Rock ‘n’ roll’s first female roadie has lived with AC/DC, toured with Suzi Quatro, Leo Sayer and Status Quo, and though she couldn’t have imagined it as a teenager, she’s proven women belong backstage.
Tana Douglas, a teenager whose childhood was troubled by a spiteful mother and an incompetent father, found her escape in live music. It was largely fate and circumstance that lead to her beginnings as a roadie in 1973. Without a home, nor an income, helping the road crew to unpack and load the band’s gear back into trucks post-show was a means of making an income and feeling part of a community. Her dedication, her relentless hard work and “I can do it” attitude meant she was constantly working, her reputation forged through word-of-mouth commendations. By 1974, she was working for – and living with – AC/DC. Their management had set up the band, along with Douglas, in a suburban house in Melbourne’s St Kilda East.
“They were so welcoming and friendly and so close to my age. It was their first time away from home, and that’s what I’d been missing, so I thought it was great,” Douglas tells Audiofemme. “They may as well have been [my] brothers, since we were doing everything together and we all got on really well.”
Douglas and AC/DC would spend a lot of time listening to records. “The brothers, Malcolm and Angus, listened to old blues. Bon was into the new ZZ Top album, Tres Hombres, [and] Alex Harvey Band because all the Scots loved him,” Douglas remembers. “We’d sit and listen to all sorts of things: Jerry Lewis and Elvis Presley. I liked Janis Joplin and though I don’t think any of them liked her, they were polite enough to let me listen. Everyone was equal, there was no separation.”
Douglas has just released her memoir, LOUD, which recalls much of her early life and illuminates the contradiction between touring with glamorous, cult-favourite rockstars while knowing she had no home to go to in the evenings, nor family to call if she was lonely or in trouble. Like many women who forge a path for other women to follow, Douglas had to bear the brunt of criticism from male colleagues, threats and abuse from female fans who saw her as a competitor for attention by the objects of their obsession, and heckling from audiences when she could be seen from the stage.
But it is also the tale of a true music industry pioneer, forging ahead in her field thanks to ingenuity, work ethic, and passion. Douglas transitioned from the backline into working on lighting and sound, despite having no previous experience in either specialty. In those days, it was a matter of learning on the job – not always easy as one of the rare women working in the support crew.
“The technology has evolved immensely to this day, but it was the new technology of the 1970s and nobody really knew anything about it,” she recalls. “It was a starting point, and people like myself kept pushing the envelope. The work schedule back in the ’70s was so heavy – with AC/DC we were doing 12 to 14 shows a week. You learn by setting it up, and when something broke you fixed it. My biggest learning curve was with Paul Dainty’s production company ACT. We were learning first in the country from experts from the US and the UK coming through on tour.”
Early in her career, Douglas realised she’d be more likely to have ongoing, reliable and well-paid work if she was working for production and touring companies, rather than for artists directly. Her employment by TASCO, a London-based production company, enabled her to work with Status Quo, The WHO, Ozzy Osbourne, The Police, Iggy Pop and Elton John. When TASCO opened a Los Angeles office, Douglas transferred to the US and became a resident.
Douglas works on a lighting rig for Status Quo. Photo Credit: Alain Le Garsmeur
In the coming years, she’d gradually shift out of working on lighting and stage production into logistics for artists as diverse as Lenny Kravitz, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Ice-T and Pearl Jam – stars with star quality. “It’s how they hold themselves before they say anything,” muses Douglas. “You can just see star quality, they just ooze it. Iggy just oozes it. He’s very feline, he prowls, it’s amazing to watch. Other people, like Elton John, it’s the way he carries himself. You know he’s a star. He’s a bit stand-offish until he can figure out what’s going on in the room. Stars have a different nuance to them. George Harrison was so quiet, so low key, but you knew it when he walked into a room.”
As for the grunge era, Douglas says there still that star power under the flannel shirts, albeit less obvious. “With Pearl Jam, there was a more laid-back, of-the-people vibe but they’ve still got it. They’ve got cargo pants on, carrying surfboards, but you can still tell,” she says. “If you’ve got to put it on, then you don’t have it. Star power, you’re either born with it or you’re not.”
Tana Douglas says she would always make an effort to talk to fellow female roadies before and after the show to build a rapport. She’d suggest companies to talk to and people to talk to. “I’d also let them know that they’d have to work as hard, if not harder than the rest of the crew,” she recalls. “You would have to give up the feminine niceties of life, and if you started making demands to stop and wash your hair, it wouldn’t fly. The trade off is if you make sacrifices and you’re good at the job, there’s room for you.”
Even today, Douglas admits, “You pretty much have to justify yourself to someone, somewhere along the line. Young women have a similar struggle now – it’s not as bad or as obvious, but it’s one of the last frontiers of men’s domain. When I had my own company, I was running it and not a lot of people knew how to do that so they’d respect that. There were contracts I wouldn’t get because I was a female, but I had a ton of different clients who knew the job would be done at a good price and they could count on me.”
Photo Credit: Alain Le Garsmeur
It wasn’t until the late 1980s that women started to become the norm backstage. “It started trickling in in the 1980s and 1990s. Lollapallooza were very pro hiring females,” says Douglas. She’d met festival co-founder Ted Gardner on a Men at Work tour; Gardner and his wife Nikki Brown had established a management company that handled Jane’s Addiction, Tool, and other alt-acts tapped for early Lolla lineups.
“They were so supportive. There were so many bands that it became something where females would turn up, do their job, and it wouldn’t matter who they were. That was a shifting point in the industry, I think,” remembers Douglas. “Nikki managed bands, and [Gardner] knew females worked backstage way back. They were professionals who realised that what they were doing with Lollapallooza was different, so why couldn’t personnel be different?”
Douglas has spent long enough in the industry to know that women have greater capacity for some roles than their male counterparts.
“Females are really detail oriented so we make excellent tour operators. There’s also a lot of females in the video departments. There’s very few female production managers, but the few there are are very good. Females are good at departmentalising, figuring it out, organising and doing the job,” she says. “Men have been holding down these jobs, but women are good and often, we have an eye for things like lighting design. Perhaps it’s more of an emotion thing of the music and the colour; they really excel at it. Things like soldering and repairing equipment, these are things women excel at with finer attention to detail.”
Photo Credit: Alain Le Garsmeur
As for writing her memoir, Douglas found it “incredibly therapeutic.”
So much of her life had been spent on tour and between tours that the hardest part was working out how to write her memories in a way that made sense. She was able to go back to old itineraries and call old friends to confirm dates, events and stories. “I think we got it mostly correct, so fingers crossed!” Douglas laughs.
There was one figure who is especially responsible for Douglas’ wild career and someone who is at the forefront of her memoir. “Wane ‘Swampy’ Jarvis made room for me – he would listen and offer advice. He was a brother figure to me, and we remained friends for his entire life,” Douglas says. “That was a bond that couldn’t be broken and that’s miraculous. We met when I was 16 and 50 years later, there was always that bond there.”
In LOUD, Tana Douglas raves about the men who were supportive, who didn’t question her right to be there, and what really becomes clear is that for women to excel in male-dominated domains – like backstage – it requires both men and women to provide space and opportunities.
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Liz Phair is a badass and always will be. Time has not dulled this truth teller. Her vulnerability is a weapon – honed and aware – and the world is better for it.
Earlier this month, she released her first book, Horror Stories, a raw, unexpected collection of 17 personal essays. This isn’t the drug-fueled, name-dropping adventures you’d expect from a rockstar memoir. It’s something different; quieter, more intimate. These are stories of love and loss that have shaped Phair’s life – those seemingly small, often painful moments that stick with you forever.
Phair first kicked us in the guts with Exile in Guyville in 1993, cutting through the alt-rock-bro scene with a self-assurance and sexuality not expected of women (on “Flower” Phair sweetly rounds “Every time I see your face I get all wet between my legs” with “I want to fuck you like a dog”). A visual artist at Oberlin, she started making the Girly-Sound tapes in Chicago, soon catching the attention of Matador Records with her lo-fi authenticity. Whip-Smart (1994) soon followed, solidifying her feminist icon status and earning two Grammy nominations.
I was 14 when I first heard Guyville. It was 1995, the internet was a newborn babe and I was stuck on an island 2,000 miles away from anything cool. But after a business trip to New York City, my dad came home with three albums that changed everything: Guyville, The Breeders’ Last Splash, and Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill (shout out to the angel with a nose piercing who pointed my old man in the right direction). That music was everything – girls with guitars speaking their truths, not worrying about looking or sounding perfect. Loud, angry and brutally honest, I was hooked and still am.
As the nineties closed and pop music dominated, Phair moved to Capitol records, releasing the more mainstream whitechocolatespaceegg (1998), Liz Phair (2003), and Somebody’s Miracle (2005) to brutal criticism as she gained public popularity. But by 2018, Phair began to experience something of a renaissance – reuniting with Matador to reissue Girly-Sound To Guyville: The 25th Anniversary Box Set, showcasing the original tracks with new unreleased songs. It was this project, along with the U.S. political fiasco and loss of iconic musicians in 2016, that inspired her to look closer at her own history. The confessional Horror Stories is part one, with part two, Fairy Tales (release date TBD), digging into more of the music.
Phair writes like she sings – confident, intimate, human. Exploring prose in a way that feels instinctual and original, and yet so classically her. “What I can’t articulate is the way my soul resides in my pussy; in my clitoris, to be exact. It’s not just biological tissue to me. It’s a whole different way of knowing.” Amen, sister.
Between tales of surviving the NYC blizzard and blackout are unguarded reflections on faith, monogamy, and motherhood. Each chapter a non-linear exposure of childhood embarrassment, teenage shame, and grownup regrets. Lines feel like song lyrics; her words giving shape to the sins we share. Regrets are punctuated with sharp bits of hilarity and pride.
From ignoring a drunk, passed-out freshman in the ladies room to breaking men’s hearts, Horror Stories exposes Phair’s behavior so that we can feel better about our own. She wants us to know that to be human is to be imperfect. And that’s beautiful. “We spend so much time hiding what we’re ashamed of, denying what we’re wounded by, and portraying ourselves as competent, successful individuals that we don’t always realize where and when we’ve gone missing. Our flaws and our failures make us relatable, not unlovable.”
And flaws she exposes, often unintentionally. The whiffs of white, affluent, attractive privilege are hard to ignore. She stumbles when faced with #MeToo. The chapter titled Hashtag gives light to her own painful and numerous sexual assaults, painting a stark picture of what it means to be a female trailblazer in a man’s world. But the message falls short when Phair is caught up in Ryan Adams’ NYTimes reckoning. “We are trapped in a culture of silence,” she writes, acknowledging her own denial being driven by ingrained coping mechanisms. Adams may be “hardly the worst monster” Phair has encountered, but her silence is disappointing and she knows it.
This week, Phair was in San Francisco for her book tour, joined on stage by MTV News alum Tabitha Soren. Presented by Noise Pop and City Arts & Lectures, they discussed the memoir and songs behind the stories. Today’s Phair is frank but polite, asking the audience if it’s okay to curse before gifting us this nugget: “When I made Guyville, I was sick of boyfriends and guys telling me what music was good. I think I just needed to say to them that it’s not that fucking hard.”
For over 25 years, Liz Phair has done the heavy lifting. She has put herself out there, writing songs that have been loved and eviscerated. The highs and lows, she says, have all been part of the plan. When Soren asks what drives her to create such intimate work, she responds, “I personally never feel stronger, never feel more powerful and more grounded to who I really am than when I have no armor on and I’m basically naked. Examining the weakest moments of our lives makes us stronger.”
The new music slated for early 2020 promises a return to her roots, reuniting with producer Brad Wood and engineer/guitarist Casey Rice, who both worked on the first three albums. “Good Side” is the first single, an easy palate cleanser, meant to balance out the darkness of the book.
Part of the magic of Phair’s music is in the space she leaves within it. Slowing down the tempo, drawing out chords to leave the lyrics bare. She closes the conversation in SF with her last confession: “[With this book] I wanted to slow down time, of the myriad things that happen to you that aren’t great enough to tell your friends or that you don’t want to tell anyone about. Things that have shaped you and driven you throughout your life. I just… I don’t want to fucking hide anymore.”
ONLY NOISE explores music fandom with poignant personal essays that examine the ways we’re shaped by our chosen soundtrack. This week, Beth Winegarner revisits her teenage obsession with infamous Doors frontman Jim Morrison, an archetype of both the sensitive poet within herself and the thorny men she encountered.
The day before I discovered Jim Morrison, I broke up with my first serious boyfriend. We’d met in high school, and got together when I was 15 and he was 18. He was impossibly tall, lanky, with a hooked nose, a puff of curly hair like a Q-tip, and pale, watery blue eyes. I wasn’t attracted to him – aside from his pale, ropy biceps – but he was sweet and kind. He was a foot taller than me; I had to stand on benches or stairs just to kiss him. The summer we started dating, he took me out to the beach and for walks in the woods, and to his house, where his bedroom was a small trailer separate from the main house. In that little fiberglass cocoon, Led Zeppelin and the Scorpions shaking the radio, we made out a lot, and went further.
At first, I wanted it – the waterfall of longing, the fumble of curious fingers, the ache between my legs. But it hurt, even more than I thought it would, and I hated it. I didn’t want to go any further; I wanted to stop and be held. I wanted to hear that it was okay, that it was my body and I should trust it to know what was right. Instead he pushed me, begging and pestering, his complaint of blue balls suggesting I owed something to him. I caved, thinking that a little bad sex couldn’t be worse than the endless badgering. I gave him what he wanted with my hands or my mouth. I gave him what he wanted while I left my own body, so I didn’t or couldn’t feel. Because what I didn’t or couldn’t feel wouldn’t hurt me. I spent so many afternoons in his trailer, leaving my body.
The author at fifteen.
I began to pull away from him, though neither of us understood why. He was oblivious; I had abandoned myself. We spent less time at his house and more time in the woods, or driving the tree-lined backroads of Sonoma County. As he steered his rumbly, faded copper Pinto, I could look out the passenger window, away from his face and his long, probing fingers, into the shadowed spaces between the redwoods.
It was Valentine’s Day when I realized I couldn’t stay with him anymore, but it felt cruel to break up with someone on a holiday dedicated to romance. So I waited a few days, invited him over, and told him on the wide front porch of my house, under my mom’s wisteria vines. I don’t remember what I said, aside from vague promises to remain friends. I know he cried. I probably cried. And when he left, my body felt weightless, felt like nothing at all.
The next day, skimming through the newspaper, I spotted an article about a new book: Wilderness: The Lost Writings of Jim Morrison. I’d been writing poetry for a few years by then, and felt a tug at my gut at the idea of a rock-god-turned-poet. I asked my mom if she’d buy the book for me. She offered a compromise: an advance on my allowance, so I could buy it myself.
A few hours later, scanning the spines in the poetry section of a bookstore, a shiver washed through my body as I found Wilderness on the shelf. I pulled the skinny, hardbound volume away from the others, inhaling the new-book smell of paper and ink as I opened it to a random page. The poem I found spoke of infinite power – the opposite of what my aching self felt in the aftermath of that relationship.
I can make myself invisible or small.
I can become gigantic & reach the
farthest things. I can change
the course of nature.
I can place myself anywhere in
space or time.
I can summon the dead.
I didn’t know it yet – and wouldn’t, for many years – but my interest in Jim Morrison was a sign of my own demons being born.
I closed the book, hugged it to my chest, and took it to the register. At home, I laid on my threadbare quilt and twisted my hair around my fingers as I read, simultaneously drawn in and mystified by Jim’s stream-of-consciousness surrealism. “If only I could feel the sound of the sparrows?” “I received an Aztec wall of vision?” I read and re-read the poems, puzzling them out, studying the ones represented in Jim’s slanted, loopy scribble.
His poetry was baffling, too abstract for my teenage mind, but I didn’t abandon him; I started buying Doors albums instead. I also devoured No One Here Gets Out Alive, the flashy biography of Jim’s life written by Doors publicist/fanboy Danny Sugerman and journalist Jerry Hopkins. I read the book while listening to their music, thrilling to hear Jim’s croons and yelps as I soaked up his collision-course life. And I began writing letters to him, calling him “James,” feeling that he was too godlike for me to call him something as ordinary as “Jim.”
Dear James, There is a poster of you hanging from my wall, at the foot of my bed. When I wake up I can look at you – when I write I can look at you as well. Last night I wrote a poem and your presence inspired a piece of it.
In his eyes there burns A calm, shivering flame Beyond which the seas rise and fall And rise again A long tendril of curious hair Falling fragrantly On the shoulder.
When I walk into my bedroom, I see your face looking back. Your eyes are so troubled and wide and innocent-looking. I don’t think you were as innocent as you seemed. Why did you never smile in pictures? Your arms are stretched towards the camera. Why? Were you trying to push it away? Were you trying to swim into it, to escape from reality?
My bedroom walls were plastered with posters, flyers for local rock shows and pictures of pop stars torn from magazines. Duran Duran, Madonna and Cyndi Lauper were still among them, but an oversized black-and-white poster of Jim took a prime position at one end of my bed, where I could look up at it while resting. In it he was bare-chested, thick hair curled around his face. His dark eyes fixed on me. A thin, beaded necklace hung from his neck, the only indication that he was, indeed, part of the 1960s rock scene, and not some Roman god back from oblivion.
Jim was unlike anyone I’d had a crush on before. He was mysterious and a little dangerous, even 18 years after his death. I studied the shadow of his brows, cheekbones, the curve of his shoulder, imagined what his full lips felt like. I wondered: what made him drink so much, take so many drugs, die so young, when he seemed so full of energy? Could I have helped him, taken care of him, kept him safe from his demons?
There are moments when I was sure he would have loved me. I was small, red-haired, porcelain-skinned and smitten with his poetry, just like his girlfriend, Pamela. I could even believe I was her reincarnation – if she hadn’t died of a heroin overdose the year after I was born. I was also like his pagan wife, Patricia: red-haired, witchy, a writer with a fondness for pop music. I could tell – I was his type.
Dear James,
I wonder where you are now. Who are you now? Do you even believe in reincarnation? I do – and I am pretty sure that your soul is walking the Earth today, probably in someone about my age. You could be someone in my school, my orchestra, someone in this area. But you might not even be in this country, you may be a small child, and you may not have been reborn yet. Or maybe your soul’s life-cycle has finished, and you will not be born again. I wish I only knew. I do know, however, that if Fate proves that I am supposed to meet you, whether for the first time or again, then I will. It will be done.
From a young age, I’d learned to put other people first. I was quiet, shy, obedient. I liked rules; I felt safe knowing I was doing the right thing, and it was an easy way to please the grown-ups around me. I earned extra praise (and sometimes cash) for good grades, so I poured myself into schoolwork. Each afternoon, I walked the dusty path home from school, sat down at the wide dining room table, and bent over my books until my homework was done.
In my preteen years, I fell in love with music and writing. Diaries and poems let me share the feelings I was too shy to speak aloud. And music offered a context for my ever-shifting feelings, plus space to dance and celebrate when I felt good. I devoured issues of teen magazines like Bop and Smash Hits, poring over photos of Duran Duran and Madonna while their music cascaded from my stereo. The boys in Duran Duran were so beautiful; I used to list them in my head from cutest to least-cute: Simon, John, Nick, Roger, Andy. With their teased hair, smooth skin and silly banter, they seemed wholesome and fun. Perfect imaginary boyfriends.
Although both my parents were loving and kind, something subtle shifted when my body started to change. My dad stopped touching me; he wouldn’t even hug me anymore when I was upset or hurt. Instead, he showed his love by cheering me on in school and making sure we had everything we needed. But I missed riding on his shoulders, sitting in his lap, snuggles and songs at bedtime. Part of me wondered if my new breasts and hips somehow made me untouchable. Unlovable. But once I entered high school, my body made the boys stare a little longer, and talk to me in ways that made me think they were interested.
I wanted that attention so badly, and it cut deeply when I discovered, with those first sexual experiences, that I wasn’t ready for it. Or that a boyfriend who claimed to love me would trample my wishes to get what he wanted.
My best friend knew more than almost anyone about the relationship I’d just left, but she didn’t know much about the sex. I didn’t tell her how much of it had been against my will. Partly because I just thought it was bad sex, nothing more; partly because she was having sex, too, and I wasn’t sure if I she would judge me for doing it wrong. And I didn’t tell any of the adults in my life, especially my parents. They would be disappointed and angry with me for having sex so young. I couldn’t face their disapproval when I was already hurting from the breakup, and from something else inside me I didn’t recognize. Whatever it was, it was huge, sad and wordless, and it left me longing for something I couldn’t put my finger on.
Jim had no drive to please the people around him. He was a rootless military brat who fell in love with the Beats and styled himself after Jack Kerouac’s rambunctious buddy, Neal Cassady, before taking cues from experimental theatre and nihilist literature. He often claimed that the defining event of his early life was passing a traffic accident on an Indian reservation, where the souls of the dying entered his body. His songs lingered on death, escape, transcendence, and women who loved to get high. Reading No One Here Gets Out Alive, I adored the stories of him on the beach, singing poetry to his friend Ray Manzarek, who became The Doors’ keyboardist; of his rooftop squat where he slept, drank and wrote; of his shyness, so painful that he sang with his back to the audience during the Doors’ earliest gigs. His excesses – his womanizing, his habit of consuming mind-melting quantities of psychedelics – seemed charming, even quaint; a relic of 1960s experimentation, even as the book described his bandmates’ concerns about his behavior.
I was just the opposite: quiet, organized, orderly. I avoided high-school parties because I was scared of losing control on alcohol or drugs, and of seeing my friends acting funny while drunk or high. I didn’t want to see their masks slip – or my own. But here was Jim, singing about the killer who took a face from the ancient gallery before threatening to kill his father and fuck his mother. It unsettled me, but I also needed it somehow.
A scan of one of the journals Jim Morrison kept while living in Paris.
Jim wrote copiously in notebooks he took with him everywhere, and kept them in a strongbox he called “127 Fascination.” I adopted this practice immediately, filling notebooks – one of which I named “128 Fascination” – with teenage poetry, quotes from friends, photos, sketches, and letters to Jim.
Dear James,
How did you feel when Pamela entered your life? Was she just another girl, or was she special right away? I read an article that called her “a young, red-haired art-school dropout from Orange County who stumbled into one of the Doors’ earliest nightclub gigs on the Sunset Strip and promptly fell in love with the good-looking singer in the band. It went on to say that you took her home that night, and ever since began introducing her as your “cosmic mate.” Is this true? How did you feel that first night, I mean, did you know? Soulmates you may have been, but how long did it take for you to realize it?
I look at you, and I, myself, feel drawn to you. There is a mystique about you that draws even the most timid of women, even the most skeptical. But you used that to your advantage – indulging your wildest fantasies because you knew they were willing, trying to have as many women as you possibly could because they didn’t refuse, because they wanted you. Sex is an escape, which is as volatile, as addictive, as any drug.
As a teen, I didn’t recognize his abusive side. The fights with Pamela. The relentless failure to show up on time for rehearsals or gigs. Performing drunk, high or both, and attempting to provoke the crowds to riot. He lived his life as a kind of social experiment or performance art, and it was years before I understood that men like him aren’t to be trusted.
Jim was the first of his kind that I had a crush on, but he wasn’t the last. Soon I had eyes for Axl Rose, the wild, unfiltered frontman for Guns N’ Roses, and the similarly unhinged Sebastian Bach, the beautiful lead singer for Skid Row. After I stopped writing letters to Jim, I started writing letters to Axl, and longed for others like him. I wanted these men’s darkness, their drama. Their tempestuousness and talent made my blood hum and limbs loosen. I mistook their raw, unfiltered diatribes for openness and vulnerability. Their willingness to be angry and unacceptable stood in for my own as I wrapped myself in fear and silence, pretending I was okay.
My ex wasn’t much like these rock stars. But he had done something that made me feel deeply unsafe, that violated my right to decide what happens to my body. Years later, I realized that my attraction to Jim was the first sign of that wound. “Many traumatized people expose themselves, seemingly compulsively, to situations reminiscent of the original trauma,” writes trauma expert Bessel Van Der Kolk. Sigmund Freud thought people repeated situations and relationships to try to gain mastery over them, but that’s not usually what happens. Instead, the repetition re-traumatizes survivors and hurts those around them, Van Der Kolk said.
My path wasn’t so straightforward. The next year, I fell in love with a guy my own age, who was kind and gave warm, strong hugs that squeezed goodness into my body. We had a lot in common, down to our fondness for thrash and funk metal, and rain in the forest. He didn’t push me to have sex. When we did, on weekends in his king-sized bed with redwoods outside, I would tremble and sob and have to stop. My body was beginning to tell me the story of what I’d been through. He held me through it, until my tears waned and the terrified parts of me felt safer again.
But the darkness was never far from the surface, and Jim was a constant companion throughout high school. Over time, it became less of a crush, more of a desire to be like him, somehow: raw, literary, brave, honest, but without all the mind-altering substances. I couldn’t let people see the wounded part of me, couldn’t let them know I didn’t have my shit together, so I lived it through Jim. I started writing short stories about damaged young men – always men, somehow – who did too many drugs, drove too fast on backcountry roads, took their own lives, or were literal murderous vampires. I rewrote those roads I once drove with my ex, and littered them with terror, fear and shadow.
Later, in my 20s, those longings spilled over into my personal life. I dated a handful of guys whose long hair, good looks and damaged souls sucked me in, like a 5-year-old to a sack full of candy. There was the one who’d stayed home from school as a childhood to keep his mother from killing herself, a passionate lover who would pound his head on the wall when he did something wrong. There was the one who’d been abused by his uncle, who drank until he passed out every night, but woke up at 3am wearing the face of that wrecked little boy. And the one who thought he was a spiritual guru, complete with visions of parallel worlds, but who turned out to be delusional. I cared for them, thinking I was giving them the mothering they’d needed but never got. Instead, I was trying to give them what I most needed myself: unconditional, gentle love, someone to help that frightened girl-child inside me feel safe so she could finish growing up.
It’s 30 years later, and the shadows haven’t left me. I see Jim Morrison now for what he was: a flawed, damaged, charismatic guy who flamed out far too early. Inside me, still, is the teenage girl who sought refuge in his darkness, a thick cloak of turmoil that masked my own. But I’m working to remember the girl I was before all that: the Duran Duran and Madonna girl, the curious, shy and trusting girl. Jim had someone like that inside him, too – a quiet boy, curious and bookish, who built up layers of armor to survive being moved from place so many times as a kid. A little boy so shaken by the sight of a violent highway crash that those ghosts rattled around inside him for the rest of his brief life. These days, I’m drawn more to that kid, whose “fragile eggshell mind,” as Jim once described it, was cracked before he knew how to handle it. The girl in me knows just what that’s like. She’s still inside, somewhere, wondering why all the lights went out.
It is unrelenting. Circular. A clump of chains I can’t untangle. It is like that hedge maze in The Shining: I cannot get out of it. I am trapped. Trapped in the ceaseless sax solo from George Michael’s “Careless Whisper.”
But why? Why is it stuck in my head, in a perpetual loop? What part of my frontal lobe – a locality so full of things that are not George Michael songs – has weakened in just the right moment for that slithery little woodwind to slip in? And furthermore: where did I even hear it in the first place?
Maybe it was playing in my corner bodega…or was that the new Drake single? Was it the jingle gracing my gynecologist’s waiting room? Oh, no, that was “Nasty Boys” by Janet Jackson (true story). Surely I didn’t hear it at a party…or did I?
I am mystified by how these things happen; I don’t listen to George Michael (RIP) – not yet anyway. And while it has been on my to-do list to “go through a George Michael phase,” I didn’t even know “Careless Whisper” was called “Careless Whisper” until I Googled “George Michael saxophone song.” So why is my mind rapt with it today?
For several hours the saxophone has persisted. It will not stop. To make matters worse, I can’t quit vocalizing the sax riff: “Byeah-duh-duh-duh-Byyyeaaaaah-duhduhduh- Byeah-duh-duh-duh-Byyyeaaaaah-duhduhduh” again and again and again. This is partly why I do not listen to classical music – the irresistible urge to sing instrumentation. It was because of people like me that phrases such as “shoobie doobie doo-bop” and “walla-walla-bing-bang” were created: so that we wouldn’t ruin the guitar solo by trying to sing it. But “Carless Whisper” hath no “walla-walla-bing-bang” to shout; therefore “Byeah-duh-duh-duh-Byyyeaaaaah-duhduhduh” we must!
George Michael’s wriggling little number is not the first unwelcome “earworm” to invade my brain – an earworm being defined as “a tune or part of a song that repeats in one’s mind” by Dictionary.com. Kelly Clarkson’s “Since You’ve Been Gone,” U2’s “It’s A Beautiful Day,” and that godforsaken new Ed Sheeran single have all been contaminants in my auditory cortex. Perhaps the strangest occurrence of these spontaneous earworms (never prompted by actually hearing the song in question) was the handful of times I woke up with Shania Twain’s “Man! I Feel Like A Woman” stuck in my head, after not hearing it for over a decade. That ditty probably hasn’t even been on the radio in that long. Had I dreamt about Shania? Had I dreamt about my friend’s mother, with whom I used to sing Shania songs? Did I feel super, extra, especially “Like a woman” upon waking, as the lyrics might suggest? No.
I’ve tried to battle these unwanted worms with “good” music; music the culturati and I regard as “worthwhile,” “respectable,” or “hip.” This cannon of “good” music can be repurposed as an arsenal of songs to deflect the “superficial” melodies holding our heads hostage – right?
Not necessarily. In an attempt to quell the writhing earworms, I’ve tried everything; all the songs I claim to love. “Still Ill” by The Smiths; “Outdoor Miner” by Wire; “Palimpsest” by Smog. I sing them on repeat, feeling every word leave my lips; begging them to stay a little while longer. But they just crumble. None of these songs – songs I deem “better” than the earworms – none of them have the fortitude to withstand the stab of “Careless Whisper’s” sax solo. One sticky note from that hunk of curved brass, and all “interesting” music buckles at the knees. Go ahead. Play “Careless Whisper” and Suicide’s “Girl” back to back. Let’s see which one gets stuck in your head.
Is this the triumph of practice over theory? Beauty over brains? Wonderbread over homemade, whole wheat? Is the micro-phenomenon of a song getting lodged in your brain representative of some greater, macro-phenomenon, like the longevity of certain music? Aren’t there scientists who can answer my questions?
Of course there are! Particularly the researchers whose study title will not get stuck in your head: Dissecting an Earworm: Melodic Features and Song Popularity Predict Involuntary Musical Imagery. Catchy! All jokes aside, I was pleased to discover that this question had plagued others to the same degree: why do certain songs get stuck in our heads, while others float away? What makes an earworm an earworm?
According to the study’s lead author Kelly Jakubowski, the “findings show that you can, to some extent, predict which songs are going to get stuck in people’s heads based on the song’s melodic content.” A few factors are at play when a song is riding a relentless carousel ‘round your brain. Familiar melodies, simple lyrics, and upbeat tempos are often proponents of the earworm, as well as unexpected intervals or jumps in the song, which add jusssssst enough interest – but not too much!
Given this formula and over 3,000 survey responses, the study compiled a list of the nine most earwormish songs out there:
Lady Gaga: “Bad Romance”
Kylie Minogue: “Can’t Get You Out of My Head”
Journey: “Don’t Stop Believin’”
Gotye: “Somebody That I Used to Know”
Maroon 5: “Moves Like Jagger”
Katy Perry: “California Gurls”
Queen: “Bohemian Rhapsody”
Lady Gaga: “Alejandro”
Lady Gaga: “Poker Face”
While “Careless Whisper” didn’t make the cut, Kylie Minogue’s “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” is too perfect for words; so perfect, that I can’t help but wonder if Cathy Dennis and Rob Davis had earworms in mind while penning the lyrics… Regardless I’ve learned two things from this list:
Lady Gaga is Queen of the Earworm, given her monopoly.
I loathe almost 80% of this list – Kylie and Queen being the exceptions.
I’ve also learned that you can’t control what songs get stuck in your head, no matter how hard you try. So you might as well relax, sit back, and enjoy the…
