When Stevie Nicks’s “Edge of Seventeen” was soaring across the radio in 1982 I was paying little attention, poised as I was for a lifelong deep dive into indie, alt, and punk rock. But I heard the song, plenty; it was impossible not to hear it. As many hit songs do, “Edge of Seventeen” entered my consciousness, then settled in my subconsciousness, and has stayed there for decades, lifted to the surface bidden by a stray memory or a snatch of melody overheard in a bar, its chorus a reminder of earlier places and people. A few months back I was half-watching the Super Bowl halftime show and heard the song again, this time performed by Miley Cyrus, who’d recently released a mashup mix of Nicks’s song with her own tune, “Midnight Sky.” There it was again.
The song that heralded Nicks’s solo career originated in random moments. She was on a plane flying home to Phoenix, Arizona in 1980 when she read about the white-winged dove, native to the Sonora desert and its saguaro cacti, whose song gives the impression that it’s singing: ooh, ooh, ooh. “As you well know, I was very taken with that whole picture,” Nicks wrote to her Instagram followers in April of 2020. That IG post included a video Nicks had taken of what she’d assumed was an owl—perched atop a high, bare tree branch, starkly grey-white against a brilliant blue sky—but which was, rather, a friend told her, the infamous white-winged dove. “Over the last 40 years I can honestly say, I have never heard a dove sing—until now,” she wrote, adding, “I started to cry. This dove had come here to watch over me.” That this moment occurred for Nicks as she and the rest of the world were on lockdown during the Covid pandemic, that she could share it with her 800,000-plus followers worldwide, added a touch of poignancy. Birdsong aside, there had been other influences on the song, too. Nicks had at some point in the 1970s met Tom Petty’s wife Jane Benyo, and in conversation with Nicks Benyo said that she’d met Petty when he was at the “age of seventeen.” Fooled by Benyo’s Floridian accent, Nicks heard the edge of seventeen. The evocative phrase lodged in Nick’s mind, and she set about to use it.
Darker currents were also at play. Nicks’s uncle Jonathan died as she was writing material for her album. The evening she completed work on a song responding to her grief, another major figure in her life died. She was in Australia in December 1980 when John Lennon was shot and killed. “Everybody was devastated,” she said. “I didn’t know John Lennon, but I knew [producer] Jimmy Iovine, who worked with John quite a bit in the ’70s, and heard all the loving stories that Jimmy told about him. When I came back to Phoenix I started to write this song.
The line ‘And the days go by like a strand in the wind,’ that’s how fast those days were going by during my uncle's illness, and it was so upsetting to me. The part that says ‘I went today...maybe I will go again...tomorrow’ refers to seeing him the day before he died. He was home and my aunt had some music softly playing, and it was a perfect place for the spirit to go away.”
She added, “The white-winged dove in the song is a spirit that is leaving a body, and I felt a great loss at how both Johns were taken.” (In later interviews, Nicks implicitly linked the white dove in her song to Lennon’s peace campaigns.) Quite a confluence: the image of a cooing bird nestled in the spiny shelter of a cactus foregrounded against loss, discovery and defeat at odds.
My maternal grandmother died in December 1980, and her death was the first loss—other than a childhood friend having moved away six years earlier—that I felt keenly, that is, which moved me to speechlessness. I tried to cry when Karl’s family left the cul-de-sac behind my house for far-away suburban Chicago, as I felt that that’s what I was supposed to do, yet at that early age I intuited, and years later recognized, that insincere weeping was a cheap substitute for that which I deeply felt but couldn’t yet name. When my grandmother died and I gazed from the door at my mom lying prostrate on her bed dissolved in tears, the word loss became something more dimensional, though it was no easier to speak.
One week earlier, I was in my bed listening to Monday Night Football on the radio when Jack Buck and Hank Stram interrupted their call with news of Lennon’s death. My family had visited my mom’s parents in the small town of Coldwater, in western Ohio, for a week each summer, and I’d cherished those days with my grandparents, yet I felt as if I knew Lennon better, or was somehow closer to him. I obsessively played the family copies of the “Red” and “Blue” albums, and the songs affected me as profoundly as any expression or gesture of family love. My mom’s weeping was among the first displays of unbridled emotion I'd seen her surrender to; after Lennon was murdered, I gathered in my sister's bedroom with one of my brothers, the three of us stunned into silent disbelief. These images commingle now in memory as my first headlong descent into the strangeness of grief. Neither loss was as personal as losses would come for me later, of course. I knew my mom’s mother well, and loved her, but from the reserved and guarded distance that most children choose to love distant, aged family members they see once a year. I didn’t know Lennon personally but knew, and possibly loved him, as deeply as I knew and loved anyone. The man who sang “There’s a Place,” “No Reply,” “Help,” “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “Imagine,” the still-new “Watching the Wheels” was now bizarrely, absurdly, gone.
