I resisted melancholy when I was in my twenties, and I also courted it. The paradox of youth. In bars and clubs, certain songs sent me to the back or, if I was feeling extravagantly melodramatic, out the door, leaving behind me groups of people colliding urgently to music that was too despondent for me. I wanted to drink and grin.
I’d tell a joke in the 1980s, unfunny to most, that the only bands that could drive me out of a bar were the Cure and the Smiths, two groups I didn’t like at the time and yet whose fans—among them a few of my best friends—I’d eye enviously as they lost themselves on the dance floor. I have clearer purchase now on what I was rebelling against. It wasn’t that I couldn’t identify with what I heard as the moodiness, affected doom, and sighing melancholy in these and other like bands; the problem was that I related too much. I had the voices of Robert Smith and Morrissey running in my head all day long; not their words, but the edgy, disconsolate tone:, a claustrophobic ennui that I struggled with in my worst moments. I didn’t want to hear that on the dance floor. I wanted to get away, leave my head and my body, exchange my blues, self-doubt, and self-consciousness for rock and roll.
Beers and barre chords! Riffs and hooks! Echo and the Bunnymen’s “Bring on the Dancing Horses” might’ve sounded great at Cagney’s or Back Alley Cafe, but it was Hoodoo Gurus, the Ramones, the Godfathers, and others in whom I found an urgent sense of purpose. There was a reason why I was teased at my college radio station as the Guy Who Played The Knack more often than, say, New Order. Even when I did spin songs that soundtracked my dejection they were usually by R.E.M., Rain Parade, Pop Art—sadness never too far from the jangle.
I sought out moodiness in books and art, in Joyce and Eliot and Franz Kline and Joan Mitchell, and during long walks in the then-deteriorating Old Downtown in Washington, D.C.. My morose reflection was cast back at me most graphically in my art history, literature, and philosophy courses, where in the quiet of reading, or in the endless stacks at the campus library, I could trace my melancholy and self-pity across the centuries. I’d indulgently lose myself in dramatic sadness during dusk hours.
Though I’ve never fully warmed to the metronomic “Blue Monday,” my distaste for the song in my twenties blocked a rightful appreciation I ought to have felt for Joy Division, another band I resisted at the threshold, fearful of how swiftly they might invade. Of course, back then I hadn’t really listened to the Cure or the Smiths, to Bauhaus, Cocteau Twins, or Siouxsie and the Banshees, or for matter much of what I'd overheard or read was Gothic—childishly, I wouldn’t let myself. (And I missed a lot of the humor, too.) I forgive a lot for youth and yet as it turns out, hey, the Smiths were a great guitar band all along! Johnny Marr’s trippy vibe in support of Morrissey’s emotional nakedness was beyond my ken when I was twenty, putting me at odds not only with my friends but with pop culture, and history.
If I’d only looked more closely at the dance floor I’d have seen guys and girls rejoicing and identifying in a language I was too petulant or cowardly to try to learn. But the release on their sweaty faces and in their limbs transcended language, as great music does. These are minor regrets, yet I wished I’d opened up some neural pathways earlier than I did. Anyway, life is pretty much about catching up. File all of this under Too Bad I Didn’t See It At The Time, a bulging, still-growing folder.
Tommy Keene was a local guy. He grew up in Bethesda, near me, and, as I had, he’d studied at the University of Maryland. He was handsome, and he had a great rock and roll name. The songs of his I’d hear on WHFS, the area progressive music station, would send me into waves of complicated happiness. He’d aways resisted (though he eventually grudgingly accepted) the Power Pop label with which many fans and critics identified him, yet there was no denying the power behind his pop songs, energy that both darkened and sought release. I aped his Modish, golf-jacket, flat-collar shirt, and narrow-jeans sartorial style when I could. I caught a lot of his area shows. His was the kind of melancholy to which I could surrender.
Keene was born in Evanston, Illinois, in 1958. His parents moved to Bethesda, Maryland when he was an infant. His native love of pop and rock and roll stoked by his like-spirited older brother Bobby, Keene first fooled around on drums and piano, later moving to guitar as the Beatles, the Who, the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, Roxy Music, and the hooks, melodies, and life-force of AM radio soundtracked his heady teen years. While at Walter Johnson High School he played in a band (Blue Steel), but wouldn’t join a serious group until he formed Rage with Richard X. Heyman while both were students at the University of Maryland. He then stepped in as guitarist and nascent songwriter in Razz, a high profile D.C.-area band that would release three singles and tour to well-received shows up and down the East Coast. After Razz imploded in 1979, Keene dropped out of college and moved to New York City where he worked with a pick-up band backing singer Suzzanne Fellini, whose Blondie-styled New Wave music never caught fire but who, for a brief time, enjoyed major label support. Wide-eyed in his early twenties, Keene dug staying at the Gramercy Park Hotel in Manhattan and playing shows on the East Coast, the Midwest, and Europe, but he couldn’t really connect with Fellini’s songs, and was growing homesick. After that gig ended he banged around in New York City for a little while longer, couch surfing, auditioning for bands. He formed a group called Pieces, but they split up when a four-song demo failed to land them a record deal.
Keene moved back to Bethesda, licked his wounds, vowed to avoid toxic band politics where he could, and wrote and wrote, inspired by his first major creative rush of marrying sense to sound. Growing confident as a guitarist, committed to being a solo artist yet curious about the appeal of his self-described “quirky” voice, Keene recruited bassist Ted Niceley and drummer Doug Tull, with whom he’d played in Razz, and got down to business. After placing two songs on a local compilation album (Connected) and releasing a mini-album of promising demos (Strange Alliance), he recorded the terrific EP Places That Are Gone in 1984 with a core band of Niceley, Tull, and Billy Connelly on guitar.
The record kicked up a lot of interest—the title track was a hit on college radio, remaining Keene’s signature song to this day. Buzzing, gigging around, aloft on the Mid-Atlantic music scene, Keene swiftly signed with Geffen Records. To us locals, it felt as if he’d ascended to royalty. He released the highly anticipated Songs From the Film in early 1986. Glossy, over-produced, the album felt at the time like a misstep; there were rumors, correct, as it turned out, that the band had cut a better sounding record with producers T-Bone Burnett and Don Dixon, but that Geffen had refused to release it. (The label also forced Keene to fire his manager.) Regretfully, Keene re-recorded the album down in the West Indies at George Martin’s AIR Studio with producer Geoff Emerick. The results were mixed. Keene loved the songs, and lamented their sound. Songs From the Film didn’t sell particularly well, the commercial backlash and local resentments stung Keene, and in 1987 his band broke up. He moved to Los Angeles the following year.
For a variety of tiresome industry-related reasons, his follow-up, Based on Happy Times, wouldn’t arrive until 1989, an eternity in pop music wilderness. I picked up the album in a record store in Athens, Ohio, gazed at Keene’s gauzy, movie-star headshots on the front and back covers, and felt that he was far away. It took several years for me to catch up with the pensive, richly downbeat mood of the album, and now, though the production’s a bit dated, it’s one of my favorites. One song in particular embodies the melancholy that I’ll forever associate with Keene’s music. “Light Of Love” is mid-paced, yet driven hard, typical of Keene in that it navigates wistfulness and loss with churning guitars. The musicians—Keene singing, and on guitar, Jack Holder on guitar, Joe Hardy on bass, and John Hampton on drums—take a stand against the minor key in which the song’s written, bravely strutting in the verses, playing their guitars as they’re sharpening blades even as the lyrics evoke sadness: there’s lightning, a dozen roses in the rain, love that’s waned. As often happens with Keene’s songs, with great pop music, the chorus complicates things further. Shifting to the major, Keene paradoxically shadows the mood, sketching out a complicated relationship:
I saw you standing in the light of love
Now I’m dancing in the night above
Come tomorrow we’ll be dreaming of
Standing in the light of love
This is vintage Keene: the swift, brutal replacing of having with losing. The melody rises expectantly, falls at the title phrase, extends higher at “dreaming of”—a phrase that might accurately subtitle Keene’s catalogue—then again falls. The despondency I hear in many of Keene’s songs arrives via those gently, often subtly descending melodies that score gains and losses—listen to “Nothing Happened Yesterday” from Places That Are Gone—in this case a figure longing for another while recognizing that all he’ll get is purchase from afar, dreams of the thing rather than the thing itself, yesterday and tomorrow pulling him from his, from their, present. Add a characteristic guitar solo that, riding changes, tries to burst the song’s very seams but is fated to land back, always, at those dejected verses.
