brendan halpin

Sent this out to my mailing list a few years ago. I’m going to see X on their farewell tour tonight, so I thought it was appropriate to re-post:

At some point in 1983, when I was fourteen or fifteen, I walked into Ozarka Records on Calhoun Street in Cincinnati and walked out with a used copy of  Under the Big Black Sun by the band X.  I bought it mostly because it got a good review in Rolling Stone (this, believe it or not, used to mean something), and I was pretty unprepared for what I was getting into. Not because of the music, but because I had never had a work of art speak so powerfully to my experience and sensibility before this.
Because Under the Big Black Sun is an album that touches a lot of bases but is ultimately about grief. My father died in 1978, so that was the grief that was upmost in my mind in 1983, but I’ve since lost a wife and two friends, and I still feel that no artist but X has made art that captures grief as perfectly as this album does.

          Grief is a nearly universal experience, but it’s avoided pretty studiously in popular music. Well, there’s breakup grief, which is somehow acceptable, but the grief of losing a loved one, especially when they die young, is nearly absent from popular music. Which is odd when you consider how many musicians die young. There were a bunch of tribute songs that came out after John Lennon died, but even the ones by his friends and former bandmates weren’t visceral. I didn’t really recognize my own grief in them. There was sadness, sure, but where was the rage? It wasn’t in McCartney’s “Here Today” or George Harrison’s “All Those Years Ago” or Elton John’s “Empty Garden.” Where was the “I’m standing here with my heart ripped out, utterly bereft,” feeling of losing a loved one? It was probably floating around somewhere, but I sure as hell didn’t hear it in popular music.

          Until I put on this album: a slab of rage and grief and destruction and despair that gave me comfort. Because one of the many difficult things about being a kid with a dead parent is that most of the other kids you know do not have dead parents. So my grief was lonely. It made me feel invisible. And of course made me resent everyone I knew who had two parents and no idea how good they had it or the horror that life had in store for them. (If you knew me in these years, I appreciate your putting up with me. More that I can probably ever express.)

          But these people knew. And they didn’t sugar coat it. There’s no inspiration, no uplift, no Mufasa looking down in approval. I knew even at that age that this vision of loss was bullshit, and the Lion King hadn’t even come out yet!  It’s pretty hard to overstate the importance and the relief of seeing your experience reflected in art for the first time.

          I’ve read some stuff about the album: it is apparently inspired by the death of Exene’s older sister in a car crash in 1980. But there’s other stuff going on here as well. A whole lot of self loathing, some self-destructive behavior, and the way grief can screw you up so bad that you mess up the relationships you have with people who are still alive.

          The album works on a visceral level—though the production is polished, the emotions are raw. But one of the ways I’ve come to enjoy this album is by tracing the thematic threads through the songs. So I’m going to do that, with the following caveat: there’s a troubled marriage that’s very much in the mix here, and I do not know, nor care, whether this is Exene and John Doe’s marriage (which ended in 1985), or someone else’s, or whether it’s entirely a fictional construct.

          I’m going to try to explain some of the ideas that permeate the record, and I guess thereby explain why it means so much to me, but I encourage you to go listen for yourself. My ideas here are a companion to, not a substitute for, listening to the album.

Side 1:
The Hungry Wolf: It’s a song about a real wolf, not a metaphorical one, and it sets the tone for the album by menacing the listener: “look across the street my friend/we’re waiting for you to slow down,” and, “welcome to dripping jaws, the altar of your death.” The marriage is introduced here, too, as the hungry wolf “loves her mate, as she loves him, and they live together for life.”
          Okay, so the wolf is in pretty good shape here, but you’re not. You’re going to get eaten.
 
Motel Room in My Bed— The title suggests a tryst, as does “I like a pretty boy, and he likes me.” But this isn’t fun. Not when crying and bleeding on the sheets are so prominent in the lyrics. I’m assuming there’s something here about how a casual sexual encounter leaves someone feeling empty, and possibly even worse than they did beforehand.
 
Riding with Mary—While Billy Zoom does a cool doppler effect with his guitar, John and Exene sing about a woman who is at a motel with a man who’s not her husband. There’s a statue of the Virgin Mary on the dashboard, but it’s “a powerless, sweet, forgotten thing.” “The next time you see a statue of Mary,” Exene tells us, “Remember my sister was in a car/riding with Mary.” You think your faith is going to protect you? Wrong.  
 
Come Back to Me— A slow, 50’s-style song featuring Billy Zoom on plaintive sax (I believe this is the tempo to which one might do The Stroll, but I’m not sure) A woman grieves, begging futilely for the return of her dead loved one. It’s simple, but it hits one of the very hardest things about grief, which is just the dead person’s utter absence. You cry and plead for them to come back, and it does nothing.
 
Under the Big Black Sun—A mix of religious, marital, and funereal imagery that’s a bit hard to untangle literally, but it certainly sounds to me like someone tries to drown their grief in alcohol and adultery and ultimately finds nothing but darkness. “The man is gone, Mary’s dead/good morning midnight.” What I love about this, besides the fact that it rocks the fuck out, is that it captures the way grief transforms your entire existence. What’s under the big black sun? Literally the entire world, covered in unremitting darkness.
 
Side one is over. We’ve been immersed in the sister’s death and its aftermath. Having looked the event straight in the eye, we’re now going to look at it sideways: through grief over the death of relationships, through a look at a mythical being who causes misery,  and ultimately through the death of hope.
 
Because I Do—A woman realizes she’s not cut out to be married because she’s forever searching for someone new. So she gets drunk and hates herself: “I’m just no good inside.”
 
Blue Spark—A man waits at home alone for a woman who is out cheating on him.
 
Dancing With Tears in My Eyes—Cover of a Leadbelly song about trying and failing to have fun, a la “I still Miss Someone” and “Tracks of My Tears.” Given additional resonance with the death of a sister haunting the record, and “I’m trying to smile once in a while, but I found it wouldn’t do” is as good a description of the throes of grief as I’ve found.
 
Real Child of Hell—three verses of menace, each of which is laid at the foot of the real child of hell, who is invisible but who encourages and causes violence and evil. The last verse depicts a riot at a concert—we can’t see the cursing child who’s behind it, but we know it’s there.
 
How I Learned My Lesson—Here we’re seeing grief refracted through a relationship story. A woman had an affair with a clergyman. He’s done with her. She’s furious at the loss, the rejection, and at the clergyman’s hypocrisy.  And she would take him back in a minute. “I’m wrecking my kitchen carefully, but I’m keeping your dinner warm.”
 
The Have Nots—I sometimes think that the song Under the Big Black Sun should have closed the album because it ties all the thematic threads of the album together, but this is a pretty nasty summation. Faced with all the hardships of life, what can we do? You can’t win the game—it moves as you play. All you can do is drink routinely and joylessly in gross bars, the song suggests. The best you can hope for is to dull the bad feelings for a short while—but there are no good feelings.
 
It's bleak. But, strangely, for me anyway, it’s not depressing. It’s strangely uplifting.  Because making great art out of awful events is one of the best, most hopeful things a human being can do. The act of making art defies despair, even if the art itself is about despair.

          We all go through the darkness at various points in our lives. At is best, art gives us a hand to hold in the darkness, a reminder that we’re not walking through the valley of the shadow of death by ourselves. That’s what this record did for me.

          I will always be grateful.