Love,” my Jennifer Lopez, and and and, and Harvilla does a formidable job summing up the absolutely bananas musical year that ’99 was.)
I had never heard of Abercrombie and Fitch until that song, whose video had a similar vibe to “Steal My Sunshine,” by Len, and we all watched videos then, and I put my hair in cute pigtails and wore tank tops and aspired to be admired by boys with frosted tips.
One day I’m going to be old and senile, and just repeating these lyrics on a loop.
Boogaloo Shrimp and pogo sticks
My mind takes me back there oh so quick..
December 9, 2022
Reason to Believe
“I still love this song, but I no longer live in it,” is something I texted my friend Marissa this morning about the Counting Crows song “A Long December,” usually on constant rotation for me around this time of year. But last night I’d realized I’d made it eight days into December without listening to it once, and it occurred to me even that this is the first December in a very long time in which I’ve not been desperate to believe that “maybe this year will be better than the last.” That I’m not listening to those lyrics with the same sense of abject sense of loss and longing that characterizes every Counting Crows song, but this one in particular. And the feeling that it’s all a lot of oysters, but no pearls
I’ve written before about how my mental health was at a breaking point a year ago, and I entered 2022 resolving to do things differently, to learn to be okay even when things weren’t okay, which was a perfect resolution for 2022, really, a year of a lot of not-okayness. And I’m not saying I’ve managed it with aplomb—the first six months of this year were really hard for me and I struggled a lot, and still do here and there—but I certainly have learned a thing or two about how to manage this, how to be okay in the midst of uncertainty, how to keep myself steady when the world’s falling apart, when “the winter makes you laugh a little slower/ Makes you talk a little lower about the things you could not show her.”
What I have learned is that value judgements such as “worse” or “better” are ideas, and that reality is reality no matter how you frame it, and that leaning in closer to that reality and how it makes me feel instead of my ideas about it—what’s good and bad, worse or better—is how to live more fully and with less anxiety. That a year is a year, and also a year is a lot of things running a spectrum from wondrous to horrible, and this one—while far from easy—has been better than the last mostly because I’m finally figuring all this out.
The reason I thought about “A Long December” last night was because Christa Couture re-shared a link to her New Year’s song “To Us” last night, a song that started off my new year, and whose message was what I needed instead of Adam Duritz’s maudlin tones:
No I’m not one to tell you, hon, “we’re in the clear”
Of course we might be, but here’s the rub:
Probably not this year
So happy new year to resentment, to enjoyment, disappointment
To all the best laid plans we won’t pull off
Happy new year to the weary, to fury, and recovery
To that which doesn’t kill us that makes us soft…
April 28, 2022
Tunes
The song on constant play in our house right now is this one, by George Ezra, which we got into while driving our little electric car along the motorways of northwest England last week. It turns out that George Ezra is already very popular, so my efforts at discovering an obscure indie artist are all for nil, but it’s still such a fun song, and I’ve come to love his others too.
November 29, 2021
Smarter Than the Tricks Played on Your Heart
I’ve spent the last six weeks revising my third novel, which is actually my second novel, written between Mitzi Bytes and Waiting for a Star to Fall. A novel that, like the others, has a soundtrack, but with a twist—this one’s soundtrack is actually good! And how it came to be has been, I think, such an interesting and organic journey.
Beginning as I was brainstorming potential titles, and “Power of Two” by The Indigo Girls kept occurring to me, because my novel is the story of a long friendship and that song’s title, as well as many of the ideas contained within, are just perfectly fitting.
Before my latest draft, the single musical reference in the book had been to another Indigo Girls song, “Love’s Recovery,” misheard lyrics from the CD player in my characters’ kitchen where such music is perpetually playing. (Now there is so much more, and it includes Dar Williams, Tracy Chapman, Ani Di Franco, Lucinda Williams, and an opaque reference to Sarah Harmer’s gorgeous “Lodestar,” which I am OBSESSED with at the moment. It’s a 1990s female singer/songwriter GOLDMINE.)
And just last week as I was writing a new chapter, it occurred to me that my immediate task at that moment was writing a line that expressed the pivotal question from the Indigo Girls’ song “Mystery”: “And if it ever was there and it left/ Does it mean it was never true?”
