The first line of the first song of the first CD I ever owned was “She was born in November 1963, the day Aldous Huxley died.”
Before then it had never occurred to me to own my own CD but my eleventh birthday was coming up and I had invited this relatively new school friend to a small celebratory gathering. Neither of us suspected at the time that he had a little more than eight years of life left to live, nor that in about three years by means of my own significant personal flaws I would back myself into a social corner so self-isolating that I would turn to him when I had no one else to spend time with, which would result in us becoming the very best of friends and closest of artistic collaborators for the last five years of his life.
It was not atypically eccentric of this friend to do this kind of weird shit: rather than pick out or make a gift and bring it to the party so he could watch me find out what it was in front of everyone, he sidled alongside me in the art room before or after a class we happened to have been placed in together and told me, about a full week before the party, what he was going to give me. And that it would be something he happened to just have lying around. I did have a choice in the matter though.
Somehow he had come into two brand-new CDs by two different artists that he didn’t particularly want. (I learned in the ensuing years that free stuff often mysteriously came his way.) He told me both of the artists. I had never heard of Sheryl Crow and when he said her name I misheard “Stone Crow,” which sounded to me at the time like a cool band name. I’ll take that Stone Crow, I told him, pretending to know what I was agreeing to. If he noticed that I said “Stone Crow” he didn’t correct me.
I was fortunate to have Tuesday Night Music Club for my first-owned disc. It holds up remarkably well; I still listen from time to time. But as an opening statement not just for a rock n roll album but for Crow’s distinguished and ongoing career, that first track is something else. The lyric about the generationally-fugitive protagonist of “Run, Baby, Run” having been “born in November 1963, the day Aldous Huxley died” hides a sophistication and resonance it took me decades of adoring the song to even begin to appreciate.
When we were seventeen my CD-dispensing best buddy and I traveled out here to San Francisco on our own for the last week of the summer before our last year of high school. We took an overnight flight back to Philly and my pal’s father drove us from the airport directly to our first day of that school year, so it was pretty cool to spend that day telling everyone that we had literally just come from San Francisco that morning and what about you how was your summer. That was my first time in San Francisco and, as is often the case for first-time visitors, the city’s topographical beauty made quite a striking impression on me, particularly as a kid from the New Jersey suburbs. Both the verdancy and vivacity of San Francisco itself and the memories of having experienced them for the first time with my best friend contributed to why I’ve ended up living here on and off for the last ten years.
I’ve never gotten around to reading a word of Huxley’s writing except for a few extensive passages from Brave New World that Yuval Noah Harari excerpts in one of his books. But during my first SF residency stint it occurred to me out of interest in Crow’s intentions as a songwriter to look into what day Aldous Huxley did in fact die.
Turns out that it was November 22, 1963, the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. I’m sure some people perceived the more layered meaning of Crow’s lyric and the rest of the tune the first time they heard it but it took me a few decades. The protagonist of “Run, Baby, Run,” the daughter of a Sixties countercultural drug-using mother and a civil rights movement protester father, has to keep running “past the arms of the familiar and their talk of better days.” Torn between parents representing the seismic cultural upheavals of the Sixties who pledged divergent fealties to non-overlapping movements, our running Baby would have come into young adulthood right as the Sixties began to fade out of immediate memory and as the strangeness of the Seventies gave way to the cynicism of the Eighties. “Baby loves to run” because she was symbolically and literally born the very day everything went haywire for postwar America.
Crow and her collaborators could have written “She was born in November 1963, the day J.F.K. died” without messing up the meter they needed to get the guitar and drums kicking in and the song off and running. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if Crow has stashed in a drawer somewhere some hand-scrawled lyrics in a notebook from the original Tuesday Night Music Club writing sessions that actually do say “the day J.F.K. died.” Perhaps with “J.F.K.” crossed out in red and an arrow indicating “Aldous Huxley.”
In any case, the lyric as presented on the record is the quintessence of songcraft as poetry because Crow and Club found a way to say something and not say it at the same time. The first thing we have a chance to learn about the protagonist of the first song on Crow’s first record, a character less than two years younger than Crow herself, is that she was born the day of Kennedy’s death — but only if we know that Huxley and Kennedy died the same day, or are interested enough to find out. And since Huxley was a counterculture icon and progenitor, there is indeed some additional poetic significance embedded in locating Baby’s birthday on the date of Huxley’s death rather than specifically on Kennedy’s. Getting Huxley’s name in there helps to suggest that she was born the day one cultural epoch ended and another one sprang violently to life and its attendant possibilities flooded in to fill the void (Huxley is said to have passed from life into death while on LSD), and that the always-running protagonist grew up alongside a country that was going insane and frantically trying to piece itself back together. For her and anyone of her generation, including Crow and what would have been the target demo for Tuesday Night Music Club, passing through adolescence across those decades and movements would have been disorienting to say the least. No wonder Baby loves to run.
I still listen to Tuesday Night Music Club, usually around my buddy’s birthday in March. With the protagonist of “Run, Baby, Run” turning sixty years old this November 22 I shall spin it again. I’m also overdue for a third reading of DeLillo’s Kennedy assassination novel Libra or one of my regular re-readings of Ellroy’s Kennedy assassination novel American Tabloid, which begins five years to the day before the day Aldous Huxley died and ends seconds before Kennedy does. If we imagine that “Run, Baby, Run” and American Tabloid are set in the same fictional universe, I wonder if Baby was born somewhere during those closing pages of Ellroy’s book.
My friend still visits me in dreams sometimes. I’ve been reading and re-reading American Tabloid since I was fifteen but I don’t remember if I ever got him to actually look at it; we loved the L.A. Confidential movie together but he never had the interest, nor in the end the time, to become an Ellroy nerd of my degree. And he was never really as into that Sheryl Crow record as I am, though I wish I could run and tell him all about that first line and make him listen to the whole song again. He would have gotten a kick out of that.
I saw him for the first time in a while in an unusually vivid dream the other night. I was on a moving train and I looked across the aisle to see him seated at a table next to me so I moved over to sit across from him and talk. The setting was new but the conversation ended as our conversations usually do, with me telling him it’s a relief to see him for the first time in so long. For some reason we are always the same age in the dreams and I am also somehow my current age. We were on a train going somewhere but I don’t know where.