He Was a Friend of Mine / Every Time I Think About Him Now / Lord, I Just Can’t Keep From Crying

Reflections on the poet, rock critic, writer and revolutionary Joshua Clover

On September 9, 2021, I received an out-of-the-blue DM from Carl Wilson on Twitter, asking for my email address to invite me to be a part of some non-specific event. I immediately handed over my credentials — Carl is a marvelous music critic and someone whom I’ve admired for decades. I’d happily attend any event he was planning (especially if there was free food and drinks. Sure, it was still the pandemic so there probably wouldn’t be any free food or drinks. But still, I was intrigued.)

The event, it turned out, was to co-host a discussion over Zoom with the poet and activist Joshua Clover, who had just written a book about the song “Roadrunner” by the Modern Lovers as the first in a series he and Emily Lordi had created called “Singles,” which was intended to give writers an avenue to write entire books about just one song. Carl thought I’d be good as a moderator because I had been tweeting about Jonathan Richman and The Modern Lovers recently and I just seemed right for the job. I of course said it would be my honor, without hesitation.

On the day of the event, I couldn’t figure out how to log on to the Zoom — something about my federal credentials (I was working on a research project for the Department of Education at the time) just wouldn’t allow me access to the conversation (thanks, BIDEN) — and I started to receive panicked texts from Carl until I finally showed up, some five minutes late, to a full house of journalists, academics, my music writer co-host Eric Weisbard, and, of course, Joshua Clover.

The program got rolling from there and the first quarter of the panel was just Joshua, reading from his book. His fandom for “Roadrunner” was clear through his impeccable prose. I was captivated. I got to ask the first question, which he charmingly allowed was a difficult one and the whole conversation took flight from there.

It was a truly great and fun hour-and-a-half of my time and shortly after the call wrapped, I received an email from Clover saying, “I feel like we have more to discuss.” I agreed.

Our friendship developed from there. We set up a second and then a third Zoom conversation to talk about his book (most of which I wound up publishing at Lawyers, Guns and Money) but also to rap generally, since he really had no idea who I was and that sort of ran both directions. A discussion of my ancestral hometown of Northport, Long Island naturally segued into talk of Billy Joel, whom he clearly liked a lot more than I do. We also got into Zevon, Roberta Flack, Boston (the city, not the band), Aerosmith, America (the country, not the band) but also America (the band, not the country), Debbie Gibson, and the end of the world.

It was clear that we got on companionably and had a lot to talk about, so we would set up regular calls to discuss music that we liked as an organizing principle to just say hey and check in. We would show up with our top ten lists of songs by our favorite artists, such as Neil Young. We emailed plenty as well, which, go figure, he was a great correspondent being a writer and all that. The things he would say were like something a character in a Portis novel might opine, and would blow my mind and make me howl with laughter: “The Kinks are a hoax.”; “I deeply believe ‘Carry on My Wayward Son’ and ‘Dust in the Wind’ are Kansas’s only two songs, and that everything else is just pretend.”; “Maybe some little switch in my mind has just decided to Be Generous In This Case. Maybe it’s just good.” (This was said in response to listening to my album For Executive Meeting). He told me about how Marc Maron was his roommate and how he bought Maron’s guitar so Maron could score cocaine get some fast money. Once he showed up to one of our Zoom chats and serenaded me with a version of “London Calling” on guitar (we were talking the Clash that day). I think it was a different guitar from the Maron-cocaine one, but it was still a cool and impressive gesture.

We had been trying to set up a conversation to discuss the Little Feat reissue of Goodbye, Columbus, a live recording we both enjoyed, but scheduling proved tough and sort of fell off the collective radar. We’d tweet at each other until he left Twitter (voluntarily or otherwise, who knows?).

The last email I received from Joshua was on December 21, 2024. It came as something of a welcome surprise since it had been probably a year since we had last meaningfully interacted. He wanted to discuss Billy Joel, one of the first subjects we ever talked about (again, he liked him a lot more than I do) and his song “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant,” a tortured drama about high school sweethearts, “Brenda and Eddie” who drink a lot of wine and just can’t make their relationship work into adulthood. I hate it. I think he loved it, obviously. He had copied and pasted all of the lyrics and presented an annotated version to taxonomize his confusion with its temporal markers and shifting pronouns. Here is what he wrote to accompany his roadmap to the lyrics:

You will see I have helpfully labeled the sections, with numbers for the de facto verses, and letters for the two consecutive de facto bridges. This is by way of getting to the mystery. Now, as a general rule, despite or because of the collaged and time-shifting aspect, each section (the bottle of red part, the “I got a good job” part, etc) has its own internal coherence. And this is generally true of the Ballad of Brenda and Eddie as well; within that part, fabula and syuzhet match up, i.e. the narration proceeds according to time’s arrow moving forward from high school honeys through post-divorce. Indeed, very conventional, which is sort of the point, from teen romance to grim adult realities to becoming an adult and handling it all and moving forward despite the impulse to move backward.

I wrote him back immediately; I was ready to cook. I’ve thought A LOT about “Scenes” and had responses that I knew he’d appreciate. I sent some initial observations and some follow up prompts for him. One of the things I said to him was this:

I think the key to unlocking the mystery of Brenda and Eddie and Billy Joel exists in these final lyrics:

“That's all I heard about

Brenda and Eddie

Can't tell you more than I

Told you already

And here we are waving

Brenda and Eddie goodbye”

It’s a lyric that has always stuck with me and the one that always stands out whenever this song comes on the radio (which it does with surprising frequency). For me, when Billy Joel sings these lines, it’s almost as if he’s apologizing that he can’t tell us any more (which, by the way, he’s told us a lot, so I’m always like, “that is cool, my man, we have covered a lot of ground here today.”) and so that’s why he’s provided a recap for us at the end, rather than giving us one more chapter of what happened in the immediate aftermath of their split.

We were careening into the holidays and our schedules were about to get hectic, but I was working on further responses to his email in my mind while I was home on Long Island for Christmas and running around Northport. I thought about Brenda and Eddie while I jogged by La Casa, an Italian restaurant on the beach, probably not too far off from the place where Brenda and Eddie drank all that wine. I meant to type those thoughts up and send them to Joshua, but life intervened and I never got around to it. But he had sent me an email to my original response in the meantime, that felt both summative and open-ended. He told me the song made him feel sad. Not for Brenda or for Eddie, but for Billy Joel, whom the world wanted to be Dylan or Springsteen when he just wanted to be Dion.

Then he said, “I am not sure I know anyone anymore whose psychic life is so given over to wandering around inside of songs except for you, so I appreciate your being there to hear my rambling, man.”

It’s tough to not freight everything with significance in the aftermath of a friend’s passing. Maybe in those final words, he, like Billy Joel, was apologizing that he could not tell me any more than he told me already. I think, most of all, Joshua didn’t start the fire. But he totally did. And his spark is fading. And I’m waving goodbye.