Not even consciously, I’d been drawing on stories and ideas from their lyrics, songs that I’ve been listening to for almost thirty years.
As a woman who came of age in the 1990s while strumming basic chords on an acoustic guitar and singing in harmony with my best friend, The Indigo Girls have always been important. I’ve seen them live at least twice. Their “Romeo and Juliet” was my only “Romeo and Juliet” for so long, same with “Tangled Up In Blue.” Before I really ever thought very much about queerness, there was still Emily and Amy, who were both gay, we knew, but not a couple, which we hetero teens were always struggling to get our heads around. They were partners, friends. And because of the place and time in which they were coming up in the industry (they were from the American South; they lost out on Best New Artist Grammy Award in 1990 to actual Milli Vanilli) they sang love songs, but couldn’t be explicitly gay about it (kind of like my cousin who always brought a “friend” to Christmas dinner) which sucks, but it also means that growing up, I was privy to the most textured, nuanced and artful portrayals of I’ve always immediately perceived as platonic friendship.
Um, though clearly I was missing several signs, of course. Just what WAS the singer’s hand doing on the subject’s knee “Five miles out of the city limit” after all?
But intense friendship is very physical too, particularly when you’re young, as I expressed in my novel. Lots of bed-sharing and clothes changing, and hugging, and holding hands. Sure, I missed the signs, but so many of them were part of my own experiences of being with my friends. So maybe I was more solipsistic than ignorant.
(Maybe there is no maybe about it.)
How lucky were we to grow up against an Indigo Girls soundtrack, to find a place for ourselves inside their gorgeous harmonies? Their songs like tiny epics that I could use to understand my own connections to other women, to my best friends. How much it managed to articulate all my teenage longings, which seemed somehow inexpressible, beyond understanding, and there it was, all that wonder and amazement, pleasure and pain:
I could go crazy on a night like tonight
When summer’s beginning to give up her fight
And every thought’s a possibility
And the voices are heard but nothing is seen
Why do you spend this time with me
Maybe an equal mystery
April 18, 2019
Points of My Own
(Some items I would object to were I the “Dark Haired Beauty With Big Dark Eyes” immortalized in Bob Seger’s 1976 song “Night Moves”)
- You were not “a little too tall.” That is not even a thing. Admittedly, yes, you were not particularly well, built, but it’s not like I’d write a song about your peculiar physique and turn the weird shape of your anatomy into the stuff of musical legend. Cuz, like, that isn’t something you and I would do to each other, right? Oh, wait.
- You never got to second base. Anyone who listens carefully to the song will understand this. If you had got to second base, you would have known that my breasts weren’t pointy, or even particularly firm. I understand that it was 1962, and brassieres back then were a bit like armour, but there was nothing pointy about it. This wasn’t Madonna in a cone bra. I don’t even know what this is about. And the way you dwell on their height, when you yourself are still going on about how you’re too tall—you realize this makes me sound like I had tits growing out of my neck, right? Just stop it. It’s weird and embarrassing.
- Your pants were tight, but not because of fashion. They were also really short and we used to call you “Floods”—but once again, I never wrote a song about that to humiliate you.
- You sang, “I used her, she used me, but neither one cared.” I cared, Bob. I did. I liked you, which is why I kept going on dates with you in futile hope that you might take me somewhere that was NOT the “the backroom, the alley, the trusty woods.” The woods were creepy, Bob. Out past the cornfields, it’s downright terrifying, and I thought maybe we could go out for a milkshake, or go see a movie, and you’d tell me, “Relax, babe,” and I kept doing what you told me because my dad was abusive and I was unaccustomed to challenging male authority.
- The most solid proof I’ve got that my breasts weren’t actually pointy is that I never stabbed you with one of them.
- You were not a bad guy. You never made me do anything I didn’t want to do. And that I feel grateful now all these years later for the fact that I was never sexually violated in the backseat of your ’60 Chevy makes me feel depressed, Bob, about the culture we grew up in.
