Drummer
Steve Shelley’s drumbeat on “Schizophrenia” was a healthy heart, pulsating through the hot Austin night in 1999 and providing solidity for sounds built from power drills and drumsticks, with hotwired pedals, amps, and guitars.
Sonic Youth had made a few records in the 1980s, toured Reagan’s America and Europe, and earned a cult following, all the while exploring the confusion of sex, the bad moons on the rise, the EVOL that is the reverse of love, and the daydreams of an entire nation. Steve left his band the Crucifucks in ’85 and after subletting Thurston and Kim’s Manhattan apartment, became their permanent drummer. Their blend of the Stooges’ aggressive art with John Cage’s cerebral style formed a heady stew of noise and passion in which Madonna, Coltrane, Manson, Gibson, and Joyce played on equal terms.
Tonight, Steve’s beat recalled the drug addict’s pulse that Moe Tucker created for “Heroin.” Maintaining an intense watch over his network of arms, wrists, and hands, Steve established a solo rhythm that filled the sweltering July night. Beanpole Thurston’s guitar then joined the displaced beat, topping it off with a brittle riff that droned on slowly, choppily, and cheaply. On stage, Thurston looked like a child shaman, wearing a red Texas Rangers’ tee-shirt and bobbing his blond bowl cut in ecstatic time with the music. Behind his microphone stand, he was on the verge of exploding in mystic and adolescent joy. Kim and Lee then joined the fray, the former firmly positioning a slow, throbbing bass line under the spiky rhythm of Thurston’s riff, the latter creating high-pitched swirling effects with the whammy bar of his beat-up Fender. Statuesque and emotionless, Kim stared out from the stage at a point just above the roiling sea of crowd, the incarnation of erotic coolness, the loose wisps of her tied-back blond hair just brushing the black shoulder straps of her dress. Lee, ever the introspective beat in plaid shirt and rolled-up sleeves, watched his moving hands through his graying black bangs, his forehead almost touching the protruding microphone in front of him as he moved his neck in time to Steve’s beat.
Thurston shook his blond locks from his eyes, stepped up to his microphone, and sang: “I went away to see an old friend of mine. / His sister came over; she was out of her mind. / She said, ‘Jesus had a twin who knew nothing about sin.’ / She was laughing like crazy at the trouble I’m in.” The band’s music upheld Thurston’s poetry, adding sonic sustenance to the story of the mental breakdown of Dick, his sister, and the mysterious and nameless narrator.
The crowd surged around me, entering the song and becoming a vital part of the schizophrenia. It boiled and melted, as if in response to the beads of sweat on Kim’s white shoulders, as if the water that sprayed off of Steve’s kit with each new beat showered them. I felt on my crossed arms the damp back of the shirtless college student standing in front of me. I was glad I had decided to wear my glasses that night because the night and the music had sucked the water from my eyes. I was breathing in time with the song and crowd, breathing with ease despite the overwhelming water.
What would it mean for Jesus to have a twin who knew nothing about sin? How would this change the structure of Christianity? History? The universe? Was this twin the EVOL that is the reverse of love?
But the narrator was insane, a crazed schizophrenic. Was I insane or just ill, as I sat there in the big blue chair, suffocating on my own fluids in the early hours of my twenty-eighth year? My mother had told me that I was in God’s hands, but I felt that the twin EVOL held me firmly in his claws and, as the song says, laughed at all my troubles.
Lee accented Thurston’s tale with the high-end fills of his whammy bar, and the crowd delved more deeply into the tune. More seemed to be at stake now, and most of the crowd was drunk and young enough to lose themselves completely in the noise. The fans were ecstatic that the band was playing one of its most recognizable pieces from its late-1980s’ heyday. But the song and its sonic enactment of the experiential state of schizophrenia captured the crowd despite the mental acknowledgement of the “hit.” The drones and swirls of the music brought the sweaty and surging audience into their fold, making it a vital part of the band’s art.
