Pulp, Different Class (1995, Island)
September 12, 2002
I’m watching the trees go by, these Douglas firs I’ve never before seen in my life. Something about their stature, their rugged, yet elegant simplicity, their fitness for the winter, gives them majesty, makes you respect them. Their uniformity is striking, like a troop marching through morning exercises. They line the hills off this winding road, this interstate creeping through hairpin turns and charging headlong into the Pacific Northwest. I take it in awestruck through the windshield, craning my neck forward from the first row of the vehicle, the white, 15-seat Chevrolet Express that has lately been in the habit of revealing things my eyes have never before seen.
Are we in Washington yet? Or is this still Idaho?
We had a layover in Miles City, Montana last night, one of the two travel days in between Minneapolis and Seattle. There’s nowhere for an upstart band from New York like us to play a show through this stretch. Big Sky Country is short on cities. So we just keep driving and sleeping until we get to the coast. The land wasn’t as dramatic before, as we toured around the Great Lakes, a leg packed with performances. The yelling of the crowds and the high decibels of our music linger in my ears amidst the tranquility of these last couple days. Now, the band has gone quiet and the land is the drama. The hills, faded lumps off in the horizon, are becoming stately mountains, with nothing in between but savannah and trees and this one lonely road, a deserted expanse, quiet, slow, untroubled by commuters from neighboring cities. There are no neighboring cities.
Paul, Eric, and I went to the local honky-tonk, which had that character of a station at the end of the line, the only inn for miles, the sole bar in all of existence. We, billiards junkies, were overjoyed when the receptionist at the Days Inn said there was a pool table in the neighborhood.
We made an impression with the locals when we walked in. Our coiffed hair and tailored clothing marked us as foreign to this part of the country. The impact of our entrance was written all over the bartender’s face, whose friendly smirk collapsed into a stony mien. The three patrons nursing pints in the corner eyeballed us and shifted in their seats.
The welcome mat that is a dive bar in a landlocked state is a tricky thing. You can feel the warmth, the amiability, the way the light shines on the dartboard, the crackle from the neon Miller sign, the ease of the bartender leaning on the drink well. But that warmth keeps something else from view, something you can feel in the air: a strange hostility, reserved for outsiders, who aren’t always as welcome as these establishments may advertise at first blush. Still, business is business.
Security eventually kicked out the slurring drunkard who tried to start a fight with us while we played pool. We hadn’t even realized there was security until the bouncer came out of nowhere. The drunkard was handsome in an all-American way, like a college quarterback, and he was bombed out of his mind. He was desperate to transduce the gooey vagueness of his drunkenness into the sharpness of fists. He could barely finish sentences but the word “faggot” fell from his lips, once, twice. Paul was on the cusp of obliging the man’s desire to “take it outside.” When the drunkard grew loud and waved his arms around, the bouncer appeared. The enormous lug wrapped his muscular body around him and deposited him outside, like he was hurling a bag of trash into the loading bay of a sanitation truck.
I turn my gaze from the windshield to the side window, still watching the trees go by.
“Remember that guy?”
“What guy?”
The voices are off screen. Depending on the light my reflection in the glass obscures my view of the trees.
“Paul didn’t tell you?”
I’ve only seen these in the movies, these copper, flaky trunks, bereft of branches until the top, when all of a sudden taut needles fan out like a mascara brush.
“The drunk dude who almost kicked Paul’s ass,” I chime in. “He was looking for a fight.”
The constant purr of the Chevy, now with close to 3,000 extra miles since it started this trip on Delancey Street a little over a week ago, makes us have to shout to be heard.
“Was he already drunk when you guys got there?” I only ever hear every other word coming from our tour manager Dave, who’s doubling as the driver.
He’s too close to the engine and not in the habit of raising his voice, but the wide vowels of his baritone patter, the legacy of his Ohio upbringing, are distinct enough that I always know what he’s saying.
“He was definitely drunk by the time we walked in.”
A couple of times the trees go away and a gas station or an auto shop or some sort of “Quickie Mart” comes into view.
“At least you didn’t have a boring night off.”
