Title:No Alternative
Author:William Dickerson
Genre:YA, Music
Pages:331
Today I'm happy to welcome William Dickerson the author of No Alternative.William was kind enough to share this guest post and excerpts of the book with us.
Guest post:
The Young
Street Bridge, Aberdeen, Washington
Underneath the bridge/
The tarp has sprung a leak/
And the animals I've trapped/
Have all become my pets/
And I'm living off of grass/
And the drippings from the ceiling/
But it's ok to eat fish/
Cause they don't have any feelings.
So goes
the opening lyrics from Nirvana’s “Something In The Way,” the minimalist last
track on their breakthrough album, Nevermind. As legend has it, Kurt Cobain wrote these
lyrics while he was homeless and living underneath the Young Street Bridge in
his hometown of Aberdeen, Washington.
I
visited Aberdeen, specifically to check out the bridge, several years ago. Here’s a brief video of some footage I shot
while I was down there:
I’ve
posted variations on this video several times and, like clockwork, I receive rather
irritated responses from fans who say Kurt never actually “lived” down
there. Some say he did, some say he
didn’t (including Nirvana bassist, Krist Novoselic), and I’m not sure anyone
but Kurt knows for sure. And I like
that; I like the mystery of it, the lore.
That’s what it is: lore. To have a
physical manifestation of that lore, which has since gone from makeshift
memorial to government-sanctioned park, is terrific. Whether he lived down there or not is,
frankly, irrelevant. What is not
irrelevant, nor up for debate, is the fact that this place inspired him, and
that’s all that matters. Whether he
lived there or not, the song remains, and it remains the same. What is also undeniable, and can only really
be grasped in person, is how peaceful, beautiful and otherworldly it is down
there. Much to Aberdeen’s chagrin, Kurt
was never kind in his descriptions of the city in which he grew up, and
admittedly, there’s nothing much to see there.
It’s a stark logging town; however, underneath the Young Street Bridge,
it’s really beautiful. It’s beautiful in
the way the sunlight hits the Wishkah River, in the way rogue pillars extend
from the water, and in the way the concrete cracks below your feet, battling
the nature underneath, and losing.
It is a
place that’s full of mystery in a town where everything is to the point. As I stood down there, I understood why Kurt
was lured down there, and hung out down there, and perhaps even slept down
there. I have a feeling that whatever
was “in his way,” literally or metaphorically, disappeared
while he spent time under this bridge.
Postscript. For a behind-the-scenes retrospective on
“Something In The Way,” I direct you to a terrific clip in which Butch Vig, the
producer of Nevermind, recalls the
recording session of the song:
Excerpt:
No
Alternative,
Excerpt 1
INTRODUCTION
Suicide is a universally human
phenomenon. It’s what separates us from
the animals, despite the fact that people shun it and cloak it in taboo. Animals do not commit suicide, at least
that’s the common wisdom. It is this
received wisdom that reveals something about our attitudes on the subject, as
suicide is most always painted in the light of shame and pity, something we
reserve for lesser beings than ourselves.
In actuality, suicide is a refined and selfless act, usually a result of
many thoughtful hours, days, months, or years of meticulous and steadfast
preparation. Suicide is not thoughtless;
it’s precisely the opposite.
In order to commit
suicide, one must be aware of one’s life coming to an end – this awareness is
wholly human, since animals are thought to be incapable of sharing this
recognition. But how can we really know
this? This is a purely clinical
assumption. There are occasions when
dogs sink into depression, whether as a result of old age or from a reaction to
emotional stimuli such as a master dying, and they willfully stop eating,
eventually starving themselves to death.
Do they understand that if they do not eat, they will die? Perhaps not in any literal sense, but it’s
difficult to believe that such actions are taken without any awareness of the
consequences.
Take as an example
the story of one such case. In Rome,
Italy, the owner of a Spanish Cocker Spaniel passed away. When paramedics removed his prone body from
his house, the dog hurled itself from the third floor. The pet lived, suffering a broken leg. After being treated by the vet, its leg
immobilized in a cast, it returned home in the custody of one of its owner’s
distant relatives. In spite of a
profound difficulty moving, and the supervision of the relative, the dog broke
free of its leash and again threw itself from the third floor of the house in
which it was raised. This time, it
accomplished what was presumably its goal: it died.
Suicide is unbiased,
non-partisan. It transcends gender,
perhaps even species. In a biological
sense, it’s pure. At no other time in
recent memory was suicide so prominent in the zeitgeist of Americana than in
the early 1990’s. The perceptive pop
listener might argue that the 80’s foreshadowed such a day of reckoning. In Billy Joel’s song, “We Didn’t Start The Fire,” history ended
when the 80’s did, as if each day that passed after his song debuted was one
match strike closer to oblivion.
Listeners were left longing for his song to stretch into the 90’s, if for no other reason than to reference Crystal Pepsi in
his “Cola Wars.”
In a
way, history did come to an end. There
was an overwhelming stench of death in the air, emanating from the rotten music
that decadent decade dished out. What
was considered music in the 80’s was reduced to ashes in the wake of the
conflagration of three unknown musicians from Seattle, Washington – actually,
two were from a shithole logger town called Aberdeen, and their drummer, Dave,
was from Olympia. They declared war
against the music industry, whether intentionally or not, and their declaration
was a singular record album, Nevermind; an
album on which there’s not a single fade-out.
Every song simply crashes to an abrupt and decisive end. As the band’s front-man appropriately said in
his suicide letter, it’s “better to burn
out, than to fade away...” That line was taken from Neil Young, but
what 15 year-old nose-picker plugging his ears with punk knew that at the time
Cobain quoted him?
What
Billy Joel couldn’t “take” anymore in his Billboard Top One Hundred tune was
different from what teenagers at the time couldn’t take anymore. To be quite frank, we couldn’t take anymore
of his fucking song. Or of Guns and
Roses and their sweet children; or of Warrant and their baked goods; or of Def
Leppard’s sugar, some of which Warrant must have borrowed to make their cherry
pie. The 90’s ushered in an independent,
do-it-yourself, ethic; a way to proactively and publicly flush the 80’s down
the toilet. Some music critics have
argued that this was simply a resurgence of the punk rock ideology that thrived
in the late 70’s, and there’s some truth to that. History is cyclical and not only was punk
rock reinvented in the early 90’s, so, apparently, was the suicide cult – what
Jim Jones did for the Peoples Temple, in which he and 914 of his followers died in a mass
murder-suicide at Jonestown in 1978, the charismatic David Koresh did for the Branch Davidians, and their 55 dead
adults and 21 dead children, in Waco, Texas, in 1993. From Sid Vicious to Kurt Cobain, Jim Jones to
David Koresh, artists and psychopaths alike were immersed in the cumulative
whirlpools of thought, aggression, freshly clipped nerve-endings, disaffection,
and the do-it-yourself zeitgeist of the moment.
Absolutely
nothing is more do-it-yourself than suicide.
***
Suicide is the
thing; the goal; the beginning and the end; the next big thing; the be all, end
all; the eye in the sky – it’s the Tylenol bottle with the 20 bonus pills,
because swallowing an entire bottle of Tylenol can kill you.
Suicide is an
option; it’s an alternative; it’s aqua seafoam shame; it’s dead of a shotgun
blast to the head.
Suicide is the lyric
of a song; packaged inside a gold record.
Spinning.
Spinning.
Spinning.
Spin the black circle.
***
If the lyric is
death, then the song is life itself, trapping its lyrics within a recurring
embrace of murder and conception, all controlled by your Aiwa Minisystem’s
three-disc CD player, its repeat button the key to everlasting life. Some traditionalists will prefer the analogy
of a vinyl record, the black circle,
a turntable needle skipping along its groove; however, to recent generations,
the black circle is a relic, just
another obstacle to sidestep in the attic when it comes time to store your
sweaters. To some boys and girls, the black circle is an object unknown. If you can’t see your image reflected in it,
it won’t play your music. There’s
something appropriate about that.
There were still
tape cassettes around in the 90’s, stacked up on shelves somewhere, neatly
organized in shoeboxes, an arm’s length away for the convenient use of breaking
up weed. By this time, though, they were
mostly used to record rock bands in garages on four-track machines or used to
record mix-tapes to win the affections of girls – magnetic pleas for admittance
into their unsullied jeans in the back of your Mom’s Ford Taurus.
If you were a
teenager in the early 90’s, music as you knew it died on April 8th,
1994. The day the music died and grunge
was born, but only grunge as a catchphrase, as an advertising motif. It was the beginning of a movement. Back when MTV actually aired music videos,
rather than the onslaught of reality television programming they broadcast now,
and viewers made a point to sit at home in their beanbags and watch those
videos, on this day, they stopped airing their music videos, however briefly,
and their perpetually coiffed and stoic news anchor, Kurt Loder, commandeered
the airwaves to impart a Special Report to a legion of slacker viewers:
The body of Nirvana leader, Kurt Cobain, was found in a
house in Seattle Friday morning dead of an apparently self-inflicted shotgun
blast to the head. Cobain’s body was
discovered by an electrician carrying out repairs at the musician’s house. Sources claim he had been missing for several
days. The singer, whose band achieved
global fame with the release of its album, Nevermind, in 1991, recently
survived a drug and alcohol-induced coma in Rome last month. A statement from Nirvana’s management company
said: ‘We are deeply saddened by the loss of such a talented artist, close
friend, loving husband and father.’
Police found what is said to be a suicide note at the scene, but have
not yet divulged its contents.
***
Spinning.
Spinning.
Spinning.
Spin the black circle.
Thanks to William for sharing this and to Kris Morton for connection with me.
