B/The Babys in Babylon

Back where I belong

Once upon a time, back in the 1970s when I was in my early teens, I went to visit my relatives in Long Island and my Aunt took me to the World Trade Center and then to see “CATS” on Broadway. It was a very great day in my teenage life, I can tell you. “CATS” was awesome, and at the World Trade Center we stood in a long line for the elevator and somewhere up ahead of me there was a group of super skinny young men in very tight trousers whom I believed to be the rock band the Babys.*

The truth is, they could easily NOT have been the Babys. In fact, they almost certainly weren’t; rather they could have just been any group of young Englishmen with mullets sightseeing in lower Manhattan. I just wanted to think it was them because I had their record and to me, New York was a place that ought to be full of English rock stars. Did I like the Babys? I think so. Do I remember a single song on that album? Nope. I think that the music was thin, high, and tuneful, it had a regular beat, major chords and the words were all about, I don’t know…girls? Love?  Time? Whatever. I think that later one of them went on to join Journey, so that kind of gives you a clue as to what they sounded like.

Anyway, that day was about two minutes before I became a stone-cold punk rocker, and when I did, I instantly realized that type of music had been put in this earth to wipe out the Babys of the world. About ten years later, there I was again, staying at my Aunt’s house in Long Island, and one day I took the train in to Manhattan to meet up with a punkity rock-band friend in the Village. My Aunt was all a dither: “Don’t take the subway when you get there, here’s a ten for a taxi.” She was worried because she thought the village was full of junkies, but what I couldn’t say was the friend I was meeting up with WAS a junkie – well, more or less. We met at some groovy café near St. Mark’s Place, drank enormous lattes, and then walked idly around the area looking in all the chotchke shops, and I bought some wildly inappropriate item of punk rock clothing which I would never wear back in California, and then took the train back to Babylon, and then my Aunt and Uncle took me out for a delicious seafood dinner.

In other words, it was just like the day I saw “Cats,” extremely fun, a little bit touristy, and very benign, yet covered over by some kind of romantic haze that I conjured out of whole cloth and a handful of album covers – “Rockaway Beach,” “Marquee Moon,” “Plastic Letters.”

Joan Didion once said, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” For so many years my stories about myself have been colored in by, surrounded by, even confused by, rock ‘n’ roll music, or my own interpretation of what was important and fun and interesting about it. Now that I am older it’s almost painful to remember my devices. Some were artifacts, like the long red satin scarf I wore to high school, in homage to Mick Jagger in “Ladies and Gentlemen The Rolling Stones,” or the gold-plated pendant of a that thingy you put in the middle of a 45 rpm record, bought at the Motown Café’s gift shop, or the baseball hat with the K Records logo drawn by me in white-out, which was meant to evoke not only my love of the band Beat Happening, but Kurt Cobain, who had that insignia tattooed on his forearm, as well as the Monkees, whose guitarist Mike Nesmith was the heir to the white out fortune.

And then there were the sonic moments as well, like the plane landing in Auckland to the strains of “Heavenly Pop Hit” in my headphones, or all those walks across Waterloo bridge at sunset just so I can sing “Sha la la” quietly to myself.  

The thing is, this past year has been one of loss and acceptance. Selling my parent’s house, saying goodbye to it and them…it doesn’t just make me feel old, it makes me feel haunted, and like nothing will ever be the same again. My friend Isabelle says, when you feel like that, you should put on your old music and you’ll feel better, but can I tell you a secret? It doesn’t. It doesn’t at all. It’s just too painful. I don’t even have a sound system in my house, and when I drive to Santa Cruz now, I listen to NPR, unless I am in the car with my daughter, and then I let her put on her own soundtrack – Megan Thee Stallion, Doja Cat, Lil Nas X and so on.

I don’t mind listening to it because I have no associations with it, but it doesn’t really do anything for me other than give me insight into all those people for whom music wasn’t that meaningful back in the day. Like my high school friends, who wanted to leave the Rolling Stones show after Eddie Money’s set.

Why, in that case do I continue to write about it? This is a question I ask myself on the daily. I suppose it’s because I want those stories that I told myself to live on outside my own brain, but it seems like an extreme act of hubris to think that anyone else should read them.

*The spelling is correct. There is another band called the Babies.