45 Years of Friendship Meets 25 Years of “69 Love Songs”
I flew to San Francisco and met my best friend for the Magnetic Fields’ two-night show at the Curran Theater.
A woman like me — who’s known multiple loves and lived many lives in my 53 years on this earth — needs constancy. And two of the greatest ones in my life have been my childhood best friend, Lawrence Winnerman, and nearly every song from the Magnetic Field’s 1999 opus, 69 Love Songs.
Lawrence and I met back in the fourth grade, in Mrs. Flynn’s gifted classroom, in an old sweaty portable in south Florida. Larry, as he was known then, was shy, brainy, the only fat kid in our class, his later-to-be-so-handsome face obscured by nerdy Coke-bottle thick glasses. Present-day me looks back on little Larry and sees how hard he tried to be invisible. He had no idea what a wonder of a man he’d grow up to be, and how much more accepting the world would grow to be of gay men.
Lawrence and I have a friendship that spans over 40 years and counting. When 69 Love Songs released back in 1999, we were both obsessed as only an indie-alt-pop loving fan-girl and a brainy queer single man could mutually be. I remember the Christmas Eve after we discovered it. We were both in Seattle — I can’t recall if it was my tiny vintage hardwood apartment or his — two agnostic pagan Jewish late-20-somethings, away from our families but happily together. We were undoubtedly full on a delicious meal Lawrence had made and inexpensive red wine, though the details are blurry now. We decided to crash midnight mass at St. James Cathedral. I’d never been to one before, and haven’t been since. I can still recall the heady thick scent of frankincense wafting to our standing-room-only spots, and the beautiful chanting of the choir. We took in the stunning initial procession but once the service began, we skipped out, giggling, and raced home to drink more wine and listen to 69 Love Songs, again.
So when I heard the band was celebrating the 25th anniversary of 69 Love Songs with a limited-city tour, where they’d perform every song on the three-volume set over two evenings, I immediately bought two tickets to the closest city to me on the tour list: San Francisco.
I knew exactly who to ask to join me.
The Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs is as singular to me as my friendship with Lawrence is. Front man Stephin Merritt is the brain behind the album which contains, unsurprisingly, 69 songs about love. Merritt created this opus with the help of an ensemble cast of singers and multi-instrumentalists, and the collection of songs span musical genres, gender, and sexual orientation, and along the way encapsulate every which way love can delight, destroy, or deliver us. But it’s not a record for everyone. These songs are quirky little masterpieces, lo-fi, charming, and often ironic. Merritt is the master of “show, don’t tell,” and uses offbeat wordplay and imagery to paint his romantic musical pictures. Any record that pairs rhyming couplets like, “broke my virgin flesh” with “as if you were Ganesh” was not made for the masses.
It was made for those of us who find love in strange nooks, who appreciate peculiar nuance, who’ve known enough love and loss to appreciate the grandeur and the gutting they both can bring, and who enjoy a DIY aesthetic with a healthy dose of gender-bending lyrics and ukulele.
To have relished 69 Love Songs back in the day is to love it forever.
I did, and so did Lawrence, and so did everyone else who filled two nights at the Curran Theater. Entering each night felt like attending a reunion of sorts. Except instead of re-meeting the jocks and nerds from one’s high school, we all got acquainted as strangers with a collective shared past. I’d never been to that theater nor met anyone in attendance before, save Lawrence, as I live two states away. But I felt a sense of camaraderie in a way that made the venue feel like home.
Even the tiles in the women’s bathroom — perfectly matched to my hair, aesthetic, and sparkling rose — felt perfectly crafted for me and my indie-pop sensibilities.
It’s strange to write about shows like this one, where a beloved band recreates a beloved album onstage. The songs are known, the set list follows them, in order, from the record. I wasn’t there to hype a new band. Instead I hoped to share anecdotes and treasured memories of how this music has moved me over the past 2.5 decades and to tell how it felt to hear them performed live, with so many associated memories.
I loved every moment.
So much has remained. The band sounds and looks essentially the same — which is to say, wonderful — a few more wrinkles and signs of the years gone by notwithstanding. “Who knew Stephin was such a bear now?” Lawrence asked as the show began, beaming. They still play at a muted volume, due to Merritt’s hyperacusis, a disorder that makes him intolerant to loud sounds. Most of the original band members graced the stage.
But the third song in the set revealed a change, a sad one. It’s my favorite song; I adore it so much, I named my writing after it: “All My Little Words.” It’s the first song on the album that’s sung by LD Beghtol, his sweet tenor practically caressing each phrase, kind and true but mournful as he laments the futility of words to convince his beloved to love him in return. “Not if I could write for you, the sweetest song you ever heard / It doesn’t matter what I do, not for all my little words,” he sings on the chorus. Tragically, Beghtol died in 2020, and while the grief no longer seems raw, I heard an underlying hint of sadness in Merritt’s voice as he introduced the song with, “LD is no longer with us. So I’m going to try to do this one justice.”
