Written by: Alex Green
Even though Dylan was in his early thirties when he sang, “She should have caught me when I was in my prime,” and Leonard Cohen was fifty-four when he admitted, “I ache in the places where I used to play,” in spite of the disparity of their ages, they were both singing about the same two things: the dimming of a libidinous vitality they were sure would always be there and the depressing realization that youth is a finite fossil fuel .
Life is brutal and unforgiving and aside from humor, wit, stoicism and a thousand shots of something strong from that bottle in the back, our only defense against its nasty curve balls, is how mighty of a cut we can take at them. In other words, when life gives you lemons, a savage swing with a shiny silver axe is your best bet because at a certain point, lemonade just isn’t going to cut it, pal.
But we’ll get back to lemonade, the brutality of life and the swinging of shiny silver axes in a minute.
Before we do, let’s just get this out of the way: when it comes to songwriters, it’s positively nuts not to put Del Amitri’s Justin Currie right up there with Dylan and Cohen. Or anyone else, for that matter. Currie’s sensibility was forged in the fires by Ian Curtis and Mark E. Smith and over the course of his nearly ten-albums of recorded output with Del Amitri (as well as four flawless solo albums), there’s a consistent precision to his writing that, like Cohen, Dylan, Waits, Reed, Cave, or Westerberg, is funny, smart, caustic, urbane and achingly precise.
You’ll find in even a cursory surveying of Currie’s body of work he flexes far more muscle than most. There’s cynicism (“Now I’m watching the fumes foul up the sunrise/I’m watching the light fade away”), romantic fatalism (“And when faced with temptation you know a man should stand and fight/But you will be my downfall tonight”), generational disgust (“Burn the canopy churn the blender/Rape the barley, bend the fender/Burn the embers, burn the embers/Cane and cane and cane dissenters/Ream the renters, shame the campers”) and, of course, spot-on cultural criticism (“You can be a has-been without having been anything”).
The point is, when it comes to lyricists, Currie is one of the very best and his winning discography has yielded no missteps or unforced errors and instead, continues to up the standard each time. The band’s 2021 Fatal Mistakes, which ended a nearly twenty-year recording hiatus, found the legendary and beloved Scottish outfit stepping back into the rock and roll ring sounding better than ever. It hit #2 in Scotland and rightfully elicited rave reviews from publications like Mojo, The Telegraph and American Songwriter.
All appeared to be going rather well until it suddenly wasn’t and in a shorter spell than seems even possible to get one’s head around, Currie experienced a Parkinson’s diagnosis, the loss of his mother and the love of his life having to live in a care home due to a major stroke. It’s the kind of triple shot of horrors that would make most jump off cliffs into strategically chosen great white-infested waters, but Currie, with steadfast determination to weather this particularly virulent system of personal hurricanes, processed this painful triptych with The Tremolo Diaries: Life On The Road And Other Diseases.
A probing, self-deprecating, emotionally honest, savagely funny and deeply poignant masterclass of a memoir, The Tremolo Diaries is a contemplative travelogue that uses the quotidian life of a touring musician to process the new weight that life is now using to bear down on him. And Currie is more than up to the task. For a man who has toured for most of his adult years, you get the feeling that in light of the way his life has suddenly been angled, he’s seeing things he’s always seen but in a totally different way. The result brings to mind an old Vonnegut line where he says: “I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.”
Currie recognizes he’s now residing far from the center and though the edge is full of insight and danger, at this point, they’re probably the two things he needs most.
Life is short if you’re unlucky, and it’s a little longer if you’re not and it’s no plot twist to reveal that none of us are going to make it out of here in one piece. It’s a sobering thought, but it’s not a surprise–it’s just that as we get older, we realize that the road in the rearview mirror is a lot longer than the road staring us down through the windshield. The Tremolo Diaries brilliantly faces the windshield while surveying the rearview mirror and the admixture of past and present intertwine themselves in seamless fashion throughout the book.
Anyone who has been following Currie’s tour diaries over the last decade or so, knows that the Glasgow-born singer/songwriter can take seemingly mundane road moments and bring them to life by shooting them through with sarcasm, hilarity and wisdom. Writing from the road is one thing, but writing about it is another and Currie is a man at home in the world, so the highway is his desk and as he sits behind it, he chronicles the life of a musician with dexterity and grace.
In other words, if you’ll permit a Mötley Crüe reference, this isn’t one of those I had to run away high so I wouldn’t come home low books about life on a rock and roll tour; instead it’s a sterling example of how to find meaning and purpose in the everyday world of road life, all the while traversing the tricky terrain of love and loss.
Speaking of loss, let’s plant our flag there for a second. The Tremolo Diaries is one of the most emotionally precise examinations of loss you’ll ever read and as Currie navigates that uncertain and uncomfortable territory, he does so with humor, George Carlin-like observational prowess and dark, philosophical wisdom.
