"You cannot hear music and noise at the same time."
That's a quote from American philosopher and poet Henry David Thoreau, an observation he recorded in his journals way, way back in April of 1854. If I understand him correctly, he was lamenting that the trials and tribulations of daily life can keep a person from fulfilling their true purpose, that divine reason for being on earth that exists somewhere inside all of us.
I can imagine that most of us have experienced that frustration in some capacity. Like the gifted musician who finds that his day job eats up all of his time and energy, and prevents him from living in the space where he can create. Or the talented actress whose family constantly tells her that there's no money to be made as a performer. So many people don't ever get a chance to tap into their music, their passion, their purpose.
Me, I sort of did it to myself. I had a chance to go to design school, and follow my artistic leanings. But when I saw how much it was going to cost - not just tuition, but materials and labs - I knew my family couldn't afford it. So I decided to take a safer route, and sign up for the growing computer science curriculum. I didn't even try to find some way to make my initial dreams happen, whether through a grant or a scholarship or a loan... I saw chaos ahead, and I crumbled.
The same thing happened in my personal life. I had a chance to walk away from a relationship that had become incredibly toxic. But I let her back in because I was a low point in my life. And over the span of two years, she took me even lower.
Ugh. I look back on all that, and even now, decades later, it makes me physically ill. So much stress. So much chaos. As Thoreau might say: so much noise.
And yet... I got beyond it all, and filled my life with music.
"Music" in the sense that I had never been happier. Sure, I'd suffered some pretty big personal setbacks. But it cleared the way for me to begin living my own life. Of charting my own path. Of being me without having to answer to anyone else. I found myself surrounded by new opportunities. By a group of amazing new friends. By the chance to embrace new experiences.
And in the midst of the new "me" I was forging, I discovered an album that would come to define my many periods of rebirth, to provide the soundtrack to every phoenix-like rise I attempted. A monumental collection of distortion and feedback that transcended whatever limits I thought my musical taste had, to become my hands-down, no-lie, favorite album of all time. A certified five-star modern classic from the undisputed masters of shoegaze...
MY BLOODY VALENTINE.
As I’ve mentioned previously, I was married once before, waaaay back when. Not long after I graduated from college in 1989, in a moment of personal upheaval, my then-girlfriend (from this point onward referred to as "The Ex") exploited my emotional weaknesses and cajoled me into increasing levels of "commitment" to her. It was kind of like being in NXIVM, but without all the dieting. At any stage I could have said no, but I didn't have it in me at that point. She bullied me into a marriage I wasn't ready for, and then months later proceeded to tear into me on a weekly basis.
It wasn't pretty. The entire situation was sapping the life out of me. And when I was at my lowest... I had my biggest epiphany ever.
One horrible night in August of 1991, I saw the light: it was time for me to go. And I did. Somehow I found the mental and emotional strength to stand up for myself, to voice my opinions, and to put myself first. My mind, my heart, even my geeky little soul... working in concert, they transformed the noise of the relationship that had immobilized me for years, into a stirring overture of music that triumphantly propelled me to freedom.
With that, I said my goodbyes. I walked out the door. I got into my car. I drove to my parents' house.
And it was over.
Seriously, I mean over. Capital-O-over. In the span of one day - less than twenty-four hours! - I went from living with my beautiful wife in a little rented house, to living out of a travel bag in my little room upstairs in my parents' house. The world I'd built for myself since college was erased in the blink of an eye. But it was deathly important that I secure my freedom. And to do that, all I had to do was give up everything I knew.
Well, almost everything. I still had my car, my beloved four-speed 1987 Honda Civic hatchback. I still had my awesome job as a software developer for a growing cell phone company. I still had Hoshi and Ami, my two cats. I still had my piercing blue eyes, two deep Arctic lakes filled with undulating waves of untrammeled sexuality.
And thank the Lords of Kobol, I still had Parts Unknown.
The greatest place on earth. (This was from when the store moved downstairs… less space, but cheaper rent!)
I discovered Parts Unknown, The Comic Book Store, quite by accident. It was October of 1989, and like every other nerdy loser in America, in the wake of Tim Burton's Batman, I was trying to put together a Joker costume for Halloween. I found a decent costume shop in the Yellow Pages (remember those?), and spent a lunch hour going through their stock and putting down a deposit. When I was done, I didn't feel like heading back to the office right away, so I decided to stroll around the mall and see what was new.
I started wandering. I checked out NC Shoes. I moseyed past Hit Or Miss. I turned the corner...
...and there it was. At the very end of the northern end of the first-floor wing, Parts Unknown beckoned. It was a huge space, filled with comics in back issue boxes and books on the shelves that hugged the walls. Displayed on the rack behind the counter was an incredible array of older books, collectibles that encompassed every genre imaginable. There were T-shirts. There were toys. There were pricey collected hardback editions. It was, in a word, heaven.
The very next week, I set up an account and became a regular customer. Every Wednesday, when the new books came out, I'd be there after work. They knew me as "the Captain America guy"... I bought any and every book or trinket that had Cap's face printed on it. I was 23, I was making good money, and I was a geek who was in the full bloom of his collecting madness. I'm sure if you look at Parts Unknown's tax return for fiscal year 1990, there's an addendum dedicated completely to me: the "1040-LOSER" form.
Over the course of many many months and many many visits, I eventually struck up a casual friendship with John, the owner, and his friends and co-workers Mark, Obin, and Rusty. I'm still not sure how I won them over. Maybe I came across as a nerd, but a stable nerd, someone who wasn't sleeping in Wonder Woman Underoos in his mom's basement. Whatever it was, they seemed to like me, and as a result the gang welcomed me into the "inner circle".
Now, let's flash forward to November 1991. Three months after my marriage imploded, I had taken the tentative first steps of rebuilding my world. I moved into an incredible two-bedroom apartment near the Arboretum, just down the road from the university. I was lucky enough to reconnect with some special people from college that my relationship had sort of prevented me from seeing for a while. And The Ex? She took the initiative to file our legal separation papers. Turns out her brother's friend, who'd had a crush on her for years, swooped in at a family beach getaway back in October, and she ran away with him. Problem solved!
So that's how things stood, as I found myself kibitzing with the guys at Parts Unknown one Wednesday night. I'm not quite sure who brought up what first, but in the course of our conversation, John threw it out there that he needed someone to fill in for a few hours during the week. And I piped up that I had a lot of free time on my hands as a result of my recent turn of events. Boom! Just like that, I sunk my excited nerdy chocolate deep into John's awesome comic store peanut butter. Or maybe, he smeared his enticing comic store peanut butter all over my eager nerdy chocolate. (You know what? Whichever one is less gross to you... go with that one.)
And just like that... I was working at Parts Unknown.
Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday nights, from 6pm to 9pm, you could find me stocking back issues, straightening the shelves, and ringing up customers. In between my duties, I'd read everything I could lay my hands on. Not only because I was an addict, but it actually helped sales. If I knew a customer loved Batman, I'd point out that he crossed over in an issue of Hawkman or Flash that month. Whoosh! More often than not they'd run over to the new issues, grab that Batman guest appearance, and add it to their haul. I was quite the salesmen to the nerd cognoscenti, let me tell you.
For two glorious years, this guy was my boss.
I had a blast working at Parts Unknown. I'm not kidding, I was literally a man-child in a candy store. Talk about noise becoming music... I turned the absolute immolation of most of my life into something purely fun and soul-enriching. This will sound hyperbolic, but it's true... There are three locations on Earth that I consider to be my "sacred places": the woods surrounding my neighborhood where I played as a kid... the Well in the courtyard of the Design School on my college campus... and Parts Unknown.
So much goodness came into my life from being a part of Parts Unknown. The friendships I made with John and Mark and Doug (another customer who passed muster)! The weird-ass customers that I had to deal with! (Oh, boy, the customers... Buy me a beer sometime and I'll blow up your head Scanners-style with my tales...) The incredible amount of comics I read!
