"Will you autograph my baseball cap?" he says, drawling sweetly.
Hayden pauses, not certain whether to be flattered or freaked out. It's his indie-rock moment. He's just been recognized for being unrecognizable, an average white boy from the suburbs. He likes his parents, has a cool girlfriend, listens to Tom Petty, hangs around in worn corduroys and brown work boots, and tries to mind his manners. That's why these kids like him. He's so low-key, he's no-key. Shy but kind of pleased, and genuinely polite, he signs the bill of the guy's hat.
"I didn't catch your name," says the DJ, making off-the-air small talk during a commercial break. The DJ's a doughy dude called Slater. He's got a party-animal voice and a ponytail pulled through the back of his Black Crowes souvenir headgear.
"Hayden," Hayden says, still polite. He's setting up his portable video camera in the corner, taping stuff so that when he gets back home to Toronto he'll know where he's been. "Just Hayden? Okaaay," Slater says, revving up to go back on air, "so what's the name of the single?"
Hayden finds a bag of mini Snickers in the studio and passes it around. "It's called 'Bad As They Seem,' " he says, chewing.
"I guess I've only played it, like, once," Slater says. Then he's on the air. He growls out a greeting, introduces Hayden and Timmins, and finally gets to Hayden's single. "Soooo," he says, mock-excited, "what's it about?"
Hayden's perched on a low stool sipping a soft drink. He's been touring for a couple of months now, and he's still not used to it. Last year, his debut album, Everything I Long For, was a hit on an independent Canadian label before it was picked up by Outpost, an offshoot of Geffen. Hayden sang like an unhappily sober Tom Waits; his songs were crafted on acoustic guitar like Joni Mitchell, recorded in his bedroom on a four-track like Sebadoh.
So he's a star back home, his record is being pushed in the U.S. by
a major label, and it worries him. He wonders if he's going to spend so
much time touring that he won't be able to get to what he likes best, which
is writing songs. There's too much time sitting around, waiting for a sound
check or a guy
from room service to show up with soft drinks or a magazine reporter
to buy you a hot lunch in a greasy spoon in order to ask five intensely
probing questions about your dad's job and your mom's feelings and your
sex life and your hopes and dreams. Then there's Slater, the measure of
your success. He used to be the kind of dude you avoided in high school.
Now he's the kind of dude who can decide whether or not you get airplay.
Hayden sips his Sprite. He leans into the mike. "It's just about a guy sitting on the roof of his house watching the neighbors and thinking stupid things," he says. The next time Slater asks him a question, on the air, about his songs, Hayden says Mike Timmins wrote them.
Hayden's twenty-five years old. For a long time he lived in his parents' house, holding part-time jobs, writing songs in his room. Lately, however, he's been performing, waiting for his new record to chart, and trying to figure out how to stay a nice suburban boy in the middle of a marketing campaign. One way is to be quietly sarcastic. You have to pay close attention to know when Hayden's making fun of you and/or himself. He's a kind person, and he's pleasantly evasive with DJs and reporters. He won't answer too many personal questions. Well, a few: He used to be afraid of swimming, until he swam in a pool in Los Angeles during his tour. Hayden's his middle name; his first name's off the record. He's been bar mitzvahed. He's got a list of five favorite bands that changes almost hourly, but Sebadoh, Pavement, and Sonic Youth are always on it. The worst job he ever had was working in a sugar factory.
"It was a place that makes those little sugar packets that you get in restaurants," he says, eating dinner outdoors at Du Jour, a friendly restaurant in a quaint neighborhood in Richmond. He orders a rib-eye steak and shares a salad with his girlfriend. It's all, like, no big deal, except that everyone at the table is both deeply aware and discreetly committed to not noticing that every once in a while Hayden jots down something in the notebook he carries around with him. Maybe his tablemates are picturing how their names'll look in the liner notes for his next CD, under the heading THANKS FOR THE INSPIRATION.