In the following weeks, I wordlessly pieced together how I was supposed to feel. One thing that was clear to me was that my response to Lennon’s death was as sharp as my response to my grandmother’s—one person I knew directly, one I didn’t. What should have been a wide gap between those reactions was in fact uncomfortably narrow, and if you’d asked me, in the months that followed, which death was harder for me, I’d have answered you honestly only after I was sure that my mom was out of earshot. In retrospect, this is unsurprising: as a freshly-minted, inward-looking teenager I didn’t know how to deal with intimate family loss, a rawly grieving parent, the profound breadth of generations, but I knew how to deal with the loss of a beloved if starrily distant pop music figure, one who gave me countless hours of pleasure. I now forgive my fourteen-year-old self’s unspoken allegiance to the memory of John Lennon over the memory of Frances Mueller.
By 1980 Lennon was an enormous figure in my life, looming as large as any friend or family member. The year before, I’d clipped an article in the “Style” section of the Washington Post about rumors that the Beatles were going to reunite for a concert for the Vietnamese Boat People. This pseudo news filled me with excitement, and my friends and I buzzed about it that morning on the blacktop at St. Andrew the Apostle as we gathered to file in to classes. By this time I knew Beatles songs, and many Lennon solo songs, by heart, their news as potent and valuable as any I’d learn in school, in church, in books, in the mirror, or around the family dinner table. After Lennon’s death, as we all remember, his songs were everywhere, what my older brother’s friend cynically (and accurately) dubbed The Dead Lennon Factor sending Double Fantasy up the Billboard charts and into the hearts of Grammy voters. The tinkling of the bell at the start of the now-ubiquitous “(Just Like) Starting Over”—the irony of the title obvious to me, though I didn’t know that word yet—now tolled at the onset of something other than a pop song: the arrival of death and loss, personal and cultural, and the start of adulthood, or anyway my fumbling attempts at describing it all, at the edge of fifteen.
In the summer of 1988 I worked for Telesec, a temporary agency that staffed libraries in suburban Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia. I’d be off to graduate school in southeast Ohio in a couple of months, and, biding my time, I more or less enjoyed the menial work that the agency put me to. In June, I was sent to the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland to report for a weeks-long job, the details of which now elude me—I remember sitting in the immense stacks of the library’s bound periodicals, hauling a truck of medical journals behind me, filing and re-filing, and taking endless statistics. It blurs. What helped pull me through the tediousness, often compounded by a hangover or the vagaries of a late night, was the Walkman I was allowed to carry, and my co-workers who, because they were also temps, toiled with varying and amusing levels of seriousness. I stoked crushes on and flirted with a couple of my co-workers, who I’d never see again come September, and when I was in the mood for some company during lunch I looked forward to hanging out.
Early that summer I occasionally worked with a tall, gangly kid named Lou, who with his gentle eyes and bushy ‘fro looked like Art Garfunkle’s little brother. He charmed me with his quiet humor, yet there was also something edgy about him that I couldn’t place; he seemed cool in a way that I couldn’t define. He was kind to me, which was nice, and we’d talk or goof around within the endless rows of multi-colored medical journals. He was a guitarist in a local band, Braille Party, whose lone album Welcome to Maryland had come out a few years earlier. I remembered seeing the album, and cautiously spinning a track or two on my show at WMUC, the student-run radio station at the University of Maryland. But I resisted the record. In my mind Braille Party was a hardcore band, which I had little interest in, in part because the music and the local scene scared me a bit, in part because I was turned off by the earnest seriousness and full-throated fury of many of the bands. I went for grins in rock and roll, was shy in embracing anarchy and nihilistic void in those days, or anyway preferred to study it in a Goya painting or an Eliot poem in class rather than as noise in my chest cavity and sweaty fists and boots at my head. I’d never seen Braille Party live, as they weren’t in the circle of bands I regularly saw during those heady years of endless weekends stuffed with rock and roll shows. None of this mattered. Lou and I didn’t talk much during work. As I think of it now, we might’ve worked together only once or twice.
On a Friday morning in June I arrived at the library, and in the stairwell encountered my manager, who was ashen-faced. She told me that the night before Lou had been killed in a car accident. A few hours later, I sat in that same stairwell and tried to name what I was feeling. I didn’t know Lou well, and yet the proximity to a sudden, senseless death struck me with great force, and the mild conversations we’d shared in the stacks were instantly re-cast with a pall. I worked that day in a fog. A day or so later, in a downcast mood I couldn’t name, I searched the Washington Post for an article about his death, found it, cut it out, and saved it. I learned that we were born a couple of months apart—he’d seemed older than me, maybe because of having played and toured in a band—and that he had lived only five miles from my house.
