Songs for the Walking Dead

Last day of Rocktober. Day of loosing evil spirits. Zombies and vampires lurk.
 

Seems like a perfect day to celebrate the third-most important purpose of modern music: lamenting the Break-Up.

One of the best break-up quotes I’ve ever heard:
“Divorce is like a death in the family where the corpse continues to walk the earth.”

I first heard these sentiments from our former pastor, a man who served as one of many valued mentors in my life, although he was just passing along the quote. An intensely private man, Larry kept most of his personal life to himself, which weirded out most of the AARPies in our congregation, because our church has always been accustomed to extroverted and deceptively open leaders.

This much about him was public: he was divorced and remarried. He had two daughters from his first marriage. The divorce was the beginning of the end of his run at his previous church, and he disappeared from the pulpit for more than half a decade, during which time he remarried.

We were talking about marriage and love and heartbreak and all that jazz when he offered this Divorce = Zombies quote.

For reasons I can’t explain, he shared many additional details about his divorce with me, often while watching football and drinking beer. Maybe he was using this information in a pastoral role as a cautionary tale or a warning of what not to do. Maybe he knew I was more than bitter enough about church to handle anything he shared without my opinion of him or Jesus being at risk. Maybe it’s got to be hell on a pastor, everyone expecting you to be perfect or mostly perfect all the time, especially when you get thrice-punished for a divorce over which you had little control.

Whatever the case, the experience clearly tore a hole in his soul. It didn’t completely crush his spirit, but it broke just about everything else in him. His entire being must have felt like someone who has been in such a devastating wreck that his entire body was in a cast, with several limbs dangling suspended in the hospital bed. He speculated that, were it not for his devotion to and love for his daughters, he might have never healed.

Divorce is the break-up to which all other break-ups aspire. Cute Puppy Love Break-up Demons lick the scraps from the dining room floor of Divorce, their little puppy love tails tucked fearfully under their butts as they whimper under the table, their ribs pushing through their flesh while Divorce sits fat and slobbering and engorged on an overabundance of food.

When it comes to the battlefield of love, I’m like Morgan Freeman in Glory, the dude who walks out into the aftermath and piles up the bodies, except with nary a tenth of his wisdom. I’ve watched lots of good men and women fall on that field, but I’ve barely earned minor battle scars. Yet there's this twisted dark part of me that, in moments of insanity or weakness, wonders what I've missed out on. How screwed up is that??

I’d love to make some argument that we’re so spoiled in contemporary America that we even glamorize the value of break-ups, that the reason the marriage rate has gone down is because it’s more culturally celebrated to break up than it is to stay together, because staying together inevitably means that you choose to put up with entire truckloads of shit and flawed behavior from your significant other.

And I totally want to believe it, too, because it sounds so damn convincing.

Except there’s this whole Romeo & Juliet thing, which is a few decades old, serving as a reminder that we’ve romanticized break-ups since the dawn of the second female.

We may have always and forever romanticized break-ups, but not divorce. I don’t know many normal people who romanticize divorce. Plenty of people pull that D trigger too soon or too often, but they’re usually the ones who pulled the wrong M trigger when they walked down the aisle in the first place. Wrong marriages end in sad divorces. Right marriages end in sadder ones. But all divorces leave corpses walking the earth, some hungrier and more present and dangerous than others.

So, in honor of respecting demons on this Halloween, I pay tribute to the world’s only real zombie-maker: Divorce.

Below are a smidgen of recent favorite break-up songs. Trying to pick a Top 10 would be like trying to pick the 10 hottest women on the planet. It’s foolish to even try, and I’d wake up tomorrow with a totally different opinion anyway.