“I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.” That’s Charles Baudelaire, writing about Tommy Keene. No. But, also yeah. I’ve been inside of Baudelaire’s observation for a long time. It feels truer every day, and comes to mind when I listen to “I Don’t Feel Right At All” from the Run Now EP, released at the end of 1986. Cut with T-Bone Burnett and Don Dixon for the shelved Songs From The Film sessions, the song positively shimmers, especially in its jewel-like opening bars, where Keene’s guitar sends sparkles in the air. Gorgeous, the phrases are soon joined by Tull’s muscular drumming and a typically thoughtful bass line from Niceley. (In his best playing on Keene’s records, Niceley gives the impression of ruminating along with the singer.)
Many of Keene’s lyrics are obscure—there are first-name references to people from his past, more than one shadowy hallway at the end of which something ambiguous happens, abstract narratives, truths that feel private to Keene and so are at times tough for a listener to enter, or even comprehend. Bruce Springsteen has described his own songwriting as being “emotionally autobiographical,” a phrase that I love. Rather than load them with details that will resonate for a few listeners, he’ll open his songs outward. The music begins, as all art does, inside the dark, then moves toward a wide, well-lit emotional landscape that only the writer could imagine yet in which friends and strangers collide, nodding at each other in shared understanding. Keene’s greatest songs work this way, too. Unless they’re decoded by a loved one, dear friend, or colleague, they remain private, yet somehow relatable.
“I Don’t Feel Right At All” is among the most forthright songs that Keene wrote. The stakes laid out in that title phrase couldn’t be clearer, the lyrics less disguised in figurative finery: forget the life I have known, I’ve never felt so below, I’m falling out, sometimes I feel so small, I can’t think of words to say, I feel so old. The melody is typically forlorn, and thoughtful, if a melody can be said to think. Mining a storied songwriting tradition, Keene tries to, if not right things in the bridge, then to nudge everything down a slightly different path in the hopes that there might be sunlight at the end of it:
And you say it’s OK to be forever bound
never free from all these things engulfing me
I can see the singer looking hopefully at the person with whom he’s speaking, seeing the kindness in their shining eyes, understanding the words they offer yet singing, in that eternal melancholia of melody, the real truth. That’s the sorry fate of a bridge in any song, especially for a traditionalist like Keene who’s happily bound to song conventions, to the forms that told a million stories over AM radio: a bridge, no matter how cheery or optimistic or caring, must end, and then it’s back to the verses, the chorus, and whatever powerful story they’re telling.
In my early- and mid-twenties those two lines were on high-rotation on my interior jukebox, a sweetly terrifying ode to the truth of my unhappiness, strangeness, my misfit-ness, whatever the term: You can say I’m ok but you’re not living it, I am.
Late in 1967, Pete Townshend was noodling around in his home studio on Ebury Street in London, working on a song about depression “around the time [the Who] were facing a void in their career,” he’d write in the liner notes to his demos collection Scoop, in 1982. “It's a tremendously haunting song,” he remarked, adding, “I suppose I was really melancholic when I wrote it.” He incorrectly surmised that the Who had never heard the demo. In fact they recorded a version of “Melancholia” but it remained unreleased for decades. Nearly half a century after writing the song, Townshend revisited it on the occasion of the release of the boxset of the Who’s 1967 album The Who Sell Out. “This was one of my first attempts to write about depression and anxiety,” he told Rob Hughes in Uncut in 2021. “Interestingly, in light of Covid, the working title was ‘The Virus’. Once depression sets in, it’s so difficult to escape it. It’s like drowning, in a sense.”
“Melancholia” is vintage Townshend: lamenting, inward-gazing, risking self-indulgence, and gorgeously forlorn. The melody’s stately, simple even, moving among five notes in the verses as the singer dryly yet achingly names the problems: his coffee's cold, his paper's old, his clothes are torn, his shoes are worn. The dust is thick, the dog’s sick, outside the kids have picked most of the flowers. Unsurprisingly, a broken heart’s the source of the downheartedness, the departed leaving behind a world of sad and meager grays. Famous for the care he lavished on his demos, Townshend produced a one-man full-band performance on Ebury Street. He sings against the ennui, his multi-tracks and overdubs crest and fall, yet plainly “the virus” has driven him mad. No song can fully deliver him.
It’s amazing that this poignant thing never made it onto a Who album; it was allegedly earmarked for a 1968 collection that never materialized, and I guess it blew out the window in the gust of the ambition and majesty of Tommy. The full band version of “Melancholia,” recorded in May of 1968 after a run-though the previous December, is unsurprisingly aggressive. Keith Moon’s drums tumble and roll, and John Entwhistle’s/Townshend’s bass-and-guitar interlock with punchy, slashing force. Townshend’s backing vocals are predictably lovely and rich, sweetening things a bit, and Roger Daltrey is able to check his laddish tendencies and find himself in the vulnerable, confessional lyrics, soaring by the end in a remarkable performance that looks ahead to his robust singing at the end of the decade and into the next. Yet to my ears the theatrical arrangement overall is a bit melodramatic relative to Townshend’s demo.
I bet that Keene adored “Melancholia,” both its intimacies and its grandeurs. He was a lifelong fan of Townshend’s songwriting and guitar playing, making it clear in interviews throughout his career the debt he owed the founder of the Who, one of his favorite bands. He covered several of Townshend’s songs, and recorded a few, including a sublime version of “Tattoo” in the mid-1980s, eventually issued on The Real Underground compilation in 1994, “Much Too Much” on his wonderful 2013 covers album Excitement At Your Feet (the title, of course, a quote from Tommy’s “See Me, Feel Me”), and a ragged, half-serious dash through the first verse of “It’s Not True,” an unlisted track closing out 1996’s guitar-heavy Ten Years After.
I wish he’d recorded “Melancholia.” The song feels tailor made for him, from its evocative opening arpeggio to the revealing interiority of the lyric. I don’t know if he ever played it live, or ever recorded it in private, but anymore it’s difficult for me to not hear Townshend singing Keene, and the other way around.
Keene was gay. He lived in an era when it was still difficult to navigate a career with an open and public queerness. We’d heard the rumors. “In the ‘80s, Tommy was more asexual than gay,” his brother Bobby told me. “I never talked to him about this, so it's still a brother speculating, but I think he moved to Los Angeles so he could be gay. It wasn't the music [in L.A.]. To the extent that people will say, ‘Tommy always held back and never embraced fame or celebrity,’ it was being gay that held him back. Because when he signed with Geffen, they wanted to make him a teen idol, and he resisted it. Totally. And there were a lot of women that threw themselves at Tommy. I know. And that made him uncomfortable. He didn't want to come out and say, ‘I'm not interested’ because of this. He just kind of was asexual about it.”
