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In her new memoir When I Grow Up, singer-songwriter Juliana Hatfield takes readers from the moment she knew she'd become a performer (a waking vision after school one day) to the daily grind of being a touring musician to receiving her $400,000 advance from a major label to denying she was dating the Lemonheads' Evan Dando in the press — inadvertantly outing herself as a 23-year-old virgin in the process. "When I was a young girl, I thought I wanted to be a rock star when I grew up," she writes in the introduction. "But what happens when a rock star starts to wonder if maybe it's time to grow up?"
Here's an excerpt from Chapter 16: Cool Rock Boys:
Sam was ten years younger than I was, a talented (but penniless) guitar player, singer and songwriter. When we started dating I said to myself, "Haven't I learned anything from my mistakes? I'm an idiot — a fool — to get involved with Sam, another cute, poor guy in a band, and so much younger than me on top of that."
Sam was starry-eyed when we met, as was I, though Sam's star had not yet risen. I saw potential (for musical greatness, and for disaster). And I think he saw in me some kind of idealized fantasy version of womanhood (pretty, thin, semi-famous, financially solvent). In the very beginning, Sam, in the throes of new, young love, said to me, "Let's get married." I declined to play along. I said, "Sam, wait six months and then ask me again. I guarantee you won't still want to marry me then. I'll bet you a million dollars you won't."
And then I thought, "I know exactly how this is gonna end."
I even told Sam my prediction: "Sam, you're gonna leave me for a model one day. Just wait." I would repeat this every few weeks, as a way to preemptively save face — to let Sam know in advance of when it happened that I'd seen it coming; so that when he dumped me, I could pretend it wasn't a shock, or a big deal, or a humiliation, and that I had even had a hand in my destiny.
Sam would counter with, "No way, Jule, you're gonna leave me. I'll never leave you." And for a while, he believed what he was saying.
But he sounded less and less convinced as time passed and the months turned into a year and the year became a year and a half.
And then he left me for a model. A model/actress, actually.
I did have a hand in my destiny. I picked the ones that I knew would ripen quickly and fall off the vine in a relatively short cycle. The fruit would go bad and I could taste the rot in my mouth and yet I kept eating. Was I a masochist? Or were bad boy decisions a way for me to avoid getting too deeply into anything very serious and painful? Was it because I felt no one could ever really love the real me (because I felt essentially unlovable) that I made sure to choose the ones I knew never had a chance to begin with?
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I was attracted to their music and to some extent their appearance (a unique, off-center, scruffy, interesting untraditional handsomeness), and I assumed they were attracted to me for the same reasons. I didn't believe I had much to offer anyone other than those two things. Every failed relationship reinforced this in my mind and drove me deeper into a hole of low self-opinion and isolation and fear of any kind of closeness. All my worth and my identity were tied up with my music (my job) and to some extent my looks (which provided a visual accompaniment for those listening to my songs). Take those two things away, I thought, and I was nothing, no one; I ceased to exist.
After Sam and I had been together for a few months I learned that he, who'd seemed for the most part so sweet and shy, had a dark side. A dark, mean, pugnacious, crazy, jealous side. He was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Sam played guitar in my band on one cross-country tour. The brooding, sulking Mr. Hyde persona took over for most of the tour. The other guys in the band took to calling Sam "The Darkness" when he got like that. After gigs, The Darkness would corner me and accuse me of cheating on him with, say, my drummer, or of flirting with other random men.
One morning in San Francisco, I woke up with The Darkness standing at the foot of our hotel bed, glaring at me. He asked in a frighteningly flat, coldly murderous tone, "Where did you go last night?"
"What are you talking about, Sam?" I said as I wiped the sleep from my eyes. "I was right here, in bed. With you. I didn't go anywhere!"
Sam, unconvinced, said, "Where did you go? I know you left. When I was sleeping. You went to Steve's room, didn't you?"
Steve was my drummer.
"Sam, you're fucking crazy. I was right here."
It was pointless to try to reason with him when he was being so crazy, out of nowhere. His delusion had nothing to do with me. It was his own affliction. And so I couldn't convince him that the truth was something other than what he believed.
This became the routine: After each show, Sam and I would go back to our hotel room, and most nights, Sam would begin his demented, groundless harangue, accusing me of cheating on him/flirting with other guys. I would at first deny everything (because none of it was ever true) and try to get Sam to recognize how wrong he was, but then I would invariably come to the conclusion, within minutes, that Sam was simply insane. At that point I would stop talking — stop engaging — and Sam would storm out of the room. That's when I would close the door, chain it and take a sleeping pill. Then I would jam my earplugs into my ears and get into bed.
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In the morning I would meet the boys outside at the van. Sam, transformed back into his sweet old now-apologetic quiet and sober self, would tell me with an embarrassed smile that he'd banged on my hotel room door for a while and when I didn't hear him knocking, and didn't let him in, he'd gone and slept in one of the other guys' rooms. Then the guys would chuckle and rib Sam about it for a minute ("Ah, Sam, crazy Sam, you nutty kid!")
But I was often still really angry in the morning after a fight.
It was exasperating being with someone who vacillated hour by hour between good and evil.
The tour wasn't any fun. In fact, it was horrible. Sam ruined it for me, and made it very unpleasant for everyone else.
And then he broke up with me.
Sam was the last straw. I'd foretold it to Sam, in a jokey-but-serious tone, in the early days of our relationship, after we'd made up yet again from yet another fight: "Sam, when you leave me for Kate Moss, I'm done with guys. Guys in bands, anyway. This is it for me. You guys are too much trouble."
Sam would smile. He thought I was kidding. He didn't believe me.
But I meant it.
After Sam, "No more rock guys! No more rock guys!" became my mantra. I would pray, "Please, dear God, just keep them away from me! No more."
They were just so hard to resist, like junk food — and so bad for me.
I was drawn to to the puer aeternus — the archetype of the "eternal boy" (the "beautiful creature" of my album of the same name, full of songs about these boys). The puer is narcissistic, immature, sensitive and artistic but not so good at coping with the demands of the world, wanting to escape into fantasy rather than dealing with the reality of a situation. The puer doesn't have to grow up because he is playing a child's game (rock and roll); playing — playing guitars, making up rhymes, playing dress-up and jumping around onstage.
Was I drawn to these boys because I hadn't matured — because I was still a child and couldn't see my way to growing up? Were they a way to avoid the difficult task of growing up? Had rock and roll, and my doomed relationships with rock and rollers, stunted my emotional growth? When — how — would I ever become a woman if I kept getting mixed up with these confused, selfish, damaged, fragile, capricious boys, so careless with their own and others' feelings? How could I transform my own carelessness, confusion, selfishness, self-absorption, childishness and hurt into strength, sense, sureness, patience, knowledge, confidence, maturity and kindness?
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It was never the guy's fault when it fell apart. It was my fault for falling for the guy who was born with the voice that made my knees weak. The man with the voice that helped to heal my wounded heart could also break it. The man could not help me; only his music could do that. That was what I finally learned through all that trial and error.
I loved rock and roll. And so I loved the rock and rollers. I always wanted to be one of them. I believed that only the godforsaken (or rock-forsaken) sound of my voice, and my debilitating self-consciousness, kept me from being admitted into that (mostly) boys' club. I yearned for recognition and accomplishment in the rock arena and I gravitated toward those who possessed or at least deserved what I wanted for myself. But I was misguided.
Because at heart, I am not a rock and roller. At heart I am a librarian, a bird-watcher, a transcendentalist, a gardener, a spinster, a monk. I was like a fish out of water in the modern rock world. That was why I was so often discontented and unsure of my self and my place. I was in the wrong environment — that's why it always seemed to me as if something wasn't quite right.
I don't want loud noise and fame and scandal and drugs and late nights and flashing lights; I want peace and quiet and order; solitude, privacy and space for contemplation. I want to awake at dawn and listen to the birds, and drink a cup of tea. I need to face facts.
None of those cool rock boys — those skinny, pale-skinned beauties you see slouching down the street in their jeans and sunglasses and postcoital mussed and matted hair — are as cool as they seem to the untrained eye. Of course, they won't admit it.
But I have seen the truth. They're not cool, I'm not cool. None of us ever was. We are all secretly freaking out.