A Sampler for the Walking Dead:

• Motorcycle Drive-By - Third Eye Blind
• Stay - Rescues
• A&E - Goldfrapp
• Your Next Lover - Lori McKenna
• Bent - Matt Nathanson
• 257 Weeks - Nine Days
• The World Spins Madly On - The Weepies
• Hope Alone - Indigo Girls
• I Wish the Best for You - Emerson Hart
• Haunted When The Minutes Drag - Love and Rockets
• Love and Memories - OAR
• I Can’t Get Over You - Buddy Miller
• Collide - Dishwalla
• Go Your Own Way - Fleetwood Mac

Halloween-ish

"The past keeps knock-knock-knockin' on my door,
And I don't want to hear it anymore."
--Lou Reed

At this time of year, one of my favorite things to do is to "troll" on hypem.com to see what cool Halloween songs are out there. I don't know if I'm too early, or if people aren't feeling it this year, or what, but I haven't been having a whole lot of success with that. Instead, I've been involved in a far more laborious process of trying to find the random song here or there that might have some tenuous connection to our most battered holiday.

But labor when searching for music usually equals fun, so I'm not complaining. Trying to build songs around a common theme is yet another way of discovering new music, and if you only have one way of locating new stuff in 2011, you're definitely missing out.

People try to mess with Halloween more than any other holiday, I guess because its roots are essentially not of the world of light. All of that darkness--plus the ghouls, goblins, vampires, demons, werebeasts, black cats, pumpkin people, and men and women dressed as provocative version of same in bars and at costume parties--scares those who are convinced that the world should be a safe place.

Halloween has become a night of unjustified terror for parents. The "trunk or treat" phenomena is the best current example of the fear paranoia that surrounds this holiday. Just tonight, the waitress at our local sports bar, a pretty sleazy place in a lot of ways, was extolling the virtues of "trunk or treat," calling it "a safe alternative, especially for young children." But that would imply that regular trick or treating is somehow unsafe, that urban legends about razor blades in apples and other things are somehow true. They aren't. Shit, the terrors in our neighborhood are the freaky Christian woman who makes children recite a Bible verse in order to get candy and the dentist's house that gives out toothbrushes.

So, if it seems like the wind is out of the Halloween sails this year, that's probably the reason why. Today's parents, the same ones who won't ever let their children's hands get dirty, have co-opted the simple joys of children walking house to house to collect unhealthy food from their neighbors. Heck, even back in the 60's, my parents made us bring the candy home so they could look at it and see what they wanted us to have or didn't. That's just parenting. But to take away the opportunity for children to enter the chaos, the harmless debauchery of Halloween, I don't think that's parenting at all. That's something else.

But, enough of that. I started off thinking about music. I think I found some pretty good stuff, songs that were sent to us, an old Lou Reed favorite, new things from other people's blogs. My thanks, as always, to those other blogs and the discoveries they provide us with whenever I have the time to look around.

Of course, along the way, I was bound to come across some songs that I liked that had nothing to do with Halloween at all, and those are represented here as well.

I hope there's a little something unplanned for your Halloween, a little something that causes a small fright or catches you off guard. And, just for the record, it's not my mix that I'm calling "Halloween-ish," it's the holiday itself, times being what they are.

I hope you enjoy this collection of songs that have everything and nothing to do with Halloween.

Harry Manx and Kevin Breit--"Do Not Stand At My Grave And Weep" (mp3)

Laura Stevenson and The Cans--"Halloween, pt. 1 and 2" (mp3)

Monarchy (feat. Britt Love)--"You Don't Want To Dance With Me" (mp3)

Wolf Parade--"Ghost Pressure" (mp3)

Little Hurricane--"Give 'Em Hell" (mp3)

Guided By Voices--"The Unsinkable Fats Domino" (mp3)

Halloween, Alaska--"Empire Waist" (mp3)

Daisy McCrackin--"I Think I'm A Ghost" (mp3)

Nada Surf--"See These Bones" (mp3)

The Boxcar Lilies--"The Ghost Tree" (mp3)

Mighty Moon--"Vampire Plans" (mp3)

Lou Reed--"Halloween Parade" (mp3)

