Talking to myself about one of my all-time favorite albums
Talking to myself about one of my all-time favorite albums
Commentary on the go: on Helmet, Genesis, drinking, weed, panic attacks, and the glorious stupidity of being in your 20s.
June 21st marked the 30th anniversary of Betty, the third album from the iconic alt-metal band Helmet. As I explain in my commentary clip above, there isn’t an album that I’ve listened to on a more consecutive basis than this one — and that’s saying a lot since I tend to get obsessively focused on music.
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I had an appointment to bake cookies with my kid, so I just talked into my phone while walking. I tend to talk to myself while walking anyway, so I might as well start turning it into footage I can put to good use. In New York City, where I grew up, no one so much as gives you a passing glance if you’re talking aloud and gesturing wildly in the street. That’s one of the few things I miss about the place…
In the small city I’ve lived in since leaving home, though, this kind of thing stands out a lot more — although you’re way less likely to encounter other pedestrians to begin with. But whenever anyone I know says “Hey, I saw you out walking while I was in my car,” I’m always tempted to ask: “Was I talking to myself?”
In June of 1994, I was 21 years old and I’d been away from home for almost four years. Which means that, for me, Betty arrived in that glorious period just into early adulthood. I was certainly developing bad habits and, in hindsight, filled to the brim with the stupidity of youth, but I was also really starting to dig-in and enjoy life for the first time.
Put another way: I was high a lot.
Having recently dropped out of college, my mom had issued me an ultimatum earlier that Spring: since I was no longer in school, I was going to have to get a job. Either way, she wasn’t going to continue offering financial support. If worst came to worst, I was going to have to go back home — a dreadful prospect for many reasons.
Sufficiently motivated, I secured work within days, landing a position as a waiter at The Olive Garden. And away we went…
Plunged into the high-energy chaos of a restaurant, I found myself in the thick of several elements that were new to me: having cash on a daily basis, working with a tight-knit group of people and partaking in the ritual of going out with them after work, drinking, and — last but certainly not least — the sexual tension that charges the air when you’ve got lots of people practically on top of each other amidst a lot of movement, noise, pressure, heat, sweat, and inebriation.
My video mistakenly gives the impression that I still use marijuana. It’s actually been almost 30 years since I’ve touched the stuff, save for a very brief dalliance with brownies in 2006, which ended hilariously in a severe panic attack while trying to watch a live Genesis DVD. At that point, it had been almost ten years of abstinence, and I swore-off for good after that.
I’d really been looking forward to watching this live Genesis footage while under the influence. Earlier in the night, I’d been at a party where the person who’d brought pot brownies warned everyone to be sparing in our consumption because he’d used a really potent recipe. I nibbled a bit at the party, but squirreled another chewy hunk in a folded paper napkin and put it in my pocket just in case…
This, of course, proved to be a catastrophic error. But I was focused on making sure I wasn’t gonna be left wanting for that extra kick to enhance the music. Just for context, I wrote this about Genesis in a Paste review last year:
The most ambitious tracks from this period tower over the stereo field—rising, falling and sprawling outwards like a vast mountain range made of sound. When strung together into a set, the music is almost too massive to be contained by a radio studio.
So, while my mistake should’ve been screamingly obvious — in real time, even to dumbass me — you have to understand my motivations: I was preparing myself for what was to be an evening rocketing through the cosmos to the epic strains of “Supper’s Ready” circa 1976.
In a sense, you could say I got my wish — a full 30 seconds’ worth of transcendence before getting completely overwhelmed by the intensity of the high. This was not new territory for me. In fact, this was precisely the kind of reaction that had prompted me to stay away from weed for a decade. Now, as onstage images of Genesis flickered on the TV screen, the music took on an almost menacing quality as my thoughts and emotions whirred into overdrive — like a ride at an empty amusement park, with no one present to hit the kill switch.
Alone in my apartment with nothing but the thrust of my overdriven brain, I knew I was in trouble.
I called my then-girlfriend and, thankfully, she answered and said she’d be right over. At that point, I’d been toying with the idea of trying mushrooms for the first time — this after she’d tilted her hips slightly, and purred “you should trip with me” with a hint of seduction in her voice. Thankfully, this experience with the pot brownie disabused me of any temptation I’d been flirting with.
At one point while I was waiting for her to arrive, I abruptly stood up, feeling like I was receiving an admonishing message from the voice of THC. In the moment, marijuana felt like a kind of single intelligence with its “brain matter” enveloped around the globe in plant form. The voice was firm and authoritative — so much so that I searched the room frantically for a black Sharpie marker and a 3 x 5 index card to transcribe the command booming silently in my head:
NEVER TRIP. DON’T COME BACK HERE.
