Peter Coviello - Long Players: A Love Story in Eighteen Songs

PENGUIN BOOKS

LONG PLAYERS

Peter Coviello has written about Walt Whitman, Mormon polygamy, Steely Dan, the history of sexuality, queer children, American literature, stepparenthood, and Prince. This work has appeared in The Believer, Frieze, Avidly, Raritan, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, as well as in several books. In 201718, he held a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He lives in Chicago.

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Copyright 2018 by Peter Coviello

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Coviello, Peter, author.

Title: Long players : a love story in eighteen songs / Peter Coviello.

Other titles: Love story in eighteen songs

Description: New York, New York : Penguin Books, [2018]

Identifiers: LCCN 2017037330 (print) | LCCN 2017037788 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525504313 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143132332 (pbk.)

Subjects: LCSH: Coviello, PeterRelations with women. | MenUnited StatesBiography. | Popular music fansUnited StatesBiography. | Man-woman relationshipsUnited States.

Classification: LCC HQ1090.3 (ebook) | LCC HQ1090.3 .C677 2018 (print) | DDC 306.7dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017037330

Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the authors alone.

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She was vigorous enough to have borne that hard night without feeling ill in body, beyond some aching and fatigue; but she had waked to a new condition: she felt as if her soul had been liberated from its terrible conflict; she was no longer wrestling with her grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts. For now the thoughts came thickly.

G EORGE E LIOT , Middlemarch

I T MUST HAVE been in the eighth or ninth song. Id lost count by then, the way you do, even if its a band like this one, a band you treasure. There in the press at the front of the crowd I was just then beginning to give myself over to that weird abandon that comes over you in unfamiliar places, where you have no friends, no connections, no social responsibilities of any kind. (This was Madrid.) What happened next took up about four minutes and thirty-four seconds. That, anyway, is how long Dalliance takes on the record. But somewhere inside the dilated time of that performanceand Dalliance is a slow-blossoming bruise of a song, one that broods over a woozy guitar riff and ascends finally toward a huge uncoiling blast of soundsomewhere along that way, aflail in a way only someone generous-hearted would call dancing, it came to me. I knew it, right there, without words and well beyond the possibility of contradiction: It is better to be doing this, exactly here, exactly now, than any other human thing.

There isnt much unusual about these strobe-lit bodywide rushes of conviction. You will have enjoyed some of your own, I imagine, and so will know they are not unique to the concert hall, the dance floor, the bar. Not at all. The whole bright delirium of sex, for instance, might be described in just these terms. Who hasnt known the feeling, in the midst of those few hours stolen away from the weary day, that youve stumbled for that sheltered moment into the right world? The world whose content is surprise, delight, self-forgetfulness, and self-reclamation? The world whose chief currency is joy? Who doesnt know that sensation: the inflooding belief in the possibility of being alive and being delighted, of being different and being you? This is some of what it means to say that sexin a phrase I once read that always lingered with meis an always available idiom for dreaming.

But its not the only one. We find our way to other idioms. Dreaming, you could say, speaks in other tongues.

I swear to you I encountered exactly that feeling, that sense of elated certainty wedded to a welcome susceptibility to transformation, there at a show by a band called the Wedding Present, at around eleven p.m. Madrid time, the thirteenth of November, near the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century.

I T HAD BEGUN that morning in the caf. Id arrived groggy and spiritless the night before, coming into Madrid from, of all unlikely points of departure, Norwich, in the east of England, where I had passed the previous week. Consult your nearest maps and you will see that Norwich is the metropolitan center of a region of England called East Anglia. I can tell you that it is a town that saw its heyday in about the mid-1400s and, to the underinformed visitor, appears to have been in a steady, unhurried decline ever since. Of course, this is hardly fair. In Norwich you will find a major university, Norman churches of evidently high distinction, and, once you make your way past the dismal car parks and retrofitted malls, miles of slow-rolling fields reaching up to a mild chalky sky.

Norwich could claim, too, just then, one couple very dear to me indeedfriends of my twenties, the both of them Irish born, whose lives had deposited them once more among the exasperating English. I was there because they were there. I was there because of the volume of postadolescent hilarity that had passed so fluently between us and that had, over the years, broadened and solidified into what all three of us would have just called love.

I was there because I was in flight. Unluckily for them, my brokenness and Ithat wearisome pairhad washed right up at their door.

They did what they could. They welcomed me. With an unstraining deftness of touch, they cared for me. At night we drank, and talked, and launched ourselves into three-body dance parties in their underheated front room. Every morning, before Anne went to work, Donal would make us all eggs and sausage in an enormous silver fry-pan, the sight of which always reminded me of the Joni Mitchell song: The beds too big, the frying pans too wiiiiiide. Id croon it to him in the warming and close little kitchen, and feel a brief restorative rightness in the world.

Then one afternoon a few days into my visit, because it seemed like just the thing to do, because nothing could be safer than this little nest in the east of England, I played them All My Friends by LCD Soundsystem, a song I thought we three might dance to and delight in. And before I could prevent it happening there it was: that familiar, enveloping awfulness.

A queasy weightlessness. A little rising plume of fear.

A small voice sidled up to me. Get ready, it said. Get ready. Get ready.

It occurred to me I was not well.

T HAT NIGHT I wrote a friend back home, who knew the shape of these episodes. She sympathized, and reassured, and encouraged. She told the kinds of jokes that arent really only jokes. (The thing about you, Dana said, as she had said before, is that you go a few months without having sex with anybody and you start to catastrophize your life. And I remember thinking,