25. Liz Phair
As I’ve written in this very newsletter, I have terrible taste in music. Is Liz Phair good? Or is she bad? I’ve seen tweets from respected tweeters that indicate both. Could it be that she is good to those people for whom her music conjures a very specific point in their timeline, an era of dramatic desire and poignant loss, or just a time when they were young? Truthfully, I suspect most music considered good is more about optics and association than its actual quality. Sorry! Not a popular opinion, but it is the one I have.
As a teenager, I had some of her songs on a mix tape a friend made me and which I listened to obsessively on a trip to Florida. That plane ride was the first time I ever experienced fear of flying. It hit me hard and out of nowhere. 15-years-old and I was throwing myself down on the carpet in the boarding bridge, sobbing in terror. I think I’d just seen that Tom Hanks movie Castaway, which contains a very vivid crash sequence. I was so hysterical, my mother wonderingly told me later, “It was the first time it really seemed like you were MY daughter.”
She tried to shove some sort of pill into my mouth to make me shut up, but having recently had a horrible acid trip I was marginally more afraid of drugs than flying. Listening to that mix tape kept me calm. I don’t think they had in flight entertainment then, at least not the free kind. When I returned to NYC, that same friend burned Liz Phair’s whole album, Exile In Guyville, for me and I listened to it over and over as well. For some reason, I especially loved “Divorce Song,” even though I’d never been divorced or married and still haven’t done either. The song is about loving someone deeply and still being unable to communicate in a way that isn’t excruciatingly painful to you both. My gal pals also loved “Flower,” because the lyrics gave us an excuse to shriek about sucking dick, something most of us hadn’t ever done either. As an adult woman, I’d say the song really is best for the moment before sexual knowledge, when all you have is unfulfilled and overwhelming lust. Or teen hormones.
Despite this fanatic listening, I would never have made an effort to see her in concert if someone hadn’t randomly posted on Instagram that they had an extra ticket. Buying concert tickets, especially for popular artists, has become so convoluted and insane I can’t believe anyone ever does it. Sending a Venmo and showing up where I was supposed to was the best I could do and thankfully it was enough. The show was at Kings Theater, which may be one of the most gorgeous venues I’ve ever seen in Brooklyn, or anywhere. Here is where I regretted my philistinism; perhaps if I cared about things like buying concert tickets I would have come here much sooner. The girls I was technically seeing the show with met me outside. They were warmed and bonded by alcohol and the fact they had planned to go together. I was just there, filling a seat, trailing behind and taking in the scene. The vaulted ceilings, rich red curtains, the carved stairwell. It felt sort of like looking at the Pyramids and knowing humankind will never create anything so good again.
Then, a few feet away, I saw someone I knew. A girl from high school, one of the group who used to yell “I want to fuck you like a dog I’ll take you home and make you like it” with me during late night sleepovers. I remembered playing my burned CD in her CD player, the light streaming into her bedroom and reflecting rainbows off a mobile made of free AOL disks. I remembered my horrible acid trip which happened at her apartment on Halloween, surrounded by a dozen other kids tripping their balls off. We weren’t particularly close, just in the same friend group, and her parents’ apartment was the place where we would go when we skipped school or wanted to drink or do drugs or get fingered. Every group has one house like that where they can go when it’s time to be bad, and that’s where we went. The night of my acid trip, I sat in her bathtub at 5 in the morning, black pomade melting down my face while her mom and dad slept four feet down the hall.
She is now a nurse and seems to be fairly successful and grounded in life, no matter how harrowing my memories of her household. We recognized each other, even though I was in a mask, and walked over to chat. I think I was being weird and that I’m weird in this particular way often, but I don’t know what I’m doing. I only know other people are reacting as though I’m acting weird. So, if we’ve met recently and I was weird, can you drop me a line about what I was doing exactly? She seemed uncomfortable. To me, it felt like a circle coming around, the feeling that life loops and will bring you back to the same places and people eventually in this beautiful, frustrating way. I tried to express that. Maybe that was the weird part. She escaped me and I wandered back to my group, which had formed into an event tighter knot that I circled around like a satellite.
It was getting to be time for the show. Our seats were in front of an aisle, which made it seem like there was more space and was nice. The opener, Blondshell, sounded so 90s it wasn’t even funny. I was mind-crushingly sober and everyone around me was rowdy and smelled like beer. But in the end I was glad, because at a certain point while Liz Phair was singing I cried and it was only my own body responding with a Pavlovian release of chemicals and hormones to the music, bringing me back in time. Just not quite far enough to warn my teen self not to drop acid.
Hi to readers old and new. I’m sorry for the long delay, I’m sure you have been desperate to read 3,000 words of my diary a few times a week. I was celebrating my birthday which inevitably led to illness. I plan to continue through 39 posts, all things I did before turning 40. I also plan to keep doing new things and maybe will write about them if it seems like people are still opening these emails.
If you enjoy them and have a Substack, re-stacking quotes in the app seems to be a great way to find new readers and I deeply appreciate anyone who has done so. TRULY!
Are there any opinionated readers who would like to see more of one thing or the other in these posts? More researched history relevant to the story? More anecdotes about drugs?
This is Blondshell:
Who would you cry if you saw them in concert today?
Honestly, I think I'd cry at Randy Newman? I've seen him once with the LA Philharmonic, and it was the best concert I've ever been to, and I've only fallen deeper in love with his music.
But also!!! Maybe Liz Phair?! I'm incredibly jealous you got to see this show at this gorgeous venue. "Exile in Guyville" is one of my favorite albums of all time.
I don't know which concert I would cry at, but a little while back I cried at the ballet and it was wonderful. I felt like I'd accessed a new part of myself and felt just a little more whole. Which is different from accessing older parts of the self, but also feels the same in a way.