"Redpath," says the object of everyone's silent attention. "That was the company's name. A guy who lived on our street's father worked there, so my brother and I got jobs. I had to wear a hard hat and earplugs. This was when I was seventeen -- it was my first job out of high school. I had to stand up top above this vat and pour starch into it, because starch is one of the things they use to refine sugar."
"He came home covered in white powder," his girlfriend says.
"Yeah," he says. "I was like a frosted flake."
He laughs, maybe because the story sounds so much like one of his songs. A few critics have pegged Hayden as a tortured boy-poet, Leonard Cohenish, singing his simple sorrows to the sound hole and his knee. But this is missing the point -- Hayden's songs aren't confessional, they're dramatic monologues, short narratives about people he meets and tries o understand: A guy buying skates in a department store. A little kid strapped into the backseat of a car. A guy in the middle of a long-distance love affair.
The scenario of indie-rock stardom, thanks to Kurt Cobain, demands that the singer-songwriter be in terrible pain. But that's not Hayden's story. He's post-Kurt, drug-free, un-hung-up, mostly at ease in the world. He's not a rat in a cage. "I'm just a guy with a guitar," he says, half coy, half sincere. In other words, he's a '90s kind of fellow, scaling down his expectations, trying to get through his day. He's talented but unhistrionic. If life bums him out, well, he'll deal with it. After all, his real struggle isn't with self-loathing, it's with self-promotion. That's the true drama of the recording industry lately -- not the production of records, but their marketing. "If my album really sells and people know who I am, well, that'll be weird," Hayden says. "On the other hand, if nobody buys it and I can't make another one, well, that won't be so good either." Alternative rock thrives on a paradox: The music and the advertising lingo celebrate an audience of fickle, jobless layabouts, and then beg for their loyal attention.
That's why there's a weird narcissism surrounding the spectacle of indie rock. It's full of people who sense that what's important about them is their unimportance. This is clear at Hayden's New York show at the Knitting Factory a few weeks later. On a desolate street in lower Manhattan, all the high-powered dudes are hanging outside the club, just like regular guys, so normal that you can't help noticing them. There's Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth chatting with Geffen publicists, and they all look like they took the F train in from Queens. A couple of suits get out of a limo, readjusting their geeky eyewear, but nobody greets them. Everyone's working hard not to matter. It's their way of saying "Want me."
Indie rockers are famous for toiling in obscurity. They get to have Van Gogh's career and his renown at the same time. Van Gogh died unknown, of course. That's what's so cool about him. He's the original alternative artist. Unlike indie rockers, however, he didn't have publicists and roadies and fanzines published in his honor and reporters following him around France asking stuff like "Why cypress trees?" He was broke and crazy and mean and undiscovered. Being unknown may have wrecked his life, but it made his art. "I wonder if Van Gogh would've been as good of an artist if he'd been successful while he was alive," Hayden worries. No one wants a rogue artist to be too well known. Hayden faces a late-twentieth-century complication unique in the history of art and artists: He gets attention for being nobody.
Van Gogh died unrecognized. Kurt Cobain had the opposite problem. He had his posthumous fame while he was still alive, because it seemed clear for a long time that his career was going to kill him. The lesson he taught isn't lost on people like Hayden, average Joes whose appeal depends on their remaining as ordinary as possible. Hayden wants to be heard, but he doesn't want to be known. Recognition equals death. It kills your creativity or it kills you, or both. In his modest way, he understands this.
Starting his set at the Knitting Factory, he says, "I'm Hayden. I'm from Toronto." His voice is lopey as a Canadian cowpoke's. We're sitting on the floor, because otherwise we can't see him. The floor's creaky and wooden and beer-soaked, and when Hayden starts singing, it's like being in his cellar bedroom, in your blue jeans, with a warm drink in a plastic cup. Watching him, you think he's safe up there, for now, talking to a bunch of people and singing stuff. There's nothing wild about him. He's an ordinary guy, doing his job, telling stories. It's his genius. Not rage, not addiction, not crawling up inside your head and amplifying your pain, but this: He knows how to connect from a distance, and you feel like his friend.
John Weir watches only one hour of television a month,
but for that hour, he watches the Psychic Friends
Network.
Details, November 1996