SHINY AND OH SO BRIGHT

(Taking a break from THE GHIBLI GIRLS this week to address the elephant in the room — or, more to the point, Billy Corgan’s ego in my soul. Ghibli Girls will be back soon, in an article mapping Miyazaki’s Spirited Away against Pixar’s Inside Out. Stay tuned…)

THRU THE EYES OF JMS:

Earlier this week I saw The Smashing Pumpkins at Madison Square Garden: it was my first trip to the Garden – but far from my first Pumpkins experience. (I’ve lost count.)

Post-Pumpkins concert, Ann Arbor, MI, 2000. All of us Juniors in high school, I’m on the back of my friend, Mara. This photo was my best friend Monique’s idea upon spotting “that burning pole!”

Billy began the 31-song set by skulking slowly downstage, alone, bathed in light and donning something in the black leather gown family – Billy Corgan standard uniform. His first words to his audience: an acoustic performance of “Disarm,” photos of his childhood projected behind him. The lyric “I used to be a little boy / so old in my shoes” had a grainy photograph of boy-Billy-Corgan projected several stories high as its background: a not-so-subtle reminder from our leader whom we’re dealing with and what we can expect on the journey ahead…

Billy Corgan was taking us on auto-biographical journey of his life’s music…AND I WAS IN:

Photo Credit: @Mulaney. (Full Disclosure: I print-screened this photo from John Mulaney’s Twitter feed. Apparently he, too, geeks out over the Pumpkins — and strikes me as someone who won’t mind my credited photo use after I AFFIRM I AM NOT A ROBOT.)

For the next 3+ hours, Billy Corgan serenaded me with our shared memories. (He also covered Bowie’s “Space Oddity” and Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.”)

For him, it’s a résumé that reflects a confident, if inflated, ego. For me, it’s a soundtrack to my very different story – and self-esteem level, starting back in the summer of 1991: I was 7 years-old and lucky to have a big brother with excellent taste in music. The Smashing Pumpkins catalog underscored much of my memory from that point forward…

It is a great understatement to claim “I wrote a lot” growing up. (Again: I’m lucky, if occasionally mortified, to have a mother who saved all of my adolescent writing.)

(As my Subscribers know) I’m just returning to New York from a full-week back home in Detroit.

In the wake of some late-night “summer reading” completed in my childhood bedroom – followed immediately, in a case of serendipitous timing, by a night of live Smashing Pumpkins songs – a thought occurred to me:

Billy Corgan was basically my therapist throughout adolescence…we just never met.

I revisited some of these “primary source documents” – that lay out in embarrassingly well-organized detail the coming-of-age story of a nerdy Midwestern teenage girl so-eager-to-leave-home-and-experience-the-world. When I needed to “escape” home (which was basically always), I had a room over the carport of my Grandma [and Grandpa] Mazer’s house where I did most of my writing – at an old wooden desk overlooking a magnolia tree on the front yard. (In my memory it’s massive; I’m not sure if that’s true.) It bloomed about one week a year. (I related to that tree HARD in high school.)

Located on borderlines between two different Grosse Pointes and Detroit, about a mile (quick bike ride) from mine, Grandma Mazer’s house provided local kids from all sides of the tracks a respite from their own lives: at least a dozen kids in the neighborhood – spanning two generations – learned to crawl through the milk chute to unlock the side door – Grandma Mazer taught them how. In addition to my candle-and-CD-filled creative lair, Grandma Mazer’s provided a small backyard pool (with an endless supply of popsicles and clean towels), two trampolines – placed conveniently (and dangerously) under climbing trees, and skateboard ramps:

I believe this photo captures my high school friends and me pretty accurately: Noxema-ad worthy (but utterly unaware) honor roll virgins, chilling up in my bedroom late at night, unsupervised, post-rock-show and subsequent backyard swim. Here we are, crazy kids, showing off our *matching* Boy Sets Fire concert tees —and, apparently, a few of my favorite things (Scooby-Doo and cows).

