newcritics

The Dum Dum Boys
(written by Iggy Pop and David Bowie; from Iggy’s The Idiot, 1977)

What happened to Zeke
He’s dead on (unintelligible) man
How about Dave
OD’d on alcohol
Well what’s Rock doin’
Ah he’s livin’ with his mother
What about James
He’s gone straight

Things have been tough
Without the dum dum boys
I can’t seem to speak
The language
I remember how they
Used to stare at the ground
They looked as if they
Put the whole world
Looked as if they put
The whole world down

We were a group of drunken young idiots. What we did together mostly was drink and talk. We were all part of various groups that merged and blended drunkenly in one long continuous party, but I’m thinking of this one little group of three or four guys; we all thought we were great writers in training. This was the 70s, and except for movies this little group of us were pretty much out of the loop of popular culture. We didn’t watch TV. We didn’t keep up on the latest bands. We didn’t read newspapers or magazines. We knew nothing about politics. We were a literary wild bunch but we didn’t keep up with the latest literary hotshots. We didn’t give a shit about Don DeLillo. And fuck lightweights like John Cheever or Updike, we were after the big guns: James Joyce, Hemingway, Samuel Beckett, Italo fucking Svevo. I remember I was hugely into the Russians: Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol — those Russian guys didn’t fool around.

We lived in crappy apartments or rowhouses in Germantown or Olney, or we lived with our parents. We were just getting through with college, and when we worked we worked crappy jobs.

What we did was drink. We weren’t acid heads, and pot was okay maybe, but mostly it was beer and whiskey for us, cheap beer, cheap whiskey. There were chicks around, but our thing was mostly a guy thing. We affected a sort of above-it-all attitude to sex, but, besides being drunken and opinionated and loud, we were shy with girls.

Me, I took a lot of nights off from the mob. Stayed home and read a book. But for some of these guys it was nearly every damn night, or every night they could afford it.

We’d be down the shore in the summer and these guys would wake up and not even know what town they were in. Go in the bathroom, puke, and then crack open another beer. They’d sit on the beach with their stale dark street-clothes on and their greasy sunglasses, hungover, building up the energy to finally get up and go hit a bar and do it all over again.

Where are you now my
Dum dum boys are you
Alive or dead
Have you left me the last
Of the dum dum daze
And then the sun goes down
And the boys broke down

We all got a little tired of each other’s bullshit after a while. The crowd fell apart. People moved away, or died, or went into AA, or got jobs, got married, had kids, or didn’t do any of the above.

People said we were negative
They said we’d take but
We would never give
But we’d sing da-da-da
Da-da-da dum dum day
Da-da-da-da-da dum
And hope it would pay
Da-da-da-da it’s been
A dumdumdum day
A dum dum day

We weren’t all that special, except in that we didn’t give a shit about making money or having some kind of normal successful career. Why worry about all that when you expect to be a famous novelist someday?

Now I’m looking for
The dum dum boys
Where are you now
When I need your noise

But it’s nice to have gone through a period like this and come out of it alive and not completely brain-dead. All those nights sitting around drinking and shouting at each other. Lying in bed all day on my days off (and somehow I managed to have lots of days off) reading Dostoyevsky for the first time. Working some crappy job. Then getting together with the rest of the nitwits and boozing it up again, shouting and yelling at each other, trying to work ourselves up into some kind of spiritual orgasm that maybe even came every now and then.

Now I’m looking for
The dum dum boys
The walls close in and
I need some noise

(This has been a special Newcritics exclusive for Quinn/Martin Productions, but if you’re desperate for more of my nonsense go visit here.)