My Rock-n-Roll Heart

When you're with a group of semi-psychotic people, you kind of lose track of reality; it's almost like being in some sort of cult or something.

-Tommy Ramone

Now I’m a rock-n-roll angel, earned my wings, easing out over the graveyard in the middle of the night. Everyone leaves things behind. For me, it was the music. The band. I left it behind, I don’t know why. That’s the other thing/ you don’t know why you do things a lot of the time in this life. But that’s also how you know you’re on the right track. If you are still maintaining a lot of who you were 20 years ago or whatever, you are probably all kinds of bent inside. That’s not science, it’s just me saying it. But I say that because I feel like it must be true.

Out in the ethereal mist, I’m an angel smoking cigarettes, letting ash fall on it’s own down, down, down from my spot 12 feet up in the air. I let the ashes grow long as strange fingernails, watch them break on their own/ float down to the night ground. Every headstone down there is a moment I lived when I was alive in the band. Every chiseled stone’s faded words, evaporating dates, it all corresponds to things I saw. People I met. People I saw. Things I met.

It wasn’t until I let go of the band that I began to appreciate what it meant to me back when it was such a centerpiece of my life. But at the same time, it wasn’t until I walked away from it that I also began to understand just how much a thing you loved can someday break your heart in ways you never ever could have imagined possible.

So let’s see.

Let’s see where that even takes us, huh?

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On a motel bathroom floor, somewhere on the outskirts of Chicago, I woke up to susurrous voices chattering from inside an old song. The shower was running but no one was in there. This I know because I’m the one who’d flipped it on when I slid down the wall/ last night/ technically: earlier this morning/ after the gig/ after the gig at the small loud club.

I was drunk/ happy/ alone.

I’m probably staying in a room with someone else but I don’t think about it. For me, rooming with bandmates was never something I particularly enjoyed. I mean, I know I saw enough of the person, whoever it was, in the van; saw enough of them in the truck stop looking at candy bars; saw enough of them in the clubs, after soundcheck, walking around aimlessly: each of us crossing paths as we nearly collided looking at posters on the walls for the other bands who were playing here soon.

Around every corner, there was a drummer. A bass player. My brother. A keyboardist or someone who was just there traveling with us for whatever reason. A stranger in a strange land was the idea behind rock/roll, but somehow once you get into a band and take to the road, you are never able to completely unmoor yourself from the connections that the band as a vessel of existence insists upon. Why? Well, I think it’s because being in a band means you are running so panic’d and frothing and hard from so many things at once.

Which also means that the other people in the band are running too. Right beside you. All the time. No matter what.

You join a band and you work hard and things start to happen and you push off the dock and it’s as if you are given a wilderness all to yourself. A mirrored lake for which to row out into/ vast and crystal/ ringed by real mountains/ engulfed in Northern Lights and shooting star glow/ there is a true sensation of intensely acute liberty that washes over your regularness, your averageness, and shifts it into something so much more electrifying than any experience you have ever had before. Alone, your body is awash in the feelings of self-fulfillment, the whiff of radically foreign pride taking shape around your heart where previously there had never been anything even close.

And it all comes from the nature of collective effort, that is true. I mean, if the band is what got you there then how else could it be? Still, the personal outshines the communal quite a lot. It is how humans are hardwired. Within the band’s group effort there is brotherhood and achievement. But the self can never be fully integrated into the community. That’s the entire reason you found yourself playing a guitar in your shitty little bedroom at 11 years old to begin with. You wanted to feel alive by feeling apart.

As it all happens then, you are unaware at times of how interconnected you really are with the mothership. You row out onto the placid glass of a magic land, your heart beating so loud that you can feel it in your eyes, as you come face to face with this new version of you who is doing it, man. You’re out there doing it. And it feels utterly heroic/ like opiates/ that pirate freedom in your sails/ powering your oars.

You find yourself shooting up with the most powerful dope known to mankind.

A sense of self.

Well, I did anyways.

Being in a band defined me at last. Being in a band took the tape off the mummy, set that dried-up shrunken little fucker loose upon the land.

It was mythical, the titillation. The sense of wonder. The possibilities that come when being no one and nothing one day leads you towards the light.

