We are driving east on the Brooklyn/Queens Expressway, heading towards the Long Island Expressway on an early Tuesday afternoon in very-late August. The sky is overcast, and the air is barely whispering that yes, Autumn really will be here in a few weeks. I had convinced you that Montauk is really fucking beautiful, and whereas I’m from Long Island and whereas I’m really into you (despite me trying to stay on the straight and narrow) and whereas we both have two and a half consecutive days off, we rent a car and are off into the country, away from the city, on our way to fall, you know? You’re really beautiful and good lord, I am trying to take it real slow and not get very attached and ergo fuck it all up. I hush my head up long enough to put an album that you and I are in love with, an album that is now the funny talking-point to what is now a marriage with a cat and rent and reminders to go to the dentist.
I am getting ahead of myself.
I, Terence Dee, hereby solemnly swear to tell you one particular way that Liz Phair’s 1993 album
Exile in Guyville has put an arrow through my ears and heart. It is supposed to be about the work in and of itself, but when you add in the fact that I’m more or less married on account of it, you could construe the story to be about love. On both counts (the album and Daniel) you will know that when I say I’m in love, you best believe I’m in LOVE, L-U-V.
Exile in Guyville was first introduced to me by my older, cooler sister Lorraine in the summer of 1995. I put it on the backburner of my mind, concentrating on more masculine sounding music like R.E.M. (ha!) and Pavement. I was actually more interested in Liz Phair’s second and third albums,
Whip-Smart and
Whitechocolatespaceegg, mainly because I couldn’t really wrap my head around how huge and complex the album was, or maybe it was that I couldn’t place it in my life, I couldn’t make it meaningful to me.
Truth be known, it’s an album about a messy break-up, hardly the type of thing two people want to fall in love to. But we did. We talked about all the things the album meant to us at different periods in time. Over those first two months, between casual flirtation and, uh… heavy petting(?) we realized that, duh: We were meant for each other.
This past June the album celebrated its fifteenth birthday. It was re-released with bonus materials and press from reviewers who bemoaned the loss of the artist to the pop scene (debatable, in my opinion). It was also decided that she would perform the album from start to finish at three dates. We bought tickets to the second New York show.
To pay good money to attend a performance of your favorite album seems sort of stupid and wasteful. Wouldn’t it be better and cheaper to simply dim the lights in your bedroom, crank the volume and stand in front of a poster the singer while singing and mouthing the lyrics? Yeah, but it is totally not being there, living it, and I can assure you that Daniel and I would have regretted not seeing it. I would even go so far as to say that I would have regretted it the way I regret forgetting to call my grandmother up on her very last birthday.
In conclusion, both of us seeing Liz Phair performing Exile in Guyville in front of us, on a stage, was her way of marrying us with eighteen songs.
We held hands throughout the entire show because we are geeks and because we are in love.
Three days after that show I went to the dentist for the first time in seven years.
And yeah, Daniel reminded me to go.