Thurston then sang, “Schizophrenia is taking me home,” leading the band into a pensive bridge that engulfed the crowd. After the band crossed the bridge, Kim approached her microphone, closed her eyes, and breathily chanted “My future is static / It’s already had it,” as Lee punctuated and emphasized everything she said with finger-picked harmonics and effects and Steve’s percussion became an understated, atmospheric presence. With the addition of Kim’s lusty and soft vocal and Thurston’s textured guitar noises, the music became more dreamy and introspective, the schizophrenic sister’s personal story of anguish.
The sister was stuck in a static situation, imprisoned against her will. Like me on my birthday night, she couldn’t even dream of a future that would allow her to escape the straightjacket of her illness. The future was dead to her, as it was for me, and death itself didn’t seem to offer a way out of the stagnant insanity of her reality. She told the world through Kim, “I had a dream / And it split the scene / But I got a hunch / It’s coming back to me.” The “it” here was indistinct and shadowy. What was coming back to the sister after splitting the scene? It was the illness, the insanity that was her jailer and the preclusion of the release of death.
Just as the schizophrenia looped back into the sister, the music changed again. Kim inaugurated the new movement. She began jumping up and down to the noise that Lee and Thurston made by running hands and drumsticks up and down the fret boards of their guitars. Steve accelerated the drumbeat, and Lee began making whirling noises on his guitar, while Thurston kept running his hands from the highest to the lowest notes of his fret board and Kim somehow held the whole thing together with her bass. She continued to jump up and down, and the crowd followed suit, mimicking her in a great bouncing mass. Beat workman Lee strained his eyes to make sure that every noise was exactly right, while, across the stage from him, Thurston had his eyes closed in an ecstasy of orgiastic release. Poet, ice queen, bratty shaman, and the former Crucifuck, the four of them made a noise whose exuberance enveloped the crowd.
When the din finally subsided, the band played the song’s final movement, a softly subtle outro featuring Lee’s guitar, the harmonies of which contrasted sharply with the brittle discord of the chaotic crescendo. This was the calm after the storm, the peace that surpasses understanding. This was beautiful music, and it seemed to suggest a fluid future for the sister, a way out of the bristling confusion that filled all her hours and days.
The band gave us an answer, a hope of which the sister isn’t aware. This was an argument for the possibility of art to suggest a resolution where none seems available. It was an argument that order can be born of chaos, that health—or at least peace—can come from disease. It was a religious argument that required belief and a leap of faith. Did the crowd believe? Did the assembled college students and aging punks understand what the band offered them that hot Austin night? Did I believe and understand that night in July and, more importantly, the sleepless birthday night I spent gasping for breath in the big blue chair?
As the teenagers whirled and sweated around me, as I was entranced by Kim’s glacial stare, I felt the first pangs of separation. The crowd had taken my wife away in its chaos. I didn’t feel lonely because I knew that she would come back. She had always come back before. She would come home late from work on Friday nights, and I would be upset about how our dinners were getting cold on the kitchen table. I would always tell her that I didn’t mind that she was late, but I wanted her to call first. Wasn’t that request simple enough? I was always worried that she had lost her way, or had gotten killed in a car accident. The phrase “gotten killed in a car accident” would run through my brain, but its true meaning wouldn’t touch me. How could it? We were young and immortal, and the phrase was a cultural cliché that surged into me whenever she was late. It was something that I said to myself to increase the severity of what I perceived to be her lack of consideration for our dinner, our prospective night out, and, most importantly, me. It was easy. It showed no comprehension of the finality of death as the end of a consciousness that remembers, dreams, and loves.
And there I was, watching our favorite band, alone. For some reason I didn’t miss her. In fact, I could see her, a few lines of bodies in front of me, struggling in the crowd. Her separation from me was as easy as the “car accident” phrase I used when she was late. The band was singing their great song about mental detachment from the real world, and she was gone, like the famous sister. But I knew she’d come back. And she did. Very soon she was beside me again, but with a wounded foot, which a burly member of the mosh pit had bloodied. She was in pain and wanted to leave, but she knew how much this concert meant to me. She was brave, beautiful in her bravery, like she is now, even after we've been apart for almost five years, even though she slept through the agony of my birthday night...when I was very angry with her and her lack of compassion.
But, perhaps, heart failure turned me into a monster...a schizophrenic of sorts. Perhaps what still feels like abandonment was my destiny, lot, and just reward.