Daphne the Gay Ninja

One of the Boys - Mott the Hoople (mp3)
Divine Thing - Soup Dragons (mp3)

Massive positive buzz abounds for a blog entry from a mother whose 5-year-old preschool son dressed up as Daphne for a Halloween party at his school. Here’s the intro, but I highly encourage you to read the entire piece:

My son is gay. Or he’s not. I don’t care. He is still my son. And he is 5. And I am his mother. And if you have a problem with anything mentioned above, I don’t want to know you. I have gone back and forth on whether I wanted to post something more in-depth about my sweet boy and his choice of Halloween costume. Or more specifically, the reactions to it. I figure if I’m still irked by it a few days later, I may as well go ahead and post my thoughts...

I find myself uncomfortably conflicted by her post. Perhaps my reaction speaks poorly of me, but the devil's advocate can't stand the absolute onslaught of warm fuzzies she's receiving. A bajillion people have commented how much they adore this woman’s post, and my reaction wasn’t nearly that simple.

Foremost, some of her zingers are absolutely awesome and righteous, particularly this line:

If you think that me allowing my son to be a female character for Halloween is somehow going to ‘make’ him gay then you are an idiot. Firstly, what a ridiculous concept. Secondly, if my son is gay, OK. I will love him no less. Thirdly, I am not worried that your son will grow up to be an actual ninja so back off.

Good stuff, that. She makes some great points, and most of them have Ka-Chow!

Admittedly, however, I have problems with her overall spiel. First, I don’t really believe someone capable of writing this well can be as clueless as she purports. If she didn’t see these reactions coming -- which officially makes her more socially naive than her 5-year-old -- then she doesn’t get out much. Besides, if she didn't see the negativity coming, then why were all her pals high-fiving her down the hallway?

Therefore, I question her motives. Was she really out to make her sweet precious Boo happy, or was she willing to use her son for her own combative lust? (And, if the answer is a little of both, is that OK?)

Third is my reaction to her conclusion:

And all I hope for my kids, and yours, and those of Moms ABC, are that they are happy. If a set of purple sparkly tights and a velvety dress is what makes my baby happy one night, then so be it. If he wants to carry a purse, or marry a man, or paint fingernails with his best girlfriend, then ok. My job as his mother is not to stifle that man that he will be, but to help him along his way. Mine is not to dictate what is ‘normal’ and what is not, but to help him become a good person.

I’ve got bad news for you, honey. Instant happiness and long term happiness are almost entirely unrelated. One of today's biggest cultural problems is that making your child happy has superseded making them good people, and you are clearly and admittedly in that Insta-Happy Camp. (Happy: first sentence. Good person: last sentence.)

Your son might be "happy one night" taking a dump in his pants. He might be "happy one night" biting dogs. He might find "joy one day" eating maggots off the couch and without utensils or his hands. He might be happy doing lots of things that aren’t “right.” I’m not saying purple tights and purses are wrong, but I’m saying that we as parents are charged with raising and educating our children about that very cruel world this mom seems to have magically discovered on Halloween 2010, several decades into her life.

Five-year-olds aren't soldiers. They shouldn't be used to fight our battles. If she'd encouraged her son to dress as Papa Smurf rather than Daphne, she didn't somehow kill his soul. He's FIVE.

Being a parent isn’t always about making our children happy in the now. Happiness is not a goal you can reach by aiming for it. Happiness is the desired by-product of other meaningful pursuits.

Let me be crystal clear here, because this is important: When your first goal as a parent is your child's constant and immediate happiness, you are at best a naive parent, and at worst a horrible one.

Cross-dressing, marrying someone of a different race or religion, moving to Pakistan to become a Christian missionary, opening a medicinal marijuana farm. These are not the same kinds of decisions as whether to brush your teeth at night. I’m not saying any of these life choices are Wrong, because I'm a lib'ral relativist. But in our time and in our culture, to suggest that parents don’t have a responsibility to educate and prepare our children for the world that might not approve of everything they do or want to do... to let your children ride their bikes into traffic without at least informing them of the risks and dangers... well, that’s shitty parenting.

