KEVIN FENTON
Ambivalence Café
My favorite Rolling Stones album was never released. It is not precisely imaginary; the songs exist. But they were never compiled by the band into the soundtrack in my head: I did that.
I like to think this personal soundtrack is a great album I’ve scavenged from lesser albums, but I can’t be sure about its greatness. My relationship to that music is too personal—it invokes the streets of Winona, Minnesota in the 1970s, as I walked under the warm smells of the pizzeria three blocks from my house; as I approached the patchouli-smelling record store by the railroad tracks; as I crossed the railroad tracks with their oil-soaked ties; as I traversed the modern Winona State campus and dreamed of whatever I thought college might give me; as I walked past Winona’s big trees and shabby student rentals; and as I trudged through the residual snow of February and March.
I knew then, as I know now, that by the mid-seventies the Stones were no longer making great albums. You can make a close-to-irrefutable case that the Rolling Stones’ last great album was Exile on Main Street. There’s a similar consensus that the albums that followed Exile—Goat’s Head Soup, It’s Only Rock and Roll, and Black and Blue—were, let’s just say, a falling off. Reviews of Black and Blue toss around terms like “consumer fraud.” It’s hard to argue with these assessments. The band called its own greatest hits from the period Sucking in The Seventies. Yet this music occupies a place in my heart that feels a lot like the place where we store great music.
Of course, that could just be nostalgia talking. These were the sounds of my teenage years. But the problem with nostalgia as an explanation for the power of this music is that my teenage years were not particularly happy times. Scorched and stunted by the death of my father; clueless about style, even by 1970s standards; and clueless about girls, even by adolescent boy standards, I was hardly living my best life. There was no golden age to summon.
That said, nostalgia is powerful partly because it doesn’t just capture golden ages, it creates them. Nostalgia also makes artistic merit kind of beside the point. One of the unfortunate things about coming of age in the 70s is that England Dan and John Ford Coley songs can make you misty eyed.
The idea that my love for this music is essentially nostalgic troubles me. Nostalgia is in so many ways the opposite of whatever it is we seek from great art. Fun and harmless in small doses, it too easily stagnates into smugness, weakens into sentimentality, degrades into delusion, or weaponizes into tribalism. Its shrinks and separates and soothes. It's a small-souled emotion that feels large-souled. I distrust it.
But it’s too simple to say that nostalgia and art are opposites. Both art and nostalgia say, these things matter; both value emotion. Nostalgia is just disproportionate and narrow. It’s like anger in that it’s a potentially toxic emotion that helps us figure out what we value.
What I hear when I listen to songs such as “Winter” or “Memory Motel” is bigger than “those were the days.” What I hear feels a lot like greatness because great art is art which helps us construct a self. It feels like greatness because great art is art which we carry with us through decades. Those albums tincture my life and evoke my youth.
The core soundtrack includes five songs: “Dancing With Mr D” and “Winter” from Goat’s Head Soup, “Til The Next Time We Say Goodbye” and “Time Waits for No One” from It’s Only Rock and Roll, and “Memory Motel” from Black and Blue.
“Dancing with Mr D” acknowledges my teenage preoccupation with finding places that were a little more interesting and a little less innocent. The song begins with a creeping-crawling guitar riff and Jagger’s breathy singing: “Down in the graveyard, where we have our tryst.” The effect is more evocative than scary, more David Lynch than Steven King; it’s mysterious, languid, and vivid. A later line mentions a Toussaint night. Toussaint is French for All Saints’, the holy day, morbid even by Catholic standards, adjacent to Halloween, when dead souls are celebrated. But, in the Stones’ world, it also meant Allan Toussaint, with his associations with New Orleans.
The attraction of “Time Waits For No One” was not in the lyrics, although what teenager doesn’t like a good ode to decay. (It’s a nice shorthand for resonance.) Winona, Minnesota, where I spent my teenage years, was a river town, which made it a little more interesting than the prairie towns and quasi-suburbs to the west; Winona was a place of deshabille Victorians, river characters who made their living trapping and fishing, diners with jukeboxes at the booth, and neighborhood bars that smelled of malt. The resonant was all around me, and I was starting to notice it.
The real attraction of “Time Waits For No One” was the music, which bore the fingerprint of Mick Taylor, the Stones guitarist at the time and an underrated influence on their sound. (He was replaced by Ronnie Wood on Black and Blue, who extended the brand but not the band.) “Time Waits For No One” feels more like water than like electricity: it’s all lead guitar, keyboards, and brushes, it’s music of streams, eddies, splashes, infusions, and murmurs.
It’s sophisticated, which is a tricky compliment, because “sophistication” is often snobbism trying to sell itself as something more substantial. When I call “Time Waits For No One” “sophisticated,” I meant you need to be at least a little serene to appreciate it. The twitchy and trashy kid I was in junior high could only be soothed by strong hooks and simple noise. “Time Waits For No One” prepared the self which would love Wallace Stevens, Virginia Woolf, and Miles Davis. It discarded the self that liked “Little Willy.” (Yes, that Little Willy. The one who won’t go home.)