I briefly turn my gaze into the vehicle and notice two of us asleep, the unconscious who manage to make up for lost shuteye over the din of the engine and the banter of the bored.
“I still can’t believe that happened. It was Miles City for crying out loud. What the hell is Miles City?”
It’s going to start raining soon.
“Well, you definitely had yourselves an American night, that’s for sure.”
We’re crossing the border, from Idaho into Washington.
“Bush country is surreal.”
I wanna live like common people
I wanna do whatever common people do
Wanna sleep with common people
I wanna sleep with common people
Like you
Oh what else could I do
I said I’ll, I’ll see what I can do
Harley is, like me, a tree gawker, always with his gaze directed onto the speeding highway, his headphones securing his aural isolation. Unlike me he almost never pipes up in the van. He’s a sound engineer we asked on this tour as a sort of acoustical insurance policy, a tour during which we anticipated finding many soundboards in squalid condition. Harley is a portly, lily-white spiritual Brooklynite (he actually lives in Queens) dressed like a Kentucky car mechanic from the ‘50s. He has a long red beard, a short temper, and a generous laugh. We joke that, between Harley’s crypto-hillbilly affect and tall, reedy Dave’s long blond hair and trucker hat (his nickname is Kidd Rock), they’ll shield the rest of us from the hostile Bush voters, whose territory we seem to be careening through every second of the day during this trip.
I’m 28 and I haven’t gone further west than Chicago. I grew up in Queens, and the least populated area I’ve ever been to is the New Jersey suburbs. The landlocked middle is a territory I’d always wondered about; how it must be to live within an area so buffered from the coasts by plains and mountains. “What are their ways?” Apart from brief stopovers in places like Miles City, the Chevy is an insulated rocket shuttling us between progressive cities. We ride in a safe, protective bubble, with a singular mission, confirmed by the joyous looks on the audience’s faces. My idea of “the locals” in the countryside is hopelessly mediated by our transience.
I wanna live like common people
I wanna do whatever common people do
——
We left the Atlantic coast and cut our way through the breadbasket, drove through the cornfields, through the ravines of the Cascades, and tomorrow we will reach the Pacific Ocean. We are driving our way across America in a white Chevy, but we are not Lynyrd Skynyrd, Creedence Clearwater, Bruce Springsteen. Ours are not blues licks. No one’s quit remarking how European we code as a band; these young men with fancy haircuts and fluency in a few extra languages. The expanse of America that’s opened up before our eyes is at once familiar and foreign, and it all requires a soundtrack.
Sprinkles of glockenspiel and the plush beds of BBC strings play on my Discman, soothing my hangover, my usual metabolic state as I sit in the Chevy making its course to the West Coast. I petition the cosmos for a gurney to relay me into this van every morning, but the request is never fulfilled. I sit here listening to the roar of the engine, and I feel the thirst of every desiccated cell in my body, starving for electrolytes, ravaged by cocaine and tequila and pints of Stella Artois. I put on my headphones and play Different Class. I watch the disc spinning inside like a potter’s wheel.
When “Common People” comes on I get excited. The élan of this song is the height of post-midnight euphoria at a club, condensed into a private session between my ears. This Pulp album is a production masterpiece, a giant canvas with perfectly balanced sound colors, a glory of harmony, a symphony of yodels via guitar and organ, with a pied piper leading the charge.
Tomorrow night we will be headlining a 650-capacity club in Seattle, in front of people I have never seen, who will bob their heads and mouth the lyrics to the music my band has been crafting in East Village obscurity for the last five years. The last week and a half has repeated that strange spectacle over and over, of complete strangers who somehow know and love this music we’ve been forcing on our friends for years. But I’m not thinking of them right now. I’m thinking of Don Hill’s, a large, dingy establishment with a Saturday night party called Tiswas I religiously attend, and during which I always hear “Common People” from the center of the dance floor.