Evangelize to cannibals in the Amazon. Cross-dress. Marry a lovely Hindu man. Whatever. As your parent, I’ll love you regardless, but I do have the responsibility to make sure you are aware what you might be getting yourself into.

Again, I admire at least 80% of what this mom says. And I admire the ferocity with which she defends and loves her son. But to say the moms are bullies? Get over yourself. Snotty? Callous? Condescending? Insensitive? Sure, to all of ‘em. But when we start labeling their behavior as bullying, we have watered down the term so much it’s meaningless. It’s like calling a kitchen knife a WMD.

Her claims of social cluelessness and her prioritization of quick happiness, however, are worth questioning. If she didn’t know it might be controversial, why were all her pre-warned pals giving her high-fives down the hallway like she was about to enter a WWE wrestling ring? Don’t couch it like your toddler has more social awareness than his mother.

And here's the last part for this mom and all her cyber-huggers. Kids are more resilient than any of you seem to realize. Her precious Boo won't remember a thing about his Halloween party in two weeks, because nobody ever said anything to him or did anything to him.

Her blog isn't about her precious Boo. It's about her.

It takes a self-absorbed blogger to know one.

Mixin' Up A Witch's Brew of Halloween Tunes

For those of you who don't tend toward the musical or who don't have the time in a world paced in microseconds to click on a song and listen to it, thank you for indulging us for this all-music month. I fear that a certain job malaise seeped into even these posts. Please know that we are ready to return to our usual societal noodlings and attempts to vent frustrations and still not to get ourselves fired.

Still, Halloween remains.

Perhaps some of these tunes will add to your enjoyment of this weirdest of holidays, a night that my little corner of the world and the city that I live in has had the hardest of times figuring out how to schedule. Halloween on a Sunday conflicts with church, with spirituality, and so we have bounced back and forth three times now (so far) trying to figure out whether Saturday or Sunday is the proper night for children to walk around a neighborhood and collect candy.

My apologies to the great bloggers out there--I've been picking and choosing favorites from among your stuff, while mixing in some of my own, and, at this point, I'm not even sure where all of it came from. So, I acknowledge all of you and your wonderful work posting for our mutual enjoyment.

Halloween is a great time for music because you can get a little weird and you can explore your darker side and you can have a little fun. It is also a fitting end to Rocktober because all of us expect Halloween to rock, at least a little bit. Hopefully, I do a bit of that here. The Crystal Castle song may not quite fit thematically, but it certainly fits sonically and it is a great Robert Smith song.

May your demons be imaginary and not ones that actually enter your house and your psyche and leave you lying awake at night listening for their return!

Bright Eyes--"Devil Town" (mp3)

Broken Social Scene--"Romance To The Grave" (mp3)

She and Him--"I Put A Spell On You" (mp3)

Ryan Adams--"Halloweenhead" (mp3)

The Doors--"People Are Strange" (mp3)

Crystal Castles (feat. Robert Smith)--"Not In Love" (mp3)

The Pierces--"To The Grave" (mp3)

Beck--"Devil's Haircut" (mp3)

Jellyfish--"Season Of The Witch" (mp3)

Freedy Johnston--"The Mortician's Daughter" (mp3)

Fairport Convention--"Tam Lin" (mp3)

Evangelicals--"The Halloween Song" (mp3)

Gillian Welch--"The Devil Had A Hold Of Me" (mp3)

John Carpenter--"Halloween main theme" (mp3)

Spoon--"The Ghost Of You Lingers" (mp3)

Mischief Night

Richard Shindell--"Are You Happy Now?" (mp3)
Guadalcanal Diary--"Ghosts On The Road" (mp3)

Like the Halloween when I was in the 5th grade and choose as my costume the uniform of a Nazi soldier, Mischief Night is probably best forgotten by time.

