The Sun in Your Eyes

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I’ll admit it: Jesse Parrish used to make me feel bad. Uptight. Not very rock and roll. Like the angry, anxious (ethnic?) New Yorker that I am. He always seemed to be asking, in his easy L.A. way: Why are you trying so hard? He made me question what I was seeking. Communion? Transcendence? Freedom? A revolution? He couldn’t be bothered with your politics and their complications, he was too busy sustaining eye contact. Too busy, essentially, being sex. He was always so distractingly good-looking and sang with such aching need that you forgot to want anything else and what was my point?

Oh, yes. His one-off show at the Academy of Music last Saturday night. It’s been less than a year since he released his latest album, The Garden of Allah, and then disappeared from view amid rumors he was getting clean or seeking psychiatric help. I wasn’t so sure I cared for that troubling record. Stark. Cryptic. Mercurial. It struck me as a fuck-you much more than a fuck-them and I couldn’t find a way in. I struggled with just about every song and called it quits at the end of “Goodnight” when he repeats the line “Tell me you care” (I didn’t). I heard it as taunting and cold, directed at someone he was ready to be done with. And it was as if he had to voice the line a few times merely to keep himself from falling asleep. The final word in bored detachment. But when he sang it on stage last weekend — tell me you care— it turned into a plea, an urgent, compulsive mantra. It was sad, searching, and sublime. I’ve sometimes thought of Jesse as a lesser, slightly campier Neil Young, and did I need a lesser, campier Neil Young? Maybe I did and never knew it. Maybe I never took him seriously enough. I don’t think I could have before this.

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