The Longreads Blog

The Story of Country Music’s Great Songwriting Duo

Jared Brainerd, Faber & Faber Social

Dylan Jones | Wichita Lineman | Faber & Faber | September 2019 | 26 minutes (5,155 words)

 

In 1961, like most fourteen-year-old boys Jimmy Webb was obsessed with three things: music, cars, and girls. In an effort to curb these distractions, his Baptist minister father got his son a part-time job ploughing wheat fields near Laverne, Oklahoma. One day, while listening to music on the green plastic transistor radio that hung from the tractor’s wing mirror, the young Jimmy Webb heard a song called “Turn Around, Look at Me,” sung by a new artist called Glen Campbell.

Webb loved that record, not just because of the tune, but mainly for the voice, which he thought was sweet and true.

Read more…

Editor’s Roundtable: Time Well Spent (Podcast)

(Jim Heimann Collection / Getty Images)

On our August 30, 2019 roundtable episode of the Longreads Podcast, Audience Editor Catherine Cusick, Essays Editor Sari Botton, and Senior Editor Kelly Stout share what they’ve been reading and nominate stories for the Weekly Top 5 Longreads.

This week, the editors discuss stories in Jezebel, Governing, and The New Yorker.


Subscribe and listen now everywhere you get your podcasts.


0:39 “The Last Popeyes Chicken Sandwich in America” (Megan Reynolds, August 28, 2019, Jezebel)

9:48 Addicted to Fines.” (Mike Maciag, September 2019, Governing)

21:35 Silicon Valley’s Crisis of Conscience.” (Andrew Marantz, August 19, 2019, The New Yorker)

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Produced by Longreads and Charts & Leisure.

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

A view of the United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility, also known as the ADX or "Supermax", in Florence, Colorado. (Jason Connolly/AFP/Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Keegan Hamilton, Mike Maciag, Brian Goldstone, Nick Heil, and Megan Reynolds.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…

Rock Me Gently

Kevin Winter / Getty, Danni Konov / Getty

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | August 2019 |  9 minutes (2,273 words)

I have no reason not to believe Rolling Stone when it calls cover star Harry Styles a “21st century rock star.” He certainly looks like one: shirtless, tattooed, his hair a tousled mess, and a smile that may not say big dick energy but definitely says he knows what to do with it. He could be 1977 cover star Peter Frampton, when he was named “Rock Star of the Year.” There’s even a tagline to the left of Styles’s nipple promising sex and psychedelics. But then you start reading, and the setup begins to break down. Sure, he has a reputation for fucking a lot, but it all sounds very consensual and age-appropriate. He also seems unfailingly polite, not to mention sunny. I mean, he gets sad — his new album is “all about having sex and feeling sad” — but he’s not broody and doesn’t seem like he’d ever trash a hotel. This is a guy who appears to sort his problems out the way therapists tell us to: friendships, meditation, even work. “I feel like the fans have given me an environment to be myself and grow up and create this safe space to learn and make mistakes,” he tells the magazine. He describes himself as vulnerable and loose (the mushrooms and weed can’t hurt). Rolling Stone describes one moment as “rock-star debauchery” but all he did while tripping was bite off the tip of his own tongue — the only person he bled on was himself. As for everyone else, he just wants them to feel loved. “I’m aware that as a white male, I don’t go through the same things as a lot of the people that come to the shows,” he says. “I’m just trying to make people feel included and seen.”

The classic ideal of the rock star — the depraved renegade with infinite hotel bills, addictions, and infidelities — is dead. The charismatic young white man (it was usually a young white man, sometimes several) who rebranded selfishness as revolution has been overthrown, taking with him a part of the individualist, white, patriarchal capitalist system he came from. In his place, new rock stars, sometimes white and male, often not, have sprung up to nurture rather than destroy — instead of shutting us out, they let us in. Read more…

In the Age of the Psychonauts

Frank R. Paul, 1924. Forrest J. Ackerman Collection / CORBIS / Corbis via Getty Images.

Erik Davis | An excerpt adapted from High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies | The MIT Press | 2019 | 35 minutes (9,207 words)

Early in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s prophet of the future discovers a tightrope walker preparing to perform in front of a crowd. It is here, crucially, that Zarathustra announces his famous doctrine of the übermensch, the overman, the superhero of the spirit. Humanity, he says, is merely a rope “fastened between animal and Overman,” a rope that passes over the abyss.

Elsewhere Nietzsche describes the spiritual acrobats who can rise to the call of the Overman as “philosophers of the future.” Nondogmatic, often solitary, with a predilection for risky behavior, these radical free thinkers are “curious to a fault, researchers to the point of cruelty, with unmindful fingers for the incomprehensible.” Nietzsche simply calls them those who attempt. Their truths are their own, rather than general facts, and they are “at home in many countries of the spirit, at least as guests.”

Sounds to me like Nietzsche is talking about psychonauts. After all, while we are used to comparing drug visionaries to mystical seekers, from another angle, they more resemble philosophers or mad scientists compelled, beyond reason but with some sense, to put themselves on the line, risking both paranoia and pathology through their anthropotechnics. Read more…

When Your Social Worker Thinks You’re Ungrateful

Illustration by Dola Sun

Dina Nayeri | Longreads | August 2019 | 13 minutes (3,210 words)

In the last two years I’ve become entangled in the workings of the homelessness prevention arm of London’s Camden Council. Camden is the borough that includes the British Museum, the British Library, a small sliver of Regents Park, and a huge chunk of Hampstead Heath. It also has its rough parts, with subsidized or free council housing, artists on grants, young mothers on benefits — as in most of London, Camden’s residents are a varied lot and everyone, whatever their socioeconomic class, uses some kind of government service.

Minoo is an Iranian refugee with two bright children and a sick, immobile husband. In Iran, she was an experienced nurse, her husband an engineer and Christian convert. Her daughter is clever and witty, her sharp eye taking in every detail. Her son is a football star with a head for math. The four escaped religious persecution and possible death in Iran, spent months as asylum seekers having their story scrutinized for lies, then slept in a roach motel for a few more months before being recognized as both refugees and at risk for homelessness. Now, having been granted asylum, they share a tiny room in a Camden hostel and wait for permanent housing.

Minoo and I met two years ago, when her church contacted me to befriend a new refugee who was at risk of depression. She was my age, a mother, like me, and came from my hometown in Iran. We had fled for the same kind of apostasy, though I had been a child and she was in her 30s. We met for coffee. She was bedraggled but smiled for my sake. She insisted on buying my coffee. She had sad, kind eyes, with a drop of something, like a tear, lodged near one iris. To bridge the class divide, and to put her at ease, I made a clown of myself, and soon she opened up to me. “We can’t breathe,” she said. “My son is almost a teenager. My daughter is suffocating.”

The family’s Camden hostel room has a single bed that they share: sick husband, wife, pre-teen boy and girl. From the bed, you can touch the bathroom door and the kitchen table. Three large steps will put you at the opposite wall. Every day, they face potential homelessness, and yet, for two years, the Camden housing authority has run them in circles. It’s important to stress that the family’s status has already been decided. By the (conservative) government’s own estimation, they are at risk of homelessness, and given the husband’s condition, entitled to public housing that includes separate rooms for the boy and girl. And yet, accessing it has been humiliating, repetitive, and opaque. Recently it’s become vindictive, too.
Read more…

Shelved: Van Morrison’s Contractual Obligation Album

Ian Dickson/Redferns/Getty Images

Tom Maxwell | Longreads | August 2019 | 12 minutes (2,134 words)

 

Sometime between the massive success of his first single “Brown-Eyed Girl” and the extraordinary musical statement of Astral Weeks, Van Morrison walked into a New York studio and recorded thirty-one of his worst songs.

To be fair, he was terrible on purpose. What became known as Morrison’s “revenge” or Contractual Obligation album is perhaps the most distinguished of many record label f-yous. Comprised of over thirty songs supposedly recorded in an afternoon, with titles such as “The Big Royalty Check” and “Blow In Your Nose,” the work was, understandably, shelved. Apparently that was the point: Morrison wanted to get out of his contract with Bang Records and make a new home with Warner Brothers, and the Contractual Obligation songs were supposedly central to that transition. Morrison’s Bang Records contract stipulated quantity, not quality. The truth, about all of it, is a lot more interesting.

Read more…

‘Nobody in This Book Is Going to Catch a Break’: Téa Obreht on “Inland”

Members of the US Camel Corps in the southwestern desert, 1857. (MPI/Getty Images & Random House)

Ryan Chapman | Longreads | August 2019 | 15 minutes (4,042 words)

Téa Obreht’s debut The Tiger’s Wife casts quite the shadow. It was a National Book Awards Finalist, won the Orange Prize, and landed its 25-year-old author on the New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” list. We’d understand if Obreht let the acclaim go to her head. We’d even forgive a sophomore slump. Fortunately for us, her novel Inland bears the same storytelling rigor and frictionless prose of its predecessor.

While Tiger’s Wife drew from Obreht’s childhood in the former Yugoslavia, Inland is set a world apart and a century earlier. Namely: the American West, spanning the second half of the 1800s. Parallel narratives follow Nora, a homesteader in the Arizona territories, and Lurie, an outlaw wanderer and conscripted “cameleer” in the U.S. Camel Corps. (An actual troop, and the novel’s genesis.)

As you’d expect, life is punishing and violence ever-present. The well at Nora’s farm has run dry, and her husband Emmett, the local newspaperman, has left to find water; her two grown sons soon follow. Nora is left to protect and watch over an invalid mother, her youngest son, and an annoying teen ward who conducts séances in town. Lurie also communes with the dead, absorbing the posthumous “want” of his partners-in-crime as he traverses the territories. An immigrant Muslim from the Ottoman Empire, Lurie is also a wanted man, pursued by a dogged marshal on a charge for manslaughter. For much of the book Lurie takes cover in the camel corps — led by a charming Turk named Hadji Ali — and bonds with his trusty camel Burke.

Lurie’s and Nora’s stories will intersect, a meeting which elevates Inland to something spectacular and timeless. It’s cliché to say a book has “reinvented” a genre. But Obreht’s achievement feels that way: like a full reset of the American Western. Its characters are those often ignored in cowboy tales, and the Camel Corps spotlights a little-known piece of history while exemplifying the Why not? spirit of possibility — possibly the oldest American tradition. I asked Obreht about her novel over caffeinated cocktails in Manhattan. Read more…

When Running Toward Yourself Looks Like Running Away

Illustration by Greta Kotz

Amber Leventry | Longreads | August 2019 | 15 minutes (3,796 words)

“No one is standing in your way anymore. Not even yourself.”Maryam Hasnaa, clairsentient and spiritual healer.

Once upon a time, not long ago, I presented as someone else. Like so many people, I’d received discouraging information about who I was supposed to be — from my family and from our culture — and I constructed a false identity, held loosely together by shame, alcohol, and obligation. The longer I perpetuated the lie of who I was, the harder life became, and the more I suffered. I was desperate to change; I knew something was missing, but I didn’t yet know what. I was terrified of making even one new choice because of all that was attached to the false ones. Just as one lie leads to the creation of many others in order to maintain your cover, deconstructing just one will inevitably lead to the unraveling of the rest of them.

The truth kept intruding on the false quiet I tried to maintain in my mind. I kept drowning out the sound of it with gin, until it got so loud I had no choice but to listen.

In the space of two short years, after a lifetime of uncertainty and denying what was true, I became committed to being real. I became sober; I came out as nonbinary; I left my female partner of nearly 20 years. I examined everything in my life that I thought defined me and realized in my rush to find myself I had never really been lost, just hidden.

Read more…

Addiction, Disorder, Disease, Call It What You Want: A Reading List on Alcoholism

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No one sets out to become an alcoholic. Life happens. And then life happens some more, and one day one drink is eight drinks is you get the idea.

I never got to meet my dad’s dad. He died just after my older sister was born, when my dad was 21 and became a dad for the first time. Even though Grandpa was an alcoholic — to the point Grandma divorced him over it — that’s not what ultimately killed him. That’s just what I’m afraid will happen to my dad.

