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THE PINK ALBUM
Natalie Jaeger
This is the circus. No one wants to go home. Everyone is trying not to say goodbye.
- Russell Hammond, Almost Famous
It’s easy to see the beginnings of things and harder to see the ends…I can remember the moment New York began for me but I can’t lay my finger on the point of when it ended…All I know is it was very bad when I was 28…That was the year, my 28th when I began to understand the lesson in that story…which is it is distinctly possible to stay too long at the fair. - Joan Didion, "Goodbye to All That"
TW: Sexual assault, grooming, and abuse.
I spent my teens and twenties starry-eyed and immersed in the circus. I sold merch at shows, briefly became a music journalist interviewing local bands, joined promotion teams, and became a teenage intern at my local haunt. By 23, I was working part-time for the radio stations I grew up listening to, interning for my favorite music venue in the marketing department, and following The 1975 on tour whenever I could. I had my leopard coat, polaroid camera, and a moleskin to document it all. I would’ve made Penny Lane proud. For the in-betweens on the road, I had a copy of Pamela Des Barres I’m with the Band and Joan Didion’s The White Album. Pamela offered a dreamy fairytale of the late 60s. Didion documented her nervous breakdown, and the end of the hippie era crumbling apart along with her. The dueling narratives provided advice and warnings.
Writing was on and off in my world since childhood, usually eclipsed by self-doubt or a preoccupation with my love for music. Music is and always will be my true love language. It is how I first learned to communicate with my parents and understand them. It is how I found community and made close bonds. Music and love are entangled in my life.
I loved writing and my teachers valued my writing, but it was a solitary act and not one that anyone close to me seemed to appreciate or pay attention to at the time. I learned to connect through music instead and put my writing aside. I kept it in my private world of diaries. It was better to be distracted by other people's artistry than to deal with the anxiety of creating my own.
My groupie escapades became interludes against the real world. Reminders of why I love the music so deeply. My most potent sense of self happened during these sometimes solo and sometimes not-so-solo adventures. My artistic self could happen on the road. My found family was created in the neon glow of The Pink Album and the traveling spectacle. Every single song on that album has a vivid memory for me. I followed The 1975 devotedly from 2015 to 2019.
Working in the music industry began to feel like the myth of Persephone; sometimes it was blissful seasons among wildflowers. Other times, seasons in hell. The crueler seasons filled with predatory people, exploitation, sexual assaults, abusive relationships, and codependent trauma bonds with addicts...all of it dismissed as a rock n roll lifestyle. I realized it was always there. The "industry of cool” was no longer being seen through violet round glasses. As a teen, I was often groomed by older musicians and began to see a lot of complicated relationships from my past replaying at my current job at a glorified grunge shop.
I had always romanticized working in a record store to be something like Empire Records. Sometimes it was. We were told we were a family, and since many of us came from dysfunction, the island of misfit toys was comfortable chaos. Guest lists, free records, parties with bar tabs on them, trips, and the potential to someday work for a record label helped. As Lester says in Almost Famous, “They want you to get drunk on feeling like you belong ...they make you feel cool”.
I was championed by my manager from the beginning. This however quickly led to uncomfortable favors being asked, jealous coworkers taking their resentments out on me, and clinging to someone who became protective of me. He felt familiar, safe, and comforting. He seemed to piss everyone else off but that was part of the appeal. I felt special when it was pointed out that he did work tasks for me that he didn’t bother to do in general, and that he treated me differently. I thought he hated me when I started, and I spent many shifts with him not speaking and listening to the records he picked. I didn’t mind because he introduced me to a lot of stuff and played a lot of albums I loved. One night he put on “Breakdown” by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and something changed. He turned it up and told me I could leave early if I wanted but all I could focus on was the collage in my mind. My childhood road trips with my mom and I belting out Tom Petty. How “American Girl” became a lifelong theme song to my restlessness. "Breakdown"’s slinky build soundtracking the early stages of our tension. His playing this song felt like a confession and a dare, “it's alright if you love me, if it's alright if you don’t, I'm not afraid of you running away honey, I get the feeling you won’t, There is no sense in pretend, your eyes give you away, something inside you is feeling like I do...” I really should’ve seen it as a warning but instead, I didn’t back down from the dare to fall for him.
