Getting Confused in Santa Cruz, Living In A Dream

Photo by Flickr user Stephanie Costa

I grew up in the tourist-town of the damned. Surf City, a beach town where old hippies came to die in peace and young surfers bloodied each other’s noses in the lighthouse parking lot past midnight. A resort town of pastel beach hotels and redwood tree-covered mountains sloping down to a pristine sea, each beach studded with curling waves, two piers with their fresh seafood restaurants and saltwater taffy, and one big colorful beach boardwalk amusement park, boasting the country’s oldest all-wooden roller coaster. This was the town that the vacationers came to from other smog-chocked landlocked places. They rented beach bungalows, came with their cars filled with sand shovels and sunscreen and screaming kids and coolers and cases of beer. This was the town that the teenage runaways came to, endless summer, plentiful drugs, beaches to sleep on and tolerant public opinions. When the fog rolled in or winter shortened the days, they each could move on, vacate their bungalows or their tents by the river and leave the eerily silent amusement parks and the echoing waves to crash hollowly in the grey.

I was a local, and I stayed year round. While to some this may seem like a charmed atmosphere to be raised in, to me it was as oppressive as anyone’s hometown is. Too small, too incestuous, and the “party all the time” alternative culture that the town embodied attracted some bad things. Those bad things were mainly violence and many many drugs, like the heroin epidemic that swept the town in the years I was in high school . I was living a light/dark lifestyle, as a confused teenager. I would hike in the beautiful mountains and swim in the freezing, refreshing ocean by day, and spend the night in rooms lit by Christmas lights, obliterated by cocktails of drugs, my skinny frame heaped in a corner like a pile of dirty laundry. It was in this environment in 1997 or so that the Magnetic Fields came into my life.

Aimee’s boyfriend was “that indie video-store guy”, who worked with the King of video-store guys- a bespeckled, highly intelligent, extremely cultured, opinionated culture-hound named Alex with an Aryan Nations haircut and a girlfriend (?!!!!). Alex tutored him in the slow hours at the territorially-named Westside Video on music and movies and what he should be watching if he knew what was good for him, and what he should avoid at all costs. Alex gave him Get Lost, the 1995 release by the Magnetic Fields, and my friends and I got — appropriately– lost.

Is there a term for the first time you fall in love with a piece of music, with a band, with a sound? We played nothing but that for weeks, months, and soon knew every turn of phrase (and there were many) and every note of every song and . We were lost in the way the sound perfectly captured the sunny 60’s chiming pop sound, and then tempered the sugar-sweetness with foghorn-voiced dark vocals about alienation, lost love, and betrayal. It was the light/dark lifestyle that we were living, manifested in music; the music knew that there was darkness and sadness at the center of all things, but still kept a romantic’s attitude.

I have always found that 60’s beach sound to be slightly scary, and I’m not sure if it was because of where I lived or because of the strange undertones in the music, a darkness that betrayed the lives of those who played it. I’m sure we’ve all heard the stories of golden children of the 60’s surf-sound whose lives were ruined in one way or another; from the Beach Boy’s Manson Family connections to Jan and Dean’s car crashes and drug problems. I relate to David Lynch, who seems to have the same opinion as me on how creepy and terrifying surf guitar is, when he includes it in practically every soundtrack to his utterly disconcerting and eerie films.

Growing up listening to public radio and the local station whose nighttime DJs played scratchy 1920’s lost hits or novelty jazz, I was frightened early by the very childlike fear that; “all the people that made this music are dead”. I felt like I was listening to ghosts, or a band box filled with a horn section of skeletons. I relate this to my fear of surf music in somewhat the same way. My hometown contains large populations of acid casualties and other human detritus from the swinging 60’s. Surf music was made at the very start of those decades, when everything was portrayed as golden and squeaky clean, which later seemed like a farce. That gave the music a danger that repulsed me, but also attracted me.