Within two months I was living in Athens, Ohio, far away geographically and culturally from the Eastern Seaboard punk scene, but I carried Lou’s death with me when I moved. It had mattered to me that he was in a band. Beyond the unspeakable grief that his family and friends felt, which I couldn’t share, I’d dimly feel the wake of his loss on stages when I went to shows, as if a kind of transparency had been lifted. Over the decades, I’d forget about him, as I wasn’t nursing a wound where a close friendship had been, but sporadically the memory of his death rises to the surface, sometimes as an impulsive response to the news of like heartbreak, as when the band Exploding Hearts, whose album Guitar Romantic I love, lost control of their van in Oregon driving home after a gig in July 2003, killing three of its members (one member and the band’s manager survived.) Such loss is incalculable, to family, loved ones, and fans, and forever affects how you listen to the music—the notes and chords and melodies remain constant, but the weather they pass through has changed, and the atmosphere the songs live in forever altered, and so their sound and the stories they tell change also.
I wish I’d listened more generously to Welcome To Maryland when it came out. Friends of mine tell me that they recall Braille Party as the artsy outsiders on the D.C./Maryland scene, and the album’s knowing eclecticism and wandering textures support that. The record came out on Fountain Of Youth, a local post-punk label (its tag line was “Where sincere kids make real noise”; I only really loved one record on the label, Abbreviated Ceiling’s fun, rocking self-titled EP). And it’s a hard album to categorize, which is likely what turned me off at the time—I’ve spent decades half-ashamedly catching up to musicians and artists whom I was too bashful or cowardly to embrace when I was younger. Welcome To Maryland’s an ambitious and curious blend of hardcore thrash and dreamy psych pop, witty and ironic, and listening gives the impression of being inside the head of a thoughtful, preoccupied kid tripping at an all-ages Minor Threat show.
The 4/4 hardcore stuff—minute-long blasts of superfast anti-government, anti-establishment, anti-complacency roar—dates the album a bit, but that might be my own biases, the noise conjuring the mosh pits and straight-edge crowd I wasn’t a part of. More transcendent, to my ears, is the pop stuff, “Evil” in particular, a lovely, nervy song with blissy melodies that belie the cynicism and meanness of the lyrics. There’s a bit of funk on the album, one reggae song, some aggressive, Hüsker Dü-styled power pop, an atmospheric instrumental, jagged time signatures popping up in surprising places keeping everything and everyone alert. Throughout, Lou Gigger’s supremely confident guitar playing is nothing short of superb: he moves from distorted, over-driven power chords to brittle, intense thrashing to ethereal, Andy Summers-like washes and spiky yet melodic leads, often in witty counterpoint to bassist Matt Riedl’s winsome vocals. Gigger’s playing does what the best guitar playing in a trio does, adds characterful touches that move noise and textures from the background to the foreground and back again, fluidly.
Welcome To Maryland ought to be considered a standard-bearer of highly original, evocative, independent art from a particularly fertile era in D.C./Maryland musicmaking history; instead, it rates as a footnote at best, a melancholy whatmighthavebeen at worst. I find it impossible to listen to the record nearly forty years later and not conjure stray images I have of Lou in the library, only now he holds a guitar, playing songs that add dimension and tenderness to the fading images. My memories of him mean little compared to the future he never had.
I wrote my first poem in December 1980. I titled it “The Year,” and it was an earnest response to the deaths of John Lennon and Francis Meuller. I think about that poem, or my impulse to write the poem, to write anything. The sorrow that I felt during that month pulled me in two directions, one toward the intimacies of family love and loss, an at-times claustrophobic and over-heated place where I could barely speak the language, or lacked the maturity and bravery to attempt to learn it; the other toward pop culture, celebrity, the kind of baffling defeat we feel when a stranger we would never meet, who’s given us deeper pleasures than our closest friends and family, cruelly vanishes.
I attempted to honor both Lennon and my grandmother in the poem, and, if the result was laughingly Early Bonomo, a parched weed next to Stevie Nicks’s verdant pop forest, the impulse to express myself was as genuine as anything I’d felt to that point in my life. I’ve come late to Braille Party and their smart, witty, evocative Welcome to Maryland. The ghost of Lou Gigger has led me here. Later today I’ll take a walk in the woods, under the songs of the birds, and listen to the album again, and honor a young man I never really knew yet whose loss lingers in me as a song that never quite fades out.
Joe Bonomo's most recent books are Field Recordings from the Inside (music essays) and No Place I Would Rather Be: Roger Angell and a Life in Baseball Writing. He blogs at No Such Thing As Was and you can visit him at @BonomoJoe.