Kristin Hersh – ‘Paradoxical Undressing’

Night swimming is mania, wanting to learn everything and live everywhere is mania, feeling warm all the time (the poor band must’ve been so cold), hearing songs, restlessness (my inability to lie on a floor or sit in a chair), a disregard for the future, seeing things that aren’t there, insomnia, racing out into storms, needing to fuzzify the world in order to focus, the Doghouse episode, hating buildings, ranting all night about how bad bad radio is (the poor band must’ve been so tired), thinking I have a calling, that I’m on a mission… these are all symptoms of a long-term manic state. How embarrassing. So what’s left? What’s ‘me’? Anything? (p. 150)

This list, halfway through the Kristin Hersh memoir some of us have been dying to read for several years now, is a pretty good summary of her activities up to this point. It’s 1985, and she’s at college in Providence, where her father teaches, and where he introduces her to the ex-movie star turned mature student Betty Hutton. Betty is 64, slightly lost in the past, and her stories about Judy Garland and Cary Grant could easily be taken for delusions. Kristin is 18, drifting between college, a squat, friends’ floors, and the rock clubs her band have been playing at for several years already. With an endearing lack of tact, her father crows, ‘It’s perfect! Kristin, you’re too young to make any friends here and Betty, you’re too old!’ (p. 16). He turns out to be right: the two are inseparable, studying together (more chatting really) for entire afternoons in the library, locked in the toilet and shouting ‘Occupied!’ in response to every knock. Betty remarks, ‘Singing on the toilet! If Mr DeMille could see me now!’ (p. 17) and it’s pure Sunset Boulevard.

Betty is overbearing, if fond, and her criticisms of Kristin’s lack of ‘sparkle’ provide an illuminating contrast to Kristin’s actual intention as a performer: not to entertain, but to disappear, to make way for the songs. It is a staple of her interviews that the songs come to her from outside, sometimes as unwelcome physical manifestations, and that all she does is transcribe them – which she must, to get rid of the wolves (‘Mania’), mechanical bees (‘Buzz’), and especially the snake (she doesn’t say, but – ‘Cottonmouth’?). She takes a detour backwards from 1985 to explain how the songs came about. A car knocked her off her bike and drove away; Kristin ended up in hospital. The accident sounds horrific, and is described… dispassionately? Not exactly. It’s hard to describe the description. There is a weight to it, at the same time she’s cracking jokes, taking notes: ‘Flying through the air in vivid slow motion, thinking, so this is what this feels like.’ (p. 74), or ‘I’d never seen blood pour into a sewer before (it looks really cool)’ (p. 75). Zero self-pity, but all the same an unblinking acknowledgement that she is messed up: ‘The front of my head was hamburger and blood with two blue eyes staring out.’ The same balance applies later on to a breakdown that leads to a suicide attempt, and medication. But those terms are crude, I feel bad for using them. Kristin’s account is precise, it is only what it is. She won’t even allow that suicidal people are necessarily sad: ‘Couldn’t we just be finding solutions to our own personal equations? Writing the end of our stories?’ (p. 149). The songs, anyway, began after the car / bike crash, like this:

A few days later, lying in my hospital bed, I heard my first song: a metallic whining, like industrial noise, and a wash of ocean waves, layered with humming tones and wind chimes. (p. 76)

For days she’s sure the sound is external, from the TV next door. It’s only when she goes next door and hears the TV making a completely different noise that she realises, ‘The noise is mine’ (p. 77). It brings colours with it, too. The songs are intensified by the ‘Doghouse episode’, a brief stay at an apartment with ‘Doghouse’ painted on the door. The building is normal, but somehow evil, and it infects Kristin’s songs. She doesn’t live there long, but carries the experience with her. And then one day, walking down Angell Street in Providence, she is accosted by a mohawked student with pamphlets, who ‘stopped me to talk about “killing God”. I was intrigued. Killing God is way better than saving whales.’ He continues:

‘Did you know that religious wars kill more people than political ones?’ I didn’t answer; I wanted him to hurry up and tell me how to kill God. ‘Well… they do. Historically, that is. And it’s because we as a species have yet to rise above the church and take responsibility for our own actions.’ I waited. Kill God, c’mon. ‘For example, say you’re a smack freak –’ (p. 118)

So this is how my favourite song got started! A ‘fake song’ at first (I think this means a consciously-written one), that was supposed to be funny. ‘The fake part attached itself to a piece of Doghouse evil and took off, came back horrifying’ (p. 129). Presto, ‘Hate My Way’. Come the recording sessions at the end of the book, Gil Norton is similarly astonished at the genesis of the only song in the world which could possibly follow ‘Hate My Way’:

        ‘My roommate, Vicky, painted some cool stuff on a box when she was moving and some of it turned up in a song.’
        He looks stunned. ‘Really? “Vicky’s Box” is a song about Vicky’s box? A box owned by someone named Vicky?’ (p. 290)

Gil is lovely, and goes to great lengths to get the astonishing performances of Throwing Muses out of Kristin (comforting, understanding lengths). Gary, who produced the demo which interested Ivo Watts-Russell at 4AD (AKA The Doghouse Cassette), is lovely too, providing support, transport and sustenance through the post-breakdown days of lithium-shaky performances and then pregnancy. Loveliest of all though is Muses drummer Dave Narcizo, who enters into all… well quite a lot of Kristin’s foibles (not wearing glasses in order to ‘fuzzify the world’, not wearing a coat because she was ‘warm all the time’), and tries sometimes to reign her in:

Dave unzips his coat to show me how it works. ‘See? We can still wear T-shirts but if we wear our T-shirts underneath coats, winter won’t hurt!’ (p. 93)

I was trying to imagine what this book would be like for someone who doesn’t love the songs. Then I stopped because I wouldn’t want to be that someone. Thank you, Kristin. Keep them (and the books) coming.

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Newly-performed Throwing Muses songs to accompany the book are here.
See Betty Hutton in The Perils of Pauline.