To All the Rock Boys I've Loved
by Eva Recinos
Saskia Jordá, 100% Contained, 37.89 miles of yarn, pins, and paper tags, 10ft W x 6ft H x 10ft D, 2017. Photograph by Bryan Griffith.
TO ALL THE ROCK
BOYS I’VE LOVED
EVA RECINOS / FEB 2021 / ISSUE 5
Chris
During a high school summer job at my mom’s office, I made friends with one of my mom’s co-workers, and we talked music. I mentioned my interest in Audioslave, how I couldn’t wait to listen to their 2002 self-titled album.
He said he would burn me a copy, but then rescinded on his promise. “I talked to your mom, and I don’t think it’s appropriate for your age. It’s got some adult themes.”
A lesson for me: some adults seem cool, until they tell on you.
I got my hands on it anyway and didn’t really see what he meant about “adult themes” but then, suddenly, I understood. “Nail in my hand / from my creator / you gave me life / now show me how to live.”
Forbidden fruit. I was raised Catholic. Listening to this song was blasphemy. It all sounded so far from the crooning Spanish love songs my parents played (that I usually rolled my eyes at) or the rancheras that blasted from the radio (which I disliked, because I knew it meant my dad was drinking).
I put my headphones in and listened to Chris belt out the lyrics so loudly that they drowned out the part of me that said a good Catholic girl wouldn’t listen to this.
Like a true teenager poseur, I had to discover Chris Cornell’s roots. I went backwards and listened to Soundgarden and realized — Chris had been singing about darkness and pain and religion and humanity for longer than I knew.
But something shifted as I got older. The angst turned into something else. I re-listened to that album during long commutes more than a decade later, shuttling myself sleepily to and from work with his chill-inducing voice in my ears breaking the monotony.
I heard his voice, loud and clear then, while medicated and learning new ways to deal with my depression. His songs became a rallying cry, a screaming refusal against the darkness that liked to envelope me. “Now I’m free from what you want / Now I’m free from what you need.” An assurance that I could talk back to it.
Chris is gone now; he died by suicide in 2017. It took me a few days to really process it. I wanted so badly to believe that his singing could carry him through tough times the same way it buoyed me during deep, depressive episodes. Home alone one night, I turned the volume up on my laptop and sang along to his tracks again. My throat tightened with each note, as I held close the bittersweet feeling that he wasn’t around anymore, but that I would always have him there somehow.
I remembered that first Audioslave CD and laughed. It wasn’t risky to give me a copy of the CD, it was more risky to keep him from me, the way his voice soothed me for so many years.
But like a bittersweet parting with an ex, his voice will always bring me back to a form of catharsis.
Zack
“The version on here is a little different from the one on the radio,” my brother-in-law said to me, “so just don’t play it super loud when your mom is around.”
It was an unedited mixed CD with some of my favorite hits from the local alternative rock station, including Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name Of.” That post-guitar-solo breakdown that repeated a single phrase with growing mania. “Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me / fuck you I won’t do what you tell me / fuck you I won’t do what you tell me.”
I sang along until it hurt. Even before I realized the true nuance behind the lyrics of the song. Even before I learned more about the police as dangerous to communities of color, inclined to serve and protect some neighborhoods more than others.
Watching Zack de la Rocha leap and scream on the stage only strengthened my dream of becoming a lead singer in a rock band one day. I wanted that wild abandon. At home, I was told to close my legs, to stop dangling one over the side of the armchair while the other stayed on the sofa. I was told to shave once I started sprouting little hairs under my arms. I was reminded that some girls were asked to serve their father and brother before they even got to sit down and eat their own dinner. I wasn’t asked to do those things but I still bristled against rules about what women couldn’t do, even at the start of puberty.
Zack was like the bad boy that would let me throw down as hard as I wanted during a rock show. Zack, who seemed to transcend any stage he took with his neverending energy and vocals that could start a riot.
I didn’t listen to Rage quite as religiously as an adult, with the fervor of hanging on to every word, but the excitement was still there every time a track came on. Zack is the ex I rarely think about but realize I’m still kind of in love with every time I bump into him.
Jonathan
It’s all fuzz, the distortion crunchy and aggressive. Then comes the bass, all rust and acid, the heavy sound of a hand slapping on strings. The cymbals punctuate every few beats, splashing over the melodic chaos. Then, the vocals. Gravelly, scratchy, like someone with a bad cold who still manages to hit a note. Jonathan Davis. Forever angry and straining his voice, a constant in the rocky years of my teenage angst.
“Right Now” was released in 2003 but by that time it was one of many Korn songs I’d fallen in love with. Picture me: less than five feet tall, 12 years old, head haloed by bushy black hair. Grieving the loss of my father and cursing the adults in my life. I yearned for someone to understand why I carried so much anger with me everywhere I went.
Jonathan sang dark lyrics so casually: “So when I feel the need / I guess it’s time to bleed / I’m gonna cut myself and watch the blood hit the ground.” The song crescendoed into the right now, the track’s title a battle cry for the damned and hurt. I listened to it alone in my room or on the bus headed to school, my headphones practically vibrating against my ears.