In 2006, Keene was asked by Bob Mehr in Magnet magazine if being gay had been problematic for him in his professional career. “It really hasn’t caused a problem,” he replied, effectively outing himself. (He’d open up again that same year for The Advocate.) “Occasionally, I get a little tired of tit jokes in the van. But hey, I like tits, too. Seriously, though,” he added, “it probably hasn’t been a big deal because I haven’t sold a lot of records. If I sold a bunch of records, maybe people would care. If I were someone like Michael Stipe or Tom Cruise, it might be an issue. I don’t mean to be flippant, but it’s never been any kind of thing for me.”
The great obsession in Keene’s songs is the passing of time. It’s hard not be rueful, at the very least contemplative, about the inevitable and accruing losses that we experience over time. Since that first rush of creativity in the early 1980s, Keene writes about days and places gone by, yesterdays regretted, opportunities missed, memories fading, his despondency in the face of it all—perhaps even his bravery about it all—soundtracked with his trademark bittersweet tones. A sample of song titles: “Twilight’s In Town,” “Places That Are Gone,” “Nothing Happened Yesterday,” “Tomorrow’s Gone Tonight,” “You Can’t Wait For Time,” “As Life Goes By,” “Waiting Without You,” “My Mother Looked Like Marilyn Monroe,” “Alone In These Modern Times.” In “Away From It All” he sings “I’ll never feel a part of anything at all,” belying the cheery melody and sprightly arrangement. He titled one of his albums Into the Late Bright—the light ending sooner rather than later. In the title track he sings, “I cannot feel anymore.”
It’s possible that any personal issues with his queerness were seen through this lens of loss and regret, yet the strongest and most powerful effect on Keene’s lyrics was the undertow of grief. In August of 1977 his mother Jeane was struck and killed by a drunk driver in Ocean City, Maryland. Bobby was with his parents, Tommy was at school, in College Park. He had turned 19 two months earlier. “All of that emotion that you can wrap up in melancholy forced its way out in his songs,” Bobby shared with me. “Otherwise he had this thick wall of defense, so you never saw it in his everyday life. His songs are the only place that really came out. And I have to say that it's hard to find a song of his where it didn't come out. A lot of his songs have of some sort of reference to our mother being killed, our lost loves, or things like that. But if you knew Tommy, that never came out in real life.”
He continued, “We all know people like comedians. They seem like the happiest, funniest people in the world, but we all know that most comedians are very broken inside, and that there’s this insecurity and this, ‘I’m never good enough.’ And that’s why so many of them self-destruct. It’s like a romantic novel author that writes about these huge, flowery, affectionate relationships, and they’re a loner. So I think, yes, all of Tommy’s songs have that melancholy sort of bittersweet good-and-bad touch to them. I’m sure that’s real, given what we went through growing up”
Shortly after Keene died, Bobby wrote a touching tribute to his younger brother. In it he described a powerful and revealing episode. “As if it was yesterday, I can remember after our mother’s funeral, Tommy sitting at the family piano in the next room and playing for the first time as if he was possessed,” he wrote. “He played with a tone of sadness and soul that few musicians can and which Tommy had not displayed to this point in time. He played with that passion and soul as if the tragedy had at once transformed his latent talent through some supernatural fission process into the very same gamer passion he played with through this last tour with Matthew Sweet.”
He continued, “It was a lightbulb moment for the older brother in the next room. The emotion you can feel from his songs, lyrics and guitar was Tommy’s signature…. That guitar tone and the bittersweet melancholy themes described by all the critics, that are so associated with Tommy, were born on that day on my mother’s piano.”
Bobby revealed to me that Tommy played the moving coda of Derek and the Dominos’ “Layla” on that sad afternoon of their mother’s burial. “And he hates Eric Clapton, always hated Eric Clapton,” Bobby said, laughing. “But he played that. And I don’t think he had ever played it before. He hadn’t played a lot of piano at that point. And so I think he had a lot of that walled up inside of him, and he found an outlet for it after my mother died.” He added, “That brought it out. And it also really, really built up the wall more.”
Most anyone who knew Keene professionally or personally describe him as a fun, and funny, guy. (“Hey, I like tits, too.”) “He made any room he was in a much happier place with his smile and quick wit,” Guided By Voices’ Robert Pollard remarked on the occasion of Keene’s death. “Nobody loved the party more than Tommy,” his brother acknowledged. Fiercely energetic onstage, he was often loose and witty up there, too, and in interviews, where the “tales of woe” of his own up-and-down career and his incisive and hilarious stories about fellow musicians are legion. (There are many conversations online, of course, and I recommend Jim Lenahan and Patrick Foster’s lively and warm Rockin’ the Suburbs podcast from 2017, one of Keene’s final interviews.) He covered the Beach Boys’ goofily innocent “Our Car Club” for Based On Happy Times; during the song’s opening bars one of the guitarists—it might’ve been Keene’s studio guest, Peter Buck—mimics a car engine struggling to turn over, and Keene busts out laughing while singing. It’s a fun and hilarious moment, and Keene wisely kept it on the album. (My smile lasted for days after hearing it.) When I caught Keene and his band at George Washington University in the Fall of 1986, I approached the stage between songs with a request. I’d heard somewhere along the grapevine that he’d covered the Beatles’ “And Your Bird Can Sing,” long a favorite of mine. I got Keene’s attention, he leaned over the edge of the stage, I asked. And he laughed. Not in a dismissive way, but in a pleased and very amused way. They couldn’t play the song, but his bright-eyed guffaw remains with me to this day, as indelible a Keene memory as any.
Recently, I asked a few of the musicians with whom Keene played down the years if they felt that he was a melancholy person. “Not particularly, not for the time I knew and played music with him,” Ted Niceley replied. “I think one has to consider that Tommy had a quote-unquote outside persona and a private one. He didn't wear his emotions on his sleeve, was very private about his mother’s death, and him being a closeted gay man during the time I was in his day-to-day life, I would think, had a lot to with his putting it into his songs. He was kind of cynical but he was never what I would term a gloomy person.” He added, “I think L.A. made him a bit more melancholy.”
Matty McLaughlin was a close friend of Keene’s for two decades, and he now runs Keene’s website. He, too, recognized something essentially despondent in many of Keene’s tunes, “but usually when he cranked out that kind of material I think it was to get it out and make something better of the emotion,” he told me. “There were ups and down in his life that I witnessed, mainly over the second ten years, but even during difficult times he never really wallowed in despair. He was pretty happy-go-lucky if he had the essentials in his life.” He describe Keene as charming and dashing, “never looking to grab the spotlight at the party but just enjoy himself and dig the scene.” He fondly recalls Keene hosting dinner parties, enjoying late night Tecates while deejaying from his enormous record collection.
Tellingly, McLaughlin noted that Keene often archly quoted his own songs in a self-deprecating manner, making fun of them and, by extension, himself. “As I started doing his website and helping him do things like burning CDs via iTunes and we’d be on the horn while I tried to walk him through the process and he’d groan ‘alone in these modern times.’ There were the times when he’d be sure he was sick or had finally contracted lung cancer from years of smoking—I think many of us thought he was a hypochondriac—and you’d hear him quote the title ‘I Don’t Feel Well At All’, always delivered in a decided iambic pentameter, stressing the key words.” More than once Keene would groan his own song titles in a deadpan manner, “but never without a chuckle.”
“I don’t really think of him as a melancholy person, but obviously I see where the question’s coming from.” That’s Brad Quinn, who played bass on Keene’s records and toured with him for a decade and a half starting in the early 1990s, following Keene’s release from Geffen, the start of many years hopping from indie label to indie label. “Tommy had his moods like anyone, though it’s possible that he luxuriated in them more than your average person.” He, too, feels that the death of Keene’s mother informed his songwriting “in its themes of loss and ephemerality, I’d say. It wouldn’t be too hard to pull that out of a number of his better known songs.”
