Billy Bragg

The first Billy Bragg song I ever heard was "Levi Stubbs' Tears." I was a brand new freshman in college and Talking to the Tax Man About Poetry had just come out. A guy on my hall named Jay heard me playing Bob Marley on my Sigma acoustic, and he invited me down to his room to listen to records. I was a little scared: Jay was a junior, and he was imposing. A giant of a man, with shocking blue eyes and thick dark hair swinging across his face. Faded black combat boots and a cheap plaid shirt like a tent. When he appeared in my doorway at 10:00 in the morning with a coffee pot full of water and a pack of cigarettes, I thought I might be in for some hazing, not genuine friendliness.

I left my guitar behind and we went down to his room on the other side of the pay phone and bathrooms. Right away I noticed a very big, very nice stereo with an actual turntable instead of a CD player. Jay pulled out a red and white 12" record with a picture of a well-dressed Levi Stubbs on the cover and BILLY BRAGG in block letters. "You gotta hear this," he said. Before even telling me his name, I think.

It was weird, really, because most of the guys on the hall wanted to hear me play, and they treated me almost deferentially. I would play stuff they expected like The Eagles and Lynyrd Skynyrd and "Magaritaville," and then I'd hip them to some deep Who or Pink Floyd cuts and some Kinks, Clash, U2, REM, Cure, and other things I considered edgy and tough. I reckon I was pretty snotty, playing and singing my simplistic versions of the things I wanted people to hear. But I was regarded as sort of the music expert on my end of the hall, and no one ever really pushed my boundaries. Jay knew from the get-go he was going to open my eyes rather than the other way around.

Billy Bragg's unadorned electric guitar and brilliant songwriting -- along with his crazy cockney voice -- were unlike anything I'd heard before. It was a bit like the sea change I'd experienced a couple of years earlier when someone put The B-52s debut record in my hands, the way that had revised the way I heard pop music. But this was something different again. There was something punk about the record, but it was like singer/songwriter punk. This had an intimacy and a sparseness to it that was more arresting in its way than all the noisy swagger of "God Save the Queen" (which, by the way, Jay and I would also listen to that morning).

The flip side of "Levi Stubbs' Tears" included the amazing "Walk Away Renee," a starkly funny poem about a romance gone wrong spoken over a guitar version of the old Left Banke song. The imagery of that track has never left me. Jay also had the Talking With the Taxman LP, and we listened to the whole thing. He turned out to be the kind of guy who would suddenly throw his head back with laughter, then jump up and lift the needle -- "Did you hear that line? 'A man could spend a lot of time wondering what was on Jack Ruby's mind'! Jesus, that's great." And then he would move the needle back and listen again.

Jay never did much like to listen to me play my guitar and sing, though we would sometimes cut class together and sit in Rose Hill cemetery to drink beer and smoke while I played. In fact, whenever I tried to play a song for him I had written, he would just laugh enigmatically, but not in the "move the needle back" kind of way. Later he moved into a house and got so heavy into LSD that when I'd go over to listen to records, he'd maybe put the Sex Pistols on one turntable and Hank Williams on another and mix the two into an unlistenable cacophony, turning it up loud and laughing over at me in that "isn't this great?" kind of way. I'd try to laugh along, but I was way too much of a square to really find this funny. I always suspected he was punishing me for not wanting to get high with him.

When Jay and I were friends, I looked up to him a great deal. He introduced me to a lot of music and ended up changing the way I played guitar and sang. When I got a band going, it wasn't a laid back, strummy, folk rock affair. I fronted it with an angry, unadorned Stratocaster; and although we covered a lot of standard "college band" songs, I stripped them back to an essential few chords and played them fast, snarling out improvised lyrics in a way I thought would make Jay howl with laughter and want to move the needle back. But he never came out to hear us play.

As for Billy Bragg, he turned 50 last year and he's still making great music. He's always been known for his Workers First "this machine kills fascists" kind of Socialism. And I love some of his big political songs like "Help Save the Youth of America" and "There's Power in a Union" and "Waiting for the Great Leap Forward." I also have to admit that some of his political songs just suck, lacking the beauty and nuance he's capable of. What I learned from Billy Bragg most of all -- the thing that really stuck with me -- is how the personal is often the most political. His very best songs are, like "Levi Stubbs' Tears," songs about individuals trying to work out the meaning of very personal hurts, people trying to sort out the messes of their lives. We may be fighting an uphill battle trying to straighten out big-picture politics as long as we haven't got a clue about the little pictures in our little worlds.

Here's a very young Billy Bragg playing "Levi Stubbs' Tears":