Premature Obituaries: An Idea Whose Time Has Come

I think it was right around the time that Scott Weiland, the self-thrashing, hollow-veined singer of rock legends Stone Temple Pilots and Velvet Revolver, did a herky-jerky dance of this mortal coil. At the time of his death, Weiland's musical life was considered to be, or so it seemed according to the popular wisdom of the time, a bad joke. Yet within hours of his body hitting the floor, music-scribblers rushed to pen tributes to, if not his genius, then at least how much his music had meant to them. Usually their love was written in the past tense, a hedging of elegiac bets if you will. And as I don't believe in cognizant afterlives, angelic, supernatural, or otherwise, it seemed a goddamn shame to me that old Swingin' Scotty Weiland died without ever getting to read such glowing tributes to his music. Thinking about all the other music artists who will one day die without knowing the depths of audience/critical love that exists for them, I had the idea for a running column: the Premature Obituary. I pitched it to Magnet, since they tend to traffic in music artists on the verge of death (note to aspiring music-content providers--don't put that in your pitch), but they didn't respond. I even included an example, because I recognized that the concept might sound a little strange on the surface. Ladies and Gentleman, I present a Premature Obituary for David Gahan written a few years ago. It wasn't good enough for Magnet, but maybe it will be good enough for you.

Premature Obituary: RIP David Gahan (1962-2016)

I guess we’ll all remember where we were when we heard the shocking news about David Gahan, the legendary Depeche Mode singer who died yesterday at the age of 54. If his band was the Rolling Stones of synthpop, well he commanded a stage better than Jagger ever did, and he gave Richards a run for his money in the chemical department as well.

A lot of people today are going to talk about Gahan’s legacy in terms of top ten hits. They’ll tell you about his decades of commercial success, the role his band played in the evolution of techno, of IDM, of EDM. And everything those people say will be important, but today I can’t stop thinking of the role Depeche Mode played in my life, how their music pulled me out of one life and into another so dramatically that I still to this day believe that inter-dimensional travel is possible.

I was 15 years old in the winter of 1988 and all I wanted to do was play one day for the Boston Celtics, or barring that, become a sports columnist for The Boston Globe. I’d been living in Southern California for two years and still didn’t fit in. Everyone around me seemed tanned and muscular and understood everything going on around them. I had none of those things. At 6’ 3” and 145lbs, my existence on the JV basketball team—at the end of the bench, to be used only in case of emergency—had more to do with my willingness to show up than any incredible physical gifts. And yet there I was, practicing six days a week and wearing a uniform that hung on me like a powder-blue shower curtain, hoping that manhood would kick in any day now and give me muscles and all the social benefits that came with being a star athlete at Granite Hills High School.

Tom and Tim Underwood were also on the team—twin brothers, I think fraternal twins, and their dad was the asst. coach. A lot kinder and quieter than our head coach, the improbably named Joe Roos, a screamer from Texas whose angry voice I can still hear booming ‘MOVE THE BALL BLUE!’ Coach Roos was a great coach in many ways, and his time at GHHS coincided with the basketball team’s greatest success (our JV team went 15-1 that year). He then got promoted to varsity coach, only to be fired my senior year after he tried to forfeit the team’s playoff game because he didn’t think they deserved to be there.

I was long gone by the time all that went down though.

I wasn’t friends with Tim or Tom—I wasn’t really friends with anyone on that team. I spent my sophomore year skinny and awkward and lost in a weird fog of confusion. So I remember thinking it was weird one night after practice when Tom asked if I wanted a ride home. When I told him I had my bike with me, he said that was cool, we could just throw it in the back of his truck. None of my friends had cars, let alone a truck, and Tom’s truck was even nicer than my dad’s car.
I sat in the back of the extended cab while Tim rode shotgun. I can clearly and vividly, almost in slow-motion, see Tim turning on the radio, and the song that came out of the speakers changed my life forever.

I didn’t recognize the song. I mostly listened to Top 40 and mainstream rock—Springsteen, Def Leppard, Van Halen, etc,—around that time. Tom got excited when he realized what song it was, or maybe it was Tim, or maybe it was both of them. I listened closer, to try and hear it the way they were hearing it

Granite Hills Drive is a curving road that twists left and right and then left again, and it can be disorienting if you’ve been playing basketball for two hours and you’re badly in need of fluids/food/sleep. No one said anything as we drove. It was the most exciting music I’d heard in my life—dramatic & forceful, but without any of the histrionics or over-emoting I was used to hearing. And the song wasn’t about girls, or sex, neither of which I had much experience with at that point. The song was about riding in a car and watching the world go past you. 

Which is something I knew all too well. And yet the singer of ‘Route 66’ made it sound like the coolest thing in the world. My embarrassing life pulled through the looking class and turned into something cool. Travel my way, take the highway that’s the best.

For better or worse, Depeche Mode still have the reputation of being effete synthpoppers, but the guitars on ‘Route 66’ were louder and more powerful than anything I’d heard before. It wasn’t rock as I knew it. There was no guitar solo, with notes all frantic & squealing & bent. The singer didn’t scream like the heavy metal guys, or shout in a faux-hick voice like Springsteen. This guy sounded calm and confident, like he knew things nobody else knew, and he had all the time in the world to tell his story.

We pulled into my apartment complex and I thanked Tom for the ride. I made sure to get two pieces of information: Depeche Mode (the name of the band) and 91X (the name of the radio station). And that was all I needed.

‘Route 66’ turned out to be the b-side on the ‘Behind the Wheel’ single—it took me forever to find it. And 91X turned out to be a station broadcasting out of TIjuana that played what was then called ‘alternative’ music (their slogan was ‘The Cutting Edge of Rock’), the kind of station that was as likely to play a band’s b-side as play their ubiquitous hit. And so I got to discover hidden gems like The Cure’s ‘2 Late,’ Morrissey’s ‘Hairdresser On Fire,’ New Order’s ‘1963,’ on the radio.

And it’s also where I discovered Depeche Mode’s ‘Never Let Me Down Again’ Have you ever seen the version from the movie 101?

It’s a masterclass in stadium singing. There’s none of Jagger’s hyperactive neediness, none of Bono’s macho pomp, Chris Martin’s faux-humility. He’s completely immersed in the song. It’s an emotional performance, and incredibly brave. His bandmates, barely lit, are all standing behind their instruments while Gahan’s out there all by himself. On one side of the stadium you have three musicians with their heads down, and on the other side you have 60,000 screaming people, and in the middle of it all stands David Gahan, an emotional conduit, overcome by the beauty of it all.

At the three minute mark, he gets so caught up in the song that he looks like he’s about to burst into tears, so when he stands up and throws his arms open towards the crowd, it doesn’t feel like a messiah-move, it feels like a desperate need to communicate, like he’s saying are you feeling this too? 

At the end of that basketball season Coach Roos pulled me aside and told me if I put on 20lbs of muscle that I’d start varsity next season—I was that good of a basketball player. Inspired, I convinced my dad to get me a gym membership and an endless supply of protein shakes, but my metabolism raged on regardless and I actually ended up losing two pounds that summer. You could actually see my ribs poking out right above my abdominal muscles. Forget about having a six-pack, I had a suitcase. Coach took one look at me when school started and decided I was lazy and unmotivated. He spent the next season screaming at me and challenging my manhood, which considering my dad—also a screamer—had just kicked me out of our apartment a couple of months earlier, was an exceptionally bad motivational strategy. And that was the end of my basketball career.

But by that point, a new world was opening up to me courtesy of the radio, and I was learning there were ways of being a man that were more interesting, and more rewarding, than simply being tough. And that maybe the star athletes at my school didn’t act confident because they had all the answers, but because they hadn’t gotten around to asking any questions. And it turned out there was a world out there a lot bigger than my high school, a world where being awkward, or lost in one’s thoughts, or confused about sex & masculinity and all the baggage that came with it, were things to be valued, weaknesses that could be turned into strengths because they were, in their own way, a form of truth, a truth that most people didn’t have access to.

Depeche Mode was never my favorite band, but looking back on it today, in the wake of their lead singer’s death, I realize that no band had a bigger impact on my life. I imagine how dull & desperate & small my life might have been if I hadn’t heard David Gahan’s voice that night. And I just wish I could have told him thank you while he was still here..

It’s strange. When a singer dies, it feels like all of their songs become ghosts, haunting us with the singer’s absence. I've thought more about David Gahan today than I have in the past 15 years. His every word recontextualized by the void and I still can’t believe he’s really gone. 

What a beautiful goddamn voice.