For a better reading experience, make sure to listen to the songs before you read the entries. You can see this and previous entries at rorschachmusic.substack.com, Week 34: Driving“There Is A Light That Never Goes Out” by The Smiths / “Rearviewmirror” by Pearl Jam
“There Is A Light That Never Goes Out” by The Smiths  After moving to Canada from England at the age of eleven, I had a three-year period in which, aside from a brief and desperate foray into the world’s saddest and most disorganized Dungeons and Dragons group, I was entirely friendless. These were solitary times; the roughest of my life. Thanks for reading Rorschach Music! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. But the bad luck broke in 1995 when I made my first proper friend as a teenager. Simon¹ was, and might still be, the coolest person I’d ever met. To this day, I don’t understand how he managed to have been as cool as he was at fifteen years old. We met doing drama club things (I realize that might count against his coolness, but bear with me). He acted, but was mostly interested in writing. We became friends doing a playwriting workshop together, and his scripts were always impossibly brilliant: funny, heartbreaking, clever. A hushed silence fell over the room every time he read something. Even the instructor seemed jealous of his work. We also both wrote poems, and would share them with each other. My poems were nonsense masquerading as profundity, but his were about things. And where my handwriting hadn’t changed since I was eight, his was amazing. He used to do these long stems on his letters that still copy when I’m trying to write fancy. He was funny, too. One day he showed up to my house to hang out before I’d arrived home from school. My mum had let him in, and Simon grabbed a pile of post-it notes and used the post-its to label every single thing in my room, from the alarm clock to the door handle, and then put a sign on my door that read “Richard Scarry’s Bedroom.” He later wrote a musical about Mona from Who’s The Boss that had a song about a toaster set to a Puccini aria. He turned sixteen a year before I did, and got his driver’s license immediately. As we were too young to go to bars, we’d spend our evenings just driving endlessly around the city in the dark. It was in these car rides when my music taste finally broke away from the radio. Before Simon, I couldn’t really articulate the difference between, say, Nirvana and The Offspring, or REM and The Goo Goo Dolls: all were bands on the radio I liked. Simon, though, knew the difference. The mixtapes he would endlessly play in his car as we drove around the streets of Calgary introduced me to The Smiths, Tori Amos, Radiohead, PJ Harvey, Bjork, Patti Smith. Eventually, it clicked, and I took the Green Day posters off my wall. He even took me to my first concert when I was just fifteen (this Radiohead show - how cool is that?), and looked after me when I got freaked out in the mosh pit. There are still many, many songs that immediately transport me back to my friendship with Simon, but none more than “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out” by The Smiths:
The sad thing about this period in my life was that my naïveté wasn’t limited to my music taste. Simon, I eventually learned, was gay, and was hoping our friendship would develop into something more. I still can’t quite decide if I knew or not. Simon certainly did present as gay, and people had asked me if he was. My mum had asked me about it, too. But it simply didn’t occur to me at that time that a fifteen year old could be gay. This seems terribly naive in retrospect, but I wasn’t really clued into romance of any persuasion at all at that age. Subconsciously, there was probably another part to it as well. I’d had such bad luck making friends that I had been starting to wonder if maybe I was just boring, uncool, uninteresting. That fact that Simon was my friend was proof that I couldn’t be any of those things. Unless, of course, he spent time with me, not because of my charming personality, but because I was nice to look at (which I was, I think, back then, all waifish and long-haired). The idea that he was tolerating my shitty poetry and uncool taste in music because he was romantically interested in me was hard to accept. But, as I said, all this was largely unconscious. All I really thought about was that he was a cool, funny, smart person, and I really liked his company. I missed the rest. When I listen to “There Is A Light” now, older and (a bit) wiser, it’s the fourth verse that sticks out:
We listened to this song so many times in his little beat-up car, and he was probably hearing something there that I wasn’t. To me, the song was about escape, freedom, friendship, and I totally missed the hope and worry and apprehension that also colours the song, and that I hear now. Simon finally did come out to me. I was understanding and compassionate, I think, but I told him that our friendship couldn’t go in that direction, because I didn’t share his feelings. He made it clear that he couldn’t continue to spend time with me knowing that, as it was too hard for him. He got up and left, my mum saw him out, and we never really talked again. And it did feel like a break-up. Simon and I had been totally inseparable for a year or two, and suddenly I was alone again. At least one mutual friend approached me and said “I’m sorry to hear you and Simon broke up,” which suggests I was, truly, the most clueless person in town. I have tried to reach out to him several times over the nearly thirty years since we last spoke, but he’s never replied. I understand, of course; coming out to someone you have feelings for, at that age, and being rejected must have been horrible. It makes me sad that I hurt him, and it also makes me sad there was nothing to salvage. Still, I think of him often. He was the first friend I made outside of early childhood, and he set me on a path of music, books, poetry, theater, that set much of the course of my life to follow. I liked him a lot, and I miss him. As Morrissey says, the pleasure and the privilege was mine. “Rearviewmirror” by Pearl Jam  In the above entry, I said that I was entirely friendless for the three years of junior high school, but that’s not exactly true, because those were the years I spent entirely in the company of Kurt Cobain and Dave Pirner and Eddie Vedder and Michael Stipe. I will always be grateful that I hit my teenage years at the exact time that grunge and “alternative rock” hit, because it meant I was lucky enough to have these guys as my role models. If I was born even five years earlier, my rock stars would have been Axl Rose and David Lee Roth and Steven Tyler. But my guys weren’t all about cars and girls and parties; they were outcasts and book nerds and they were angry. Eddie Vedder was the best of them, even though his band wasn’t. Pearl Jam do have some great songs, but, artistically, they’re a pretty middle of the road rock band. Despite the flannel and the angst, they are sonically more like a seventies bar band, and often a pretty leaden one at that. But Eddie ruled. Part of it was how he managed to be a deeply empathetic, passionate, sincere, politically-engaged man without turning into Bono. He wrote music about injustice and inequality not because he felt a personal calling to change the world, but because it made him genuinely angry. There’s no pretension in Eddie, just fury. And, despite Pearl Jam not being a punk band, Eddie introduced me to the punk ethos, which is essentially the belief that, once you have your moral compass in place, you need to remain true to it. “Not selling out” wasn’t really about money; it was an ethos of integrity. Eddie, for example, thought that music videos had nothing to do with making music, so he stopped, at the height of Pearl Jam’s fame and the peak of MTV. He also stopped doing interviews, photo shoots, and everything besides writing and performing music. He despised Ticketmaster price gouging kids who wanted to be at their show, so he boycotted it, which led to years (again, at the height of their popularity) in which they couldn’t tour. When they did start touring again, the label offered the band private jets to get to their shows, but Eddie was disgusted by the cost, so he drove himself from venue to venue in his little van, doing pirate radio shows along the way. At his shows, he plays a different setlist every night to make every show special for the serious fans; he also encouraged bootlegging, and looked after the kids in the mosh pit. Outside of the band, he supported Ralph Nader and, later, Bernie Sanders, and became friends with Howard Zinn. He’s just impossibly cool. Vs. isn’t my favorite record of theirs (too much wah-wah pedal and funky bass for my taste), but it’s fascinating how politically progressive it was for 1993. You’ve got songs about gun control (“Glorified G”), white privilege and police brutality (“W.M.A.”), neurodivergence and child abuse (“Daughter”), and political dissent (“Dissident”). It also has no fewer than three songs sung from the first-person POV of a woman: “Daughter,” “Elderly Woman,” and “Rearviewmirror.” (I challenge you to think of three other songs from a female point of view, by any male singer, let alone three on one album). “Rearviewmirror” is a song of liberation. A woman is escaping a long-term abusive relationship, reflecting on what she had wrongly learned to tolerate, and using the pain she’d suffered to propel her escape. The musical elements complement the lyrics: the propulsive riff and drums tie together with the image of the woman with her foot on the accelerator, freedom ahead, misery behind. The start of the song focuses on the horror of her past but, by the halfway point, it’s all about freedom: Eddie howls “I gather speed from you fucking with me” while the music reaches its noisy crescendo. Plus, “I saw things so much clearer / once you were in my rearviewmirror” is a perfect couplet: almost too easy, but couldn’t be improved upon. What really makes this song work, though, is that it’s a driving song. All the classic driving songs – “Running Down A Dream,” “Life Is A Highway,” “Born To Be Wild,” “Here I Go Again,” “Radar Love,” “I Get Around” – are about freedom and escape, but very few make escape seem so necessary, and the freedom achieved so liberating (the only other song I can think of that does this so well is “Fast Car” by Tracy Chapman, which I discuss below). It’s almost impossible not to speed when listening to this in the car. I also love how fully Eddie inhabits this character, and it goes back to what I wrote about at the beginning of this entry about Eddie’s moral compass. He isn’t offering a public service announcement about domestic abuse to raise awareness; Eddie isn’t Phil Collins telling you to feel sorry for homeless people. He’s writing this song because his life and his art are based in emotion and empathy: he’s trying to feel what she feels, and he does it ferociously. So, yes, that’s my little celebration of Eddie Vedder, who taught me a lot when I was thirteen. Honorable Mentions “Won’t Be Home” by the Old 97s  I stand by my claim that the Old 97s are my favorite band. They are not the best band in the world, but no band (except maybe The Beatles) brings me as much joy. And “Won’t’ Be Home” is my favorite Old 97s song. It’s very similar in subject to “Rearviewmirror,” in that it’s a driving song about getting out of a bad relationship, and it similarly ends with the singer repeating “You’re getting smaller in the rearview mirror.” It’s a lot more fun, though, because this wasn’t an abusive relationship, just an annoying one, and the song is very much a silly revenge fantasy of throwing the infuriating partner out of a moving car. It has lots of clever wordplay (“The problems getting big, and it’s a compact car”), an explosive chorus, and the perfect drumbeat for a driving song. “Fast Car” by Tracy Chapman  This is the saddest driving song, because the desired escape never happens. The narrator remembers being free as a young woman, and dreams of once again feeling the same way, but remains held down by obligations, first to her alcoholic widowed father and later to her drunk unemployed husband. Bittersweet hope remains, but, when the song ends with “We got to make a decision: leave tonight or live and die this way,” you know she’ll end up with the latter. I suppose it could be argued that he’s singing from the perspective of an abused man, but I don’t think so. There’s a hint that this is the same woman from “Daughter,” because that song ends with the line “The shades go down,” while this one ends with “Finally the shades are raised” (although Eddie might just be reusing the metaphor). 1 Not his real name. A bit of discretion never hurt anyone. You can read older entries on the Rorschach Music website. You can hear Jim's own music on his other site, Jim Clements Music. If you liked this post, please share it!
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