It’s the end of the Aughts (or the Oughts, or the Should’ves), and I’ve been looking at lists. Name a category: someone has chosen the “Decade’s Best.” Among the anointed, you’ll find Radiohead, Cormac McCarthy, Ichiro, and 2005. (You’ll also find some head-scratchers. The Darjeeling Limited wasn’t the second-best movie of the past ten years.) But what if some late-charger enters the fray? It’s happened before: The Clash released London Calling (in the UK, at least) in mid-December of 1979. “Top that!” Joe Strummer seemed to say. But how could anyone top it, with so few days remaining?
The US release of London Calling occurred a few weeks later, in January of 1980. In baseball terms, this would be like a team scoring sixteen runs in the first inning — game over, essentially. Rolling Stone later selected it as the Best Album of the Eighties. For me, it was a glimpse of something — something larger, messier, more urgent than what I had known. I had just turned thirteen, and I listened to it with my cool friend Brian’s even cooler older brother, after school and before Little League practice.
By the mid-Eighties, “Jimmy Jazz,” “Brand New Cadillac,” and “The Right Profile” were part of my teenage, driving-around-with-the-windows-down soundtrack. Still, the members of the band (or “news-giving group”) were exotics — British punk superstars that I couldn’t, on any deep level, identify with. Fast-forward a few more years; enter (in my life, anyway) The Replacements. When Paul Westerberg sang, with a voice that felt like it lived inside of me, “Look me in the eye and tell me that I’m satisfied” — well, that I could identify with. I used to sing it to myself when I was driving; sometimes (though less often, thank God) I still do.
A few days ago, on Slate, Stephen Metcalf enthused about The Replacements, calling their 1984 album Let It Be “arguably the finest” of its decade. A couple of things appear to have prompted the piece: (1) the 25th anniversary of Let It Be‘s release, and (2) a recent oral biography, All Over but the Shouting. Regarding the band’s transition from Minneapolis slackers to rock stars, Metcalf writes,
They signed to a division of Warner, made Tim, a rousing follow-up to Let It Be and another classic; but the salesmanship necessary to being a national act was taking its toll, though for the most perverse of reasons. They were four whey-faced dunces from Minnesota, but the masks they were asked to wear by the label made them resemble . . . four whey-faced dunces from Minnesota. It was like putting on an unbreathably thick layer of makeup to look like yourself; like Nixon wearing a Nixon mask. “Our managers encouraged our hijinks more than they encouraged us to straighten up and fly right,” reports Westerberg.
One day they were a small band on a tiny label, whose hatred of MTV could fairly be described as sincere. The next they were a major label act, selling themselves as the lovable fuck-ups, as part of a varied menu of pop music options. The effect was deranging. “They laughed in the face of stardom,” says their A and R guy at Sire, “yet got really pissed off if you didn’t treat them like a star.” As the divine nobody tasked with holding it all together, Westerberg appeared to be splitting at the seams. He was a fuck-up; he was a striver. He was the sensitive one; he was the asshole who drove the lighting guy to tears. Jim Walsh, the compiler of All Over but the Shouting, describes a bootleg video of the ‘Mats playing “Bastards of Young,” their own blank generation anthem, at a speedway arena. At the end of the song, Westerberg says either “I love you” or “Fuck you,” you can’t tell which. Exactly.
That’s the point, of course, where this post should end. Except that last week I promised to give an account of a miracle. So, here’s what happened . . .
I was in the University of Michigan’s Hatcher Graduate Library, having just heard Uwem Akpan read from his Oprah-approved collection of stories. And I was hungry. And I saw this little room that I had never seen before — the Audubon Room, I think it was called — and I thought, OK, I’ll give this room one minute, and then I’ll go eat. And inside this tiny room that I imagined deserved one minute of my time was the copy of Leaves of Grass that Whitman sent to Emerson in 1855 — the copy that prompted Emerson to write back to the unknown poet,
DEAR SIR — I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of “LEAVES OF GRASS.” I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile and stingy nature, as if too much handiwork, or too much lymph in the temperament, were making our western wits fat and mean.
Isn’t this the single most important book in American literature? I don’t mean the book in general (though that may well be true) — I mean this particular copy of the book, the one that caused Emerson to rub his eyes a little, “to see if this sunbeam were no illusion.” And it was just sitting there, in this little empty room, as about a hundred book lovers (or Oprah apostles) headed for the exit, only a few yards away. I couldn’t believe it; I still can’t believe it. And part of me feels that I should play the reporter, ask someone in Special Collections how the university acquired the book, share the information, etc., etc. But can I tell you how much I want to live in a world where the tiniest of chance detours results in this kind of encounter? And what moron wants to explain away a miracle? Go find it yourself: Leaves of Grass, the best book of the 1850s. A book to read “in the open air every season of every year of your life.”