In this age of police, DNA, Internet tracks, and all of the other ways in which we are so easily identified, Mischief Night, which was a fairly harmless evening of causing trouble, today would cause a lot more trouble for the perpetrators.

The holiday that we call Halloween used to consists of two nights, not just the current one. Halloween Eve, at least in Pittsburgh where I grew up, was called Mischief Night or Devil's Night, and, as such, was probably the most appropriately named night of the year. Imagine this: otherwise responsible mothers and fathers allowing their sons to dress up in dark clothes and go out with their friends in roving gangs to play pranks all over the neighborhood. "Come back when you're finished, kids, and maybe we'll have some hot cocoa waiting."

And that's what's funny to me now. There was nothing secretive or underhanded about it at all.

But, first, that costume. My grandfather and great uncle served in World War II in the infantry, and one of them, my great uncle Clinton, I think, came home with a full German uniform, complete with boots, helmet, belt buckle, rifle, and bayonet. The story behind how he got it is one I don't know. Moths went to work on it, so by the time parts of it passed to the only male grandchildren in the 1960's, only the collars and cuffs of the uniform remained intact. I suppose it is some measure of both my naivete and stupidity that I spent the day sewing the cuff and collar onto a green sweatshirt, donning the trademark German helmet, and heading out the door with a pillowsack to collect candy.

And was it a sign of the times, as well? My parents didn't bat an eye, my friends that I walked with from house to house didn't seem to find it at all odd that the uniform of ultimate evil was travelling amidst their ranks. And what of the houses where we rang the doorbells? A Jewish home, perhaps, where the mother opens her door to find a blond haired, blue-eyed member of some neo-Hitler Youth expecting some candy?

Back to Mischief Night. A simple Internet search reveals that this tradition continues, but not in Chattanooga, as I just confirmed on the phone with my blog mate. "Mischief Night? What are you talking about?" he asked. I'm talking about soaping windows, rolling houses and cars with toilet paper, peanut butter on screen doors, eggs everywhere, soap on windows, smashed pumpkins. I'm talking about a PG-rated suburban version of A Clockwork Orange, tacitly, if not officially, sanctioned by the adults of a neighborhood, loosely monitored by the police. I'm talking about the things Adam Sandler and his friends do early on in Billy Madison, like lighting bags of poop and then ringing the doorbell and hiding in the bushes to watch the homeowner stamp out the bag and step in the poop. Those things happened on Mischief Night.

I'm talking about the night that made Halloween all the more special, because when you went house to house Trick or Treating, you were in costume partially to disguise your role in what had happened to that house the night before. And, yes, you did visit those kinds of houses, the ones singled out for retribution, both night.

The farther back you go, the more mischievous Mischief Night was. Talk to my father or get him talking about his father, and you're talking about a Mischief Night that involved firecrackers before there were standards, firecrackers that were little less than mini sticks of dynamite, used to blow up outhouses. You're talking about real delinquency, hoisting fences up onto telephone wires and other ways of destroying property.

Our greatest prank was essentially harmless. An old lady three or four houses down, who was the kind who would yell at us for walking on her grass, kept a meticulous year, so meticulous that even in late October, there was not a single leaf in the entire yard. So how do a group of boys respond? By getting several garbage bags of leaves, then dumping and spreading them all over her yard. The next night, while Trick or Treaters came and went, she had hired a security guard to hide inside her large evergreen, keeping watch. Did we go there for candy anyway? Absolutely.

In the context of today, as parents of today, it all sounds pretty barbaric, evidence of some previous, lawless society. We'd never let our children do anything like that. It's enough that we let them drive to Starbuck's alone after 9 PM.

But it's one of those signs of the times, isn't it? One of those requiems for what we have become, a society that is so concerned about being safe and so concerned about staying out of trouble with neighbors, the police, bosses, and anyone else who might hold us or our children accountable for a little good, not-entirely-clean, fun.

Mischief Night in 2009 Chattanooga may seem like anti-social behavior, but if the society expects it, or deserves it, how anti-social is it? I freely admit that even as a responsible adult in the second half century of his life, I have thought of expressing my feelings about a certain neighbor with a dozen eggs launched after midnight. But these days you never know where the cameras might be, you know? Be afraid.

If you've never heard Richard Shindell's terrific "Are You Happy Now?" you have missed out on the story of the worst Halloween prank of all. His work and Guadalcanal are both available at Itunes.

Howling Monsters R Us

"Being bad feels pretty good, huh?" -- John Bender (Judd Nelson), The Breakfast Club

Halloween brings out the worst in people. And we love it.

We relish the opportunity to wear the bad or unsavory parts of our selves on the outside for once, rather than keeping them pinned down in the solitary confinement chambers of our conscience.

At Halloween, males dress up like horror movie killers, or deformed mutants, or women, or Joe the Plumber. Males get to be someone frightening or famous, or they get to wear women's clothes without having to give up their NRA card and NASCAR fan gear. Well-behaved females get to dress like sluts from a porn movie. Slutty women get to dress like the sluts they are, which is to say they get to look just like the well-behaved females who, for one day, seem to be jealous of their naturally slutty gifts.

The day gives us that one precious chance to celebrate our darker dreams, to display the demons we keep in check so well for those other 364 days.

Before I was married, I had five serious relationships. Two of them ended in the aftermath of Halloween. Believe me when I say it wasn't coincidence. The worst parts of both people emerged to battle on a metaphorical playground, challenging the other: Can you handle this part of me? Here's your warning. Leave now, and don't look back!


The tragic part is how much we love our dark sides. Most of us talk a good game about how we want to walk that straight and narrow path and do the right things, but very few of us can escape this life without finding a few small paths off that dusty trail, escapes from a very long path with very few curves, bends, or changes of scenery.

The human part is how ineffectual our goodness is without our badness. As my buddy Mark so loves to point out, even Superman enjoyed his Red Kryptonite every once in a while. [Translation for those who don't know comic book lore: Red Kryptonite never has the same effect on Superman, but the effect is always something counter to his nature as the supreme savior of American innocence. Generally it turned Superman into something of a self-centered prick who cared mostly for himself. Superman feared Red Kryptonite mostly because, when exposed to it, he had the time of his life and never wanted it taken from him.]

Without Red Kryptonite, Clark Kent is probably still a virgin. 'Nuff said.

But back to the point. We carry these bad parts around because they tend to be inextricably tied to our good ones. Yin, meet Yang, so to speak. Or to put it another way, who hasn't watched Dexter and found themselves fighting not to enjoy it?

Maybe we do ourselves wrong by celebrating the bad side only one day out of the year. Maybe we should dedicate a whole month. Maybe we should call October "The Dark Month" and allow ourselves a little bit more lenience.

It's probably wrong that I teach Sunday School.

Billy's 2008 Ghoulies + Ghosties Mix

1. Peek-a-Boo - Devo
2. Scared, Are You? - Better Than Ezra
3. Superman's Dead - Our Lady Peace
4. Black Moon Creeping - The Black Crowes
5. Dim and the Dark - Jump
6. Angels or Devils - Dishwalla
7. Wave of Mutilation - Pixies
8. Strange - R.E.M.
9. Evil - Interpol
10. Vampire - The Blakes
11. The Beast in Me - Johnny Cash
12. Graveyard Girl - M83
13. Don't Come the Cowboy With Me, Sonny Jim - Kelly Willis
14. Good Monsters - Jars of Clay
15. The Frog Prince - Keane
16. Cry in the Dark - Juliana Hatfield
17. The Devil Never Sleeps - Iron + Wine
18. All You Zombies - Hooters
19. The Pretender - Foo Fighters
20. Sin Wagon - Dixie Chicks
21. The Best Deceptions - Dashboard Confessional

The complete mix above can be made available for those interested. Leave me a request via comment and an email address or some other way of providing you a link.