However, Tommy was a really fun person, overall. He loved to party and have a good time. He was very social and pretty much made friends with every single person that came to one of his shows. He also really loved what he did. He basically made records for himself, and he made the music that he made because that was the music that he dug. Tommy perhaps had a melancholy streak—and a number of other streaks, as well—but it was not his overriding essence. He was a generous, levelheaded, and well-balanced person.
He added, “And, of course, the opposite is also true.”
“I have a kind of different, distinctive voice,” Keene once said. Many days I wonder if that difference, that distinction, was the source of the bittersweetness in his songs. His voice was certainly imperfect, was often described by critics as “nasally” or “reedy.” He wasn’t a crooner, a smooth balladeer. When he pushed against the top of his range, as he often did, in his rockers as well as his mid-paced songs and ballads, his vocals sounded slightly labored, strained, with a hint of struggle; the impression was that they were in conflict with something in the words, in the mood that they and the melodies create. In his greatest vocal performances—in “Back To Zero Now,” say, or “Nothing Happened Yesterday” or “Silent Town,” to name but a few—this inelegancy added to the emotional richness of the music. Even Keene’s sweetly sung tunes like “Baby Face” and “Safe In The Light” benefitted from the rawness, the limitations, of his vocals.
When Keene was young, his enlarged tonsils and adenoids were removed, yet several years later they grew back. They were removed again, and the trauma left its mark. “And I’m not so sure they didn't grow back again,” Bobby said. “If you think of yourself as sort of having a sore throat and then singing? Right. That’s exactly what it sounded like and felt like.” Bobby feels that these nasal surgeries ultimately took his brother’s life, contributing to the sleep apnea from which Keene suffered for decades, and which grew more severe in his final years. “And I kicked myself,” Bobby said. “If you now read about sleep apnea, it’s a debilitating condition that ultimately will get your heart.” Tommy Keene died of cardiac arrest in his sleep on November 22, 2017. He was 59 years old, and otherwise in good health. “If you’d ever heard him sleep, or anybody with sleep apnea from that matter, there’s a point in time, a millisecond, when they stop breathing. Those milliseconds over sixty years add up to break your heart. To literally cause you to have cardiac arrest. That’s what’s on his birth certificate.”
Sometimes I fantasize about swallowing a pill or taking a shot that would allow me to hear a song again for the first time. Imagine! Sam and Dave’s “When Something Is Wrong With My Baby,” Howlin’ Wolf’s “The Red Rooster,” the Everly Brothers’ “Like Strangers,” the Beatles’ “Please Please Me,” Peter and Gordon’s “I Go To Pieces,” Dusty Springfield’s “I Only Want To Be With You,” Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Blondie’s “Dreaming,” the Stooges’ “T.V. Eye,” an overplayed radio hit, a hammed Christmas song, Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, a child’s lullaby, Chuck Berry, that tune that scored the summer I turned thirteen. So many more. Stripped of nostalgia, of intensely emotional context, of familiarity, what would I hear in these songs? The same notes, the same performances. More intriguingly, what wouldn’t I hear? When a song passes through the weather front that is a listener’s life, it’s affected, it morphs from something private to something personal, exponentially, is no longer only the singer’s or the band’s, but the listener’s also.
I grew up with a father who, when the mood struck him, would play his cherished Frank Sinatra albums on the family stereo, his eyes moistening as the songs brought him to places his children didn’t see. If I could hear Sinatra and Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Change Partners” for the first time again, I know that I’d be struck dumb by its devastating beauty (that bridge!), but missing would be the overlay of my dad in the rocking chair in the rec room after dinner. I’m not so sure being allowed to hear a favorite, well-worn song for the first time would be the blessing that I imagine. The beauty, fun, and hooks, or the anger, ennui, and punk recklessness, would be there, fresh, but the song would feel less personal. Until it felt personal again.
I believe I’d hear the same poignancy in a Tommy Keene song if I could hear it new again—the ragged exquisiteness in his best, most affecting songs transcends a listener’s private attachments. The descending melodies, the voice straining to sing them, the disconsolate lyrics written in a bid to translate what’s untranslatable yet must be voiced—it’s all there before I hear it, as it was in the songs that so moved Keene in his lifetime. He titled what ended up being his final studio album Laugh In The Dark, a cheery stay against confusion. (He released a live album, his second, in 2016, the year before he died.) His last several studio albums—Crashing The Ether (2006), In The Late Bright (2009), Behind The Parade (2011), and Laugh In The Dark—are richer and warmer sounding than the records he made in the 1990s, partly a consequence of shifting tastes and trends in production and mastering, partly of Keene’s continued maturation as a songwriter and singer.
“I make records for myself,” he said to the L.A. Record on the occasion of the Laugh In The Dark’s release. “And this is what I want to hear. I’m my biggest fan and I’m my worst fan. I’m the most critical person of what I do. But it’s got to be a record that makes me wanna put it on on a Saturday night and jump around the room.” He added, “And it’ll have some thoughtful and some melancholy songs. But that’s what I wanna hear.”
“All Gone Away,” the final song on Keene’s final studio album, is difficult to listen to. An epic six and a half minutes, paced luxuriously, the song’s a natural album closer, and it plays now as a heartbreaking theme song of sorts: as you listen, end-credits of a film about Keene’s life virtually scroll in the air. The Beatles’ “Dear Prudence” and Electric Light Orchestra’s “10538 Overture” are clearly the song’s musical touchstones, and Keene was also clear about another key ingredient, “a funky ‘70’s Baldwin organ called a Fun Machine that I found at a consignment shop out in the Desert some time ago.” The ironically named organ contributes a solemn, churchy majesty to the proceedings, and an air of resigned bittersweetness pervades. How much of this mournful tone I hear retroactively, I’m not sure; I bought the album soon after Keene’s death, and everything’s colored. If you need a song to listen to while imagining Keene exiting a stage in slow motion, waving back to the crowd before he vanishes through a side door, this is it.
His humor’s intact here: the opening line, “Plant you now, dig you later” cracks an adolescent half-grin, and Carmen Electra, of all people, makes an unreasonable appearance in the second verse. But I write this on the cusp of the five year anniversary of Keene’s death, and the poignancy of the rest of the lyric, married to the inevitably downward pull of the melody, is nearly overwhelming:
I should’ve seen what was coming / I couldn’t even say goodbye
There isn’t any time to stay here today / It’s all gone away
Look at all the people lost and found / They haven’t got time to stay / They’ve all gone away
Twenty-seven minutes left for you / How do you want it to play? / What would
you pay to just fade away?
The final two minutes are devoted to Keene’s splendid guitar playing into the fade, giving a frustrated but finally freeing voice to all that’s left unsaid in the song, the last of his, and characteristic of his best in every way. “I’ve never ventured off into any other genres or experimentations because I thought, well, that’s what people do when they’ve made it at what they do,” Keene said a couple of years before he died. They say, ‘Let me try this because I’ve already proven myself with that.’ But I’ve never proven myself. So I’m still struggling to make that perfect record.”
Special thanks to Bobby Keene and Matty McLaughlin
Joe Bonomo was named the music columnist for The Normal School in 2012. His books include Field Recordings from the Inside, Sweat: The Story of The Fleshtones, America’s Garage Band, Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found, AC/DC’s Highway to Hell (33 1/3 Series), Conversations With Greil Marcus, and, most recently, No Place I Would Rather Be: Roger Angell and a Life in Baseball Writing. He teaches at Northern Illinois University and appears online at No Such Thing As Was. Visit Joe on Twitter and on Instagram.
Photos by Chris Rady