Tag: Shady Lane

The House on Shady Boulevard

“So this home,” begins the Narrator. “It’s the cute little craftsman — the one with the stained glass, correct?”

“Yes — inasmuch as the Ship of Theseus is the Ship of Theseus,” replies the Traveler. “Yet don’t be fooled by its current guise. A subsequent owner repainted the home’s exterior with colors that don’t suit it. To properly understand its appeal, one must picture it now as it appeared then: a charming brown-and-yellow bungalow, two houses in from the corner, cyclopean stained-glass Eye of Providence fitted into the frame of the front window, staring intently at all who pass, on land that used to belong to the city’s waterworks.”

Narrator meets the Traveler’s gaze for a moment, then jots a few words in his journal. “And the musician / record producer Mitch Easter,” murmurs the Narrator, as if reading from a dossier. “Frontman for 80s alt-rock / jangle-pop group Let’s Active: he lived there too, did he not?”

“Yes, Easter grew up there, too. Not in the same house, mind you,” hastens the Traveler. “The Easter home was two doors down. But yeah, that was Drive-In Studio. That’s where Mitch recorded R.E.M.’s first single, ‘Radio Free Europe’ — there in his parents’ garage.”

“And Mitch would go on to produce Brighten the Corners, is that right?” asks the Narrator.

“Yes, precisely—the Pavement album,” says the Traveler, lips pursed.

“On which appears…?” adds the Narrator, as if coaching the Traveler through an as-yet unmemorized script.

“On which appears / a song called ‘Shady Lane.’”

Shady Lane

When I listen again to “Shady Lane,” ears like Adam’s on the morning of his creation, I hear Pavement songwriter Stephen Malkmus sounding not like himself, but like a persona worn by a faraway you. You, dear reader, eyes closed before a cascade of ivy. It’s you, there, singing of worlds colliding. You, of all people, whether with emery board or without, shouting “Freeze, don’t move” and “Glance, don’t stare,” looking at me and thinking me beautiful when I cry.

“Shady Lane — everybody needs one,” goes the chorus. And it’s true. For one can scarcely improve on such a place. And I had one: albeit, “once upon a time.” However timeworn the connotations of that beginning, however hackneyed it may sound, I shit you not.

“For a time I lived differently,” sings the Narrator,

“mind out of time

or in sidereal time

time immemorial

because measured by fixed stars

in a house on Shady Boulevard.”

Granted, it was a strange place, this house — one that left me with many questions. Who from the home’s past, for instance, mounted the cattle skull on the home’s exterior above the porch? Was that the handiwork of the Wizard or of one of his successors?

***

To arrive at an answer, let us report on ourselves in third-person.

The journey occurred, we report, during the period of the professor’s tenancy, in the home of the Gay Wizard. Recalling it now in retrospect, his spiel is, “It never occurred to me at the time that the place might have been haunted.”

“Yet this haunting,” he says, “if that’s what we’re to call it: I insist, here, that the spirits involved were benign.”

“A benevolent haunting! Fair enough,” nods the Narrator. “Tell us more.”