“Til the Next Time We Say Goodbye” and “Memory Motel” broached what was literally virgin territory—the romantic self. They suggested a life beyond a life of unrequited crushes, a romantic life that was as real as friendship, a life of conversations, places (“a coffee shop down on 52nd street”), and enthusiasms. The romance itself—“watching the snow swirl around your feet”—is muted. The couple in “Til The Next Time” has been together a while; the romances of “Memory Motel” are, as the title suggests, past. The women here are imperfect, with teeth that are “slightly curved,” and they have lives outside the singer; they drive pick-up trucks; they’re “singing in a bar.” If the Rolling Stones have things to teach you about how to view women, you’re clearly starting from a bad place. Well, I was.
“Winter” feels like it’s about a very particular sub-season: late winter—which can run from Valentine’s Day into April in Minnesota. It’s a particularly exhausted version of winter — long gone are the sparkle of first snows, the charm of Christmas, the optimism of New Years’. It’s not spring—there’s too much filthy snow for that—but it lets you imagine spring. Jagger begins with a wordless semi-moan of dissatisfaction and desire. The first words are “it’s sure been a cold cold winter.” The guitar meanders intensely, like a teenager’s walk. I also now believe that these late winter weeks in 1975 were when I came out of the first, wordless, baffled stage of my grief for my father.
These songs meant more to me because I was a teenager and because I was a particular kind of teenager. For my older sisters, rock and roll was a reason to dance. For me, it was something else (not necessarily something better.) For me, culture was a user’s manual, a Cliff Notes for existence, the food and water of the essential self—the self that answers William James’s question, which he says is at the heart of all spirituality: What are the secret demands of the universe?
I spent a fair amount of time alone in those years, walking the streets of Winona, ruminating in my cluttered room. But it wasn’t entirely anti-social. My friends and I talked music. It helped us explore the Venn diagrams of friendship—where do we overlap? Where do we differ? “You love the Allman Brothers, Bob Dylan, and Howling Wolf. You love Joni Mitchell and Jackson Browne. You love Queen, Yes, and ELP. Do I? How much?”
I was also lonely in a more essential sense, a sense accentuated by my grief: I was busy with the self-pitying teenage enterprise of self definition.
Music pointed to the world outside and the future ahead. At least in outstate towns in Minnesota in the 70s, teenagers were archeologists. We summoned the greater adult world from the fragments we heard and saw. When I heard Jagger sing about “a coffee shop down on 52nd street” Winona had no coffee shops. But I began to imagine them. With my friend Neal Nixon, who also lost a father, I began to discover literature as well as music.
Winona itself felt adolescent: it felt on the verge of becoming more interesting. Or more precisely: it wanted to become more interesting but couldn’t quite figure out how. A few hippies would get it together sufficiently to open an almost vegetarian café for a few months. An independent bookstore appeared and then disappeared. We’d had a co-op which I remember for its dedication to carob.
Winona became more interesting. It acquired coffee shops, and then a Shakespeare festival, and then a film festival and music festival. I grew up and moved away but I’m happy to come back occasionally. I discovered more music, some of which critiqued the music of the mid 70s—music which could feel exhausted and, at its worst, complacent and smug.
The time of year Jagger sang about in “Winter” would take on special resonance for me. On a March day in my early thirties, I quit drinking. I had tried to stop and failed in late February, careening through my last binge with people cashing welfare checks on the first of the month. In those first grey days, I felt scraped, emptied, and, let’s just say, unphotogenic. As the weather struggled toward spring, with hisses of sub-zeros and sloppy melting, it provided a perfect objective correlative for what was happening inside of me.
On my iTunes, I currently have a playlist that replicates the secret Stones album in my head. It includes the five songs I mentioned and a handful of others from that time (such as the Jamaican-influenced “Luxury”). It’s a bunch of really good songs, albeit songs in a more wistful and personal vein than the Stones earlier music. This imaginary album uniquely highlights the contributions of Mick Taylor; it nods to reggae, jazz fusion, and the best singer-songwriters; and it distinctly captures the zeitgeist of those deep seventies years when the hippies had been assimilated and the punks were still being incubated.
I labeled my playlist “Ambivalence Café.” It felt like a nice title for an imaginary album. And when I walk the streets of Saint Paul, Minnesota in February and March, past polluted snow, archipelagos of ice, and brown edges of lawn, that soundtrack starts to play.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kevin Fenton is the author of the novel Merit Badges, which won the AWP Prize for the Novel, and the memoir, Leaving Rollingstone. His work has appeared in the Laurel Review, the Gettysburg Review, and Ploughshares. He has a JD and an MFA from the University of Minnesota and lives in Saint Paul with wife, Ellen, and their greyhound, Evie.