My Life with Peter Gabriel, Part Two

From roughly 13-15 my friends and I hung around anywhere we could, in parking lots, diners, parks, driveways, basements, family rooms, derelict train cars, the high school bleachers (but never on game nights). A favored spot, at least to get high, was simply behind the fence at a gas station near our school. Like most such places we claimed — a certain stairwell comes to mind, or a narrow strip of grass next to a bank parking lot — we were oblivious to the surrounding area, babies in an elaborate, public round of peek-a-boo: if we didn’t see the adults, they didn’t see us. It was a fragile scene in those years, trouble at home for some of us, trouble at school, and it seemed like the whole world was trying to keep us at home or school. Although I did my best to steer clear of serious trouble, I found some, mostly in drug use and the eventual self-determined cessation of my public education in the course of my sophomore year. It was a difficult time.

A spot favored by my friends and me, 1983-84.  Photo taken in 2017.
A spot favored by my friends and me, 1983-84. Photo taken in 2017.

But there were two things in my case that made a difference: I was honest about my truancy, and I never missed my curfew. Why would I lie about skipping school if both the school and my mother knew I had done it? I saw no point, and the penalties for skipping were not, in my estimation, prohibitive. As for the second thing, why would I stay out later than my mother wanted when I could get high and listen to music and read at home? I was perfectly happy, most of the time, to abandon my crew and head home to food and shelter and the safety and comfort of my bedroom. As it happened, mine was a home almost entirely free of conflict, if not worry. There was plenty of worry but my mother and I seemed to agree about it, share the struggle.

My mother and I, 1983.
My mother and I, 1983.

And so I came to spend an increasing amount of time alone with either headphones and my stereo or my Walkman.1 This would have been 1984-5, as I recall, and my listening was all over the place: Bob Dylan’s first three records were favorites; metal as it was understood at the time by Kerrang magazine; Jimi Hendrix, especially Axis: Bold As Love; Stevie Ray Vaughan’s Couldn’t Stand the Weather;2 British Invasion, especially the Who and the Kinks. Lots of music. Always music. There was also radio, 96.5 WCMF,3 92 WMJQ,4 and 104 WDKX.5 Radio was social, mostly for the car or seasonal hanging out at people’s homes, speakers in the window or dragged outside. This was the stuff I shared with others. My private music, on the other hand, was Gil Evans-era Miles Davis, especially Sketches of Spain, a reasonable collection of Motown and Chess tapes, and Peter Gabriel, especially Security which for reasons described elsewhere both confirmed and assuaged my most intense fears.

I’m not sure why I kept these musics to myself. I suspect it stemmed from my response to my parents’ divorce, which was to hold things close for fear that they might be taken from me, or that this kind of compartmentalization kept me from being totally abandoned, kept something for myself, gave me a barely-conscious feeling of control. For some kids, divorce leads outward and they seek relief in likeminded and collusive souls whose presence secures them from further pain and separation. Experience is validated by consensus. Some, however, like me, withdraw even from their peers and seek refuge in more private selection and recursion. It’s hard on the kids either way and the difference is more temperamental than qualitative. Without a group’s affirmation, the first kind of kid sinks. Without sufficient fortification, the second kind of kid can’t bridge the gap between themself and the world around them.

Peter Gabriel’s music eventually became my sufficient fortification, the music that first bridged this gap for me.


  1. Unrelated: the first tape I ever wore out was a TDK C90 with Judas Priest’s Unleashed in the East on one side and Iron Maiden’s Number of the Beast on the other. At some point while listening to Maiden, Priest’s “Sinner” became audible, backwards. 

  2. Subsequent editions of this record have replaced the original sequence on most streaming platforms. I link here to the original sequence because it’s the one I’m referring to. 

  3. “Rochester’s only home of rock and roll!” 

  4. Somewhat awkwardly, never quite able to rise above the status of Rochester’s other home of rock and roll. But there was plenty of rock and roll to go around back then. 

  5. A black-owned and operated station since the 70s whose call letters stood and stand for Frederick Douglas, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X

My Life with Peter Gabriel, Part One

I was inspired to write about Peter Gabriel’s music after seeing him perform at Madison Square Garden last fall. It was, as they say, a once-in-a-lifetime experience, one granted to me as a birthday present from my wife. She told me that she bought the tickets because she knew I wouldn’t have done so and would, further, have regretted it. She was right and I remain grateful. It was one of a handful of concerts I have attended that undeniably changed me in some essential ways. It’s worth noting that Gabriel is the only artist who has had this effect on me twice, once in November, 1986 and again in September, 2023. I won’t go into it any further than that at this point but it seems worth mentioning at the outset, in case you’re wondering why I’m writing this at all.

My life with Peter Gabriel began, as far as I can recall, with the “Shock the Monkey” video and then that of “Games without Frontiers.” It was 1983 and I had just moved back or was about to move back to Rochester, NY (from Annandale, VA) under somewhat troubled if not, though probably, traumatic circumstances. My mother worked a lot and MTV was an important part of latchkey life for my friends and me. In that context of being left to our own devices in modest suburban basements, of smoking cigarettes or pot, of getting to second base or whatever else was happening among unsupervised 13 year-olds, MTV was frequently just on, like regular tv or the radio.

Gabriel’s presence was jarring to my pre-/adolescent mind, and stood out from most of the videos that were in rotation at that time. In Gabriel’s music, there weren’t exactly monsters (were we the monsters?) and there definitely weren’t any parties or particularly festive events, no breakups or rain-soaked night-driven heartache, even if there was rain.

Some of his lyrics, even the hooks, were largely unintelligible to me 1 but their intention was clear as verses or choruses, for example, and I always knew, or thought I knew, where he was coming from. His music was made by machines, a fact that was enmeshed in several cultural conflicts at the time, but it wasn’t exactly electronic music as that was understood. And although he was well-known, the trio of “Solsbury Hill” (which I must have known from the radio), “Games without Frontiers,” and “Shock the Monkey” didn’t add up to the kind of fame I understood to be the goal of popular musicians and artists.

He was weird and I was into it but couldn’t say why. I picked up his first two records, known colloquially as Car and Scratch, and except for “Solsbury Hill” and “Here comes the Flood,” I was baffled. Looking back, those two records seem to be mostly a matter of getting the era out of his system. Much of it sounds like lesser or confused versions of his contemporaries.2 Peter Gabriel 3, also known as Melt, however, was a significant shift. I’m not sure all of the songs were better, exactly, but the focus was clear: each song described or narrated a certain kind of person or their action. So even if, for instance, ”Intruder“ wasn’t your thing, there was no denying that it was intruder music. There were flashes of the kind of complications that bogged down the first two records3 but any record that has ”Intruder,“ ”No Self Control,“ and ”Biko” was bound to hit me where I was living.

And then there was his fourth album, Security, which included “Shock the Monkey” and marked the end of his initial solo phase. To my young ears, this record was from a different planet, one eroded by blurred paranoia and abiding, persistent, and disenfranchised ritual. The message I received was that on a global scale, nothing was working out, and the forces we sought to annihilate or convert weren’t having it.

Our days were numbered. What I was hearing was music from the future, from after the end, from after the flood. Gabriel’s music seemed to offer some answers, to know something we didn’t. However bad things got, there was an after and what were we supposed to do then? This all made sense to a teenager whose recent years had been defined by myriad thwarted and fugitive desires, and seemingly few allies.


  1. I don’t think I ever believed the line from “Games without Frontiers” was “She’s so popular,” but learning that it was rather the name of a French game show failed to unmuddy the lyrical waters. ↩︎

  2. e.g. David Bowie, Brian Eno, ELO, Pink Floyd, and of course Genesis. The leap in sophistication and the extent to which he established his own voice between his second and third albums is remarkable, and telling with regards to his next two albums. ↩︎

  3. e.g. ”Family Snapshot,” which strains under P.G.’s efforts towards enactment or a theatrical mode that was better suited to his work in Genesis, which is not to say I don’t love it, but rather to say that I came to love it after I fell for So and needed to hear more Peter Gabriel of any kind. ↩︎

Morning Routine in the New Year

Thinking this AM about all manner of things. I sipped through half of a cup of coffee in a distracted effort to get the mix right in my mug: a little more coffee, sip, a little more oat milk, sip, a little more coffee, etc. As far as I can tell, the current cup has a little too much oat milk. I’ll get it right next time. But this cup ended up being more like two cups with all the “testing” and I’ve had a little more coffee a little more quickly than I originally intended. Distractions. Even this post is an effect of distraction.

Going into the holiday season last year, I was riding a wave of several months1 of a handful of solid morning routines. My work schedule changed significantly after Thanksgiving, though, as it does every year, and I found that each aspect of the morning routine slipped away over the course of a week or two. By Christmas, I wasn’t doing any of it.

Like many of us, if I thought about it at all, I assumed I’d get back on track after dead week but I didn’t. And now, even though it’s only been a month since I followed that assumption with a resolution to resume my morning routine, I find I just can’t get up as early as I did last September or October. Sleeping later has its advantages, or at least its advantage: I get more sleep. But the overall routine is a pretty tight schedule most days, and if I don’t stick to the wake-up time, the whole shebang goes out the window. Which is where it’s gone.

So I guess I’m writing this post to account for this shift. Perhaps it’s seasonal? It does correspond to the advance of winter and shorter days so that’s possibly part of the shift. And as frequently noted throughout the productivity/GTD/self-discipline space, it’s often more difficult to restart a routine than start one in the first place. That is, missing a day isn’t too bad, or even missing a few. But a month? I’ll be better off starting an entirely new routine than trying to resume the old one.

🎧: Fluxkit Vancouver (i t s suite but sacred), Darius Jones


  1. Five months? Six months? More? I could consult my daily log, a routine that goes back several years now but for the purposes of this post, I’m not sure it matters. Except here I am bringing it up, so let’s agree that it does matter but only enough to be a note. 

Why I Moved to New York City

“I am going to lose myself in the busy crowd and plunge with it into the open gullet of city and boredom, shuttle from one brief neighborhood to another, underground, like the rats. I am going to ride until there is no more stop or signal, ride between two doomed worlds which a whistle, shrill like the scream of a child-woman riveted to her own vertigo, calls back to the formless world of shadows. I am going to break away from myself through that docile part of me which is not afraid of compromise.”

— Jabès, Yukel, p.28

Cars

There’s an interesting piece in The Atlantic on one of the more compelling aspects of our time, ambivalence about cars. My wife and I own a Prius C, which is about as size- and fuel-conscious as we’re likely to be in our current circumstances here in New York City with no ready, secure access to charging and no desire to drive a newer, bigger car. We use our car mostly for utility and sometimes for convenience. It is, however, not something we think about very much. We have, we use it. We worry about replacing it sometimes and then forget to worry.

But there is no doubt that I bought into the American myth of automobile-derived freedom from an early age, and by the time I had my own car at 17,1 it was a haven from all manner of perceived and real threat, hassle, and infringement, a site of recklessness, retreat, intimacy, and independence. From ages 15–21 or so, my entire worldview was shaped while leaning against, sitting on, and hanging around in cars of all different makes, models, sizes, and shapes and in all states of repair. Much of the time, it didn’t matter what kind of car we were in as long as the following criteria were met:

  1. We had plenty of gas. And money for more.
  2. We had an ample (effectively endless) supply of cigarettes.
  3. We had an ample (effectively endless) supply of caffeine, initially Coke or Mountain Dew mostly, and as we got a little older, coffee.
  4. We had a functioning stereo in the vehicle, preferably with a tape deck but working radio was fine as long as it was loud enough. I think I knew one person with a CD player in their car, and that was near the end of the era I’m describing, roughly 1984–1990.
  5. Someone in the car had to have a legal driver’s license but it didn’t have to be the driver.
  6. The car had to be nominally legal and safe. Expired registrations, inspections, or insurance were tolerable as long as they weren’t too expired. Forgiveness of such violations was in direct proportion to whether or not a more legal car was available. Desperate times, etc.

Additionally, the etiquette of these rides was fluid but firm:

  1. There were no non-smoking cars. Cars were, from a certain adolescent standpoint, machines made for the purpose of smoking in.
  2. Music, always referred to as tunes, was played according to the preference and discretion of the driver, unless they were driving someone else’s car and the owner of the car was present in the vehicle. In this uncommon but not impossible situation, the owner’s choice would prevail.
  3. If the driver of the car was on or held even the slightest prospect of being on a date, all passengers had to either be cool and occupy themselves outside of the date-parked vehicle until such time as the driver and date once again made the vehicle available to all; or, if it was a real date, like going somewhere on a date, all passengers had to find a different ride altogether. This subject was frequently euphemised at the time, so I continue that practice here.
  4. Some, but not all, cars had given names or nicknames. These monikers were to be respected by all passengers, past and present, if the car was referred to without the owner’s possessive (e.g. “The Chicken” and “Philly’s car” described the same vehicle.).
  5. If one was dismissed from the vehicle, that was not a warning: it was a dismissal. Among my cohort, this was unusual but not unheard of.

  1. Or more likely when my older friends gained steady access to their own or their parent’s cars, which preceded my own by a couple of years.

10 Rules for Reading a Poem

  1. You’re probably reading the poem in a language you already know.
  2. You probably know all of the words in the poem, so in the most fundamental sense, you already understand it.
  3. If you don’t know all of the words in the poem, feel free to pause your reading to look the word or words up, or consult with someone who might know. The poem will be there when you return to it.
  4. You don’t owe the poem anything, not your time, not your understanding, and certainly not your affection. The poem owes you these things.
  5. You are a guest of the poem. If you are offended by your host, move on and don’t return. They will not change in your absence.
  6. The poem will not, as above, change in your absence. You, however, might, and so might revisit the poem someday to see how much or in what way or ways you have changed.
  7. The poem is indifferent to how you change while you’re away from it.
  8. The poem is concerned with how you change while you are reading it. This is not the chief concern of the poem. It is the only concern of the poem.
  9. Do not be seduced by the poem. It doesn’t mean you any harm, exactly, but it doesn’t know any better, either.
  10. Take a moment to reflect on your favorite lines. Write them down in your notebook. Use them in your own poem.

Lieu and Theo

Yesterday marked 12 years with Lieu and Theo.1 Surgeries, illnesses, intimacies, tolerances, delights, routines, affections, and care have made it seem like both a shorter and longer stretch. Here’s a photo from shortly after we brought them back to the apartment on night one of the rest of our lives together. That’s Theo on the left and Lieu on the right.

🎵 Listening to Canto Ostinato

  1. Known formally as Lieutenants Columbo and Theodopolous Kojak. Known colloquially by too many names to list here.

Late Start? Not Today.

Covid, the era more than my case last year, has made it difficult to wake up as early as I’d like to or used to. It’s not a problem, exactly,1 but it is frustrating.

Most days I sort of shrug it off when I’m steeping coffee 30 or 45 minutes later than I’d hoped to be. Today, however, I managed to get up as intended, and reflecting on this I can’t help but think of the broader lethargy the pandemic and its mishandling has brought to bear. I need to remember that it isn’t just me, just my problem, that even among the most resilient and unaffected of us, Covid has cast a unique shadow over our lives. Keeping this in mind serves empathy, which is always a better emotional start to a day than self-pity.

🎵 Listening to Canto Ostinato

  1. Even the change I’m describing here doesn’t make me late for anything, but it does make me feel like I don’t have time to do everything I like to do to start my day.

Rather than subject myself to the endless appetite of endless scrolling, I’ve lately been spending time surfing the web again. This shouldn’t seems like such an archaic path,1 but it sort of feels like one. Heading in several directions, perhaps, with no algorithm to guide me, 2 the only guiding force is my own curiosity.


  1. even if the nomenclature demands that the undirected act of clicking through links online appear in italics or quotes.

  2. Algorithms, of course, are the drivers of platforms, not the internet.

Records in the New Year

Non-rock records, J-M

One of my goals for 2023 is to buy no additional LPs. The reasons for this are two in number: 1) Between COVID-pandemic life and a generally expanded musical life, my record-buying has become, I fear, excessive; and 2) I’d like to be more familiar with my existing collection, and so digging through my own records seems like a good thing to do.

There are, no doubt, nearly-buried or -forgotten treasures around here. Like many listeners, I keep my records pretty well organized, but jackets are slim and one’s movements sometimes quick: alphabetization might not be as tight as one thinks and titles are forgotten or misplaced. The last time I did a thorough run through the collection was a lockdown-derived impulse to separate the rock records from the non-rock records. My listening at the time was once again diverging from rock music and I saw fit to spare myself the added effort of weeding through all of the records to find the creative, improvised, jazz, classical, and other stuff.1 I have come to live with this arrangement but it is still many records and a half-baked subdivision as I proposed provides only a smattering of relief.

I’ll add that my record collection, though sizable 2, is admittedly dwarfed by those of several of my friends. I’ve liquidated at least two LP collections over the years 3, where many my age have all of their records from their whole life. We’re mostly in our 40s or 50s and many of us musicians or in the music business, so as you might imagine, some of the collections I have in mind here are vast! Alas, I have what I have nonetheless, and it has become unmanageable.

I’ve learned elsewhere that when one feels overwhelmed , one might be best served by retreat and inventory. That’s what I’ll be doing here this year, cataloging and tracking my (hopefully) daily reacquaintance with the music I already possess. One point worth making, I think, is that I’ll still listen to new stuff digitally 4 and plan on keeping a list of records to look for when the moratorium is lifted. There’s surely more to say about all of this, about what a collection or archive or library is, about possession and scarcity, about supporting friends and artists one wants to support, about identity and artistry. But we’ll save those remarks for the remainder of the year. We’ve got our hands full enough right now. Happy new year to you all.


  1. As you have likely already observed, this taxonomy — if we can call it a taxonomy and not just a segregation — fails at the outset: what of This Heat? What of Tortoise or Trans Am? Is it simply a mater of instrumentation and backbeat emphasis? I have drawn my own fool’s distinctions and they are at best inconsistent. And why not? This isn’t the turn of the century or something. No one else is looking for a record on these shelves. This is the kind of exercise I’m prone to in the best of times. Such organizational strategies have flourished during the times of COVID-restricted activity.

  2. Roughly 25 linear feet, including box sets and a foot or so of my own work and excluding CDs. At 80-100 records/foot, I’m looking at well over 2000 LPs, a number in much more rapid expansion these last, say 7-8 years as both my music-making and listening have grown.

  3. Once in 1988 to raise $ for CD purchases and again around 1996 to raise $ and make way for my burgeoning jazz listening.

  4. I’m not a monk!