At the start of our Magnetic Fields obsession my friends and I were not the kind of people who actively pursued whole collections of a band’s music, but we became those people with The Magnetic Fields. The band was not popular, so we had no idea who they were or where they came from. All of the albums said “made in the People’s Republic of Canada” and had a portrait of a smiling couple in the 50’s sitting on the hood of a car, so we thought of them as Canadians, and speculated that the couple was perhaps related to a member of the band. There were different singers on each song, so we saw them as a larger outfit that they actually were, and the cover of Get Lost, with its strange black and white group portrait of awkwardly beautiful people in evening dress reinforced this. The more music we acquired from the band the more the intrigue grew. The Magnetic Fields played in many different musical styles and genres- from the weird, spare banjo song “Tar-heeled Boy” on 1992’s The Wayward Bus that sounded like it sprang from an Appalachian mining town, to the sound of the album “The Charm of the Highway Strip” which my boyfriend described as “country heroin Christmas music”.

Topics covered in the songs were even more strange and enticing and with each listen it was harder to pin down the personality behind the music. From the perfectly gothic love song “Smoke and Mirrors”:

Smoke and Mirrors mp3

special effects

a little fear

a little sex

that’s all love is

behind the tears

smoke and mirrors

to “Tokyo a Go Go,” a song about international espionage and cradle robbing:

I was only doing my job

for the company

with a gun in my pocket

no identity

I fell in love with you

but we’re not free

and vampire lovers who are mythically cursed to never be together in “You Have the Sun I Have the Moon” (my interpretation): mp3

You have to fly around the world all day

to keep the sun upon your face

I’d like to come and comfort you

but I’d be blinded by the blue

You have the sun

I have the moon

to the mysterious “Babies Falling,” which defies interpretation: mp3

pressing up against the ticket counter window, our faces pressed against the glass

bleeding from the waist

kissing to be chaste

I had, in fact, never been so pleased by a band’s lyrics. The Magnetic Fields lyrics were sentimental and nostalgic, yet darkly witty. They were simple and usually in the old verse-chorus-verse style, but there was always a payoff at the end. They seemed to be written by a highly intelligent, morose romantic, and as I fathomed myself as just that persona, I connected with them deeply. However topically strange or laced with sarcasm they were, they were all connected by one subject- LOVE- so it did not surprise me in 1999 when they put out a three-album set of love songs. I was 20, and my boyfriend gave me the boxed set for Christmas that year. I was overjoyed and by this time was aware that the band was actually one guy, a highly intelligent songwriter named Stephin Merritt, who had a revolving cast of singers and players- hence our confusion at the different voices and the different pronouns used to refer to the Lover in the song. Women sing about loving “she” and “he” in the songs, as do the male singers. This disregard for sexual roles in such straightforward and nostalgic love songs had always delighted us, and now we knew that the writer of the songs was a gay man, too- someone more inclined in our minds to not care too much about crafting typically heterosexual love songs.

I have been my whole life a visual artist, and I mark time by the inspirations that surround me, because they are so connected with my own artwork. When music becomes the marker of an era in your personal history, it is a powerful nostalgia, but a pleasing one. It is not just a story, it is a story with music and with a beat. The lyrics as you interpret them are coupled with the chorus hook, and this combination can evoke a sensual memory unlike any other. Time passes and you grow older and you don’t notice it until you hear that song that you sang along to on the front porch of the Weeks Ave. Victorian, on an evening when the salt-sea fog was sweeping in and your friends were cooking dinner, and you were so confused and sad.

Years pass. Now I’m 28, and The Magnetic Fields has have just released a new album, Distortion, to much critical acclaim. It is dark, witty, and more fuzzed out than ever before, but intimate and familiar. There are songs about zombies and nuns, naughty lyrics, gender-muddling pronouns and 60’s chiming pop music filtered through a long dark hallway. Listening to it the other day, I was seized with that nostalgia, though I had not listened to the album before. I escaped that coastal town, moved away to sunnier suburbia where you cannot smell the ocean, but The Magnetic Fields made me miss it again.

The sound of the music was still “the coastal town that they forgot to bomb” (as Morrissey would say): ballads of a closed-down amusement park after the crowds go home and the fog rolls in, local kids nodding out by the river, summer love that is lost and gone, the local dive bar lit with Christmas lights and beer signs. Who knows if it’s anything that Merritt ever intended?. In 1997, the only clue that my friends and I could find was in the song “Lovers from the Moon”, where he name-checks Santa Cruz, and that was enough for us:

They say you’re a frog prince swollen with pride

always a bridesmaid, never a bride

getting confused in Santa Cruz, living in a dream….

I’m not afraid to walk hand in hand

I think we were made to lie in the sand, decadently, by the sea, under the sun.