Different Class is already a classic, an emblem of Francophilia in the Anglo gaze, like eating a crêpe with tea, like listening to Gainsbourg in Essex. It’s a sensibility that began with The Beatles, when studio wizardry teamed up with songwriting genius to tell finely crafted stories about humanity’s arrival to the modern era. But this breathless universalism, evinced in every winking chuckle and magisterial organ pad, is also its undoing: the album tries too hard. It’s something that might be said of much of its Brit pop cohort—these self-satisfied, Blairite creations full of sparkle and intelligence. Classic “End of History” vibes naively unaware of the approach of 9/11. And still, its exquisite nostalgia paved the way for so many rock bands that came of age after that cataclysmic event.
Different Class is a retreat into rainbow-colored fantasy. It’s an everything drug, a stimulant and a depressant. These songs, with their wit and their swagger and their optimism and their breadth, incant the frisson within – a flattering mirror on this juncture of my life, a reflection of certain victory, when the band finally makes it.
——
In Seattle, they are bobbing their heads and they are mouthing the lyrics, just like they did in Minneapolis, in Cleveland, in Milwaukee, in Chicago. They purchased our CDs while our heads rested on pillows thousands of miles away. The act of listening transfigured those units of mass-produced culture into magic in their eardrums. And now, the humans who created the music are a fully-realized entity, performing live in front of their eyes.
Interpol is in a process of becoming. We’ve been christened as moneymakers, soon to occupy the Google search results for “indie rock” and “post-punk revival,” and twenty years later, “indiesleaze.” We rep a cure for Grunge-lite, for Nu-metal, for the slacker college rock of the late ‘90s. The new scene is dirtier, sleazier, more urbane than what’s on the radio today. “Music is fun again, thank God,” a friend recently told me.
Politics has kicked music down a couple levels on the Maslovian pyramid: the self-actualization of Clintonian Grunge, the rock’n’roll that spent a decade on the Freudian couch, is giving way to the funky desperation of the Lower East Side. It’s a throwback to an earlier Republican presidency, when Reaganism coincided with the primal, apocalyptic punk and hardcore scenes borne from NYC’s dilapidated streets. Seattle, the city that not so long ago birthed the angsty music that usurped the cheesy ‘80s, embraces us, and now we’re ready to usurp their music scene. We spike their latte with a shot of whiskey. The cafe, with its invitation to talk and exchange ideas, gives way to the nightclub and its celebration of pleasure and the human body. Music has regressed to fulfill our sensual needs.
I meet Stephanie after the show, when we dance together at the afterparty next to the venue. Before we have sex, Stephanie produces a large binder where she keeps her CD collection and points to her copy of our album. Isn’t life weird, I think, how something like this could happen, that what has beaten in my heart and my bandmates’ hearts for the last several years is now tucked in a plastic sleeve next to copies of Korn, Creed, and Linkin Park. I am flabbergasted that the kind of music we made would ever make it into a binder alongside these mainstream albums.
I first kissed her outside the venue while we waited for a taxi to take us to her place. I took a picture of her under the streetlights with my disposable camera. Later when I look at the photo, I will reflect on her plain beauty, how utterly normal, yet utterly gorgeous she looks. Stephanie is a normie college student with a sweet tooth for tastemaker music, and I will then see that was her half of the reason we spent an evening together in Seattle. This stranger gave me the fantasy of sexual conquest and I gave her the fantasy of intimacy with fame.
The drugs, the sex, the clichés, and the chaos reach another level after this part of the tour. All-encompassing fame, with its theft of regard for the mundane, and its fusion of the person with the work, will not spare me enough imagination to contemplate the trees.
The hostility we encountered in Miles City was two nights ago, but if we would have instead walked into that bar next week, the drunk quarterback might have fumbled for a pen and paper and asked for our autographs. And then there wouldn’t have been a story to tell. Soon, I will start seeing jocks at our shows and our music will no longer belong to NYC hipsters and music aficionados with their ears to the underground. I am overwhelmed by our fate. I recall the look on our publicist’s face just before the tour began, his shit-eating grin when he met us at JFK after our press junket in Europe. Turn on the Bright Lights had been out for a week and the SoundScan numbers had come in. From here there’s only the stars ahead. I will never be common again.
***
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