10. Harlem Roulette
“It’s about the last night of Frankie Lymon’s life, Frankie Lymon who sang ‘Why Do Fools Fall in Love’ and had one of the most beautiful voices ever,” Darnielle said before playing “Harlem Roulette” in a 2012 video for Pitchfork.
“And then [he] got drafted in the middle of his fame,” Darnielle went on to say,
and then went AWOL, but then by that time his voice had changed and music had kind of moved on and he was having a hard time finding a place to fit in. But there were a bunch of little labels and one called Roulette offered him a deal, and he went in and tracked a bunch of songs . . . and [got] just enough money to buy some more dope, and he went home and overdosed. . . . I don’t know why, because I myself was not a child star, but people who get famous too young and then it just ruins them as people, I get really sad thinking about it.
Then he plays the song. When it ends, he looks away, and when he looks back, the sadness is visible in his face. The song is about that, too, about a person who is weighed down by Lymon’s story. And it’s also about how any of this happens, how anyone’s imagination gets them from one place to another, how anyone gets from their own life to the glowing outskirts of someone else’s.
In my notes for this project, there’s a sentence whose original context is totally lost to me: “Pushing into the night of not-subjectivity, farther and farther, if you can.” In the first lines of “Harlem Roulette,” Darnielle sings of “Unknown engines underneath the city” and “Steam pushing up in billows through the grates”—things that don’t cohere very well with most people’s subjectivities. He didn’t plan it that way; he just ad-libbed the lines, thought they were interesting, and kept going. It’s as if they billowed up from grates inside him, generating an unfixed setting through which he could pass from now to then. “Frankie Lymon’s tracking ‘Seabreeze’ in a studio in Harlem,” he sings in the next lines. “It’s 1968.” Someone else’s subjectivity enters the song at this point, except maybe really it doesn’t, maybe it’s more truthful to say that a specter of subjectivity begins to glow in the partial darkness of Darnielle’s aesthetically active mind. When he sings, “It’s 1968,” his voice thinned out and young, a little bit out of phase with the galloping rhythm section, it’s much more than a precondition of the action in the song; it’s a product of imaginative activity, Darnielle’s and our own, a ghostly-real point at which we’ve arrived.
Farther and farther. “Just a pair of tunes to hammer out/Everybody’s off the clock by ten.” On the word “ten,” Darnielle and Hughes move up to A, the tension-and-release chord in this key-of-D song (there’s three different eight-bar chord patterns in the song, and each of them climaxes on A). Then there’s a drop to a new chord, Em, and the four-bar refrain begins: “The LONEliest PEOPle in the WHOLE wide WORLD/Are the ONES you’re NEver GOING to SEE aGAIN.” After all of the clipped vowels in the lines that precede it, the long Os in the first line of the refrain, over an Em and a G, change the temperature of the song. I hear the refrain clearly, thanks to that shift, without totally understanding it; the syntax is a little too complicated to follow in time with the song. But I’m getting acclimated to the Wurster-driven rhythm, Hughes and Darnielle are tight as hell—eighth-note 4/4 measures with the fourth and eighth beats dropped out—and we’re on to the second verse:
Feel so free when I hit the avenue
Nothing like a New York summer’s night
Every dream’s a good dream, even awful dreams are good dreams
If you’re doing it right
At first, the “I” seems like it’s Frankie Lymon, coming out onto the street with his session fee, and the next lines—
Remember soaring higher than the clouds
Get pretty sentimental now and then
The loneliest people in the whole wide world
Are the ones you’re never going to see again
—seem like they’re registering his desire to get high and quick-cutting to everyone he’s going to leave behind. But the “I” could just as easily be the speaker, the Darnielle-persona who’s been dreaming this sad story; he could be the one who’s walking down the street on this New York summer’s night (Lymon died in February), remembering how much he used to love heroin, and thinking about what it would be like if no one in his life ever saw him again. “Four hours north of Portland the radio flips on/And some no one from the future remembers that you’re gone”—a John Darnielle you, maybe, not a Frankie Lymon you (Lymon had no connection to Portland). “Armies massing in the dusky distance/Ghosted in the ribbon microphone/Leave a little mark on something maybe/Take the secret circuit home.” Darnielle is trusting his images and letting them work, letting them become more mysterious and revelatory. “There’s nothing in the shadows but the shadow hands,” he sings. “Reaching out to sad young frightened men.” Reaching out to Lymon, reaching out to the Darnielle-speaker, reaching out to everyone who is sad and young and frightened. It’s almost over. Sometimes, deep in the mix, you can hear Hughes singing harmony, like a ghost or a small boy.