Alcoholism falls into two categories: alcohol abuse and alcohol dependence. Growing up, my dad’s drinking habit fell into the “week or weekend, 12-packs of Bud Light don’t judge” kind of dependence. He drank socially, but his specialty was drinking alone in the garage late into the night. Sometimes my mom would become so frustrated with his drinking that she’d go off to her parents’ house to avoid it altogether, leaving my sisters and me behind.

On one of these nights I needed a ride to stay over at a friend’s house and opened the door to the garage. I found Dad in the drunken state I expected and asked him for a ride. After reminding him Mom had left a couple hours earlier, he stared at me with bloodshot eyes, eventually slurring out, “Can you drive?” Not legally.

It took him more tries to get into the passenger seat than it did for me to start the car (one), and he passed out not long after that. When I pulled up to a stop light, an empty bottle rolled from under the seat and hit the back of my foot on the brake. The person in the passenger seat looked like my dad but wasn’t my dad. He wasn’t the person who loved me, who I loved back. He wasn’t the person who went to work every day to support his family. He wasn’t the person who told the best stories and made everyone laugh. He wasn’t my dad. The person next to me was this thing — addiction, disorder, disease, call it what you want — that manifested itself when the sun went down.

I was 17 when he got his first DUI. Attempts at sobriety started piling up after that, with nights of seeing him shake and sweat under blankets. I was 23 when my younger sister died in a car accident. Dad got his second DUI soon after that. Life happens.

There are days when I hope there’s still time for sobriety to stick to him. But I admit, there are more days when I’m a cynic, a realist. I know his body has been conditioned over decades to depend on alcohol in order to function and no one is meant to live forever.

For both the hopeful and the cynical, what follows is a reading list on how alcoholism has been experienced by real people who have struggled and managed to survive. Cheers.

1. For Leslie Jamison, Running and Drinking Were The Two Quickest Ways to Escape (Leslie Jamison, April 2018, Vogue)

For Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams and The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, running and drinking became her escape from shyness when she left junior high.

Jamison describes how she trained to be a long-distance runner and drank her way through high school, literally drinking to the point of passing out the night before her graduation ceremony. She “finally stopped drinking entirely” at 27 and it was at that point when she learned she “needed to be released from that defining sense of self,” created by running and drinking, so that she could “meet the other selves that were in there, waiting.”

If running and drinking both offered a sense of release from myself, they offered it in very different—nearly opposite—ways: Drinking felt like transportation out of myself, while running transformed my sense of who I was. If drinking loosened me from the cloister of my body, then running involved inhabiting that body fully: sweat pooling in my collarbone, flattening my hair to my skull, coating my shins in layers of dust and grime.

2. Distress Tolerance (Kaveh Akbar, April 2018, Gay Mag)

Psychologists refer to “distress tolerance” as our ability as individuals to endure negative or painful experiences. “Alcoholics and addicts, whose lives are often spent lurching from one painful crisis to another,” Kaveh Akbar writes, “tend to display distress tolerances that are significantly higher than those of their sober peers.”

Akbar uses his own experience with drinking as a remarkable case study for this assertion. He describes how he once got into a bike accident while drunk, resulting in a shattered pelvis and a cracked vertebra, but also the discovery by doctors that Akbar had a two-month-old fracture on a different vertebra that he didn’t know he had. Possibly more remarkable is that this wasn’t the turning point for Akbar to get sober. That “took another couple years.”

The more you drink, the more you become defined by the drink, the more you look like a drink and smell like a drink and behave like a drink. In a blackout, this effect reaches its apex — you leave your body completely, and the drink is finally left to move unaccompanied through the world.

3. For Years, Alcohol Was My Only Comfort. Then It Nearly Killed Me. (Heather King, July 2019, The New York Times Magazine)

Heather King, a former aircraft maintenance technician in the Air Force, writes about her history of drinking and how she “felt as if [she] had to drink in order to function, or at least appear to function, as a normal human being.” Alcohol was her “lifeline.” When she nearly dies in a drunk driving car crash, and after her mother bails her out of jail, King realizes she not only wants to get sober, she wants to live “[f]or the first time in many years.” And her desire to live, after nearly 20 years of drinking, finally outweighs the desire to drink.