And the new music I discovered.
What? Music? At a comic book store? Oh yes. John kept a small boombox behind the counter, and to fill the quiet parts of the workday, they'd throw on some tunes. Now John, being a child of the 70s, he was into more classic rock stuff, like ELO. I loved the song "Don't Bring Me Down", but I'd never listened to Discovery, the album it came from. Well, a few nights alone in the store took care of that. Getting to hear some true deep tracks from ELO made me love the band even more.
Mark, on the other hand... Mark was at the other end of the spectrum. He was younger than me, and he had his finger on the pulse of what was new and eclectic in the world of music. Thanks to Mark, I heard Dinosaur Jr. for the first time. If my memory serves me correctly, he also introduced me to Sonic Youth. When I started working at the store, Nirvana's Nevermind had only been out for six weeks, maybe seven, but I think he was listening to that as well. (Believe it or not, kids, there was a time in history where "grunge" wasn't a thing. And the world was all the better for it.)
A lot of that new stuff didn't really click with me, to be honest. I was still in the throes of my college-era tastes. A Flock Of Seagulls, Queen, George Michael, Yes, Erasure... It was hard for me to wedge Hüsker Dü or the Lemonheads into that group. So although I gave Mark's collection a shot, it just wasn't doing it for me.
Except...
There was this one song, the last tune on one of his Mark's newer CDs, that intrigued me. It was a long tune - over six minutes! - but it never overstayed its welcome. The intricately loping drum patterns. The buzzsaw drone of the rhythm guitars. The ethereal, unintelligible boy/girl vocals. It even had a name that didn't make any immediate sense: "Soon".
Written down, I'm sure that all sounds weird. A mix that's potentially unlistenable. And yet... all those disparate elements came together in a hypnotic swirl of tonal emotions and feelings that did something to me every time I heard it. I mean, I hate dancing, but damn if that stupid song didn't make me want to flail around the store. When Mark would listen to the CD, I'd ask if I could play “Soon” again. When I was in the store alone, I'd listen to that one song over and over. It wasn't just a good song... it was frigging perfect.
Even the CD art was entrancing: a maelstrom of fuchsia and purple, like an angry Magic Eye poster. If you stared at it long enough, the image morphed into a blurry closeup of a hand strumming an electric guitar. And at the bottom of the cover, in contrasting red colors that made the letters almost disappear into the chaos of the design, was the name of the band: My Bloody Valentine.
The rest of the CD, though... It scared me! The other songs where chaotic. They were loud. In spots the album was soft and caressing, in others it was abrasive and pummeling. Talk about being outside your comfort zone... none of the other tunes sounded anything like the bouncy pop music I was used to. So when I popped the CD into the player, I would skip right to "Soon".
And that, in a long-winded nutshell, is how I discovered Loveless.
“I told you a thousand times already: we don’t have any more copies of ‘The Death Of Superman’! So stop calling, dammit!”
Now, here's the funny thing: I don't have a "punchline" for how it became my favorite album ever. As you just read, there's an amazingly tortured and self-indulgent origin story as to how Loveless came into my life. But once it was there... it was just sort of always there. It sat on the periphery of my thoughts. It crept in around the edges of my musical taste. It slowly wrapped itself around my heart, my mind... my very being. I found myself humming "Soon" while I was at work writing code. It just wouldn't leave me alone.
I remember finally buying the CD at BB's. My aim was to own "Soon", but I had to get the entire thing if I wanted that one song. (No iTunes back then, kids!) And when I got it home, I figured I had to listen to the entire thing... I just paid good money for it, after all. So I spent an evening drawing, with the CD on in the background. I let the surreal soundscapes of "Blown A Kiss", "Loomer", and "To Here Knows When" seep into my subconscious. I found that when I wasn't concentrating on the music... I'll be damned, it was great. Gorgeous, even. All the cacophony that Kevin Shields labored for years to create, coalesced into a staggeringly emotional aural environment.
