If You’re Looking for Trouble

Eternal Trouble, Eternal Return, Moving Down the Line

“I come up hard, now I’m cool.”  Too true, Marvin Gaye.  And keeping cool after coming up hard takes a lot of cool.    Because this stack is called “Trouble Man,” you should know why I identified so strongly with a song made for a Blaxploitation movie sung by one of the greatest soul singers—visionary, genre buster, seer—who ever did it. I am not taking on the mantle to romanticize the ghetto or the game or appropriate someone else’s suffering when I have plenty of my own.  “Trouble Man,” the song, the soundtrack, the film, the brand, was released in December of 1972, but it hit the top ten in January, 1973, the month I hit the world—1/1/73 with a bullet. 

The first thing you hear in “Trouble Man” is the riff—D Minor, with a sus chord (G major) moving to a dominant seventh chord (D minor 7).  I am not alone in noticing that this is the riff of “So What,” the lead track of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue.  Kind of Blue has become The Beatles of jazz records.  In 2019, 60 years after its release, it was certified 5x Platinum.  For a jazz record, and for a really spectacular one, this is a big deal, and it comforts me that so many people are listening to such beauty.  But I am not here for comfort.  I am here to talk about trouble.  “So What” is a way of saying, “So what, motherfucker.”  A week after Kind of Blue was released, Miles Davis was arrested, jailed, and beaten for talking to a white woman in front of Birdland, where he happened to be headlining.  He kept the blood on his clothes.  He wanted everyone to see it.

That riff keeps reminding us of “So What,” and Marvin Gaye is there to tell you that you could be making the masterpiece of your life and still be treated like Emmet Till one damn week after the record drops.  The Trouble Man of the song is the antagonist, dodged by Marvin Gaye and his Blaxploitation analogue. 

I come up hard baby, but now I'm cool
I didn't make it sugar, playin' by the rules
I come up hard baby, but now I'm fine
I'm checkin' trouble sugar, movin' down the line
I come up hard baby, but that's okay
'Cause Trouble Man, don't get in my way

“I didn’t make it playin’ by the rules”: to defeat Trouble Man, Gaye has to invoke his inner Trouble Man, and that’s what I’m talking about.  You can’t defeat trouble without being trouble yourself.  Joni Mitchell performed the song live in 1998, and I can just see her on her British Columbia property dancing by herself through the fuzzy radio reception when it came out.  She was dodging Trouble Man, too, and would soon write an extraordinary song called “Trouble Child.”

Have I been trouble man?  A brief catalogue: learning about sex from my mother then spreading the word to everyone I knew, 1st grade, beaten up by my entire class for being The Devil, 5th grade, prank phone calls, recorded by the Dallas Police, 7th grade, confronting Yanni and telling him his music was worthless, 10th grade.  I did manic stuff when I experienced mania, and I managed to offend even with perfectly balanced equilibrium.   Some but not all exes, haters in the comments section, dense book reviewers, traffic cops, insecure bean counters, people who punished me for things they envied, anyone who decided to despise me for not being someone else—none of these people left the David Yaffe Experience without some trouble.

John Lewis, the Civil Rights icon (not the Modern Jazz Quartet icon) talked about getting into “good trouble” which is as noble as it gets, but trouble is a force of nature that can be spun into infinite directions.  Trouble could be when you’re stuck.  Trouble could be when you should stop but you keep going.  Trouble could be what Fiona Apple called a “well-made mistake.”  Trouble is necessary if you are going off the grid, deviating from the script, thinking for yourself.  Trouble is when there is no longer house style.  If you’re looking for trouble, sang Elvis, you came to the right place.

Trouble is what Herman Melville got into while he was writing Moby-Dick.  Omoo and Typee did well enough, but in this novel—the reason there is a thing called The Great American Novel—he unshackled himself from commercial writing.  In the mid 19th century, no one had written the King Lear of American novels, and he had one on his hands.  It was insane, it was genius, it broke all the rules for novel writing, got bad reviews, and it was pulped and forgotten until after he was dead.  The trouble wasn’t the failure, though he never recovered.  The real trouble was what he was writing.  Ishmael’s bosom friend on the Pequod was a cannibal.  “All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad,” he wrote.  You could call him Ishmael, but it all turned into some of the most elaborate, sublime trouble ever written.

And we all know what happened to Marvin Gaye.  His father, who was experiencing dementia, did not approve when his son sang “Let’s Get it On.”   A song Gaye was recording at the end of his life, “Sanctified Lady,” was really called “Sanctified Pussy.”  Gaye was shot and killed by his own father when he was just 44.  The prophecy of “Trouble Man” became fate.  He could only dodge the Trouble Man for so long.  And yet Gaye’s posthumous stock kept rising.  When I was 14, Rolling Stone ranked 100 albums and said that Sgt Pepper was the greatest album ever made.  The last time they made such a list, that honor went to Gaye’s What’s Going On.  Herman Melville, Marvin Gaye, so many of the afflicted geniuses, faced trouble after making it, then were canonized after they could enjoy it. 

“Look into infinity, and all you see is trouble,” sang Bob Dylan.  That will take a while.  If Dylan is correct, Trouble Man sees no shortage for material.  Marvin Gaye seemed to see his own trouble coming.  But listen to that falsetto.  It is a thing of beauty and a joy forever.  It floats above the song.  It is audacity.  It faces brutality and sounds sweet.  On “Anger,” from Here, My Dear, his brilliant and strange divorce album, he falsettos the word “rage,” like it is the sexiest word alive.  That Marvin Gaye falsetto keeps cool no matter what.  We can still listen to it.  We can still read Moby-Dick.  The world is particularly brutal right now, and it is more important than ever to cultivate our gardens while we can.  There’s trouble outside, there’s trouble within, and if we are lucky, we can turn it into something vital, something where we can recognize ourselves and each other and find ourselves more truly and more strange.  There is so much more trouble to dodge, and even more to make.  We can still get that buzz.  We can get away with it for another day, moving down the line.  As long as we are allowed to have this conversation, we are still free.