Aspects of working at the record store were akin to the mythology of Fleetwood Mac. He and I had a Stevie and Lindsay kind of dynamic, tender and cosmic, or fighting through playing records at each other. My memories of that time are neon-lit fragments of karaoke bars, crying in a lot of bar bathrooms, writing, or reading alone together during the slow shifts, going to shows together, sharing eye rolls and laughs, daydreaming about living in New York City together, phantom touches of where fingerprints left pressed flowers or bruises depending on the intentions especially when they were perfumed with liquor. We were like Penny and Russell. He brought adventure, a mutual deep love for music, attention to little details, and a safe haven. He wasn’t intimidated, and he let me be completely me, he read my mind, and he saw me. He was also empty promises, cruel, manipulative, a deserter, and selfish. A fucked-up soulmate. It was never going to be what I wanted or needed it to be. It didn’t matter if he loved me back and I’m so glad he ghosted because I didn’t know how to leave.
On our last night together, he betrayed the safety I had always felt with him. He violated my trust, my body, and the friendship he claimed was important to him. He never bothered with a condom and he non-consensually put his hands around my neck. I only remember bits and pieces of the night, but I remember that moment because it scared me. I was so confused, conflicted, and horribly hungover the next day. He took me to breakfast the morning after, we shared a cup of coffee, and he showed me his childhood memories of our shared hometown. He disappeared shortly after that. I didn’t know how to even begin to understand what happened. I didn’t know how to let it go. I went to work and was called a “slut” all day long by our sociopathic coworker who loved to blame everyone else for his drunk decisions.
I was laid off in the summer of 2020, and couldn’t wait to finally escape. I began to process while in quarantine, I found appreciation for the relationship we had and for not ending up the one under his thumb. I found gratitude for the good shows, good music, and good friends that did come out of that time but most importantly for the realization that it was time to say goodbye to something, and that was the circus. My mind just kept repeating Didion’s words from "Goodbye to All That,"—"...it is distinctly possible to stay too long at the Fair”.
I had stayed too long but now it was shut down and no one knew when it would return. That destroyed me more. Since my teens, the concert ticket drawer kept me alive and now it was gone. I was grieving so many dreams of mine dying while so many people were physically dying. It felt trivial but still painful. A gaping wound that refused to be ignored.
At the beginning of quarantine, I tried to be productive, avoiding the healing process. The somatic aspects of it all caught up to me. I started a travel blog about my groupie adventures, but the timing was quite excruciating. I couldn’t write and I couldn’t think of everything I missed, especially since some of the things I missed nearly killed me. I went on a lot of walks. I was diagnosed with PCOS which helped me make some sense out of my body. I binged a lot of podcasts and the soaps of my teenage years. I spent a lot of time ordering records from Discogs and watching planes or clouds fly over my bedroom window. I lingered over lyrics, creating my own kind of liner notes. I journaled A LOT. I learned to cook through meal delivery kits. I avoided social media and deleted most of it but Instagram. I read a lot of Sylvia Plath and Joan Didion. I submitted a question to Phoebe Bridgers via a Patreon account for The Forty-Five which she answered, and I considered a comeback to music journalism. I began EMDR therapy. It took a year for me to acknowledge that condom sleuthing is sexual assault. It is illegal in California, Germany, and the UK. I had to process that most intimate violence is perpetrated by a romantic partner or someone the person knows. It felt like a topic people talked about but never addressed the complicated feelings around it. I processed a lot of traumas through texts with my ex-coworkers about what had happened to us. These long late-night conversations helped us liberate each other and I’m not sure if they would’ve happened like they did if it wasn’t for quarantine. It was through the quarantine that I realized my time in the circus involved a lot of intimate violence.
At the end of May 2022, I went to a movie with a friend. When we were walking back, I looked down and let out an amused laugh. On the ground was an actual ticket to the circus. All this time I was mourning music thinking I had to let it all go, but I didn’t. I just needed to let go of the industry. I could still be the music girl without the industry. It was never going to be what I wanted or needed it to be.
I spent the following summer falling in love with fangirling again. I let out a Beatles mania-level scream at my first concert back post-quarantine (after a year and a half without live in-person concerts). Fall Out Boy played “Saturday” which I wasn’t anticipating, nor was I expecting the banshee guttural sounds that projected past my mask from my throat. This continued rapidly in the summer of 2022. Halsey, Stevie Nicks, Phoebe Bridgers, The Killers, Pom Pom Squad, etc. I even screamed in the bathroom with my friend over the lead singer of PPS fangirling over us and signing my purse, and as per usual in any concert hall bathroom, every random person in the bathroom was equally thrilled for us. This energy culminated at The 1975 shows at the end of the year in New York and back home in Seattle.
In 2020, I canceled a trip to New York City to see The 1975 at Madison Square Garden due to COVID. In 2022, I rebooked the trip with my 1975 family to recreate our 2017 IRL meet cute. The return trip morphed into a partial trip with my mom, showing her New York for the first time then one solo day, and finally a few days with my girls. It was an absolute dream. A trip of a lifetime.
I had several epiphanies in New York City. It reminded me of "him" and the fantasies I built around us but more importantly it reminded me of all the things I’ve ever wanted. It brought me back to myself. I watched Almost Famous on the plane. My mom and I stayed in the East Village and our first stop was Veslekas for pierogi and egg creams. We walked across the Brooklyn Bridge under lavender skies. We saw Almost Famous: The Musical and I cried the whole time for various reasons. For better or worse, I would always be Penny Lane.
We met Cameron Crowe afterward and I told him how I was in town to meet up with my own band-aids (a very fitting term the more I reflect on it and what fan-girl bonding means to me, seeing my girls was so healing). He was so kind and indulged me in signing my theater bill with “It's all happening!”
On my solo day, I lived out my pre-teen punk rock dreams and stayed at The Chelsea Hotel. I went on a Just Kids walking tour (I knew Patti was in town and loitered in her usual haunts). The next day, I met up with my beautiful band-aids. We embraced after three years apart in the middle of Time Square. Our version of the V-J Day kiss. We went to the show and scoured the merch tables together to find out who had what and sang and swooned watching our boys perform. Afterward, we took an overpriced pedicab blasting our boys throughout the streets and went back to our Airbnb to order Taco Bell. I was reminded of the importance of The Pink Album in my life, and what it gave me and brought me through.
As Sapphire says near the end of Almost Famous, “They don’t even know what it is to be a fan y’know? To truly love some silly little piece of music so much that it hurts.”
Processing taught me to embrace the unconventional path that I started during The Pink Album years. To focus on my own artistry. To build a life around storytelling. To help others heal through writing, advocacy, and as a future therapist. To buy a ticket and a seat by the window as often as I can (ideally while channeling my inner Audrey Hepburn). The reverberations of the circus will remain but this time the song won’t remain the same.
ABOUT NATALIE
Natalie Jaeger lives in the Pacific Northwest but mostly in her perfectly soundtracked mind. She can be a walking study in demonology but usually, that just means she's hangry. She is a future therapist, a self-read groupie historian, an aspiring music journalist, a reluctant writer, and occasionally has photography phases. She has a background working in the music industry and for non-profits. She spent post-quarantine assisting with the development of the Seattle Art Museum VSO Union, binge-watching ghost-hunting shows, and falling in love with music again. She is currently working on her Master's in Counseling and some version of a groupie memoir or collection of essays, or both.
Words by Natalie Jaeger. Portraits by Hilary Northcraft.
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