He did, with his inimitable baritone filling each phrase with pathos. It was beautiful, but it wasn’t the same and I think he knew it, too.
Some things never can be.
When I asked Lawrence to come to the show the previous month, he also announced a big, sad change: his marriage to Max was over, he told me, and he was preparing to leave the west coast and move to the Midwest to be near family. Like Merritt, I could hear the hint of sadness in his voice, and also the resignation. Things wouldn’t be the same, with him no longer on the west coast, as we’d both been nearly our whole adult lives. He knew it, but he also knew he’d be able to carry on in his new home, in his own inimitable way.
And I’d support him. After over four decades of friendship, we both knew we could count on this. But he wasn’t sure he could swing this show, what with his life changes ahead.
“Come back to San Francisco,” I half-sang to him on the phone, track seven on disc one of 69 Love Songs. I asked him, what could be more Magnetic Fields than a heartbroken gay man and his super single woman best friend, spending the weekend in the gayest city in America, “…closing the clubs and haunting the cabarets, looking for what?”
“If you don’t cry, it isn’t love,” he continued, as only best friends and Magnetic Fields fans can do.
“If you don’t cry, then you just don’t feel it deep enough,” I replied.
“If You Don’t Cry.” Track eight, disc two.
There really is a Love Song for every scenario.
And of course, Lawrence decided to “come back to San Francisco” for the show.
Hearing “Come Back to San Francisco” sung live by Claudia Gonson — vocalist, piano player, and manager for the band, as well as Stephin Merritt’s best friend since high school — was glorious. It sounded pitch perfect to the record, with an additional enthusiasm layered in, performing the song in front of its namesake city.
Neither Lawrence nor I have ever lived here, but we relished the hometown pride of the moment nonetheless.
I’m not a religious person, nor a particularly spiritual one, not in any traditional sense. But sitting in that gorgeous theater for two nights, surrounded by strangers who shared a common love for this album, and celebrating that love by listening to the band perform it again, in its entirety? For me, that’s transcendence.
This show was my church.
I felt this vibe reverberating through the venue throughout the entire two-night performance. But then we reached “Papa Was a Rodeo,” song 17 from disc two, and for many — including me — the first song we ever heard from 69 Love Songs.
This song is storytelling at its finest, told from a world-weary traveler of a protagonist who’s encountered an intriguing romantic interest in a dive bar. The song opens with sparse, rhythmic instrumentation, poignant and plodding, evoking the narrator’s loneliness and the monotony of his life on the road. But also, a sense of yearning echoes throughout, one that’s underlined by Merritt’s iconic, bottom-of-register delivery.
The opening notes began, as we knew they would in that moment, and the shift in the room was palpable. By the time Merritt crooned those opening lines: “I like your twisted point of view, Mike. I like your questioning eyebrows…” we were all entranced, under the spell of this longing narrator and his gender-ambiguous love interest.
Our enjoyment shifted to reverence. We collectively moved from attentive to rapt.
This was our high sermon, preached in the imperfectly perfect baritone we’ve all known and loved so well these past 25 years.
Lawrence and I looked at each other, smiling the sort of knowing smile we can only share with those we’ve known and loved through time. How amazing, that our mid-50s include fun and travel and merriment like this. How astonishing, that now, as adults in 2024, being gay isn’t something to hide but something to celebrate and sing about. How lucky, that our friendship has endured and grown like this. Wordlessly, I knew we both got it all at once, in our ears and hearts and down to our bones. I wondered if Stephin and Claudia share this same bond, a sense of intimacy that comes from wordless knowing. I hope they do.
I wanted to express my joy by belting out the chorus, but would never disrespect the band or my fellow worshipers like that.
Lawrence leaned over. “It’s perfect, but I almost wish they were louder, because I really want to sing along,” he whispered in my ear.
Of course you do, Lawrence. Of course you do.
“Your papa was a rodeo, too.”
Greetings!
I’m Dana DuBois, a GenX word nerd living in the Pacific Northwest with a whole lot of little words to share. I’m a founder and editor of three publications: Pink Hair & Pronouns, Three Imaginary Girls, and genXy. I write across a variety of topics but parenting, music and pop culture, relationships, and feminism are my favorites. Em-dashes, Oxford commas, and well-placed semi-colons make my heart happy.
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25 years!?!? Definitely defines that era of my life.
I can totally relate to concerts/music/records being church and religion. I’ve said that before in some of my writing. I hope your dear friend will settle ok Midwest. Glad you had that little SF trip.