Not get all New Age-y, but by not listening, I heard. (Now there's a Zen koan for the ages.) Over the course of many months, all that puzzling noise became achingly beautiful music.
After a couple of years, my day job workload, along with my new relationship, made me decide to end my time as an employee of Parts Unknown. (I still bought comics, though. Lots of comics.) And then a year and a half later, I found myself moving to California with that same girlfriend. And then three years after that, I moved to Berkeley when our relationship ended. Just like in the fall of 1991, I had to rebuild my life from the ground up. But once again, I still had a few things to keep me going: My car. My job. My cats. My devastatingly blue eyes. The only thing missing… was Parts Unknown.
Ironically, the one constant through all those unexpected bi-coastal highs and lows was Loveless. The album born out of chaos (seriously, the production was so fraught with issues they almost didn't finish it) was one of the few things that brought stability to my life. Every time I transformed my own personal noise into wonderful music, I did it with the help of an album that accomplished the very same thing.
In the quiet hours of the night, when I was all alone in the store… there was only one person I could turn to for strength. And he never let me down.
It's hard for me to wrap my brain around the fact that Loveless has been my go-to album for three decades now. So much has happened since those first innocent days, when I climbed out of my chasm of woes and discovered that I could actually be my own person.
Take John, and the fate of Parts Unknown. Not long after I'd moved to California, there were... shenanigans, let's say, and the mall almost burned to the ground. John was forced with saving his business, a pressure-filled situation that he admirably made happen. And then in the years to come, he had setback after setback. He had to move the store again. He suffered health issues. The unstable economy almost tanked the store, multiple times. He lost his brother and one of his best friends.
And yet... he never gave in. If you stopped by the store, even though his Mom was in the hospital, he'd give you a big boisterous hello. And if you had the time, despite the threat of eviction hanging over him, he'd regale you with one of his astonishing comic book- or wrestling-related stories. You'd never know John had problems, unless you were close enough that he'd share them. To the community at large, he was just John.
What kept him going? Several things, but one of the big ones was comic books. To go back to Thoreau's point, they're his music. He realized what his passion was when he was a little kid, and he followed it big-time. Ignoring all the life-generated noise that swirled around him, John let himself be carried away by his love of the four-color music of comic books. He frigging loves comics, everything about them, and he's made it his mission to share that love. No matter how much he has to struggle.
And his struggles... my struggles... the struggles of so many of my friends... all our mutual struggles have made me realize: maybe Thoreau wasn't speaking for everyone with his observation. My 11th grade English teacher, Mrs. Boyles, who worshiped Thoreau like a god, will probably start spinning in her grave when I say this, but... maybe Thoreau was wrong. Maybe noise can co-exist with the music. Maybe hearing them both at the same time is a choice you make.
I'm still learning how to make that choice. For instance, the whirlwind of ideas I dream up for my various writing projects stresses me out to no end, but all those thoughts eventually condense into finished products that fill me with pride and happiness. Being booted out of urban Los Angeles back in 2019 was devastating and demoralizing, but it resulted in my new suburban digs being a better environment for my pets to spend their lazy days. This past week, I heard four years of nationwide angst and stress erupt into an inspiring symphony that arose from the joyous celebrations that followed the results of the recent election.
To me, at least, all the chaos in the world, in the country, in everyday life... it doesn't have to be an obstacle. It can be a chance to change things. To shake things up. To make life better, even in a small way.
And I'm proud to say... from all the existential noise I've experienced over the years, I've been able to compose some damn beautiful music.
BIO
Don Stroud is not the famous actor and world-class surfer of the same name. He is the non-famous California transplant who became an award-winning film editor and struggling amateur screenwriter. He loves cats, sushi, comic books, movies, music, and Cherry Coke. What's that, dear? Oh yes: and his wife. You can follow him on Twitter, where he pops up sporadically, at @DonStroud2.