- I wasn’t using you. Seriously, what exactly would I have been using you for? I thought we had something. I was flattered that you liked me. I thought the other kids were mean when they made fun of your pants, and I felt a bit sorry for you. I never used you. And if I had used you, well—and you know where this is going—I wouldn’t have written a song about it. Because that would not be very respectful.
- Sometimes I wonder if you ever figured out that breasts aren’t pointy.
- I don’t know what “front page drive-in news” is, but of all the things I wasn’t trying to make back then, this definitely was it. Which was why we kept going out beyond the cornfields where the woods got heavy, because if people had found out that we were necking in your Chevy, my reputation would have taken a beating. So thank goodness you eventually recorded a song about it in 1976, eh, Bob? Just to keep the whole thing really fucking discreet.
- You got this right: we were young and restless and bored. I’ve never been so bored in my life. What I would have given to have you take me to a movie. Honestly, at the movies I probably would have let you touch my boobs. Looking back, I regret that I didn’t, because it would have made a better song.
- I don’t remember any thunder. It was a really dry summer, if I recall correctly. It hardly rained at all.
- Possible songs you were humming from 1962: Mashed Potato Time, by Dee Deep Sharp; Patches, by Dickie Lee; If I Had a Hammer, by Peter, Paul and Mary; Duke of Earl, by Gene Chandler; or Dee Deep Sharp’s most ambitious follow-up Gravy (For My Mashed Potatoes).
- Man, if you thought autumn was closing in in 1976… What is UP with Baby Boomers and premature nostalgia?
- Working on mysteries without any clue. INDEED.
- My favourite song that year was Palisades Park, by Freddy Cannon, about a guy who took his girl somewhere that wasn’t a backroom or an alley. They kiss at the top of a ferris wheel, and I don’t have any details about her breasts, because Freddy Cannon was a gentleman.
July 18, 2018
Astral Weeks
We were away last week and we brought our portable stereo and listened to the same CDs over and over, which are the same CDs we always listen to when we’re at a cottage—Bon Iver and Kathleen Edwards’ Voyageur, and the Beach Boys, and I bought Joni Mitchell Blue. And also Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, which I would listen to when I was in the cottage alone in the morning when I was drinking my tea and not ready to get dressed yet and my family was already down by the water.
And those mornings listening to Astral Weeks when I was all alone were like a time machine, taking me back to 2004, when I bought the CD. My friend Kate had mentioned it in an email, I think, and I looked for it at Tower Records the next time we were in Osaka. We were living in Japan at the time, which is why my copy of Astral Weeks comes with Japanese liner notes and lettering on the CD case. I bought the CD, and immediately fell in love with it, and “Sweet Thing” has been my favourite song ever since. That lyric, which I really understood having not long before undergone a season of tumult: “And I will never grow so old again.” (I also liked that the “garden all misty wet with rain” from “Sweet Thing” is referenced in Caitlin Moran’s new novel, How to Be Famous, which I read last week in less than a day…)
In 2004, Stuart and I lived in a tiny apartment and slept on a tiny platform below the ceiling that we had to climb a ladder to reach. We were both working as English instructors and had the same work schedule, except for Tuesday mornings when he worked in the morning and my shift was in the afternoon. So on Tuesday mornings I was by myself, and I’d put on Astral Weeks, music that I am quite sure was not long after encoded into my DNA. It’s partly the flute, something about the flute. I don’t know that I know another pop song with a flute in it, or at least that I’ve noticed, but the flute on “Astral Weeks,” the opening track, is one of my favourite sounds. And that lyric, “To be born again. To be born again.” I could relate after getting my life back on track, and beginning to move forward. That momentum—it was exhilarating. And the memory of all that possibility is what overwhelms me when I listen again to Astral Weeks.
The album is the soundtrack to all my memories from 2004 (except the ones where I’m singing “Bad Bad Leroy Brown” at karaoke), though I’m not sure this was really the case. It could have been though, because I had a mini-disk player and later and iPod shuffle, and I’d possibly downloaded “Astral Weeks” onto both these devices, and perhaps it was Astral Weeks that was playing the very first time I read Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, on a trolley ride from Hiroshima to Miyajima. It might as well have been, the two are so connected in my mind—they actually came out in the same year. I feel like Joan Didion would have known something about being caught one more time, if not up on Cyprus Avenue: “And I’m conquered in a car seat. Nothing that I do.” (She probably had a migraine from the Santa Ana.) Madame George also seems like a character from one of her essays—one of the ones where the centre does not hold.
