My brain is chock full of ideas for things I want to write. It almost always is. There’s a running list in my mental Notes app that has snippets of conversations and random thoughts that crept in at bedtime and survived sleep. One piece has been on that list for at least a decade. No, longer, because I did pitch the idea of writing a column on this topic, paired with a male music writer, to a magazine well over a decade ago.
The pitch wasn’t picked up, and I’ve never felt like I have the knowledge base, or now a publisher, who might even be interested in this idea. It’s not well-formed. If it was I wouldn’t be rambling as I am. So I’ll jump in. You’re smart. You’ll figure it out.
Three Days in 1993:
June 22: Liz Phair released the album Exile in Guyville
October 5: The Afghan Whigs released the album Gentlemen
October 22: I turned 21.
I didn’t buy either album upon release, or even after they had aged a bit, but I stared at their covers every time I went to Slacker’s to spend my little bit of spare cash—and plenty that should have been spent elsewhere—on the lower-priced used CDs. While college did give me more access to music I wouldn’t have heard back home, there was the problem of being a broke college student. I didn’t have money to spend on used CDs of music I knew I already loved, or would likely love based on a couple of songs I’d heard.
Most indie music that wasn’t getting direct airplay was out of my reach—I couldn’t risk my precious music budget on something I might not like. Slacker’s had just opened, run by two guys not much older than me, who always complimented my taste when I bought Replacements discs and those shitty first-run Beatles CDs. They had a ratty old couch where people could listen to CDs before buying them, but I was too shy to ask.
And yet every week I’d go to Slacker’s, and I’d stare at these album covers side-by-side on the New Releases display: one a purple-tweaked close-up of a woman, eyes partially hidden by a hood, mouth wide open, charging forward, a tiny bit of her aureola exposed. The other, the orange glow of a dingy lightbulb washed over two upsettingly young children on a bed, looking like broken lovers.
I was transfixed by both, and wanted so badly to know what was inside. I was too afraid to risk the investment, which is a shame, because inside those now-iconic covers was the story of my 20s, predicted on the eve of my 21st birthday.
Eventually, my budget caught up with my tastes. Or rather, I said fuck this budget business, I want music and acquired both albums along the way. Not that either resonated much with me at the time.
Liz seemed much more sophisticated than me. The urbane daughter of a doctor from a wealthy Chicago suburb probably didn’t know much about my life in the dorky broke slums.
The Afghan Whigs were the type of guys who probably wouldn’t give this fat girl a second look. I discovered them with their next album in 1996, when Greg Dulli stepped up to the mic and snarled, “Got you where I want you, motherfucker.”
Liz came to me on MTV, before my cable got canceled for delinquent payments in 1994, singing the virtues of a man who could “fuck like a volcano.” Around the same time a friend and a guy I was dating both put songs by Liz on mixtapes to me.
I started paying attention to both The Afghan Whigs and Liz Phair, but the former disbanded at the end of the ‘90s*, and Phair’s music took a turn in 2004 that so clearly reflected the realities of being a wife and mom that I couldn’t stand it, and still can’t, save for “Extraordinary,” which makes me cry, it’s so familiar.
In recent years, I’ve rediscovered the Whigs and Phair. People who know me are surely sick of me referring to Dulli as my future ex-husband, but that’s okay. And four years ago I met Phair at a meet and greet when she released her memoir, Horror Stories. I kind of made a fool of myself, because I was hollering at my best friend as I walked up for my photo op with Liz.
I’ve been listening to both albums a lot in the past year since they were turning 30. It’s not exactly a landmark for me—the 30th anniversary of making weekly visits to the covers of albums I wouldn’t buy. But at the same time, these albums were cultural artifacts I tucked into my brain. They resurfaced when I was ready for them.
Two weeks ago I made another trip to New Orleans to see Liz play Exile in Guyville in its entirety. I’m sure the incident above had nothing to do with the tour not coming to St. Louis. She did two hometown shows at the Chicago Theater, which would normally be exactly what I wanted, but I wanted a smaller venue without the spectacle of a hometown show.
Besides, seeing her in New Orleans gave me an excuse to go to New Orleans for the third time in 13 months. Unrelated, but my favorite NOLA tattoo artist continued the retro dessert buffet above my ass.
More related: I stayed in a suite at one of the New Orleans bars co-owned by Dulli. Not for the first time—the same bestie I was yelling at with Liz fucking Phair between us and I stayed there last February. And I’m no stranger to Dulli’s family of drinking establishments, having had both a bad night and a good night at Club Tee Gee in Los Angeles. Of course, the corny fantasy is that we’ll be at one of his bars at the same time, and he won’t have a restraining order against me for all this “future ex-wife” business.
This time, I’d be lying if I didn’t want him to make an appearance on stage with Phair.
Crazy, right?
Except maybe not. Because something I realized in coming to these albums later that I wouldn’t have noticed in 1993 is that these two albums—one bearing a reputation for being brazenly slutty, the other for being overtly macho—is that they are about the same relationship.
No, really. Hear me out.
This is where I’d love to write something journalistic or academic about the themes of heartbreak and young love, and how gender roles influence them. Because that’s what they are and I have wished for well over a decade that someone would write that paper because I want to understand my theory better.
No one has written this. As best as I can tell, the only time the albums appear in the same articles is when the subject is how crazy good 1993 was for music.
But I swear these albums could be a call-and-response breakup fight, but it’s one I wouldn’t have understood in 1993. I didn’t have those lived experiences yet. But socioeconomic and physical differences aside, I would live out every song on Exile in Guyville with boys—yes, boys, because we were goddamn babies, in retrospect, not much older than the kids on the album cover—who took Gentlemen as a how-to relationship guide. (It’s not.)
I’m five years younger than Liz Phair. Seven years younger than Greg Dulli. I just needed some time to catch up to them. When I did catch up, I wasn’t self-aware enough to pick up on the similarities in the themes of their raw, exposed, messy-bedsheet masterpieces.
I wouldn’t have seen that these albums were a crystal ball in which I would have been able to see my future, myself.
At one point during the New Orleans show, Liz remarked that the time when we were young, in our early 20s, was a sort of liminal space where we weren’t kids but we weren’t the grown-ups. It was a magical, formative, and fucked up time.
She’s right about that. But I was struck by how she talked about those feelings in the past tense, while I feel like I’m still living them. Not for the past, but now, especially in light of the last half of October shaking up so many of my relationships and making me wonder who the fuck I am now.
I’m still that girl in “Fuck and Run.”
The girl in “Divorce Song.”
The girl in “Canary.” Oh my god, that girl …
I learn my name
I write with a number two pencil
I work up to my potential
I earn my name
I come when called
I jump when you circle the cherry
I sing like a good canary
I come when called
I come, that's all
I shed tears for that girl that night in New Orleans, knowing just how a girl can strive for perfection, for pleasing everyone she loves until, like the woman in “When We Two Parted” from Gentlemen:
If I could have only once heard you scream
To feel you were alive
Instead of watching you abandoningYourself.
It’s only been recently that I’ve stopped abandoning myself for other people. I’m still learning and practicing. Since October it’s been a test to see if I can stand firm in who I am, what I believe, and what I want in my life.
So far, so good.
I’m still on hiatus with my alcoholic friend. It’s work to not slip into worry. On some nights habit makes me want to hit his number and find out what albums he bought that day.
My L.A. friend and I are acting like nothing happened. I’m fine with that.
Still no word from the person I reconnected with in July. I’m not thinking about what happened as much. When I do, it’s usually the thought that I should send him a Venmo request for his concert ticket and dinner that night. I won’t, despite deserving compensation.
To try to not feel like a 51-year-old adolescent, which is how I generally feel, I think about how Liz and Greg wrote the lyrics for these albums when they were only in their mid-20s. That is astounding to me. I was writing back then, but I had no idea how to articulate much of what I was feeling or experiencing. Because I was so afraid to scrawl my truth in number two pencil. That’s an evolution that keeps chugging along, even as I’m terrified to send these words out there, to you, whoever you are.
I do know this:
After the concert in New Orleans, I came out of the theater to wait for my Lyft. It had stormed during the show, which I hadn’t noticed. Puddles and eavesdropping clued me in. I gave the address of Sylvain, a French Quarter restaurant I’ve wanted to try. I’d considered inviting one or two of my New Orleans friends to join me for dinner, but I didn’t. Alone has felt good lately.
I sipped an Aperol spritz, ordered the striped bass, ate my vegetables, and thought about my night, the albums, and the artists, hoping that the show, Dulli-less as it was, would give me some conclusion about how these albums should be sold as a set, at the very least. Nothing came to me, except a slice of chocolate hazelnut tart at the end. Which was enough.
When I was two, my parents took me to New Orleans. Because that’s exactly where you vacation with a toddler. I have very fuzzy memories of running in front of the cathedral, among peacocks and buskers. Nothing concrete, just a flash of a scene probably based more on vacation photos than the experience itself. I flashed on those memories when a couple came into the dining room at 10:30 pm, toddler and high chair in tow. Maybe the kid was local. Maybe a tourist baby who will someday have an affinity for New Orleans that they just can’t explain.
It’s not her time yet. Just like it wasn’t my time in 1993. My time arrived soon enough. Only now do I wish for a scrap of the beautiful ignorance of that 21-year-old blowing out the candles.
My friend, you and my Robbie could talk for hours on music. This is the article and you pulled my ass right in. I don’t even need to know the artists. 1993 was enough.
Thank you
Take two albums of the same exact slice of time and see how they compare--- seems like a solidly fertile concept.