Then you realize that they’re all there too. The other band members. Just standing there smoking a sad bowl under an awning on the side of the Motel 6 where no one cares what you do. They cough because their lungs are stoned. Their black duffel bags are blocking the glass door. I am about to go get the van, pull it over here, watch them all pile in, aim us towards the next town. The next gig. The next chapter.

The rain is pounding down. The sound of it is like the shower back in the room. You are freer than any man could ever want to be. And you are shackled to these other freedom junkies. Look at them, blowing factory clouds of pot smoke into this heavy iron Gary Indiana morning.

Fuckers.
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My mouth was beefy, oniony. On the filthy tiles of that bathroom, I began to see things coming into focus. It wasn’t wink-wink movie focus either; there is hardly any cinematic charm to most moments in a band as they are going down. Just like with anything in life: most magic occurs in retrospect. And to make matters more difficult to wrap your head around: there is only an instant of real time life versus the endless looking back on things that once happened in life. And so there is that issue to contend with. It’s easy, as you grow older, to fantasize that you were always in a perpetual state of good times when you look back on the years in that life. Maybe it is the mind’s way of moving you forward. Or maybe it is a sign that we are less evolved than we like to think.

Unless, of course, you were born under a whack sign like me. For all of this consistently made me quite curious. A witness, I became, right there as things were unfolding beneath my proverbial feet! Free! Alive! Out in the wilds and no one knew where the fuck I was at any given moment! I lived, for a spell, in a touring life before cell phones! Can you possibly imagine?? If you lived that life too then you understand the truest meaning of adrift and untraceable. But very few did. It leaves me feeling special that way.

Curious then. I was curious about why I was so frequently overcome by a kind of fathomless blues that only seems to exist for travelers (as far as I can tell). A unique brand of stifled and unsure, these were chains around my limbs that seemed to drag me down into ethereal blues way more than I would have ever expected. I’d always been somewhat depressed, I figure, but this was different. It was purer. It felt more rooted into the landscape and the sky-scape than anything I’d ever known or read or heard sung about in a song, Hank Williams came close, I guess. Ralph Stanley, Robert Johnson. Stevie Nicks. I don’t know. It’s not for me to say.

It wasn’t constant either, this cloud, I swear. But I did find myself very regularly under the spell of whatever it was. Tiring mystical sadness rising up from nothing. It appeared to roll up off of the Wyoming plains/ to wash up over all those bridges on the Charles River. In parking lots in rural Nevada a wind would strike down out of the forbidding mountains laid out before me and I would see the other guys walking ahead of me laughing, smoking, happy to be out of the van for ten minutes, and I would lag behind/ all alone/ feeling dense/ invisible/ maybe even doomed.

Now, hidden from the world in this motel, hidden from my bandmates by a couple doors and the late night need to entomb myself away from them, I looked down at my boots still tied tightly to my feet and I had this vigorous rush of fellowship for this person laying right where I was laying.

The running water had long ago shifted to cool. The steam it had filled the room with when I first cranked the shower knob had left condensation on the walls. The diseased fuchsia paint was soaked. The whole room appeared wet but I was mostly dry. My skin was clammy but that was to be expected. I was still wearing my vest and dress shirt from last night. My pants were the same ones I’d been wearing on stage for weeks now without being washed. They were tight and I was thin and I hoped that it turned women on even though none of them ever said anything.

I was a damp lad.

I had no idea what time it was.

I pulled my backpack close to me, felt the heft of my books in there. My novels.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

Silas Marner.

Mountain Man.

I became awash in unusual feelings. I was contented. I was upset. I was horny. I wanted coffee. I was exhausted. I was eager. I was so very proud of being here: alone on that floor: not much to my name: no one wondering where I was or how I was. The whole world out there acting as if I had never even existed to begin with.

I sighed and rubbed my eyes.

My contacts were still in.

I smiled, sheepishly.

Then I closed my eyes to die.

But that’s not how these things go.
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Guitars in stands, a bass leaning against a Fender amp that’s set up on a cheap rickety red vinyl and wood chair, lights on pedals/ flickering and going dark/ a mostly empty room but muffled laughter coming from different corners. A telephone ringing off in a room somewhere. The smell of snow on people’s jackets as they come in. The whiff of the cold night clinging to their smiling faces. An unmanned cafe table with CDs/ stickers in a small pile/ handwritten prices scrawled out in black Sharpie on a single piece of white paper. Two different patterns of t-shirts, each on a hanger hung from above.