I was also discovering Margaret Drabble for the first time in that period, so her books are connected to Astral Weeks as well for me. The first novel I read was The Radiant Way, whose Esther Breuer lives at “the wrong end of Ladbroke Grove,” which is where Van Morrison saw the subject of “Slim Slow Slider” walking, and maybe he even saw Esther too. And falling in love with Margaret Drabble (and Joan Didion) was such a big deal for me as began to discover who I was as a reader and writer. It was a period in which I developed a habit that I’ve never been able to get back again—underlining words I didn’t know in books and looking them up in the dictionary. I kept a list, and one of them was “avarice,” and I’m not sure whether I encountered that one in a book too, or else it was just the line from “Astral Weeks.”
I was keeping the list because I had been accepted to graduate school for the following September, and I was hoping to improve myself enough in order to be smart enough to warrant being there. (It didn’t really work. Do you know what it is to arrive at graduate school with absolutely no knowledge of critical theory? It is NOT FUN.) I was looking forward to moving back to Canada, and I was also planning my wedding (to someone who never mentioned driving his chariots down my streets of crime, but I know he would do it if I asked him), and really, we were on the verge of everything. I knew it, so it was overwhelming to be there in 2004, the sun shining through our window and rendering everything golden, and outside a pachinko parlour on the horizon. Not long ago, I found our old apartment on Google Maps, and the parking lot next door had sprouted a building, so the sun doesn’t shine through that window anymore, but I’m so glad I was there when it did, listening to Astral Weeks.
“And I will raise my hand up into the night time sky, attract the star that’s shining in your eye, ah just to dig it all and not to wonder, that’s just right. And I’ll be satisfied not to read in between the lines.”
October 23, 2017
Leader of the Pack Conspiracy Theories
The whole thing just sounds incredibly dodgy to me: “I met him at the candy store,” Betty explains to her friends. “You get the picture?” But no; we don’t. Because what kind of self-respecting motorcyclist, let alone one who rises through the ranks to become the actual leader of the pack hangs around at a candy store? The very idea is embarrassing. What was he buying: Big League Chew? Unless it’s a candy store that’s a front for a pedophile ring, or something else just as sinister.
“Hey, Betty, are those Popeye cigarettes you’re smoking?” “Uh, uh.”
But before we go leaping down “Leader of the Pack” rabbit holes, I want to start at the very beginning, possibly a problem of chronology. Or else the ridiculous insensitivity of Betty’s “friends” who can’t stop talking about her boyfriend and say to her, “Gee, it must be great riding with him. Is he picking up up after school today?” Betty’s reply being negative. Because, obviously, he’s just been killed in a fiery crash, and her friends must have known about this because at school everyone stops and stares when Betty can’t hide the tears, and she doesn’t even care.
Are Betty’s friends just really really cruel and they’re merely toying with her in order to start her crying again? Are Betty’s rampant emotions just a game to them? Although another possibility is that in this era of boyfriends killed in fiery crashes (Teen Angel, Tommy who told Laura he loved her, and the poor fellow who was driving the Jaguar XKE in “Dead Man’s Curve”) Betty’s friends had come to take such incidents for granted, the same way we don’t think a lot about breathing, or gravity, and maybe Betty’s boyfriend’s recent tragic death had simply slipped their minds.
One important clue to the entire song lies in a lyric that follows Betty’s initial exchange with her friends, and after she recalls the way her folks were always putting him down, her friends pretending to play a supportive part by functioning as a literal echo chamber—and let me tell you, tonally speaking, there is something disingenuous about they way they ask her, “Whatcha mean they say he came from the wrong side of town?” Obviously, these girls know their local geography. Betty’s parents aren’t saying anything that Betty’s friends haven’t said amongst themselves. But can you blame them for their disloyalty? I’m not sure we can…
I’ve still not got to the clue yet, but bear with me. All this thinking about the complex and troubling narrative of “Leader of the Pack” has come about because my daughter is obsessed with the song (as I was at her age; it’s a song about boyfriends and candy, which is very appealing to eight-year-olds and a reason why eight-year-olds have a prime demographic of the terrible pop song “My Boy Lollipop” for decades now). And in thinking about “Leader of the Pack” in the context of having a daughter, the line that stands out for me is one that I sang with unawareness for years and years but which terrifies me now, and it is, “They told me he was bad; but I knew he was sad.”
