from:
http://www.laobserved.com/intell/2008/02/john_doe_is_my_copilot.php

John Doe is my copilot
Nancy Rommelmann • Bio • Email

Back in the mid-90s, when I was working as a nightlife
columnist in Los Angeles, I had a little
pre-evening-out ritual: I’d get my young daughter
settled at her father’s house or a sleepover, and
then, perform my ablutions while listening to Meet
John Doe, or more precisely, the song “Knockin’
Around,” which I’d set to replay as many times as it
took for me to pick an outfit and blow-dry my hair.

I can go out to every club in town, not get what I
need
Sit right there and drown. Sit right there and bleed
I have been drunk amongst you all, and you know me for
some time
Sometimes I slip so far down, I don’t even realize

Acrylic by Heidi BarackI did not make more of than
necessary the overlaps with the lyrics and my life,
and anyway, I liked slipping down; it was the place,
paradoxically, where I thought you find transcendence.
Isn’t that why people went to bars? And if most of the
time you just got drunk and had the same conversations
with the same people, there were also the nights when
you made out with your friend Jason by the bathrooms
at the Lava Lounge and laughed and laughed and
laughed, or sang Frankie Valli’s “You’re Just Too Good
to Be True” at the top of your lungs with everyone
else still at The Room at closing time, which got your
head about as far into the ether as it could go
without actually having sex.

I’d also liked Doe since college, when a friend called
me my freshman year and said, “You have to get down to
New York; I got us tickets for X.” I didn’t know who X
was, but they’d just released "Under the Big Black
Sun," and I knew, as I watched and listened to Doe and
Exene Cervenka mesh those harmonies that should not
have worked but did that they were ripping up old
ground and making something new, and letting us walk
around on it. Cool.

Four years later, I was living in Los Angeles. Eight
years after that, Exene was eating dinner at my house,
our kids in my daughter’s room building a fort made of
blankets, onto which they beamed Mickey Mouse
flashlights. Two years after that, Doe was singing me
on my way out the door.

Sometime around 2001, I was at Frank ‘n Hank’s on
Western Avenue, with the man who would become my
husband. Frank ‘n Hank’s is a great dive bar, and at
the end of the bar was a couple, maybe 15 years older
than we were, maybe 30, it was hard to tell. They were
having a little party with a man they’d just met,
talking over each other, their laughter punctuated by
coughing jags. I looked at how the gal’s lipstick had
stained the bottom half of her face coral, how her
eyes unmoored when she stopped talking, as though,
without the tether of speech, she just drifted away.
She and her husband began fussing about whether they
could keep the trailer parked where it was for two
nights or three, and I thought it might be a good idea
to not get too cozy on this barstool, and realized
this, too, was the point of Doe’s song.

Last night, I went to see a friend play a small club
here in Portland, Oregon, where I’ve been living since
2004. Also on the bill was John Doe, who I’d not seen
play since New York. As I listened to the other bands,
I saw Doe in a little archway near the stage. He was
looking at me, the way a friend looks across a room,
just pleased to see you, and before logic told me,
this could not be (he and I have never met), I
thought, of course he knows me, all those years of us
both in LA, our lives running parallel, and him having
the heart and guts to write songs about it.

Doe took the stage, dark jeans; jean jacket, hair that
maybe hadn’t washed in a few days. I’ve known a lot of
people in touring bands; it’s a young man’s game,
driving from city to city, trying to get some sleep in
the van. Doe didn’t look unnerved by any of this; he
looked like the last man standing. Alone on stage, no
fancy lights, he started to play. His acoustic guitar
and voice filled the room more than any of the
preceding five-piece bands. Yeah, he was loud, but
that’s not why he was rocking harder than anyone else;
he was rocking harder because he had authority. The
other acts had been arty, testosteronic; enamored of
their own sensitivity, and they’d all (with the
exception of the sensitive guys) been interesting to
watch. But was that why we were here?

Doe changed over to electric guitar. “That’s all the
stage craft you’re going to get, folks,” he told the
room. Then he played songs from the new CD, A Year in
the Wilderness, including one I’d heard him talk about
on NPR, “Little More Time,” about his oldest daughter,
who I know is about eighteen, the same age as my
daughter. The title of the song tells you what it’s
about, and as I watched and listened to Doe sing it, I
stood there and cried. It’s the song I hear every day
these days, if not exactly that song.

“Go ahead and talk and let your cell phones ring, I
don’t give a shit,” Doe told the crowd. There was
nothing to prove; we were going to get what he was
talking about or we weren’t. Then he asked for
requests. Someone shouted “Fourth of July!” but Doe
said, “It’s just after New Year’s; too early for
that.” I thought about asking him to play “Knockin’
Around”; I thought about it for a few minutes. But why
should he? Hadn’t I dipped in that well hundreds of
time? Hadn’t I sucked what I could from it? And, was
there part of me that imagined I’d shout the title and
Doe would say, “That song’s always meant a lot to me,
and I’m going to play it right now for you, little
lady”? Yeah, there was, and screw that. Better to let
him play what he wanted, to hear what he’d learned
lately. Which was: We’re already raged at the sun, and
what good did that do? Nose down, keep working; look
how much we’ve got.

A few months ago, I heard an X song, in repeat, coming
from my daughter’s room. It was Nausea, one of the
world’s great odes to hangovers, which goes, in part,
Today you're gonna be so sick so sick you'll prop your
forehead on the sink, and I thought, oh Christ, what
was my child up to last night? But she bright and
chipper, sober as the day she was born. “I just like
the song,” she said. I say, preemptive learning.

Image: Acrylic by Heidi Barack, GalaxyGloo.com

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