The Swirling Vortex That Is Head Candy
In the celestial River of Life, sometimes a driftwood snag carries as much as it catches...
I had plans to hit the carwash today.
So, as one does, I made a pit stop at my favorite South Minneapolis independent bookstore, The Irreverent Bookworm, to snap up a volume I could read while waiting in line and riding out the brushes, suds and polish. Perusing the shelves of fiction, starting in the middle, a title leapt out at me, a turn of phrase that hadn’t crossed my mind in decades.
The four words and the author’s name pulled on a long thread from the recesses of my mind. I began to hear a six string acoustic chord progression, melodic and tenuous, pensive, but suave, shadowy, a bit foreboding. My internal Musical Wayback Machine whirred to life and my heart went elsewhere…
When I was sixteen, I was offered a job at the only independent record shop in my hometown of Winona, MN. I was rail-thin with long, blond hair and I rode a skateboard nearly every waking moment that I wasn’t eating or in school. I say ‘nearly’ because music, cartooning and writing in the sanctuary of my bedroom were the collective driftwood that kept me from drowning in the River of Life.
Music in particular had an iron, mythical grasp on me. There were songs, often whole albums, that I would hear and feel an internal volcano or electrical storm erupt - as if that particular piece of music had already been living dormant inside me and hearing the song externally triggered a form of remote control detonation; blowing the music out of its hiding place and unleashing a flood of ichor through my veins. My skin could barely contain the way some bands could make me feel. When I was with others I would skate as if I had sprouted wings on my back - an infallible Icarus on Rat Bones - or I would dance with a levity, energy and abandon possessed only by the delight of youth.
When I was alone that music would leave my mouth - poorly but uncontrollably. I eventually learned to wrangle it into something passable as vocals (stories for another time).
I can probably count on one hand, maybe two, the number of times that I heard a song and immediately had to know who was playing it - greedy to bring it into my life and devour it repeatedly. In the decades before streaming, the end result of said sensation was less folding money in my britches and a soul permanently enriched.
I think, perhaps, the reason that some of those particular albums ripped a hole through me in the way that they did often had much less to do with where I was at the time than that what I found them offering was creativity’s greatest dividend: possibility.
We all have the kinds of songs that seem to have been written just for us after a breakup or a conquest or a milestone or a monumental loss. The songs from my youth, however, that remain spun into the fibers of my heart, seem to have a common thread of something like clairvoyance - lyrics as mystical roadmaps. Or dare I say, from a chef’s perspective, recipes?
I had just begun my senior year of high school in 1990 when The Connells released the masterpiece One Simple Word. I was already a surf and power-pop devotee. The art form was in its infancy, still waltzing arm in arm with straight up mosh-pit punk rock across the concrete ballroom of skateboarding. Cribbing from liner notes in a Descendents CD, my friends and I used the blanket term ‘stupid girl songs’ for the wide-ranging genre.
That is to say stupid songs about girls - not implying the girls said songs were written to and about were stupid. Nevertheless, with nigh on four decades of hindsight, even from the mouths of 1990’s babes it remains borderline chauvinistic cringe.
I digress.
The searing, melodic opening bars of “Stone Cold Yesterday” - the first song on the album - let me know know I was in for a ride. Fast, melodic, electric machinery coming to life beneath my feet through the delivery vehicle of my eardrums. Then Doug McMillan’s tenor, earnest, sweet, rolling the beauty up and down like that neon octopus carnival ride until it soars into the harmony of the chorus, launching me high enough to see and hear the whole god-damn fairground of my life.
The horses are out of the barn at that point. Every song on the album, beginning to end, leaving anything like it - anything from that time thus far - in the dust.
The Connells were far better, braver and more imaginative musicians than most of the aforementioned So-Cal scene and considering the fact that they were from the Carolinas, they dropped in some seriously bejeweled, borderline psychedelic honky-tonk of the variety R.E.M. only wished they had the soul and/or the sack to compose (it had been nigh on half a decade since Stipe and company had turned away from the perfection of Life’s Rich Pageant to pursue bubblegum, anthemic pretense).