I tried it once, because people at school were talking about it: cut myself haphazardly with one of the razors I’d just started using to shave my body hair. It was pink and had a thin handle, one of those cheap ones you get in a pack.
I imagined a stranger standing in his own bathroom, in front of the white sink debating whether or not to do it. Glancing at his reflection before making a decision.
When the razor made contact with my skin I almost thought nothing would happen, that I did it wrong. But red bloomed quickly and the panic rose in me and I regretted it immediately. I stepped out of the bathroom and ran right into my mom and we cried and fought in my bedroom as I held a towel to my wrist and waited for the bleeding to stop.
I had to leave Jonathan for a bit. I didn’t want to tiptoe so close to the edge of things anymore. Jonathan gave me words to express my anger and hatred and sadness but some words became too dark, hit too close to home. Catharsis turned into pain.
I watched a video interview with him recently. He’s soft-spoken and laughs, even while he talks about being pissed off and trying to avoid parties. Turns out he loves playing kids’ video games; he uses them to bond with his son. Jonathan, a father.
I don’t need Jonathan in the same way anymore, but the sound of his voice still transports me to the time I couldn’t seem to get through my days without him.
Brody
This is the part where I tell you there were girls, too.
My sister signed me up for summer school classes. I arrived with my binder, the kind with a clear top where you can slide in printed sheets with a title. Some of us, kids, though, used that real estate to make collages on a sheet of paper and then slid that through instead.
I can’t remember everything I included but I do remember one image: Brody Dalle, lead singer of the Distillers, wearing her Liberty spikes. Her skin was pale and smooth, her cherry red lips popping. Her hair was black and her eyes were heavily shadowed (black, too, of course). She was topless, with just her arms crossed over her. I cut this image out, led my scissors carefully all the way around her spikes, so that I could put it in my binder.
The kids at the classes were immediately curious. I hedged their questions (who is she? is she naked? why did you put her in your binder?) and apparently I did it well enough for them to stop asking about it. They moved on. I kept Brody held close to my chest.
I carried her like a silent icon, a reminder that when I got older I’d be able to do my hair however I wanted. And, then, something else. I wanted to smooth my hand over her back, tenderly peck her cherry lips.
Brody’s voice, so scratchy and loud and unkempt. So far from the feminine, sweet image that I was being told to adapt to as a pre-teen. I loved it when I would get a cold and my voice went hoarse. I wanted to sound older, more mature, less girly. Good girls didn’t scream into microphones. Good girls didn’t like other girls.
Whenever a Distillers song comes on in the car, it feels like when I catch a whiff of my ex’s perfume in a crowd.
Jack
“Hey, can I request a song?”
“Yeah, what can I do for you?”
“Can you play “Seven Nation Army” by The White Stripes?”
I didn’t realize this would be recorded, so when I listened to the radio for my request, I was shocked to hear someone else had asked for the same song. No wait, that was my voice. I sounded like a teenage boy. Then they played the song—my anthem—with the same riff over and over, increasing in intensity.
I took the band’s color scheme seriously. For my quinceañera, I begged my mom to let me design my own dress. I hated the frilly, bright ones everyone else loved. I wanted to pay homage to my favorite band. So I opted for a white and red dress; poofy, white, with red stripes going down the seams of it. I wore long red gloves and my hair was stiffly curled into ringlets. There were red rose petals on the white tablecloths at each table. I wanted to make it clear that I knew what bands I loved and that I would find wiggle room within the rules.
Just before I left for graduate school, tensions ran high at home. I was breaking curfew. I had tattoos. I got home one night super drunk, blabbering and crying about how my mom never trusted me. We’d already been through losing my dad together, and this would be another test. I was counting down the days until my move to San Francisco. I still wanted to feel rebellious, even though I was going to grad school to make my family proud.
My partner, just a few months into being my boyfriend at the time, drove up to my mom’s house in his dirty Honda Odyssey with the drum set in the back. He was wearing a leather jacket and as he pulled a U-turn on our block, “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground” started to play on the radio, its opening, screeching guitar notes so familiar to me. The piercing sound of Jack’s distorted guitar drowned out the thoughts swirling in my head that I wasn’t good enough. I sank into the chair and untensed my shoulders a bit, rolled down the window. For a couple of minutes, I could forget.
I told my partner I always hoped it would happen this way, that I would get whisked away while this song was playing.
The writer would like to acknowledge Wendy C. Ortiz's "Mix Tape,” which was important in thinking about music for this piece.
Eva Recinos is an arts and culture journalist and non-fiction writer based in Los Angeles. Her reviews, features, and profiles have been featured in Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Hyperallergic, Art21, Artsy, Jezebel and more. Her essays have appeared in Catapult, PANK, Electric Literature, Blood Orange Review and more. She is currently working on a memoir in essays.
Saskia Jordá was born in Caracas, Venezuela and works with site-specific installations, drawings, and performances that map the tension between retaining one's identity and assimilating a foreign persona. “Having relocated from my native Venezuela to the United States as a teenager, I became aware of the layers of 'skin' that define and separate cultures—one's own skin, the second skin of clothing, the shell of one's dwelling place—all these protecting the vital space of one's hidden identity.”