Familiarity in the voices of total strangers.

Cigarette smoke etched into the beer glass like stained glass cathedrals. Cold pale ale. The smoldering woods of a Marlboro Light. A sound guy in pen light back behind the board. The phone ringing again. Bar maids who smile and bar maids who never smile.

Music starts on the house system. A cool comp someone made.

First song: Dinosaur Jr.

Second song: The Ramones.

Third song: a Japanese punk girl.

Fourth song: We Built This City on Rock-and-Roll.

A few people stand kind of close to the stage. A young dude comes through a dark door and carries two Bud Light cases back behind the bar. There are Christmas lights, a neon Killian’s Red light, a clip on light above the cash register for the people working. There are different colored lights on the stage. Mostly red. Someone walks up to look at the floor of the stage, at the band’s gear maybe. Or at a setlist if there is one. Then they walk back to their friends/ slowly/ grinning a little/ sipping a Jack and Coke. Underneath this building there are buried bones of Indians who died long ago. No one knows they’re there. No one ever will. In the backstage area the bands all mingle between stacked plastic crates of recyclable empties. Some smoke cigarettes, some puff on a joint. There are a couple local bands and a band from far away. Everyone is trying to fit in. Some are better than others. Sometimes there is tension but not usually. Mostly it’s just imagined in the heads of the rabidly insecure. There’s a small mini-fridge that was filled with domestics. It’s almost empty now though, even with a half-hour to go before anyone plays a note. Someone’s mom and stepdad come back to say hi. People laugh. There’s a Johnny Cash poster tacked to the drywall. He’s staring straight into the camera, menacingly. He’s flipping the photographer off. You know the photo.

You were born inside of it many moons ago.

We all were.

Many, many moons ago.

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In it’s truest form, playing rock-n-roll music on a stage with other musicians who you have played with many many times before, it transcends language. The static buildup that happens in the hour or so before a stage in a bar is lit up by sound is something as pure as anything I’ve known. I carry it with me on quieter nights now. I carry it with me and I’m glad that I can.

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No force of nature ever hit us as hard as the slamming of the gales that we drove into that day. The Alabama sky went green like a bruise. It was something out of Faulkner. Something out of Cormac McCarthy. I felt certain that a tornado would come tearing across the horizon. Things happened so fast, but maybe we should have known. The sky off ahead of us was sinister dark/ as if the whole of space was being funneled down through the atmosphere and seeped into some county sky just up ahead of us and our van and our uncertain Yankee asses.

Weather such as that, it lights a fire in you. You grow energy where there wasn’t any a few moments ago. Inside of each of us in the van/ inside the five or six of us/ we began to move from the individual realm that typically occupies that uneventful space over into a much rarer realm in which our agitated tired road-weary experiences were very swiftly placed on the floor of the Sprinter in favor of this other thing: this collective unified thing where each band member’s individual agency/ the guitar players and the lap steel player and the bass guy and the drummer/ they all stared straight ahead at the deep south horizon and the green bruise of destruction that most certainly was awaiting us up ahead: and we shape-shifted, as only people in bands can ever do, from separate entities with their free copies of the USA Today from last night’s Super 8 into a group of travelers pulled closely together upon seeing, all at once, the formation of a bad storm on the horizon.

I drove us straight at it. Everyone agreed. We had no other choice. Never before had any of us even seen a tornado let alone had the cards in our hand to possibly deal ourselves smack into the middle of one. To perish, all of us together, in such a way would not only guarantee us rock/roll legend status, but it would undoubtedly seal our fates as some of the greatest American badasses who’d ever lived.

We flew by Waffle Houses and churches and fields. We passed poor neighborhoods down off the highway where you could see thick weeds covering up the baseball fields. We ran by people pushing their shopping carts from the grocery store doors towards their cars in the parking lot as if the sky was calm and blue not green and haunting. They didn’t give a rat’s ass. There were no state trooper cars flying down the road. I didn’t see any rescue vehicles or hear any sirens going off in any of these little scrappy towns on the outskirts of Huntsville. I thought it might start raining catfish and cottonmouths any second, but it never did.

We simply plunged, headlong, into the heart of a tornado that never even existed.

Eventually the skies broke open and the guts poured out and the rain was dazzlingly harder than anything any of us had ever seen. But I pulled the van off the highway and we waited it out.

It was bullshit and we knew it. We had been braver than hell, willing to hurl ourselves at the hungriest sky in order to achieve mythic status as a band. We had broke out of our creepy loner survival places in the van just to meet each other on the trail of death. And we had done so willingly, without ever questioning any of it.

But you can’t get to legend dying as a band in a thunderstorm, no matter how bad it is. I cracked the window a bit, thinking maybe lightning would blow into the vehicle and fry us all. But the rain coming through the slight opening was too hardcore for me at that point. Big blops of Alabama rain hit me in the eyeball and pissed me off. I rolled up the window and that was that. Everyone lifted their USA Today, hid themselves back in the paper curtains.

I lit a smoke, cut the wipers, watched the patterns of bursting rain explode all over the windshield. I began to think about lunch. Bbq. Maybe a Ryan’s buffet. I inhaled slowly, held the smoke in my lungs, and then let it slip up out of my body and back into the faces of the rest of the guys.

Somewhere out there, there was sweet tea and biscuits and a road unseen.

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When I close my eyes, I see many of you. Or some version of you, I promise. Faces in the crowds, people at the bar. I went out on the road once upon a time with my brother, some others and it was messy and chaotic and quite loving and violent and hard.

Circus Train Deadwood. Viking Gospel Choir. Pennsylvania Soul Searchers.

The Traveling Tap Room Night Poet Society.

Nothing had prepared me for the ways being in a band could lift a person so high. Or drag them down so low. I see now, every other day or so, musicians I once shared a stage with/ or a ride with/ or a meal with/ or whatever/ and I see that many of them are still out there: still playing their guitars and their drums in the night. I have a lot of affection for those people. I have mad respect for their continued resonance, loud or soft, humming in the dirt.

At the same time, I think being a musician in a band also made me very, very sad in ways that I am still exploring. I feel that it is possible that I let myself be too invested in it, but I also don’t have any goddamn clue what that actually means. I understand that words are only words and if nothing else, I have found that by sharing my established thoughts, and more poignantly, by sharing my whimsical notions that have no real structure or foundation or any of that, I have often drawn comments from folks who mean well and make a lot sense, even though they have completely missed whatever the hell it was that I was trying to get close to. I never knew what I was trying to say, but I somehow knew that they’d missed it bad anyhow.

Which leads me to the conclusion that I’ve got a long, long way to go as a writer. And I know it. But, you see, that’s the reason I think I keep coming back to this. It feels so alive to me where the stage had begun to feel differently. In my own head, as I grew older and had kids, I began to notice that I might have to spend some time trying to figure out what was creating blues in me. Less and less, over time, was I inspired to walk out onto the stage again. And not that anyone has ever spent even a moment wondering why I made that decision, or if I would stick to it, but for reasons embedded in my own subconscious, I suspect that it does me a little good now and then to allow myself to think back on it all. To reminisce and daydream. To try and remember what things smelled like, what they tasted like. Everything is so ephemeral. But being in a band really is. One day you are hanging off the top of the Empire State Building. Then the next day, there you go, walking out that back door into the winter morning: your lunch in a sack: your coffee in the same travel mug you use everyday. That wild transience, that eclectic freedom that came as part of the rock/roller package, it lives on, for better or for worse, down in the juices splashing up and down my bones.

I miss nothing. I pine for none of it. I open my lunch bag and see what I packed myself and it makes me laugh to have come so far from the very edge of so much only to stand well back from it now.

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I remember the edges of greasy stages. I recollect the sky’s edges burning up to the color of moss. So many nights: I stomped on the edge of my tuner and freed myself into the rest of the band, into the music they were making. I landed on the edges of futures that never panned out and I edged out others for the one that did. Down in all of that rarified sadness that once overtook me as I drove that van through herds of antelope on the plains, I found something indescribable, something that lives out beyond words, in the simple act of giving myself over, without fear, to the chance of doing something righteous, strong, and good.