Indeed, one of the songs on the album, “All Sinks In”, a rollicking, poppy sing-along, turned out after repeated listenings to be about the narrator’s revelatory reawakening from a deep depression after having been encouraged by friends to join them in an afternoon LSD trip.
Though the winter of my final year in high school was on the way, I could close my eyes while listening to One Simple Word and feel summer sunshine on my face, the esprit de corps of skateboarding with my friends, sunburned afternoons on the Mississippi River, leaping like a young god from the wagon bridge into the cold, swift brown water thirty feet below - again and again. Leaping into reckless adventure and possibility… The possibility of romance… The soaring flash of joy and energy a boy feels when the girl he knows is out of his league smiles back and winks.
The Connells’ songs weren’t about the art scene, or ocean boulevards or cars or fashion or geopolitics. They were singing about life in a small, history-laden college town like ours. They were from Raleigh, after all. There was something that strongly resonated in that - for me anyway. I tried to get some of my friends to dig on them like I did and was met with a resounding lack of enthusiasm. I couldn’t understand how these songs didn’t punch them in the feels the way they did for me. I wanted this album to be the windows down, sing-along soundtrack of the upcoming graduation season. Our road trip album.
That ship sailed and sunk.
I was okay with it. I think the fact that no one else got on board with One Simple Word made it mean that much more to me - a secret I kept to myself. An auditory narcotic that had been delivered directly to me - as if when The Connells heard the final mix in the studio they all grinned at one another, nodded and said, “Perfect. Let’s get it in the mail to that skinny kid in southeastern Minnesota. It’s gonna blow him away.”
The way snippets of their lyrics drifted in and out of the melodies directly evoked my feelings, seeming to polish and harmonize the drivel in my journal - or the thoughts I felt my friends kept hidden.
“Overthrown and unwise in your mother’s eyes”
“I watch you stir around cuz it keeps me busy; always willing to take the time cuz it tends to waste away - and it’s tearing you apart”
“Too strong to be held tight, too young to be told… turn me over, pound me out flat, then just let me be”
“She never listens to me at night. Ah, but I remember…”
“Will you stand him in your favor? With the sun in his eyes starin’ a 14 carat stare… he’s coming ‘round and his mind stops there”
“This time is closer and somehow, now, it’s not what I wanted”
I began to hear the narrator singing from the same position I felt I was in - outsider, observer, desperately wanting to be valued, to belong, to be desired - someone with an overwhelming need to give voice to their love for the world but feels the music turn to dust in their throat.
An opened mouth offering nothing.
It was a sad, but tremendous comfort to me to feel that in those songs, one after another, stories setting scenes in a town I began to recognize as my own - from a perspective I recognized as my own.
I listened to One Simple Word for months. It was a medicinal balm that lived in my walkman and accompanied me on all of my swim meet road trips, bouncing along half asleep on school bus bench seats, pensively contemplating the years ahead. For all the soaring sunshine the album had offered me, it began to reveal long, dusky shadows too.
One Simple Word seemed to start showing me what my life would be like if, as my parents and grandparents before me, I never left Winona.
I would never fit in.
Not only was I outside of where I was, I was outside of what I wanted.
Despite the fact that I had rabidly and religiously remained straight-edge while one by one my friends began to indulge in everything, I had a strong feeling that if I spent the upcoming years of my life in Winona, whiskey and everything that came along with it would replace what skateboarding had been to me. It might take a couple of years, but I would likely succumb out of loneliness or hopelessness.
No one would ever read what I wrote unless I mailed it to them in a letter. I would never sing in a band. I would never see the world on my own terms.
Nothing I felt I was born to do would provide me with any satisfaction or self-respect, much less a living, in Winona, MN.
I don’t know that I would have understood that without the roadmap laid out by the songs on One Simple Word.