Know what we were up to? Listening to music – and that was it. Truly. For any concerned parents out there: the “craziness” that happened over at Grandma Mazer’s was almost exclusively music making/listening (also swimming, trampoline gymnastics, tree climbing and skateboarding). I never drank or did drugs – not once – in that house. My “baddest behavior” included skinny-dipping (a lot) and, one time on a half-day, watching stolen porn with some skateboarder friends – as a brief intermission between skating sessions. To be clear: we watched this mild pornography fully clothed – drinking Kool-Aid. (That isn’t “code” for anything: it was literal Kool-Aid, no alcohol – probably not even sugar, knowing the adults in my family – at least one of whom would have been on-site, probably reading or playing piano, confident [and correct] that nothing dangerous was happening.) While the videos were NC-17, we were PG-13 at our worst. (That, and my journal-lined, candle-covered, wood-paneled room was most definitely a fire hazard…)

*A Timed Dose of Nostalgia: listened to Siamese Dream and flipped through some photos — all events shown contained HEAVY doses of The Smashing Pumpkins.*

I was a drug-free, straight-A, 3-sport Varsity athlete virgin teenage girl…and Billy Corgan was my unlikely “Angel of Music.”

…I haven’t changed that much, come to think of it. My “rockin’ weekend” while back home?

Friday Night, 2018:

MOM
What do you want to do tonight?

JMS
Go to a grocery store – a big one. A Kroger. I want to walk down every aisle:

…And then I went home and read journals/wrote lyrics in bed, cuddling with my parents’ dog:

Then, Saturday Night:

MOM
What do you want to do tonight?

JMS
Oh, I’m going over to Rufus’ house – we’re gonna sit on his deck and talk travel and catch-up. Wanna come?

An important point of clarification: Rufus was my 7^th Grade Social Studies teacher. He recently published a book about his travel to every country in the world (literally). For our World History curriculum, he didn’t use a textbook: he showed his personal slides and told us travel stories. We learned the name and location of every country in Africa and the Middle East (while listening to songs like Ray Stevens’ “Ahab the Arab” on a loop – talk about learning to focus through distraction!).

*I did this at age 11, after listening to my teacher’s personal stories about these countries and the people who live in them.*

Seventh Grade World History with Rufus fueled three guilty pleasures: (1) travel; (2) nonfiction; (3) dumb comedy songs. We’d open class by interpreting and debating political cartoons for jellybeans: sugar gets kids talking, and Rufus tricked us into making it about our world and our country’s actions in it. We saw photos and heard stories of regular people all around the world – with little regard to whether national stations and publications deemed their lives newsworthy. We were exposed to everything on the menu from war, tragedy, poverty, humanity, mercy, community, family, and love. We were tricked into learning compassion for others as we learned about the world, past and present – he re-wired us (for the better), if we let him.

During high school, I baby-sat his son (as it happened, he lived just a few blocks from Grandma Mazer’s). We’ve stayed in touch: my mom, a fellow teacher in the school district, took over that baby-sitting gig for me when I left for college – probably because Rufus ranks among the most interesting humans alive (and his family is lovely).

The peak of my wild weekend: Rufus and I drank beer together – that part was a first. (My mom was my designated driver.) In a mind-bending twist: a teacher from my high school showed up, one who had taught my big brother speech and drama – and coached me for my high school graduation speech, now seventeen years ago. Sharing a conversation with her, through the thick fog of distant memory and a beer-laced brain, stirred up all sorts of forgotten past chapters of my writing:

*Photos included to show how gorgeous Grosse Pointe South looks at graduation. (I gave a speech about rejection — with a title that later became a Pumpkins single. Can’t make this stuff up…)*

While I’ve been writing and singing/performing for what feels like forever, I didn’t start writing songs until much later:

In the Fall of 2012 – while working as a white collar litigator for DC’s largest law firm, I found my way into a musical improv class (at Washington Improv Theater, music director Travis Ploeger at the keys).

My succinct sales pitch to anyone considering musical improv: at very least, it will reveal literal music inside of you. I think that’s a powerful experience for everyone to have, personally. (I recognize my bias.)

From my first time performing musical improv, at a black box in DC, something changed inside me (broke, some might say):

I started hearing music…then lyrics…ultimately songs in my own life. The structure of my notebooks changed: paragraphs (d)evolved into bits of dialogue and song titles; alliterative strings of words set to actual melody. I chased that feeling: where could I learn how to extract the raw material I was hearing into some sort of viable form on-the-page?

In January 2014, I started The Second City’s Music Conservatory – coincidentally in Billy’s hometown, Chicago.

