I love my life, I love this record and

Unrelated to today’s essay, here are two pieces I read recently; one is about live music 30 years ago and the other live music today. I really enjoy Caryn Rose’s work, especially about U2, a band I cannot bring myself to love, but on whom she essays with such eloquence and erudition.

U2's Zooropa at Wembley Stadium, August 20 & 21, 1993 by Caryn Rose

TikTok Has Transformed the Concert Experience by Aja Romano

I thought these pieces spoke to each other from across the ether, and made me feel somewhat at peace about concert-going as an evergreen social activity, even amidst the corporatization of all life.

Anyway.

Every time I take my car into the shop they offer me a free lift with a guy named Ron. He has lived in the area his whole life, and knows the ins and outs of the one-ways, the byways, the highways. You might assume this means he gets me home in record time. Absolutely not. Ron takes the wackest routes imaginable.

Every time Ron drives me home he tells me how his wife died. He tells me how their dog was lying in bed with her body, cold and stiff after a pulmonary embolism, possibly brought on by a surgery she had years earlier. Every time Ron drives me home he tells me how big the funeral was, how beautiful the flowers. Ron never remembers he’s told me all this before.

When I first starting working at the used bookstore, the etiquette for who picks the music playing in the store wasn’t immediately clear to me. I deferred to the man in his sixties with a pony-tail whom customers always assume is the owner. (He isn’t, and is stunned when people expect it of him.) Chris used to make custom t-shirts. Screen-printing. For years he designed the official t-shirts of the town’s local 4/20 fest, Hash Bash. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of science fiction and horror novels. He reads a lot of news headlines and chainsmokes. We stack boxes, we price paperbacks, we commiserate over climate change, the rise of American fascism, and he says he expected to kick the bucket before everything went too bad. I tell him I’m hanging on to outlive Trump/Mcconnell/etc. he says, oh don’t bother. “I’ve been waiting for Kissinger to kick it since the seventies.”

At some point when the doomsaying becomes too bleak I insist only one of us is allowed to be depressed per shift. He puts on a smile, says ok fine it’s your turn today. He quotes What We Do In The Shadows at me.

The first time it’s finally my turn to choose the music, I queue Kate Bush’s debut album—an obsession of mine I think would gel with the store’s vibe. Chris almost immediately says to me, “The Kick Inside? Oh my god I lost my virginity to this album.” We had known each other for two weeks. He did not yet remember my name, greeting me only ever with a “Hey…man.”

Eventually he too tells me how his wife died. MS. Long, drawn out. Years of hospital bills. They’d been together his whole life. She loved Kate Bush too.

My friend and mentor Fritz is responsible for the largest collection of typecasting equipment in America and possibly the world. (Don’t worry Fritz’s wife is alive and well. Hi Sara!) In a warehouse in Ohio Fritz and several partners in crime have everything and anything a person would need to make lead type on an industrial scale. (You can follow and support the preservation work they do here.) He inherited this dubious heirloom and its attendant responsibilities from his friend and mentor, Greg Walters, a man of overflowing personality whom you can see in various documentaries about printing presses. (Here is my favorite. He’s there, about 5 minutes in.)

Fritz asked me to help sort some of Greg’s massive collection of type and accoutrements. Among it all was a box of type labeled “GAGA”. I’d never heard of that typeface and asked Fritz about it. Fritz didn’t know much either, but what he could tell me was that Greg Walters was the biggest Lady Gaga fan he’d ever known.

Greg lived alone, never married, and had no children. Those prone to condescending pity might have considered him a lonely man. I did not know him myself, but the picture Fritz paints for me defies this easy image. Greg attended dozens of Lady Gaga concerts. He was well known amongst diehard fans. The road and security crew knew him on a first name basis. I suppose he stuck out—a balding older man in a Jimmy Buffet button down, floating about the crowds of poppered twinks and starry-eyed tweens. A lighthouse against the loneliness other might imagine for him. If you take the time to watch him speak about typecasting and letterpress you’ll witness a level of dedication associated primarily with wizards of old. But far from living in a haunted tower leaning over a bubbling cauldron, ruing a world ignorant of his genius, Greg was devoted to the preservation and dissemination of his knowledge. What he loved so deeply was never meant for his enjoyment alone. I suspect he approached all his great loves similarly.

I don’t have as many shifts at the bookstore with Chris anymore. At a recent overlap he asked me if I knew of this great new artist. Orville Peck. I laughed. What in the world was Chris doing listening to a gay cowboy cosplayer from South Africa?

“Oh you gotta hear this one.”

And for the third time that day, he informed me, Orville Pecks’ cover of “Born This Way” by Lady Gaga, graced the bookstore patrons ears.

If you like Orville Peck, you’ll love it. He does all his moves: lonesome coyote howling, troubadour trembling vibratto, big booming honky-tonk guitar lines. It’s laid back, a little longer, but remains pretty faithful to the original. No exuberance is lost in Peck’s rendition, if anything, he helps lay bare the succinct and sharp writing that made the original such a smash. The image of a mother doing their child’s hair and makeup in the mirror of her boudoir is simple and clean. In Gaga’s version it evokes a sense of womanhood passed from mother to child. Peck refuses the cowardice of those other cover artists always changing the pronouns to no-homo the vibe—and rumbles through that line in a manner that gives me gender euphoria. Peck grew up doing ballet, so one can easily imagine this line rings as true for him as it does for Stefani Germanotta. What’s passed from parent to child isn’t just gender, but performance itself. We learn through imitation and experimentation, whether it’s language, our looks, or those we love. This cover sings.

If you love Lady Gaga the way I do, which is to say “You and I” is the best thing the Fame Monster ever did, then you will also love this version. There are few things more country than camp. Gaga, Peck, and their perfumed predecessor Miss Dolly Parton know this well. If anything is worth feeling, then it’s worth feeling with your whole body.

That said, God might not make mistakes, but sometimes Miss Gaga does. Peck updates the original’s ill-advised bridge to say “Asian or Latinx” in place of “Chola or Orient”. It wasn’t great then, Gaga, and it ain’t better now.

I’m not a fan of essentialism, unsurprisingly. Predestination has always turned my stomach. Yet this anthem calls to me, its death-defying, “I was born to be brave, I was born to survive.” I tend to fall on the side of Lana Del Rey: “Born to Die.” Or as the gender-jumping inhabitants of Ursula Le Guin’s planet Gethen say in The Left Hand of Darkness, “There’s really only one question that can be answered…and we already know the answer.” That we will die.

The song defies my petty pessimism, and says shut up, you’re going to love this. The joy of singing along: it doesn’t matter what the original artist felt or feels about this song, when we sing it back to them, we feel our own feelings and they sound similar enough to those in concert around us. We’re all alone together in our mothers’ boudoirs, looking at our reflections.

I hope the next time I need my car fixed, Ron will tell me something other than the details of his wife’s death. He doesn’t really let his captive audience get a word in edgewise, but I would like to ask if they had a favorite song. I wonder how many times we could listen to it before he finally got me home. Probably six.