I’m pretty sure I still have that index card somewhere.
I need to stress that, for me, marijuana’s appeal was almost entirely musical: hearing “Tomorrow Never Knows” by The Beatles at an impressionable age was life-changing. And I wouldn’t trade it — even with the full knowledge that a lifetime’s worth of distress would soon follow in its wake. That’s how powerful the experience was for me in sheer musical terms.
I started experiencing anxiety attacks in late 1993 — two years or so from my first dabblings with weed. And it just goes to show how habit-forming marijuana actually is — or how fucked-up >I< was — that I kept using it, plowing through excruciating bouts of terror, for another four years before quitting.
For the record, I’ve long been convinced that marijuana didn’t cause these episodes, but that it simply drew an inner turmoil to the surface that was bound to reveal itself sooner or later anyway. I also understood, even at the time, that it was better sooner than later. For what it’s worth, my anxiety has persisted in all these years that I’ve abstained, which would seem to support my contention that there was something already sitting in my psyche just waiting to be unearthed.
Either way, being high all the time certainly didn’t help. I wrote about a particularly fraught — and comedic — instance here:
My Betty video also gives the impression that I initially found Helmet’s sound overall too barbaric for my liking, which isn’t the case. I didn’t explain this clearly in the clip, but I’d already been a fan of Helmet’s previous release Meantime. Interestingly enough, I’d stumbled on an important realization about a month prior to the release of Betty.
I’d been feeling increasingly numb to music while under the influence of pot, in essence trying harder and harder to get less and less of a response. So, for a time, I found myself caught between a rock and a hard place, no longer feeling much of anything while listening to music whether high or sober.
Needless to say, this was quite alarming to me. I grappled with the prospect that I’d somehow fried my neurological receptors beyond repair, to the point that music would be forever lost to me. And the thought of listening in either state felt deeply unappetizing.
So I took a break from smoking. Alas, after a few days, listening to music felt as just revelatory and fresh sober as it had felt to me on initially getting high. It occurred to me then that any state one stays in all the time becomes routine, and any deviation from that state will feel like a new angle on “truth” — something to be careful of.
Both states, I reasoned, contain facets of “truth,” and both states are also filled with “lies.” Of course, being 21 years old, I didn’t do much with this awareness, and by the time Betty was released weeks later, I was back on the Mary Jane train. I don’t regret it. All in all, it was a hell of a summer.
Meanwhile, my relationship with the album persisted at a fever pitch for a year and a half. What a ride!
As always, I’m not necessarily looking for readers to relate to the actual music I’m talking about, but instead to similar experiences you’ve had with music that occupies a comparable space in your life. Nevertheless, if what you’re hearing and/or what I’m describing intrigues you, the most poetic description of Helmet’s sound I’ve ever run across comes courtesy of Greg Kot, the only self-identifying music critic I’m a fan of.
In a 1997 Rolling Stone review that literally set the direction of my life, Kot wrote:
[Bandleader Page] Hamilton's style is all about an economic restraint that verges on repression. His guitar lines stretch like high-tension wires across a grid of cross-rhythms.
I myself wrote this in a 2016 Pitchfork review:
It’s hard to calculate just how pervasive Helmet founder Page Hamilton’s influence has been, but at one point during the mid-90’s it seemed as if his footprints were all over the heavy metal and alt-rock landscape. You could make a strong case that there are traces of Hamilton’s style in the music of Tool, the Deftones, and even the likes of Weezer and the Smashing Pumpkins.
Hamilton’s hypnotic, earworm-like riffs have a way of instantly getting under your skin and sticking to your brain like gum. So does the grooving but strangely counter-intuitive approach to rhythm that sets the band's sound apart to this day. So it’s easy to see why Helmet's signature style rubbed off so readily on other bands. In fact, it’s hard to imagine Meshuggah or the Dillinger Escape Plan evolving the way they did without Hamilton’s proto math-metal vocabulary to build on.
And a year earlier, in a Betty retrospective piece, I wrote:
[The album] announced a departure from the spartan rigidity and single-mindedness the band made famous with their 1992 sophomore effort, Meantime. Betty captured Hamilton and the rest of the band taking more chances, experimenting and incorporating texture to a greater degree than on any other title in the Helmet discography. Over the course of 14 songs, [the band] locate elasticity and groove in Hamilton's riffs in a way they’ve [never quite matched since].
In any case, here’s to talking to yourself in public! Loudly and unbothered…
I’d urge you to check out former Rolling Stone editor
’s interview with original Helmet drummer John Stanier…
… as well as my recent two hour-plus chat with Page Hamilton: