About 9:00 p.m. one night, towards the end of one of the recent blizzards, I got sick of being entombed inside my apartment. So I laced up my knockoff Red Wings and hiked it across the mile of South Minneapolis that separates me from Matt’s Bar, snow still coming down. It took me about half-an-hour.
Matt’s has one of my favorite jukeboxes in the city. It’s nothing spectacular, but it does have Big Star, Otis Redding and It’s A Shame About Ray. It also only plays music when it’s been programmed to do so; no ghostly electronic cycling through the catalog to pass the time between quarters. A dollar buys you three, so more often than not, you’ll hear suites of three songs, then silence again. While I was eating a burger and reading Robert Caro’s Master of the Senate, someone had programmed a cycle of three songs, ending with “More Than This,” by Roxy Music.
I always remember the first time I heard “More Than This” at Matt’s Bar. I was having dinner with the girlfriend from a few girlfriends ago, a New York-ish East Coast gal I was tentatively trying to persuade to move here, and I was finding my powers of persuasion hilariously ineffective. The trip was, in retrospect, sort of a disaster, but a disaster that unfolded very slowly, perhaps to the point where it only looks like a disaster now in retrospect. Actually, “disaster” is too strong a word, but now that I think about it, a lot of those few days consisted of a slow, steady accumulation of arguments, petty resentments and confusion. Like the jukebox: short three-song suites of enjoyment, punctuated by long bouts of silence.
However, we were having a great time that night in particular — she really loved the burgers at Matt’s, as anyone with a heart will — and the Roxy Music song coming on over the jukebox sewed it up. We’d been talking about Roxy Music recently, because with certain types of boys and girls, Roxy Music is a great band to talk about when you’re trying to project a certain type of self-aware cool to people you don’t know well. It came on, and she sighed contentedly and then asked if she could come sit next to me in the booth. Look, I know nobody likes walking into a restaurant and seeing two people on a date sitting next to each other, because it’s sort of gross and teenage-y, but secretly, that will do it for me every time. I melted. It was bliss. The whole mess would be over within a few months, but that was certainly one of only a handful of times where being in love felt like being inside a three-minute pop song.
So whenever I hear “More Than This” at Matt’s, I am always vaguely irritated. This time in particular, though, I was more irritated than usual, because it was in the middle of a blizzard and blizzards have really, really weird effects on your emotions. “I see what you’re doing, Universe,” I grumbled, probably poking a french fry into the air. “You’re trying to do the old compare-and-contrast, because I am by myself and sweaty and covered in beardcicles and feeling gross because I hiked a mile over two-feet high mounds of snow on the street corners and because I am sitting by myself drinking beer reading an 800-page biography of Lyndon Johnson and I probably have french fries in my beard. And I am emphatically not sitting next to a beautiful New York girlfriend and both a little drunk.” I ate the fry, and continued.
“Well, it’s not working and I am not buying it. Because a.) I am feeling just fine right now, thank you very much, not just right now at this moment in particular, because Lyndon and I are having a fine old time, but about, like, my life in general, give or take a couple things, and b.) the specific experience you are referencing was certainly a treasured moment I will also think of with great fondness for years and years to come, but all in all, it was in its entirety a highly dubious experience that it should be pointed out ended not-very-well, and I think Bryan Ferry would absolutely agree with me, because it is more like Bryan Ferry to be sitting somewhere by himself in a bar thinking about love than almost anything else, although he would probably be wearing an eye patch and a pair of epaulettes and not knock-off Red Wings and he would also be drinking something classier than a Grain Belt Premium in what at Matt’s is referred to as a ‘scoop,’ but it’s still a lot closer.”
My words hung in the air for a moment, then the song ended after that synth outro. And there was silence, because it was the last song in the person’s dollar cycle. And I realized I had proved the Universe wrong, and I was right about “More Than This.” Or maybe the Universe wasn’t doing compare-contrast at all, and I had misinterpreted its intentions to begin with.
But the point is, I will never go into Matt’s Bar again and not play “More Than This.” Because on top of all of that, it’s a really great song.