There it is, in a nutshell.
I tell my daughter, “If you ever, ever, hear yourself uttering a line like that, don’t walk but RUN away from whatever relationship you’re in.” Never date someone who is bad but you know he’s really sad. Such knowledge is not actually knowledge at all, but instead it’s a delusion. If he’s really sad, you’re not going to be able to fix him, and then you’re going to have to spend the rest of your life riding sidecar to Melancholy Melvin, who cries all the time and hates your friends. And possibly everyone’s not wrong about him, and he really is bad—this is the Leader of the Pack who hangs out around the candy store, remember. He’s not even good at being Fake James Dean.
So what if Betty’s friends had heard her line about how she knows he’s sad, and decide there’s no other answer…but to mess with the brakes on Jimmy’s bike? Betty’s dad could also have in on the deal, making a point of informing his daughter that she has to find someone new on a day in which the weather forecast called for rain. The slippery streets and the messed up brakes meant that a crash would be inevitable. Though they’d all be also putting Betty at risk—presumably she’d be riding on his bike at some point, and maybe he’d even be picking her up from school that day…
Another suggestion is that Betty herself is responsible for Jimmy’s death, that her testimony about having begged him to go slow was completely a lie. I mean, she hadn’t even ensured that he’d heard her, right? So how earnest could she have been? Maybe the begging was a whisper in her mind. “I could speak this thought aloud,” she told herself, “or I could let him speed and die in a fiery crash, thereby freeing me from the burden of spending the rest of my life hitched to a biker who hangs around candy stores.” Betty’s obvious distress at Jimmy’s passing, as expressed in the song’s final verse, her inability to hide the tears, is mostly because Betty’s feeling guilty, but there is a part of her that also feels freed.
I wonder if the reality is more complicated, however, and doesn’t involve murder in the slightest. What if the entire song is the fantasy of a middle-aged Betty, living in the suburbs during the 1970s. She’s got five kids, one with special needs. Their ranch bungalow needs work and condensation keeps seeping in, fogging up the windows. The kids won’t stop bringing home puppies, and her eldest son is going to be drafted. Betty’s husband Jimmy can’t hold a job for more than a couple of months, and her parents have had to help them out time and time again. Jimmy’s teeth are in terrible shape from decades and decades of eating candy, but they can’t afford the dentist. He has a dream of opening a bike shop, working as a mechanic, but Betty’s lost her faith in Jimmy because his own bike’s been sitting in the carport for years and no matter how much time he spends fixing it, he can’t make the damn thing start. If the bike only started, Betty thinks, maybe her sad sorry husband could ride away, out of their life, and she’d stand a chance at a fresh start on her own.
“Leader of the Pack, and now he’s gone,” is the song’s final refrain, and the meaning is doubled here. First, as a projection, a thought about what could have been if Betty had been able to listen to her dad and break up with Jimmy—but she was already pregnant with their first child by this point, totally craving sugar, and Jimmy always had candy, which kept her coming back for more. What if things had been different, Betty wonders, almost able to see the hypothetical fiery crash in her mind, and hear the thing she might have shouted: “Look out, look out, look out!” Or possibly she wouldn’t have shouted at all. (Also, what was he supposed to be looking out for anyway? So much goes unsaid in this scenario.)
But the refrain is also a more mundane reflection of her 1970s’ reality, about how Betty’s archetypal husband has morphed from a badass biker dude into a sad wreck of a failed mechanic whose white undershirts are stained yellow now and whose leather jacket is in tatters.
“Leader of the Pack, and now he’s gone,” and is he ever, thinks Betty, who is contemplating better things, the return to fashion of shoulder pads, and getting a job as a career gal in the city.