Related reading: Jane Brody writes about functional alcoholism in a 2009 piece at The New York Times.

What I appreciate most about King’s piece is that she’s a realist. She acknowledges the “struggle” she “fought” to become sober, admitting that “[t]he decision to get sober and stay sober, by no means easy, was the single most important decision” she has made in life. She’s honest that she couldn’t get sober for anyone else, not even her children — she had to want it for herself for it to last.

Alcohol became my solution to everything. I justified it by saying, ‘If you lived my life, you would drink, too.’ I convinced myself I could stop. After all, quitting was simply a matter of will. The Air Force had taught me resiliency and strength. What other tools did I need? But alcohol had me beat; I just didn’t know it.

4. I Hadn’t Seen My Addict Father in Years — Then I Ran Into Him on the Street (Jordan Foisy, August 2019, Vice)

In this intimate and matter-of-fact glimpse of what it’s like to grow up with an addict parent, Jordan Foisy shares what it’s like to finally meet the person they may have been all along.

After not seeing his dad for three years — as the title suggests — Foisy runs into his dad and the two make plans to have lunch the following day. What unfolds is hours of hanging out together and Foisy getting to see that while his dad has a coke problem and lives on the margins of society “garbed in clothes that look like a donations box sneezed on him,” his dad is also “funny, opinionated, hypocritical, charming, strange, and loving.” At the end of the day, though, Foisy is left realizing his dad is “committed to his drugs, and letting them kill him. He doesn’t want to get better because what kind of life is waiting for him on the other side?”

This piece begs the question: Does someone have to get sober in order to live?

A lifetime of movies had left me with these fantasies of The Great Conversation: If I had enough courage, I could engage my dad in a way that would save him, and by saving him, save myself. It would end in great heaving sobs between the two of us, our arms wrapped around each other; him committing to getting clean and apologizing for all his misdeeds; and myself, born anew, filled with confidence, serenity, and, inexplicably, newfound athletic prowess.

5. Chasing Drinks with Lies, and Lies with Drinks (Katie MacBride, April 2018, Longreads)

Before getting sober, Katie MacBride was a blackout drinker who told lies about drinking and, when holes were poked in her lies, doubled down on those lies. She writes about her period of reckoning that started after waking up on a hospital gurney with a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) of .4 (blackouts start at .2-.29 BAC), a box cutter and, in her words, “A suicide note I vaguely remembered writing on a Post-it just in case I ever needed it.”

MacBride’s story illustrates how the lies we tell ourselves only take us so far and then we have to start being honest with ourselves.

When there were no clues, I had no story — none of my own anyhow. My life belonged to witnesses, unwilling participants who might know the things that I did not. This is the scariest part of being a blackout drinker: not the inability to remember, the fear that someone else does. The worst thing you can do to a blackout drinker is tell them the truth.

6. The End Of Alcohol: One Writer On Going Sober (Billie JD Porter, April 2019, Elle)

Billie JD Porter writes about being an all-or-nothing kind of drinker since the age of 13 and growing up “relatively used to the idea of hitting the self-destruct button, and the fallout that went with it” as a result of having parents addicted to heroin. When her parents’ struggles with various substances became a mirror for her own alcohol dependency, Porter decided to take a year off drinking to discover the root of why she drinks.

By taking a break, to discover what that may be, I was strengthening my own foundations, so the past doesn’t grow into an even bigger, scarier monster that I’m unable to confront, like it has done for my parents.

At the time of my hiatus, I was only 23; I don’t think my days of cry-laughing into Tyskies and obnoxiously shouting my way through an evening into the early hours are behind me just yet, but I wanted to learn to be able to drink and have fun, in a manner that doesn’t see me descend into a downward spiral, taking me and everything I’ve worked so hard for, with it.

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Alison Fishburn is a writer and recovering Floridian living in Ontario. She’s working on a memoir about the sudden death of her younger sister while learning to grieve. You can find her on Twitter @AlisonFishburn.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands