Peter Ames Carlin > Quotes

“Bruce has wrestled with his moods, and a psyche genetically prone to extremes, for most of his adult life. Decades of psychotherapy helped reveal and cast light on some of his most primal traumas and conflicts, but his raw moods, and occasional descents into full-blown depression, never quite went away. "You go through periods of being good, then something stimulates it," he says. "The clock, some memory. You never know. The mind wants to link all your feelings to a cause. I'm feeling that because I'm doing this, or because that happened."

Eventually Bruce realized that his worst moods had nothing to do with what was actually taking place in his life. Awful, stressful things could happen - conflicts, stress, disappointments, death - and he'd be unflappable. Then things would be peaceful and easy and he'd find himself on his knees. "You're going along fine, and then boom, it hits you. Things that just come from way down in the well. Completely noncasual, but it's part of your DNA, part of the way your body cycles."

Bruce knows his particular brain chemistry will never leave him completely in the clear. "You manage it, you learn and evolve, but another recognition you gotta have is that these are the cards you were dealt," he says. "These things are never going to be out of your life. You gotta be constantly vigilant and realistic about these things.”
― Peter Ames Carlin, Bruce

“The highway's closed at a certain point. You have a certain amount of miles that you can make. It's a recognition of mortality.”
― Peter Ames Carlin, Bruce

“Only now, on the other side of his success, Bruce had come to understand what time and experience can do to the most closely held dreams. The point in your late twenties when you're grown up enough to realize that 'life is no longer wide open'.”
― Peter Ames Carlin, Bruce

“If only every member of the family could have grown as straight and strong as Ann Garrity's beech tree. But as fate and genetics would have it, both sides of Fred and Alice Springsteen's lineage came with a shadow history of fractured souls. The drinkers and the failures, the wild-eyed, the ones who crumbled inside of themselves until they vanished altogether. These were the relatives who lived in rooms you didn't enter. Their stories were the ones that mustn't be told. They inspired the silence that both secreted and concentrated the poison in the family blood. Doug could already sense the venom creeping within himself.”
― peter ames carlin, Bruce

“It was like a bat signal coming through the clouds. If you don’t belong, you belong here. Even as the band ascended, they knew where they could find their people.”
― Peter Ames Carlin, The Name of This Band Is R.E.M.

“The music and applause fast fading from his ears, Bruce would lay down his guitar, grit his teeth, and walk dutifuly back into his father's charred vision of the world.”
― Peter Ames Carlin, Bruce

“They haven't made a drug that can touch this pain," Clarence said. "I feel like I'm made of pain.”
― Peter Ames Carlin, Bruce

“Singing wordlessly over the song’s (and the album’s) final moments, Bruce evokes the opening bars of “Something in the Night,” and the chill cloaking the entire album: the creeping suspicion that the things that make you feel the most alive will turn out to be some combination of unobtainable, worthless, and self-destructive.”
― Peter Ames Carlin, Bruce

“They were all out of their bodies then, their shared momentum carrying them higher and farther than they'd ever dreamed.”
― Peter Ames Carlin, The Name of This Band Is R.E.M.

“C’mon, Tinker,” he said. “Janis really wants to fuck Bruce.”
― Peter Ames Carlin, Bruce

“He didn't look angry. Stern, maybe. Impassive, definitely. Eventually, he raised his hand and turned away. Not just sort of away, but forty-five degrees away, like, I'm not looking at you anymore. I'm looking this totally different way now and so we're done.
Just above face level, his palm flat and perpendicular to the floor, like a stereotyped movie Native American going "How!" Or a traffic cop saying, "Stop!" Or maybe a guy signaling his uninvited biographer to keep his distance — which is understandable on a human level, but less so in the wake of fifty-plus years of public life. All that self-revelation in his music — in the hundreds of thousands of words of interviews he's given, talking about his wives; his lovers; his astonishingly screwed-up relationship with the friend/musical partner he will sometimes insist had no real impact on him at all, and then turn around and say that their lives have always been woven together; and his father; his creative blocks; his anxieties; his therapists; and more.
Still: Don't look at me.”
― Peter Ames Carlin, Homeward Bound: The Life of Paul Simon

“Interviewed before the show that same day, Peter and Mike also talked about their connection with college students. Peter: “It’s one of three things: they have more leisure time, more money, or they take more drugs. I haven’t decided which one.” The host, sensing the sound bite forming in front of him, asked if they’d worked out the answer yet, leading Peter and Mike to shoot back, reflexively and in unison: “More leisure time!”[2]”
― Peter Ames Carlin, The Name of This Band Is R.E.M.

“If you were poor or gay or even just different—arty, offbeat, angry, beset by visions of what should be, even given the allure of what was—you felt awfully alone. The music on the radio didn’t speak to you. You had to look for special outposts where people like you could speak freely in your native tongue. If you were lucky, you’d live somewhere close to a college or a community that supported a fringe radio station. Some cities had specialty record stores, or there might be bookstores, a coffeehouse, a bar with a cool jukebox and a clientele who didn’t want to watch sports or thump you for looking a particular way.”
― Peter Ames Carlin, The Name of This Band Is R.E.M.