I wanted desperately for the people with whom I improvised to like me – but more importantly, for them to know me.

One thing I know about me: when it comes to subjects I love, I tend to write a lot – and fast. Over the years I’ve come to view my eagerness to learn as the “cool fraternal twin” of brownnosing: seemingly the same at-a-glance, startlingly-distinct upon up-close examination. Keeping this in mind, I would set timers for my written homework (in hopes my classmates wouldn’t come to despise me for my off-the-charts levels of musical theatre geekdom).

One assignment: share a story about your favorite song, any genre. (Mine is, unsurprisingly, a Pumpkins song.)

Another case of serendipitous timing: I’d recently met Billy Corgan – at his small tea house in Highland Park, IL – where he was playing a wall-full of fancy synthesizers to an audio-recording of Siddhartha – for eight hours. I’d gotten an invite through some Pumpkins-related mailing list I’m on, inviting me to a performance “to be centered around an ambient/musical interpretation of Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha; built by modular synthesis, on the fly. Readings of the text to go hand in hand with whatever is created.”

Of course I went – and went early: I got a prime seat and scored a lengthy conversation with Billy – while he sold me raffle tickets for a chance to win his art: I bought some, for two reasons (1) I wanted the art; (2) I wanted our conversation to last longer (which it did, on account of the financial transaction). We talked about dogs and philosophy and the Midwest. …And then I watched him play with sounds for several hours. (After a few hours, I decided to surrender my seat to the girl at the head of the line of fans waiting outside to watch. Perhaps trying to channel The Golden Rule: it felt like the right thing to do.)

It was during this specific half-hour writing session – about a Pumpkins song – that I started to understand the “lane” for my (eventual) songs and (subsequent) musicals.

An [edited] excerpt of JMS Homework: FAVORITE SONG (ANY GENRE) + WHY
“Thru The Eyes Of Ruby,” The Smashing Pumpkins (from Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, 1995)

Through this Program, I’ve come to appreciate that each of us connects with music in our own way. For me, music is emotional exploration and a method of cataloging memories.

My Grandma Mazer, a piano prodigy and lifelong musical director, was first to introduce me to music as an infant — I made my musical theater debut at eighteen months. Thanks to a childhood in musical theater, I sang about a lot of things, through the filter of characters, before I would actually experience them in my own life. By age five, my parents had me singing alongside my big brother in church choir and participating in a choir exchange that led me to sing not just before our super-white, suburban congregation, but in lively downtown Detroit churches complete with impromptu electric guitar solos and fainting parishioners. (…Thanks to church choir, I was exposed young to the truth that most black people are awesome – and white people can be racist garbage.)

Music created the landscape for how I would later approach love, lust, heartbreak, betrayal, sickness, death, family, God – all of life’s heaviest lifting. To date, when facing heavy stuff, my innate reflex is to turn back to music: what song(s) am I living now? (…What song(s) do I WANT to live now?)

My big brother, Kenny, introduced me to a lot of the [non-Broadway] bands/artists that would influence me most: Nirvana, Radiohead, U2, [early] Counting Crows, Pearl Jam, Tori Amos, Sigur Ros – and, of course, The Smashing Pumpkins.

Listening to Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness for the first time, with Kenny, is one of my most powerful music memories. It was Christmas Eve, 1995: I was in seventh grade, Kenny in tenth.

Seventh grade, for me, was a disaster: my female friends seemed to decide, simultaneously, that they wanted to “be popular” (they also seemed to decide, simultaneously, that I could not join them on this quest), I’d started to “like” my male friends (and I’d find out years later that they’d started to “like” me) which made everything suddenly awkward; my dance choreographers didn’t know how to deal with me, as I’d recently developed boobs and hips and swimmer shoulders and no longer seemed to “fit” into their numbers — or my costumes, for that matter.

Bottom line: I didn’t seem to fit anywhere, except in music. Looking back, I suppose it’s not really a surprise that, under such seemingly desperate circumstances, I’d be in prime position to connect with my favorite song.

Tradition dictated that we celebrate Christmas Eve with my dad’s side of the family, and each receive one gift that night (mine was always new pajamas – which was what I’d always request). In 1995, Kenny’s Christmas Eve gift was Mellon Collie on CD. Neither of us had yet heard the full album (released that fall), and my dad’s parents didn’t have a CD player, so we had to *beg* our parents to let us break tradition and go to Grandma Mazer’s house (which had a CD player) so we could listen – waiting until tomorrow was simply not an option. Our parents finally relented, and we showed up on my Grandma Mazer’s porch that night, in the snow, (I wore my new pajamas), CD in-hand like a locked treasure chest only she had the tools to open.

We went up to Kenny’s room (it had been my Grandpa Mazer’s room, but he’d passed away the year before and Kenny inherited the space) and sat, in silence, through all 28 tracks. We took no bathroom breaks, we didn’t even stop for an “intermission” between discs. As we’d discuss afterward, the album felt like one big, important journey: we actually felt like different people after it ended.

Mellon Collie includes two longer, epic songs that feel a bit like self-contained mini-journeys: Disc One contains the optimistic “Porcelina of the Vast Oceans,” mirrored on Disc Two by “Thru The Eyes Of Ruby.” Ruby’s tone is equally romantic, seductive even – but with a dark side. It has “baggage.” At a time when I felt lost inside myself, drowning in what felt like a million new and different emotions, that song – that seven-minute journey – was everything: everything I couldn’t express, or even describe, somehow “clicked.”

To date, “Thru The Eyes Of Ruby” leaves me, without fail, feeling empowered: even if in a dark place, I’m able to find beauty and steadiness there. Now, years later, I also think of Grandma Mazer (who passed away in 2004) and Kenny (living in Oregon, and whom I haven’t seen since 2006): I feel temporarily young again and connected to two of my favorite people on the planet.

Something I’m discovering in this moment, as I write, is that a favorite song can be a very personal thing: I can’t imagine your experience with this track is anything like mine. But, as it plays, I hope you go SOMEWHERE – and I hope you enjoy that place, wherever it may be:

MY FAVORITE SONG (ANY GENRE):

Still reading?

Then it won’t surprise you to learn at this point that, in the wake of Wednesday’s concert, I went home and outlined an entire Smashing Pumpkins musical that merges Billy’s songs and my high school memories. For fun. (That’s the brain behind this blog.)

Care to go one step deeper down the rabbit hole of my Pumpkins love (and passion for homework)? Fear not: I won’t post my outline – not yet anyway. Perhaps I’ll share “Draft 13” – in, like, a decade or two (long after Sarah and the Seed).

For now: it’s a rock musical inspired by a structural mash-up of Deaf West Theater’s production of Duncan Sheik’s Spring Awakening; Green Day’s American Idiot; Hedwig and the Angry Inch; and Alanis Morrissette’s Jagged Little Pill. …Except my story contains no rape or suicide or drug abuse or identity crisis: where most rock musicals go dark, mine goes light – Miyazaki-style.

The adolescent anarchy is very real – but its cause isn’t sex or drugs, just a really good song.

This unlikely “North Star” leads away from two common roads: abusive relationships and substance-induced hallucinations. Or a hybrid of the two, for that matter, as is the story of Billy Corgan and Jimmy Chamberlin: a friendship between a legendary narcissist and his talented but tragically drug-addicted drummer friend who know how to write a f**king rock song:

But can these songs fit in a world where:

Muses come in the form of grandparent ghosts and public-school teachers – the kind you can reach out to decades later and drink beers together and absolutely nothing is awkward.

The crazy isn’t mental illness in need of medication, it’s creation in search of the right company and a medium – and maybe enough luck to make it into a living.

The primary focus is never romantic love, always adventure.

There is no “enemy.” The conflict examines the vulnerable space between creativity and insanity – a frequency Billy Corgan rules…and one I’ve come to occasionally tune into, like a local radio station in a mountain town.

The songs aren’t plot points in a fictional story; they’re emotional lynchpins in a real life – mine. (This is crucial, as I assume at the outset a 0% possibility of acquiring the rights – the idea being that, if successful in writing the book, further adaptations could succeed with another catalog.)

…But in my fantasy – where the impossible is possible, this song would be the closing number:

Believe in me as I believe in you.
xo

Please direct comments to me by email: I’d love to hear from you!

More JMSunderduress you may enjoy…

BOW. REFLECT. GO AGAIN TOMORROW.

RODGERS & HAMMERSTEIN’S CAROUSEL: IF I REWROTE YOU

INDOOR VOICES (singing!)