September 26 Friday roundup

For the most recent episode of the podcast, I wrote about how easy it is to get caught up in staying up-to-date with rising repression online while not actually doing anything about it. You can watch the episode on YouTube or listen to it via Apple, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. If you want to read it instead, or if you’d like to explore links to people and events mentioned in the episode, you can find them in this week’s Tuesday post.

By popular request (looking at you, Tommy Tomlinson), today I’ll write about the first time, as far as I recall, that I ever wound up in the newspaper unexpectedly. Thirty-seven years ago this month, I went with a friend to a Marty Willson-Piper concert at the old 9:30 Club in DC, which was very much my stomping grounds for a few years before and after that show.

I went to the concert because my friend had invited me. She and I had been working together at a DC record store for eight months by then and liked a lot of the same music. We went to the same college, too, though we were in different years and different programs.

Willson-Piper is British, but I knew his music from the (mostly) Australian band The Church, which I liked well enough. I didn’t know much of his solo work then, and what I had heard was less my bag. But live music could often be very different than a studio sound, and I was game.

The club was too small, and always hot and crowded. I had long hair, and the dense cigarette fug was like a malevolent spirit. Smoke would linger even after I’d showered, and stayed on the outer layer of my clothes after they’d been through the wash. Still, it was a kind of home.

What everyone realized pretty early on after Willson-Piper took the stage that night was that he was in a sour mood. He possessed a kind of willowy, ethereal beauty, and it was perhaps unfair to see it as discordant with his presence. But he was grumpy that night.

Later, I would learn that several of his guitars had just been stolen—I think in Baltimore the same week. But I didn’t know that then. He just seemed on edge, and like he was mad at the audience.

He talked vaguely about the state of the world, and spoke in different languages. Each time he did, someone in the crowd answered back in that language. I think French was one, and maybe Swedish, and there may have been a third one.

Instead of being amused when someone in the audience could understand him, it just seemed to make him more upset. He began to heckle the crowd. Maybe it was because he was in Washington, DC, and Reagan was in his last months in office at the time. I honestly don’t know. At any rate, that crowd was not likely to include a lot of Reagan voters.

He made another comment, and it was then that I shouted. I don’t recall exactly what, but it was something along the lines, “Why don’t you play music instead of acting superior to everybody?”

The room was small, and I’m a loudmouth. What I shouted caught his ear.

“Would the person who just said that like to come up on stage and say it into the mic?”

Of course I would.

Everybody knows you don’t invite the vampire in. Except Marty Willson-Piper, I guess.

People in the crowd who were also maybe a little tired of his mood gave me a hand, and up I climbed. Two mic stands stood on stage. I repeated my comment into one of them, and it went from there.

It was like the worst rap duel ever, except there wasn’t even rap. Or music. What exactly did we even argue about?

At one point, he grumbled about being working class, and tried to slam me as bourgeois. I was a university student, it was true, but I was working retail full-time to pay for my own school. I had just come off a summer of working more than 65 hours a week, and I still couldn’t pay my tuition.

He didn’t have a real grievance to lodge against me, he was just swinging at some imaginary idea of who I was. I didn’t have a problem with him as a person. I knew almost nothing about his life. I had just come to see him play, and he was picking a fight with the audience, which I imagined was defending.

Eventually, I ended it by saying something like, “I’d rather you play the songs you came here to play, and I bet the audience would, too.”

Yes, the audience did rather. They applauded. I jumped off the stage. And finally, Willson-Piper put on the show everyone had come to see. A fine show.

The next day, a Washington Post critic wrote a review of it, and I ended up in the paper. I didn’t yet have a subscription, but someone saw the story and mentioned it to me. My concert-going friend is meticulous about documenting what shows she’s been to, and the article must have made it into her archives, because decades later, she sent me a photocopy of the original paper, with the concert date written in the margin.

Two or three times in the years between then and now, I’ve run into somebody, or my friend who was at the show that night has wound up talking to someone who was there that night. Everyone remembers the verbal battle.

But none of us can ever remember exactly why he seemed so irritating that night, or what he and I argued about onstage, even though I must have been up there for ten solid minutes.

He wanted to play. I wanted to see him play. But we wound up working at cross purposes with each other.

This kind of thing can fall under the category of the narcissism of small differences, in which people who have a lot in common mange to find ways to be aggressive and cut themselves off from each other.

Since then, every once in a while, when I’m deep into a heated argument with someone, I ask myself what it is we’re really arguing about. It is going to matter the next day? In a decade, will I even remember what it was about? I’m quicker to end a stupid fight or to avoid it altogether than I used to be.

Willson-Piper came back to the 9:30 Club a year and a half after that fateful show. My friend—who apparently wasn’t too embarrassed to be seen in public with me again—asked if I wanted to go. I passed.

But I’m told he mentioned the incident from his prior gig at the club, asking the audience, “That girl from last time isn’t here, is she?”

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