The poet Jack Gilbert once observed that the world must have been a terrifying place before we had names for things and Currie, picking up on that idea, in a flash of Edward Gorey-like inspiration names his illness The Ghastly Affliction” and his tremor Gavin, casting him as, “a traitor who comes and goes.” The assignation of names to what surely must be a disorienting, terrifying and uncertain physical aliment, helps diminish the vaporous menace of Parkinson’s and recasts it as a prankster, running amok inside the body. “Gavin is an underminer and an intermittent reminder that I’m ill and unsteady,” Currie writes.
The Tremolo Diaries is nothing short of a literary feast; written with undeniable narrative velocity, singular authorial momentum and pitch-perfect timing, it’s one of the most immensely satisfying books you’ll ever read.
Filled with a phalanx of rock and roll venues, soundchecks, familiar hotels, tourbus window ruminations, laundry excursions, tedious equipment load-ins, hasty COVID tests, gap-toothed waiters, bad sleeps, awful dreams, Mexican restaurants in Minnesota, Dan Fogelberg exhibits, and trips to the zoo, where Currie observes a hornless rhino in the sun as looking like a “fucked tank,” Tremolo is packed with marvelous sentences, unforgettable images and a murderer’s row of emotional sucker-punches. It’s also loaded with hilarious observations (“military shit makes me nervous”), rock and roll absurdity (“Five For Fighting break into Bohemian Rhapsody during their soundcheck. Deary Me…”) and existential devastation (“My voice is a bit weird. It’s hard impossible to know which frailties are just the deleterious effects of ageing and which can be ascribed to the Affliction…”).
Life is brutal and beautiful and brutal again and Currie’s memoir is a brilliant reminder that whatever you get in this life is only a loaner and joy and sorrow are far closer on the emotional map than we ever could have realized. “…Another man is growing inside me, slowly seizing the means of control” Currie writes. “It’s as if your own shadow has leapt from the ground and buried itself within you. And this shadow has malevolent intent. He may share my shape, but now we’re combined it’s a fight to find out who has the most valid claim.”
Later, when Currie confesses: “…I long to be normal. I don’t want to have some handicap taken into account. I just want to be judged for getting the songs across,” the poignancy of worrying about the ability to deliver the musical goods really hits home. For a guy who has never had any issue in that department, watching him digest how occupational and artistic uncertainty have formed an uncomfortable braid is its own painful thing but wondering if they can be separated adds another sinister layer to the proceedings.
The Tremolo Diaries is a lot of things; an endlessly amusing travelogue, a meditation on mortality, a love story that’s taken a dark plot twist and an ode to friendship, fellowship and community. But it’s also something else and that’s the primary disease the book’s title refers to: the lifelong condition of the artist to keep producing, to keep chasing the thing that keeps them up at night, or out all night or feeling like the night itself. Being an artist is to be Sisyphus himself because no matter how many times you get it right–and the Del Amitri songbook is deep bench of doing just that for decades— the boulder still must be rolled back up the hill.
In a moment of unvarnished and understandable rage, Currie writes: “I’m angry that I’ve left My Love to flounder in a care home to play a 30-minute set to a bunch of bored rich people halfway across the world for not very much money. But I’m afflicted with the drive to go on, show after show, it’s all I’ve ever known. And without it I’m done.”
To create, to pull things out of mid-air, to grab the mystery by the throat as it tears by in a vaporous waterfall is what it means to be an artist and that’s both a blessing and a…condition. As Currie observes: “The foundations of who I am are weak and watery like a bad cup of tea. But I can walk around and witness and I can still sing and sway and so, like all musicians I’m driven by another ghastly affliction to play. Because to play is not to work and though we call playing work it is nothing of the sort. It’s the vaunting desire to show feelings and write them in the air.”
And perhaps that’s the biggest plot twist of them all because in the end, both The Ghastly Affliction and troublesome Gavin end up being secondary afflictions; the primary is the desire to create, the desire to play, the desire to deliver the work.
The Tremolo Diaries presents us with several conundrums, but perhaps the two most central are what to do when the person you love is trapped on an island you have no map to and the second is the business of what happens to the self when it starts to unravel.
Of the first, Currie heartbreakingly describes reaching his love–or not reaching her—like this: “I feel like I’m standing at the end of a jetty calling her name into the fog. All that comes back is the echo of my own voice.”
And of the second, he writes: “We cling desperately on to the present, driven by this affliction that no matter how bad it gets, things will turn out all right. Even when we know we’re headed inexorably for hell, we find faith in a dream of the opposite.”
We are never out of weapons, we are only out of time. And The Tremolo Diaries reminds us that even if we smash the clocks, burn the calendars and demolish the decades with swift swings of shiny silver axes, the seconds keep ticking away whether they’re marked by us or not.
So what to do in the meantime? Keep laughing, keep loving, keep your friends close, keep the brush to the canvas, and keep pushing that boulder upwards until one of you finally gets what you want and rolls like a demon down the other side of the mountain.
www.justincurrie.com
