The Long Goodbye
Lloyd Cole at Largo at the Coronet, July 2, 2025
When I was young, here's how I found out about what bands were coming to town. Every Sunday I would open up the entertainment section of the SF Chronicle and I'd leaf through it eagerly, circling the shows I wanted to go to, and then if I had the money, I'd rush out to the ticket outlet in the basement of Bullock's Department Store and buy one, and if I didn't, I would just wish I could. Getting to the show was my next problem, but usually I figured something out, and it was always so worth it because those rock shows made up my entire fund of memories, I knew even as I went to them that they were going to be the peak experiences of my youth.
It wasn't until after college, when I was living at home and being a d-jay at KFJC, that I figured out an even more fun way to go to the rock 'n' roll show: ROAD TRIP! Isabelle and I went to LA to see the Rain Parade just a few months after we met, and our car broke down irreparably on our way home in Carson, that was a big bummer but even so we had a great time. The next April we flew to New Orleans and it was so spooky and exotic and sweaty and fun there! I remember lying on the grass drunkenly in between the streetcar tracks at 2 AM, the world spinning around as we stared at the stars…we'd just seen a band called Shot Down in Ecuador Junior, and David Byrne himself walked by us on the street, of course he did because that night Isabelle and I were the center of the very universe.
The point is, not that bands play better in other cities but that bands give you a good excuse to go places. Nowadays there is a whole industry around destination concerts - festivals mostly; promoters have figured out how to max out audiences by adding amenities for the older, feebler people (like they do on airlines), and thanks to Instagram, etc., people are obsessed with curating their own memories at them. Going to Coachella or Lolla or Beyonce, is a way of ensuring your own nostalgia-life beforehand. It's just a pity all those Instagram photos look more or less alike.
Even so, every now and then I get the urge to see some favorite musical act somewhere far away from home, and this summer it was Lloyd Cole. I saw that he was playing a single solo West Coast show* in Los Angeles, and what's even the point of being a grown up if you can't just drop everything and drive 400 miles at the drop of a hat? What even is the point of summer?
So on Tuesday morning, I got in my car and set out for Los Angeles. I went on Highway 101 - the 5 is faster, but kind of soul-destroying as I found out on my return: it's astonishing how that bleak route hasn't changed one iota in my entire life time, and it might be the only part of California that hasn't. But it was weird reconnecting with California after almost a month in Europe. From afar, California looked like it was under attack by malign forces, but up close it looked like it always looks, blue and gold and utterly empty, punctuated with fields full of farm workers and those weird old oil rigs that look like giant ants, you know the ones that I mean.
There's a place on 101 where the road hits the sea, and it was grey and unbeautiful last week, and then the highway turns in toward LA and the only word for it is, 'bleah.' I always forget how extremely spoiled vast amounts of Southern California are, not the beautiful bits, which exist in close proximity, but all those vistas of tract homes and shopping malls, miles upon miles of them, can get me down. Also, just the size of L.A. is so intimidating. If you go up to Griffiths Observatory - which I did on Wednesday - or you're driving over Laurel Canyon to the Valley at night, there will be that sudden lurching view of LA stretched out in endless squares in front of you forever and ever and ever, and it's just so vast and impersonal, it scares me. It's a mood, as the kids would say.**
I’ve lived in LA twice in my life, and both times ended in tears. I like it there a lot better now, at least to visit, but it does bring up a lot of weird memories. One of my favorite quotes by Joan Didion is, "I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.” When I am in LA, I guess I remember who I was and that is not always the most comfortable of feelings.
Another person who loves Joan Didion is Lloyd Cole, the man I went to L.A. to see. "Rattlesnakes," his first hit, retells the plot of her novel “Play it as it Lays," and he has many other songs that either explicitly or indirectly refer to literature – broadly defined, i.e. all the stuff that furnishes your mind. But here's the thing about Lloyd Cole. I love his music so much that I don't know how to talk about it. Moreover, I don't feel a need - or a possibility - of convincing you to do the same: it's a visceral thing for me, how the hollow, resonance of his guitar sounds to me like the strings were steeped in honey overnight and then swole up and are now shedding nectar into my very soul. I hear his guitar sound in my solar plexus as well as in my ears, and the lyrics in his songs strike similarly plangent chords in my heart, but I can't expect them to do the same thing to you. Indeed, it would be weird if it did, like if we all fell in the love with the same person at the same time.
Just: no.
I think we can all agree our musical taste is really just a factor of where-and-when. You aren't me, so you can't love him like I do (though I will say, the 899 other people at Largo, the club that I went to see him, definitely do).
The whole where-and-when thing though…these days it makes me wonder why anyone dares write about music, and the hard part is, if you take away the music, you’re left with and I don’t know if I have the – chutzpah? -- to think a reader could possibly care about my where-and-when. I mean, I recall listening to his fourth album "Love Story"(1995) on headphones in a train on my way from Waterloo to Crystal Palace, and when I hear it now I can see the rain dripping down the window and smell the grey-green mold on the side of the platform, and I know how I thought that the music was perfectly suited to the moment:
“And anyone who had a hat would surely know
It only rains when you leave it at home…
But as I said, I can see that this might not have the same affect on you. At Largo, Lloyd played two sets of songs, all of which I love, and the 12 or so hours of driving it took to make it happen was as nothing, I would (or will) probably drive further for less, and I hope that you would too. The music writer Caryn Rose has a catch phrase that alludes to this sentiment, it is “always go to the show,” and I concur. Always go. Always.
***
*Lloyd Cole also performed the night before at a tribute show to the late artist Jill Sobule, who was in his band the Negatives. This is the song he sang. It’s good.
**A few years ago, I wrote a piece about how I can only view L.A. through the words of Raymond Chandler, you can read it here: Under Lockdown With Raymond Chandler.
LARGO SET LIST: (via Lloyd Cole):
Set 1
Past Imperfect
Lucy At The Gym (Sobule)
Brazil
Like Lovers Do
Kids Today
Speedboat
Rattlesnakes
On Pain
Can You Hear Me? (Bowie)
Why I Love Country Music
Trigger Happy
Why In The World?
2 CV
Undressed
The Afterlife
Set 2
AYRTB Heartbroken?
Impossible Girl
The Idiot
Pay For It
Unhappy Song
Night Sweats
No Blue Skies
Vin Ordinaire
My Alibi
Don’t Look Back
Woman In A Bar
Myrtle And Rose
Brand New Friend
Perfect Skin
Encore
Chelsea Hotel (Cohen)
Forest Fire
Oh I love that he does Chelsea Hotel in his shows. One of the best Cohen covers ever.
Sure, I see that - his voice has a Tom Verlaine timbre.