Rock-n-roll bands like the one I was in leave scars on your throat where they cut you open hoping you’d die. But they also rub memories into your temples, gentle wordless poems that can never be undone. A sunset over the mountains. A train way off in the distance. A forest on the side of a mountain. A sandwich on a majestic vista. A conversation in a dark late bar. The music plays inside me even if I rarely let it out. And the sweat running down our foreheads, dripping down onto our guitars, leaving salted snake tracks running down the backs of our instruments, trails that have faded by now into the new day’s sheen, I remember the sting in my eyes, the methodic blindness that leads to audible bliss. The sincerity of volume. The burnt-out essence of moments lost forever, no matter what we do.

To have done a thing is one thing, but to have done a thing and to feel so proud of it is something else altogether. Especially if your heart lies elsewhere now. Green sky in the rearview, standing in the goddamn shower instead of sleeping on its banks, I mash the pedal and hurl myself forward into modern moments rising from my past.

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Hey. Thanks for reading Thunder Pie!! In case you didn’t know, I write here every single week, mostly for paid subscribers. I sure would appreciate it if you decided to become one of those. It’s only $10 per month or $120 per year. That’s a good deal! You get like 50 new creative non-fiction pieces a year for that! One every Friday morning. Plus PAID SUBS also get exclusive access to almost 3 years worth of my work; it’s all there, just waiting for you to sit down with your coffee (or a glass of hooch) and dig in.

If you’re already a paid subscriber, please know how very grateful I am. Without your belief in me, I could not do this. And this writing dream means everything to me.

Serge

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THINGS I LIKED THIS WEEK.

• ‘I Don’t Care Anymore’ by Phil Collins. This song is better than almost all the other songs by all the other people who have ever written a song about a the end of a relationship. It perfectly captures a very very specific two-way street in my life/ and I’m guessing a lot of other people’s lives as well.

• This song too. Genesis. Jesus Christ/ so good/ so soulful and melodic and synthy and drum driven and teenage sad and perfect.

• I listened to an actor reading New York Magazine writer Tom Scocca’s article, My Unraveling. It was easily one of the strangest pieces I’d encountered in a while. And I mean that in the best way possible. The tale (very well-read by Eduardo Ballerini) is the writer’s true account of a period in his life, not long ago, when the shit really hit the fans for him in more ways than one. This one rolls like a runaway train until, at one point, I had to pause it and put down my caulk gun at work and just drink some coffee because I was confused and feeling rattled by everything I was hearing. Just brilliant writing that drops you off at a corner in the modern big city with no answers whatsoever.

• I have been digging winter/ being inside my big coats/ hiding away under my big coats/ feeling safe and secure down within the caves of my big coats.

• There are a lot of documentaries about the Amish on YouTube. Which is kind of ironic, I guess, since most Amish people have most likely never even heard of YouTube. Living in amongst them as we do here in Centre County, PA, there’s a tendency to see them as nothing special/ just our neighbors/ pains-in-the ass on the road when you’re in a hurry. But I’m glad I’ve been feeling curious about them lately, checking out some cultural profiles of their story and such. If you are ever in search of damn fine films about the Amish…well, I reckon I’m your man. This Our Story TV doc was worthwhile, I thought. But if you only have time to watch one (wtf is wrong with you??!!) then might I recommend this very vintage 1959 one? It is a Pennsylvania real treasure.

• I’m eager to see the highly-anticipated upcoming Brian Grazer film, ‘The Zone of Interest’. My guy feeling is that it’s going to be a wildly emotional labyrinth/ a masterwork of strata upon strata. Fingers crossed.

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Europe was a horrible place. There was nothing on TV. The food was terrible. And they don't even have ice. Who doesn't have ice?

-Johnny Ramone

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I leave this QR hanging right here for folks who want to help support my writing with a one-time donation: a weekly ‘cuppa coffee’ fund, a little something something for the sake of art. Just aim your phones camera at the picture and my Venmo address will pop up. Easy. I put a whole lot of work into Thunder Pie and I truly appreciate every penny people kindly lay in my path. It really helps me out so much.

Thanks for considering. :)

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Thunder Pie is edited every single week by Arle Bielanko.

Photos: Serge Bielanko, Arle Bielanko, Anna Selden

Email: sergebielanko@gmail.com

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Play before you get good, because by the time you get good, you're too old to play

-Joey Ramone

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