Months later, high school graduation having come and gone, enrollment in Winona State University completed, a handful of nights behind a microphone with ad hoc cover bands in beer-damp basements, Nirvana and the grunge explosion, hundreds of road-trip miles logged to soak up dozens of bands at First Avenue, another summer of full-time factory work poured into a college tuition fund, I walked into my Saturday morning shift at Face The Music.
The manager suggested I play a CD that had arrived with several promos earlier in the week.
“We’ve listened to it a few times. It’s pretty good. Really rocks. Sounds a lot like the stuff you’re into, JD.”
The cover didn’t appeal to me, a graphic mix of some Silver Surfer knock-off and a stretched out band photo filtered through what looked like a leftover Black Sabbath concert backdrop - appropriate for the album’s name, Starcaster. The band’s name, Head Candy, sounded like an inebriated afterthought.
My displeasure ended there.
When I pressed play, a dusty, three chord groove seemed to be trying to play the kind of power pop The Connells owned like a fiefdom but were too angry to speed it up.
Perhaps it’s personal, but I have a soft spot for singers who were not born to sing - the ones who were chosen to rock the mic for one or both of two reasons:
They’re delusional enough to believe they belong there, despite an acknowledged lack of talent
They’re brave enough to turn the way they see the world into poetry and melodies and share them with both conviction and impunity
Checking out the liner notes and band roster, I decided that Mike Sangster was clearly the latter - and, along with his bandmate Doug Robertson, was a hell of a guitar player.
Head Candy’s riffs were crunchy and quick without falling into the ‘drop D’ range pioneered by Helmet and later used by Pantera to excite white supremacists everywhere. Their micro-solos and high octave licks were like gold leaf on filigree and beyond catchy.
However…
From my perspective as a budding poet - as a word junkie who craved esoteric sincerity - the lyrics were a Willy Wonka wonderland. Baudelaire raised in between a cut-rate university and an oil refinery. EE Cummings as the doorman at a Lower East Side nightclub.
Sangster’s sandpaper baritone pleaded with the world from his gut, belting out what we needed to hear as if the microphone were trying to run away from him. On a first listen I deciphered what seemed to be heady love songs with honest, unconventional turns of phrase:
“You’re my soul grinder”
“Slumming angel, magician, having trouble he won’t tell… wished upon a falling diamond star halo” (cleverly sneaking in an appropriation from one of the greats)
“You are ancient and you are beautiful all because of gravity’s pull”
“I’m trying to save myself from using you. I’m my own disaster.”
“She was plunged into my mind. Cinderella Suicide. Mona Lisa Overdrive”
“as the whirlpool drowns me, I got my imagination. It’s not where I think it should be”
Some of the songs raced like a motocross track, careening in circles. Others were a charging bull elephant, too agile to miss your dodge, bashing you with sheer momentum. One or two were simply soft. Not ballads - not even close - but a gentle address to some kind of evasive, damaged muse that seemed present in every song.
One of the three efforts that closed out the album grabbed me tightest. The acoustic instrumental that kicked you and I, dear and patient reader, down this rabbit hole earlier today, had an almost medieval edge to it - like “King Volcano” by Bauhaus but elegant and manic. Head Candy had titled it “Invitation to a Beheading” which I thought genius-level inventive and rife with imagery. I discovered years later that it was the title of a surreal Nabokov novel - the one I spotted in the bookstore this morning.
Midway through the album, I mused on the origin of the intellect they seem incapable of hiding. There was snarl with no need for swagger. They certainly weren’t Seattle. Not snotty enough for Chicago. Something about them reminded me a bit of Buffalo Tom or maybe The Buck Pets from Dallas.
“Are these East Coast guys? Boston?” I asked.
My manager chuckled, “Nope. Iowa City.”
Fuck yeah, I thought. Our neck of the woods. Midwest, mid-tier university town. Now the chip on their shoulder was obvious, now the fever-dream, void-howling poetry made sense.
Like I had with One Simple Word, repeated listenings of Starcaster peeled away the veneer of tough-guy romanticism to show something far deeper - almost mystic. Head Candy had initially come off as the Buzzcocks dosed with peyote, dragged over gravel and left for dead in a by-the-hour motel. Instead, it began to dawn on me that the muse Sangster had been pleading with, serenading - imploring to see the world in a different, more beautiful way - was internal.
Perhaps there were real lovers behind many of those lyrics, but as I understood them, the dark romances Sangster was sharing with anyone who would listen held a lesson that took me another lifetime to put into practice: our lives will create nothing but wreckage and regret unless we learn to love, understand and observe the journey to accept everything about who we are.
Denying that just isn’t worth it.
I was a frustrated young man when I discovered the Starcaster album, filled with a desperate and furious belief that the beauty and heartbreak in life I was so ravenous to devour was only to be found elsewhere. I was primed and roaring on the jet fuel of possibility that life had yet to burn out of me.
Eventually, that jet fuel did take me elsewhere, out of Winona, pursuing possibilities, creating them, standing on stages and howling out my own dark romances through the electric gales and lighting strikes of rock and roll.
For a while.
Kitchens came next.
I never saw Head Candy live, never heard of them touring. For years I kept looking for a second album that never appeared.
Just shy of a decade later, I was working lunch shifts at a French Brasserie in downtown Minneapolis. It was one of the busiest, toughest, and most demanding kitchens in the state due in no small part to both the owner and executive chef having spent the first halves of their culinary careers in the white linen pressure cookers of Manhattan’s finest restaurants.
Many of the cooks that came through our doors didn’t last long - unable to take the speed, the pressure, the verbal abuse or unreasonable, often batshit crazy demands of the owner.
One day a cook we’ll call D started his first shift. Within minutes it was clear this guy was distinctly overqualified. A real journeyman. He cooked circles around the sous chef. Total octopus arms on sauté station, piling on the fire tickets and even helping the broiler guy with vegetable sides when he got buried. D also worked clean - impossibly clean. Not only was he wiping down every inch of his station in between fires and plating, but his fitted coat AND apron stayed spotless through service.
D was very quiet and very nice and had none of the swingin’ dick chutzpah I was so used to seeing from every other seasoned, accomplished cook or sous chef who had rotated through the kitchen and out due to incompetence or bruised ego. D seemed to epitomize the aphorism, “Still water runs deep.”
Making our way through formalities during post-rush prep, I found out D was originally from Iowa. I related that my wife had graduated from Luther College in Decorah. He seemed nonplussed, which surprised me.
Seeing as how no one trusts a cook who isn’t passionate about music, our conversation eventually swung in that direction. Turned out D had spent some time playing rock and roll as well.
“There was this band from Iowa City that I loved. Released one record and fell off the face of the earth. Called Head Candy. Ever heard of them?” I asked.
D smirked and stopped scrubbing a far corner of the stainless he had reached over the table to clean.
He straightened up and looked me in the eyes from behind service-smeared glasses.
“I played drums on that album,” he said.
“What? You were the drummer in Head Candy?!?!”
“No. Jim Viner was their drummer. I was friends with those guys. When Viner couldn’t make a couple of the sessions I sat in. I’m thanked in the liner notes.”
He gave his name, which didn’t match the one on his time card.
“Yeah. I, uh, changed my name when I got married,” he said evasively.
I let it go. He wasn’t the first white guy I’d met who had been employed under more than one name and/or social security number.
It was a far less digital world at the time.
I made several attempts to get more information on the band, why they didn’t tour or release more music.
“Just broke up, I guess,” was the clearest answer D ever gave me.
They remained a mystery, waypoints like stars that guided me I needed it most.
Starcaster and One Simple Word helped show me that I wasn’t alone - that my desires were valid and worth fighting for, that my emotions and origins were all I needed to turn words into something more than thought.
They led me to my own opportunities to scream out my dreams in front of the world, marrying poetry to melody, taking that ride.
The invitation to make music with people who felt the same way I did is one of most fulfilling experiences of my life - short lived as that time was.
I said a lot of what I needed to, but I never quite got it all out of my system.
Don’t think I ever will.
That’s what poetry is for.