I’ve seen Radiohead live one time, at Bonnaroo, in 2012. I went with my boyfriend (I’ll call him R) at the time. I think Radiohead played on Friday night. I don’t remember who else played that day. I do remember that through a series of calculating maneuvers involving blind confidence and sneakiness, I got us right up to the stage barrier. From that close up, I could see the stage set-up in high relief. I remember there were giant LED panels set up as a backdrop to the band, but I don’t remember what the band looked like, or what they were wearing, or what they did when they came on stage, or what songs they played.
What I do remember is that around the middle of the day, we had found out through whispers across the farm that a member of Radiohead’s crew had been injured when one of those giant LED panels had fallen on him. Less than a week later, an outdoor stage in Toronto would collapse during set-up and kill a member of Radiohead’s crew and injure three others. In my errant, human memory, these events have all collapsed into one. But I remember hearing the news of the injury and feeling like a gray hush had fallen down over the farm, even as people were rolling and tripping and vomiting into plastic water bottles and screaming. And I remember being close to the stage, and seeing the LED panels, and thinking about death, and I remember feeling scared.
Radiohead, as I wrote about last week, has always induced fear in me. I’ve waited to listen to each album they’ve released since I started listening to them for at least a few weeks. I didn’t listen to In Rainbows for more than a year after it came out. You only get one first listen, and I want to be in the right place for it. With Radiohead, that means I need to be ready to withstand a significant adrenaline rush.
There is, of course, no exact way to know I am ready. Sometimes I just have to go for it, decide to do it and go through with it even though I am not certain I am ready and can’t be sure what will happen. I am no longer talking about just Radiohead.
R and I broke up about a year and a half after we went to Bonnaroo. He wanted to get married; I didn’t. There’s a difference between wanting to do something but not being ready to, and not wanting to do it at all. I started spending a lot of time at a place in Knoxville’s Old City called Urban Bar, which had a well-stocked jukebox in the back-left corner of the front room. I would walk in, pee before the bathrooms got gross, order a gin and tonic, flirt with someone just long enough to get them to give me a quarter, walk to the jukebox, and put on a song. Eventually, I started putting on “Idioteque,” from Radiohead’s Kid A, every time.
One day, someone (I’ll call him S) came up to me while I was at the jukebox and told me he also loved “Idioteque.” I smiled and said something like “yeah, it’s such a good song,” and then walked away.
I spent the better part of a year semi-unconsciously avoiding developing a relationship with S, even though we were in all the same circles and would always find each other at the back of rooms during house shows, or out on bar patios, or on front porches while everyone was screaming inside. We’d have the kind effortless conversation you enjoy so thoroughly while you’re in it, you only realize it was effortless after the fact. But I was really afraid we’d fall in love, and then afraid we wouldn’t be able to make it work, and then afraid of all the mutual propping-up that would give way to collapse if our relationship ever ended. Eventually, I leaned into the fear, and we did indeed end up falling in love, and then a bunch of other stuff happened, none of which really matters for the purposes of this story.
Sometimes I think about what will happen when S dies. I wonder how I’ll feel and can probably guess that I’ll feel like part of me has died, too, some part that was alive because of him and because of our love. I wonder whether I’ll get to mourn him — maybe I’ll die first! — and with whom. Will there be a funeral, and will I be able to go? Will others be there; will they know what he meant to me; will I have to explain? To be clear, S is healthy and well, and there is no reason to think that he could die any time soon. But love and death are twin forces. Giving love to someone means also understanding that there’s only a limited time in which to do that. One day, one of you will die, and that love will no longer have a home.
I used to think of death as something that would happen after my life was already over. In my mind’s eye, my life was like an arrow moving toward some destination, presumably death, but who could be sure. The farther the arrow got from this, the present moment, the deeper it plunged into a thick fog. Death was nowhere to be seen, just off, in the distance, somewhere, not here, not where life is. Now, I think of my life as a rope stretched taut between two poles, birth and death. Without the poles, my life is limp.
At some point during Radiohead’s Bonnaroo set, the LED panels that served as backdrop flipped forward ninety degrees and appeared to float above the band’s heads, creating a kind of roof and raining light down on them. It filled me with dread. I didn’t know anything about the injured crew member, could not have predicted the fate of the guys in Toronto, but in the space between the band’s heads and the LED panels, I saw the possibility of death. I remember scanning the crowd for a single face that mirrored the worry I felt must’ve been visible in mine. I couldn’t find it.
This is the second part of a three-part series on Radiohead. You can read the first and third parts at the links below: