D(r)owned

I was grouting tile in a strange house in San Francisco when The Ear played “Downed” for me. I was twenty-three, had recently split up with my girlfriend, and was embedded in a depression so thick and wide I couldn’t see either end of it, every day a grueling stretch of isolation and paranoia. I knelt in a bathtub in the Upper Haight, and somewhere—the apartment downstairs, a car that had parked itself outside the plowed lot that had once been (and would again be) Kezar Stadium—a radio played those flanged chords I might’ve heard before in junior high, though I didn’t remember them. It stopped me dead. I went over to the window and stuck my head out. The clocks had just changed, it was the first day of Spring, and a girl I’d seen at a bus stop at 2 AM the night before but been too shy to talk to now walked opposite, up the bright side of the street beside the crater of the stadium. These things—girl, spring, sunlight, song—intersected for me, flung me outta my head. Sixteen years later, that song is still what it was in that moment: a pinnacle of civilization insofar as—like all such pinnacles—it instills me with religious ecstasy.

Some time after that, after this girl—or maybe it was a different girl, it’s hard to keep track of the phantasms of my twenties—had re-bruised my heart I lay in bed and listened to New River Head in its entirety. This was a record that carried recumbency in its wake, melding prog Anglo majesty to couch-rock despair, and “Drowned” was a big favorite on The Ear’s infrequent KALX appearances. Its tremelo’d guitar loop and sluggish keys were weirdly consoling to me, a bait-and-switch of mood not unlike Cheap Trick’s crisp, kinetic ode to the 714. I think The Ear understood this. I think he understood me too.

Cheap Trick-Downed

The Bevis Frond-Drowned