It is where nothing feels important anymore — because everything is. A kind of ambiguity that makes it hard to live in, or even navigate, the present tense. So the ache of nostalgia never finds its point of disappearance; it hangs in some ghostly void — apart from belonging, from real connection, from meaning. And it’s all yours. That feeling makes it so easy to feel uncomfortable and uncertain around friends, strangers, acquaintances — even family. But the ache isn’t real. It’s based in a fiction. More like a song you can’t escape — a long one, held together by a thousand sad melodies that came before.
What matters feels tragic. The psychic weight of having Donald Trump forced into your head — it weighs a ton. The genocide in Palestine — it weighs a ton. Climate collapse denial — it weighs a ton. You could go on and on.
And the weight will always shift.
It’s like trying to hold water.
How is it not easy for anyone to lay comatose? Well, it’s a lot easier to end up in a coma if you get hit by a car traveling 60 miles per hour while walking to the store near your home. As I write this, a good friend I’ve known since the early 1980s in my Gentleman Afterdark days — Kevin Doll — is in a coma on life support in a Scottsdale hospital after a car slammed into him as he walked to the store. The details are sketchy, it just happened, but what’s true is this: Doll suffered severe brain trauma, and it would take a miracle for him to return to the living.
Kevin Doll, a rock ‘n’ roll disciple to what is essentially his deathbed. Music shaped his instincts, tuned his decisions — he let it steer him without question. A junk-riff monster guitarist architecturally designed to live and breathe the stuff, though he never really sold any records with the bands he was in — from the storied Phoenix undergrounders The Shivers, a 1980s four-piece that employed heroin as an invisible fifth member, to the Faces-revering Hippie Shakes in Los Angeles, to his own solo recordings.
Growing up the son of a strong, caring mother and a vaguely mob-tied go-go bar owner father —divorced, he said they’re each in their own orbit — Doll came of age in Calumet City, on the Indiana/Illinois border. He studied diligently the manuals of Johnny Thunders, Keith Richards et al.—learning to subsist on cigarettes and attendant toxins at a tender age. Their songs and addictions became another kind of longing, and Doll learned the styles dutifully — a scholar — complete with the rock ’n’ roll commandments (“Awwww, this shit should never be played when the sun is up!”) and sublime suffering (he managed to survive the drugs — no mean feat). We loved the old Mott the Hoople records and lived by the lines: “And you look like a star but you’re still on the dole…”
Last time I saw Doll — who’d called Phoenix home for decades — was at one of my book readings there a few years back. We hugged, laughed. He still sported the Keef rats' nest shag and the spindly carriage, though a few more parenthetical lines bracketed his mouth. He carried that strange dignity reserved for rock ’n’ roll dandies and others who’ve learned lessons from a life of improvisation — boatloads of charm and calm upholding a rakish elegance of leather jackets, blazers, floral-patterned shirts, bolo ties and dapper footwear.
But Doll was always smart enough to see through jive, and wise enough to understand his guitar playing payout would never amount to more than a pauper’s collection of wounds and heartbreak — and how you can’t put your arms around a memory. He knew he was destined to obscurity. It wasn’t about the money — though it would’ve been nice — it was “about the soul singing, man,” as he once said to me years ago, and it stuck.
He was good with that. Doll was also wise enough to understand the absurd societal guidelines about what makes a loser and what makes a winner. He was the latter — a guy who’d gone to the battlefields of his addictions and come out on the side of the living.
His life’s research left him a fairly unjaded man, which flies in the face of nearly anyone who gave their life over to the devil’s racket. I remember him as always selfless to strangers, kind to animals, and true to his friends. His edges forever blunted by quiet composure.
Some of his bandmates from years past have died too young (including our mutual bud Steve Davis). He still has, by his side in the hospital, the woman he absolutely adores — Ana Fe, his common-law wife and best friend of 28 years, who he told me was “the love of his life. The woman who saved me.”
I called up an old buddy, Mark VanBrocklin, who was a bandmate of Doll’s in the Shivers. Their friendship dates back to the late 1970s. We talked for a long time, traded stories of our pal — good, bad and hilarious. But VanBrocklin captured Doll best with this: “Me and Kevin could always make each other laugh. He had a frailty — you know, tough on the outside, but tender on the inside. He used to cry a lot of times, talking about his childhood. I think that drew me to him — his heart.”
Maybe the ache of nostalgia is just some kind of love, stretched thin by time — a way to hold our hand. Maybe that song was never meant to end, but instead, persists, unfinished, like the spaces between the notes we never quite catch but feel nonetheless.
