The 'Days Between Stations' columns, Interview magazine 1992-2008: Adventures in Listening

February 2001

Not long after moving to New York for the fall, I found myself in the Tavern on Jane, just off 8th Av­enue. It's mostly a bar scene, but the food is far better than you have any right to expect; I was drifting into the pleasant state of noticing nothing, 12 x 5, the second Rolling Stones album, was halfway over before it caught my ear.

It was playing low; it wasn't obvious. It was merely in the air of the room, the old rock 'n' roll and R&B numbers the Stones were using in those days: "Confessin' the Blues," "It's All Over Now," the 40 miles of bad road they traveled just crossing a single juke joint dance floor in "Around and Around," the fierce "Empty Heart." But there was nothing fierce or even open in the music as it played this night. That I might have been the only person in the place old enough to have heard the record when it came out in 1964—or, for that matter, even born—seemed to mean nothing. As the music crept around the room, it was hard to remember the titles of the songs, and even harder to care. It was hard to imagine someone had just punched up the al­bum on the bar CD player; it was more like the music had built the bar, called it into being.

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It reminded me of hearing Meet the Beatles, just after it hit the radio, in St. Michael's Alley in Palo Alto, the only bohemian outpost in town. Every time I've heard the songs from that record since, I've tried to put them back in that room, to make them sound as menacing and unstable as they sounded that night—especially "Don't Bother Me." George Harrison as a threat? He was that night, and somewhere inside that song he still is. Music changes places, but places may fix music even more permanently.

Back in the Tavern on Jane, as 12 x 5 finished, I was carried off with wondering why it still sounded so new, like a trail blazed that no one had fol­lowed. The barman put on Exile on Main Street. A masterpiece. But now—as if only hustlers and con artists were following the trail blazed by virtuous pioneers and lone-wolf explorers, business­men walking in the footsteps of adventurers—the album seemed ornamented, posturing, corrupt. If 12 x 5 built the place where the music was play­ing, the place silenced the next record it played.

For the next few months, that night shaped al­most every night that followed. The music play­ing in any place became a story in itself—or a chapter in a greater story. From place to place, city to city, whatever was playing in the back­ground became the foreground. In Quaglino's in London, it was late, the huge, trendy bistro was jammed, everyone was shouting, everyone was drunk. We sat down, asked for a bottle of water, tried to yell at each other that we were glad to be there, and then we heard the impossible: a live band. A trio, in the balcony bar, grinding at im­possible volume into "The Girl from Ipanema." Our table turned upside down; nausea washed over it. The music had a single, overwhelming message: You don't want to be here. We threw some money on the table and ran.

We should have been where we were the night before, in the Prospect Grill on Garrick Street in London. The place was ready to close, but they let us into the dim, warm room and, as in the Tav­ern on Jane, it took a long time to even notice anything was playing. But then it seemed as if Bryan Ferry was leaning over our shoulders like a waiter simply to tell us that it was no illusion: of all the joints in all the world, we'd walked into the right one. We'd never heard the recordings be­fore: "Where or When," "Falling in Love Again," from Ferry's As Time Goes By, his latest album, which I had somehow missed. The songs lifted every word we spoke, every sip we took, to the level of never like this again. They said that at any time, in any place, everything is in jeopardy, noth­ing will last, so move as slowly as you can down whatever path is given you to follow.

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Originally published in Interview Magazine, February 2001