When I think of the peak years of the pandemic, as I often do, I think of the illnesses (physical and mental) and deaths, the layoffs and evictions, the failures of the private and public sector employers to protect their workers, the impossibilities of elementary school online education, and the long, long aimless walks I took with my dog. But above all I think of the music I listened to during those years.
According to my streaming music service (for it was also in those years that I fully succumbed to our streaming overlords1), I listened to a number of things in 2020 and 2021—Dylan, of course, including all the alternate takes from More Blood, More Tracks; Bruce Springsteen (my most played track in 2021: “Atlantic City”); the entire Emmylou Harris catalog; Warren Zevon; the haunting, light up the phones voice of Mindy Smith singing “Come to Jesus;” The Mountain Goats; Tift Merritt; Emily Haines singing “Wounded.” But when I think of that time it is only three songs I think of (two of them courtesy of my friend
, without whom I would likely know no new music): Phoebe Bridgers’s take on “If We Make it Through December,” Lana del Ray’s “The Greatest,”2 and, above all, the Velvet Underground’s “Sweet Jane.”3“Sweet Jane” was written and recorded long before the pandemic, a few years before I was born. Lou Reed wasn’t writing about a pandemic: he was writing about a world he knew well but the world outside his New York City scene did not, the world he’d make famous in “Walk on the Wild Side.” But what gets me about “Sweet Jane” is a moment near the start:
Standin’ on the corner
Suitcase in my hand
Jack is in his corset, Jane is in her vest
And me, I’m in a rock ‘n’ roll band
Huh
Riding in a Stutz Bear Cat, Jim
Ya know, those were different times
It’s that “Huh” that’s a suppressed laugh, a cut off snort, a breath, a huh, an indefinable combination of all those things—that gets me. “Those were different times.” I listened to that over and over and over—huh, those were different times. Was there, is there, a better description of what we in my neighborhood started to call the Before Times?
I think of it even now, as the pandemic has supposedly ended. I think about how it still sometimes feels like we won’t make it through December. I think of how seldom I’ve been out of my neighborhood, much less out to hear rock and roll. I think of life when a cough was a mere annoyance. And I think of the pandemics I never really knew—the unforgivably large number of people who died from AIDS; the influenza that happened long before I was born.
My last few months working in a public library we stacked the newspapers on a counter each day because no one knew what else to do with them. One day I stood, unable to turn myself away, from the picture of tent hospitals set up in Central Park on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, unable to believe in the tent hospitals themselves or that the Wall Street Journal would feature them. Those were different times, too.
I don’t know that anything will ever feel like the Before Times ever again, and I don’t know if that is good or bad. I don’t know if the sound I hear in that huh is indicative of my feelings about the pandemic or my feelings of being closer to death now that I am to birth.4 I know only that that huh signifies something, some dividing line.
I read recently a bit from an interview with Dylan, my northern light, my guiding star. He’s talking about listening to vinyl, but he’s talking also about those different times:
[I]t always takes me back to the days when life was different and unpredictable. You had no idea what was coming down the road, and it didn’t matter. The laws of time didn’t apply to you.
Maybe that is what I mean.
I succumbed, but digital ownership is important, yo. Just look how much trouble this NYT reporter had watching a DVD! (Protip: GO TO THE LIBRARY.)
"Me and my friends we miss rock and roll.” Don’t we all, Lana, don’t we all?
I understand there are many versions of “Sweet Jane,” but for the purposes of this Substack, there is only this one.
I mean that not morbidly but just that, at 47, I am more than likely more than halfway through my life, a thought that, once you think it, will continue to haunt you.