Senior year in college, I lived on a run-down street in Somerville, Massachusetts. One Sunday night, my roommate called me to the front window and said, Look! There was some kind of riot going on in front of Studley’s bar. We drank there a lot, since it was really cheap: 75 cents for a bottle of beer the size of a fire extinguisher. From the look and smell of it, Studley’s economized on sanitation and passed the savings along to the customer.
But on Sunday nights, they out-did themselves, running some kind of loss-leading deal that drew every unemployed badass within a ten-block radius. I forget what the signs outside said. Something like Spell Your Name and Drink Free All Night. Or Buy a Double Shot and We’ll Pay You to Drink Till Saint Patrick’s Day. Wretched, wretched guitar music filled the street until two in the morning, going Dunna nunna nunt! / Dunna nunna nunt! — all of it probably collected today on some KTEL record called Proletarian Dance Tunes of the Reagan Era. We stayed away.
Sunday was Drink-Till-You-Get-In-a-Fight Night under the best of circumstances, but what was going on downstairs that night looked grave. There were dozens of men in the middle of the street, divided into two milling circles. Two guys were raging at each other with their whole arsenal of invective (an arsenal that consisted of two words, one of which was “you”). The assembled mob was apparently trying to restrain them — but only apparently, because once we opened the window, we could tell that the crowd was as eager to watch a fight as the two drunks were to have one. They were practicing the eternal art of preaching peace and stoking war. “Cooler heads” were “calming tensions” by saying things like, on the one side: C’mon, Kevin, Mark thought you wouldn’t mind if he stole your girlfriend, ’cause he assumed you were gay! And on the other: Hey, Mark, if Kevin was such a bad guy, why would your sister be sleeping with him? Oops!
Just as the thing was about to blow, another man emerged slowly from the line of women assembled on the sidewalk. He had one leg and was hopping along on a crutch. Clearly he’d been deputized by the women to talk sense into Kevin. The sight of him seemed to calm the pugilist down immediately. The two of them walked together to the other side of the street, where the one-legged guy sat on the hood of a car and began to counsel Kevin in a calm voice. Kevin kept nodding. But his one-legged interlocutor obviously made a misjudgment, because Kevin suddenly began shouting again, and before anyone knew what happened, he caught the poor guy with an uppercut that knocked him across the hood and onto the windshield. At that point the police came.
“Did you see that?” I said to my roommate.
He smiled, and with the tenderness that would be a hallmark of the investment-banking career he launched six months later, said: “Yeah. I’d hate to be in his shoe.”
Before going back to reading (respectively) Keynes and Saintsbury, my roommate and I indulged the first instinct of undergraduates in such circumstances: to discuss the various ways in which one is superior to what one has just witnessed. This we did with about as much self-knowledge as the boobs who had been trying to “stop” the fight outside.
What was striking when we shut the window, we decided, was that after the animal Dunna-nunna-nunt music the barbarians had been listening to outside, the cynical, ironic “alternative” rock we’d been playing was strangely comforting. “One of the nice things about Talking Heads, as opposed to the pap those kids listen to,” I said, “is that I don’t imagine you or I will be weeping over lost youth when we hear ‘Houses in Motion’ on the radio twenty years from now.”
In the last few weeks, I’ve had a chance to put my proposition to the test. The music of my undergraduate years is becoming a mainstay of Oldies stations — although in deference to my generation’s many-splendored capacity for self-delusion, the deejays on the station I tune in to use the “O” word sparingly, preferring to describe theirs as the “jammin'” station.
The station lumps together the “cutting-edge” music I favored with the two-chord rock the thugs from Studley’s liked, and with the dance music that led so many of my contemporaries to don “Disco Sucks” T-shirts. It’s as if the deejays can’t discriminate between them. What’s humiliating, though, is that I can’t any longer, either. Yes, a Eurythmics song, for instance, calls back pleasant states of mind. But so does Dunna-nunna-nunt. At a “seventies party” last week, I found myself wondering whether the old disco tunes playing were, as they used to say, “available in stores.” I don’t know if I could listen to any of this stuff day after day. But we’ll find out once Proletarian Dance Tunes of the Reagan Era arrives in the mail.
CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL
