THE THIRTYING: week three

Welcome to the “Late Edition” of The Thirtying, Taking Tiger Mountain’s only weekly feature! Now, it’s a “Friday Edition” cause I’m a lazy editor. Dan did me the honor of providing me Week Three wayyyy early, due to the fact that he’s heading on a vacation this week (something touched upon in this column). My own life got in the way, and here I return his favor with late content. I’m testing a new format for the column this week, giving you a tease and putting the rest of Dan’s words behind a cut. Be sure to click the link to get the full glory of Week Three of The Thirtying. If you don’t, you won’t find out know what Danzig listens to while he works out…

Without further ado, Week Three of The Thirtying by DAN SOLOMON, the only person in all of England with a Texas themed tattoo:

Next week- thoughts on how to be a vital contributor to youth culture when one is becoming chronologically separated from its prime adherents.

Geez. Did I really promise that last week? That’s pretty much what the whole column is here to explore, and if I have any real coherent thoughts on the subject by the end of its run, I’ll be awfully proud of myself. Sitting down to write this column tonight- three days ahead of deadline, for reasons I’ll get into later- I’m not sure where the arrogance that led me to believe I’d be ready to have any sort of useful thoughts on the subject in a week’s time came from. Trying to answer the question it poses has led to staring at a blank screen for most of the duration of the lucifuge album by Danzig, which is not a bad thing to do while listening to that one.

Did you know that Danzig listens to Danzig when he lifts weights? I was playing a show in Minneapolis a couple of years ago and I shared the bill with a fella from Los Angeles who worked in Danzig’s neighborhood, and he said that he would occasionally pass his house and find Glenn out in the driveway with a weightbench, bravely intoning the words must…. get…. bigger…. pecs…! as his own voice sang to him that he was the killer wolf. That sort of self-involvement is awesome, totally cool and enviable. I bet Danzig’s own Thirtying process lasted about ten minutes and involved mostly flexing in front of the mirror.

Except that’s not really true. He disbanded the Misfits at 27, and he spent the next three years trying to keep Samhaim together, which eventually failed. At thirty, he finally found a new lease on his career when Rick Rubin signed the band and offered him the stability of a permanent lineup. Those years in between were probably harrowing.

Picture it- Glenn Danzig at twenty-seven, getting older and trying to find a band and a voice that will keep him relevant to people who recognize and admire him primarily for things he had done when he was younger. He was still the guy from the Misfits at this point, and he hadn’t recorded “Mother” or “Am I Demon” yet, and there was no reason to suspect that he ever would. Most people who are aware of who he is are interested in him as an artifact, and he may go the rest of his life working in a Taco Bell in Lodi, New Jersey, every so often being recognized by an aging punk rocker who smiles and goes hey, astro creeps as they place their order for a Mexican pizza and a medium cinnamon twists. And so he’s still trying, still playing music because what else are you supposed to do, but the band’s gone and people are way less interested in Samhain than they were in the Misfits, and time is running out. Punk rockers don’t tend to age well, and who is he going to make music for as he gets older?

But then there’s Danzig, the band that Rick Rubin helped him put together, and suddenly there’s money to support what he’s doing and better musicians and better songs and people start paying attention again, more people than ever. People who remember him from the Misfits, or who listened to the band on tapes they inherited from older brothers who went on to college and studied computers or real estate investment, care about what he’s doing, and people who missed out on all of that listening to Whitesnake like the way “Twist of Cain” sounds and they think it’s about coke instead of demons. And then- wow, he’s climbing through his thirties, more relevant as he gets older than he maybe ever was as a young man.

Well, isn’t that something to aspire to?

So how do you become a vital contributor to youth culture as you get older? For one, you mustn’t get trapped in the past. Old men chasing trends look like fools, and old can just as easily refer to a twenty-nine year old as a fifty year old here. Because in order to chase those trends, you have to deny that your cultural experiences are different from the people who are setting those trends; you have to forget the things you know, and follow instead of leading. That’s never cool, and it rarely makes one relevant. Danzig made the music he wanted to make, rather than trying to tap into what was hot in ‘88, and rather than try to re-hash what he did when he was twenty-two, and it worked out for him.

Sincerity is key. Insincerity can be forgiven in kids, as they’re still learning what their identity is and what they really think about much of anything, but as you get older, you find that it’s one of the few things that you can offer anyone that’s unique.

But I’m running dangerously close to preachiness here, and I haven’t really got a whole lot else to say, so I’ll just end up repeating the same thing over and over again. It’s a start, though, right? And who doesn’t want to read about Danzig anyway?

So the reason I’m writing this column on a Sunday night when it won’t go live until Thursday morning is that I’m off to Paris this week, and I had forgotten that I was going until just now. Life is fascinating when things like trips to Paris can be things that you forgot you had scheduled, but it’s the way things work sometimes. It can change very quickly, and lead you to places you never expected to go. I live in London right now because my wife is studying here, and a few years ago she was in a crappy relationship and working in a bookstore; I was living in Texas and dating a string of girls named Kate and heating Spaghetti-O’s on a space heater, jerking off to the shaky reception of the price is right models until my hand was translucent. It doesn’t always take a lot for things to change and get neat, and that’s an important thing to remember as the Thirtying goes on-

Getting older tends to be inherently cool, because the future is where cool things happen. Ask Danzig if he expected at twenty-seven that he’d be able to afford a nice house in LA with a front yard in which he could set up his weight bench and grow his pecs even larger while he listened to a platinum-selling live album he recorded at thirty-five. Thirtying is not a reason to despair.

And so much for that. I’ll leave you this week with no promises as to what next week’s column will contain- instead, I’ll give you a quote from a guy named Mel Galley, who used to play in Whitesnake a hundred and fifty years ago. Whitesnake isn’t a band to think about very much, but Galley was recently diagnosed with a terminal form of cancer, and he decided to offer a farewell to his fans via a statement on his website. The closing sentiment is a very nice one, and one that bears some further consideration.

“You are the music. I was just in a band.”

You can learn something from anyone, it seems.

-Dan Solomon