Featured Essay: Don't Be Denied

by Albert Tarples

In the fall of 2015, I moved back home to Los Angeles for a job. I moved into a modern all-amenities included, pristine cruise ship of an apartment complex in the very hip, recently renamed “arts district” which was a developers’ way of distancing the neighborhood from skid row, which was in fact spitting distance away. I hated my job. I hated my boss. But I loved my view, and I loved my records, and I loved my wine.

My boss, the owner of the digital agency we worked for, was an abusive alcoholic, who would pour us glasses of warm gin in the morning and encourage us to drink, only to be rageful and vengeful when there were typos or inconsistent fonts in our work. One Saturday afternoon he sent me a comprehensive email dismantling a PowerPoint deck I had completed the week before, which basically amounted to him not having downloaded the latest software update and therefore not having the correct fonts. In other words, my work was fine, and he was an asshole. It’s no wonder I spent my weekends shutting out the whole world, drinking rose and listening to analogue music.

When I was a kid, I liked to tinker and fix (and break things). So when I found my parents’ disused record player, I brought it back to life. Aside from my mother’s old Beatles albums my parents didn’t really have much music I was interested in. Maybe some big band shit. Aside from maybe one or two Duke Ellington records, nothing tasteful. So I found one of the last record stores in LA still selling vinyl and started collecting. My musical tastes branched from classic Rock and Roll, into Punk and New Wave—which is to punk what the arts district is to skid row—to prog rock and avant-rock. But it all, as it has for so many people, started with The Beatles. So when I heard that Paul McCartney would be playing at a music festival at the Coachella site, only a couple hours away, with The Rolling Stones, The Who, Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan, and Neil Young I got tickets.

Between the time I bought the tickets and the fall of the following year when the festival was to take place, I quit my job and ditched LA for San Antonio, Texas. I had been offered a job on a congressional campaign, and political campaigns had made up the majority of my work experience to that point. One of my closest friends was managing the race and he asked me to come help him out.  The caveat was that I would get the weekend of the music festival off to travel back to LA and then down to Palm Springs.

Music is funny, it can make you feel the entire range of emotions. Music I like a lot of people hate. I put Captain Beefheart on in my car and people think it’s a joke. Some coworkers asked me to play my favorite band and I put on Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense and they laughed so hard at “Psycho Killer,” I turned it off before my favorite song, “Heaven” even played. “Heaven” is the second song on the album. When I laid on the grass at Oldchella listening to Neil Young, I forgot. I forgot that at least 45% of Americans were about to elect Donald Trump. I forgot that I had run my own losing campaign into debt. I forgot about the horrible boss I’d had who abused me to the point of leaving an indelible mark. I just listened and discovered something new.

My friends and I joked that Neil Young was the breakout artist of the weekend. None of us had been Young fans before. We saw Paul McCartney play alongside Rhianna, we saw The Rolling Stones do a rousing version of Midnight Rambler, we saw Roger Waters fly a giant pig, but it was Young’s uncomplicated nudity that stuck with us. On our drive down to Palm Springs we joked about how disinterested we were in Young. On our drive back up to LA we listened to only his music.

For the remainder of the campaign, I listened almost exclusively to Young. I scoured record stores across the American southwest for his albums and my collection went from one album, American Stars And Bars (no idea how or why I initially picked that one up) to over 25. But when I got home to LA, and moved back into my apartment there was only one I wanted to listen to: Time Fades Away.

It’s not a stand out album, in that there weren’t any singles and a passing Young fan probably has never heard it. But it also isn’t a departure from his signature sound like Re•ac•tor or Trans. It’s Young at his most vulnerable. It’s a live album (which are his best) of previously unrecorded songs. It’s not clean, it’s heavily produced, and he refuses to play the songs from it anymore because he was so miserable during the tour when it was recorded.  It’s an album you couldn’t get on CD until 2017 and if you wanted to find it on Spotify or Apple Music, you’d have to know where to look. But it is so raw. It is packed with so much emotion and meaning. Of course I spent hours after the 2016 presidential election listening to it and crying. And almost ten years later, after victories and defeats, the message for all of us on the outside remains the same, it has to. Don’t Be Denied.

Albert Tarples was born on the California Coastline. Tired of getting nowhere, he moved to New York City, where he always wanted to be. Lookin’ for happiness, keepin’ his flavor fresh, he got jobs that took him all over the county. The wonderful people everywhere helped make him a neon meat dream of a octafish. In the end, St. Louis got the best of him. He was tired of traveling alone and any fool knows a dog needs a home.  He’s settled with a family where he once belonged. When he isn’t writing, you can still find him on a desert highway, he rides a Harley-Davidson, with his long brown beard flying in the wind.