Guides
Essay by Jill LaBrack
On a recent Sunday night my wife and I drove north from New Haven, Connecticut to Northampton, Massachusetts to see the singer-songwriter Tanya Donelly. She was participating in Robin Lane's Songbird Sings, a benefit for women subjected to violence. After a tough New England winter that paired eternal snowfall with freezing temperatures, this early May evening was thankfully on the warm side.
Our first stop was supper. In my youthful days attending club shows, I never bothered with the triviality of sustenance if arriving less than two hours before the first act went on stage. I wanted to be stationed right up front, so I prepared by anxiously smoking cigarettes in the growing line outside. Now, I eat regularly and eschew cigarettes for vitamins. I also reluctantly had to admit that smoking was not quelling my nerves, as cool as I tried to play it back then.
After our meal, we headed a block over to the club. It hadn't opened yet but people were standing outside. Baby boomers in line were talking concerts, Neil Young (expected) and Girls Guns and Glory (unexpected). I didn't see anyone close to my age. I wondered if my generation of grunge and alt/indie fans would start heading out to see bands again, maybe once less sleep-deprived after years of raising children. I myself do not have children and don't attend many shows anymore. In the late 1990s, I grew tired of the time and money sacrificed for bands that didn't seem to have bothered practicing. Now I pick and choose: Wild Flag, Marnie Stern, Lucinda Williams, Kacey Musgraves, Ted Leo, Angel Olsen, The Decemberists, Sonic Youth, Amy Helm, and Low. These are the artists I've seen in the past ten years. For comparison's sake, that might have covered one month in 1995.
Through an open window, we were treated to soundcheck. I stared at the cement sidewalk and basked in the last hour of sunlight. When we were let in, my wife and I took a table at the front of the room.
Tanya Donelly co-founded the band Throwing Muses before co-founding the Breeders, left both of those to start Belly, and has been a solo artist since that band dissolved in 1996 after only two full-length records, Star and King. Between 1993 and 1996, I saw Belly play live sixteen times in five different states plus the District of Columbia. Had there been more opportunities, my attendance surely would have increased. Belly's bassist, Gail Greenwood, would add me to the guest list in areas she knew I was near ("Don't pay for tickets!" she admonished me once. We met outside the club Cat's Cradle when it was still in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, at my first Belly show.). Whenever I was invited backstage, Donelly and Greenwood were always chatty and kind. I adored them; I loved the band's music.
The last time I saw Donelly play was 1997. She was in New York City for her first solo album tour. Out of sorts, I forfeited my usual spot to stand near the back. I was there with someone who had recently dumped me but still insisted I attend the event with her. I was 40% sad sack and 60% refusing to give up my stake in Donelly. It's easy now to say it was 100% a mistake. In my post-breakup state, the music merely was loud background, and I stood there wishing I had stayed home.
For several years after that show, I listened to Donelly's work regularly. In February 2001, my parents were diagnosed with cancer within three weeks of each other. I began driving back and forth from my apartment in the Bronx to my hometown of Southington, Connecticut every weekend at first and then, once I became a casualty in the dot-com bust, once or twice during the week as well. I frequently tuned in to the numbing blandness of Top 40 radio: lots of Sublime, Sugar Ray, and unnecessarily hyped-up DJs. When I felt up to active listening, the voices of Donelly and Magnapop's Linda Hopper were the ones that comforted me most.
My father beat the cancer quickly. My mother died the night before Memorial Day, a holiday she had teased me about only a week prior. "You'll be in charge of grilling," she joked, acknowledging both the illness that left her and my father weak, and my then poor culinary skills.
In early 2002, I turned 33. I was living in New Haven, having made a commitment to return to Connecticut the morning of the day of my mother's death. Her tradition was to call my sisters and me on the minute we were born and sing "Happy Birthday" in a voice never meant for song. I dressed that morning listening for the phone. In a grieving, grasping state, I was looking for signs from the great beyond. I wanted my dead mother to make the phone ring. I wanted proof that she was okay somewhere, anywhere. Of course, what I really wanted was for her not to be dead.
Later that day, a needed moment of grace came at my job. My co-workers at Cutler's, a now-defunct independent record store, surprised me with a card and an advance copy of Tanya Donelly's second solo album, Beautysleep. I waited to play it for the drive home and, as Donelly's voice drifted out of the car speakers, I cried.
Not long after that - three or four years - I was barely listening to her at all. It was situational and inevitable: my access to music and ability to research grew exponentially with technology and, simultaneously, a higher salary allotted me more spending money. Honestly, I acquired more than I listened. I pointed to others to justify my obsession. Even those friends with fewer years spent collecting were amassing digital libraries of more than 20,000 songs. How could I call myself a music fan if I wasn't actively digging for obscure gems at every opportunity?
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A few weeks after my wife and I saw Tanya Donelly, we went to a play, The Children, written by Phillip Howze. In it, a motley crew of homeless teenagers who exist across the sexual- and gender-orientation spectrum try to figure out who they are and where--or if there even is--a place they belong. As the characters sang their stories of hardship in coming out, I thought of my own story, my wife's, and those of my gay friends. In our shared past is the reality, and terrified imaginings, of rejection. This twisted into a self-hatred that manifested itself in myriad unhealthy behaviors. I can't think of one person who wasn't abusing something. Distance uncovered a pattern many of us had of pushing people away, keeping ourselves safe. One of my soundtracks while mired in this period was Belly's King.
Most of us made it out on the other side. Now we are in our late thirties and forties, with careers and houses and healthier habits. Not all of us are still in contact but that's okay. We fought the initial discrimination from outside and inside ourselves that kept us closeted for too long and then moved beyond it, blurring the rearview mirror. The Children made it all crystal clear. The play made me realize how hard I had worked to hate and hide my true self and how hard it was to stop. Even now, the self-sabotage can creep up and startle me.
When Donelly took the stage, time collapsed and eighteen years became a minute. I don't mean I figuratively became 25 again, wearing cut-off shorts, a Helium t-shirt, and black Doc Marten boots. I mean that her voice brought me back to a state I once inhabited regularly. I went to see my favorite artists live because it was frequently transcendent. The best shows I saw then - from Belly to the Geraldine Fibbers to Jawbox - lifted me out of the day-to-day, out of my mortal coil. I found meaning in them until I could forge one in my own life.
Seeing Tanya Donelly alongside The Children felt like a one-two punch. If I must echo a Motley Crue classic, I will: it kickstarted my heart. It helped me to reclaim some things I had lost, or maybe just laid down for a bit. I believe in moving forward, in not dwelling in the past, which has led me to the habit of erasure and thinking each day can be as simple as flipping paper on an easel. I am quick to forget or ignore the impressions that have already been made, these markings to use as a guide.
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I recently packed up 500 compact discs that I will sell to a local record store. It's a good collection but one in which I was more intellectually than emotionally attached. In the library of more than 700 discs and records I kept, Donelly's sit safely. Tomorrow I plan to get in touch with a friend from the old days, to see when we can hang out again.
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Jill LaBrack's writing has appeared on PopMatters.com, StylusMagazine.com, and in The Fairfield County Weekly. She resides - along with her wife, four cats, and dog named T. Riggins - in New Haven, Connecticut.