Paul Murray as a teenager.
Once upon a life: Paul Murray
In 1983, a young man named William Bruce Bailey arrived in Los Angeles from Lafayette, Indiana. He had left his home and family, and soon he would leave his name behind, too. William Bruce Bailey became W Axl Rose, lead singer of the hard rock group Guns N' Roses and the unlikely hero of a small group of academically gifted boys in the South Dublin school of Blackrock College.
As I turned 14, I didn't have any serious interest in music. A couple of years earlier, in a kind of patriotic fervour stoked by the massive success of his single "Lady in Red", I had bought Chris de Burgh's album Into the Light and been burned badly. Later I started listening to Def Leppard; I took personal pride in the six (six!) hit singles taken from their platinum-selling LP Hysteria, and the fact that their lead singer was for tax reasons domiciled in Ireland. But I was never entirely happy with Def Leppard. Their ringlets were a little too bouncy, and when, in the middle of their big hit, "Pour Some Sugar on Me", Joe Elliott squealed, "Do you take sugar? One lump or two?" I felt an inexplicable sense of embarrassment.
I still remember the day that my friend David "Muller" Mulryan gave me a C90 tape of Appetite for Destruction, Guns N' Roses's first album. I had heard about these guys. Controversy stalked them at every turn. Their songs tackled such subjects as child abuse, drug abuse, the daily horror of life in LA. Word had it that Axl Rose had chosen his nom de guerre because it was an anagram of "oral sex", and added the mysterious prefix "W" so that his initials would spell WAR. Most shockingly of all, their LP featured gratuitous swearing. "You're fucking crazy," Axl sang in "Crazy". "So fucking easy", he sang in "It's So Easy".
From the vantage point of 2010, after two decades of hip-hop in which needless profanity has been taken to stratospheric new heights, it's impossible to describe how subversive this once seemed. Nobody had ever sworn on a record before. Suddenly civilisation balanced on a knife edge. In the US, Al Gore's wife, Tipper, was building a political career around the threat to society posed by "explicit lyrics", and as I listened to the songs at very low volume on my stereo that night (Muller had helpfully placed an asterisk beside the swearier numbers) I felt an exhilarating sense of danger and transgression. Here was an artefact of an adult world that I had never encountered before, an adult world that my parents, I knew without a shadow of a doubt, would revile. To me, still living the weird, cloistered life of a child, it seemed nothing short of a portal into reality.
A week later, I bought my own copy of Appetite for Destruction on cassette. By that stage the controversial cover art, which featured a monster attacking a robot that had just raped a flower seller, had been banished to the inlay and replaced by a more tasteful portrait of the band as skulls, arranged in a kind of Celtic cross. I brought it home and put it on at a low volume. The sound quality was exactly the same as the C90, but by spending £5.99 of my limited resources on his music I believed a new and deeper bond had been created between Axl and me. I was demonstrably on his side and, in return, something of his power and swagger had been transferred invisibly to me. For the first time, I had fallen for the central promise and illusion of capitalism – that owning something changes you, that by purchasing a product you somehow absorb its beauty or its power or its dynamism into yourself. So had my friends, who'd all bought the album, too, in spite of the fact that we were living proof that it didn't change anything.
On the face of it my friends and I, academic honour-rollers drawn together by mutual awkwardness and a shared interest in the works of Raymond E Feist, had little in common with a bunch of LA junkies infamous for stealing money from their groupies after having sex with them. Certainly in terms of what actually happened, my average day had little in common with Axl's, as I was painfully aware. Axl did not have a healthy breakfast of two Weetabix plus one boiled egg every morning. He did not spend half an hour in school-run traffic in his friend's mum's car, forced to listen to a radio station that, in my memory at least, played no other song but Phil Collins's "Another Day in Paradise". I doubted whether table tennis figured in any serious way in Axl's day, whether before class or at lunch break.
And yet, when I put on my cassette, and heard the police siren and threatening riff that opened the first song, "Welcome to the Jungle", it made perfect sense to me. Because behind the rolling green rugby pitches, the castellated walls, the lovely groves of trees that our parents saw as they dropped us off, school was a jungle, every bit as lawless and feral as the gang-run urban ghettos of LA, although unlike the ghettos we also had an art room and put on an opera every Christmas. And in this jungle my friends and I were like a bunch of myopic slow-moving gazelles, easy prey for more or less everyone.
Our tormentors came in many shapes and sizes. Richard Black was what you might call the "classic" bully, thick of arm and low of intelligence. He had hit puberty at around eight years old and all through primary school, while the rest of us were figuring out how to transform our Transformers, he had towered above us like King Kong's attitudinally maladjusted, Benson & Hedges smoking, compulsively masturbating younger brother. By 11, however, he had dramatically stopped growing, and now almost everyone was taller than him, which cruel twist of fate had, in a rage-against-the-dying-of-the-light type way, pushed him to new extremes of violence and terror.
More insidious and common were people like Liam Conboy, scion of a wealthy family, who had worked out that it didn't matter what grades he got and so devoted himself instead to undermining the system and those pitiable chumps who tried to play by its rules. Apart from a freakishly large head, Liam Conboy didn't have the physical presence of Richard Black, but he made up for these shortcomings in sadism and persistence and knowing just what buttons to push. Richard Black would strangle you with your own tie or throw you into the thorn-bushes; but Liam Conboy was the one who would spit down your back, pour Pot Noodle into your schoolbag, spread rumours about your mother.
In hindsight, the Hobbesian state of affairs isn't hard to understand. A 14-year-old boy is a seething torrent of sexual anxiety; a single-sex Catholic boys' school, therefore, is like a sexual-anxiety Large Hadron Collider. Almost overnight we had been transformed by powerful new desires, but we didn't yet know what we'd been transformed into, and without any girls in the vicinity on which to try out our new sexual identities, those identities were permanently in question. Uncertainty manifested as a hysterical homophobia. Hitherto innocuous things became signifiers of the dreaded "gayness". Dropping a pencil was gay. Feelings were, by and large, gay. Being hit on the head by a Frisbee, even though it wasn't strictly speaking your fault, was gay. Life became a desperate and unending struggle to demonstrate one's "straightness" to the satisfaction of one's peers.
Beating up nerds was the most reliable means of establishing your heterosexual bona fides, but for those whom God had not favoured with a good bullying physique, music played a crucial role. It articulated the nameless emotional chaos going on inside, and also, more importantly, provided role models – men with prominent guitars, facial hair and unapologetically tight trousers – by compulsively imitating whom we could bring shape to our amorphous lives. From a mildly diverting alternative to football, music and musicians suddenly became an obsession. Axl, Eddie Van Halen, Anthony Kiedis, Robert Smith: these were our new leaders. The recent arrival of the Walkman enabled the merging of music and life as never before; we listened to them so intensely we felt we were on the point of actually channelling them. We romanticised them out of all proportion. They were the living embodiment of their music, who never did anything boring or mundane. But they were also just like us. When he wasn't taking heroin, smashing up a hotel room or having sex with groupies, I imagined Axl avidly reading The Dragonlance Chronicles or playing "The Last Ninja" on his Commodore 64.
There is nowhere a teenager would less rather be than in his own skin, and though from here this mimesis-cum-worship seems odd if not downright vampiric, at the time it provided a blessed escape from the stifling prison of myself. For several weeks, the curious synthesis of me and the person I imagined Axl Rose to be conducted himself happily through the school. I let my hair grow, though it seemed to want to shape itself into a bouffant. I took up gratuitous swearing ("Does anyone want a game of fucking table tennis?"). Also, though I was still in two minds about heroin, I started smoking cigarettes.
This caused consternation among my friends. "What are you doing?" they said. "Do you want to get cancer? And detention?"
I was surprised by their reaction, as Axl Rose could quite clearly be seen smoking in most of his pictures. So what if it was against the rules? Didn't they want to be like Axl?
The realisation that they did not opened my eyes. Suddenly I understood why we got bullied all the time. We were yes-men, collaborators, shills of a stupefying educational system and the ferocious ambition of our parents. We had sold out our youth in order to flesh out their fantasies of us aged 27 with neat haircuts and good jobs in the financial sector. Everything we had – Debating Club, Prize Day, Evil Dead night at Neal's house – was built on a lie. Well, I'd had enough. "Eat it, suckers," I told them, and went outside to smoke.
At first I enjoyed life as a rebel. The bullies were surprisingly receptive to my new direction – the smoking particularly impressed them, and often after throwing me into the thorn bushes or pouring Pot Noodle into my bag they would stay to share a cigarette with me. But I quickly began to feel dissatisfied. Apart from smoker's cough, and nausea from all the breath-freshening gum I was chewing, was my life really any different? I was still stuck in school, this unworldly, girl-less prison where nothing real ever happened; if the other prisoners approved of my new persona – well, so what? There were other problems, too. I really wanted to see this new film Weekend at Bernie's, but having dismissed my friends I had no one to go with. Worse, Guns N' Roses's new album, GN'R Lies, was a pallid affair consisting of a live set of early material and four acoustic songs, one of which, "One in a Million", seemed to paint Axl as a pathetic racist and homophobe. I couldn't fight the growing sense that Axl and I were, after all, not the same; and were he ever, as I had frequently fantasised, to visit my school, he would be more likely to side with the bullies in throwing my lunch under the bus than engaging me in a conversation about, for example, who should play Judge Dredd if they ever made a movie.
Like any drug, I was learning, music's effects were limited; and as they wore off, I looked around to see all my old problems and anxieties loyally awaiting me. In this nightmarish comedown I had the terrifying thought that my parents were right: that life didn't change in a moment, no matter how seismic that moment appeared to be. Instead, it moved only gradually, and imperceptibly, and according to forces external and internal that you were only dimly aware of… And then, as I changed for gym class, I noticed David "Muller" Mulryan wearing a new T-shirt. It featured a black-and-white picture of a semi-naked and glowering young man. "It's Jim Morrison," Muller explained. "From the Doors."
"Wow," I said. "What's that he's wearing?"
"Leather trousers," Muller said.
"Wow," I said again. This guy really looked like he knew the score. Unlike Axl, you could tell he'd read a book or two. Maybe he liked Raymond E Feist.
"Make me a tape?" I asked Muller. "Sure," Muller said. We went into the gym. I couldn't concentrate on indoor hockey. I was deep in thought. Leather trousers, I was thinking. Leather trousers. The world around me seemed to fade out. Everything was about to change.
No comments:
Post a Comment