Such Waltzing Was Not Easy

Because Mark Eitzel is Bitter and Because He is My Heart

The songs preceded my misery.  They were here first.  And yet, sometimes, they sound like they were made for me.  Such delusions can be dangerous.  I’m just talking about my misery, and the way some songs can find their way to it.  And sometimes, people are extravagantly rewarded for this ability, but that doesn’t always work out.  Imagine if we could make the overrated and underrated people switch places.  Who would decide?  I would volunteer, but I’m not getting any offers.

I was 18, I had just moved to New York City from Dallas.  I never had to share a room, and now I was sharing a room with two people.  The bedroom was on the 16th floor, and it had a view of the Queensborough Bridge, and it reminded me of Joan Didion writing about being nostalgic for not knowing the names of bridges.  I write about the past.  Does that make me nostalgic?  Or is it more like a much-quoted line from Faulkner?  The past is never dead. It's not even past.

One of my roommates subscribed to Spin.  They recommended an album called Everclear by a band called American Music Club, and American Music Club really meant all songs and vocals by Mark Eitzel.  My roommate bought the cassette, but then, after hearing it, I commandeered it.  I was known to turn off the lights and listen to Joni or Miles or Billie or Dylan.  But this was something new, and it sounded like me.  It sounded like the way I felt.  It sounded like loving and hating someone.  It sounded like being drunk or hung over, though I didn’t drink then.  It sounded like me 15 years later if my heart kept refusing to learn.  I was into uninterrupted moping.  These songs were made by someone I had never met, and my misery was right there to eat it up. 

I'm sick of food
So why am I so hungry?
I was sick of you
But I don't mind seeing your little face
I was sick of love
So I just stopped feeling
But I couldn't find anything to take its place

When I was growing up in Dallas, my bedroom was over a rotting foundation, though we didn’t know it at the time.  I was getting sicker and sicker, and it must have been my fault.  I was burning the candle at both ends.  When I graduated from high school, I weighed under 120 pounds.  Every other week, I couldn’t keep food down.  I felt so fragile, I couldn’t imagine a robust adulthood.  I had never heard a song that captured what that felt like. 

When I moved to New York, my health improved, and, eventually, an insurance company discovered the rotting foundation, which was centered on my bedroom.  I wasn’t going to waste away.  I was going to get a chance.   But I never forgot what that felt like.  It sounded like Mark Eitzel.  I started to see him perform, and when he felt like he was on, he was an Aeolian harp.  I came from a generation—X—that was proud of accomplishing nothing.  At Sarah Lawrence, ambition was shunned.  Writing something for the sake of writing was the ethos.  When I transferred my sophomore year, I had a roommate who was into American Music Club, too.

So I go back to my room
To my room by the freeway
I fall onto my bed like snow
Like the cold I never woke you
And a killer followed me home
"Hey what song you whistling?"

If I have to be this lonely
If I have to be this lonely
If I have to be this lonely
I may as well be alone, yeah

At 18, I already learned that getting the girl was necessary, but could also be where the trouble began.  You could be lonely, but not alone.  And solitude was a painful but priceless commodity. 

I’m 20, and I am a music intern for The Village Voice.  I discover that American Music Club will make their major label debut on Island, produced by Mitchell Froom, who had previously worked with Richard Thompson, Elvis Costello, Paul McCartney, and Suzanne Vega, whom he also married.  Joe Levy, the music editor, gave me the assignment—my first—but also said, “The people who like this band will like this band, and that’s it.” 

I thought there was more life than finishing a drink
I thought gravity helped you to dance
but it just makes you sink
I stand in the way of people who stopped caring
Numb hands and feet and ears long past hearing

They sing now you're defeated baby
Fall on your face in the divine way
Don't worry about anything, no
It's just the world having its little way

The world keeps having its little way and it does not relent. Many of us felt that way.  Except that we had other parts of the day when we still tried to be in love and find meaning in the written word, in all that is sung and expressed that is worth it, including this divine ennui. 

I hate to see you look that way
All the beauty has left your face
That's such an easy thing to give away
That's impossible to replace
So I'll take you in my two weak hands
And I'll throw you so high
Watch you fall forever in the western sky
And when you land then you'll turn into some kind of prize
Into somebody's sweet prize

Keep getting older, keep getting your ass kicked, but keep surviving.  Eitzel kept writing devastating songs.  Kurt Cobain and Elliott Smith could not tough it out, and here is Eitzel, wearing his fragility on his sleeve, surviving a heart attack and still making making songs that speak to those of us who need them.  His voice has never sounded more beautiful than it does on his most recent recordings.  It has more depth.  It sounds and feels like a heavy French wine. He has said that he’s old and over now.  He speaks for all of us who have felt over.  Maybe feeling over is a sign of hope.  It means you won’t take being present for granted.

And when I reconnect with the sadness Eitzel brings me to, I like it because it is bitter and because it is my heart.    

Come on dance with me right here
Right here in your merciful kitchen
Let all the sorrow disappear
While our feet go missing

Under your soft Christmas lights
Who would ever reap what they sow
Dancing's the only thing I do right
As long as we keep it nice and slow

And you’re always on my mind
I just can’t leave you behind
You make me want to stick around and find
If there’s an answer

This is from Eitzel’s most recent album, Hey, Mr. Ferryman, which he got to record because his friend won the lottery.  There’s a clip of him singing “An Answer” alone, and at the end, he adds, “I know there’s no answer.”  He felt that way when he was singing, but less hopeless when he was writing.  They’re both real. 

You are 18.  You cannot get through life.  You are sick of food.  Everyone is dying.  Kids in writing workshops are coddled, and told to find their voice.  You certainly hear their voices.   They talk, talk, talk, and their writing is transcribed talking.  You cannot delude yourself you are Proust.  It goes against all of your instincts.  You hope you will become something.  You hear Nirvana for the first time and you leave the NYU party, walk outside Rubin Hall, look at the arch and you think that something scary and beautiful is happening, but the world will keep having its little way.

You go to Tramps in Chelsea and run into Eitzel at the long gone Barnes & Noble on 6th Avenue.  He has a volume of Theodore Roethke.

The whiskey on your breath   

Could make a small boy dizzy;   

But I hung on like death:   

Such waltzing was not easy.

We worry about people that are too close to the undeniable reality.  Rezső Seress’s “Gloomy Sunday” was called the “Hungarian Suicide Song.”  It was said to inspire listeners to jump out of windows, so imagine what happened when it was translated into English and sung by Billie Holiday.  Seress eventually jumped out of a window himself.  He survived the fall, was admitted into a hospital, then choked himself to death with a wire.  He said that the success of “Gloomy Sunday” depressed him because he knew he could never have another hit.

Mark Eitzel has survived.  He wrote songs for a play, Cornelia Street, that will open at the Atlantic Theatre Company next year. 

Lazarus wasn't grateful for his second wind
For a second chance
Watch his chances fade like the dawn and leave
I can barely tell you just how pale I get without you

I've been a mess since you've been gone

Lazarus didn’t have to be grateful.  If you believe the story, he came back for us.  Some people don’t give up.  You never know.  There could be an answer.